Bogeywoman

side, looking down fascinated at O’s big eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling-two Caribbean portholes ringed with stove black, in each of which a blind dab of fluorescent light floated. “I do a good coma, don’t I,” she said, and we both jumped.

Bertie grabbed the H around the waist, tipped but couldn’t lift the thing. I laughed. “Okay, Koderer, you do it,” he grunted. Then panic whited out his face: “Cheese it-the Regicide!” And suddenly the H was rocking like a bowling pin on its heel. Bertie dove into one laundry bin and I took the next one down the line, and pretty soon we heard the swat, swat of Reggie Blanchard’s tennis-racket-sized white rubber-soled hospital loafers on the linoleum.

“Lady O! How ya doing. You be up here scouting again for that doper cat? What did that eight ball ever do for you?”

Comatose. Not a blink. A drapette of the highest principles was O, stand-up to the final hour, a stone stoic even though we both knew that Bertie would have swapped either one of us, or both, to the hoods or the cops in a minute for eight ounces of Saigon gage or anything else really hard to get.

Our Reginald was an artistic-looking tea-colored negro whose beautifully molded lips had ambiguous and unsettling punctuation marks at the corners of them. He wore a little W.E.B. Du Bois goatee as sharp as a tack, and his poison-honey eyes were cruel. I mean it was the way he saw the world. Really he’d rather save you than sell you, but first he checked the price.

“What’s your hustle today, sweetheart? Coma! All dummied up! Ain’t talking to the Reg! Ain’t you the one,” he saxophoned. “Old O, if she can’t say sumpm nice, she don’t say nothing, is that it? I hear you! Been had your messed-up brain taken right out, huh? Well it was nothing but trouble anyway. Tell you this, sweetheart. You the best-looking empty they ever had up here, you know that? And as I know you are a schooled young lady, down with all games, and I desire a word with you, Ima give that coma my special cure-scope the gangway first, make sure nobody ain’t coming-okay now Ima turn that coma over to Doctor Blanchard for his patented guaranteed coma process-”

Things went quiet, too quiet, and, since my laundry bin had no peephole, I had to periscope up through the twisted towels and damp pajamas to see what was going on-and got my head up just in time to see the dirty dog lying on top of her.

With my record I bet you think I jumped right in there on top of them, punching and kicking. Well, I was a Bug Motel now, and not only a Bug Motel, a Bug Motel on mission. I stayed put. Over Reggie’s shoulder, O narrowed her eyes at me warningly, and I obeyed. O half growled, half giggled, and finally she clawed Reggie’s back with her black raspberry fingernails. “Hey, Lady O, there you is. This coma is defunct, you cured, I Dr. Reggie done cured your bug-eyed self, or was you shucking the whole time? You? Not you! But anyhow you back with the living. I missed you, baby. Now sit up. Gimme some sugar.”

O sat up with a sigh and swung her legs side-saddle off the gurney so her gold lame ballet slippers dangled. She patted her big hair, curled back her bony shoulders, planted hands on hips, pointed her nuzzies professionally and said: “Hey Reg. What’s uptown?”

“Welcome back, baby. Nothing much. Same old three-six-nine. Say, what yall crazies looking for down here on three? Wyncha let me take cay it for yall? I wear a white suit but I ain’t the heat. I knew you from the world, don’t forget that, sweetheart. What was you prospecting for?”

The Blue Bomb stood fifteen feet from them, but Reg had no interest in dentist D.O.A.P.

“You,” she said. “Unh-huh. Huckly buck,” Reg said, pleased just the same. “Let’s you and me go somewhere. Outasight,” O spooky-fluted in his ear, and her scuffed-up gold lame ballet slippers plinked onto the linoleum. He forgot about our mission. “Hey, baby, I hear you,” and next their assorted big and little soft shoes slapped away together down the corridor. I surfaced among the towels in time to see Reginald poke his keys into some door marked NO ADMITTANCE halfway down the hall. And the two of them disappeared behind it.

I wished on Reggie Blanchard all the violent deaths of Pennsylvania Avenue whence he had come. Like I said, he’d sooner save you than sell you, though he looked at the price tag first. But here he was, a royal, well anyway a royal flunky, oinking a mental peon-for an old-time street hustler like himself he had no mercy. He didn’t think O could be harmed by doing it in a mop closet. And neither did O. I smelled sumpm rotten in the whole deal, but after all, we were in the bughouse. To be mentally hygienic or even nosily parental was just not done among the mental patients, and especially not among the Bug Motels. Besides, oinking on her feet, for small change or even in swap for that good old dreamboxoline, in barroom toilets and phone booths and back entrances, was O’s official problem: she had to stop thinking of men that way. We Bug Motels had a hands-off nose-out policy towards all official problems, and as for what we really thought-we didn’t think it.

It did flash on me that O was about to peddle herself in a broom closet for us, the Bug Motels on mission: that is, just to clear the coast for a giant tank of laughing gas-and I resolved then and there not to sniff one sniff or laugh one laugh of the stuff, at least not until O forgave me for letting her. Then again I never believed for a minute that O might not forgive me for letting her. And another thing: none of us, not even Bertie, put that old dreamboxoline-by which I mean assorted dreambox oils, drops, gasses and powders-higher on the list of daily necessaries than O did, although she herself might go easy on the purple dots or the mushrooms- never on the bottle, however. Already I could picture her holding that red clown’s nose of an N₂O mask, with its nostrils-of-pig outvalve, to one of our faces after another, while she swigged from her own little half-pint of peppermint schnapps. The feast of sumpm for everybody, that was what O liked when she was Mary Hartline, that and the clear swill she was swilling, vodka or schnapps, screech or moonshine, whatever one of her boyfriends had organized for her that day. Now she was Mary Hartline on Super Circus holding out those goldfish bowls full of coins to our fat fists, only the pennies nickels and quarters had turned into laughing gas, and never mind where she got it (really she had to stop thinking of men that way).

Well, anyhow, from here on, with O and the Regicide taken up elsewhere, it was easy. Though the thing must have weighed two hundred pounds, all I had to do was tip that great mother H up against the gurney while Bertie held the cart rollers in place, and hoist her with one big hoist, and tuck her in, and climb back into bed with her. In the dark, under the covers, she was buxom and stately and cold. She had no nipples to her iron bosom, she was wearing a funny hat, and I had a feeling that just when I needed a girl more than I needed life itself, I had traded in my lovely O for a bust of Queen Victoria.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

The stuff made cute white clouds float up out of the black, the black of Bertie’s private closet and the black at the back of my head, where brain cells must be popping like popcorn. “Why is this fun?” I wondered out loud. “I mean I could be eating popcorn instead of hallucinating it.”

“You’re a grownup now, Ursula,” explained Bertie, who was always magnanimous when the dope was enough for a banquet. “Grownups need visions of beauty, little kids just wanna eat.” O yeah? I have every low intention of eating beauty, I thought but didn’t say-lemme die first. My blood sprouted pillows and now I lay back on them. What was the use of talking?

“Maybe it iddn’t so fun,” said Emily Nix Peabody. Refusal, you will recall, was her middle name. Each time the gas nozzle came to her she would merely graze her olfactory bulb, which was the size of a cocktail onion, across the clown’s nose and pass it on to the next mental patient. And truth was by now she looked a little better than the rest of us. She weighed fifty-three pounds this week and was yellow as candle wax, but we were gray, except O, who was blue.

It’s a funny thing how people pour that dreamboxoline onto their broken hearts, squirt it in the black veins of their crooked elbows, douche their gratings with it, breathe it, lap it up, suck it up, meanwhile staring slit-eyed at the heartbreaker as though that dirty rotten so-and-so was working the plunger. And this was when I found that out. That’s how O was looking at me now. She wasn’t forgiving me for letting her, as easily as I thought.

Ten minutes ago Bertie and me had rocked and dragged the H bomb into Bertie’s private closet and shut ourselves in after it. A second later Dion slid in, fanning a hand like his fingernail polish was wet, and just as the three of us were getting good and uncomfy on top of Bertie’s smelly socks, Keds and doo-wop 45’s, O appeared.

Right away I could see sumpm was wrong. She looked normal, except that her knee-knocking shiny black sheath skirt had a wet spot on the back and the zipper was a couple degrees off course. She hadn’t stayed five