Revenge of the Cootie Girls (25 page)

“Safety, no. But opportunities for pranks at the factory level … Instead of programming it to sing, programming it to say, ‘Hey! Who turned out the lights?'”

“Or ‘Remember the Alamo!'”

“Do they sing in Hungarian, Magyar, whatever it is?”

“I don't know.”

“That would be scary, if the woman didn't know it was a singing condom, and then all of a sudden, during penetration, her partner's penis started singing in Hungarian. That could conceivably cause a heart attack.”

“But no safety problems with Tupperware?” Claire said.

“No. Wait. You could put someone's eye out with the thing inside the lettuce crisper, and you could get cut up pretty badly if you got a finger caught in the salad spinner, but other than that …”

“Robin, it's amazing that you ever leave your bed,” Tamayo said. She turned to Claire and said, “Do you want to go with me to visit my Grandma Scheinman on Long Island tomorrow?”

“Okay,” Claire said. On they went, making plans. I tried to warn them that, as the old saying goes, when people make plans, God laughs. Or cries. I always get those two confused.

“Do you guys know the playmate song?” Tamayo asked.

We both looked at her, not sure what she was talking about.

“Playmate, come out and play with me, and bring your dollies three, climb up my apple tree, holler down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door, and we'll be jolly friends forever more,” she sang.

“She couldn't come out and play, it was a lovely day, with a tear in her eye, I heard her sigh, and then I heard her say,” Claire chimed in.

“Playmate, I can't come play with you, my dolly's got the flu, boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo. Ain't got no rain barrel, ain't got no cellar door, but we'll be jolly friends, forever more,” Tamayo sang.

She especially liked the part, “My dolly's got the flu, boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo.” She also sang the variation, “She might throw up on you,” over and over as we walked down Fifth Avenue, looking for a taxi.

I still had one crappy decision to make, Mike or Eric. But then I realized I'd made that decision, when my future flashed in front of my eyes and I saw myself with Mike, for the weekend at least. When I got home, I saw those cheesy Mecca souvenirs, and it confirmed my decision. Still, it was hard, because Eric was important to me, and incredibly sexy, and it meant slamming another door on the past. He was my transitional man. But that transition was over.

Louise Bryant was at the window. I opened it and she came in, looked up at me, and then walked over to her food dish.

“Had a good night, did you?” I asked her. I took her silence for a yes.

After I fed her, I collapsed on my bed in my clothes. I'd been going on adrenaline and a senior-citizen megavitamin all night, and now I felt like every cell in my body had been drained of life force. I slept for about an hour, and Eric called. I told him I couldn't see him. He was distressingly okay about it.

I fell asleep again. The next time I awoke, Mike was there, leaning over me, kissing my eyelids. I wasn't tired anymore. I pulled him down to me and we mated in the most unholy ways. Nearly dying is a great aphrodisiac. Afterwards, I was about to go back to sleep when the cops came. Local cops, NYPD. They wanted to speak to me about a stolen taxicab.

EPILOGUE

T
HERE'S A CULTURAL GROUP
, Native American, East Timorese, something like that, who believe there comes a point in the middle of your life when you meet your own ghost. You might not recognize your ghost, but how you treat it, the lessons you learn, determines how the rest of your life will turn out.

Something like that. When I read about it, I didn't know it was going to come in handy one day, and so I didn't pay as much attention as I should have. But that's true of a lot of things in life, little things at the time that turn out to be huge things later. If only you'd known back then.

Anyway, I think that's kinda what happened to me on Halloween.

Because of cooties, I had the distinction of having an actor play me on an episode of “America's Most Wanted.” More directly, it was because Julie Goomey got away with forty million of the Perrugia family's closest friends. But as I explained earlier, cooties were at the bottom of all this. If it weren't for the cooties, Julie and I wouldn't have bonded, my self-esteem would have been higher, I wouldn't have let Chuck boss me around, and I would have spent spring break '79 frying, drunk, on a beach somewhere instead of with mobsters in New York.

The actress who played Julie did a good job, but the one who played me was too short and had an annoying nasal voice. Our episode was on the special Interpol show. Since then, Julie Goomey has been sighted all over the place, but Interpol hasn't grabbed her yet. I don't think they will. She could dye her hair, wear glasses, disguise herself. With white-blond hair, she could blend in in any of the Nordic countries. With a bit of a tan, she could lose herself in India, home of the bandit queens.

Anyway, she reportedly has $40 million to keep her until the heat blows over.

Help for Kids was a legit charity she set up with Perrugia-family money and it did some good stuff, in addition to serving as one of Julie's money-laundering transit points. Meanwhile, everyone in the city is trying to find out who made an anonymous donation to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The note that went with it was unsigned, but I saw a picture of it in the newspaper and, guess what, I recognized the handwriting.

About a month after all this happened, I got a note from her myself, written inside a cootie catcher, with a parcel containing a costume. It was Munch's
The Scream
.

Dear Robin,

Sorry I put you through all that. I didn't know the Perrugias would grab your intern or friends, and I had arranged for the feds to meet up with you to help you out. I am having a ball. I'm painting again. Hope you're well too.

Thanks for being such a good sport. No hard feelings, huh?

Putli Bai

Sorry. I still had hard feelings. I believed her when she said she didn't know Kathy would get caught up in it. She gave me an insurance policy, Granny, she gave us a scoop, and I guess we learned a few things along the way. On the other hand, she fucked with us and put us at incredible risk.

The voices in my head keep arguing about her. The jury is still out. One thing I am pretty sure of, I don't think this is the last I'm going to hear of Julie Goomey in this lifetime.

The whole Perrugia clan, sans Granny, is going up the river for a very long time. Unfortunately, they still haven't found the body of Johnny “Nostrils” Chiesa, or, as I now know him, Johnny “Burgers.”

It's
almost
enough to put a girl off red meat.

I guess I did learn something about recognizing the hidden menace in people. In a way, that's what I did with Granny, when I turned her into a weapon. That was resourcefulness. The bonding between my 'fro and the earring-faced boy, that was dumb luck. A happy accident. I may be living under a curse, but I seem to have enough dumb luck to keep me going.

I was not charged with grand theft auto. It seems the cursed cabbie came back a while later looking for his cab. The dispatcher I'd called hadn't understood me. The cab was eventually found in front of my building and hauled off. Once I explained the situation, they let me go.

The earring kid came forward to get his share of the reward money, which I insisted he get. He claimed he didn't have a gun, so apparently it was illegal. It's funny, I've always been for gun control, but my life was saved by a gun-law violator, and, of course, by the fact that I'd stopped relaxing my hair and gone natural. But, you know, you get older and things aren't so black and white anymore. I used to be completely against capital punishment, for example, and I still am philosophically, but I don't miss Ted Bundy. You know what I mean?

Claire's “taking the cure” on her grandmother's farm in Mississippi. Two weeks of up at dawn, slopping hogs, milking cows, and generally just living off the land might be just the ticket for her. I wouldn't mind two weeks like that myself. Except without the hogs, the cows, and the up-at-dawn stuff.

All our talk about name-callers, bullies, troublemakers, tattletales, liars, cheaters, and prideful self-righteous gossips made Claire nostalgic for that unruly playpen, Washington. So she's going back to D.C. to report, until she can get herself overseas. I know how this choice may haunt her, how, when she's down about her work, or down about her love life and her work doesn't seem to provide enough compensation for the sacrifices she's made, she might think of Jess, or her and Jess in a parallel universe, and get a little sad. But she'll get through it okay, because she has a lot of strong people in her life who love her, and she has a really big ego.

Kathy has decided to finish the semester and then go back to Florida. I don't blame her. I mean, getting kidnapped by a bunch of strange women with green wigs and guns can put anyone off a place long-term. Still, she wasn't too much the worse for wear, and I heard her telling a friend on the phone about all of it in a very excited manner, as if she was proud to have gone through it and come out of it okay. She's already turning it into a personal legend. A good outcome puts a whole different spin on events, you know?

So I figure, Kathy will be telling that story for a long time to come, and not only to a series of therapists.

Tamayo is still Tamayo. She finished her UFO screenplay and now she's writing one under contract about our Girls' Night Out. Everything is going very well for her. Somehow, she talked me into taking a torch-singing class with her. Who knows? One of us could be the next Yma Sumac, if not in this lifetime, maybe in the next one.

Phil, our super, is going to Africa, but just for a couple of months, then he's coming back to us. I suspect it has something to do with Helen Fitkis. She's going with him, but she didn't want to go indefinitely, so they compromised. I admire them, in their seventies, going off for an adventure that way.

And get this: Tamayo's talking about taking a month and going over to Africa with Phil and Helen. To do comedy! For refugees! I've never heard of such a thing, but she says refugees need to laugh too, and it's a chance for her to work on her physical comedy, which is universal. Phil promised her she'd learn as much from the refugees as they would from her. As Tamayo figures it, somewhere out there is a funny cootie girl like her in a society that oppresses women, and she needs to find her.

(“And then kill her,” she jokes.)

Sally died.

While she was in the hospital, she died and was dead for all of three minutes. Although they were very long minutes, she still claims to have seen an awful lot in that brief time. And what she saw was so pleasant that, when she came to in the hospital, she screamed in horror at the faces of the doctors and nurses.

Back home and calmed down, she said that she'd been in this beautiful place, and had seen all her favorite dead relatives, plus Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, chaos magician A. O. Spare, and her dead cat, Pie, who opened his mouth and spoke to her. He told her she had to stay on earth and fulfill her mission.

Right, Sally, gotta go, the microchip, etc.

I didn't bother to point out that all the drugs in her system might have caused her to hallucinate. Why spoil her fun?

If you want to know what heaven is like according to Sally, she'll be happy to tell you, cryptically, over a long period of time and for $50 an hour. Those on a budget can catch clues on her new public-access show on Channel 17 every Wednesday at midnight.

Maybe I make fun of her because I envy her.

Her renewed faith inspired her to fall in love again—this time with the insanely handsome man who lives upstairs, Wim Young, when he came back from doing a road show. It is, Sally declares with all confidence, True Love. She reminds me of the Countess de Lave, in the 1939 all-chick flick
The Women
, who, despite three husbands, one of whom tried to push her down a ski hill and one of whom put poison in her headache powders, never loses her faith in “
l'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour
” (or as I know it, Le Madness).

Sally, of course, sees some kind of connection between her dream about me and the evening's outcome. If you want to make the great leap and discount the coincidence factor, I suppose you could see something in the fact that I was led by an old woman—asleep and in a wheelchair—and there was a man there whose face wasn't visible—Earring Boy. It's a stretch, but if it makes Sally feel better, what the fuck. I did have to sit her down and explain that, even if she is prophetic some of the time, I don't want to know about it. I just don't like anyone telling me the future. I'd rather be astonished, despite all the trouble this policy has gotten me into. I'm just made that way.

I did, however, let her treat me to a past-life reading by her nutty guru Sister Delia, who determined that during my human existence I had been, among other things, an uppity queen in Babylonia and later, in the tenth century, Hrotsvitha, a nun at the Abbey of Gandersheim and the prolific writer of tragedies, comedies, and histories which combined tawdry titillating spectacle with pious religious teaching. Most of Hrotsvitha's comedies feature a beleaguered virgin who wants to remain unsullied until she dies so she can arrive in heaven pure. Through all sorts of machinations, the beleaguered virgin eludes marriage for as long as she can and, if forced into marriage, escapes “defilement” by conveniently dying (clever girl). In one “comedy,” the husband tries to obtain his marital prize by following his bride to her tomb, where he attempts to get amorous with the corpse. A big serpent appears and kills him. The end.

And this is one of Hrotsvitha's funnier comedies.

Most people like to hear they were someone great in a past life, and I expect past-life readers always pad the past-life résumé to play to people's egos and endear them. But this did not cheer me up. Clearly, I was working my way down the karmic ladder, from queen, to writing nun, to middle manager with little hope of advancement. At this rate, I thought, I could be a cabbie in just a few short incarnations. Or a lab rat. Made me wonder, will someone a hundred years from now consult a past-life reader and learn she was me? Will she curse or bless my name?