Revenge of the Cootie Girls (6 page)

“Robin, calm down.…”

“Naïve or not, she is not completely aware of all the terrible things that can happen to you in a big city like New York on a night like Halloween.…”

“You're starting to sound like your Aunt Maureen.…”

Boy, did that put the fear of God in me, being compared to my Aunt Maureen. As soon as Tamayo said that, I heard the voice of my Aunt Mo in the back of my head, before I came to New York the first time, saying, “Don't go to New York! It's full of atheists and perverts just waiting for a lamb to stumble into the slaughterhouse.” She was so sure I'd be set upon by white-slavers and pornographers and people who would hide drugs in my suitcase to be smuggled back to their nefarious contacts in northern Minnesota. For two months before the trip, she sent me clippings from newspapers about bad things happening to young women in New York.

On the other hand, she wasn't completely wrong about New York. At various points in my life here, I
had
been set upon by pimps and perverts and murderers.

“I should have taught Kathy how to scream her way out of a jam, or bought her that lupus book, or a glue gun …” I said to Tamayo.

“That woman said Kathy was just here. That means she got out of the apartment, came here, and should be calling you soon,” Tamayo said.

Tamayo had cruised through life on laughter and good luck, so she tended to see things as a little rosier than I suspected they were. Tonight she was in her transcendentally confident mode, her belief that, if you keep a light heart, ultimately everything will work out as well as it possibly can in a life that ends with death.

But she had a point too. A couple of hours had elapsed between Kathy's stop at Chez Biftek and her stop here. That would account for her time in the closet. But why hadn't she called me yet?

“Did you come here that night in 1979?” Tamayo asked.

“God, no. The amazing coincidences have ended,” I said, punching in Kathy's apartment phone number on my cell phone to see if she'd called Donna. Donna had gone out and turned on the answering machine. There were no new messages for me at home or at work.

Two guys came up, both with baseball caps pulled low over their eyes. Tamayo grabbed one. “Will you guys take us into this place?”

“Uh, wow! Yeah,” one said, sounding like he was making his voice lower than it was naturally. “Good costumes.”

As soon as we got inside, we cheerfully and unceremoniously ditched them to talk to a bouncer, who told us we wanted to speak to Candy, who was MC'ing the show in the Pussycat Room.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the dark. There are classy strip places in New York, male and female, if that's what you're into. This wasn't one of them, but it was far from the worst place I'd been in, and it even had some artistic pretensions. On a stage in front of a backdrop painted, badly, to look like a jungle, several extremely big-breasted “dancers” were taking off their faux animal skins in front of a room of men in baseball caps. I recognized the music, it was Yma Sumac singing some 1940s jungle-movie song—Yma's operatic voice against the background of thumping drums and deep-voiced chanting men. It's very primal stuff, and made me think of my occasional boyfriend Eric, because he loved Yma Sumac and liked to play her CDs during sex. Great take-me-now-wild-man kind of music, and this display was ruining the memory for me. The place smelled of I don't know what. I hoped I didn't smell this smell from now on whenever I heard Yma Sumac.

“This is every horny little straight boy's Saturday-matinee dream come true,” I whispered.

“Yeah! Like a Tarzan movie where Jane takes her clothes off.”

“It's almost … Disneyesque.”

“Why would any woman want breasts as big as regulation basketballs? Think they knock a lot of stuff over with those?” Tamayo asked, exaggerating slightly. Her eyes swept the shadowy audience. “And look at all these bottle-fed babies.”

“Sssh,” said a man ahead of us.

This was a different crowd from the yuppies who went to upscale clubs like Scores on the Upper East Side and The Platinum in the Flatiron District, or boho strip joints like Billy's Topless A-Go-Go or Blue Angel. This was strictly what
les snobs
call bridge-and-tunnel traffic, mama's boys from Jersey and the outer boroughs who come in to 42nd Street looking for something very specific to their tastes. In this instance, very big breasts.

“Are these guys jerking off?” Tamayo said, peering around. “Oh God, they are.”

“We've seen guys jerk off before. Don't act so impressed.”

“It never fails to impress me, though,” Tamayo said.

“I can't watch,” I said, and turned away. “That woman in the middle? An accident waiting to happen.”

All that hardened silicone was dangerous, and I knew it was silicone, because they were just too big and round to stand up that way on their own. I was afraid she'd swing 'em a bit too briskly, and the weight would throw her into the audience and injure some poor sap. I was fairly certain she could kill a man with those enormous tatas.

My phone rang, drawing several ssssh's, so I went back through the heavy black curtains to stand in the foyer until the show was over.

“Robin? Claire. Kathy called you from 555-0318,” she said very quickly. She was between shows and hadn't much time.

That was the Help for Kids number.

“Next break you get, can you check out this charity for me? Where is it, who is involved. I'll explain later.”

“Okay. I'll call youse guys soon,” she said, and hung up.

That was when I saw the word “Malabar” inlaid in the foyer's tile ceiling. Of course. This used to be the Malabar Theater, and then later the Malabar Disco. After we'd gone to the French restaurant that night in 1979, we'd all come here. We danced and drank with Billy and George. We danced and drank with a Saudi prince and a Finnish mogul. Julie told the mogul I spoke Finnish. Lucky for me the music was so loud I was able to pretend I didn't hear her or him. I should have just told him she was lying, but I was afraid, after all the lies we'd told that night, if I confessed one I might just keep going and confess them all. It was a burden keeping up that multilingual-heiress persona.

Three different places from that night in New York. Celestine Prophecy notwithstanding, I was beginning to think this was no cosmic coincidence.

The curtains parted and a stream of men in lowered baseball caps filed out, followed by a bouncer, followed by Tamayo and an extremely buxom, fully dressed brunette in her thirties or forties.

“I'm Candy,” she said. “You wanna talk? Come with me.”

Tamayo went outside to smoke while Candy and I went into her grotesquely girly office, a bright-pink room with lots of flowers, heart-shaped things, and posters of “Candy Apples” in her heyday as a stripper.

“If you do a story, I hope you'll do a positive story about the charity work we do. And that we do a whole theatrical production here, costumes, sets, music.… It's, whaddya call it, like burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee. We're classy. We're completely out of the live-sex business, have been for almost a year.”

“Uh, okay,” I said, as I tried to figure out the decor. She had kind of a Barbara Cartland-meets-Al Goldstein thing going in here. (Barb and Al, that's a live-sex show I'd pay money to see, but only on an empty stomach.)

“A woman came by not long ago to pick up an envelope?”

“Yeah, and it was over a half hour ago, before the eight-thirty show.”

“Over a half hour ago?” Then she certainly should have called me by now. “Was she alone?”

“As far as I knew. Someone must have escorted her in.…”

“She left alone—”

Candy cut me off. “Alone and in a big hurry,” she said.

“Did she open the envelope here? Do you know where …”

“No.”

“How did you get mixed up in this, who …”

“Why not? It's for charity, for kids! We do a lot for charity. We like kids. Lots of us here have kids. We're a woman-owned business. We pay our taxes. We vote,” she said, a
tad
defensively. As this unsolicited recitation of her good-citizen credentials showed, she was feeling the Disneyfication pressure.

“What do you know about Help for—”

“I checked them out with New York State. It's a legit nonprofit corporation, okay? I got a call a while back asking if we'd take part. Then I got a FedEx today with an envelope and a receipt for a donation to charity.”

“What was the skill-testing question?”

“The what?”

“Wasn't there a skill-testing question attached to the envelope?”

“I didn't see one,” she said, leaning over to dig through her trash. When she did, she knocked a pencil cup off her desk with her breasts.

She found a FedEx envelope and handed it to me. “Help for Kids,” it said in the “From” space, and gave a P.O. box. Inside, stuck in the crease, was a slip of paper with a paper clip attached.

“Who broke the dress code at Hummer High school in 1975?” it said, referring to a time when we fought passionately for the right to wear polyester shirts, gold chains, blue eye shadow, and platform shoes.

On the other side of the paper, it said, “Answer: Lucky Jake.” Lucky Jake was me, or, rather, the male pseudonym under which I wrote humor for the school newspaper (since it had become clear to me that boys didn't seem to go for the funny girls, and I liked boys a lot). I didn't break the code alone, though my reports on the goofy clothes the teachers wore when they were our age and what teachers and parents thought about it then helped galvanize the dress-code liberals, and we won the right to wear really ugly clothes if we so chose.

These charity people had gone to extraordinary lengths to kiss my ass.

“Did the woman who picked up the envelope open it?”

“Not here,” Candy said.

Now I sized her up. She didn't look like the kind of woman who would give an envelope to someone without first checking what was inside it.

“Did you happen to see what was in the envelope?”

She didn't answer right away, and I said, “Look, my intern, this twenty-year-old girl from rural Florida, she's been following these clues, and now I've lost her. It's really important to me that I find her.”

Candy located a small key on the crowded key ring, opened her top desk drawer, and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“I can't be too careful,” she said. “I have enemies. I didn't want anyone to set me up.”

She handed me two sheets of paper. The first was a photocopy of a typed note that read:

Robin, thanks for coming this far. It's for a good cause. The newspaper clipping will explain some of it, and you'll understand the rest later. Backslash Cafe.

The second sheet was a handwritten note dated August 7, 1979, which said, “Where the Blue Moon burned down.” It was signed “Putli Bai.” The Blue Moon was a supper club in my hometown, and Putli Bai an alias I was familiar with.

Holy shit, I thought.

The first photocopy had what looked like creases copied into the paper. I asked Candy about it and she said, “It was all folded up, like one of those thing kids used to have. Whaddya call 'em? Cootie catchers.”

Even if I hadn't known about the cootie catcher, or seen the trademark signature or the skill-testing question, I would have known by the handwriting on the second sheet that this was from Julie Goomey. God, it was strange to see Julie Goomey's handwriting again, which hadn't improved much over the years, with its t-crossing flourishes and extra-loopy loops that shifted whimsically from left to right as if blown back and forth by the wind.

Looking at it brought back the memory of a thousand notes covertly exchanged during classes. One time in eighth grade, Julie got me out of my dreaded sewing class by saying she had a note from the principal. Thank God Mrs. Hobbins, the sewing teacher, didn't read the note, which said, in Julie's unprincipallike blue scratch, “Tell Robin Hudson to get her ass down to the office before I kick it to China. Signed, the Principle.” Of course she had misspelled “principal.”

“Where's the clipping?” I asked.

“There was none,” Candy said.

No clipping—that was a classic Julie-esque stroke. Something she often did when someone didn't write her back promptly was send an empty envelope to pique the person's curiosity—or worse.

One time she sent me a letter from Ohio, where she was looking after a sick relative, with the last page of a three-page letter that began midsentence with, “to get her letter and hear some of the news from Ferrous. I hope you don't take what she said about you the wrong way. You know how she is and have to consider the source.” I was of course so frantic to find out who had said what about me and why I might be offended that I picked up the phone and called her, running up a $30 long-distance bill. Actually, I'd always kind of resented that particular tactic of hers, but Julie never knew that, so she probably thought the clipping was just a cute variation on it.

Then there was the time, in tenth grade, when I found a typed love letter signed “Doug Gribetz,” this boy I was
mad
for, in my locker, asking me to talk to him and let him know if I felt the same way about him as he felt about me. When I told Julie about it, she admitted that she had written the note. Come to think of it, I had always resented that little joke too, though I was grateful Julie told me before I went to Doug and completely embarrassed myself.

Candy knew no more than what she'd told me, or so she said. After thanking her, I handed her my card and said, “If anyone else comes by, or you remember something else, call me.”

“Sure.”

Now I could relax. Obviously, this was all an elaborate stunt of Julie's, and Kathy was in on it, if not from the beginning, then certainly by now. There'd probably be a big celebration at the end, just like the time Julie set up a series of clues that led me to my surprise sixteenth-birthday party. Once I finished throttling Julie for making me worry so damn much, we'd have a hearty laugh and reminisce about the good old days. Many was the story I told Kathy about the pranks my friends played at ANN. She knew I had a good appreciation for a quality prank. Still, it surprised me that Kathy, sweet Kathy, could be so inconsiderate, scaring me like this.