Shark Infested Custard (7 page)

       Larry had a literal mind, and although I knew him well enough by now to know that he would and did take many things literally, it was a characteristic that one never gets used to completely. His interpretation of movies, for example, was maddening. He was unable to grasp an abstract conception. When we discussed 'Last Tango in Paris'', he claimed that the reason Brando's wife had purchased identical dressing gowns for her husband and her lover was because she got them on sale. This absurd, practical interpretation of the identical dressing gowns makes Larry seem almost feminine in his reasoning, but there was nothing effeminate about him. He was tough, or as the Cubans in Miami say, 'un hombre duro'—a hard man.

       As an ex-cop, Larry had an excellent job at National Security, the nation-wide private investigation agency. He was a senior security officer, but not a field investigator, although he had a license, of course. He was an administrator, and worked in the Miami office on a regular forty-hour week. He never went out on investigative assignments. He has a B.A. in Police Science from the University of Florida, and his literal mind, apparently, was not a drawback insofar as his work was concerned. He wasn't allowed to say exactly what it was that he did at National Security, but his work had something to do with personnel assignments, and keeping track of cases and operators in the field. He made about twenty thousand a year, if not more.

       Part of Larry's personality problem, although Larry was unaware of any problem, was his inability to taste anything. Something was awry with Larry's taste buds. He was unable to tell the difference between sweet and sour. Everything tasted just about the same to him. One night when were both at Don's house, Larry took two bites out of a wax pear, picking the pear out of a bowl on the sideboard and biting into it without asking Clara if he could have it. The point is, he took the 'second'' bite before complaining that "this is the worst goddamned pear I ever ate."

       The fruit looked realistic, all right, and anyone could have made the same mistake in the dim dining room, but no one with any taste at all would have taken the second bite. Larry would have gone on, in all probability, and eaten the entire pear if Don and I hadn't started to laugh. Clara, of course, didn't laugh. The wax fruit was quite expensive; she had purchased it from Neiman-Marcus' Bal Harbour store. On another night, he ate a colored soap ball in Don's bathroom. There was a full glass of these pastel soap balls in there, and he thought he was eating a piece of candy. He didn't stop to consider that it would be peculiar to keep a jar of candy on a shelf beside the bathtub.

       At any rate, Larry's lack of sensuous taste extended into tastelessness in other matters; in the clothes he wore, in his speech, and even in women. But there was nothing wrong with his olfactory organ. He had a keen sense of smell, which is unusual when something is wrong with your taste buds, and in a way, somewhat baffling when you consider that if he could smell the soap, and recognize the smell, why would he eat it under the impression that it was a piece of candy? All he could come up with in this instance was that "It smelled good enough to eat, so I thought it was candy."

       When we went out together to eat, either for lunch or dinner, he invariably ordered a club sandwich. A club sandwich is easy to eat, of course, and it has all of the life-sustaining ingredients: turkey, ham, cheese, bacon (sometimes), lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, three pieces of toast, and usually, pickle and potato chips on the side. At any rate, that was the reason Larry gave for always ordering a club sandwich.

       I was sitting by the pool with a beer when Larry joined me, about five-thirty one evening. He told me that he had sent in a coupon and a check for ten dollars to "Electro-Date."

       "What for?" I said. "There're about seven single women in Miami for every single man now. It's ridiculous to pay ten bucks for an electronic date. All you have to do is..."

       "I know," he said. "I have a book with names and phone numbers, and if I got on the horn, I could have a woman join us here at this table in about ten minutes. But that isn't the idea."

       Sitting there, with a secret widening grin, Larry was hard on my eyes. His silk shirt, stained with sweat, was yellow, and his Spanish leather tie was the color of dried blood. His textured hopsack jacket was orange, and his hair, Golden Bear styled, was haloed by the low sun with a 1930s rim-lighting effect. He took off his jacket, and draped it over a metal chair.

       "All right, Hank," he said, "let's look at the evidence. If I made a phone call, and arranged a simple date—dinner, a movie, and then back to my apartment for a couple of drinks and a piece of ass—how much would it cost me?"

       I shrugged. "About fifty bucks. It depends on where you have dinner, and the number of pre- and post-prandials you drink"

       "Not necessarily. When you drive to Palm Beach every month, and you stop for a Coke and a hamburger, how much do you put down on your expense account?"

       "Seven or eight bucks, something like that."

       "Right. And you've made at least a three-fifty profit."

       "About that, but on my expense account I'm entitled to a six-dollar lunch. If I take a hospital administrator to lunch, I can get away with a twenty-dollar tab, or, with drinks, even more."

       "Exactly. So if I spend forty bucks on a simple date, and forty bucks is the irreducible minimum nowadays in Miami, and I can charge off the date to my expense account, wouldn't you say that I could get away with an over-all tab of fifty or sixty?"

       "Sure. But a personal date, even with an electronic service, will be hard to slip by your office comptroller."

       "You're right, Hank. Impossible, in fact. But not by the Internal Revenue Service. I can take the cost of the date off my income tax."

       He took out his wallet, flipped it open, and displayed the photostat of his private investigator's license.

       He said: "The idea came to me this morning when I saw the ad in the 'Herald''. Instead of taking a chance on picking up a broad in a bar or a party who might turn out to be a drag, or a professional virgin, or a husband-seeker, I can get a date through the computer that fulfills most of my requirements in a woman. When I sent in the coupon and the check, I started a new file at the office. What I'm doing, you see, is investigating the possibility of using these women who sign up with Electro-Date as part-time operatives, to employ when we need them at National Security for special assignments. After each date, I'll fill in a mimeographed form I've devised on the girl, and put it into this new folder. I can then take the expenses of the date, padded, naturally, off my income tax."

       "Did your boss authorize this?"

       "The Colonel? Hell, no! He'd never okay anything this reasonable. This is my own idea, and I'll spend my own dough. But the point is, if I'm called down by the IRS, I'll have the folder with the info on the girls to show them. I 'am'' a private investigator, and one of my duties at National is to check background reports on possible employees. My reason for doing this, officially, is personal enterprise. I'm showing initiative, and if the Colonel ever finds out about my plan he'll have to back me up with IRS because he's a great advocate of personal initiative. Besides, it isn't costing National a dime."

       "What's the real reason?"

       "Compatibility. As I said, the girl who signs up for ElectroDate has to pay fifty bucks for five dates. The male client only pays ten bucks for his five dates. So much for Women's Lib, you see. But she will be favorably disposed to me from the beginning because she has put down on her form what kind of man she wants to date, or thinks she wants to date, which is the same thing. And on a first meeting, we won't need any elaborate setting, nor will I have to spend a lot of dough. We'll want to talk, to explore each other, discover our likes and dislikes. No movie, no Miami Beach first-date crap, with the big stage show and champagne cocktails. No. Just me. Honest Larry 'Fuzz' Dolman, and the sincere here's-what-I-think-what-do-you-think heavy rap. One hamburger, two cups of coffee, at Howard Johnson's, let's say, and I can take fifty bucks off my income tax for a so-called investigation. If I like the woman, and if she likes me, on the second date I'll have her in the sack in my apartment.

       "What do you think?"

       "I don't know, Fuzz. In a way, it sounds almost brilliant. But it seems to me that women who would sign up for a computer date are either going to be dogs or desperate for a husband."

       "That used to be true. The older dating services were mostly match-making matrimonial set-ups, but that isn't true any more. Women have changed..."

       "When it comes to wanting marriage, women never change."

       "The form will avoid such problems. All I have to do is put down that I want to date a woman who doesn't want to get married. A career woman, or something. Anyway, when I get the questionnaire, I want you to help me with it. You're the man with a degree in psychology, and these data forms have probably got a few catch questions."

       "Why not?" I said. "We'll have some fun with it, and you can hardly go wrong on a ten-dollar investment. But if IRS ever calls you down, don't count on me to go down there with you."

       However, you can go wrong on a ten-dollar investment, as Larry found out on his first date.

CHAPTER SIX

The questionnaire, when it arrived, was not what we expected it to be. What Larry thought, and was led to suspect, was that the form would be a series of multiple choice questions, all of them concerned with the personality traits and characteristics he wanted his ideal girl to have—like the tests they run occasionally in the women's magazines, with the things you like least versus the things you like best in a "mate." 'Cosmopolitan'' magazine has tests like these all the time, and any person with a fair grounding in psychology, and mine is a good one, can score a hundred every time on such tests.

       I was particularly good on testing, anyway, because of my two years as station psychologist at the U. S. Army Pittsburgh Recruiting Station. It was my job then to weed out military misfits, to interview admitted homosexuals, actual and phony, and to make decisions on whether to accept borderline enuresis cases or to send them home. The testing department was also under my supervision, although I had a Master Sergeant who ran this section for me. I was smart enough to let him alone and allow him to do things his own way, and as a consequence I learned a lot from him.

       The only disagreement we ever had was about my attitude toward draftees who asked to see me because they were homosexuals, or claimed that they were. Sometimes, oftentimes, they were not, and it was easy enough to tell when they were lying.

       When you ask some innocent eighteen-year-old, "What do you do together, you and another man?" and he is unable to tell you because he has no idea of what two men do together, it is obvious that the prospective draftee is lying to avoid the draft. But I would reject him anyway, much to the annoyance of my NCOIC of Testing. The way I figured, if a man was so terrified of the Army that he would say that he was a homosexual, even though he wasn't, he wouldn't make much of a soldier. And the first sergeants, down on the line somewhere, who would have to make a soldier out of him, had enough problems already.

       But the questionnaire Larry received from Electro-Date had no questions whatsoever about his preferences in women. It was all about him—his age, his religion, his hobbies, and so on. This information would be transferred to a card, the card would be run through the computer, and then the cards that women had filled out—those that were similar in information to his—would drop out. He would be matched with one of them, and a date would be arranged between the two of them on the telephone by someone at the Electro-Date office.

       "What you're going to have to do, Larry," I said, "is lie."

       "Why?"

       "Because the women who fill out their questionnaires are going to lie, that's why. For example, what's the upper age limit you'll agree to date?"

       "Thirty, I suppose. I don't mind dating a woman my own age."

       "There you are," I said. "If a woman's thirty-five, and she thinks she can get away with it, she'll put her age down as thirty. So you'd better put down that you're twenty-eight instead of thirty. You still might get an older woman, but at least you'll have some leeway.

       "What's your religion, Larry?"

       "None, really, but I used to go to the Unitarian Church once in awhile in Gainesville."

       "You can't put that down. That's the last thing you want, a date with a Unitarian. They're weird, man."

       "I know. They were weird in Gainesville, but they weren't inhibited, either."

       "Put down Church of England."

       "Episcopalian?"

       "No. Church of England. That way they can match you with Episcopalians and lapsed Roman Catholics. If you happen, by chance, to get a real Church of Englander, they aren't concerned with morality anyway. Episcopalians are all time-servers, and lapsed Catholics have a sense of guilt they're always trying to deny. A girl who thinks that sex is dirty, and feels guilty about it, can be a damned good piece of ass. If you were sincere about this questionnaire, I'd say to put down Roman Catholic, because you'd probably get a lot of nubile Cuban girls. But they'll all be looking for a husband."

       "How young?"

       "Look at the newspapers. Usually, Cuban girls are married by the time they're sixteen. If they're nineteen and still single, they're desperate, Larry."

       "Let's change Church of England then, and put down Roman Catholic."

       "Why?"

       "A desperate girl is ready for anything."

       "You'll be flooded, Larry. Except for priests you're probably the only single thirty-year-old 'Catholic' in Miami who's eligible and unmarried."