Stabs at Happiness (10 page)

“Honey, nothing comes easy in this world, you must know that by now.”

“Here you go,” she said, holding out a five dollar bill folded lengthwise, much more than she needed to pay.

The narrow streets were lined with parked cars and signs that said
NO PARKING AT ANY TIME.
The taxi driver passed a street-car out on the left, giving Jean an exhilarating but not exactly pleasant feeling that gravity itself might be defied—and then the cab bounced, ending the illusion, continuing its way down the hill at top speed.

“I seem to remember a place where you can lose all the money you want,” he said, unlit cigar clenched between yellow teeth. “But a woman like you going in by yourself, you know what they might think. They don't like stray cats pawing their guests.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Sure you can. No skin off my bones. Don't blame me though if the next thing you know you're on a slow boat to China, getting advanced lessons on how to play the flute.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothin'. Same as everything else.”

“You taking me to Chinatown?”

“Nope.”

“Then let's go.”

“Sure, honey. You can take care of yourself.”

The doorman let her in for another fiver. Remembering what she had heard about San Francisco, she figured the fix must be in with the local police.

Everything inside was done up in shiny, glossy white and polished gold. Pillars and high ceilings and a Negro hot jazz band all dressed in white. What a good clarinet-player, she thought idly, while heading to the gaming tables. When she got into a game of blackjack she lost a hundred bucks in the first fifteen minutes.

“Hit me,” she said, and got the Ace of Spades. She won. She got the Queen of Hearts. She won again. A handsome guy across the table was losing, at the same time giving her the eye. He looked like a high class gangster, if there was such a thing – or no, more like a sharpie, a mouthpiece for some syndicate. He wasn't muscle, he was brains. He had on a very nice pearl gray suit with a pale blue shirt and navy tie with diagonal red stripes. He was tall, with dark brown hair and a closely trimmed mustache. A cleft in his chin. Shrugging after another loss, he gave up his place at the table and left Jean's range of sight.

In about half an hour she was tired of playing. It was wearing her out. She left the table and cashed in her chips, coming out slightly ahead. She saw the man sitting at a table next to an over-grown fern. He was staring at her so unequivocally that she didn't think it was out of place for her to walk over and say Hi. He got up to hold a chair for her and the waiter instantly materialized with a brand new drink.

The gambler said his name was Kit McPherson. Jean said she was Susan Rose. Kit was the most magnetic of any of the men she'd met in San Francisco thus far. She felt like she could fall in love.

“Well, Susan, as I was saying… What brings you to a place like this? Studying the natives in their natural habitat? Looking for hepcats?”

“Actually,” said Jean, “I thought this was the Bamboo Room. I'm here by mistake.”

Kit laughed. “Call it fate.”

“You call it fate.”

“Okay, I'll call it fate. Why don't we let fate guide us out of this dump and over to a place with a little more life? I'm supposed to meet a cousin of mine at The Lotus Club. What about it? Does that sound like it might swing?”

Jean shrugged, gesturing indifferently with a cigarette in her hand, but she meant Yes and Kit knew it. Somehow it seemed like he just snapped his fingers and they were in a cab, he immediately started kissing her, sticking his tongue into her hot pliant mouth and his right hand up her dress between her legs. She didn't fight it. Why should she? She liked it. She was ready for the works right there in the back of the cab.

But Kit had more class. He put one knowing finger inside her, then stopped short of any further move. She was panting. The cab stopped in Chinatown and he said he'd be right back, he had to run into this restaurant and pick up a package from some Chink. The cabdriver stared cynically at Harlow in the rear-view mirror. In less than a minute, Kit was back — the cab then roared off.

Kit now seemed elated. He laughed aloud, but when she asked him why he shook his head and changed the subject. They arrived at their destination. It was a confusing place to get into, two stories underground. They had to give passwords at three different ominous metal doors. Jean had no idea such places existed. Her eyes grew wide; she was wondering what was going to happen to her.

The smell of exotic incense, sandalwood and musk, mingled with reefer and sweat and perfume, as well as the smoke of burning opium and hashish. Some of the beautiful girls waiting on the tables seemed actually to be transvestites, delicate and cute, some even possessing breasts. Where did such hermaphrodites come from? The scenery was slurred blue pink and gold.

“What do you think?” asked Kit, and Jean didn't know what to say, all she could do was look around and marvel at what she saw. He led her to a table where they joined a muscular, brown-haired guy named Dirk, who had a slight German accent, and his date, Fawn, a redhaired, plumpish, pretty girl with freckles, who was wearing a thin, lemon-yellow silk dress which showed off her lovely, slightly sagging fleshy breasts.

There were girls dancing in a line, all platinum blondes like Jean Harlow in
Hell's Angels
. Again, it seemed that some of them were not really girls.

Blue sequins and flashing sparkles of jewels made out of glass. Fawn passed “Susan” a sweet-smelling, perfumed cigarette. Jean smoked a little bit and got terrifically high. The platinum blondes made her giggle almost uncontrollably. Everyone in America was bleaching their hair to be like her; and here she was, wearing a brunette wig, trying to escape (even if not forever, even if only as a dangerous experiment). She thought of all the dirty pictures people sent her. She felt like a child. If MGM was sending detectives to find her they'd have a hell of a time following her down here.

It was infernally hot down here. Reddish pink lights and spots cut through plumes of smoke. A Chinese dragon danced, all gold, to the accompaniment of cymbals and wailing flutes and clarinets.

“Let's go,” said Dirk, to Kit. “Let's go someplace… where we can…” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

In the backseat of Dirk's car Kit started feeling Jean up again, exciting her, she was still telepathically receptive to his touch. He knew how to find the right spot. God. She moaned, shamelessly, knowing the others could hear and knew exactly what was going on. But this was who she was supposed to be!

It didn't take long to get to the hotel… but then, time was losing its normal relation to events. It was smoothing out, flashing with little subatomic suns and glares of light. Microscopic nebulae and mirrored moons that could have been streetlamps or reflections in the pupil of an eye floated, revolved.

The next thing she knew, in Room 421, the needle was dipping into her vein, waking her up in a hurry, the cocaine making her feel like she was going to die yet flooding her with a new electric life. Ooh… she felt so good… ummmmm…

There was an arrangement of one couple on the bed, another on the floor. Kit was fucking Jean for awhile, but he seemed more interested in mathematically changing positions than in giving himself time to come. He had instructed her, while she was undressing, to leave on the garter belt, seamed stockings and high heels.

Fawn had frizzy red pubic hair and freckles on her upper back and lower arms. The more intoxicated she got the more in evidence was her Southern drawl. She was from Vienna, she said. Vienna, Georgia.

The radio was on. With the strains of an orchestra in the background, an announcer was saying, “Direct from the beautiful Bamboo Room in the Hotel Belton… in the heart of beautiful downtown Des Moines…”

“The Bamboo Room?” exclaimed Harlow, laughing like a four-year-old, helplessly and unaffectedly, the cocaine giving her a feeling of indescribable giddiness and wellbeing. The wig had come off, and she told them a story about her head having been shaved a month ago in New York because she helped get some gangster out of town the local mob was looking to knock off… a few minutes later she said that she was married but her husband was in Sing Sing…

“Giddy-up. Come on, horsey.”

Jean rode around on Dirk's back. He had a good body, something was said about him once having been a prize-fighter, he kept himself in good shape. He could maintain his erection, doing Harlow doggie-style while Kit sat in the green chair, watching, fondling the skull and hair of Fawn as she blew him, working like a pro.

The needle… drawing up blood, the spurt of red… and then pushing it back down into the chemistry of the body, exciting the nervous system like a disease, white death… red and black inside the veins, a hundred miles an hour—faster, faster…

Some kind of big swelling liquid warmth built within Harlow's lower belly, her private parts, flooding her deepest reaches, the hole of love bleeding all through her sex and down through her legs, stiffening and straightening out her bones, making her cry out…she didn't know what she was saying… speaking in tongues like a Baptist handling snakes…
oh God
… interior rush of a swift black sea. Cresting, foaming… submerging an entire continent … making it disappear just like that.

It was Kit's idea for the two women to get together. Actually, neither Fawn nor Jean were all that crazy about each other: Fawn was jealous, and Jean either sensed this or reacted to something else; perhaps, simply, in contrast to her relations with men, she was just a snob, stuck-up about her looks, in any case, Fawn knew what to do. Even if she didn't care for Jean, she knew how to make her feel good. She got a feeling of power from what gave her pleasure in return.

Harlow enjoyed being the star. When she was a child, raised by her doting, wealthy grandparents, they had called her “the Baby” until she was 11 or 12. She had been pampered and spoiled, protected from the world. Her hair and face and early development had set her apart, gave her the sense of being special, a soft-skinned princess living in Kansas like it was Oz.

A cigarette with a long ash dangled from Kit's fingers, virtually unsmoked. Dirk put his hand up between Fawn's thighs, getting his fingers sticky and wet with syrup from a berry pie.

Jean's blonde hair was parted on the side, short and wavy but long enough to comb, and she wore dangly gold earrings and had on the typical amount of makeup, black-lined eyes and ruby-red kewpie-doll mouth… amidst so much warm sweating flesh.

She saw lights, little white lights as though the ceiling had opened up and the sky descended, violet-black background for sharp-pointed, electric, dazzling stars. She saw three concentric circles of white girls on their backs, seen from above like in a musical, their platinum heads close together, legs stretched out, separating in rhythm, opening and closing in the contraction and expansion of a muscle being stimulated through sensitized nerves… diamonds and stalactites of unmeltable ice, glistening, gleaming, glinting silver and white, here and there a glint of blinding gold, beginning to melt or dissolve as the plum-black darkness folded away in the heat of throbbing lights.

Kit looked at her, and she saw him, his features smearing, face falling apart, coming together again… and then he fucked her… like a killer… and then… or maybe later…

Glimpses: Kit was combing his hair in front of the mirror, pants on but no shirt, a scar on his back… while somewhere else… somewhere else… something was happening, some kind of heat was being generated someplace soft, everything was so soft and moist and soft…

Dark streets and cars. She dreamed that she was in the back of a speeding car, on the run from gangsters with machine-guns, she and her boyfriend the killer, looking out the rear window as the car sped down twisting, slanting hills of blue cement. It was all right, everything was excellent—even if they didn't get away it would be perfectly fine. They were in the train station, hiding in the public restroom, and both the nasty gang and the mean stupid cops knew where they were. They kissed one last time, star-crossed lovers, then slit their wrists. It didn't even hurt, it was a luxurious warm damp feeling like being a small child in the … endless dark.

Harlow awoke to find she'd wet the bed.

“Oh, God,” she said aloud, shading her eyes from the daylight. She didn't know what time it was, what day, where she was exactly… She didn't know anything. She didn't move, lying there in her urine-soaked sheets as they gradually cooled and began to chafe.

Flat on her stomach. Left knee slightly bent, right cheek pressed to the mattress. It was daytime and she was all alone.

“Shit.”

She was completely naked. Her thighs hurt. She had a headache and a sore jaw, and she felt like she'd bitten her tongue.

After a while, still somewhat out of focus, she got up and washed her face. She looked out the window through the blinds, squinting to avoid the greenish dreary light. She wondered what time it was. Kit and the others were long gone.

It looked like they'd cleaned her out. All of her money was gone, her empty purse thrown on the floor. Her jewelry was gone also—even to the paste pearl necklace and earrings. Her fur coat, her blue dress and shoes.

She couldn't cry. She wanted to, consciously, but her eyes stayed dry. She felt too much… too much like she'd anticipated the whole thing, like it had all been in the script.

The smell of urine was pretty strong. She took the sheets off the bed, and, embarrassed to have the maid know she'd peed them, put them in the bathtub to rinse out. She could do nothing about the mattress, she realized, but at least she would do what she could.

Getting the water running and doing something manual helped get her mind functioning, to some extent, even though she still felt under the influence of the residue of alcohol and drugs, she couldn't clear her head…