On Archimedes Street (13 page)

“Well, it’s not a sin,” said Dutch seriously. “I’m a virgin too.”

“Get out! Don’t give me that shit. Someone with your looks?”

“You think I’m good-looking?” Dutch sprang to his knees on the sofa cushion and sang in a schoolyard chant, “Flabbott thinks I’m Adonis and Apollo and Herculeeeees!”

Flip hurled a pillow at Dutch’s head, but he just snatched it expertly from the air.

“It’s true, you know,” said Dutch. “Heaven forefend that I should sink it into some pox-ridden doxy.”

“Oh stop it with the ten-cent words,” cried Flip, “I just need to sink it!”

“Well, my boy, looks like you and I are headed for the Quawtahs tonight.”

“What quarters?” asked Flip.

“The French Quarter, you idjit. The Voo! The Vieux Carré! Don’t you know how to speak Yat yet?”

Flip brightened. He gave Dutch a sly grin. “Actual, I bin bonin’ up. Done enrol’ in Wailin’ Elwoodese 101. Howze dis: Where y’at
daw
-lin’? When I stop by my cuzzin Clothilde, dey all ax for you.”

“Pfft! Not eben close,” said Dutch, secretly impressed by Flip’s ear. “But we’ll make you a yat yet.”

In short order they were ready and taking off in Dutch’s vintage Triumph sports car. Three neighborhood spies witnessed their rattling departure down Archimedes Street. Rita watched them with proprietary pride. Such beautiful men! They were hers, in a way. Doodie, spying from Gretna Best Hardware, spat in contempt. Two overgrown boys, with their knees sticking out of an amusement-park bumper car.

From behind register one, Lotte looked at them worriedly through the plate glass of her grocery. Where were they going, and was that car safe? What about their Bible study? She offered a prayer for their safety.

Speaking fervently into the early evening air, she said, “Watch over dem, Mother Cabrini.”

“M
OTHER
C
A
-
BRI
-
NI
,
Mother Ca-bri-ni,” intoned Dutch. “Help me find a spot for my little ma-chi-nie.” Parking in the packed French Quarter, with its narrow streets, was notoriously difficult.

His supplication was instantly effective. Dutch spotted the white reverse-gear lights on the Lincoln Town Car, screeched to a halt on Royal between St. Louis and Conti Streets, waited for the Lincoln to pull out, and deftly backed into the spot.

They were ready, said Flip to himself. Then, looking over at Dutch, “What kind of twink outfit is that, anyway?” Dutch had elected to wear a hot-pink T-shirt under a shell-pink dress shirt, tucked into shiny black chinos.

“Don’t you like it?” Dutch asked innocently.

“You wanna come off as some kinda weirdo?” huffed Flip. But, in truth, Dutch could get himself up in a tutu and still look completely masculine. How did he pull it off?

“What the fuck do I care what anyone thinks?” Dutch shrugged. “Keep ’em guessing, boy, keep ’em guessing. Anyway,
I
think I look hot in it.” And to Flip’s annoyance, Dutch did look hot. Very hot. Since when, Flip asked himself, had he started thinking of men as hot? Shit! He buried the thought.

Dutch ambled the one block down St. Louis to Bourbon Street slowly, with Flip at his side. Yes, Dutch had been to Paddy O’Hara’s Bar—once—a rite of passage for all freshmen in New Orleans colleges. The Hawaiian-punch flavored “typhoon,” treacly yet deadly, had left him nauseated. The only Quarter he really knew was the Quarter his parents frequented. Achille and Say-Say were loyal to Anton’s, Galantine’s, Arnold’s, and other fancy restaurants. They were on the Board of Governors of “Le Petit”—Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré—and throughout his childhood Dutch had complacently accompanied them to places like these. But the truth was he didn’t know anything about the seedy part of the Quarter, and he had no idea of where to go to get Flip laid. The wild French Quarter that tourists flocked to was a mystery.

But Bourbon Street seemed a logical first stop.

Chapter 17

A
S
A
final resort, Elwood had worn old, very brief gym shorts without underwear to this nightly session with Special Ed. He usually wore a tight T-shirt, but tonight he went bare-chested. He figured that, in certain positions, something or the other would poke out the bottom of his shorts. His hope was to distract Special Ed from the lesson of the day. For giving Elwood lessons was what Ed had intended when he demanded an hour of Wailin’ Elwood’s time every day after work in return for staying on and helping him manage his analphabetic life.

It wasn’t that Special Ed humiliated him. It was, Elwood realized, that he knew it was hopeless, and it galled and saddened him to see Special Ed trying so hard for nothing. He was unteachable. Those years in school, if they had taught him anything at all, had certainly taught Elwood that. He reflected that it would be far more enjoyable for them both if Special Ed would just give in to what he wanted and spend the hour spit-polishing Elwood’s knob—hence the shorts—rather than doing what they were doing.

And what they were doing was plain crazy. Special Ed had taken over the never-used dining room and turned it into a classroom like no classroom Elwood had ever seen. It had a gymnastics beam that Elwood balanced on. Special Ed asked him to balance and thrust out his arms in a crucifixion pose as he chanted inane multiplication rhymes. Then there was the beanbag. Special Ed asked him to toss it from hand to hand as he sang the alphabet song and chanted the times tables. “Two times one is two!/Two times two is four!/Now toss the beanbag back and forth/As you walk up to the door!”

It was ridiculous and childish. More than that, it was just a plain waste of good time. And all for nothing, he knew. Also—this was teaching? Elwood remembered school well enough to believe that maybe Special Ed was playing some kind of joke on him. He balanced on the beam while Special Ed flashed the flash cards. Ed said that it didn’t matter if he got it wrong or right, just to keep balancing and responding to each flashed card. Ed chalked letters on the polished floorboards and had Elwood describe their shape by walking over them, then crawling over them. The chalk wore off on his knees. How in the hell was
that
supposed to help? he asked himself.

Tonight’s lesson was the “At Family.” Special Ed had asked Wailin’ Elwood not to sound out the
A
and the
T
individually, but just to look at them together while he tossed the beanbag back and forth and balanced on the beam. “At, at, at, at,” Elwood repeated with each toss. Fortunately, he had a monkey’s sense of balance after hanging out in trees all these years. Then Special Ed asked him to “travel” the alphabet and put each letter in front of the “at” to see if together those three letters made a word. If so, Special Ed told him, that word was in the At Family. Special Ed shone a laser pointer at the
A
of the alphabet he had thumbtacked to the dining room wall.

A: “Aat: Alrelly in the fambly.”

B: “Bat!”

“Good!”

C: “Cat!”

“Yes!” Special Ed added the words as Elwood encountered them, writing them inside the literal family circle on the chalkboard. Then he laser-pointed to the D.

“Dat!”

Special Ed frowned. “Just go on.” Then he changed his mind and added it to the family circle anyway.

E: “Eee-at. Nope.”

“Just go on.” Ed frowned once more.

F: “Fat!”

Special Ed welcomed Fat into the family by chalking him in.

At the end of the exercise, Special Ed contemplated several spurious claimants to consanguinity in the noble house of At: the relative pronoun
dat
, of course, but also the redundant mammal
kat
, the winged nuisance
nat
, and the New Orleans biped
yat
. It was too early to expel them as imposters, he knew. And maybe
yat
was not really an imposter but just born on the wrong side of the blanket.

As a final test, Special Ed held up the flash card with “fat” on it. “What’s this? Say it!—quick!—without thinking about it.”

Elwood recognized “at” right away. But his mind harkened back to an especially painful school memory. “Cat?”

“That’s enough for tonight. You did great, Elwood. Tomorrow we’ll do the It Family.”

“Alrelly know one,” Elwood drawled. “Cuzzin Itt from the Addams Fambly.”

Ed aimed a level gaze at Elwood. “Are you hiding a sense of humor somewhere?”

Elwood looked down at his gym shorts and smirked.

“Let’s end with the letter crawl.” Special Ed chalked a giant
A
and a giant
T
on the floor.

“Know enudder from the It Fambly: shit!” Elwood looked at Special Ed with defiance. “I hate dat crawl shit, dammit!”

But Ed insisted.

As he crawled the giant
AT
, Elwood regretted his outfit. He’d been forced to go through the pointless exercise anyway, and he knew he was flashing his nuts as he crawled, ass in the air.

“You lookin’ at my junk?” he growled accusingly at Special Ed.

“No,” Ed lied.

Larceny, exiled in the living room behind an expandable, scissored dog gate, whined and pawed at it.

“Don’t you be lookin’ at my junk eeder,” Wailin’ Elwood told his dog.

Chapter 18

T
HE
CONCEPT
behind Glitz on Bourbon—familiarly known to its disheartened employees as Titz on Bourbon—was threadbare and obsolete ten years before the club opened its doors. The proprietor, Carlton Carrollton, had been of an impressionable age when he first visited the Playboy Club. He had loved the idea of keys, of membership, of the posh surroundings and the playful but classy Bunnies. A very young Carlton, key in hand, had savored the unfamiliar sensation of privilege.

Glitz, which had taken every penny of Carlton’s savings, was a diluted, dispirited imitation of its outmoded inspiration. Carlton, facing an empty house night after night, had quickly given up on the notion of membership. He’d tried one-night membership, a sad euphemism for “cover charge,” which his patrons—largely Alabama and Mississippi college boys—saw right through. What remained was a cardboard key, handed out to patrons desultorily by Cleanhead the barker as they entered. “Your key to a good time!” it proclaimed jauntily. But since the keys were not good for a drink, they ended up littering the floor of Glitz like so many peanut shells crackling underfoot in a Far-West themed steakhouse.

Another Playboy throwback was the uniforms the “Glitz girls” wore. Carlton had not wanted simply to ape the Playboy Bunny franchise, and he’d come up with a truly knockout and original uniform design. Tonight, Sandra, Myrtle, and Dora wore it: a white satin tailcoat barely concealing pasties over nipples, white piqué bow tie and collar worn like a necklace, black bikini thong, fishnet stockings, and a white top hat. As a cost-cutting measure, Carlton had passed on the expense of maintaining the Glitz uniform to his waitstaff. Myrtle Guerrère—who’d had the sense even in second grade to ditch “Myrtle” and reinvent herself as Mimi—especially resented the expense. White satin was the most impractical thing that pain-in-the-ass Carlton could have come up with. Leave it to him to dream up this loopy uniform. The dry-cleaning costs were eating her up alive.

Still, she needed the job if she wanted to get through Redemptorist College. Stints as a personal trainer were far more profitable, but few and far between. The job sucked, really and truly. She’d have to fend off Sandra’s advances once again tonight, she knew. Nonetheless, she had a fondness for Sandra. She loved how Sandra jerked around the college boys. Dora, with her drooping tits, was not a crowd favorite, but she was a font of wisdom. “Don’t end up like me, honey,” she’d told Mimi. “Stay in college.” Cleanhead the barker could be relied on to do double duty as a bouncer when things got rowdy. Eusebio, the Mexican mixologist and dishwasher, rounded out the Glitz crew. It was sweet, really, thought Mimi—Eusebio didn’t mind Dora’s sagging tits in the least.

The crew had developed an odd solidarity, wedged, as they were, between the rock of the raucous college boys, all hands, and the hard place of the penny-pinching Carlton, short-tempered, panicking at every turn, and fearful of losing his investment.

D
UTCH
STEPPED
into the milling, streaming crowd on Bourbon Street hesitantly. How in the world would he get Flip laid, when he didn’t know squat?

The answer came out of the ether, as it always did for Dutch: “Dutch! Flip!” Googs Pizzalotta, the least focused microscope in Habbott’s—for in this way had Dutch renamed Honoria—anatomy class, leered drunkenly at them. “How you hangin’? Let’s hang together!”

“’Sup, Googs,” said Flip without much enthusiasm.

“Googs! Well met in Padua! Haw! Haw! Haw!” Dutch and Googs simultaneously brought their fists to their temples in imitation of horns, pawed the ground, and butted heads. “Butt ’em Rams!” Dutch was genuinely pleased to see him. He liked Googs. He loved the Redemptorist Rams, and Googs was their star quarterback. They fell into step, three abreast, and tried to read the roiling street. As they passed strip joints and music clubs, the barkers competed for their custom.

“Riight-cheere, riight-cheere. On stage. Live. Two hung studs and one hot woman. Whoooo’s gonna be Lucky Pierre?”

“Last night of an exclusive three-night engagement! Little Blind Leroy and his trio!”

“Step in, step right in, fellas. See the Amazing Margarita work her ping-pong ball. Pop goes the weasel!”

“No cover, no cover!” was the best Cleanhead could do, as he waved the cardboard keys to Glitz. The white top hat, too small for his shaved head, sat askew on that huge bronze dome. It should have looked ridiculous, but somehow it looked powerful and menacing instead.

Dutch seemed disoriented, and Googs just lurched unsteadily. Propelled helplessly forward in the drunken, rowdy crowd, Flip began to feel like a dogie in a cattle drive. Uncharacteristically, Flip took control. “Pop goes the weasel” had made him a little queasy, and “no cover” promised momentary, nonthreatening relief from the sensation of claustrophobia. He shepherded the hulking boys into the dark, cool cave of Glitz, which smelled of flat beer, pine oil, and stale air-conditioned air.