We used to see them in the District when all the small-time dealers were working psychedelics on the Avenue. You would be sitting in the Hasty Tasty having a late-night coffee and you would see them glide by the windows like a ballet of luminous spectra. And sometimes their appearance would upset people.
One night a young, long-haired guy in a leather coat stood up and challenged them. They had just come in, and this guy said, “Why do you do that?” He had been sitting down, relaxed, before they came in.
“Do what?” the white-faced guy nearest him said.
“Put that crap on your faces?”
“What crap? What’s wrong with my face?”
“The white stuff,” the longhair said.
“White stuff? What white stuff?”
“Ah, shit,” the longhair said. He sat down and stumbled.
They laughed.
“You’re all ridiculous,” the longhair said.
“No,” a girl seated at a table in the corner said, “you’ve all been to a party, right?”
“No,” said the Botticelli-looking girl of the two white-faced girls, “we’re out exploring, you see.” Her smile was genuine under the dusty white of her face, and I thought, Ah, Christ, look at her. She was right out of Children of Paradise, 1900 Paris, her beauty as precise and ethereal as that of the film, but one going even further back than that, past classical film, classical painting, past all education.
“Ah, you’re all fucked up is what you are,” the longhair said. He was standing up again.
All four of the white-faced people laughed and turned away, looking for a table of their own. The long-haired guy sat down again.
That was not an unusual response. They nearly always caused some kind of response, and you never knew what direction it would take.
The last time I saw them was several months later. It was the Hasty Tasty again. They came in and went into the back. I took my coffee to a table by theirs. The Botticelli-faced girl was telling the other white-faced girl a simple thing about eye contact. She was looking back and forth at me, her green eyes constantly checking when I looked back into them.
“One of the first things private detectives learn when they are assigned to tail someone,” she said, “is to never establish eye contact, eye contact unsettles the soul, you make eye contact with a man on the street and he thinks you desire him, or,” she said, “if you’re a male, and make eye contact with an older woman she’ll feel flattered, think rape, and hurry away clutching her purse tightly against herself. Can you see me as an older woman clutching my purse to me?”
She was looking at me as she said this, and she stood up and pantomimed scurrying out the door.
It was a few seconds before I, along with everyone else, realized what had happened.
She was gone.
Then the other three got up, and went out after her, all of them looking very happy.