“How’s it going with the lunch truck?” he asked, stroking the half-assed mustache he’d been cultivating for the past year or so. Other than that, his appearance hadn’t changed much since high school. He still had the same limp hair parted in the middle, still wore the same flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off and the untied work boots that had been his uniform at Harding. I usually got pissed off when my friends mocked me for going preppy on them, but sitting next to the Squidman in my jeans and Hawaiian shirt and penny loafers, I understood why they might think so.
“Not bad. Kinda sucks getting up at four in the morning, though.”
“There’s a truck that comes by the loading dock,” he said. “Coffee tastes like shit.”
“Our coffee’s not so bad until about ten o’clock. After that it’s a little iffy.”
A panicky feeling came over me just then, like I’d forgotten to do something important but couldn’t remember what it was.
“Fuck,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t lost those directions. I can’t remember the last time I went to a party.”
I closed my eyes for a few seconds, trying to get everything to slow down so I could think a little.
“Did you get a weird buzz off that pot?” I asked.
The Squidman ignored my question. He looked me over for a few seconds, like he was trying to figure out if he could trust me.
“You wanna go to Cousin Butchie’s?” he asked. “I bet Jenny’s dancing tonight.”
Cousin Butchie’s looked
like a regular neighborhood bar, except for the fact its only neighbors were a few rundown houses on one side and the Bayway Refinery on the other, a sprawling, mysterious
facility fenced in and lit up like a maximum-security prison. Every time I saw the storage tanks, dozens of them laid out in neat rows like a suburban development, I couldn’t help remembering the massive explosion that had ripped through the refinery when I was a kid. Even eight miles away in Darwin, the sky had turned a bright blazing orange, and people came spilling out of their houses in pajamas and robes, pointing heavenward and wondering out loud if the Russians had started World War III.
Despite the universally glowing reports I’d gotten from my friends, it struck me as soon as I coughed up the three-dollar cover and stepped inside that Cousin Butchie’s wasn’t a place you came to have fun. There was a charge in the air, an aura of bottled-up tension and impending violence; with each step I took I felt myself becoming younger and younger, a little boy wandering into a circle of embarrassed and angry men. They were working men, mostly, guys in dusty jeans and steel-toed boots who probably bought their coffee off a truck, clutching beer bottles and staring at a sullen Puerto Rican girl in moccasin-style go-go boots and a feathered headdress who was gyrating to that song about how “they took the whole Cherokee nation, and put us on this reservation.”
The Squidman and I claimed a pair of stools and ordered expensive beers. The bar was circular, and I found myself struggling not to make eye contact with the man directly across from me. He was about my father’s age and I had him pegged for a salesman of some sort, a chubby, exhausted-looking guy in a rumpled gray suit with an overstuffed three-ring binder resting on the bar next to his bottle of Bud. The stools on either side of him were empty, and I couldn’t help wondering what would drive somebody like him to a place like this at ten o’clock on a Friday night. His stardiously blank expression only changed once the entire time we were there, after a black dancer wearing a leopard-print G-string squatted right in front of him and shook her ass in his face for a long time. When she finally stopped, he looked like a different man, his eyes bulging and his mouth hanging open, his whole face
shining with a look of awestruck gratitude. He took a bill out of his wallet and waved it back and forth over his head until the dancer took pity on him and did it again.
There were five girls trading off in a round robin, dancing for a song or two, then making way for the next. Each one had her own meager costume and matching style of music. Besides the Puerto Rican Cherokee and the black woman, who had a kind of Sheena thing going (her signature tune was Jethro Tull’s “Bungle in the Jungle”), there was a voluptuous California girl (“Surfin’ USA”), and a petite Asian woman in a waitress uniform (“Brass in Pockets,” followed, for some reason, by Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”), and finally Jenny, who came bounding out to “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies in an honest-to-goodness Harding High cheerleader outfit, complete with saddle shoes and green-and-gold pom-poms.
It was a surreal moment, made even stranger by the fact that I didn’t recognize her right away. Part of it was that she’d dyed her hair black since I’d last seen her and was wearing it in pigtails, but mostly it was just the sheer incongruity of the costume. If they’d given out an award for the girl least likely to be mistaken for a cheerleader at Harding, Jenny would have been a shoe-in. She’d always been perversely proud of her identity as the school slut and was probably as scornful of the perky and cliquish cheerleaders as they would have been of her.
Even if you hadn’t been her classmate, though, it wouldn’t have taken you long to figure out that Jenny hadn’t logged a lot of hours at pep rallies, or in drama class, for that matter. Her impression of a cheerleader was fairly minimal. It basically consisted of shoving the pom-poms in one direction and jutting her hips in the other, and then reversing the procedure, all the while making absurdly lewd faces at the audience. When this got old she did a few jumping jacks and then gave up on the pom-poms altogether, tossing them over her shoulder to a wiry bouncer with a slicked-back Sha Na Na haircut whose job it was to collect the discarded items before they fell into the hands of the paying customers.
The next segment of her routine played off the illusion—given
the skimpiness of the G-string, it was a fairly convincing one—that she wasn’t wearing anything under her short pleated skirt. She skipped a quick circuit around the elevated walkway, flipping up her skirt every couple of steps to give the viewers a good peek at what was underneath. The Squidman, who was normally pretty shy around girls, clutched my arm as she approached and let out a roar of delight when she gave us the obligatory eyeful.
“All right!” he bellowed, pumping both fists in the air. “Woo-hoo!”
Pleased by his enthusiasm, Jenny skipped back in front of us and gave a brief encore performance for our benefit, adding a couple of well-rehearsed bumps and grinds to the mix. The way the walkway was rigged up, my eyes were level with her knees, so I had to tilt my head at an uncomfortable angle to look at her face. I wondered for a second if she might recognize me, but she just kept staring at nothing, her eyes glittery and hollow, as she ran her hands slowly up her thighs and over her breasts.
She stripped before the next circuit, gathering the sweater over her navel and lowering it a couple of times before pulling it off completely. Wriggling out of the skirt with a similar lack of ceremony, she kicked it through the air to the bouncer, and then, for the first time since she’d made her entrance, really started to dance, turning in slow circles so that everyone could appreciate her small upturned breasts, bare except for the nipple-concealing pasties required by state law, and the shapely contours of her ass.
I had been mildly troubled by the other dancers, embarrassed and amused by the spectacle of their near-nudity at the same time that I was amused by the goofy theater of it, but with Jenny these mixed feelings intensified to a different level of magnitude. I was riveted by the sight of her, but also a little sickened, like I was looking at something I shouldn’t have been allowed to see. My face burned as I watched her make her way slowly around the platform, pausing for a few seconds in front of each audience member so he could have a chance if he wished to reach up and tuck some money into her G-string.
“Woo-hoo!” the Squidman was screaming beside me. “Shake those titties!”
She was on the other side of the bar at the time, a few stools down from the salesman, but she turned and did as he’d requested, raising her arms and arching her back to give her breasts more forward thrust. That was when our eyes met. I felt the shock of recognition when it happened, saw the momentary flicker of startled displeasure pass across her face before she turned away from the Squidman and me, and got back down to business.
Her reaction caught
me off guard. I’d gotten the impression that lots of our high school classmates had been coming to see her dance—the Squidman claimed to have caught her act a half-dozen times—so it wasn’t like she objected in principle to being ogled by people she’d grown up with. And it wasn’t like I was a special friend or enemy of hers, either. I’d barely exchanged a word with her in high school—she had dropped out in the middle of junior year, after getting pregnant by one of the Coletti brothers, all three of whom had allegedly taken turns with her in their backyard toolshed—and had hardly given her a passing thought since the day I’d left for college.
The last time Jenny and I had had anything to do with each other was way back in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when we’d been part of the same big group of kids who hung out at the town-sponsored recreation center at the Little League. Even then she was way beyond me, letting high school boys get her stoned and take her out to the woods, but sometimes during the day, we’d kill time playing nok hockey or ping-pong, Jenny holding a cigarette in one hand and a paddle in the other, a box of Marlboros tucked inside her tube top. She never talked much or bothered to laugh at my jokes, but she didn’t seem to mind having me around, either.
The only problem we’d ever had came at a dance near the end of the summer, when a bunch of us—five or six boys and Jenny—
were playing tag in the outfield. At some point, tag changed into something else, with whatever boy was It chasing after Jenny and tagging her on the chest or ass, copping as much of a feel as he could before she squirmed out of his grasp. Everyone was doing it, and Jenny didn’t seem to mind; she just let out this weird high-pitched giggle whenever anyone groped her. Then she always ran after another boy and tagged him to keep the game going.
Finally my turn came and I ran after her like everyone else, my heart pounding like crazy. In the parking lot, the band had just started up again after a break, grinding out “Sunshine of Your Love” at a brutal and exhilarating volume, and I could feel the music surging through me as I chased her. The game had pretty much been confined to left field until then, but this time Jenny just kept running, a lot faster than I’d thought she could go, past the scoreboard, almost to the right field line. I was just about to grab her when she stopped in her tracks and turned around.
“Don’t,” she told me, breathing hard and holding both hands in front of her chest.
“What?”
“It’s over,” she panted. “I quit.”
“What?” I repeated. She was wearing a tight shirt, a dance leotard with glittery planets painted on the front, and I couldn’t keep my eyes focused on her face. “You can’t just quit. I have to tag you.”
“Come on,” she said, not quite pleading, but still holding her hands up, as if she thought I might take a swing at her. “Just cut it out, okay?”
“It’s not fair. Everyone got to tag you but me.”
Jenny bought time, looking off toward the first-base bleachers. A bunch of older kids were sitting with their backs to us, facing the band.
“Can’t you just leave me alone?” she asked.
“Please?” I whimpered. “It’ll only take a second.”
She stared at me for a moment, then dropped her arms in defeat. Saturn was located over her left breast, and that was where I placed my hand. I’d never touched a girl like that before, and it
felt great. I cupped her breast from underneath, lifting as gently as I could, testing the weight in my palm, listening to the sound of my own breathing. If she hadn’t yanked my hand away, I might have stood like that for hours.
“Okay?” she said, glaring at me with helpless fury. “Are you fucking happy now?”
A long time had passed since that night at the Little League. The Coletti brothers and lots of other guys had done lots of worse things to her in the meantime. She was a professional stripper who’d had her baby taken away by the state and put into foster care. It was hard for me to believe that she’d even remember that stupid incident at the dance, or hold it against me if she did. But when she finally came around to our side of the bar, she rushed past the Squidman and me without even stopping, not giving us the chance to add our carefully folded bills to the impressive bouquet of money that had sprouted between her hips.
“I don’t know
what was wrong. with Jenny tonight,” the Squidman observed, reaching into the open sack of burgers between us. “She’s usually a lot more friendly. Once she even came out and talked to me during her break.”
“It was weird seeing her up there.” We were perched on the warm hood of his car in the parking lot of the White Castle in Union Village, our customary destination after a night on the town. “I mean, imagine if you had a sister and that was what she did for a living.”
The Squidman chuckled lasciviously. “I wish I had a sister who did that for a living.”
“Why? What good would it do you if she was your sister?”