“That’s where I go all the time,” he said. “It attracts a much better crowd.”
The half-dozen grizzled men clustered around him agreed that the parlor on Rollins and South Fifth attracted a much better crowd.
“Very ritzy,” one of them said.
“Who do you like in the third tomorrow?” the other security guard asked.
“Pants on Fire,” the first one said.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Good horse,” the first guard said.
“He runs like he’s got a load in his pants, never mind a fire.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” one of the men chanted, and everyone laughed.
One of the other men asked the guards about something supposed to’ve happened here at Temple only the week before. Man named Rudy Price had gone apeshit, tried to drown himself in the toilet bowl. Stuck his head in one of the toilet bowls, tried to drown himself. The guy was asking the guards if it was true. Everybody seemed to think it was comical, man trying to drown himself in a toilet bowl. The guard who liked Pants on Fire said Yeah, it was true, they caught him just in time. One of the men said they shoulda let him do it, he was a no-good fuck, Price.
Hawes zipped up his fly, and shuffled over to the group.
“What time’s breakfast?” he asked the guard.
“First time here?” one of the men asked him.
Big burly black guy with a beard like Brillo. Wearing jeans and combat boots and a beaded vest and a scarf. The vest looked as if he’d got it in India someplace.
“Yeah,” Hawes said. Briefly.
“Breakfast starts at six-thirty,” the guard told him.
“Yuppie commuters in here got to catch they trains,” the black man said, and grinned at his own little joke. His teeth were a lot whiter than the ones the lab had given Hawes. He was tempted to smile back. He didn’t.
A man wearing a blue watch cap pulled low on his forehead, coal-black eyes burning in his skull, said, “Lots of crazies here tonight.”
Hawes thought he looked crazy himself.
“Keep you awake all fuckin night, their screamin,” he said.
“Whyn’t you guys try to get some sleep?”
This from the guard who thought Pants on Fire was a dog.
Hawes had the feeling the guards wanted these guys out of the men’s room here, where they could get in trouble shooting dope, or fighting, or whatever. Didn’t want to have to divide their time between here and the drill floor outside. This was a shelter with a heart, Laughton had told Meyer, but things happened here. Hawes didn’t know how many square shields there were on the job—he’d seen four or five of them outside when he was collecting the blanket and stuff—but there were more than nine hundred cots out there, and it seemed just possible that more guards were needed on the floor than here in the head. Hence the eagerness to get all their chickens in one coop.
“Quieter in here than out there,” the man with the crazy eyes said.
“Well, let’s turn in, anyway, huh?” the guard said, gently but pointedly.
The men began moving out. The two guards walked out behind them, like shepherds nudging their sheep to pasture. The big black guy fell in beside Hawes. On the drill floor just outside the men’s room, a naked man was pacing back and forth, yelling, “This is a case for the Supreme Court! I cite Wagner v. Wagner, 238 Alabama, 627, 184, South Dakota, wherein it was ruled and upheld on appeal…”
“More of them on the streets than there is in the hospitals,” the black man said.
Hawes said nothing.
“I’m Gleason,” the man said.
“Hudson,” Hawes said.
The guard drifted off, walking to where two other guards were standing near the registration desk. There was still a hum in the room. Lights turned low, the room humming with the sound of hundreds of men asleep or awake.
“You dealin?” Gleason asked.
Hawes looked at him.
“Get guys in here lookin like they been through all kinds of shit, they really dealin.”
“Not me,” Hawes said.
“You fuzz then?”
“Sure,” Hawes said and rolled his eyes.
Gleason studied him, still not certain.
“Lydia brace you yet?” he asked.
“Who the fuck’s Lydia?”
“The tattooed lady.”
“Guy in army undershorts?”
“Queer as a fuckin geranium.”
“He told me I was in his cot.”
“He wishes .”
Hawes began walking away. Gleason fell in beside him again. “I’m here all the time,” he said. “How come I never seen you here before?”
“I like it better on the street,” Hawes said.
“What street? What’s your corner?”
“Lewis and North Pike.”
“Then what you doin here now ?”
“I came south for the winter.”
“Too bad it’s already spring, man.”
“Too bad it’s none of your fuckin business,” Hawes said.
“You sure you ain’t fuzz?” Gleason asked.
Hawes turned to him, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “Say it just one more time, man.”
Gleason nodded.
“I think you are,” he said, and walked off.
THE CLUB was called Eden’s Acre.
It opened for business at twelve noon, at which time free lunch was served in what was called the Snake Pit. Chloe didn’t start work till around ten each night, and then she worked straight through till four in the morning, when the club closed. On a good night, she averaged something like a hundred and fifty bucks. A lot of the girls made twice that amount. But Chloe wasn’t doing hand jobs in the Pit.
The first thing you saw when you walked into Eden was a stage shaped like a half-moon on the left side of the room. Flanking the stage on either side was a giant television monitor showing pornographic movies in full color. Some ten to twelve live girls in various stages of undress were dancing on the stage. Eden claimed that a hundred girls danced for the club, which was true. A hundred girls did work here, but there were never a hundred girls in the place all at once. Instead, there were four shifts: noon to four, four to eight, eight to midnight, and midnight to four. The girls could work whichever shifts or combinations of shifts they wanted, three or even four shifts a day if they so chose. Usually, most of the girls worked some six hours a day, overlapping one shift into another. The busiest shift was the eight to midnight. Sometimes on the eight to midnight, there were forty or fifty girls milling around the place topless.
The club advertised itself as a totally nude club, but you never saw anyone strolling around bare-assed here. What the girls did, they tugged aside the leg holes of their panties while they were dancing, exposing their genitals to the men sitting at the bar drinking nonalcoholic drinks at five bucks a throw plus tip. In this city, you couldn’t serve alcoholic drinks in a so-called totally nude club. The waitresses were quick to tell you that they worked on tips here. The dancers didn’t have to tell you because you could see the bills tucked into the waistbands of their bikinis or, if the girls were wearing garter belts and sheer silk stockings, the bills were visible inside the stockings, where men tucked them while simultaneously copping a feel of sweating naked flesh.
The stage was some twenty feet deep, which gave the girls plenty of room to maneuver from back to front where the half-moon became a bartop flanked by those huge television screens flashing men and women in various compromising positions. The girls danced right onto the bar top, gyrating into the faces of the customers, shaking their silicone breasts and tugging aside their panties to show the real thing, quite often shaved. All of the dancers on the stage were available for private one-on-one sessions in the Snake Pit. Little Lucite holders spaced along the bar top advised: