Buggywoman
BUG MOTELS ON MISSION
I was in the bughouse, but I wasn’t hearing angel voices. I wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, through invisible microphones in the toilet. I wasn’t the Virgin Mary. If I found a fat shoelace probably I tied my broken ukulele case together with it instead of trying to dangle from it, by the neck, inside my private closet. And, speaking of that closet, the cockroach I found there, napping in my sad-faced sneaker, was no hallucination but just as real, and just as big, as the Koderer nose on my face. I liked girlgoyles, that was at the bottom of it, but of course I wasn’t telling them that. I liked girls, except for me. And in the wilderness between my hunger and its exception, I sometimes drew maps with no way out on the inside of my forearm with a razor blade. Or anything else sharp I could find. I was seventeen now. I had been in this dump one year, seven months and seven days. I still dreamed of dirty rotten Lou Rae Greenrule, who loved me and left me, and of the wood wizardess, who turned me in. Sometimes I dreamed I was back at Camp Chunkagunk and having a pretty good time, except for those two ripe pimples I was hiding inside my brassiere, so sore and popping full of yellow cheese they made me want to puke.
I was safe in the loonie bin, and to make sure I was safe, I kept my mouth shut. Who knew what a bona fide loonie might have to say? So I gave em the silent treatment, I mean all the dreambox mechanics and especially “my” dreambox mechanic, Foofer. For one year, seven months and seven days-not one word. Right smack in the bughouse I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, or at least I was until that dirty stoolie Margaret wrote sumpm on the back of a greasy menu that Foofer got his hands on-as she knew he would. (I forgot, says Margaret. Forgot! I’ll say no more. It doesn’t take a Sigmund Food.)
But this was before the menu, before Zuk, before I said a single word. Foofer musta thought he’d heard it all, but one year, seven months and seven days of nothing?-I have reason to think he was impressed.
A state hospital would have rolled me over in a week, but Thomas Hare Rohring and Eugenia O. Rohring Clinic could afford to ponder my case. After all, Merlin was forking over a hundred dollars a day. Merlin felt sick at heart for the mess I was in-he said-but he was having a good year. No way Merlin’s Puppets World Tour could come home from Haiphong, or Penang, or Surabaya, or wherever he was that week, just to nurse me. “And I’d have to nurse you,” he threatened, his voice all thready sizzles and crackles on the phone from the bamboo post office of some island campong, “because I sure wouldn’t have the dough to keep you in Rohring Rohring if I came home.”
I never quite got it how being the wizard of world peace during the Vietnam War turned into money for the old man; there couldn’t have been any dough in those two-donkey village squares where Merlin’s Puppets was always mounting the same old show. But sumpm must have turned into sumpm because here I was. Only famous court cases like O and Emily got scholarships to this dump. Anyhow, the way I looked at it, after all those years of feeling left out of the fame part, here I was doing my bit for history by costing Merlin so many dollars a day that he had to stay in Asia and be the bane of Lyndon Bugbane Johnson himself. Now and then I did wonder just what unsavory republic might be putting up the bucks.
Still, that was a terrifying threat from Merlin: I’d have to nurse you… It meant of course being nursed not by Merlin but by the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette, who’d be flown home from Hanoi or Samovarobad or somewhere for the purpose. Which, shudder, could mean that the theatrical vampiress might one day try to touch me with her creepy whisker-thin hands. And also the idea of home starched my will to stay where I was. I had said-in fact I had hollered, pretty inconveniently if I should ever change my mind-that if they threw me out of Camp Chunkagunk I would never go home. And I didn’t. Not that I had a home to go home to, in the usual sense of the word. But this way they wouldn’t slap one together for me, either, with some slave-driving twenty-one-star foster mom out in Harford County, in the pay of the state, with the girls’ dormitory set up in an old chicken house on the family farm and enough “chores” to exhaust an infantry battalion.
Anyway the social worker wouldn’t hear of me going back to Merlin’s house on Ploy Street all alone, to bounce around like the last beebee in a broken puzzle, the only one that hadn’t rolled out the hole yet. Merlin and Suzette were on tour and sister Margaret was off somewhere with that racetrack bum and couldn’t be reached-yes I had given up on old Margaret, for the moment.
To save me from being remanded to the juvenile authorities, a phrase terrifying even to him, Merlin used his connections to get me into Rohring Rohring and sent the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette home from I think it was Fiji, for a week. She packed whatever looked like my stuff in spare packing crates from Merlin’s World Tour and was supposedly going to haul it up six floors to the Adolescent Wing of the bughouse all by herself. But as soon as Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard spotted the skeletal but rich and trashy-looking redhead endangering her fake fingernails on those boxes, he saw fit to saunter out of the supply closet, where he was sneaking a smoke, and carried them for her. And come to think of it that was my first sight of the Regicide, once the crates and I were both upstairs-as he leaned against the supply room door, staring down his Egyptian nose at Suzette’s stony buttocks in a miniskirt, and sliding his hand out of the white pants pocket where he had just stuffed her enormous tip.
I had a private room-we all did. Likewise a private bath and, as I said, a private closet. These lodgings weren’t fancy but neither were they like your common everyday hospital room, nor even like the clean ugly compartments in a new motel. Instead they kinda reminded me of servants’ bedrooms in swanky old Central Park West apartments like Grandma Schapiro’s, or in Monument Street brownstones like Grandpa Koderer’s, square airy rooms, neither small nor large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, with oak woodwork. And one large window, barred in a discreetly ornamental fashion, just like at Grandma’s.
To return to my private closet, its oaken doorframe had been blackened by a thousand coats of shellac, and the cracks in the plaster resembled the queen of spades in deep décolletage, looking at her icy self upside down in the playing card mirror. I had better sense of course than to tell them that. Bertie Stein, who lived next door to me, once whispered to a nurse’s aide that the tangled pipes and cracks and water stains on his ceiling were maps, drawn by trolls, of the royal palace. If Bertie said it, this was nothing but doper’s theater you may be sure, and even so there was sumpm in it: one floor up were the offices of all our dreambox mechanics, traceable by their rotten plumbing, if you left out about the trolls. Bertie got a little pill each morning for that indiscretion, Hollywood Bar blue, Stelazine it was called, which to me sounded just like the name of some babydoll-faced bride whining for a dope (meaning a Coca-Cola) in a Tennessee Williams play. Bertie even kinda looked like Stella Zeen, with his silky page boy, and soft co-cola eyes, and droopy little shoulders. So as usual Bertie got his dope, and took it too. Even if it made his head feel like a cabbage, to him any pill at all was better than no pill.
As for me, as long as I was here, I took my job to heart of being a bughead-for I saw right away that the others were better at it than me. I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, and I meant to keep it that way. It was like I’d pitched my one-woman igloo at the South Pole, where nobody’d ever see it, and now and then I wondered if I might not as well be dead as be bopping around with the penguins down here.
Course I knew I wasn’t the only in the world. At Girls’ Classical I used to hear the rumors-what the hump, I spread some myself-about those two Popeye-jawed gym teachers Miss Swigart and Miss Dusterhof, in their size 14 lime-green gym-suits and pink eyeglasses, who had oversprung kneecaps bulging out a bit at the back and raucous altos like military macaws. At least Swigart and Dusterhof had each other, or at least they had the same address in the Vineyard Villas Apartments on North Charles Street. I never asked em-lemme die first-but I looked em up in the phonebook. I knew I might grow into a bird like that myself someday. I didn’t want to be in the same club with those gnarled dollies even if it was the only one that would have me for a member.
When I got to Rohring Rohring, my cut-up arms said sumpm loud and clear to the management, but then there were three hours a week with Dr. Foofer left to kill. I treated my dreambox mechanic to the changeless silence of the ice shelf. With all that empty space for interpretation, the old gas bag thought the worst of me, I could tell, and I was pleased. Still, at pharmaceuticals that might seed the brainclouds in my dreambox and really change the weather, I had to draw the line. I mean I didn’t even know what my own real weather was yet. So I tongue-rolled every little green pill and stockpiled them in the hem of my overalls, just in case I might as well be dead.
Then I made it into the Bug Motels (the name of our rock group): which was Bertie, Dion, Emily, O and me. None of us heard voices. None of us thought we were the Virgin Mary or Jesus either. I got asked into the Bug Motels one day when I saw that one more green pill and the bottom of my overalls would sag. So I palmed over to Bertie an M &M’s bag full of the things. “Holy godzilla,” he said, “good stuff. How much?” “Nuttin,” I said, and next thing I knew I was sitting at the Bug Motels’ table in the dayroom, bidding zero at O Hell.
Everybody said that Bertie Stein had had a brilliant mind before it got flattened under the influence of various drugs like a chihuahua under a garbage truck. He had pawned his genius sister’s viola, a Guarneri del Gesù, insured for $50,000, to buy a block of hashish the size of a small pound cake, and had smoked the whole thing himself, and so landed in Rohring Rohring.
Dion Dragoumis had been sent to the bughouse, so the story went, to save him from his old man. His file had come not from Juvenile Justice but from some anti-racketeering office in Washington, where he had begged an agent to hide him.
So how did being in Rohring Rohring hide him? Basil “The Blowfish” Dragoumis still had to pay his bills and knew just where the kid was. Even we could tell Dion wasn’t cut out to be a gangster, and at first we considered this a point in his favor. But soon we kinda wished The Blowfish would apply some muscle to the case.
Dion loved himself all day every day, until sumpm better came along. Then he would drop his old self just like that for his new self. No way he would love anybody else’s self-he could only suck it up and swallow it and make it his self. He took Bertie’s slinky walk for instance, and my skeptical snort. He was so handsome he was ugly, and his tailor would come by the Adolescent Wing with swatches of sharkskin and shantung rippling with silvery light, and ruffled shirts and pointy tasseled shoes. The rest of us dirtballs stared.
The bughouse is no democracy, but in a way the buggy majority rules. To us other Bug Motels Dion was a doomed and laughable sicko in his Liberace clothes: We never realized that he was on his way, we were the flops, until later. Dion was all but useless on mission for the Bug Motels, since he refused to carry anything in his pocket, not even a key or a dollar bill, for fear it would mess up the line of his trousers. But he wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, well maybe he was but he didn’t think he was, and we had to admit he looked like one of the Four Tops, so he qualified for the Bug Motels.
Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, was eleven years old, weighed fifty-four pounds and losing, and wouldn’t eat for weeks, maybe months or years. Otherwise she was the pet of the place, Miss Dying Popularity we called her. So that was us on “the Adolescent Wing”-the east end of the sixth floor of Rohring Rohring-except for Mrs. Wilmot.
Why Mrs. Wilmot was still in the Teenage Ward after all these years, nobody knew. Wilmot was a skinny-shanked, potbellied old girl of around sixty, in a buttonless (or she’d have unbuttoned it) pink chemise, with skin like a wet brown bag sliding down her bones. Now that woman was crazy, which, come to think of it, did nothing for her prestige with us Bug Motels. Mostly what she did was sit on the bench just inside the entrance to the Adolescent Wing and pull up her dress and waggle the peapod, yes I mean her graypink coochie in its skimpy ring of grizzled whiskers, in full view of all of us.
Maybe they thought we teenage loonies needed some kinda callous on our sexual eyeballs and maybe it worked, anyhow it wasn’t sex we Bug Motels were conspiring on, at least not with each other, even though we had our beauty, O. And now I gotta tell you about O. Of all the girlgoyles I ever fell for, O was the most ridiculously urgent. She was a cross between Mary Hartline of Super Circus and the kind of drapette who would jump you at the bus stop and kick you in the shins and tear out your hairclips and throw your schoolbooks down the sewer. Her hair was like fiberglass snow in Hutzler’s window at Christmastime, mounds of ratted platinum, about fifteen pounds of it, frizzed on rollers, crackling with white electricity and a million shiny threads flying. She had on ballet slippers with little pink elastic bands over the arch like only a drapette would wear, and a sheath skirt that knocked her knees together so hard she had to scuff along pigeon-toed. Her eyes were big, dark, wet and ringed with blacking. She couldn’t see without glasses, which she didn’t even own, and she could hardly walk in that skirt, but she beamed agile violence, so that somehow I always thought of her walking like Mary Hartline upside down on a pair of jeweled daggers in her hands.
Every man O had known had tried to oink her-anyway she said so, that was her problem, that and working the Pratt Street bars from the age of twelve, for they had all tried and a lot of them had succeeded. And somewhere along the way she started to charge for it. And then, sumpm else happened, sumpm with a knife. O was a police case too. Probably everything she said was true, certainly she was the belle of the bughouse, where the dreambox mechanics told her: she had to stop thinking of men that way. Anyhow no suitor was too lowly for her chill, calm, slightly cross-eyed smile. Not even me.
You could go buggy from boredom in the bughouse, if you weren’t buggy already. But at least from fall to spring all five of us Bug Motels from East Six went to school. We really went, almost the way normal teenagers get on the bus and ride to school. And yes it was queer going to Girls’ Classical from the loonie bin, and even queerer to go from Girls’ Classical back to the bughouse every afternoon, but everything about a ritzy dreambox hospital like Rohring Rohring makes for strange combos.
A little yellow school bus just our size picked us up every weekday morning on the traffic island between trolley tracks at the Broadway entrance. If Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reginald Blanchard was the one sent to watch us off, and usually he was, we’d be smoking down the line of us like five twigs of kindling. Behind us loomed the ruby brick hospital, frilled with black iron lace like the fin de siècle society matron she was, and across six lanes of traffic was the livery stable of all the fruit and junk wagons left in the city, where a few late-sleeping ayrabbers (the lowest of the low except for us mental peons) were still straggling out the wide-open barn doors one by one behind their seen-it-all nags. Then the bus pulled up and we were off to our separate lyceums, Park School for Bertie, Mount St. Agnes for O, Faith Bible for Emily, Calvert Hall for Dion-I was the only one in public school, since Merlin wouldn’t have us think ourselves so grand, not even from the bughouse.
And at 4:45 we were all back on the traffic island, with tall red Reggie firing up our Luckies again, bending down the row of us with his lighter like a mother bird loaded with worm purée. And as we eyed that swanky Dunhill, inlaid with pearls and engraved not RB but lmcl, obviously cadged from some female ex-patient for favors large or small, we thought uneasily of all the ways Reggie wasn’t like a mother to us, for, all things being equal, he would rather please you than thwart you, but he had his price. Now he let us smoke, backs to the wind, while he turned up his own collar, and when we were through he delivered us safely back to Rohring Rohring, sixth floor, east end, the Adolescent Wing, and, wherever we had left it, our mission.
Even when you live in the bughouse, life needs a mission. Especially when you live in the bughouse. After all, here you’ve got no field hockey team, no terrarium for your reptile collection, no Broncos Marching Band, no Future Lawyers of America. We called ourselves the Bug Motels because we were a rock band, but we hadn’t gotten around to learning instruments yet. Junk food couldn’t be a project here. This wasn’t Camp Chunkagunk where you got a candy bar every two weeks when you turned in your laundry. We Bug Motels had pocket money and charge accounts, two restaurants, a snack bar and a gift shop with a six-foot-long candy counter in the basement. We rolled in malted milk balls, canned potato sticks, cheese and peanut butter crackers, pretzel rods, you name it. For a while we had the use of the doctors’ tennis courts in the afternoons and huffed around the sunless courtyard in parkas and gloves, but then it got too cold even for us. We needed a doper to refine and complicate our appetites and godzilla gave us Bertie Stein, not only an experienced dope fiend but a mastermind. Bertie funneled us into the Manhattan Project, the H Bottle, the Big Blue Bomb.
You know that quaint sort of old bomb that falls, like it’s raining lipsticks, out of bulky white airplanes in The World at War? Under the main hospital next door were a huge pharmacy and the fabulously rumored morgue, but Rohring Rohring’s eight stories sat on a warehouse, an underground dump for big stuff, distillation urns and sterilizer boilers and hundred-pound drums of industrial cleanser, and royal blue size H cylinders of laughing gas that looked just like those bombs. It was one of them, fixed nicely next to its twin H of oxygen in Robinhood green on a cart like you’d use to bus a cafeteria, that souled our mission.
Bertie Stein was featherweight and restless and sifted about the corridors of Rohring Rohring all day long in roachlike silence, slipping through cracked doors if he found any, trying every lock and tuning his junkie’s x-ray eyes on blank walls and dead-end corridors. One day he saw a silver cart loaded with nitrous oxide roll off the third floor elevator and take its place in a row of rolling bins of soiled linens, waiting for some dutiful flunky to wheel them over the catwalk to the laundry chute in the main hospital. Bertie crawled on his hands and knees between laundry bins and from the moment he goosenecked up for a closer look at that cart with its copper tubes and gauges and mixers and regulators, the funny gray enema bag of a gas reservoir dangling down and the dear little red clown’s nose of a mask with two horny valves sticking out of it, he had to have one for his own. For our own. And pretty soon that was our mission.
He reported to the Bug Motels: “The nature of this gas,” drawling it out farcically, gazzz, “is a cartoon with the picture gone. You know, like, Tom the Cat falls through the roof of the opera house and bounces around the orchestra on his rubber stamp head. He gets spitted on a cello bow, sucked up a flute, digested by a bassoon, ha ha ha, tenderized by a marimba mallet, hee hee hee, and finally he gargles the tenor’s high C by swinging from his tonsil. Ho ho ho, except there’s no picture so why am I laughing. I’m laughing cause I weigh nuttin and I got these pink and blue bubbles popping in my veins. And now I’m crying cause I just tasted the tragedy deep in the pillowy fizz. Good stuff you’re gonna say. So how come such good stuff is legal for totally square tooth mechanics? Cause they’re gonna torture you anyway so you’ll never know you had any fun, but we’ll cop us a tank before our teeth are rotten.” The picturesque logic of the bughouse-how could any self-disrespecting Bug Motel argue with that?
Bertie ya see had three traits which made him a great maestro of missions: all that Stein moolah, a mind bent on one thing only, and no fear of the consequences, so that if someone had to take a fall, why shouldn’t it be Bertie? And that’s how he had landed on the funny farm in the first place, by juvenile court order. He had seen the inside of every crumbling smelly youth joint in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and at least had breakfast there before his parents fished him out, over and over, and redeposited him in Rohring Rohring. This scary exposure had only hardened in his dreambox the wish to be changed from itself, by any substance obtainable.
For a week we had been sending Emily down there five times every afternoon in a bin of dirty hospital gowns to scope the landing, since at (presently) fifty-three pounds she made the least dent in its canvas bottom. Of course she couldn’t roll herself off the elevator much less back onto it. She had to peer out through holes we had poked in the side for the ten seconds the elevator doors were open, while up on the sixth floor we pushed the down button frantically to summon her back to the Adolescent Wing before anything funny happened. “Bombs away?” we’d whisper in code into the bin of pale blue bathrobes and sterilizer towels, when it reappeared. “Nuh-uh,” she squeaked back every time from her nest. And on like that for six days and then on the seventh the elevator came back empty. “Uh-oh.” Sumpm funny had happened. We looked at one another and shuddered and ran down the hall to play ping-pong. We had to look innocent-and besides, Dion pointed out, for once we had just the right number for mixed doubles.
“Three to two, my serve,” Bertie hollered, so the whole bughouse would believe in our alibi. “Is she dead?” O whispered. “Who da hump knows,” Dion said. “It depends if she went down the chute headfirst or sideways,” I whispered back. “Sideways… oooo,” O echoed in her spooky-flute voice; you could tell from the queer crook of her chin she was picturing Emily stuck between the third and second floors, with her head wedged at an uncomfortable angle. “Say, does it hurt to be paralyzed?” I asked.
“Aaanh, she was only fifty-three pounds away from disappearing anyhow,” Dion said, “she wants to die, ain’t it?” “She was waiting for the birds to feed her,” I said, “least that’s what she told Dolores, who told Reggie, who told me.” “That’s a very beautiful idea,” sighed O, “that Emily is a saint, I’d never think of nuttin like that.” “Ya know, certain girls love death like I love D.O.A.P.,” Bertie observed, “like O here-you can tell from the eye makeup. To her every day is a funeral.” “Just cause you have to die before you get to wear makeup, Hebrew school creepo,” sneered O, glacially. “I don’t care if I do die. That’s why I’m here,” Bertie bragged, “and I won’t be wearing makeup either, I’m getting smoked, man, cause I figure I’ll be 98 percent tetra-hydrocannabinol by then.”
“Aaay, don’t worry, da stuff looks good on you,” Dion told O, “ladylike, I mean. Koderer don’t wear no black on her eyes, and she looks like Oliver Twist. In the movie, ya know.” “Ursie’s queer,” Bertie explained. I froze and O gasped. “Get oinked,” she said loyally, for she was a friend of mine, and as I was wildly in love with her I had never even let my hand brush her hand by mistake (lemme die first).
“I wear a little Clearasil over da zits now and then,” Dion said, “but nuttin on the eyes. Nino don’t recommend it.” Nino was his tailor. “I wonder if they’ll put any makeup on Emily,” O worried-meaning on her little dead white face. “Aaanh, Emily was a strange-looking bird at best. Makeup wouldn’t do nuttin for her,” said Dion. “I think Emily was cute, in a ugly sort of way,” O almost sobbed, in her spooky-flute. [Whap!] “Ace,” she added. O had a devastating serve. We volleyed on gloomily.
We had played three whole games-by now we had just about given up on ever seeing Emily alive again-when they rolled her onto the ward on a gurney, trailing white linens like a dead infanta. It all looked like a weird dream: Dr. Hamburger and Dr. Beasley running behind like footmen, or pilgrims, in tunics of elfin green. The last of the day slanted through the tall windows of the dayroom in banks, forming six mirages in the shapes of pyramids. As her body passed through them, the dust, like shrimps and scorpions of pure light, made way for the princess in worshipful agitation. The turban of gauze on her head pushed her face up at us, her open eyes glimmered drily in death through the mashed lace of her eyelashes-but then she blinked and smiled a little.
“What happened? What happened?” everyone asked, and we ran alongside the palankeen too. “Oooo my neck. It was kind of fun. Ursie…” I bent down to her, and she whispered: “… they think I tried to kill myself…” She giggled. “So what else is new,” Bertie panted, and I jerked his ponytail and stuck out a Ked so he fell splat on his face. “… and listen, Bug Motels-bombs away,” Emily said in code, “Big Blue on three… just standing there…”
Dr. Buzzey (Emily’s friendly but useless dreambox mechanic) met Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger, the medical residents, in her doorway. Then her private room sucked in all three, along with a coupla nosy nurses, Hageboom, if I remember right, and Mursch, and the door flapped shut behind them. Fluorescence streamed from its little square window. Somebody clicked shut the louvers. We stood there staring at the nothing of it.
“Ursie,” Bertie said, tenderly pinching his nose to make sure it wasn’t broken, “get down to three before they move that thing.”
“Me!” I said. Bertie after all was my height, had subsisted on tablets, syringe squirts and aromas for five and a half years and was skinny as a Yeshiva boy from Ruthenia. “I weigh one twenty-five,” I argued pointedly, knowing his own weight couldn’t be over a hundred. Even O was fatter than he was. “But girls aren’t as noticeable for being up to sumpm,” he said, an insight which didn’t quite hold up in the bughouse, but I was pleased that he clumped me with girls, it meant my cover was working. “And if the bomb is a heavy motha,” he went on, “who else but you can carry it?” He had a point there. Now ya see how Bertie got to be a mastermind: He knew his henchwoman, just which body part was headquarters of all her vanity, and mine was my muscles.
So I said yes but I stuck at going downstairs in a canvas laundry cart as long as some unknown unbribed nurse’s aide was still on the loose on three, zealously dumping the laundry bins down the chute without even checking them for mental patients. “And besides, we got no cart,” Dion reminded us. It was true, Emily had been launched from the one laundry bin we’d purloined. We were stuck. But all at once Emily’s door opened a brilliant crack-I caught sight of Dr. Beasley leaning down to her face like a strangler-and the empty gurney popped out. The linens on top of it had been whipped into peaks and gulleys, alarming as a meringue pie. Forty seconds later we had a new plan. Big Blue… just standing there, Emily had said, which sounded like that H, big as ya motha (Bertie’s charred old doper’s eyes glowed like furnace doors), wasn’t even on a cart-so we needed all the muscle we could get.
Bertie faded around the corner, came back in a minute with two surgeon’s tops he had pinched during some other caper, two pale green blouses with only a few smears of sumpm liverbrown and crusty down the front. He handed one to Dion. “Cheese, cool,” Dion said, and waltzed off down the hall with the thing. “No, man, keep away from that mirror!” Bertie called after him but Dion was already turning into his own room. “That’s the last we’ll see of him,” Bertie sighed, and it was. “Hey, what the hump, I guess I can push the thing by myself, it’s got wheels. Okay, girls, climb aboard.” O and I stared at each other while Bertie pulled his own green top over his head. It was big as a bank lobby on him but the smears of ancient gore and baggy fit looked touching on his haggardness, as though he were in med school at the age of twelve, a boy genius whom dissection of dead bodies had shocked out of his growth. I mean he looked plausible in a certain way. Fact was even Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger looked kinda babyish, big-eared and simian in those green smocks. And by the way, what were they doing in there with Emily so long, I wondered. Bertie must have had the same thought. “Is she stand-up?” he asked, squinting at her blank door. “As a fuk in a phone booth,” O replied, in the voice of vast experience. She and I still stared at each other and I saw her heart beating fast in the faint blue fork under her temple. Climb aboard, Bertie had said. Did that mean-lie down together on top?
“Okay, you two, lie down together on top and I’ll wrap you.” To my amazement, she nodded. She was wearing a pilly pink orlon V-neck sweater, sumpm only a drapette would wear, and a black bra you could see through the pink, and the V-neck almost down to her pupik. And so it came about that O and me, the Bogeywoman, lay body to body, or more specifically her lovely head stuck out the top and my bulby nose was pressed to the washboard of bone between her momps, so that I almost swooned for real from hyperventilating while Bertie tucked and patted and sculpted us, under that froth of used sheets, into one improbably thick beauty. “How do we look,” I muttered, for an excuse to move my lips. “Don’t talk, it tickles,” O spooky-fluted. But at least she didn’t say don’t breathe. I turned my chin up a little so my breath was mossing her throat. “Calm,” said Bertie, “you look calm,” for O always did, and down we went to the third floor landing with Bertie pushing.
Of course every hair of me waved like a sailor at the nearness of her. She was the shikseh oxymoron personified, she was the highest girl and the lowest girl and nothing in between: She was a drapette but also Mary Hartline of Super Circus, she had that public gorgeosity, she could be famous right now, a star, a TV star at least, and at the same time she was that sullen teenage underbitch calling you a jew, goading you in her peroxide hair and trashy clothes, then beating you up for looking at her funny. She reeked of the last cheap perfume tester she had boosted from Read’s, probably My Sin. I felt my heart budge against her and knew she could feel it too-like a mole under a tent floor. But then, was I right? she swiveled the tiniest bit, toward me not away, and my lips were quivering like a rabbit’s in the gulley between her momps, kinda folded into the dunes that swelled out of her bra and actually quivering, I would just need to stick out my tongue-and all would be lost lost lost! She might even knife me. I pulled myself together. I stayed where I was. I was almost happy: I was on mission, but at the same time I was a snouty cub who’d fallen asleep at the teat and woken up again in sweet milky darkness. Then suddenly her hand pressed the back of my head, her nuzzy pressed my lips and I knew she’d let me do whatever I
The elevator doors shuffled open and Bertie sang, “Oink me, it is an H. Holy godzilla, look at that motha.”
And I peeked out of our sheets at the thing. It sat on a stainless steel dolly in a row of dowdy linen bins, a Nike among Miss Muffets. It had been many times slicked over with paint but still had a rough, psoriatic crumb to its blue enamel that made me loath to touch it. It was like sumpm left to rust in a marine junkyard because it might explode-and yet it did resemble somebody’s mother: five feet high, all the power in the bosom and shoulders, some sort of undersized glass-faced gauge where the head should be-a meter instead of a dreambox, isn’t that just like a mother? Well what do I know, never having had one since I was two.
“Come on, Ursie. O, you stay put-make like you’re paralyzed or sumpm. Perfect.” Bertie and I stood side by 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 lamé 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 lamé 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 whole minutes with the Regicide, but she had stopped somewhere to paint fresh rings around her eyes and white lipstick on her mouth. She looked calm, she specialized in that. But there was sumpm funny about her eyes besides their being a little crossed, so that you wondered if they weren’t a hair closer together than they ought to be. They looked sore, scheming and goofy all at the same time, like Ol’ Witch Hazel’s niece Little Itch in Little Lulu.
“Could I talk personal to you?” O said, squinting into my face. “You mean me?” I said. I had dreamed she would come to me and say that, but this had the feel of a grenade under her clothes and I scrunched back in the corner against a tennis racket. Suddenly I remembered O was in the bughouse like all the rest of us. And there was some story, sumpm scary, sumpm with love and a knife.
“Aaaay, you made it, ace bad job, Sidekickette,” said Bertie. She just stood there, looking up at him from the bottoms of her black-ringed eyes. “Don’t call me Sidekickette,” she said, and Bertie scratched his chin, thinking. “Hey Dion, who was that bleach-blond sidekickette on the tube who walked on knives? Busting through that paper ring with her flaming batons? Bowls of nickels pennies and quarters, right? She was a ringer for O, maybe she was O, did you maybe used to walk on knives, O, besides throwing em?” “Mary Hartline, Super Circus,” I muttered. “Hey yeah-Mary Hartline. So have a huff, Mary Hartline. We haven’t done any yet. We were, er, like, waiting for you.” “You were?” “Sure.” Just then Emily leaned around the door jamb, looking like a cross between a virgin picked for sacrifice and a unicorn, her long white hospital gown dragging on the floor and a big dab of purple merthiolate on her forehead, with the lump of unicorn horn beginning to stick out of it. “Aaaay-boss good deed, Sidekickette. Mission accomplished. We were waiting for you. How’s the dreambox?” “Don’t call her Sidekickette,” O spooky-fluted, but then they both sat down. “You start, Mary Hartline.”
But O passed and anyhow Bertie never quite opened his hand to leggo the apparatus-instead he gave a lecture demonstration. He impaled the red nose mask on a pinky and pointed to the tube the laughing gas went through. He fingered in a nasty way a little red nub of valve hanging next to it: “Know what this is for? Huh? Everybody listening? No, you don’t know what this is for. Oxygen which we don’t have, sidekicks, so don’t go too long without breathing.” And then he showed us, and Dion tried it, and Emily touched her little nose to it, and Bertie showed us again. And while he was busy showing us, O leaned over to me:
“I ain’t no bull dagger,” she whispered.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know what a bull dagger was, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, the toughest girl possible, but I’d never talked knowingly to another in my life, and Bull Dagger sounded to me sort of like a character from Oliver Twist, so I figured it was sumpm to do with parting fuddies from their bankrolls and I said, “That’s okay. I know you’re not,” although I knew she was. “I’d do it for you, though,” she let go a hot gust of some kind of spirits in my ear. I stared at her. Now I thought she was saying she had oinked Reggie for me and I was scared it might be true. “Don’t you do sumpm like that for me.” She squinted back suspiciously out of her huge, raccoony eyes and said, “Ain’t you one?” “Hump no.” “So how come you did me like that?” “Huh?” “Under the sheets.”
I was beginning to see my mistake and I felt the sweat glittering on my temples, which was sheer fear of being found out. “I didn’t do you like that,” I hissed, “you did me like that.” She thought this over. She didn’t go for it. “I oughta kill you for lying,” she spooky-fluted, “but I’d still do it for you,” she offered again, sorta fiercely, “because I like you better, you ain’t like a fuddy, you ain’t like nobody, but then you have to be mine, you colly?” “Yours?” “Mine. All mine. M-I-N-E mine.”
I was looking, just looking, at that gleaming, half-cracked, poison bait in her slightly crossed eyes, and Bertie put the red pig mask in my hand and I buried my nose in it just to get away from that look. I needed her so bad, or let’s say I needed someone so bad, I was going to say yes now and pay later whatever the bill was, I mean who cared, I was in the bughouse, what worse could happen. She could kill me lit up my dreambox, and I almost remembered that story about just how O got into Rohring Rohring, but even so I was going to say yes if what happened next hadn’t happened-I mean if Zuk hadn’t come out of nowhere to save me.
Anyhow those giant popcorn balls were sailing by, ball by huge slow ball, and I said I wonder why this is fun and Emily, refusal was her middle name, said Maybe it’s not fun, and O, who’d been skipping the gas and pulling now and then on a little two-ounce snort bottle of white rum I think it was or maybe peppermint schnapps, snatched the red gas mask and stared at me balefully and buried her nose in the thing like it was the last rose of summer. And never came up for air again. We all looked at each other, helpless doomed looks were going around like yawns, and the next thing we knew she was thrashing about in Bertie’s tennis rackets and shoes and Marvel comics and 45’s, having a convulsion.
“Cheese, what are we gonna do?” cried Emily. (Because she was eleven years old and Miss Dying Popularity, Emily was exempt from the laissez faire of Bug Motels in trouble.) The rest of us looked blank. “Aaaannh, she’ll come out of it,” Bertie crooned at last, delicately unhooking O’s fine blue fingers from the red rubber mask and hose and ferrying the appliance from her small nose to his big one, a princely triangle, shiny and freckled like a blintz.
O’s teeth were still chattering but some little bubbles that stuck to her lips showed me she was breathing, or trying to, and I remembered from Lake Sci at Camp Chunkagunk that you’re supposed to make sure the girl’s tongue isn’t stuck in her throat and there’s no plug of Double Bubble in there and she didn’t go down chewing her noseclips. (As if any tough girl in paradise, any girl whose life was worth saving, would wear noseclips!) And so I leaned over and slid two fingers through her lips, and felt around the wet satin of her mouth and over the faint callous of her tongue-which was a lot like kissing, kissing without being kissed first, and right in front of the Bug Motels too. And then I bumped along the backs of her teeth and the ridges of her palate-it seemed like everything was where it ought to be, but somehow I couldn’t stop.
And wherever she was, maybe she thought it was kissing too. (Maybe O dreamed she was lying washed up on the scratchy pebble beach at Fort Smallwood, where she once saw a drowned black girl whose bathing suit was gone, and her raspberry lips wrinkled up like a kiss that hurt, and somebody had draped a white towel across her crotch like a label they forgot to fill out.) Anyhow all of a sudden her teeth clamped down hard, so hard on my fingers I wanted to howl out loud and I could hear myself howling, far far away. But I didn’t want to scare her and of course I wasn’t howling in front of the Bug Motels, lemme die first. Finally her eyes popped wide open inside their blackened portholes and maybe she saw me, maybe she didn’t-“Sufferin cheeses,” she shrieked, at least spitting out my fingers, and leaped halfway up and threw herself with one great hand-puppet flop out of Bertie’s private closet and into Bertie’s private bathroom, and somehow her head got stuck fast, face up, between the toilet and the lead pipe that filled the tank.
And now she screamed bloody murder, and soon she really was bleeding from banging her head over and over against that pipe, bong bong bong. Emily superfluously screeched: “She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding, can’t none of you guys see she’s B-L-E-A-T-I-N-G bleeding”-I’ll never forget her spelling it like a lamb. “I’m getting a royal,” she threatened. “Don’t do that,” said Bertie smoothly, “we can take care of this-hey, easy, O, easy, be cool, don’t jump around.”
Dion tried to hold O steady-for after her shriek I wouldn’t have laid a hand on her again for a million dollars, lemme die first-and I stared at her long white throat and the flawless prow of her chin underneath (where I had a coupla black wires even then) and those flying drops of blood spattering the wall where she kept banging her forehead on the bolt that holds the tank to the toilet. Finally she held still.
Her neck stiff, her eyeballs swiveling around the room, she spooky-fluted: “Sufferin cheeses, Ursie! What the hump happened?” She looked at me pleadingly. “Could I please talk to O in private?” I said. “Like dat’s gonna help!” objected Dion delicately, “like you can muscle her dreambox outa dere all by yourself.” “Get out,” I shrieked and they finally went. After all they only had eight feet to travel back to Bertie’s private closet, where they had the whole H bomb of laughing gas to console them-and I kicked the door shut between us and the boys and said into O’s ear:
“We shouldna fed you to the Regicide.” “Aaaa who gives a gum wrapper,” she muttered. She wouldn’t meet my eye and suddenly I could tell she’d lost her way for love-didn’t I know the signs?-and of all people, right now it was me she loved. She loved me a little, that automatically put me above her, made me her boss or was it her pimp-I mean she’d take from the others and give to me-that was the way she thought. The tears were sliding backwards down her temples into her hair. And I was even more scared of her, like hanging by my fingernails, but kinda touched. “Gimme a smoke out my pocket, would ya?” she spooky-fluted. “Reggie gave me his Luckies, ya want one?” I thought it would be, er, unchristian, not that I pass myself off as a christian, not to smoke her swag, I mean the half a battered pack she’d picked up for herself, feeding herself to the Regicide. I stuck a coupla towels behind her head, pronged two fingers into the side pocket of her skirt-her hipbone stuck up like a rock in a harbor-and worked the Luckies out. I lit one for each of us. We smoked in worried silence. I mean, her head was still stuck all this time in the toilet pipe. Brown blood matted the pale floss at her hairline.
I thought I could smell the hot blue smoke on her that blows in your gills whenever you even kiss, never mind oink, somebody for a practical reason. I was trying to think of a way to artistically make her feel better, feel sumpm, when I was almost too scared to touch her. “Er, is it any fun, oinking a guy like the Regicide?” She shrugged. “Reggie ain’t so bad,” she said. “Him and me go way back. A lot of these fuddies won’t give you carfare to welfare. Reg, if he’s got two dollars you got one.” I smiled half-heartedly. She had to stop thinking of men that way. “Here’s the hump about Reginald,” she went on, “you never come first with him, ya see. You’re one bitch, he’s probly got five or six bitches, maybe even ten or a dozen bitches. He’s like the mayor of the bitches of Reggieville and you just get one vote. He’ll even tell you that very reasonable: He’ll run your life for you if you want him to, but you’re only gonna get one vote in Reggieville. The general good of Reggieville comes first, he says. He’s gotta keep peace among the bitches, ya see.” I nodded.
“Say, Ursie. You’re the only girl I’d do it with. But I don’t exactly think of you as a girl.” Again I smiled crookedly. I didn’t dare ask her what, exactly, she thought of me as. “I don’t want to run your life,” I said. “Hey, why not?” she spooky-fluted with a spooky smile, “ain’t it fun to run somebody’s life?” “I don’t even like to run the vacuum cleaner,” I hastily lied. For I wouldn’t mind one bit running everyone’s life, and then I could tell them to run the vacuum cleaner. It was just O poisonally I was scared to boss around. Frankly I didn’t think she’d listen.
“Let’s kiss, Ursie.” She closed her eyes halfway and stuck out her tongue a little. Her head was nicely framed in the toilet pipe, wreathed in and out with tongues of platinum hair. My heart started to gong Charlie Chan style, but I thought twice. I mean her forehead was still bleeding a little and the other three Bug Motels, who were probably listening, might throw open the door-it was quiet in there, too quiet, but every now and then Dion yelled out Hurry up in there you lesbos with a whoop of goofy laughter.
So I thought twice. But I had been starving too long. She waggled that pink goldfish of a tongue and said, “Come on, Ursie. Kiss.” “Right now?” I said. “Sure.” “You got nowhere to put your head.” “So lie down on top of me.” Wincing for her, but panting like a guilty dog I lay down on top of her body in its tight peel of black and pink. And since I was literally wincing, my lips curling back in animal dread from my teeth, in went her tongue as smooth as a letter opener. O my oasis-silk crossed the border, pepper oil, dried apricots, olives, tokay, how long we went on trading like this at the water hole I don’t know, not long, when
“Gorgeous, stupid youths-perhaps you can explain me what is the difficulty?” Came into my ears for the first time that voice, that slow, scraping violoncello of a voice, melodious against the smoke of a hundred thousand Gypsygirl cigarettes. I pitched a bit to the right to see who it was, my hand still on O’s keel-puncturing hipbone. The door had opened above us, and here was Emily dragging help by the arm after all-a stranger, a woman, probably a doctor, long necked, muscular, her gray springy hair convict-cropped, her handsome face not young. No spring chicken but a silvery winter weasel-right away I thought of Mustela erminea.
I should have been horrified, considering that I was still a Unbeknownst To Everybody. Above all no dreambox mechanic should get wind-the nerve of these royals, butting into my private life, not to mention my death, if I should choose to off myself, with the rent here as steep as it was and the grub just eatable-and if any royal should ask me flat out, I’d never talk (lemme die first). Well, the woman observing me was clearly a royal, but of some novel and dazzling subspecies that mixed me up-and I ask myself, could I have been falling in love with Zuk already?
But she was a royal, so an excuse for lying on top of O could not be far away, here it was: “Thank godzilla you came,” I panted, with Camp Chunkagunk earnest. “I couldn’t have held up her head another minute. I got her loose as far as her ears,” and I bent out those small translucent cockleshells like a medical exhibit. “Maybe we could vaseline em.”
The newcomer stood between the two open doors of Bertie’s private bathroom and private closet, running her fingers through her spiky hair, looking back and forth from the H of laughing gas to the two shrimpy and sheepish boy worshippers kneeling at its foot among the smelly shoes and tennis balls, and on to the two girlgoyles lying en sandwich with their tongues lately in each other’s mouths, one of them with her head wrapped in the toilet pipe. She wore a soft and clinging dress of sumpm pearly gray-coulda been weasel pelt. And now she began laughing, slowly, low in her throat, in a kind of disbelief. “From where you kids organize this thing?”-pointing at the H. No one said anything for a rather long time, then Bertie: “Found it.” “Where you found it?” Shifty eyes, skating round and round behind his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, no reply. “Come, tell me, what room you got it? I don’t punish, I want be sure you don’t screw up anesthesia of somebody.” “It was loose,” Bertie assured her. She snorted. “Yes, I believe you-far too much loose articles around this rich like Rockefeller hospital. So. You gave it good home. And job. But you are sure it wasn’t already employed and you liberated…?” “It was down on three. On the landing.” She nodded her approval.
Now she turned her attention to the girlgoyles on the bathroom floor. Actually I might as well not have been there for all the attention the woman paid to me. She took over. She knelt down to O with a decisive squeak of her high-heeled sandals.
“This is very lovely girl,” she said, with thrilling irrelevance for a dreambox mechanic, looking curiously at the face she found between her hands. Her hands were ugly, clean and square, with gnawed-down fingernails and no rings. “Too much maquillage around the eyes, I show you better way later, my dear, if you remind me. How in hell you got here anyway,” she murmured, but uninterrogatively, and parted the hair a little with her fingertips to look. “These-are-nothing, little punchholes all under hair, except here maybe could use one stitch, later will be just little white star at hairline, quite pretty I think.”
Haven’t we gone about far enough with the royal commentary on the mental patient’s beauté? “Say, are you a dreambox adjustor or what?” I blurted. “Why you want to know that, my dear?” she said without turning around, “a minute ago you are glad to see me, no? You want to help?-find me soap. How you gorgeous stupid youths live without soap?”
It was true we Bug Motels were a by and large soapless society, but I flew to my private bathroom and pried away, from the center of the mirror, a hockey puck of orange Dial I had stuck there long ago so I wouldn’t have to look at my nose. “Here it is,” I panted. “Is good work.” She let go of O’s dreambox, which banged against the pipe. “Sufferin cheeses,” O said through her teeth, “get me outa here.” “I’ll hold her headbone,” I offered, “I’m strong as a little French horse and I got experience.” At that the woman stopped dead on her way to the sink and looked over, not at O, at me, at me! with sudden interest, her face at an odd tilt, one eye asquint. Involuntarily my hand stole to my nose. Maybe sumpm was hanging off it. “You are Ursula Koderer,” she divined. “Um, er, uh…” But why prevaricate? Some little bit of fame had evidently stuck to me behind my back. “Yeah,” I said, slitting my eyes at her, feeling a happy, cozy little glow of suspicion, “so what if I am?”
But already she was at the sink with her back to me, rubbing up a lather, and I eyeballed the busy jiggle of her muscular buttocks with conscious impudence. “Sufferin cheeses, hurry up,” O croaked. I crawled over to the toilet and took her dreambox by the ears, without even seeing, this time, how bloody, how pretty-that quick, the silver weasel had taken over.
And then that personage herself elbowed me out of the way, carrying mounds of foam. “O yeah, the old soap trick, why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered. “Because is too easy. You are heroical type,” she explained in that scratchy, ironical contralto that, as long as I knew her, refused to hurry itself for any calamity. “You climb pear tree, leap over wall, maybe break neck, without first to try gate. Charming, I know this type well.” “Whaddaya mean? What do you know about me,” I said, unable to give her up so soon, but she had gone on to more important stuff and steadfastly ignored me.
I studied her from behind. She was more tall than short, more fleshy than boney, and she seemed to be as fit as a soldier in the field, though with those gnarled hands and that gray spiky pelt on her head you could say she looked her age, whatever her age was-sumpm between thirty and sixty. Only the Abominable Snowman could have put his hands around that waist but she was long and lithe in the spine and the back of the neck, with a sturdy compact derrière that worked up and down like twin pistons as she energetically lathered O’s ears, and again I thought of the elegant and voracious lines of a winter weasel or a mink that for the sheer fun of it kills ten times as much as it eats. You might suppose I would take this as a caution, but I felt only hungry wonder at sumpm new in the usually boring line of grownups-to be exact, a grown-up woman who had none of the martyred flab and grizzle about her of somebody’s wife, somebody’s ninth-grade teacher, or somebody’s mother.
Bossy as hump, though-you could tell that already. And another thing I noticed right away as I took in the soft gray drapery from her throat to her knees, and the glinting pearl stockings along the blades of the shins and over the curve of the soleus, which was developed like a soccer player’s. As the Bogeywoman, as Merlin’s daughter, as apprentice to the wood wizardess and a slob all my life, I had never paid any attention to clothes. But hers I could tell were beautiful and, sumpm else, they meant money. Her money-it was printed on her whole air like NABISCO on a cracker-a certain kind of authority-yes, a lady dreambox mechanic rolled in her own dough. And for the first time I realized that one day, or not, if I didn’t off myself, I’d have to have some too. Not clothes. Money.
So. Her hands piled with lather, she sat down on O like a kayaker to hold her in place, reached all business through the hole between fill pipe and toilet and soaped the small ears. “Ouch, sufferin cheeses,” O whined and pulled this way and that way. “Relax head,” commanded the weasel, sinking hard fingers in the blond clouds of Mary Hartline hair, and O instantly sort of broke at the stalk of her neck and the headbone dangled there, with the doctor’s other hand guiding the chin, but it was still stuck. “Ch-ch-choleria!” doctor weasel snarled; it was the most terrible curse I had ever heard, and afterwards I could see little beads of her spit pearling O’s forelock. Angrily she got up again, filled her hands with more foam, roughly sideburned O’s cheeks and chin, pompadoured the bloody brow with pinkening scum, screwed the whole head a little bit east like turning a globe and gave it a jerk not altogether gentle. The head popped free. “Sufferin cheeses Emily where’d you find this brutal bitch,” O muttered ungratefully, rubbing her ears and neck, “who da hump is she anyhow?”
There was a thunder of fuddies’ hooves: Bertie and Dion were cheesing it out of the closet and down the hall, in exact accord with Bug Motels’ operational principles, leaving me and O holding the bag. The weasel showed a commendable lack of interest in their existence. She didn’t even look round. I recalled that my Bug Motel’s duty, now that O was free, was to slink out while the slinking was good. O all by herself was famous for stonewalling cops, and royals. I backed gluily towards the door, but thank godzilla, doctor weasel clamped a hand around my ankle in time. “You,” she said, rising up into my face. “Miss Koderer. Please to explain me what is happened.” I blinked. I couldn’t squeal right in front of two other Bug Motels. But I didn’t want the weasel talking to anybody else either. She was no ordinary dreambox mechanic-if she was a dreambox mechanic-and I was just about to ask her again exactly what she was, when old dying hence ethically exempt Emily piped up: “O had a grandma fizzy fit on the floor, she even had whip cream in her mouth like when a dog bites a frog or sumpm.” The weasel turned to O, who sat hunched and rubbing her neck inside the icy billows of her hair, a lit Lucky hanging from her dry lips. “Miss O’Day?” O shrugged and showed the weasel her back. So it came back to me.
“Miss Koderer. This object. You can explain me please for what you want it?” Her voice thrummed lazily on its low string and she touched with a pointed toe the H of laughing gas, then the clown’s nose lying in its loops of red rubber tubing. “I…” I stammered, glad to have her eye on me, but embarrassed to look like a mastermind of dreambox oils powders and gasses in front of her, for I had a hunch what she would think of that. I mean, she was a mysterious, grown-up woman of the world, next to whom even the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus, looked like a bucktoothed rube. I gasped at my own disloyalty to my first love and for a moment I hated the woman, for how could she ever love my kind, my potato-shaped nose bulb, lips of wornout underpants elastic, body straight as a pencil, rusty hair, hun manners?
“I… had to have sumpm to do in this dump,” I whispered. Until I saw you, I thought. She didn’t smile. I felt her peer through my buggy disguise as through a glass pane; one of her eyebrows arched up mockingly. “How you are called, my dear?” “Bogeywoman,” I said, and O and Emily tittered, because I had never let a dreambox mechanic in on my moniker before. Doctor weasel put out her ugly hand. “Is pleasure,” she said. I stared at the hand floating between us. Then I remembered to take it.
“How… how you are called?” I mimicked her, not only to be fresh to a dreambox adjustor in front of the Bug Motels, though I knew they would be impressed. No, I must have sensed I would have to haggle and track and scheme and beg for every crumb of truth about her as long as I knew her. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Zuk,” she finally said, in her peculiar, salivary accent, sumpm between shook and zook. “Doctor Zuk?” “Zuk,” she repeated, her voice loud and bored, as if she regretted having said so much.
She leaned into Bertie’s closet and laid a finger on the cold pebbly cylinder of laughing gas. “Pfui,” she exclaimed, “unpleasant feeling like skin of dead hairless animal. Here is interesting fact: human beings despise everything hairless-at least I think is true. Pig, snake, legs of chicken, wing of bat, bald head of man, tail of opossum and rat, I wonder why is this? Why they would hate everything bald like themselves?”
“Cause they got taste,” I said-talk about an easy question!
She didn’t answer, but her silvery eyes lit on me for maybe five seconds as though I were the most interesting animal on earth. Then she turned and walked away. And I remember her sleek behind flexing like a fist under the velour, and the pinprick her champagne-flute heels made across my forehead as she went-that was as close as I came to taking her in.
Bertie came creeping back as soon as she was gone. “They didn’t even call the cops,” he said in a hurt voice. “Well, maybe they still will,” I consoled him, “she just left.” “Did she look mad?” “Er, not exactly.” Of course we were too nervous now either to sniff the H or to leave it alone, but a few minutes later Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard came in without a word-just shot us a scornful look, kiddie D.O.A.P. it said, like the time we five choked down a whole McCormick’s tin of nutmeg between us and all of us puked for an hour but nothing else happened-and rolled the H bomb away. But two minutes later he left in its place a modest little E cylinder on a cart with its twin oxygen tank and gauges and valves and other appurtenances, all in working order, and said, “Yall damn fool huff-heads got fi-teen minutes with this baby and that’s it, so get to work.” We dutifully sat down and huffed, but all the fun had gone out of that mission. I didn’t see any more giant popcorn. Instead I had a vision of Zuk, the international doctor weasel, skiing in her high-heeled sandals on a sort of slag heap of stars. A great dust of stars flew up all around her-she was brilliant, but she was dust, and she was skidding down down down.