Buster Midnight's Cafe (8 page)

Me and Whippy Bird know the final straw was the food basket. Some ladies from the Blessed Sacrament Church found out about Mrs. Kovaks and brought a food basket. They didn’t just leave it on the porch and slip away. No, they got all dressed up and bustled up to the front door where everybody could see them. Me and Whippy Bird were there with May Anna when they rang the bell and handed the basket to her like she was supposed to fall on her knees and pretend they were the Doublemint version of the Virgin Mary.

One of them said, “My dear, we like to do this for those less fortunate. We hope you appreciate it and are grateful to the Lord. The Lord is only punishing her for her sins, but He will be merciful.”

Then the other woman looked May Anna up and down like you do a used car and added, “I’m looking for a kitchen girl and might consider you.”

Me and Whippy Bird were so mad, we could have knocked them down the stairs. The Kovakses needed that basket. We thought May Anna would either say thank you very nicely or else scream at them to get the hell out, but she did something me and Whippy Bird would never have thought of.

“Why, ladies, whatever is this about?” she asked. “Mother and I have no need for a food basket. You must be mistaken. But won’t you sit down? My friends and I were about to have tea.” So those women had to sit right down there in May Anna’s house and drink tea and be in her debt then slink back out with their basket. Even in
The Sin of Rachel Babcock,
May Anna was never as gracious and as much a lady as she was pouring tea for those two busybodies that day.

When they left, May Anna stood there clenching her fists, her face white. “I’ll never take charity,” she said. “Never! Never!”

Later on, when we saw
Gone With the Wind,
Whippy Bird asked, “Do you think Scarlett O’Hara would take a charity basket before going hungry again?” It wasn’t more than a week after those two biddies called that May Anna was working out of a house in Venus Alley.

Ma tried to talk her out of it. She went to see her and invited the Kovakses to live with us until May Anna finished high school. May Anna shook her head and said her mother was her responsibility, and she’d made her decision. Then Ma hugged her and said she loved her and she was always welcome at our house, anytime. May Anna told her that was the nicest thing anybody ever said to her, and it probably was. May Anna said Ma was a saint. When Ma died, May Anna sent Pig Face money for enough candles to burn down Blessed Sacrament.

A few days after she’d gone to work for Nell Nolan, who was the biggest madam in Venus Alley, me and Whippy Bird ran into May Anna on the street. It was over by where the Ben Franklin is now. She worked all night, then she came home during the day to be with her mother. Or sometimes she worked the day shift so she could be home at night. “You know what I’m doing now,” May Anna said. “You can pretend you don’t know me. I’ll understand.”

Me and Whippy Bird looked at her like she’d gone crackers. “See here, kid,” Whippy Bird said, “just because you’ve got a job don’t mean you’re better than me and Effa Commander. We’re still the Unholy Three whether you like it or not.”

May Anna laughed and laughed and said she was the luckiest girl in the world to have two best friends like me and Whippy Bird. Then she got serious and said, “Whippy Bird and Effa Commander, you’ve got to help me out.”

We told her we surely would though we didn’t have much money. Then she said, “Not money. A name. I need a new name. All the girls have them.” She thought maybe a movie star name. Since we’d just seen
Rio Rita,
we thought Bebe Daniels would be nice, but she said there already was a Bebe Daniels who worked up the alley. I liked Mary Miles Minter, who was also a movie star, but May Anna asked what drunken miner could say Mary Miles Minter and make himself understood? Barbara La Marr was another favorite, but May Anna didn’t think men would want to go to bed with somebody named for a dead person. That was when me and Whippy Bird looked at that street sign and before you knew it we had named the woman who would someday be one of the brightest stars in Hollywood.

After May Anna turned out, the Unholy Three was mostly me and Whippy Bird. We still saw May Anna as much as we could, and she was always our friend. Sometimes when she was working at Nell Nolan’s during the day, me and Whippy Bird walked down Venus Alley just like it was any other street. If May Anna spotted us and she wasn’t busy, she tapped on the window, which was a signal she would meet us at Gamer’s in five minutes for a coffee break. Even during the day, the street that ran along Venus Alley was as busy as Broadway after shift since the high school boys liked to cut through there on their way to the football field and bang their helmets on the doors.

Mrs. Kovaks died six months later, which Ma said was a blessing and we thought was a relief. She sure wasn’t pretty to look at, and at the end you could hear her screaming at May Anna all over Centerville. Ma said she was just crazy from the pain.

There weren’t many at the funeral, just May Anna and Buster and the Birds and us. May Anna saved up her money to buy a nice stone that said
REST IN PEACE MINERVA EVANS KOVAKS.
Then after asking Ma to give Mrs. Kovaks’s things away to a poor family May Anna gave up the house and moved into Nell Nolan’s full time.

In May, me and Whippy Bird graduated from high school. I went to work for Gamer’s as a waitress, and Whippy Bird got a job at the power company as a professional secretary. She came into Gamer’s two or three times a week for lunch. Gamer’s, which had its own bakery, was one of your better Butte establishments. I remember one Saturday we baked twenty wedding cakes. We made our own candy, too. Babe Gamer ran a confectionery in the basement with seven girls making candy and packing it to mail all around the world. At Valentine’s and Mother’s Day you’d have your miners lined up five deep in front of the counter to buy those big copper-foil boxes.

We ran into May Anna on the street sometimes or in the store. Or May Anna came into Gamer’s with some of the other girls from Venus Alley. They were always real nice and left good tips, too. Sometimes at night, the girls called and asked would we bring over a pastie or a chicken potpie, and if I wasn’t too busy, I’d run it over.

You read about your hookers being mean or else having hearts of gold. I suppose there were both, but the ones me and Whippy Bird knew in Butte were like anybody else. Unless you knew they worked on the line, you never guessed it. They weren’t all hussies with low-cut dresses or thick makeup. In fact, me and Whippy Bird always wore more makeup than May Anna except that May Anna liked bright nail polish.

Where we’d see May Anna most of the time was if we ran into her out on the town. In fact, that is how we happened to be maids of honor at May Anna and Buster’s wedding. It wasn’t a legal wedding, of course, but it was good enough for Buster.

Pink and Chick took me and Whippy Bird to the Jug one night. A few minutes later May Anna blew in with another girl and Buster and Toney. Buster had just won a fight at the Knights of Columbus gym, and they’d been drinking plenty. Even Buster was feeling fine, which was unusual for him. They ordered some more at the Jug because that’s the main reason you go there, then they came over and joined us.

“Buster Midnight has just successfully won his two hundredth fight,” May Anna said, slurring her words because she was drunk.

“Aw, May Anna, I never fought that many fights.”

“Including Pig ‘Puss’ Stenner,” she said. May Anna was surely drunk as a lord. “What is more, this is Buster Midnight’s birthday, so we are going to have a special celebration.”

“We already have,” Buster told her.

“No, Buster. This night I want to do something special. Like lunch at the Finlen Hotel.”

“It’s already eleven-thirty at night,” he said.

“Then I’ll order a birthday cake. Effa Commander, go down to Gamer’s and bake Buster a cake.”

“The bakery’s closed,” I told her.

May Anna pouted for a minute, then she said to Buster, “What have you always wanted besides lunch at the Finlen and a birthday cake from Gamer’s?”

“He’s always wanted to marry May Anna Kovaks,” Chick said, and we all laughed.

“There is no May Anna Kovaks. There is only Marion Street,” May Anna said.

“I’ll take what I can get,” Buster said.

“All right, we’ll get married. Pink will be the priest, and Toney will be the best man, and you will be the maid of honor,” she said, pointing to me and Whippy Bird.

“Who?” we asked.

“You,” she said. “Whippy Bird and Effa Commander.”

Toney got everybody at the Jug in on it, moving chairs aside to make an aisle for the wedding march and turning a table into an altar with a red and white tablecloth for the altar cloth. May Anna found a white crepe scarf for a veil, and me and Whippy Bird got down a bunch of crepe paper flowers that was pinned to the wall for a bouquet. They were dusty, but May Anna didn’t mind. Then Pink stood up in front of the bandstand and picked up the baton and told the band to play “Here Comes the Bride.”

They played it five or six times while we took May Anna into the little girls’ room and stripped her down to her white satin slip, which was as plain and elegant as a cocktail dress. We draped the scarf over her head, put the bouquet in her hand, and when we finished, she looked more like a nun than a bride.

Buster stood up in front of Pink with a picture of a flower pinned to his suit. He’d torn it off a cigarette advertisement hanging over the bar. Chick and Toney were behind him waiting to be the best man. Then we marched—staggered is what Whippy Bird says—from the bathroom to the bandstand and stood right under the cutout wooden jug that was the symbol of the place. Pink, who’d never been to a wedding and didn’t know what a preacher was supposed to say, just waved the baton and announced that Marion Street and Buster Midnight were man and wife.

Buster picked up May Anna and carried her outside to that black deuce roadster of his while we threw popcorn. Then the two of them drove off, drunk as coots, to spend their wedding night at Nell Nolan’s. Mrs. Nolan didn’t think it was so funny, even though later on she got to calling May Anna Mrs. Midnight. She made Buster pay for an all-nighter.

It wasn’t long after May Anna “married” Buster that she went to Hollywood, and you can thank President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for that—except that he was Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt then.

He came to Montana to get us to vote for him for president of the United States. Not me and Whippy Bird because we were too young to vote then, though we voted for him the three other times he ran. Vote early and often, that was always Butte’s motto.

There were ten thousand people who turned out to see Governor Roosevelt speak at the courthouse, which was our pride, better than the state capitol. The capital has a copper dome, but our courthouse has copper doors and marble columns the color of melted strawberry ice cream. We took the day off and met Governor Roosevelt at the train along with most of the rest of Butte.

“There he is,” Whippy Bird said when the dining car slid by, but I told her she was a damn fool because everybody knew he was in the last car. Whippy Bird was right once again, though. He was there in the diner eating his ham and eggs with nobody but Whippy Bird recognizing him.

A long time after that, May Anna met President Roosevelt at the White House when she went there for a dinner with her famous actress friend Faye Emerson, who was married to one of the Roose-velts. May Anna told President Roosevelt she remembered him visiting Butte when she was a girl. By then May Anna was lying about her age. Hell, by the time she was ten miles out of town she was lying about her age. She said she went with her two best friends, and that we were known as the Unholy Three, which made me and Whippy Bird proud, you can bet, to think that President Roosevelt in the White House knew about us. Whippy Bird says maybe he told Mrs. Roosevelt. Now wouldn’t that have been something?

May Anna met Mrs. Roosevelt, too, but she just shook her hand and said pleased to meet you, so she wouldn’t know about us unless the president told her later on. It’s just as well May Anna didn’t say anything to Mrs. Roosevelt because she was a smart cookie and she would have known May Anna was lying. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to town, it was just me and Whippy Bird standing at the station. May Anna didn’t go along. She was too busy selling her services to the men he brought with him.

The hookers always liked it when the bigwigs came to town because they brought lots of men with them, but never their wives. The men had just one thing in mind, and that was getting a little, as the fellow says. May Anna said it made you wonder what their wives were like, though May Anna never had anything against wives. She said that’s what drove men to Venus Alley. “If it weren’t for married men, we’d all starve to death,” she told us.

I can tell you where she told us that. We were having coffee in the Chequamegon on North Main, which we always called the “chew-quick-and-be-gone-again.” Only we weren’t chewing anything, just drinking coffee. May Anna ordered tea. She thought tea was more genteel. Once when me and Whippy Bird visited her in Hollywood she took us out for coffee at some restaurant decorated with pink ducks and palm trees, and I remember the waitress bringing her coffee, and May Anna saying in her sweet little voice, “Oh, would you be so good as to bring me tea instead?” May Anna always said “would you be so good,” even before she went to Hollywood. Me and Whippy Bird picked that up from her and used to say things like “Would you be so good as to bring me the can of Crisco?” or “Would you be so good as to buy me a roll of toilet paper when you go to the Nimble Nickel?”

Whippy Bird says would you be so good as to stay on the subject, Effa Commander. You must be old, the way your mind wanders. Well, I’m not any older than you are, Whippy Bird. When you point a finger at somebody, there are three more pointing back at you.

There were all those big government men lined up in Venus Alley waiting for the girls, and there was May Anna, still at Nell Nolan’s, earning her living as fast as she could. One of her newly arrived customers was a little man with hair like Richard Dix and a tiny mustache, one of those thin ones that men you don’t trust wear.

May Anna was making conversation and asked him what he was doing in town. He replied he was with a Movietone News crew taking pictures of Governor Roosevelt. You might think that would be hot stuff in Butte, but we weren’t nincompoops. Even me and Whippy Bird wouldn’t have fallen for that, and May Anna knew a lot more than we did about that kind of line. She just hooted and said, “Sure, honey. The governor left at one
P.M. YOU
miss the train?”

He didn’t like that. He argued he was in there taking moving pictures of Mr. Roosevelt to show in the newsreels they used to play in movie theaters along with the previews and the cartoon. He claimed he stayed on to shoot an extra day or two. May Anna said, “If you say so, honey.” He kept insisting he was telling the truth, and May Anna kept agreeing in that way you do so the other person knows you don’t believe them—and all the time May Anna was taking care of business. His business, if you know what I mean.

It didn’t matter to May Anna what that man did as long as he paid and gave her a tip, but he just had to have May Anna believe him. He said if she went up to the Finlen at 8
A.M.,
she could watch them set up their newsreel cameras. May Anna said she wouldn’t be going to bed much before 8
A.M.
so she sure wasn’t going to get up that early. Then he said to come at noon, and if she did, he’d put her in the Movietone News. He took more time arguing than he did on his business, so May Anna said sure because Nell Nolan was knocking on the door to say that time was up.

What me and Whippy Bird never figured out was why May Anna met him at all. Maybe she believed him or maybe she thought she could turn another trick. Whippy Bird thinks May Anna was angling for lunch at the Finlen Hotel, and that was why she got all dressed up. Dressed up for May Anna, even then, was elegant. Of course, May Anna never looked like a hooker—even though there must have been people at the Finlen who knew she was.

May Anna remembered every single thing to tell us later. She showed up the next day, dressed so fine she just knocked the socks off that little man when he saw her. He was standing in front of the Finlen with three or four other men operating one of those great big cameras on a stand with lots of cords draped all over the sidewalk. They were taking pictures up and down the street, and May Anna walked up there, cool as you please, held out her little hand, and said, “How do you do. So nice to see you again.”

She was some sight in Butte, dressed all in white like the day she took first communion at BS. Nobody in Butte wore white because of the dirt and smoke. What was surprising was she was some sight to the little mustache man and his crew, too, and they were used to movie stars dressed in white dresses and shoes and purses. It wasn’t just the clothes, though. It was May Anna. Seeing May Anna every day, me and Whippy Bird just overlooked that in the four years she’d been a hooker, she had turned out to be one of the most beautiful women of the world.

Those men stood there like she was some vision. The mustache man stuck out his chest like a peacock at Columbia Gardens and took her hand, as if he thought she was Fay Wray instead of a hooker from Venus Alley.

“So good of you to come,” he said, then he whispered, “What was your name again?”

May Anna almost gave him the shove at that, but she was already an actress, so instead she gave him her closed-mouth smile that didn’t show her crooked teeth and purred, “Marion Street.” She purred very professionally by then.

May Anna liked it when men fell all over themselves for her, so she was having as good a time as that man—May Anna said she never did know his name. He showed her the big newsreel camera and all the other stuff they had spread across the sidewalk. With his mustache and a beret, he looked like pictures you see of movie directors. He also looked like a damn fool in Butte, which made people laugh at him when they stopped to look.

It was just like an accident when one person stops to see what’s going on, and before you know it, there’s a crowd. So in about ten minutes there were lots of people around May Anna and the mustache man. They were laughing at the man and gawking at May Anna when a little girl came up to her and asked for an autograph.

May Anna was as surprised as if somebody had handed her a thousand-dollar bill instead of the back of an envelope. She looked up to see who was pulling her leg, but there was just the little girl. Behind her was a woman who was beaming at May Anna and pushing the little girl toward her. May Anna thought it was a joke but wrote “Love, Marion Street” anyway, expecting any minute now the mother would recognize her and turn red and tear up the paper. But the mother said thank you kindly. Then somebody else asked for her autograph. May Anna said she signed her name at least six times.

Some little kid asked her, “Are you a famous actress?” and you’d of thought the jig was up. Not May Anna. She smiled as sweet as she could and said, “Why bless you, no. I will be someday, though, so you just keep that piece of paper.” I expect if that kid did, it would be worth five or maybe ten dollars today.

We always knew May Anna planned on being somebody, though we didn’t know who. Maybe she didn’t either. She said acting never entered her mind until that little kid asked. Maybe she went there to turn a trick but found she had a chance to better herself. May Anna was not one to let opportunity slip by.

With all those people watching, the little man acted as important as Cecil B. DeMille. He waved his arms and pushed people away and told May Anna to go up by the power company, walk across the street, and ignore the camera. She did, just strolled along looking fine. Then he said go back and do the same thing only look into the camera, and she did that, too. Then he ordered her to walk a diagonal across the corner of Broadway and Wyoming. Finally, he said walk away from the camera up toward Granite Street, just slow and easy, and she did that and became a movie star.

Something else that never occurred to me and Whippy Bird before was that May Anna had quite a backside. When she swung that caboose in her tight skirt, men just naturally fell over in the street with their tongues hanging out. Whippy Bird says, now, Effa Commander, how would you expect us to notice something like that?

May Anna walked up and down that street about two hundred times. The little man was hoarse from yelling instructions, and May Anna’s feet hurt something awful. Still, she kept right on walking. Later on, May Anna told Hedda Hopper that she believed in pushing herself hard, and that her motto from the time she was a little girl was “Beauty knows no pain,” which is a crock of applesauce. We never heard her say that, and what’s more, May Anna was no beauty when she was a little girl. She did have a way with words, though. A way with lies is more like it, Whippy Bird says, but she means it in a nice way.

About the time May Anna’s heels were worn down and her feet were bleeding, this big man with a cigar came out of the Finlen and stopped to watch. He stood there for five minutes before the little man saw him and turned red and said, “Vic, hey, we thought we’d get a little man-in-the-street action, show the local yokels gawking at the big guy.”

The man with the cigar said, “Yeah, good idea. You going to show just one local or this burg got other people?”

“Right, Vic. Right. Just want to make sure we got this one down,” he said, leering at May Anna.

The man with the cigar looked him right into the ground. So the mustache man called to May Anna, “Thanks a lot, honey. See ya in the Movietone News.” He started packing up the camera, making little motions to May Anna to be on her way, but she was having too good a time. She never even looked at the big man, but you can bet she knew he was there, and she knew he was somebody. She stood quietly in that way she had so she’s the center of attention, then held out her hand to the little man and said, “Thank you so much. It’s been great fun.” Then she began walking away.

She took half a dozen steps, when Vic called, “Hey, sister!” May Anna didn’t stop for even a second. She kept right on going. It always surprised me how May Anna could look like she was walking fast but never get anywhere.

“Honey!” he called. May Anna kept on walking. By then she must have been half a block away. There was just May Anna and Vic on the sidewalk, since people were standing in the street, out of the way, thinking this was part of the movie.

Finally, Vic puffed up the street after May Anna and grabbed her arm and said, “Hey, I’m talking to you.” May Anna didn’t look at him. She looked down at where his hand was clutching her little white arm, turning it red, and in a second Vic let go.

“Yes?” May Anna said. She looked at him like he was a stray dog.

Vic was flustered. When he saw the mustache man watching them, Vic scowled at him until the little man scurried around like a chicken, gathering up all his wires. When Vic turned back to May Anna, she was giving him her bored look. “So,” Vic said. May Anna didn’t answer.

“You want to be an actress, do you?” Vic asked.

“Not especially,” May Anna told him.

“Then how come you’re walking up and down the street in front of the cameras?”

“Because the gentleman asked me to.”

“You always do what gentlemen ask?” He stood back and looked her up and down. His eyes kept coming back to look at her chest, which had grown a good deal more than the rest of May Anna since the day we first met her at the Little Annie glory hole.

May Anna flashed him an angry look and said, “Did you want something?”

That stopped him. May Anna said every time people like Vic went anyplace, they ran into pretty girls trying to get into the movies. He didn’t know what to do around one who didn’t care about going to Hollywood. Though, as you can guess, after her experience with the newsreel camera May Anna had decided she wanted to be in the movies in the worst way. She was playing the professional part of hard-to-get. Vic was playing the chump.

“Well?” May Anna asked. Right there if Vic had said, well, nothing, May Anna might be sitting in the Jim Hill today with me and Whippy Bird. Her whole career was held up on that “well.” Could have been sunk in that well, Whippy Bird says. Whippy Bird’s sure a wiseacre, all right.