Whale Season (4 page)

Chapter 5

T
he Dream Café is not just, as it is still called by the locals of Whale Harbor, a titty bar. Thanks to a new bank loan, they also have a website. Billboards span five miles up and down I-75 to alert drivers on their way to Miami to this fact. Fluorescent green, they feature the high school yearbook photos of Dagmar and the rest of the Pep Squad from St. Jude's class of 1978. Plaid uniforms. Pom-poms. The girls are Clearasil clean and smiling.

“Naughty but Nice!” the caption reads.

The billboards really bring them in.

Underneath the smiling faces fine print, tiny as wayward ants, states that these photos are representative, not the actual photos of women employed at The Dream Café.

Nobody's sued yet, but Dagmar's not planning to go to a high school reunion anytime soon, either.

Dagmar, Leon's ex-wife, is a striking woman. She stands like an Egyptian queen. Honey-skinned, steady brown eyes, apricot hair piled on her head like a Twistee-Freeze. She commands every room she walks into, but never seems to notice. Or care. It's second nature to her.

“The sex we sell here is good clean fun,” she tells her dancers. “If we keep it clean enough, we get couples in the door and double our profit.”

Since Dagmar inherited the place from her uncle Joe five years ago, there have been a lot of changes. Last year, The Dream Café was identified by
Inc.
magazine as part of the “revolutionary trend in a new user-friendly adult entertainment industry.” Wholesome as it profitably can be. There's even tour bus parking.

The Café has always been a family business. Dagmar's mother was a dancer, and Dagmar has worked there for as long as she can remember—first as a bartender, then bookkeeper, and then a manager—never danced herself. It only made sense that she would inherit the place. Uncle Joe, a bowling ball of a man, never married.

So, when he died, Dagmar was the only one left. She'd always been interested in business. In between the endless “ons” and “offs” and “on agains” with Leon, she managed to finish a BA in Business Administration at the University of Miami. After graduation, even though she had just had her son, Cal, she planned to find a job with a Miami-based company. Work her way up from the mailroom if she had to.

But Uncle Joe got sick. Then died. And she was stuck. The Dream Café was suddenly hers. The roof leaked. The septic system needed to be replaced. The property taxes hadn't been paid in three years. And Cal was a very colicky baby.

The night after Joe's funeral, Dagmar sat in The Café and tried to come up with a plan—something other than arson. It was Friday and the place was nearly empty except for a foursome of giggling tourists. Dagmar was downwind of them. The air was thick with the scent of coconut oil. They were more or less her age and dressed in a style that is often described in the fashion magazines as “Tropical”: expensive, impractical, and carefully designed to scream, “Hey, I'm from Michigan.” The men wore pastel cotton sweaters casually tied over the shoulders of their “authentic” Hawaiian print shirts. Collars up, of course. The women had spray-on tans and Lilly Pulitzer sleeveless shifts, just like the ones their mothers wore in the sixties. Slightly corseted. Discreetly zipped up the side. Lemon meringue yellow with tangerine daisies. Bermuda blue with pink flamingos. Tiny bows at the jewel neckline.

They were slumming. Loudly asking if The Café had any champagne without a screw top. Any hollandaise sauce for the french fries? But when the dancers came on stage the foursome grew quiet. Each one bought a lap dance, even the women.

Suddenly, Dagmar understood that sex had a new market share—baby boomers—and a business plan was born.

Now, in the gift shop, vibrators of all sizes are sold shrink-wrapped alongside movies on DVD. Edible panties come in double mocha latte. Body paints in Range Rover green. Uncle Joe would never know the place. Dagmar even tried to get a Starbucks franchise for the lobby, but no luck.

The Café does offer food however, just as it did when Uncle Joe was still alive. It's just like Grandma used to make—except there are naked girls and you don't have to say grace. And the pies are called tarts. And the fish is always sushi grade. And the cheese grits are creatively known as polenta. Instead of Uncle Joe in the kitchen, there are graduates from The School of Culinary Arts in Atlanta. They create reductions with sorghum, mangos, and Chardonnay. Offer goat cheese and guava in phyllo triangles “to start.”

The music is the same, though. Five days a week, the blues, the heartbeat of the South, is offered during Happy Hour, courtesy of the Blind Brothers' Blues Band. The band is made up of five elderly black gentlemen. Old school. They are neither blind, nor brothers. Jimmy Ray, the band's front man, has a special place in Dagmar's heart. Always has. Always will. That's why the band is still around, still plays that midnight rough blues.

Jimmy Ray had open-heart surgery a couple of years back. He needs to get to sleep by 9
P.M.
Doctor's orders. That's why he and the rest of the fellows play only during Happy Hour now. Dagmar picks him up every night and takes him home, too. She is careful of his dignity. He is an elegant man. Caramel-skinned, handsome, and soft-spoken. Part of the aristocracy of the blues, he claims to have been born on Beale Street, right on the sidewalk. Says his mama went into labor singing for loose change.

It's easy to believe. Jimmy Ray embraces the blues as a birthright with an unsurpassed regal air. Pin-striped suits. Manicured hands. His blue-black hair, now gone silver, is always set in the perfect marcel waves. His skin has that acid old man smell, and he shakes a little, but he still knows how to play the blues and riffs about the life he had, and misses, all smoke and whiskey and big-lipped women reckless as Saturday night. He growls like thunder. Gives you chills.

Forty years ago, when Uncle Joe first hired Jimmy Ray and his band, The Café was well known not only for its dancers, but also for its after-hours club, a “Black and Tan,” as such clubs were called.

After all the other bars closed—the bars for “Whites Only,” and those where “Coloreds” were allowed to sit near the toilets, but not to use them—anybody who could still drive would cruise over to The Dream Café. Jimmy Ray and the band would play until the sun rose. BYOB. Mixes available. Anything that happened behind The Café's doors stayed there.

At sunrise, the band, the dancers, the drunks, and the lovers—the “black” and “tan” who only had this place, this moment—would all eat breakfast together. It was served family style in overflowing plates passed around the table. Country ham baked in milk with crackling bread and wild orange jelly. Pancakes with cane syrup. And lots of Cuban coffee, sweet and thick.

Growing up, Dagmar and her mother lived in a trailer behind The Café. On Saturday mornings, Dagmar would take her place at the table and have breakfast with the adults.

It was magical. They spoke to her about things she knew nothing about, like politics and travel. It was like being in a movie. The women were birthday cake beautiful with their bouffant hair, pale pink lips, and rhinestones, lots of rhinestones in their ears, on their shoes, sewn into the fabric of their Sunday-best dresses. They sparkled like so many candles. And the men that encircled them, arms casual across the backs of their chairs, Dagmar remembers them, too. Their slick hair, their silk shirts, their diamond rings, and the smell of spice and tobacco. They reminded her of pirates.

She still remembers every detail of those mornings. The way the dawn smelled, the heady mix of salt air and dew. The way people spoke in whispers. But most of all she remembers her mama, Annie. Her hair was the color of peaches, just like Dagmar's, as was her skin. The lack of sleep always made her voice smoky. “Give us a kiss, sugar,” she'd growl and pull Dagmar into her tired arms, give her a little squeeze. “You okay, darling?”

And Dagmar would nod, even if she wasn't okay, and hold her mother's face in her small hands like one does a firefly—amazed at the light, not wanting to let go, but knowing you had to.

Her mother had always talked about leaving, about going to a real town like Chicago: a town with something to do, something other than watch each other grow old and die. “Florida is heaven's waiting room,” she'd say. “And God's not ready for the likes of us yet.”

Sometimes Dagmar would come home from school and find her mother passed out on the couch, smelling of strawberry wine and cigarettes.
General Hospital
blaring on the television. Jimmy Ray would usually stop by around suppertime and bring dinner.

“Mama needs her rest,” he'd say, and he and Dagmar would sit on the steps of the trailer and gnaw at the bones of BBQ, or fried chicken.

“We're going caveman today, gal.”

And they'd talk about anything and everything, except Annie.

The last time she saw her mother was at Saturday breakfast. Dagmar was just fourteen years old but knew there was something wrong. Annie seemed nervous. Wouldn't look her in the eye. Kissed her too hard. And when the coffee was being poured, she stood up and said, “My baby's learning French.” Which was true, but everybody stopped talking and stared. Breakfast wasn't a situation usually given to announcements and her mother's voice was pulled taut.

“That's my girl,” Annie creaked. “Citizen of the world.” Her eyes were filled with tears.

Most at the table just nodded and went back to their conversations. But Jimmy Ray leaned over to Dagmar and said, “You know, I know some French. Learned in New Orleans. That's a town where they know how to
vo-lay-vo
.” And then he winked.

Everyone laughed, but not her mother. Annie leaned into Jimmy Ray and spoke, fierce and low.

“You better keep your
vo-lay-vo
to your
vo-lay
self.”

The table went silent. Uncle Joe cleared his throat. Dagmar turned red. Jimmy Ray looked hurt.

“Don't mean no harm, sweetheart,” he said to Annie. His voice was whiskey soft. “You know that, no harm at all. I'd kill the man who touched her.”

And then Jimmy Ray and her mother exchanged a look that Dagmar would never forget. It was the kind of look she'd seen other men and women give each other. The kind of look that says they have secrets. That surprised her. Until that moment, Dagmar never thought much about Jimmy Ray. He was just there, always, a part of her life. He was like the sun in the morning, like the gators in the creek. She never noticed how he always sat next to her mother. How it was his arm draped over her chair.

She never noticed any of that until they exchanged that look—and then Dagmar noticed everything.

Her mother's eyes narrowed. “You'd better watch over her,” she said, roughly. “Better do the right thing.”

“The child knows I love her,” Jimmy Ray said.

And Dagmar did. Still does. Doesn't need to know much more. The look between Jimmy Ray and her mother said it all. And Jimmy Ray's love, constant and unflinching, confirms it.

Dagmar never saw her mother again. There were plenty of letters postmarked from all over the country, but never Chicago. They all ended with “See you soon. Luv, Mama,” which always struck Dagmar as odd. Annie never liked to be called “Mama.” There was never a return address.

When Dagmar turned eighteen, her mother sent her a birthday card with lace edges and a poem about a mother's love. She didn't write “See you soon.” She signed it “Ann,” not “Mama.” Underneath her name was a single sentence: “Being a mama isn't for everybody, but that don't mean I never loved you.”

But she never came back.

All Jimmy Ray could say was, “Your mama had a hole in her that love couldn't plug.”

And Dagmar inherited it.

All these years later, the heartbroken girl inside of her still waits for her mother's return. That's why she's put her face on the billboards. That's part of the reason she stays. If she left, her mother wouldn't know where to find her. Besides, where would she go? Like it or not, The Dream Café is her home.

“Come join the fun!' it says on the back of the matchbooks. And fun is what Dagmar feels she sells. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Three hundred sixty-five days a year. “We are the Wal-Mart of fun,” she tells anyone who'll listen, and nearly believes herself, even though it's clear by the look on her face that it's difficult for her to watch the dancers at work, difficult for her to see the calloused hands of the men who sit up close.

“She's got no stomach for it,” the dancers say among themselves. Some say it with pity because they know that she'll eventually close the place and that would be a shame. In towns like Whale Harbor jobs are scarce. You do what you can. What there's a market for. What's more or less legal.

There's a club near Orlando that does Shakespeare in the nude because the town has an ordinance that says that nudity is legal in legitimate theater. “To be or not to be,” never had so many layers of meaning before.