Uncle Janice (16 page)

This little booth fly? With her tights tattered to shit? She came buzzing up to him to ask, “Yo, you got ‘Dam Dadi Doo’?”

“Hmm,” he said, surprised.

One of them anime girls, then. Probably went to Comic-Cons wearing the plaid schoolgirl skirts with her hair twisted into fuck-me braids. Sure, he had “Dam Dadi Doo,” had it right here, matter a fact, bought it like—what? Like two weeks ago, from Breakdown in Bayside. He planned to quick mix it in later, during primetime, with some of his other party-rocking tracks, but yeah, okay, if she couldn’t wait—and the way she leaned over his table, hands held behind her back, she didn’t seem the type who liked to wait for anything—he’d play it for her now, no problem, milk it for her, too. But first? To show her a little turntablism? He adjusted one of the muffs on his headphones, dropped the record, cut it twice with the cross-fader, dropped it again and gave it a
reverse teardrop before dropping it for real this time, how do you like that?
When the morning come come, I’m dancing like you’re dumb dumb
. She closed her eyes to move with it a little, just her hips and shoulders going.

“Me and my girlfriend?” she said with her eyes still closed and her voice real quiet like she didn’t care if he heard her. “We lost our virginity to this song.”

He pulled off his headphones.

When she opened her eyes again, she looked so happy, but a little out of it, too, a little heavy-lidded, like maybe she was drunk or tripping balls. “Your nose is running,” she told him.

Of course it was. He wiped it real quick with the back of his hand, then tried to distract her by baby-scratching “Dam Dadi Doo” over the beat on table one’s record, which was, of all things, a remix of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go.” Of course it was.
Please don’t go
, he accidentally asked her without asking her, and she leaned even farther over his table.

“How much more of that coke you got on you?” she asked. “I’m not trying to score anything off you for free. Don’t worry, I got money. But me and my girlfriend?” She tilted her head toward the dance floor beneath them, where he was making all those young bodies move. “We’ll save half for you when you get a break.”

“I don’t get a break,” he said. “I’m stuck up here until closing.”

“But you got that coke on you?”

“A little.”

“Well, that’s perfect because I got a little money,” she said. “You should probably take my number, too. When’s closing at? Like five? I can’t promise me and my girl will still have a whole half for you left, but I guarantee we’ll both be up.”

Two buys down, two more to go.

Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Breath mints. Dental floss. Mouthwash strips. Paper towels, a big stack of them, ready for Rose to disperse one at a time. Knockoff perfumes from the former love of her life, that dirty-dicked motherfucker Ricky Sprinkle. Lotion. Band-Aids. Hairpins and safety pins. A needle and thread, although Rose had never seen anyone reach for them. Condoms ribbed for her ladies’ pleasure. Kleenex, aspirin, Tums, and Pepto-Bismol. A comb and two brushes. A lint roller. Some static-cling spray. Some antiwrinkle spray, which she twice had to explain was for fabric not faces. Midol. Tampons. Maxi pads. Shout Wipe & Go Instant Stain Remover. Windex for the windows when the nastier of these nasty-ass bitches popped their pimples onto the glass. Jasmine-lily hand soap to pump into the palms of women who too frequently avoided eye contact. A wicker basket loaded with one- and five-dollar bills, most of it money brought from home to remind these misers that tipping was always appreciated, that none of these goodies were free—except for the perfumes, which technically counted as gifts but had cost her all sorts of emotionally crippling capital—and it wasn’t any fun to sit in a ladies’ room all night on an ass-deadening stool and smell other people’s shit, piss, farts, and vomit.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” a young lady said. She was half black and half Hindu, probably from one of those Caribbean islands near Jamaica. Her skirt was high enough for the wind to whistle through her you-know-what, but she’d spoken to Rose with more politeness than anyone in months. Ma’am? Please, Rose was just happy to have someone look into her face. “Can I ask you a question?” the girl asked.

“Anything you want.”

“I’m not looking to buy one, but how much do you charge for tampons? I’m just curious.”

“Everything here is pay-what-you-will, like the Natural History Museum, but if you’re in trouble just take one and don’t worry about it. You want some Midol? How bad is it? You want some OxyContin?”

She laughed. “You got Oxy?”

“Honey, if you can think it, I got it.”

Behind them a toilet flushed. A chubby redhead, with eyes spread too wide apart on her face, stepped out of the middle stall. Head down, she hurried over to the sink, not to wash her hands like a civilized human being, but to drink water straight from the tap. Rose tried to give her a paper towel, but the girl walked away without taking it. Now that her cotton mouth was a little less cottony, nothing else mattered. Once the door swung shut behind her, the other girl, the nice Hindu girl, handed Rose a twenty.

“The Oxy,” the girl said. “Is that pay-what-you-will, too?”

“It’s more of a suggested donation.” She gave the girl two fives from the tip basket and a small white pill from her purse. “That should do you for now, honey. It’s a little-bitty dose, just the ten millis, but you come right back if you think you’re gonna need anything else.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the girl said, her manners exquisite, her mama having done at least a little something right. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“Well, I don’t know about all that.” Rose shrugged. “But I do aim to please.”

With more buys on the night than she could use, Janice left the bathroom and went looking for Tevis. It was a quick search. She found him right there in the corridor between the ladies’ room and the gents’. He stood on a line six dudes deep, whereas the women’s had no wait at all, a disparity Janice had only ever seen at Mets games. Under the club’s silly black lights, his cocoa butter glowed like impetigo. She wondered if he knew, if that’s why he was waiting on line, to wash his face, but probably not. Probably, a conscientious ghost, he’d only been waiting for her. She slipped the DJ’s coke into his palm. It filled half of a miniature manila
envelope, the kind used in Clue to conceal murderers, weapons, and crime scenes.

“What’s this?” he said.

“The one I owe you!”

“What?”

“The one I owe you!” Close to a cluster of speakers, they took turns shouting into each other’s ears, certain none of the other guys waiting for the bathroom could hear them. “For missing your positive last week,” she said. “Now we’re even!”

He untied the golden string on the manila envelope and peered inside. “Are you crazy?” he said. “I can’t take this!”

He meant—she assumed—that as the ghost he wasn’t allowed to make buys. But what if he’d only been doing his job? What if he’d gone up into the crow’s nest for its better vantage point, to keep an eye on both uncles at once, and the envelope got forced on him, pushed into his palm, which was with a few minor differences essentially the truth? What if the coke was so cheap he couldn’t give it back without arousing suspicion? Seriously—who did it hurt? Over at the bar on the other side of the club, Gonz was in no position to contradict anything. Nor was Fiorella. And the DJ wasn’t even going to get arrested. So why shouldn’t Tevis score a little boost on the buy board, especially since he unfairly got screwed the last time he went out? As far as Janice was concerned, this was merely the universe leveling itself out,
I Ching
–style. Plus, even better, now she could stop feeling guilty.

“But they know I didn’t come out here with any buy money,” he said.

“Who’s they?” she hollered into his ear. “All this gets buried in paperwork. Just say you used your own money.”

“I would never use my own money.”

“I just used my own money to buy Oxy off the bathroom attendant.”

“A bathroom attendant?”

Fiorella snuck up behind them to bump their heads together. It was, apparently, the most hilarious thing she’d ever done. She couldn’t stop laughing, her grin glittering in the black light as if floating in a photo negative. Because it was impossible to get mad at her, because Janice and
Tevis were both happy to have found another familiar face in this overcrowded nightclub, they rubbed at their foreheads without complaints. The music cross-faded into a novelty song, a remix of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” something Janice actually recognized from long-ago quinceañeras and bat mitzvahs.

“Tevis accidentally made a buy off the DJ,” she told Fiorella.

“No shit?”

“You want it?” he asked her.

“Nah, I copped molly off the bartender like twenty minutes ago. Where you guys been? I’ve already taken three tequila shots on Gonz’s bar tab.”

“He’s buying?” Tevis said.

“Yeah right. He left it open and then got distracted talking to this chick, some poor chubby white girl who wandered into his talons.”

“Redhead?” Janice asked. “Eyes super wide apart on her face?”

“You know her?”

“I saw her.”

“So we’re done, then?” Tevis said. “Back to the rumpus?”

“What’s wrong with your face?” Fiorella asked him.

“What’s wrong with my face?”

Fiorella looked around at all the dudes, nine deep now, outside the bathroom. “Why’s there such a long-ass line for the men’s?”

“I think someone’s getting a blowjob,” Janice told her.

“What’s wrong with my face?” Tevis said again.

“Your lotion,” Fiorella said as she pulled Janice away by her elbow. “Go wash up, then meet us at the bar. I’m thinking Gonz is gonna be buying rounds all night.”

“My lotion?” he said, confused, touching his cheeks, the manila envelope still in his hand. “What’s the matter with my lotion?”

“You’re glowing,” Janice said.

“I’m what?”

“You’re glowing!” she shouted into the music, but Fiorella had already dragged her too far away.

Hours later the uncles staggered out of the club. The bouncers told them to take it easy. The sidewalks, wet with rain, reflected light from brontosaural streetlamps. Gonz insisted on driving back to the rumpus, and because he’d paid his tab without bitching—or more likely without looking at it—they indulged him. He got as far as the first traffic light before a tall and beautiful Latina transvestite lay down on the hood of their car. Five months late, or seven months early, she wore a slutty Halloween costume: a police-girl uniform with blue short-shorts, a plastic billy club, reflective sunglasses, and a neon squirt gun holstered to her hip, everything but the detective badge from the Rite Aid toy aisle. Her dark curly hair spread like algae across the windshield. Gonz honked and cursed, but she just laughed, sprawled out on the hood through an entire traffic-light cycle, from red to green and back to red. Then, as delicately as she’d hopped on, she hopped off and strutted away toward a parked van on the opposite side of the street.
QUEENS #1 CARPET CLEANERS
said the side paneling. Its back doors swung silently open for her.

“What just happened?” Fiorella said.

“I’m gonna tell you something,” Gonz said. “If patrols actually looked like that, I’d
volunteer
to get demoted.”

Janice said, “You know that was a tranny hooker, right?”

“Amazing observation,” he deadpanned. “You know, it’s a shame you won’t last the full eighteen and get to put those incredible detective skills of yours to use.”

If Puffy were there, he would’ve thanked Gonz for the pep talk, but instead Tevis asked him, “No, but seriously, you do know that was a tranny hooker, right?”

When another beautiful transvestite hooker, this one dressed as a slutty nurse, climbed up into the same van, Fiorella said, “What is going
on
?”

Janice thought it might have had a bizarro connection to the big news of the day, that a federal wiretap had caught the New York governor paying for sex. “Ho No!” said the
Post
. “Gov in Romp with Hooker ‘Kristen.’ ” But that didn’t really explain these particular streetwalkers or
their getups, not that Janice even wanted them explained. She felt happier not knowing. She wouldn’t have changed any of this. While Vita and Judith and Barbara and Brother and all the high school friends she didn’t have time for, while all those people were at home, in bed, asleep, Janice was getting paid to be here, in the backseat of an unmarked car, drunk on free booze, awake and somehow simultaneously inside the rubric of dreams. Before another ass could plop itself onto the hood, Gonz sped through the intersection without waiting for the light to turn green. Nobody honked. Except for the party in that carpet-cleaning van, they had the entire road to themselves.

The
Post
’s headline the next day, day two of the Spitzer scandal, read: “Hooked: Sex Addict Gov Spent $80,000 on Call Girls.” The uncles were inspired. Stuck in the rumpus all afternoon without any buys to look forward to, they whittled away their shifts trading stories about the worst things they’d ever done. Fiorella confessed to stealing twenty dollars out of her son’s sock drawer. Tevis said he probably didn’t remember the worst thing he’d ever done, but the last bad thing happened just this weekend when he went to drop off his daughters at the ex-wife’s house. Because he seemed ready to slip into his epic mode, the uncles told him it sounded like a very interesting story but could he please maybe table it for another time. As if troubled by the overly serious tone of the conversation, Puffy said the worst thing he’d ever done was spill wee-wee on Janice’s lap. Gonz refused to play along, so they answered for him: being born. Pablo Rivera, paranoid as always, citing the wolflike ears of Internal Affairs, also refused to participate, but Grimes admitted to burning down his own house. On purpose? On purpose. The uncles didn’t seem to know what to do with that. They turned to Eddie Murphy, who said he had two worst things: wearing a leather beanie in
The Golden Child
and that long wig in
Vampire in Brooklyn
. A total lame-azoid, Janice told them that her sister had once dared her to steal something from a gas station and so she snuck out a can of Sunkist under her sweatshirt, but
afterward she felt so guilty and so eager to get rid of the evidence that she puked halfway through guzzling it, and to this day couldn’t drink orange soda without throwing up.