I hauled my chair over to the window, eased myself into it, opened the book open on my lap and rested my feet on the windowsill. Every so often I would look up from the book and out of the window in the hope that Cinderella Sims would treat me to a glimpse of her beautiful body.
A few minutes before twelve I was taking my apron from the hook in back and telling Grace to take off whenever she felt like it. I let Carl know that a mushroom omelet wouldn’t be bad, picked up a dishcloth and wiped a few places on the counter that Grace hadn’t bothered with. She always seemed to leave some recent dirt around for me to amuse myself with. It was something to do.
The night started slow and promptly died. It was a Wednesday, which is never the most exciting night in the week and was setting out to prove the validity of that statement this particular evening. When I took over from Grace there were two Puerto Rican fellows gulping coffee at the counter and one shopworn old maid polishing off the special one buck minute steak. The old maid took off a few minutes after I came on and the Puerto Ricans had another cup of joe apiece before they vanished. They both left tips, which is rare when all you order is coffee. The old maid more than made up for them by taking up a table, spending a buck and not leaving anything: Such is life.
I ate my mushroom omelet. Carl makes damn good mushroom omelets if you care for mushroom omelets, which I happen to. The joint was happily empty while I ate, permitting me to contemplate why an old maid would be eating a minute steak at such a late hour anyway. Maybe she was just getting up. Hell, she didn’t have anything to stay in bed for.
With this observation, a whole new vista opened to me. The Lindsay method of behavior analysis. To hell with Freud, to hell with Jung and Adler. To hell, for that matter, with Strom.
The Lindsay Method of Behavior Analysis (I was writing it in capital letters now) provided the perfect key to understanding the inner emotions that ruled the lives of ordinary people. Like this:
A person acts funny if he isn’t getting plenty.
There were corollaries. The funnier a person acted, the less he was getting. If a person acted normal, he either was getting enough or he didn’t know what he was missing.
It was ingenious. It was the most fundamental observation since Murphy’s Law. It was perfection.
And I was pleased with myself.
I also needed it even more than the old maid. According to the Lindsay method, she didn’t know what she was missing. Hell, I knew what I was missing. I was missing Mona, but there was no sense crying over spilled flesh. I was also missing Cinderella Sims, and in addition I was missing all the other succulent female flesh that walked the sensual sinful streets of the sensual sinful city of New York.
Which was annoying.
Two young hoods wandered in. You know the type — they look as though they just stepped out of a 42nd Street B movie, with black leather jackets and ducktail haircuts and stomping boots. The movies probably give them their inspiration, I don’t know.
They took seats at the counter and I got uneasy. It always makes me uneasy when juvies come into the place and I’m all alone out there.
So what happened? So they each ordered black coffee; smoked three cigarettes apiece, left half their coffee, put half a buck on the counter for the two cups and told me to keep the change. I don’t know — you can take your sweet little old ladies and shove them. Give me the no-good bastards any day of the week.
But this still didn’t do much for my sex life.
So I went over to the side to jaw a little with Carl. This wasn’t designed to do anything for my sex life either, as Carl and I could hardly have been less interested in each other in that respect. Come to think of it, I don’t think sex in any form made a hell of a difference to Carl. All he cared about was cooking and drinking, and not in that order.
He was a bow-legged old goof, half English and half Irish, and years ago he’d shipped all over the world as cook on a variety of leaky freighters. He was one of those guys who always had a three-day growth of beard on his face. I don’t know whether it was because his beard didn’t grow any longer or because he never changed the blade in his razor. Maybe nobody ever told him you needed a blade in your razor. Whatever it was, beautiful he was not.
But he could cook like a stove. He kept a quart of white port in the kitchen cupboard and swigged it quite openly but Grace worked like a dog to pretend not to notice it. She had this self-imposed rule against keeping an alcoholic on the payroll, and if there was ever an alcoholic, Carl was it. If she let herself admit this little fact she would have been honor-bound to chuck him out on his ear, which would have knocked her business into Kings County. So she ignored the bottle and Carl cooked a blue streak and everybody was happy, especially the customers.
“Carl,” I said, “I need a woman.”
“Everybody does.”
“I mean it,” I said. “I need a woman.”
“In this neighborhood,” he said thoughtfully, “even the women need a woman now and then. You seen the fleet of dykes we been getting lately?”
“Many of them?”
He shook his head as if every incidence of lesbianism was depriving him of a potential conquest. “A pair of ’em came in ere this afternoon, one of ’em you couldn’t of told from a man. Without you turn her upside-down and have a good look, that is.”
I forgot to mention another of Carl’s virtues. He worked sixteen hours a day. This can make a hard-headed businesswoman like Grace overlook one hell of a lot of white port. And why not? Like in the song, a good man is hard to find. Especially at the wages she was handing out.
“These dykes,” he was saying. “I got a look at ’em through the serving slot, you know. You took a close look, you could tell the one was a broad underneath it all. Probably even had a pair of boobs on her, although I’ll lay odds she was embarrassed that she did. But the other one. A doll. A doll.”
“Yeah?” My conversation was a little less than brilliant.
“A redhead,” he said. “Not a freckle-face redhead. A peaches-and-cream redhead. Built for action. And I would stand there, you know, and I would think about this dirtpicking dyke and the things she’d be doing to this peaches-and-cream redhead, those hammy hands on the chick and her mouth and everything, and the peaches-and-cream redhead squirming around and loving it and all, and let me tell you, it made me sick to my stomach.”
“The redhead was really something, huh?”
He shook his head, his eyes as sad as a Charlie Chaplin movie. “Built,” he said. “Built for action. I got a look at her going out when she stood up. Boobs on her out to here. A behind with a motion like a pogo stick. I thought about her and that dyke, you know, and I got an idea what the two of ’em would be doing. It made me sick.”
Him it made sick. Me it made more frustrated than ever. I needed that talk with Carl like I needed a broken collarbone.
“They ordered eggs,” he said. “Fried and over, you know. Let me tell you, I burned those eggs. I burned ’em crisp as leather. Maybe crisper.”
The redhead who came in a few minutes of four was not the peaches-and-cream variety. She was the freckle-faced variety, and if she was a lesbian I was the faggot’s Prince of Wales.
No woman ever oozed heterosexual sex the way this one did. No woman since Cleopatra. Possibly no woman since Sheba. Possibly no woman since Eve.
She wasn’t pretty. Her nose was too big and her forearms were too fat and her eyes were bloodshot. But her breasts were pair of warm pineapples and her lips were the color of spilled blood and the look in her eyes said something that rhymes with pluck-me.