Bogeywoman (9 page)

“Okay, you two, lie down together on top and I’ll wrap you.” To my amazement, she nodded. She was wearing a pilly pink orlon V-neck sweater, sumpm only a drapette would wear, and a black bra you could see through the pink, and the V-neck almost down to her pupik. And so it came about that O and me, the Bogeywoman, lay body to body, or more specifically her lovely head stuck out the top and my bulby nose was pressed to the washboard of bone between her momps, so that I almost swooned for real from hyperventilating while Bertie tucked and patted and sculpted us, under that froth of used sheets, into one improbably thick beauty. “How do we look,” I muttered, for an excuse to move my lips. “Don’t talk, it tickles,” O spooky-fluted. But at least she didn’t say don’t breathe. I turned my chin up a little so my breath was mossing her throat. “Calm,” said Bertie, “you look calm,” for O always did, and down we went to the third floor landing with Bertie pushing.

Of course every hair of me waved like a sailor at the nearness of her. She was the
shikseh
oxymoron personified, she was the highest girl and the lowest girl and nothing in between: She was a drapette but also Mary Hartline of
Super Circus
, she had that
public gorgeosity, she could be famous right now, a star, a TV star at least, and at the same time she was that sullen teenage underbitch calling you a jew, goading you in her peroxide hair and trashy clothes, then beating you up for looking at her funny. She reeked of the last cheap perfume tester she had boosted from Read’s, probably My Sin. I felt my heart budge against her and knew she could feel it too—like a mole under a tent floor. But then, was I right? she swiveled the tiniest bit, toward me not away, and my lips were quivering like a rabbit’s in the gulley between her momps, kinda folded into the dunes that swelled out of her bra and actually quivering, I would just need to stick out my tongue—and all would be lost lost lost! She might even knife me. I pulled myself together. I stayed where I was. I was almost happy: I was on mission, but at the same time I was a snouty cub who’d fallen asleep at the teat and woken up again in sweet milky darkness. Then suddenly her hand pressed the back of my head, her nuzzy pressed my lips and I knew she’d let me do whatever I

The elevator doors shuffled open and Bertie sang, “Oink me, it
is
an H. Holy godzilla, look at that motha.”

And I peeked out of our sheets at the thing. It sat on a stainless steel dolly in a row of dowdy linen bins, a Nike among Miss Muffets. It had been many times slicked over with paint but still had a rough, psoriatic crumb to its blue enamel that made me loath to touch it. It was like sumpm left to rust in a marine junkyard because it might explode—and yet it did resemble somebody’s mother: five feet high, all the power in the bosom and shoulders, some sort of undersized glass-faced gauge where the head should be—a meter instead of a dreambox, isn’t that just like a mother? Well what do I know, never having had one since I was two.

“Come on, Ursie. O, you stay put—make like you’re paralyzed or sumpm. Perfect.” Bertie and I stood side by side, looking
down fascinated at O’s big eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling—two Caribbean portholes ringed with stove black, in each of which a blind dab of fluorescent light floated. “I do a good coma, don’t I,” she said, and we both jumped.

Bertie grabbed the H around the waist, tipped but couldn’t lift the thing. I laughed. “Okay, Koderer, you do it,” he grunted. Then panic whited out his face: “Cheese it—the Regicide!” And suddenly the H was rocking like a bowling pin on its heel. Bertie dove into one laundry bin and I took the next one down the line, and pretty soon we heard the swat, swat of Reggie Blanchard’s tennis-racket-sized white rubber-soled hospital loafers on the linoleum.

“Lady O! How ya doing. You be up here scouting again for that doper cat? What did that eight ball ever do for you?”

Comatose. Not a blink. A drapette of the highest principles was O, stand-up to the final hour, a stone stoic even though we both knew that Bertie would have swapped either one of us, or both, to the hoods or the cops in a minute for eight ounces of Saigon gage or anything else really hard to get.

Our Reginald was an artistic-looking tea-colored negro whose beautifully molded lips had ambiguous and unsettling punctuation marks at the corners of them. He wore a little W.E.B. Du Bois goatee as sharp as a tack, and his poison-honey eyes were cruel. I mean it was the way he saw the world. Really he’d rather save you than sell you, but first he checked the price.

“What’s your hustle today, sweetheart? Coma! All dummied up! Ain’t talking to the Reg! Ain’t you the one,” he saxophoned. “Old O, if she can’t say sumpm nice, she don’t say nothing, is that it? I hear you! Been had your messed-up brain taken right out, huh? Well it was nothing but trouble anyway. Tell you this, sweetheart. You the best-looking empty they ever had up here, you know that? And as I know you are a schooled young
lady, down with all games, and I desire a word with you, Ima give that coma my special cure—scope the gangway first, make sure nobody ain’t coming—okay now Ima turn that coma over to Doctor Blanchard for his patented guaranteed coma process—”

Things went quiet, too quiet, and, since my laundry bin had no peephole, I had to periscope up through the twisted towels and damp pajamas to see what was going on—and got my head up just in time to see the dirty dog lying on top of her.

With my record I bet you think I jumped right in there on top of them, punching and kicking. Well, I was a Bug Motel now, and not only a Bug Motel, a Bug Motel
on mission
. I stayed put. Over Reggie’s shoulder, O narrowed her eyes at me warningly, and I obeyed. O half growled, half giggled, and finally she clawed Reggie’s back with her black raspberry fingernails. “Hey, Lady O, there you is. This coma is defunct, you cured, I Dr. Reggie done cured your bug-eyed self, or was you shucking the whole time? You? Not you! But anyhow you back with the living. I missed you, baby. Now sit up. Gimme some sugar.”

O sat up with a sigh and swung her legs side-saddle off the gurney so her gold lamé ballet slippers dangled. She patted her big hair, curled back her bony shoulders, planted hands on hips, pointed her nuzzies professionally and said: “Hey Reg. What’s uptown?”

“Welcome back, baby. Nothing much. Same old three-six-nine. Say, what yall crazies looking for down here on three? Wyncha let me take cay it for yall? I wear a white suit but I ain’t the heat. I knew you from the world, don’t forget that, sweetheart. What was you prospecting for?”

The Blue Bomb stood fifteen feet from them, but Reg had no interest in dentist D.O.A.P.

“You,” she said. “Unh-huh. Huckly buck,” Reg said, pleased
just the same. “Let’s you and me go somewhere. Outasight,” O spooky-fluted in his ear, and her scuffed-up gold lamé ballet slippers plinked onto the linoleum. He forgot about our mission. “Hey, baby, I hear you,” and next their assorted big and little soft shoes slapped away together down the corridor. I surfaced among the towels in time to see Reginald poke his keys into some door marked
NO ADMITTANCE
halfway down the hall. And the two of them disappeared behind it.

I wished on Reggie Blanchard all the violent deaths of Pennsylvania Avenue whence he had come. Like I said, he’d sooner save you than sell you, though he looked at the price tag first. But here he was, a royal, well anyway a royal flunky, oinking a mental peon—for an old-time street hustler like himself he had no mercy. He didn’t think O could be harmed by doing it in a mop closet. And neither did O. I smelled sumpm rotten in the whole deal, but after all, we were in the bughouse. To be mentally hygienic or even nosily parental was just not done among the mental patients, and especially not among the Bug Motels. Besides, oinking on her feet, for small change or even in swap for that good old dreamboxoline, in barroom toilets and phone booths and back entrances, was O’s official problem:
she had to stop thinking of men that way
. We Bug Motels had a hands-off nose-out policy towards all official problems, and as for what we really thought—we didn’t think it.

It did flash on me that O was about to peddle herself in a broom closet
for us
, the Bug Motels on mission: that is, just to clear the coast for a giant tank of laughing gas—and I resolved then and there not to sniff one sniff or laugh one laugh of the stuff, at least not until O forgave me for letting her. Then again I never believed for a minute that O might not forgive me for letting her. And another thing: none of us, not even Bertie, put that
old dreamboxoline—by which I mean assorted dreambox oils, drops, gasses and powders—higher on the list of daily necessaries than O did, although she herself might go easy on the purple dots or the mushrooms—never on the bottle, however. Already I could picture her holding that red clown’s nose of an N
₂
O mask, with its nostrils-of-pig outvalve, to one of our faces after another, while she swigged from her own little half-pint of peppermint schnapps. The feast of sumpm for everybody, that was what O liked when she was Mary Hartline, that and the clear swill she was swilling, vodka or schnapps, screech or moonshine, whatever one of her boyfriends had organized for her that day. Now she was Mary Hartline on
Super Circus
holding out those goldfish bowls full of coins to our fat fists, only the pennies nickels and quarters had turned into laughing gas, and never mind where she got it (really
she had to stop thinking of men that way
).

Well, anyhow, from here on, with O and the Regicide taken up elsewhere, it was easy. Though the thing must have weighed two hundred pounds, all I had to do was tip that great mother H up against the gurney while Bertie held the cart rollers in place, and hoist her with one big hoist, and tuck her in, and climb back into bed with her. In the dark, under the covers, she was buxom and stately and cold. She had no nipples to her iron bosom, she was wearing a funny hat, and I had a feeling that just when I needed a girl more than I needed life itself, I had traded in my lovely O for a bust of Queen Victoria.

The stuff made cute white clouds float up out of the black, the black of Bertie’s private closet and the black at the back of my
head, where brain cells must be popping like popcorn. “Why is this fun?” I wondered out loud. “I mean I could be eating popcorn instead of hallucinating it.”

“You’re a grownup now, Ursula,” explained Bertie, who was always magnanimous when the dope was enough for a banquet. “Grownups need visions of beauty, little kids just wanna eat.”
O yeah? I have every low intention of eating beauty
, I thought but didn’t say—lemme die first. My blood sprouted pillows and now I lay back on them. What was the use of talking?

“Maybe it iddn’t so fun,” said Emily Nix Peabody. Refusal, you will recall, was her middle name. Each time the gas nozzle came to her she would merely graze her olfactory bulb, which was the size of a cocktail onion, across the clown’s nose and pass it on to the next mental patient. And truth was by now she looked a little better than the rest of us. She weighed fifty-three pounds this week and was yellow as candle wax, but we were gray, except O, who was blue.

It’s a funny thing how people pour that dreamboxoline onto their broken hearts, squirt it in the black veins of their crooked elbows, douche their gratings with it, breathe it, lap it up, suck it up, meanwhile staring slit-eyed at the heartbreaker as though that dirty rotten so-and-so was working the plunger. And this was when I found that out. That’s how O was looking at me now. She wasn’t forgiving me for letting her, as easily as I thought.

Ten minutes ago Bertie and me had rocked and dragged the H bomb into Bertie’s private closet and shut ourselves in after it. A second later Dion slid in, fanning a hand like his fingernail polish was wet, and just as the three of us were getting good and uncomfy on top of Bertie’s smelly socks, Keds and doo-wop 45’s, O appeared.

Right away I could see sumpm was wrong. She looked
normal, except that her knee-knocking shiny black sheath skirt had a wet spot on the back and the zipper was a couple degrees off course. She hadn’t stayed five whole minutes with the Regicide, but she had stopped somewhere to paint fresh rings around her eyes and white lipstick on her mouth. She looked calm, she specialized in that. But there was sumpm funny about her eyes besides their being a little crossed, so that you wondered if they weren’t a hair closer together than they ought to be. They looked sore, scheming and goofy all at the same time, like Ol’ Witch Hazel’s niece Little Itch in
Little Lulu
.

“Could I talk personal to you?” O said, squinting into my face. “You mean
me
?” I said. I had dreamed she would come to me and say that, but this had the feel of a grenade under her clothes and I scrunched back in the corner against a tennis racket. Suddenly I remembered O was in the bughouse like all the rest of us. And there was some story, sumpm scary, sumpm with love and a knife.

“Aaaay, you made it, ace bad job, Sidekickette,” said Bertie. She just stood there, looking up at him from the bottoms of her black-ringed eyes. “Don’t call me Sidekickette,” she said, and Bertie scratched his chin, thinking. “Hey Dion, who was that bleach-blond sidekickette on the tube who walked on knives? Busting through that paper ring with her flaming batons? Bowls of nickels pennies and quarters, right? She was a ringer for O, maybe she was O, did you maybe used to walk on knives, O, besides throwing em?” “Mary Hartline,
Super Circus
,” I muttered. “Hey yeah—Mary Hartline. So have a huff, Mary Hartline. We haven’t done any yet. We were, er, like, waiting for you.” “You were?” “Sure.” Just then Emily leaned around the door jamb, looking like a cross between a virgin picked for sacrifice and a unicorn, her long white hospital gown dragging
on the floor and a big dab of purple merthiolate on her forehead, with the lump of unicorn horn beginning to stick out of it. “Aaaay—boss good deed, Sidekickette. Mission accomplished. We were waiting for you. How’s the dreambox?” “Don’t call her Sidekickette,” O spooky-fluted, but then they both sat down. “You start, Mary Hartline.”