10

Kicked Out

DENNY WORE DAZZLING SHIRTS that were sunflower yellow, parrot green, candy apple red. He was puckish and too pretty for a boy, and anyone who thought about it would have known that his eyebrows couldn’t have been arched so high and perfect without the aid of tweezers. In speech tournaments he did Biff from Death of a Salesman in an exaggeratedly melodramatic voice that was pitched in an upper octave and made his interpretation unintentionally comical, but that didn’t seem to matter much to him. Mario was the real reason he’d joined the Speech Club.

When he called one evening to ask if I thought Mario looked greater in his black T-shirt or his white one, I said, “I’m gay too.”

“I knew it, I knew it in my bones!” he shrieked and cackled; he became my best friend at Hollywood High School. I had too much to hide from the other kids.

It was Denny who introduced me to the secret life that played itself out on Hollywood Boulevard, just a couple of blocks from our school. Most passersby never seemed to notice the young men who trekked up and down the boulevard from Highland to Vine in little knots, shouting merriments or imprecations to other little knots of young men. “She” or “Mary” or some such feminine signifier was how they usually referred to one another, and they talked in high voices about cruising and camping and queens and sailor’s rosaries (“the buttons on a sailor’s pants that queens pray over,” as Destiny, the most fabulous queen of all and my buddy for about three months, defined it for me). A casual stroller might see a beautiful, elaborately made-up woman and think “a Hollywood starlet,” but Denny introduced me to many of them, drag queens who walked the boulevard to hustle or to see how well they could pass. It was Denny also who clued me in to the gay cruising scene on the boulevard; and he took me to the Marlin Inn, a coffeehouse where underage gay boys without fake I.D.’s for the bars could hang out. Our favorite after-school stop was Coffee Dan’s, a regular meeting place for the Hollywood gay crowd, where the straight patrons seldom noticed that the people in the next booth—billing and cooing or camping it up, sometimes wearing gobs of eye shadow and rouge—were all male.

Being an honorary member of the secret world of gay boys made me long for the freedoms they claimed for themselves. I’d never heard of lesbians cruising one another on the street, but I yearned to know what it would feel like to pass a strange woman on the boulevard, exchange a significant glance that would be invisible to the droves around us, and follow her (as gay boys followed one another), our blood tingling, around a corner. But if lesbians ever walked down those streets, I didn’t recognize them, and I lived in celibacy through much of my junior year because I knew I had to stay out of the bars. Mostly I was okay since I had plans: I’d finish high school in a couple of years and go to a college I’d seen only a few blocks away from the Open Door, Los Angeles Junior College, and when classes were over every day I’d stop by for a beer and meet women there and have all the lovers I wanted. I’d know how not to get myself in trouble with a brutal woman like Jan. For the present, it was something at least to walk down the boulevard with the queens or hang out with them in the coffee shops.

Once in a while I “dated” gay men I met at the Marlin or Coffee Dan’s. Wendell looked like a beefy young businessman and worked for the Southern California Gas Company. He asked me to front for him at a Christmas party. “You have to bring a wife or girlfriend to those things, so it would be a big favor to me,” he said. “Tell them you’re twenty, okay? And if they ask, say we’ve been going out for about a year.”

I was happy to do it. “I’ve got a date,” I told my aunt when Mr. Bergman drove her over to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. “He’s twenty-three, has a very good job with the gas company.” I waxed ecstatic. Maybe it would put a halt to her nagging for a while.

“Jewish?” she asked.

 

At the end of each semester I took my report cards to Maury because they were trophies too: I’d ended the eleventh grade with mostly A’s. He blinked owl eyes behind his thick glasses as he scrutinized the grades. “Mazel tov, bubeleh!” he shouted and pumped my hand as though I’d brought him nachas, gave him pleasure as if I were his own kid. “Colleges forgive a lousy freshman year if you can make grades like this. It shows you’ve matured. A collitch lady you’ll be, und a lady bachelor und a lady master und a lady phudd. So, where will you apply?

“Los Angeles City College?” He scowled at me when I told him my plans. “Ridiculous! That’s a junior college—two years only. With grades like this and those first-place speech trophies you can write your own ticket—UCLA, Berkeley, Columbia University. Don’tcha know there’s a difference between those places and someplace like Los Angeles Junior College? There’s a whole big world out there. How’d you like to be living in the heart of New York? That’s where Columbia is. Don’tcha know that in New York they got more theaters, concerts, museums, lectures—more of everything worth doing and seeing than anyplace on the planet?” I didn’t know. I only knew that was where I came from, and those memories weren’t too terrific. But Maury’s words propelled me to dream of New York as a fabulous possibility. Columbia University. Or I could stay in California and go to Berkeley. Or UCLA.

 

The first time I saw Nicky I thought she was a straight boy. I’d gone to the Marlin Inn to meet Denny, and she was sitting at a table with him and some other queens. Her gray wool man’s shirt hung loose outside her jeans, and her auburn hair was buzzed and shorter by far than anyone’s at the Marlin. You had to really look in order to notice the breasts under the shirt—not because they were so small but because the whole effect was so successfully male that your eyes could trick you into ignoring the soft swell beneath the shirtfront.

She was the first lesbian I’d met in Hollywood. “Won’t you join us,” she said with great formality and jumped to her feet. She relieved me of my books and almost bowed as she pulled out a chair. At first I wondered if she was making fun of me, but no, she was serious. She was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

“Thank you, that’s kind of you,” I said. I knew how to be Ingrid Bergman too, so I let her settle me into the chair. Denny giggled. I threw him a look.

The second I took a cigarette out of my pack, there was a worn, gold-plated lighter waving in front of my nose, and when the waiter brought the coffee I’d ordered, Nicky insisted on paying, then got up to get me some apple pie and then a second cup of coffee. When I said I had to go, she asked if she could walk me home. “Sure,” I said, because I missed the gay girls at the Open Door.

She talked and talked as we sauntered down Hollywood Boulevard, as though she’d had no one to talk to in a long time. I saw now that she was a great galumpf of a girl with puppy feet and puppy eyes that belied her efforts to pass as a sophisticated man. She’d come to L.A. with a magazine crew, she said, a boss and six young people. Her job was to go door-to-door with a basset hound look and a heart-wrenching tale, like “My mother and father died in a fire last month, and now I have nobody in the world except for a maiden aunt in Topeka, Kansas, and I’m trying to make enough money by selling magazines so I can take a bus back there and live with her. Won’t you please help me?” “They’re good magazines—and a lot cheaper than on the newsstands. People enjoy them once they get them,” Nicky explained earnestly.

“You don’t have to go in right away, do you?” she asked when we turned the corner onto Fountain Avenue. She was a character; I’d never met anyone like her. So I plopped down with her on the apartment house lawn next door to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows and listened for another half-hour as she poured out her life story, plucking nervously at blades of grass and dandelions. In six months she’d already been to Chicago, Des Moines, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, and San Francisco. She pronounced the name of each city with pleasure, a world traveler who’d seen wonders. “And I’ve made a lot of money. I’m good at it,” she said in a boy’s clear voice. “The crew boss keeps the money on the books for you, and they pay all your hotel bills and stuff. Then, when you’re ready to leave, you get your wad.” Waaad, she pronounced it, making the word sound as though it meant chest of gold doubloons. Though she was a year or two older than I, I felt like a jaded woman in comparison. The whoppers she’d told in the service of the Ladies’ Home Journal hadn’t yet made her eyes look hard and savvy, and there was an ingenuous air about her. She’d been a carhop before she joined the magazine crew, a telephone operator before that. “But what I really do is write,” she said.

Sometimes, when I got rave comments from an English teacher on an essay, I thought that I might like to become a writer. It seemed as exciting as being an actress—more exciting, really, because it took intellect. (“You put some squiggles on a paper, and miraculously your mind goes out to the minds of thousands of strangers. You’ll never even see them, but you’ve taught them, you’ve touched them,” Maury had said. “The greatest profession in the world,” he called it.)

“I’ve got around fifty pages done,” Nicky said now, and I listened, awed. “The book’s actually about me, but I call her Blackie, a butch from St. Louis, eighteen years old, travels around the country, trying to make it on her own. I’m naming it ‘Walk With the Wind.’” When Blackie is twelve, she wins a national short story contest for Catholic school girls, first prize, and the story, “Big Red,” about a Call of the Wild kind of dog, is printed in a magazine that goes to all the Catholic schools. The nuns at her school say she’ll be the next Graham Greene. But when she’s sixteen her mother makes her go to work for the St. Louis telephone company, even though the principal nun pleads with the mother, says she’ll get Blackie (Nicole, she’s called then) scholarships to college. Nicole’s mother is adamant; she went to school only until she was sixteen, and what was good enough for her should be good enough for her daughter. So Blackie begins a life of plugging wires into the phone company’s main switchboard. “I’m a homosexual,” she tells her mother when she’s seventeen, because she’s fallen in love with a girl at the phone company. That’s when her mother kicks her out, won’t even let her take clothes with her, just says, “I don’t have a freak for a daughter.”

“Did that really happen?” I asked, incredulous that there were mothers who would do that to their children.

Nicky cracked her knuckles, loud, first on her left hand and then on her right, before she answered, “That’s just the way it happened. That was last year. I’ve been walking with the wind ever since.”

“But . . . doesn’t she yell at you to come home when you phone her?” I remembered my own telephone booth calls to my hysterical mother.

“I only phoned once, when I got fired from the carhop job for stealing ’cause the pay was so lousy and I had no money and no place to go. I said, ‘Mom, it’s me, it’s Nicole. I wanna come home, Mom.’ ‘I don’t know any Nicole,’ she says and hangs up. Bitch, huh?” Nicky grinned, but I saw her lower lip quiver.

“Can’t I come in for a few minutes?” she asked, clutching my schoolbooks to her chest when I said I really had to get home now.

She was nothing like Jan, and I’d never met anyone who wanted to be a writer before. “You better tuck your shirt in and put on some lipstick,” I said, handing her a tube of Red Hot Peppermint that I fished from my purse.

She looked horrified for a flash, but she took the lipstick. “I don’t have a mirror,” she said. “Tell me if I’m doing it right.”

My mother was playing gin rummy in the kitchen with Albert and didn’t even notice her. “I got a friend from school,” I shouted in my mother’s direction, and Nicky and I slipped into my room. “Okay,” I heard my mother say. Albert said nothing. I closed the door and pulled from my cache of books a bunch with garish covers that I’d found on the twenty-five-cent paperback rack at the drugstore—Women’s Barracks, Queer Affair, We Walk Alone, Odd Girl Out. “Take them,” I told Nicky. “They’re about lesbians, but your story is a zillion times more interesting. I know you’ll get it published.” My ambition for her was growing like a beanstalk.

My mother did catch a glimpse of her a little while later, as she was leaving, but she didn’t seem to notice that Nicky looked like a boy. There’d been no butches in the shtetl, or in the movies she’d seen, or in the shops where she’d worked. “She’s so tall for a girl. I never saw such a tall girl” was all my mother said.

Nicky came again on Saturday and then on Sunday, and when the workweek started she came the minute she was free in the late afternoons. Maury told me I needed to fill out college applications and write my essay on why any college should be happy to get me. I’d already decided to apply to all the good colleges in Los Angeles—UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, Occidental—because I wouldn’t be too far from my mother at any of them. Nicky stayed with me in my room as I strained over my work. Sometimes she wrote a bit of “Walk With the Wind” or she read one of my drama books or novels, her big frame stretched out on the floor near me as I sat at my little desk. “Can I read you this?” she’d ask from time to time. I didn’t mind the interruptions because usually she read passages I liked too, and I thought her comments were so smart, better than mine. “You’re the one who should be applying to colleges,” I told her. It was cozy—her company, our shared tastes—and I found myself dreaming a little, about how she’d become a famous writer and I’d become . . . I didn’t know what yet, something else good.

When she kissed me the first time, there in my room, it was a shy, kid’s kiss, with soft, closed lips. “Don’t you know how to kiss?” I teased, and I showed her, like an older woman. Somehow, though, the pieces didn’t fit; it didn’t seem at all . . . sexy. Still, I went out to the living room to tell my mother: “Nicole is staying over. She’s helping me study for a test.”

 

I turn the lock and put out the light after I hear my mother or Albert close the door to their room and two pairs of shoes drop on the floor. I take off all my clothes and throw them in a pile. I can see Nicky’s shadow, her back to me, as she gets out of her shoes, socks, shirt, pants, and nothing more. She climbs into bed before I do, covers herself, and then she reaches out for me. I slip under the blanket and she caresses me everywhere. Id longed for a lover, and now I’ve got one who is so sweet and bright and ardent. But something crucial is missing. Whatever it is lets my mind keep wandering to other things—the sound of my footsteps on the marble staircase that leads to Maury’s office, the dark circles around my mother’s eyes. And suddenly I know: It’s not Nicky’s fault that I’m not stirred deeply. Together we are two left shoes. What I really want is an older woman. An older woman. Even the phrase excites me.

 

Yet I didn’t want her to leave. I really liked the way the gay boys on Hollywood Boulevard coupled us—we were Lil-and-Nicky. Sometimes on weekend evenings I’d put on my harlequin capris again and the high heels that she loved, and we’d strut down the boulevard, her arm a shawl round my shoulders. “It’s okay,” she assured me the first time. “Everyone thinks I’m a guy.” I decided she was probably right, and I relaxed into the masquerading fun of it, the charm of fooling the tourists who thought we were like them. “You make a stunning couple, darlings,” Destiny gushed. I liked even more the way she sat with me while I did my schoolwork, and how we talked about her finishing “Walk With the Wind” and selling it for a lot of money. We were discovering books together like The Prophet and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence. She said the book she loved best was Walter Benton’s love poem sequence This Is My Beloved, because the beloved’s name was Lillian. She recited the Benton poem “Your Eyes” to me again and again in a rich, melodious voice, her intonations subtle and canny.

In about a month the magazine crew had milked all the neighborhoods in L.A., and Nicky’s boss told them they were shoving on to San Diego. She ran to my house as soon as she found out. “Tell me to stay.” She held my hand, peering into my eyes and pleading, like a Victorian suitor proposing.

“Yes, stay,” I said. I’d be lonely again if she left.

I went with her to collect her clothes and money at the hotel where the magazine crew had lived, the Hotel Royal Astor, a building as grimy as the one I’d lived in with Jan. The glass front door had a crack running its length, as though someone had taken a crowbar to it, and the lobby was decorated by a single overstuffed chair that leaked straw guts. I followed Nicky up familiar-looking unlit stairs and down a smelly corridor.

The crew boss had a thin black mustache and a cocky tilt to his chin. He wore red suspenders and his hair was slicked, like a 1930s gangster. Without so much as a glance at Nicky, he kept putting things into a suitcase and muttered that she had fifty dollars coming.

Even from where I stood at the door I could see the deep flush that spread over her face and neck. “But what about all my money on the books?” she cried.

“Yeah, that’s fifty dollars,” he snapped, still not looking at her, pulling a ledger book out of a big box and throwing it on the unmade bed. “Look, here.” He pointed with a blunt finger on the page, and Nicky leaned down, craning to see. “Right here—hotel rent, food, clothes, spending money.” He flipped the pages wildly. She kept shaking her head at the figures. “A doctor in October when you had the flu—look at how much that cost us.” He stabbed his finger like a shiv on another page.

“But I’ve been working since July. I’m the one who sold more than anybody!” Nicky wailed. I stood with my back pressed up against the door, suddenly scared for her.

“Damn it, it’s all there!” His voice rose, and he slammed the ledger shut and glared at her. “You made $1,265 since July, and the company spent $1,215 for your upkeep. Can’t you read?”

“Hey now, look . . .” I squeaked and came up behind him.

“Who the shit are you?” He whirled around as though he hadn’t seen me before and curled his lip as if regarding a cockroach. My stomach tumbled and I backed to the wall, but he waved me off with a flip of his hand and turned again to Nicky. “We owe you fifty bucks, and that’s what I’m giving you,” he said now in a tone of sweet reason.

“That’s impossible,” Nicky moaned.

“Fucking dyke!” The reasonable veneer vanished quickly, and he tossed the ledger on top of the box. “Wadda you gonna do, call the cops?” he drawled.

Nicky looked at the closed ledger. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.

“Do you want the money or not?” he snarled a few minutes later, locking his suitcase with a key, then sticking the ledger back in the box. “I can’t just stand here clapping my jaws with you. Look, you’re quitting on us without notice. By rights I don’t even have to give you the fifty dollars.”

“Carl, don’t do this,” she begged. “You can’t do this!” But he’d already thrown two twenties and a ten on the floor. He put the box under an arm, then grabbed his suitcase and slammed the door behind him.

 

Wendell says Nicky can crash on his sofa until she gets work. Every morning she stands on the corner of Fountain and Orange Grove avenues, waiting to walk me to school so we’ll have a few minutes together. When I get to the corner, I always find her studying the Help Wanted—Women section of the Los Angeles Herald and circling ads with a green pencil stub—salesgirl, countergirl, file clerk. Now her hair is longer, her shirt tucked in, and she wears my lipstick and eye shadow. “I’ll find something today,” she says every morning, her energy renewed. But at three o’clock she’s waiting for me at Coffee Dan’s, lipstick worn off, eye shadow smudged, shoulders drooping. By then she’s answered every ad, trekked all over Los Angeles. “They just turn me away without even asking me anything.”

One place, a department store, doesn’t turn her away immediately. A woman in the office gives her four pages of forms to fill out and a six-page test to take. The woman grades the test while Nicky sits there, then calls her over and says, “You got 100 percent! Goodness, we’ve never had anyone get 100 percent before!” She tells her to go to another room and wait for the interviewer, who emerges from his office a couple of hours later, takes one look at Nicky, and says, “We don’t hire tomgirls here.”

When Nicky related that last story to me and Wendell in a booth at Coffee Dan’s, he tried to lift the pall by telling us about a new bar in North Hollywood—“mostly lesbians, very chi-chi. Let’s go this Friday.” He smiled. “It’ll be my treat.”

“No, I better not,” I said. If the bar got raided, my Herculean labors at Hollywood High would have been for nothing.

But Nicky immediately shifted mood, as though the brutal insults she’d survived for the past weeks were dead and buried and she was ready for life again. “Oh, yes! Lil, please,” she begged. “We’ve never been to a bar together. Please, I need some fun now.”

 

The Club Laurel was nothing like the Open Door or the If Club. The neon marquee in front read:

 

“BEVERLY SHAW, SIR”
SONGS TAILORED TO YOUR TASTE
APPEARING NIGHTLY FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE

 

A colored picture in the blue-draped window showed a woman, forty perhaps, perched on a piano bar in a short dark skirt, high-heeled shoes, black bow tie, white tailored jacket. Her long legs were crossed at the knee, her lipsticked mouth was open in song, and she held a microphone in her hand as though she were romancing it. I stared. I hadn’t seen anyone so gorgeous since I’d last laid eyes on Irene Sandman. But there was something more: The woman in the picture projected a kind of power—not masculine exactly, but certainly not at all feminine. I’d never seen anything like it before. I was mesmerized.

 

Lil and Wendell: “Once in a while I ‘dated’ gay men . . . ‘You have to bring a wife or girlfriend to those things.’”

 

“Beverly Shaw, Sir”

 

Nicky (in the 1960s)

 

“Let’s go in,” Wendell nudged at my back, but I couldn’t stop looking at the picture. Was this really a lesbian?

Once inside, I was sure Wendell had made a mistake—this couldn’t be a lesbian bar. There were straight-looking couples sitting in the black upholstered booths and at the sleek white piano bar. There were a lot of women with other women too, but almost all of them wore tailored dresses and high heels and makeup, and to my untutored eye they all appeared to be executives or lawyers or journalists. “Are these people gay?” I whispered in Wendell’s ear.

“I promise you,” he laughed at my open-mouthed bumpkin look. “Maybe a few are straight tourists who like to watch the scene, but trust me, there’s mostly gay girls here.” I felt the way my mother must have at the Café de Paris when she’d sighed, “Take it all in.” I was drunk—with Beverly Shaw, the elegance of the Club Laurel, the beautiful lesbians in beautiful clothes! I could see that Nicky too was having a fine time, her cheeks pink with pleasure, gazing in wonderment.

“I love youuu, for sentimental reee-sons,” Beverly Shaw sang. She sat on top of the piano bar, as in her picture, crooning a caress to the microphone. The songs were the ones my mother and I used to hear on “Your Hit Parade,” and Beverly Shaw now seemed to be looking right at me as her lips formed each entrancing word. Her voice was low and sultry. The rest of the world dropped away as she held me in the palm of her splendid, manicured hand. I felt her to the root of my spine. I studied the tanned skin on her neck and felt my lips there, then at her breast. I would kiss her belly, worshipfully; I would go down farther to feast on all her secret places. I’d never done that to anyone before. To touch her like that, to taste her, to devour her—would that break open for me the secret of her magical force?

I tried to listen to her singing, to pay a little attention to Nicky and Wendell, but my fantasies spun themselves out, beyond my control. After each number Nicky banged her hands together happily, like a kid watching a fabulous high-wire act. My eyes couldn’t keep away from Beverly Shaw’s legs.

“We’ll take a little break now. Don’t go ’way,” Beverly Shaw said to the crowd.

“Never,” I whispered to her myself. “Never.” I’d had a glorious epiphany. This was the kind of woman I wanted for a lover—one who looked commanding, in control of life, nothing like Nicky or me. And more than that, this was the kind of woman I wanted to become.

“That’s Mark!” Wendell broke into my reverie. I looked where he pointed—to a man I’d noticed earlier because he’d seemed as enthralled with Beverly Shaw as I, hanging on to her every note. I’d wondered if he was straight. He had black curly hair and wore a pearl-colored tie and a dark suit that I could tell was expensive, even across the distance of the piano bar. A gentleman—a real one, I’d thought. Now Wendell said he’d met him the summer before, in Mazatlán, at O’Brien’s, a bar where Americans hung out. “And that’s Alfredo, his boyfriend.” I hadn’t noticed earlier the slight boy with a wavy black pompadour and a lugubrious expression. Wendell got up and took me and Nicky with him. Mark turned when Wendell tapped him on the shoulder and rose to his feet. They hugged and laughed about meeting once again in a bar, this one a thousand miles from O’Brien’s. Then Alfredo stood up, and he and Wendell shook hands formally, and Wendell introduced me and Nicky. “My buddies,” he called us.

“Have you ever been to Mazatlán?” Mark turned to me with a bright smile.

“Hey, you two look alike,” Nicky piped up from nowhere.

“Yeah, you could be brother and sister!” Wendell grinned.

Mark peered at me. “I’m not that pretty,” he said.

When Beverly Shaw came back for her next set, I was torn about where to put my eyes. Mark and I really did look alike. It was like staring into a mirror and seeing an older, polished, masculine version of myself. We’d all moved to a booth, and Mark had ordered a bottle of Mumm’s and paid the waitress with a twenty-dollar bill. “Salud, l’chaim, à votre santé,” he said, clicking my glass first. Alfredo didn’t toast with us. When the champagne came, he got up and went to the men’s room, but Mark seemed not to notice that he was gone.

I let Nicky stroke my fingers under the table until Mark offered me a cigarette. I freed my hand to take it from his pack of Kents. Nicky pulled out her lighter, but Mark had already struck a match, and I bent my head toward it awkwardly, feeling Nicky’s pique without looking at her. “Bev really knows how to get a number across, like Marlene Dietrich, don’t you think?” Mark whispered to me between “I Get a Kick out of You” and “Let Me Go, Lover.” “Have you ever seen Dietrich in person? She was at the Palladium last month.”

Alfredo never came back to the table. He was chatting animatedly with two men sitting at the bar. He waved an absent-minded good-bye when we passed with Mark, who said he’d walk us to Wendell’s car. “I’ve got a couple of extra tickets for Rubinstein a week from Thursday,” Mark said as Nicky and I were getting in. “Alfredo works Thursday nights, and I hate to go alone. Why don’t you two come with me?”

“Well . . .” Nicky began and looked at me. I knew she wanted to say no.

“We’d love to,” I said quickly, though I had no idea who Rubinstein was.

 

I was really worried about Nicky now. She was down to seven dollars and looking scared and haggard. “Why don’t you go back to school?” I urged Maury’s solution as we sat at Coffee Dan’s over the coffees I’d bought us.

“With what money?” She shrugged.

“Well, you could get a part-time job to support yourself. Maybe after the first year you could even get a scholarship.” But I knew as I said it that it couldn’t work. In 1957 poor girls like us could seldom traverse the enormous distance to college. Even to dare the expedition you needed an owl to guide you, a tiger to protect you, and a faithful creature whispering, “No matter what, I love you.” If you had all that you might make it, because it could give you power—maybe more than even a chest of gold doubloons could. Without all that, how could even gold doubloons get a girl across the scary terrain?

Nicky had nothing, not the creatures and not the gold. Something else had to be done. “Maybe it’s the way you dress,” I said, trying to sound as gentle as I could. “I mean, the fly-front pants, the man’s shirt . . .”

“Okay,” she said as she shredded her paper napkin into bits. “I’ll do anything. What do you think I should do?” She sounded almost angry.

“Listen, maybe when you go job hunting, if you had a lady’s suit to wear and high heels . . .” Denny knew a tall drag queen, Miss Latisha, who might lend her a skirt and pumps. “Borrow Wendell’s jacket,” I urged Nicky. That was the way Beverly Shaw dressed. I loved the idea.

 

Denny came to get me at the Speech Club meeting. He was sweating and panting, as though he’d run for blocks. “Gotta talk to you,” he whispered. “It’s Nicky!” I followed him into the hall, feeling my throat close in panic. It was something awful, I knew. And it was my fault, because she’d stayed in L.A. for me.

“Tell me!” I shook his shoulder.

“She said to get you . . .” He fought to catch his breath. “She’s being arrested. Right now! Coffee Dan’s.”

We dashed all the way up Highland to the boulevard. When I flagged, Denny grabbed my hand and pulled. “Denny, why? Tell me,” I kept shouting. “Tell me!” But he wouldn’t stop to say what had happened.

Two police cars were parked in front of Coffee Dan’s. Inside, a couple of policemen stood, their guns in holsters, chatting and laughing as though nobody’s life was being changed. “Where’s Nicky?” I cried to Denny. He shrugged and looked scared. The people in the booths and at the counter were craning their necks to stare at the policemen.

Nicky came out from the ladies’ room just then, head bowed, wearing a black skirt, black pumps, Wendell’s gray tweed jacket. A woman in a police matron’s uniform walked behind her. When Nicky lifted her head, I could see that her face was a sickly white.

“God, they’re taking her in,” Denny breathed, but the police matron went to join the policemen, and Nicky saw us and ran to me. “Thank God you’re here! Oh, Lil, it was so awful.” Her eyes looked as though she’d been flogged, and I opened my arms to her in despair.

“You guys, go sit in that booth,” whispered Sandra, the plump waitress who knew us, pointing to a table in the back. Denny held Nicky’s hand to lead her and Nicky held mine, and we walked in a line that way to the booth, with curious and hostile eyes following us.

The ugly story poured out of Nicky in heaves. She’d gone looking for work all dressed up. She went everywhere, but there was nothing. Finally she decided just to sit in Coffee Dan’s and wait for me. “This fat cop comes up out of nowhere. He’s swinging a bat in his hand. Right in front of me he stands and says, ‘Do you have three articles of men’s clothing on you.’ I swear, I didn’t even know what the hell he was talking about. ‘Three articles of men’s clothing,’ he says again. ‘Don’t you know there’s a law against masquerading?’” Denny looked as puzzled as I was. “Don’t you get it?” Nicky cried. “He thought I was a guy dressed like a woman. He says he’s taking me in. ‘I’m a girl,’ I tell him. ‘I’m a girl!’ But he doesn’t believe me. ‘I swear I’m a girl!’ I keep saying, and finally he says, ‘Okay, I’m callin’ a police matron, but if you’re tryin’ to make a fool of me, I’ll see to it they throw away the key.’ That SOB made me stand up against the wall until this broad arrives, and she takes me to the ladies’ room, makes me open my blouse and take down my underpants . . . feels me up everywhere. Oh, Lil!”

“It’s okay, Nicky. You’ll be okay,” Denny said, hugging her to his chest, patting her back as if she were a kid who’d had a bad dream. “Lil loves you, I love you.”

She broke from him and clutched my hand now with both of hers, as though she were going under. Beneath the harsh lighting her skin looked like a dead person’s, and I could see that her hair was matted with sweat. I clutched back and kept saying, “You’re okay, it’s okay now!” though I knew it wasn’t.

In the booth across from us was a man in a powder-blue polo shirt with his family. His wife wore rhinestone-framed glasses, and their three stair-step little blond girls had matching yellow barrettes in their hair. “I’m as innocent as cabbage,” their round faces all proclaimed. They didn’t notice us for a while, but then the woman peered through her glasses at Nicky. She must have recognized her as the one the matron had carted off, because, almost in a reflex action, she threw an arm protectively around the daughters on either side of her, like someone warding off evil or a plague.

“Cunt,” I sniggered impotently toward Denny. “What’s she looking at?”

Nicky was too upset even to notice. I knew she was still back in the ladies’ room with the matron who’d made her undress and touched her where she’d never even let a lover touch her. “I’m so ashamed, Lil, so ashamed,” she kept saying. And I was so ashamed for her, so angry too about the injustices she’d suffered over and over—her mother first of all, then Carl, the department store interviewer, now the police.

But I was also horrified by Nicky. Why did things always go wrong for her? With all her smartness, why did she always fall prey to the beasts of the world who could tear lone females to pieces with no more conscience than a pack of wolves picking over the bones of a lamb? The kinds of cruelty they inflicted on Nicky were different from those they wanted to inflict on me, but both were deadly. What my time with her was teaching me all over again was that I absolutely had to figure out how a female could arrange her life so the beasts couldn’t turn her into carrion.