August 1984

In the barn, Khali and I listened to Malfitano ace the last act of Madama Butterfly—Morte di Butterfly—on the boombox. We both appreciated opera, but it had to be kick-ass, the very best. I mean, it’s always the same plot, where the soprano suffers and dies for shit never caused. I don’t even consider Carmen to be a villain, except in the eyes of man. She was just before her time, like Khalika is. The final scene is killer, of course. They all are. All props to Puccini. Even Merc and Nimmy, perched on his back, seemed impressed. The bought bride disembowels herself right before the sperm donor shows up with his new white wife to claim the kid. Khalika said she was a real toe rag if she stayed with Pinkerton after that.

Khalika insisted that when these guys came to lay a beating on Dick, I should be in the barn, hiding in the hayloft. I’d know because Mercutio would know, would start snorting and pacing, and crazy Nimrod would jump down on his back from the rafters to calm him. I used to wonder who owned who in that relationship.

“No music for a few days,” she warned. “And no lights! It won’t be long now, because we both know Dick is broke, that this dump is mortgaged to the hilt, and he’s borrowed even more from some very unsavory types.”

I told her she better not fuck off on me again, that I couldn’t get through this without her. She reassured me that she would be around until it happened, and I believed her. She seemed to live for this stuff. Her pupils were dilated like she’d taken a hit of something stronger than beer.

“I’m just high on life,” she joked.

“Hey, if the prick is broke, what happens to Mercutio?”

“I said you needed to trust me” was all she would say.

A couple of weeks after Ryker’s warning to Dick, Khalika returned to the Envy to ask about a job. She spoke to the manager, a big, stupid oaf straining the seams of his shiny suit. She opened her coat and showed him the merchandise. She wore a black one-piece made basically of strings—a spider’s web—and thigh-high red boots. He asked if she was legal and she said she was, had already been dancing across the river in Jersey before she realized Manhattan was more lucrative. Lurch said auditions were the first Monday of every month. Khalika put her name on the list on my behalf.

“You’re the dancer, and besides, you’ll need the money,” she said by way of explanation. “I don’t want you mixed up in what I’m doing.” She told me I’d find out soon enough about her reasons for getting me the gig at the Envy.

“Don’t tell me I’m a plant now!”

Khalika just smiled, lit a cigarette. “You’ll just have to trust me on this one too. It’ll be good exercise—mental and physical, if it wasn’t for those feet-mangling shoes.”

Khalika also wanted me to test out the getup she wore to travel on the train, said it was genius. All her hair under a cap, no makeup. Baggy jeans and a work shirt. The first time she wore it, a passing punk looked her up and down and hissed, “Fucking faggot.” She didn’t even flinch, just pulled up her T-shirt and flashed him. That shut him up. Another time, a transvestite in full stage makeup, wearing platforms and trailing parrot plumage, checked her out, trying to decide if she was mid-transition.

Khalika told me she was preparing me for making a living off the radar, like she did, until our inheritance came through. She predicted that Dick would get more and more desperate as the money ran out—got pissed away.

“Stupid, desperate Dicks do stupid, desperate things.”

Khalika suggested we hang out around 47th and Broadway for a while, get a feel for the environment. She’d lied about working in Jersey, but she had used a fake ID to get barmaid jobs in a few clubs there for a while.

“I’m gonna bring you out of the shadows,” Khalika assured me. “You will transition from a shrinking violet to an ultra, break free from your chrysalis.”

I had to agree that I was developing a knack for navigating the deepest, most polluted waters, for choosing another, less open face from the ancient gallery, as Jim Morrison put it, and running with it.

“It’s about time,” she laughed.