Skinny’s been a wonderful wife to me. Really. Of course she hasn’t been able to get along with Mother, especially when Mother didn’t pass on as we expected. Certainly you can’t blame Mother for that, I was happier than anybody two months ago when Mother hit eighty, but I do blame Mother for calling Skinny a communist. Unquestionably I shouldn’t have hit Mother, that was a contemptible and a big mistake that I’ll be paying for until I die, even if it was nothing more than an accidental flick and anyway Skinny always gets everybody around her terribly worked up. There was absolutely nothing to Mother’s suspicions. Skinny’s father had all sorts of upside down social ideas in the old days… as who didn’t, they tell me… but now the only subversive literature you’ll find in his place of business is on Russian wolfhounds. Supplying dogs and cats and birds to stabilize the American home is just about the most patriotic job a man can do, in a way, wouldn’t you say? Skinny’s own interest in Russia is strictly limited to music, ballet, and Orthodox Church decor. A balalaika hanging on the wall against jewel-crusted brocade, that about sums up the Soviets for Skinny, though it’s true she once had the ice in the punchbowl frozen in a big red star at one of the parties Mother came to, I don’t know why. Certainly the detective Mother hired to investigate Skinny never turned up anything except the lunch dates she was having with a mocky screenwriter, or so he claimed to be… but that’s another story. And in a way the trouble with Mother hasn’t turned out so badly. She and Skinny stay away from each other, which is a relief, and although I can’t expect any lump-sum money when Mother dies I’ll get something in trust… she’ll probably live to one hundred anyway… and meanwhile she puts up a little cash from time to time for me to study my new job of selling securities in preparation for getting a license to sell them. Buy you another beer?
I’ve been slow getting my license, I have to admit. There are all sorts of tests you have to pass and I don’t have Skinny’s kind of ambition though tries hard enough to give it to me. Maybe I should go back to an office job. Skinny herself is almost coming around to think there are advantages, even if no future, in a biweekly paycheck. I don’t know.
Skinny’s still terrifically ambitious, though. As always, not barring childhood. She ran off and got a job dancing with a carnival when she was fourteen. She looked older then, just as she looks younger now. The girls had to turn cartwheels in one number. Skinny swore she could though she knew she couldn’t. That night she went out to the park and practiced. When dawn came she could turn cartwheels. That’s how I sometimes think of Skinny… a little girl all alone in the park turning cartwheels at 3 A.M.
The carnival had its points, Skinny said. They had a pit of rattlesnakes in the sideshow and she got a kick out of looking down into it.
Her father wasn’t much help to her… that was before the pet shop and he was saving humanity and shifting around in these free-love situations. Skinny wanted to dance in ballet… she knew it was tops, her father did give her that scrap of information… but those were depression times and the big ballet troupes weren’t going strong yet. Skinny got a job dancing in the Palace lone. She held it for five years.
I imagine you’ve been to enough burlesque shows, friend, probably more than I have, but it was little Skinny who told me how hard those line-girls worked. Fours shows a day seven days a week and five on Saturdays. A day off when and if. Rehearsal every weekday morning, early on Fridays to fit costumes for the new show. Playing one show, rehearsing another, and learning routines for the third. Monotony for the headlined strippers, boredom for the stand-around showgirls, but those little line-dancers got their tails worked off. Because Skinny was the most active and ambitions, they put her on the end of the line where she had to dance twice as far… when the line danced off sideways into the wings she was the last to leave the stage. By the time they exited high-kicking into the other wing, the line was reversed and she was still at the on-stage end… they somehow arranged it that way, Skinny told me, though at one point she’d have to sprint from one end of the line to the other to make it come out right.
I can’t speak for the showgirls, friend, but I can assure you that the girls of the burlesque line were virtuous… those routines left them with no energy for anything else. Skinny told me she’d wake up nights counting five-six and she said that when the Midnight Shambles came along on Saturday it was just that.
Skinny rose to being a specialty dancer a few times at the Palace. Her high point was a poison dance as Lucretia Borgia… she carried a bottle of green dye and dripped it in the goblets of ten showgirls. But then stage burlesque faded and Skinny got started on club dates. She auditioned for ballet a few times, but it’s my honest opinion Skinny simply had more than ballet knew what to do with. Same with movies, the stage and now TV. Skinny’s an endless dynamo. Another beer would go fine. Thanks.
Club dates can be anything from a company dinner for the whole family to an army of drunken apes at a so-called hunting lodge in the middle of an impenetrable forest. Business men, lodge brothers, politicos, actual fishermen, or just plain boobs, Usually the show would carry a pianist or even a band but once they had to fall back on a member of the audience who could only play the first six bars of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”… two hours of that, over, and over, while different girls stripped, can you imagine? Sometimes they’d have an auditorium; sometimes the stage would be the back end of a panel truck. Once the apes got the idea they’d grab Skinny off the back of the truck and throw her around among them… she’d been doing her half-and-half apache number and the year before there’d been a little stripper who’d let the apes give her the pass-around treatment. Skinny had to climb to escape. She was marooned on the roof of that truck for half and hour, but every ape that grabbed at her ankle got his fingers stamped on. So Skinny says. Oh, those club dates! All those effing club dates! as one of Skinny’s earthier associates refers to them.
Sorry you have to go, friend. Gentlemen, may I buy us a beer around? I couldn’t help hearing the three of you discussing the perennial problem of how to make money. Now at a modest estimate my wife Skinny thinks up in a month more plans for making money than the four of us will in all our lives. That is, if you gentlemen are anything like me. Arabian restaurants where you sit on pillows, dog walking services that also change cat boxes and clean the birdcage, a chain of friendly American motels across Mexico that specialize in New England cooking, a shoppers’ escort and buying-guide service, a distressed party givers’ bureau that does everything from taking unruly drunks off your hands to emptying ashtrays the next morning… you name it, Skinny’s thought of it and threshed it all out… along with all the more conventional business enterprises. One new way a week of making a million dollars… that’s par for Skinny.
But you can’t understand how intense Skinny is about her ideas for making money unless you’ve seen her make a pitch. She gets some of us together, me and two or three other lads, and she hands us a drink around and then she gives us a half-hour sales talk, all about initiative and push and golden opportunity. The NAM should hire Skinny, they really should… you never heard anybody build up industry, advertising, and the rewards of success the way she does. Her face just glows. She generally tops it off with something like, “Gentlemen, I have given you your choice: sit around on your fannies all your lives in Noplace Alley or put a down payment on a five-figure address on Easy Street!” Sometimes she says six-figure.