15: Sydney Cinnamon
IT WAS ONLY NINE o’clock when I strolled out of The Stardust Room, three hours until my telephone date with Little Little.
I walked around the lobby, looking for a place that sold magazines and paperback books. I always checked out the newsstands in hotels and motels because they often displayed reading material on racks that ran the length of walls. I could stand and read the titles of all except those on the top rows. In regular stores I was helpless against counters and tables I couldn’t reach.
My eye caught an enormous white wicker giraffe in the window of a store called Wicker Wonderland. The giraffe was a plant holder about ten feet tall, something I would have liked shipped to my room over Palmer Pest Control in Wilton. Even though I would have to stand on a ladder to water any plant I put in it, it would be the pièce de résistance of my collection.
It was Cloud who had started me collecting giraffes. One Christmas he had presented me with a stuffed giraffe that stood four feet higher than I did. He had written on the card, “For the smallest, the tallest!” Since then I had added giraffes in all sizes, made of cotton, clay, china, wood, and leather.
Mr. Palmer had slipped me two hundred dollars at dinner. The white wicker giraffe had a price tag tied to its neck: $185. If the store had been open, I would have bought it, but there was a sign on the door saying OPEN SUN. 9 A.M.–12 P.M.
While I was still searching for the newsstand, a bellboy called me.
“Mr. Cinnamon? I’ve been looking for you.”
He handed me an envelope. “We were afraid you’d slip by us and we’d miss you.”
I gave him a tip, and ripped open the envelope to find his note inside:
They told me at the desk it’s you in Room 807.
I don’t believe it! Come to Room 829.
Love and kisses from the Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy—
Amen, Brother!
“Sydney Cinnamon!” Knox Lionel shouted when he saw me walk through the door. “You old Leprechaun, you!”
His unpacked suitcases were on the floor of the motel room. He was standing there in blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, black boots on his feet, and a black cap pulled down over his red hair.
We threw our arms around each other; then he stepped back and said, “Let me look at you!”
“You look more like a thug than a minister,” I said. “Where’s your white suit?”
“I have to disguise myself,” he said, “or I get mobbed! I’ve been waiting for you, Sydney. I have to move over to The Lakeside Motel. I keep a room one place and stay another—that way I don’t have to fight off the Faithful!”
He picked up the phone and said, “Room 829 here. I have bags to go and I’ll need a taxi.”
Then he turned back to me. “I keep my car here in the lot to throw them off. Come with me? All the dwarfs in town are over at the Lakeside, and, Sydney, there are a lot of us in town!”
“I heard,” I said.
“So come with me while I settle in. We’ll have a drink. You’re old enough to drink now, aren’t you?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “What are you doing here in La Belle?” he said. “Where the hell have you been keeping yourself? Tell me all about it! You’ve heard about me, I guess. Hey, Sydney, I’ve got a lot to tell you! Praise the Lord, it’s like old times!”
On the way to The Lakeside Motel, in the back of the taxi, he told me he had a white Mercedes convertible, a ten-room house on the Palisades overlooking the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River, and a fiancée shorter than he was and prettier than a picture—in that order.
“And she’s from a good family, too,” he said, lighting up a little brown Schimmelpenninck cigar. “Her granddaddy’s a legitimate preacher and her daddy owns this whole damn town!”
I didn’t tell him I knew Little Little.
I walked around to the back of The Lakeside Motel with him, and waited for him while he left a note in her car which read: “Don’t go. I’m here. Little Lion.”
“They’re all in watching a movie right now,” he told me as we went through the back door of the motel. “We’ll have some time to catch up—I want to hear all about you, boy!”—pounding me on my hump. “She doesn’t expect me until tomorrow, so she’s in there with the TADpoles being a proper hostess, and she’s proper, Sydney, not like the ones I used to chase after when you and me were roommates. This gal’s got class!”
As soon as his bags were in the room, he ordered up drinks, a double screwdriver for himself, he said, and what about me? I said I’d have orange juice, too, but I wanted the vodka on the side. I was doing some fast thinking … and I wasn’t a drinker.
He scrambled up on the bed and settled himself against a pillow and said, “God, am I anxious to hear about you! And don’t get me wrong, Sydney. I may not have all the degrees (I don’t have any of them) but I am the little lion fighting in the arena for the Lord, for sure, Sydney! My heart’s in it, A to Z! Sydney, remember that Saturday night in Leprechaun Village we put on the show and I was David in the loincloth fighting that stupid dishwasher supposed to be the giant, and that dame from the audience kept pulling at my loincloth till it slipped down and I was bare-assed? OhmyGod, I’d forgotten that one!”
While he paid the waiter for our drinks, I dropped my double jigger of vodka into his screwdriver, pretending as he turned around that I’d swallowed it.
“I like it better straight,” I said.
He held up his screwdriver. “Sydney, here’s to you, as good as you are, and here’s to
