Under the Skin (8 page)

who mighta done it. About the only thing they knew for sure was
that it wasn’t suicide. The old boy who told me the story did say real
quiet-like that it was
sorta
like suicide, since a woman who’d cheat on
Rose Maceo might as well wear a big ‘Kill Me’ sign on her back.”

Caruso finished wailing about the tragic clown. Rose dabbed at his
eyes with his napkin, then blew his nose.
“Fucken guinea,” he said. “Voice like an angel.”
The waiter came and topped off our coffee. A moment later the
window abruptly brightened with an explosion of light and sparkling
skyrocket trails arcing over the gulf. There was a muted staccato popping of firecrackers, an outburst of car horns. Somebody in the
kitchen began banging pots and shouted “Happy New Year!”
Rose raised his coffee cup and I clinked mine against it.

drove Rose back to the Club and parked the Lincoln
in the reserved spot by the back door of the building. The moon was down now, the stars larger and
brighter. Rose said he had to take care of a few things before he went home. He slapped me on the back and said
goodnight, then went into the Club.

I walked up the alley and into the bright lights of 23rd
Street. The haze and smell of spent fireworks were still on
the air. The theaters had let out and the line of people waiting outside the Turf Grill was even longer than before. I’d
been vaguely edgy all through supper and wasn’t sure
why—but as I stood there, watching the passing traffic in
its clamor of klaxons and clattering motors, what I hankered for was to get laid.

I usually took my pleasure with one or another of the
hostesses or waitresses who worked at the Maceo clubs, but
then I’d have to wait for the girl to get off work, and I
didn’t feel like waiting. Besides, I was in no mood for the
banter and kidding around that was required for a free one.
I just wanted to get to it.

than probably anywhere else in the country and I was already in the
neighborhood for it. Post Office Street—the heart of the red-light
district—was right around the corner. With my balls feeling heavy as
plums I headed on over there.

For a span of five or six blocks, Post Office—and portions of Market and Church, the two streets north and south of it—was mostly
one cathouse after another. Most of the houses were narrow two-story
buildings with latticework screens in front of the porches to give a
little privacy to guys who didn’t want to be seen going in or out. I always wondered who they were afraid might see them, since anybody
who was in the neighborhood sure as hell wasn’t shopping for shoes.

The houses were owned by a variety of different people but they
were all managed by women. The madams paid rents that were practically robbery, but the district was so well established they didn’t
have to pay off the cops to leave them alone—at least not as long as
there was no bad trouble in the place. Most houses turned a nice
profit by simply staying honest and clean. The madams wouldn’t
stand for their girls getting drunk or fighting on the job, and they
made them get regular medical checkups. A man might have to pay
a house price of fifty cents for a dime’s worth of booze or a quarter for
a nickel glass of beer, but he could be pretty sure he wouldn’t catch a
dose from his three-dollar hump. And if he gave the madam his
money to hold while he had his fun upstairs, he knew none of it
would be missing when he got it back.

Tonight the district was as raucous as I’d ever heard it. Every
house had a jukebox, and a crazy tangle of oldtime rags and recent
big-band instrumentals streamed from the parlors to mix with the
racket outside. Cars honking and jarring over the uneven brick pavement, the sidewalks full of soldiers and sailors and college boys,
dockwallopers, businessmen off the leash from home, laughing and
looking damn happy. Bad fights were uncommon in the houses—
guys eager to get laid or who’d just had their ashes hauled weren’t

usually in a fighting mood. There’d be some hothead every now and
then, or some guy too drunk to know better, but every house had its
bouncer to take care of them.

The best thing about the Galveston houses—and the most surprising to me when I first arrived on the island—was that so many of
the whores were actually pretty. Where I’d grown up, there had been
only two whorehouses inside a hundred miles, and of the handful of
women who worked in them only one looked to be under thirty years
old, and only if you’d had enough to drink would you call her fair of
face. It was a widespread joke that most of the girls at both those
houses were so ugly
they
ought to pay the guys who humped them.
But it was also a common saying that you always paid for it with any
woman, one way or another, and a whore was the only one honest
enough about it to charge you a specific dollar price and give you
what you paid for and leave the complications out of it. The steepest
price for it was marriage, of course, and lots of men paid it. “The full
freight,” LQ called it, and he’d already paid it twice. But he still preferred trying to woo a woman into bed rather than giving her cash.

“A man needs to feel like he’s getting it because the woman thinks
he’s handsome or charming or can make her laugh,” LQ said. “Like
he’s getting it for
some
goddamn reason other than he’s got three
bucks in his pocket. A man’s got to at least
feel
that way every now
and then, no matter it aint true.”

Not even Brando argued the point with him. But we all knew that
sometimes a man wanted it the other way, too—straight and simple
and without the bullshit. Here’s the money, honey, let’s get to it.
Which is how I was wanting it just then.

I had intended to go into the first house I came to, but as soon as
I turned onto Post Office Street I remembered a Mexican girl who’d
been working at Mrs. Lang’s the last time I’d been there, about three
months before. She wasn’t really Mex—she’d told me she was born in
Colorado and that her grandparents had been the last real Mexicans

in her family—and I knew she didn’t speak Spanish any better than
Brando. But she
looked
every bit Mexican, and tonight that was what
I wanted.

A skinny Negro maid with sullen eyes greeted me at the door. A
loud jazzy version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” was playing on the juke,
and the parlor was hazed with cigarette smoke. About nine or ten
guys were in there, waiting their turn to go upstairs. They sat on sofas
along the walls or stood at the small bar at the rear of the room, where
they were served by a little gray man with a hangdog face. Some of
the younger guys were talking low and snickering among themselves,
but the older ones just sat and smoked and stared at the nude paintings on the wall or down at their own shoes. Even through the smoke
and the scent of incense candles, you could detect the faint odor of
disinfectant and a musky hint of sex.

Mrs. Lang came toward me with a bright red smile, blond hair
braided in a bun at the back of her neck, gold hoops dangling from
her ears. She gave me a quick hug and said happy new year and been
so long and so forth. She had bright green eyes and a wide sexy mouth
and looked pretty good for a woman in her forties. She gave my briefcase a curious look—not a lot of guys carried a briefcase into a whorehouse—but said nothing about it. As she led me toward the bar with
her arm hooked around mine I asked if Felicia still worked there.

“She surely does, honey. She just this minute went upstairs. But
sweetie, we’re just
so
busy tonight, you’re going to have to wait a bit.
Another fella’s already waiting specially for her too.”

I wasn’t disposed to wait. I slid a twenty out of my pocket and
slipped it to her.
“My, we
are
in a hurry, aren’t we?” She slid the bill up her sleeve.
“But you know, baby, the other fella waiting on her is in a hurry too.
It’ll be awful hard to explain things to him just right.”
I gave her another ten and said she ought to at least have the decency to pull a gun on me.

She laughed and patted my arm and discreetly tucked the money
in a side pocket of her skirt. Then looked across the room at a big guy
leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. The
bouncer, a different one from the last time I’d been here. A young guy
wearing an open coat over a black T-shirt stretched tight across his
chest. He caught Mrs. Lang’s look and straightened up, made a little
nod and began cracking his knuckles.

Mrs. Lang fitted a cigarette to the end of a long holder and I lit it
for her, then bought her a glass of sherry and had a beer for myself
while we waited for Felicia to finish up with whoever she had upstairs. Over the next few minutes three guys, almost one right after
the other, came out of the upper hallway and down the stairs and only
one of them waved so long at Mrs. Lang before scooting out the door.
Each time a guy came down, she nodded at another one in the parlor
and he’d go up to the girl waiting at the top of the staircase. Most
whores couldn’t remember your name from one minute to the next,
but they had damn good memories for faces, and madams had the
best memories of all, never losing track of their customers’ order of
turns even on the busiest nights.

The girls wore short little camisoles, and one of the whores on the
upper landing grinned down at everybody in the parlor and flicked
up the front of hers to give us a glimpse of her trim brown bush, then
busted out laughing and retreated into the hall with her next trick.

“That Carolyn is such a slut,” Mrs. Lang said, but she was smiling.
Girls like Carolyn were great for business.
Now another guy came out of the upper hall, still adjusting his
tie, and started down the stairs. And Felicia stood up there, her skin
dark against the pale yellow camisole.
Mrs. Lang took me by the hand and hurried me to the stairs and
gave me a little push up the first few steps. “
Move
it, honey,” she
hissed at me. “You’re the one in such a rush.”
Somebody said,
“Hey!”
and I stopped on the stairs and turned.

A burly redfaced guy in a derby hat who’d been sitting on a sofa
was coming toward us. But the bouncer cut in front of him, saying
something I couldn’t hear over the loud volume of “Let’s Fall in Love”
coming from the jukebox. I knew he was hoping the derby man would
try something, if only to break the monotony. I’d been a bouncer in
San Antonio for a time and knew how boring the job could get.

Mrs. Lang flapped her hands at me like she was shooing something, and then Felicia had me by the hand and was tugging me the
rest of the way up the stairs, saying, “Come on, baby, come on—long
time no see.”

As we got up to the landing, I looked back and saw the madam
speaking in earnest fashion to the derby man, the bouncer standing
with them and looking disappointed. Then we were in the hallway
and out of view of the parlor.

We went into her little room and she shut the door and glanced at
a bedside chair holding a small stack of fresh hand towels. I set the
briefcase down next to the bed and hung my hat on a bedpost and
took off my coat and draped it on the chairback. She pulled off her
camisole and tossed it on the chair, then stood naked in front of me
and helped me unbutton my shirt, talking all the while, saying she’d
been wondering what had become of me, had I got married or moved
away or what, trying to sound casual but doing a poor job of concealing her eagerness to move things along and serve as many tricks
as she could on this most lucrative night of the year. Then I was naked
too and we got in bed and went at it.

I was surprised at how worked up I was. She said, “Oh yeah, honey,
yeah,” as I hammered away at her. The whole thing didn’t take but a
minute. Then she was squirming out from under me, saying “That
was great, baby—wooo, yeah.”

She wiped herself with a towel and handed me one, then slipped
her camisole back on and shook my foot by the big toe. “Hate to rush
you, sweetie, but gosh, tonight it’s just busy-busy, you know?”

I put my pants and shirt on, then sat on the bed to tug on my
boots, sensing a familiar sadness. I’d heard or read somewhere that the
French called sexual climax “the little death,” which was a pretty
good description for the way it always felt to me. I wasn’t sure what
it was that died each time, but I’d often wondered if the strange sadness that came afterward might be some form of grief for it, some special sort of sorrow rooted so deep inside of us that we didn’t even have
a name for it. This time, for some reason, the melancholy was more
insistent than usual.

“Dream a Little Dream” was on the juke when we went out to the
landing. Felicia gave me a so-long peck on the cheek, then turned to
smile down at the guy in the derby hat who’d gotten up from the sofa
and was heading for the stairs as I started down. Mrs. Lang was at the
bar and looking at us. She cut her eyes to the bouncer, who was over
by the juke, pointing out selections to a guy feeding coins into it.

The derby man’s face was as easy to read as a fist. I figured him for
a sailorman treating himself to a New Year’s Eve on the town in his
best suit and hat, and he’d obviously been sitting there seething
about me buying a turn ahead of him. Maybe he was drunk or maybe
he was one of those guys who took everything personally, or maybe it
was something else, I didn’t give a damn. But everything about the
way he was carrying himself as he came up the narrow stairway said
he’d worked himself up for a scrap.

Mrs. Lang must’ve seen it too. She called out, “Hollis!” I caught a
glimpse of her directing the bouncer’s attention to us, of other guys
looking up to see what was going on.

We were in the middle of the staircase and almost abreast when
the derby man pointed his finger in my face and said, “Lemme tell
you something, you mongrel sonofa—”

I grabbed the finger and pushed it back so hard my knuckles
touched his wrist, and even over the music the whole room probably
heard the bone snap.