Hurricane Doris didn’t seem especially disappointed at the absence of a crowd; and perhaps the boys were even grateful to have fewer people staring at them, as they dragged their bright, cheap equipment from outlet to outlet, plugging in.
The first thing I heard Doris Wales say was, “Move the mike back, Jake, and don’t be an asshole.” The acoustic bass (called Jake), another greasy splinter in a GULF shirt, cringed over the microphone as if he lived in terror of electrical shock—and of being an asshole. Sleazy Wales gave the other boy in the band a lovable punch in the kidneys; a fat drummer named Danny, the boy absorbed the punch with dignity—but with obvious pain.
Doris Wales was a woman with straw-blonde hair whose body appeared to have been dipped in corn oil; then she must have put her dress on, wet. The dress grabbed at all her parts, and plunged and sagged over the gaps in her body; a lover’s line of hickeys, or love bites—“lovesucks,” Franny called them—dotted Doris’s chest and throat like a violent rash; the welts were like wounds from a whip. She wore plum-coloured lipstick, some of which was on her teeth, and she said, to Sabrina Jones and me, “You want hot-dancin’ music, or slow-neckin’ music? Or both?”
“Both,” said Sabrina Jones, without missing a beat, but I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
Doris Wales, some months after the hurricane that was her namesake, first heard Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” when she was actually in a hotel. She told Sabrina and me that this had been a religious experience.
“You understand?” Doris said. “I was shacked up with this guy, in an actual hotel, when this song comes over the radio. That song told me how to feel,” Doris explained. “That was about half a year ago,” she said. “I haven’t been the same since.”
I wondered about the guy who’d been shacked up with Doris Wales when she had her experiences; where was he now? Had he been the same since?
Doris Wales sang only Elvis Presley songs; when it was appropriate, she changed the he’s to she’s (and vice versa); this improvisation and the fact, as Junior Jones noted, that she was “no Negro,” made listening to her almost unbearable.
In a gesture of making peace with his sister, Junior Jones asked Sabrina to dance the first dance; the song, I remember, was “Baby, Let’s Play House,” during which Sleazy Wales several times overpowered his mother’s voice with his electricity. “Jesus God,” Father said. “How much are we paying them?”
“Never mind,” Mother said. “Everyone can have a good time.”
It seemed unlikely, although Egg appeared to be having a good time; he was wearing a toga, and Mother’s sunglasses, and he was keeping clear of Frank, who lurked at the edge of light, among the empty tables and chairs—no doubt grumbling, to himself, his disgust.
I told Bitty Tuck that I was sorry I’d called her Titsie—that it had just slipped out.
“Okay, John-John,” she said, feigning indifference—or worse: feeling true indifference for me.
Lilly asked me to dance, but I was too shy; then Ronda Ray asked me, and I was too shy to refuse. Lilly looked hurt, and refused a gallant invitation from Father. Ronda Ray swung me violently around the floor.
“I know I’m losing you,” Ronda told me. “My advice: when you’re going to pull out on someone, tell them first.”
I was hoping Franny would cut in, but Ronda wheeled us into Junior and Sabrina, who were clearly arguing.
“Switch!” Ronda cried, gaily, and took Junior away.
Hurricane Doris, in an unforgettable transition of slopped-together sound, crushed instruments, and Doris’s strident voice, switched gears and gave us “I Love You Because”—a slow, close-dancing number, through which I trembled in the steady arms of Sabrina Jones.
“You’re not doing so bad,” she said. “Why don’t you put a move on that Tuck girl—your sister’s friend?” she asked me. “She’s about your age.”
“She’s eighteen,” I said, “and I don’t know how to put a move on anybody.” I wanted to tell Sabrina that although my relationship with Ronda Ray was carnal, it had hardly been a learning experience. With Ronda, there was no foreplay; sex was immediate and genital, but Ronda refused to let me kiss her on the mouth.
“That’s how the worst germs get spread around,” Ronda assured me. “Mouths.”
“I don’t even know how to kiss anybody,” I told Sabrina Jones, who seemed puzzled at what—for her—was a non sequitur.
Franny, who didn’t care for the way Ronda Ray was dancing the slow number with Junior, cut in on them, and I held my breath—hoping Ronda wasn’t going to come after me.
“Relax,” said Sabrina Jones. “You feel like a ball of wire.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Never apologize to the opposite sex,” she said. “Not if you want to get anywhere.”
“Get anywhere?” I said.
“Beyond the kissing,” Sabrina said.
“I can’t get to the kissing,” I explained to her.
That’s easy,” Sabrina said. “To get to the kissing, all you have to do is act like you know how to kiss: then someone will let you start.”
“But I don’t know how,” I said.
That’s easy,” Sabrina said. “Just practice.”
“Nobody to practice with,” I said—but I thought, fleetingly, of Franny.
“Try it with Bitty Tuck,” Sabrina whispered, laughing.
“But I have to look like I know how,” I said. “And I don’t.”
“We’re back to that,” Sabrina said. “I’m too old to let you practice with me. It wouldn’t be good for either of us.”
Ronda Ray, cruising the dance floor, spotted Frank behind the empty tables, but Frank fled before she could ask him to dance. Egg was gone, so Frank had probably been waiting for an excuse to go corner Egg alone. Lilly was dancing, stoically, with one of Father and Mother’s friends, Mr. Matson, an unfortunately tall man—although, if he had been short, he couldn’t have been short enough for Lilly. They looked like an awkward, perhaps unmentionable animal act.
Father danced with Mrs. Matson and Mother stood at the bar, talking with an old crony who was at the Hotel New Hampshire nearly every night—a drinking friend of Coach Bob’s; his name was Merton, and he was the foreman at the lumberyard. Merton was a wide, heavy man with a limp and mighty, swollen hands; he listened half-heartedly to my mother, his face stricken with the absence of Iowa Bob; his eyes, feasting on Doris Wales, seemed to think that the band was inappropriate so soon after Bob’s ultimate retirement.
“Variety,” said Sabrina Jones in my ear. “That’s the secret to kissing,” she said.
“‘I love you for a hundred thousand reasons!’” crooned Doris Wales.
Egg was back; he was in his Big Chicken costume; then he was gone again. Bitty Tuck looked bored; she seemed unsure about cutting in on Junior and Franny. And she was so sophisticated, as Franny would say, that she did not know how to talk with Ronda Ray, who had fixed herself a drink at the bar. I saw Max Urick gawking out of the kitchen doorway.
“Little bites, and a little bit of tongue,” said Sabrina Jones, “but the important thing is to move your mouth around.”
“Do you want a drink?” I asked her. “I mean, you’re old enough. Father put a case of beer in the snow, out at the delivery entrance, for us kids. He said he couldn’t let us drink at the bar, but you can.”
“Show me the delivery entrance,” said Sabrina Jones. “I’ll have a beer with you. Just don’t get fresh.”
We left the dance floor, fortunately just in time to miss Doris Wales’s slamming transition to “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine.”—the speed of which prompted Bitty Tuck to cut in on Franny for a dance with Junior. Ronda looked sullenly upon my leaving.
Sabrina and I startled Frank, who was pissing on the trash barrels at the delivery entrance. In a gesture of Frank-like awkwardness, Frank pretended to be pointing out the beer to us. “Got an opener, Frank?” I asked, but he had vanished into the mist of Elliot Park—the ever-dreary fog, which in the winter was our dominant weather.
Sabrina and I opened our beers at the reception desk in the lobby, where Frank had permanently hung a bottle opener from a nail on a length of twine; it was for opening his Pepsi-Colas when he was on phone duty at the desk. In a clumsy effort to sit beside Sabrina, on the trunk of Junior’s winter clothes, I spilled some beer on Bitty Tuck’s luggage.
“You could introduce yourself to her affections,” Sabrina was saying, “by offering to take all those bags to her room.”
“Where are your bags?” I asked Sabrina.