Dog Day Afternoon (6 page)

“You holding a piece now?”

“I’m on parole, man. They jug my ass if they find me packing iron.”

“I got an idea how we can make big money.”

Sam’s face went sour. “I know those ideas. One of them got me two to five.” He shook off Joe’s hand. “If I’d been carrying heat it would’ve been seven to fifteen for armed robbery.”

“I said I had an idea. It don’t include getting caught.”

Sam’s eyes widened for a moment; then their lids lowered. “None of them do.” He moved off along Christopher. Littlejoe watched him disappear into the crowd. Jail had taken all the joy out of Sam, permanently. He found himself wondering how hard it could be if he too landed in jail. Could it be worse than Nam? Nobody tried to frag you in jail. There was a lot of asshole banditry, but, Christ, they had that in Nam, too.

He entered the bar and moved into the back room. This was a classier place than Mick’s other back room. The orgies here were refined. The impromptu shows had a little class, a few laughs. And women were allowed back here, as long as they came with a man. He spotted Lana at once.

She had gotten up on a table and was singing a song whose words didn’t make sense, maybe because she was drunk and couldn’t remember them. Two men were seated at her feet, clapping time for her. Every once in a while she would flex her long foot in its spike-heel slipper and shove the toe under one of the men’s noses. “Kiss, kiss,” she lisped.

Then she resumed her song, something about a man who played a piano in old Hong Kong, but the music never made any more sense than the words. Littlejoe started toward her. She had decided to strip now. She was a tall girl, almost six feet in height, which Joe loved, and she was slender, poured into a gold lamé dress that sparkled in the dim light and barely covered her shoulders and breasts. She pulled one shoulder strap free and her left breast popped out, firm, lush, big, with a nipple as hard as a bolt screwed into her rather small areola.

People at other tables were clapping now and yelling encouragement. A woman against the wall had tucked two fingers in her mouth and was producing a shrill wolf whistle in time to Lana’s sinuous movements.

Littlejoe stopped a table away.

He didn’t mind her theatricality. After all, that was what she was all about. A lot of people badmouthed her for the way she dressed, that spun-sugar wig she flaunted, with its long back flip and bangs, those huge upcurling fake eyelashes flecked with glitter, the dark eyeshadow, the dark lipstick, rouged out to make her mouth bigger than it was, the hectic spots of color on her cheeks. But that was Lana. Take her or leave her.

She had worked her other breast loose and was stroking it admiringly. People began to hoot and yelp like dogs. She was wriggling up out of her golden sheath now, pulling it down over her hips while she writhed and mouthed nonsense words to the rhythm of the clapping.

Her navel came into view and, an instant later, the top of her muff, flaxen and flat, like an expensive linen towel. She turned and stuck out her ass at the crowd, slowly unveiling it with a back-and-forth bump in time to the clapping. “Kiss, kiss.” Then she turned back and her penis, engorged, arose from between her legs like some primeval sea monster searching for its mate.

The crowd went wild. Littlejoe glanced proudly around him. He had no idea how many of the people here tonight had known Lana was a man. A few. Himself, of course, included.

5

E
ven at midnight, the apartment on East Tenth Street was hotter than the street outside. Or so it seemed to Joe.

The damned trouble, he told himself as he lay beside Lana on the old king-sized mattress shoved into a corner of the living-room floor, was that they had no cross-ventilation. Few of these tenements had been built to let air flow through from front to back. Or, if they had, over the years greedy landlords had so chopped and walled them off into cheap little apartments that the air had long ago stopped moving, stopped clearing out the stink, stopped cooling people on hot August nights like this one.

It was, nevertheless, not a bad little pad for what he wanted. He needed it as an address for the welfare people and as a place to bring Lana after he’d gotten her high. He’d been pretty selective as to whom he brought here. This wasn’t just any of his welfare pads. He’d even brought his mother here. This was where he crashed in the Village, even though it was a little too far east for the real action.

“Unreal,” Lana muttered, rolling over on her back and snuffling.

“What, baby?”

Littlejoe liked it when Lana was stoned out of her skull and nine-tenths asleep. He’d brought her home in something like a fireman’s carry, her long, slender body half draped over his shoulder. He might be a head shorter than she, but he knew how to handle weights, always had. She lay naked now in the darkness, only a faint glow coming through the grimy front windows from the street lamps three floors below on Tenth Street, her lovely breasts firm and young. He stroked her face for a moment. She needed a shave again.

Joe grinned to himself in the darkness as he stroked Lana’s long, slender flanks. Sam had called her an animal, and he was right, of course. She was like a racehorse, a thoroughbred animal, fast and a little wild. He understood why people like Sam hated people like Lana. There had been a whole change among the gays in the last few years as they came out of the closets, a change to being natural like the blacks. The slogans were almost the same: “black is beautiful” and “gay is beautiful.” One promoted Afro hair and looked down on skin-lightening and hair-dekinking as a form of slave mentality. The other, among gay males, led to dressing like men, perhaps a bit freer and more creative than most, and looking down on drag queens.

Well, that was Lana. The bitchiest drag queen of them all. And Littlejoe had her.

Maybe drag queens were on their way out as part of gay life. Maybe not. In any event, it was too late for Lana, with her silicone-injected breasts. She had lived the life so long now that she was comfortable only as a woman.

“Real dumb,” she murmured and rolled away from Joe’s stroking.

“You okay, baby?”

She had taken on quite a load even before Joe had found her in the back room of Mick’s Number One bar. And it hadn’t been till maybe four stingers later that she’d been willing to pull herself together and go home with him—or, rather, let herself be carried away.

“Last of the big-time unreal spenders,” she said very distinctly now, spitting out the words with an excess sibilance that told Joe she was angry.

“Yes, baby.”

“Couldn’t even spring for a whole, entire cab,” she went on viciously. “’S’matter, didn’t your welfare check come in, Daddy Warbucks?”

“Next week, baby.”

“Carrying me through the Village like a common baggage.” She had started to sniffle. “Unreal little jerk-off.”

“Now, baby.”

“If you loved me,” she said, suddenly whirling to face him, “you’d think enough of my reputation not to expose me to every insane prying eye in the Village.”

He saw that her mascara was running in black rivulets from under her eyes. Because she was lying on her side, the black was running sideways from the corner of her lower eye into the hair around her ear. He watched, fascinated, as the mascara from the upper eye began to run over the bridge of her rather large, aquiline nose.

“If you really loved me,” she was saying, “there’d have been a cab. How much, I ask you, does a cab cost? Can it possibly be more that one of those insanely overpriced stingers that Mafia cousin of yours sells? Um?”

“No, baby.”

“What is he charging these days, three whole dollars a whole entire blast?”

“That’s about right.”

“Everybody knows the drinks cost, like, unreal, because nobody goes there to drink. They go there to look up my asshole. The old tunnel shot. I really showed it to them tonight, too.” She shifted from a sob to a giggle and wiped her eye, smearing the wet mascara into a blotch like a black eye.

“If you honestly loved me,” she went on then, in a calmer voice, shifting out of her high register into a throatier one, “you would somehow get it all together for a change and help me with my problem, wouldn’t you?”

“What’s that, baby?”

“What’s that?” Her voice slid up an octave in irritation. “You of all people have the insane nerve to ask what my problem is?”

“Oh, that.”

Littlejoe lay in silence for a while. She was back on that again. He’d checked it out with friends. Even if you could get them to do it for you in the States, say at Johns Hopkins down in Baltimore, it still cost about three grand. That included the whole thing, castration and the making of a cunt. If you had to take your problem to Casablanca or Stockholm because the doctors in Baltimore said no dice, it cost less for the surgery and hospital but you had the air fare thrown in. So it always came to about three grand. And what for? Some whim of Lana’s? Who needed the whole thing?

“You’ll love me when I’m a real woman all over,” Lana said then, her voice dropping to a point where it was lower than Littlejoe’s, and very arousing to him.

“No I won’t.”

“You’ll adore me, baby.”

“You’re fine just the way you are.”

“Uh-uh. No way. Like this it’s unreal, love.”

“Not to me,” Littlejoe insisted doggedly. “I like you this way. I don’t like you with parts missing.”

“But a new part put in.”

“That’s bullshit,” Joe corrected her. “I talked to guys who know. They say it’s a lousy substitute. I know what the real thing is, remember. Even on Tina. What they’ll cut for you is no way like the real thing, no muscles, no juices to make it nice and slick, no nerve endings. You won’t feel. It’ll be like I’m fucking somebody else.”

“And you,” she snapped waspishly, “won’t have this all-day sucker, will you?” She sneered at him, her nostrils widening fearsomely. “It’s everything for you, isn’t it, bitch? You want that fat slut out in Queens at your beck and call. Roll over, have kids, drop dead, on command like an insane doggie. And you want me to take any way it strikes you, upside down, up the rear, in the mouth. It’s, like, unreal, a circus act. They warned me about you,” she added darkly.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. “What’s that?”

“You heard me,” Lana retorted. “They warned me you were no good. A real waster. They warned me you’d fuck anything that’d stand still for it. Oh, baby, were they right or were they right.”

“Who warned you?”

“Ev-ry-body,” Lana drawled scornfully. “Ab-so-lutely every mother on the street told me what an insane cunt you were, not even a proper gay, AC-DC, swings any way he can get it with anything that he can tie down and ram it into. What you are, you’re a nymphomaniac.”

Joe laughed softly. “Is that what I am, huh?”

“You got, like, an unreal itch,” Lana told him. “Sometimes I can’t believe what you do. Other times, of course, it’s so easy to figure.”

“No kidding.”

“So easy,” she taunted him. “You’re an open book with that baby tool of yours. Talk about Tiny Alice. I had a thirteen-year-old once that had three times as much as you, and he didn’t stop growing for another five years.”

“Cradle-snatching, huh?”

“People say to me, ‘Lana,’ they say, ‘it’s, like, unreal how that Littlejoe carries on,’ they say, and I say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what I know about him,’ and they say, ‘Like what?’ and I say nothing. I protect your insane reputation. Don’t ask me why.”

“Because you love me, that’s why.”

“Love? With that kind of love, who needs suicide? You’ll murder me with love.” She had started to cry again. “You won’t even pay for the one thing I need to become a real person.”

“Maybe I will.”

The tears stopped. “Yes? When?”

“One of these days.”

“The same promises.” Lana shook her head, and the long flaxen wig slid uneasily over one eyebrow. “I don’t know why I believe them, why I keep sticking with you, why I protect your good name, even now. Let the whole world know what kind of unreal creep you are, why should I care? I got everything about you figured out, and there isn’t even one good reason to keep it to myself.”

“What’s my secret?”

“Never mind. We both know what it is.”

“No, tell me,” he coaxed.

“I’ve said it before. It’s not exactly the hottest news in town.” She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. Passing cars in the street below set up strange shiftings of light and shadow with their moving headlamps. “It’s that insane minicock of yours. Anybody who calls you Littlejoe has probably heard how small it is. He’s probably even seen it, the way you flaunt that tiny thing.”

“I never heard anybody complain about it,” Joe said.

“It’s because you’re so touchy. Nobody wants to run afoul of you. You’re small, but everybody knows you’re, like, insane strong.”

“You better believe it.”

“Then if you’re really strong,” she said, “be a man. Get me what I need. Don’t think of it as a favor to me. Think of it as an investment. I’ll keep repaying you for the rest of my life.”

“You will?”

Lana lay without speaking for a moment. Littlejoe decided she’d gone too far, promised too much. Part of Lana’s charm was her selfishness. It turned him on. “You really want the operation that bad?”