Perversity is the muse of modern literature. – Susan Sontag
Barker Ajax liked to sit in the Magic Gardens, making up stories about the crowd of obvious serial killers watching young girls. Tender flesh they’d never have for themselves. He watched the men watch the nude dancers on stage, prancing in front of multiple mirrors and strobe lights. Gleaming. Barker tried to guess how many innocents had been murdered by this gang of voyeurs. A gathering of pallid lone wolves. Rabid, of course. No sane dog could do those things.
These guys made you wish you’d watched more of those TV shows where they re-enact the crime and ask viewers to help capture the perpetrators. They have to be wanted real bad for some crime somewhere. Such shows were a little too Orwellian for Barker. But then you find yourself looking at men like this and wonder how many were wanted for major felonies. Baby bowlers and mother rustlers. Father rapers.
Barker didn’t really seem like he belonged in a topless – for that matter, bottomless – bar. He was the kind of man who would “BURP!” and then apologize to the solemn pervert sitting on the next bar stool.
How many bodies had these slobbering degenerates watched dance naked to rock & roll music?, Barker wondered.
How many such women had he stared at since that first visit to the Calico Cat, when he’d been in Texas for basic training. San Antonio. Only barely 18 years old. Training didn’t get much more basic than the Calico Cat.
So, get this, one hour I’m in Manhattan, Whitehall Street, and some soon rapid hours later I am in Texas. My first time out West.
Not saying I’m the sharpest knife, but when I come from a rural community fifty miles north of New York and you suddenly surprisingly fly me to Texas, do not post signs saying, and I paraphrase, admittedly, but not by much, TWYLA HUMPHREY & her daughters Wanda & Lotta, known as the Humphrey sisters, are operating a house of prostitution at 10017 County Rd 11, This house is OFF-LIMITS to all military personnel.
The Air Force, even two-bit beers and agreeable frauleins in Bavaria, he thought, not enough to make me want to wear a uniform for twenty years.
Not that they wanted me to stay. I overheard my flight commander tell his National Security Agency contact, “Airman Ajax is our best man, sir, but he’s not what you would call ‘military material.'”
The Gardens has a pin ball machine that audibilizes suggestive phrases every time you score.
“Sock it to me, baby!”
“Hey, let’s party!”
“How about another ball, big fella?”
Lucy was the woman dancing. Girl, really. She couldn’t have been nineteen yet, if she was legal. Got a two-year-old herself. Caesarean.
Barker wrote many of his columns at the Gardens, figuring you only get back what you send out. And he found himself writing better here than in any other environment.
His ex-wife had called it “the sludge life.” Well, sludge happens. But the girls knew everything that was going on in town. Absolutely all that was happening with the criminal element and most of the lower-class goings-on. And Barker never failed to seem – really – simply flabbergasted at just how much some of these ladies knew about the upper class of the city, about the power brokers.
The only thing that surprised him any about people these days was some of the sick things they do to a man.
Barker couldn’t help sometimes but to overhear some enigmatic dialogue. He was sitting at the bar. There was a naked woman – geezus, she was gorgeous for this time of day – on stage singing along to Orbison and “Pretty Woman.”
“I don’t do that,” the off-duty dancer told the guy next stool over. “And, if I did,” she looked at him like he was lower than puppy crap, “you couldn’t afford me.”
The job might not have much class, but at the Magic Gardens the women all seemed to have some special kind of common sense. Common sense that comes from shaking your naked ass to fill your kid’s belly.
“Let’s go, sugar,” Lucy was suddenly there.
“More than ready.”