The question left Lon as confused as before—repelled by her own raw ignorance yet fascinated by the need for answers. She drove the remaining blocks with the self-assured recklessness peculiar to drivers who can take their car apart and put it back together again. She drove harshly, yet floated on with the promised delights of the club named to honor a statistic. And breathed the delicate air of Parma violets.
IT WAS Rags who peered cautiously into the night, opening the drab green door of the lonely cement-block building at the end of the dark, undeveloped street. Lon knew Rags by the sharp black tux, the cerise bow-tie beneath a pallid, acne-scarred face. Rags stood sullen in the doorway, behind her an amateurishly lettered notice: THE 28%—MEMBERS ONLY.
“What the hell’s with the pounding?” Rags was no bigger than Violet, but the tough bass sound was enormous.
“Sweetie, meet this real good friend a mine. Lon Harris.”
Unsmiling, Rags nodded. “Hiya, Lon.”
Lon responded, “Hi!” And apparently being Violet’s “good friend” meant open sesame. Friend and proprietress led Lon into the smoke-blue dimness. Lon blinked at the strangeness of the scene.
Rags hurried ahead, circling behind the long, home-built bar. She had been interrupted apparently, by Violet’s hammering. But now she backed the girl Lon judged to be a barmaid-partner against a chipped and dented bottle cooler. Grimly, she clasped the taller girl in her arms. Kissed her as though it were a life-death matter. Lon watched, something forbidden stirring inside her. “Our kind of kids,” Violet had said. “Our kind of kids!”
Violet led Lon to the far end of the bar. She pounded amiably on the linoleum top. “Hey, quit makin’ out. How’s about some service?”
The girl in Rags’s stranglehold laughed and pushed herself free. “That’s what I’m getting! Break it up, honey. Vi wants a drink.”
She came to their end of the bar, and Lon was introduced to “a real swell kid—Betty.” Betty from out of a black-and-white movie; colorless, pale, like shoots that spring up from under sidewalks.
“We need a couple beers,” Violet told her. “How ‘bout that, Lon?”
“Right,” Lon said. Using a ruggedly deep voice that came instinctively because she knew it would sound right. Betty took two brown bottles from the cooler, popped them open with a church key and set them on the bar.
“Most of the kids are in the other room,” Violet said, swigging. “I’ll go see if I c’n find us a table.”
She wriggled her way toward the opening in the divided wall, stopping to scream, “Hi, doll!” to a girl in fly-front slacks and white T-shirt, Lon’s size. And Violet hugged another girl, a pug-faced peroxide blonde. Violet shrieked, “Swee-tie-eee!” at another group and made her sensuous way to the rope curtains that divided the barroom from the room in which the shadow-forms of kids danced to a recording of Lonely Street. The kids, the kids … Violet glanced over her shoulder once to wink at Lon, to let her know, it seemed, that she knew the kids and the kids knew her and weren’t they all having the craziest time? Like Eddie, thought Lon. Eddie going to Disneyland with the family after having gone before with the Cubs—anxious to point out the sights and let everyone know in a loud voice that he had been there before. Like a queer lavender Elsa Maxwell, Violet greeted the loved and the unloved, the staked and the cruising, disappearing finally into the packed room where the shadow-shapes clung to each other. Now she was singing in unison with the record: “Perhaps upon that Lonely Street, there’s someone such as I …”
Lon sipped beer. Sipped the new bitter taste and marveled at the way dry palm fronds and a raffia backing on the bar had given an exotic air to a cement-block garage. Someone had painted a Hawaiian hula scene on the wall above the bar. Someone had sketched a likeness of Rags on the opposite wall, and had framed it with bamboo. This is the way the clubhouse will look. This is the way we’ll fix up the recreation hall on the Island! She swigged from the bottle again, mellowing with the sense of a long-gone traveler at last arrived home. For the threesome at the other end of the bar were not unlike the traveler she had seen in mirrors, her own self.
They wore tan peggers, nonchalantly unpressed. Two in plaid flannel shirts, one sharper in an open-throated white job with a turquoise sweater vest. Lon envied them the clipped haircuts, the strong scrubbed faces. And ignored the lazy eyes and droop-cornered mouths.
“I still claim you owe me two-bits,” one argued.
“The hell you say.”
“You remember that girl, right here at this bar?”
“Oh, Jesus, yes.”
“You bet me a quarter I couldn’t make her.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, didn’t I?”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I’ve got a witness.” The first of them turned to the silent one. “Did I make her, Chuck?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you.”
They roared at this and then the loser paid her bill. “Here’s your goddam quarter. Just tell me one thing. Was she butch or fem? Christ, I couldn’t tell!”
“Smorgasbord. By the time she went home I wasn’t sure which I was!” Eyebrows wriggled up and down, implying secrets that could not be unveiled. Regular guys, remembering a girl and laughing it up. Regular guys, flicking kitchen matches with their thumbnails for a light, burrowing hands in the front-zipped pants for a crushed cigarette pack and belting each other in the back to punctuate a bellylaugh. Regular guys, and less than twenty years before, unknowing nurses had checked the wrong box on the hospital form that offered only Male and Female. For perhaps the choice was incomplete.
Halfway through the brown bottle, Violet came back. “I got a place at their table. This girl, kid—Jeez, she’s society an’ everything. Boy, would I like to get next to her. She’s here with some crazy dark one. I hate t’ say this, but this girl, wow, is she sharp.” Violet spilled the words breathlessly. “I got a spot at their table. Pray for me, kid.” Leading Lon from the bar toward the curtained room, frenzied with her dim hope of a conquest that escaped Lon. “Make out like I’m your girl. Act real nuts about me.”
They wove their way through the dancers. Pretty girls and crones at sixteen, old hands and neophytes, insatiable and satiated; Lon saw them in the darkened room where dreams were woven, seeing through the untutored, all-sensing eyes of the young, the clip-haired butches who looked as she herself must look, yet knowing the purpose of their maleness, shuffling to the agonized cry—“Where’s this place called Lonely Street?” Big, brawl-sized butches and tiny Napoleons, out to prove to the world: we are not small; we matter, we count! Hands clutching their partners as though someone might doubt their talents to possess, hip grinding hip.
And Lon heard, through the unplugged ears of the young, their spicy, pungent talk, as she tacked her way through the crowd:
“… took ourselves out on the lawn and I mean, almost froze …”
“… told that witch, in the future you keep your hands off my girl. Fun is fun and I’m no prude, but I’ve got my standards, honey …”
“… Okay, okay, we’ll go home. I said we’ll go home. Okay, so you can’t stand to see me have a little fun …”
And the shriek with its aftermath of hilarious commotion; somebody gagging somebody, everyone game for one more laugh.
Lon saw and heard with the inner awareness that transcends callow ignorance, linking phrase and gesture.