Virgin Heat

PRAISE FOR VIRGIN HEAT

"Nearly impossible to put down. Its Key West setting and laugh-out-loud wit recall the best of Carl Hiaasen. Its quirky characters and tough-mindedness are like Elmore Leonard's.... It's art and entertainment at the same time."

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The plot of this slapstick caper…has been built for fun . . .even [Shames’] zaniest characters have a dark core that gives them dimension in this sun-bleached land of forgetting."

—
The New York Times Book Review

"
The Birdcage
meets
The Godfather
... Nutty enough to satisfy Shames's growing number of fans.”

—
The Orlando Sentinel

"Shames once again gives us a wild ride. At once literate and accessible, often hilarious, and always on the mark.”

--Washington Times

"Laurence Shames just keeps getting better. That's saying something, too, because he's always been damned good."

—
Bookpage

Virgin Heat

By

Laurence Shames

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 1997 Laurence Shames

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Originally published by Hyperion, 1997

Please visit
http://www.LaurenceShames.com

Once again, to Marilyn
".… you're an O'Neill drama,
you're Whistler's mama,
you're Camembert. . ."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the fifth novel I have set in Key West, and I have never publicly thanked the town for being so humid and so strange, such a congenial place to write about. So, thanks to the fronds for rustling; to the compounds for being clothing-optional; to the bars for being serious; to the people for taking pride in their astute peculiarity; and to the island itself, for being a place where things can happen.

If geography has always been an active— no, a crucial—conspirator in the work, then so have my editor, Brian DeFiore, and my agent, Stuart Krichevsky. Thanks, gents, for keeping me productive and for all the good ideas whose provenance I have conveniently allowed to blur.

1

Paranoia doesn't sleep; a guilty conscience looks over its shoulder forever.

Ziggy Maxx, nearly a decade after he took that name and the new face that went with it, still hated to be photographed, still flinched like a native whenever a camera lens was aimed at him.

Cameras were aimed at him often. A bartender in Key West, he was a prop in a million vacations, an extra in the memories of hordes of strangers. He was scenery, like the scabbed mahogany tree that dominated the courtyard at Raul's, like the purple bougainvillea that rained down from its trellis above the horseshoe bar. The bougainvillea; the beveled glass and polished teak; the burly barkeep in his mostly open shirt with faded palm trees on it—it made a nice picture, a travel poster, almost.

So people shot Ziggy with Nikons, Minoltas, with cardboard disposables that cost ten bucks at any drugstore. They'd raise the camera, futz with it a couple seconds, then they'd harden down and squint, exactly like a guy about to squeeze a trigger. If the barkeep wasn't quick enough to dodge and blink, to wheel discreetly like an indicted businessman, the flash would make green ovals dance before his throbbing eyes.

Every time he was captured on film he felt the same archaic panic; every time, he had to soothe himself, to murmur silently, Hey, it didn't matter, no one would recognize the straightened nose with the dewdrop septum, the chin plumped and stitched out of its former cleft, the scalp clipped and sewn so that the hairline, once a prowlike widow's peak, was now a smooth curve, nondescript. Hell, even nine years after surgery, there were hungover mornings when he himself didn't recognize that fabricated face, thought his bathroom mirror had become a window with a dissipated stranger leering through it, begging for an aspirin.

Still, he hated having his picture taken. The worry of it, on top of the aggravation from his other job, sometimes gave him rashes on his elbows and behind his knees.

The guys with videocams, they were the worst.

Like this guy right here, thought Ziggy, glancing briefly at one of his customers. Typical tourist jerk, fifty-something, with a mango daiquiri in front of him and a Panasonic beside him on the bar. Shiny lime-green shirt. The round red cheeks of a clown, and a sunburned head peeling already under thin hair raked in oily strings across the hairless top. Next to him, his wife—pretty once, with too much makeup, too much perfume, sucking on a frozen margarita, her lips clamped around the straw as though claiming under oath that nothing of larger diameter had ever penetrated there. Tourists. It was early April, the ass-end of the season, and Ziggy Maxx was sick to death of tourists. Sick of being asked where Hemingway really drank. Sick of preparing complex, disgusting cocktails with imbecilic names—Sputnik, Woo Woo, Sex on the Beach. Sick of lighting cigarettes for kindergarten teachers from Ohio, Canadian beauticians; nice women, probably, but temporarily deformed and made ridiculous by an awkward urge to misbehave.

A regular gestured, and Ziggy reached up to the rack above his head, grabbed a couple beer mugs, drew a couple drafts. His furry back was damp inside his shirt; Key West was just then poised between the wholesome warmth of winter and the overripe, quietly deranging heat of summer. By the thermometer, the change was subtle; still, it was all-transforming. Daytime temperatures went up only a few degrees, but they stayed there even after sunset and straight on through the night. The breeze diminished, the air sat there and congealed, grew freighted like a soggy sheet with remembered excess. Sober winter plants died back, were overwhelmed by the exorbitant rude growths of the tropics—butter-yellow flowers as big and brazen as trombones, the traveler palm whose leaves were taller than a man, weird cactuses that dreamed white blossoms in the middle of the night.

When the wet heat of summer started kicking in, Key West seemed to drift farther out from the familiar mainland, became ever more an island. Ziggy Maxx had lived here six years now, and he'd noticed the same thing every year: less happened in the summer, but what happened was more strange.

Another tourist caught his eye. Ziggy's glance slid off the face like it was a label in the no-frills aisle, fixed instead on the jerky slogan on the tourist's T-shirt: WILL WORK FOR SEX.

The tourist said, "Lemme get a Virgin Heat."

Ziggy stifled a grimace. Of all the idiot drinks he hated to make, Virgin Heats were among the ones he hated most. Fussy, sticky, labor-intensive. Substitutes for conversation, they drew people's attention away from each other and toward the bottles and the bartender. The building of a cocktail like a Virgin Heat sent people groping for their cameras.

And sure enough, as Ziggy was setting up the pony glass and reaching for the Sambuca, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the man with the sunburned head was readying his videocam. Ziggy flinched, turned a few degrees. He poured the thick liqueur, then felt more than saw that the camera was sliding off his manufactured face to focus on his busy hands. An artsy shot, the barkeep thought, with something like relief. Another jerk who'd seen too many movies.

Ziggy made the drink He made it with riffs and flourishes it never dawned on him were his alone.

Although he wore a short-sleeved shirt, he began by flicking his wrists as if shooting back a pair of cuffs. When he inverted the teaspoon to float the Chartreuse on the 'Buca, he extended a pinky in a gesture that was incongruously dainty, given the furry knuckle and the broad and close-cropped fingernail. Grasping the bottle in his right hand, he let his index finger float free; mangled long ago from an ill-thrown punch, that bent and puffy digit refused to parallel the others. He didn't bring the bottle directly to the glass, he banked and looped it in, like a plane approaching an airport. Slowly, with the pomp of mastery, he poured a layer of purple cassis over yellow Chartreuse, green créme de menthe over purple cassis. He topped the gross rainbow with a membrane of grenadine, then delicately laid in a cherry that sank with a portentous slowness, carrying with it a streaky red lascivious rain.

He slid the drink across the bar to the tourist who had ordered it. "Five dollars, please," he said.

He took cash, glanced around. The videocam had been switched off, for the moment everyone was happy.

A light breeze shook the bougainvillea on its trellis, the papery flowers rattled dryly. A woman, a nice woman probably, from Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, fumbled in a big purse for a cigarette. She didn't have a match, she looked at Ziggy. Damp inside his faded shirt at the beginning of that season when things got only damper and only stranger, he snapped his lighter and cupped his hands and lit her up. She smiled, then blew twin streams of exhaust through her nose. If she was out to misbehave, and if she could stay awake till closing time, and if she didn't get a better offer in the meanwhile, maybe she would misbehave with him.

A week later, in the chill and sniffly north, a tardy spring was still struggling for a toehold.

Confused crocuses poked up through drab gray grass spiky with winter; forsythia strutted its early blooms against a bleak, gnarled backdrop of naked branches, hopeless twigs. In Pelham Manor, a sliver of lower Westchester that had learned its table manners in the Bronx, on an oak-lined street called Hillside Drive, the lawns were squishy with unseen thaw, yet patches of crusty snow still lingered under boulders; the early evening streetlamps made them blue.