Tickets cost ten dollars for three minutes, twenty dollars for seven minutes, and so on. For fifty dollars, you could be alone with the dancer of your choice for a full twenty minutes. The way it worked, the dancers on the bar top wiggled and jiggled in your face while you kept slipping dollar bills into their panties or stockings, and when they took their break they circulated around the room, working it, sidling up to you and saying Hi, mind if I join you, and pulling up a chair. A waitress came over very quickly, asking if you’d like to buy the lady a cocktail—they called them cocktails even though there wasn’t any booze in them—and this would cost you five bucks plus the tip, of course, and the girl would climb onto your lap and wiggle around there, sipping at her drink and chatting you up for a while before she asked if you’d like to go back to the Pit with her. If you said Yeah, that sounds nice, she’d lead you over to a cash register where you then purchased your ticket or tickets and then you went back with her to this dimly lighted room some twenty feet wide by thirty feet long.
One side of the room—the side on which you entered—was entirely open except for two dozen or more plastic shrubs and trees lined up in a double row where the wall might have been. Through the fake leaves and fronds and stalks you could still see the stage and the girls dancing on it and the monitors displaying fellatio and cunnilingus and other refined sexual acts while you were back there in the Pit enjoying your one-on-one.
In the corner to your right as you came in, a fully clothed man and a girl wearing only a bra, panties, and spike heels sat at a card table. The dancer you’d chosen handed your ticket or tickets to the man—the tickets rather resembled utility bonds, though they were longer and narrower—and he scribbled her initials on the back of each ticket, and then she came over to you, smiling, and took your hand again. There was plush carpeting on the floor of the room, and the carpeting continued up from the floor to cover the banquettes that lined the other three sides of the room. Fastened to the floor at spaced intervals in front of the banquettes were carpet-covered platforms some three feet square and a foot and a half high. If you were sitting on the banquette, a girl dancing on one of these platforms had her crotch virtually level with your face.
For ten dollars, the girl danced on the platform for three minutes, first taking off her bra top, and then lowering her panties for you more recklessly than she had on stage. This was theTABLE TOP DANCING promised in the little Lucite holders outside. Twenty dollars bought seven minutes ofCLOSE DANCING, which required the man at the card table to strategically place three or four of the fake plants and trees around you and the girl on the platform so that you could nuzzle her breasts and clutch her buttocks and kiss her nipples if you were so moved. For twenty minutes ofDIRTY DANCING, you and the girl moved to the far end of the room, where you were surrounded by a virtual jungle of plastic plants that thoroughly screened you from view. You sat on the banquette, the girl sat on the platform before you, unzipped your fly, slid your penis out of your trousers, and masturbated you to climax.
So far, Chloe Chadderton hadn’t done any dirty dancing, even though she knew this was where the real money was. The trouble with the three-minute or seven-minute stints was that you had to do a lot of them to make any money. A girl’s take was half the price of the ticket. Five bucks on a ten-dollar ticket, ten bucks on a twenty-dollar ticket, and so on, all the way up the line. You did a three-minute dance, you got five bucks plus tip, which was usually a deuce, although some cheap bastards slipped you a single. But then maybe it’d be another half hour before some other guy wanted to go back with you, so if you made twenty, thirty bucks an hour, that was a lot.
On the other hand, if you talked some guy into the dirty dancing, you got half of the fifty, which was twenty-five first crack out of the box, plus he usually tipped another ten or sometimes even twenty, from what the girls told her, which meant in twenty minutes a girl could make something like forty bucks for a mere hand job. So even if you did only one of those in an hour, you multiplied that by six hours, which was how long Chloe worked each night, and you went home with close to two-fifty for a night’s work, which was a hell of a lot better than the five and dime, Jimmy Dean.
Tonight, as Chloe stood on the platform doing a seven-minute close dance for a white Yuppie wearing a three-piece suit and sweating profusely as he touched her breasts and her hips and her thighs and tried to slip his hand into the panties low on her crotch, her mind was a hundred miles away. Silver had called her this afternoon, to ask her to dinner tonight. She’d told him she was busy. He’d said, “How about tomorrow night then?” She said she had another date, but maybe she could break it. She’d cornered Tony Eden né Ederoso sitting at his card table in the Pit the minute she’d come in tonight, asked him if he could do without her tomorrow. Most times, there were plenty of girls ready to work the eight to midnight, but Tony didn’t like to find himself in a position where there’d be a hundred guys in the place and only a handful of dancers. He said he’d let her know what it looked like later on tonight. Ten minutes ago, he told her it’d be okay.
First thing tomorrow morning, she’d call Sil, tell him it was okay for dinner.
“And by the way,” she’d say, “when do you think I’ll be getting my check?”
He’d promised her twenty thousand for the rights to “Sister Woman,” but so far she hadn’t seen a nickel. The big concert in the park was scheduled for this coming weekend. His crew would be performing the song then, but meanwhile no bread. Until his call asking her to have dinner with him, she’d thought this was a strictly business thing, lawyers’d draw up the papers, she’d sign them, the check would change hands, good luck and goodbye. Now a dinner invitation. But still no check. She wondered if dinner was some kind of stall. But he wouldn’t just do the song without paying her for it, would he? Wouldn’t that be dangerous for a group as well known as Spit Shine? She’d talk to him about the check tomorrow morning. The check was her way out of this. Before it got too late.
“Careful, man,” she told the Yuppie. “I don’t dance dirty.”
AT SIX-THIRTY that morning, the first of the shelter’s hot meals was served. It consisted of orange juice, coffee, scrambled eggs with bacon, two slices of white bread, and a pat of butter. The eggs were somewhat runny, but otherwise breakfast was pretty good. Somewhat better than jail-house grub, somewhat worse than what Hawes used to eat when he was in the navy. The meals were served in the big dining hall on the second floor of the armory. Upstairs, fluorescent lighting bathed the tables and benches. Later on in the day, the windows would stream natural light that would be denied to the level below by the new floor installed when the place was turned into a shelter. Once upon a time, the armory had been a wide open space where reserve soldiers drilled. Now, it was a two-level sanctuary for the homeless. It was estimated that a third of those men and women had mental problems. The man with the crazy eyes was sitting opposite Hawes at the table.
“So how do you like it here?” he asked.
“Fine,” Hawes said.
“Good grub, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jerry Hudson.”
“I’m Frankie. You got to be careful here, Jerry.”
Hawes nodded.
“Lots going on here, you got to be careful.”
“Like what?” Hawes asked.