I drove Rose back to the Club and parked the Lincoln in the reserved spot by the back door of the building. The moon was down now, the stars larger and brighter. Rose said he had to take care of a few things before he went home. He slapped me on the back and said goodnight, then went into the Club.
I walked up the alley and into the bright lights of 23rd Street. The haze and smell of spent fireworks were still on the air. The theaters had let out and the line of people waiting outside the Turf Grill was even longer than before. I’d been vaguely edgy all through supper and wasn’t sure why—but as I stood there, watching the passing traffic in its clamor of klaxons and clattering motors, what I hankered for was to get laid.
I usually took my pleasure with one or another of the hostesses or waitresses who worked at the Maceo clubs, but then I’d have to wait for the girl to get off work, and I didn’t feel like waiting. Besides, I was in no mood for the banter and kidding around that was required for a free one. I just wanted to get to it.
It was an urge you could satisfy more easily in this town than probably anywhere else in the country and I was already in the neighborhood for it. Post Office Street—the heart of the red-light district—was right around the corner. With my balls feeling heavy as plums I headed on over there.
For a span of five or six blocks, Post Office—and portions of Market and Church, the two streets north and south of it—was mostly one cathouse after another. Most of the houses were narrow two-story buildings with latticework screens in front of the porches to give a little privacy to guys who didn’t want to be seen going in or out. I always wondered who they were afraid might see them, since anybody who was in the neighborhood sure as hell wasn’t shopping for shoes.
The houses were owned by a variety of different people but they were all managed by women. The madams paid rents that were practically robbery, but the district was so well established they didn’t have to pay off the cops to leave them alone—at least not as long as there was no bad trouble in the place. Most houses turned a nice profit by simply staying honest and clean. The madams wouldn’t stand for their girls getting drunk or fighting on the job, and they made them get regular medical checkups. A man might have to pay a house price of fifty cents for a dime’s worth of booze or a quarter for a nickel glass of beer, but he could be pretty sure he wouldn’t catch a dose from his three-dollar hump. And if he gave the madam his money to hold while he had his fun upstairs, he knew none of it would be missing when he got it back.
Tonight the district was as raucous as I’d ever heard it. Every house had a jukebox, and a crazy tangle of oldtime rags and recent big-band instrumentals streamed from the parlors to mix with the racket outside. Cars honking and jarring over the uneven brick pavement, the sidewalks full of soldiers and sailors and college boys, dockwallopers, businessmen off the leash from home, laughing and looking damn happy. Bad fights were uncommon in the houses—guys eager to get laid or who’d just had their ashes hauled weren’t usually in a fighting mood. There’d be some hothead every now and then, or some guy too drunk to know better, but every house had its bouncer to take care of them.
The best thing about the Galveston houses—and the most surprising to me when I first arrived on the island—was that so many of the whores were actually pretty. Where I’d grown up, there had been only two whorehouses inside a hundred miles, and of the handful of women who worked in them only one looked to be under thirty years old, and only if you’d had enough to drink would you call her fair of face. It was a widespread joke that most of the girls at both those houses were so ugly they ought to pay the guys who humped them. But it was also a common saying that you always paid for it with any woman, one way or another, and a whore was the only one honest enough about it to charge you a specific dollar price and give you what you paid for and leave the complications out of it. The steepest price for it was marriage, of course, and lots of men paid it. “The full freight,” LQ called it, and he’d already paid it twice. But he still preferred trying to woo a woman into bed rather than giving her cash.
“A man needs to feel like he’s getting it because the woman thinks he’s handsome or charming or can make her laugh,” LQ said. “Like he’s getting it for some goddamn reason other than he’s got three bucks in his pocket. A man’s got to at least feel that way every now and then, no matter it aint true.”
Not even Brando argued the point with him. But we all knew that sometimes a man wanted it the other way, too—straight and simple and without the bullshit. Here’s the money, honey, let’s get to it. Which is how I was wanting it just then.
I had intended to go into the first house I came to, but as soon as I turned onto Post Office Street I remembered a Mexican girl who’d been working at Mrs. Lang’s the last time I’d been there, about three months before. She wasn’t really Mex—she’d told me she was born in Colorado and that her grandparents had been the last real Mexicans in her family—and I knew she didn’t speak Spanish any better than Brando. But she looked every bit Mexican, and tonight that was what I wanted.
A skinny Negro maid with sullen eyes greeted me at the door. A loud jazzy version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” was playing on the juke, and the parlor was hazed with cigarette smoke. About nine or ten guys were in there, waiting their turn to go upstairs. They sat on sofas along the walls or stood at the small bar at the rear of the room, where they were served by a little gray man with a hangdog face. Some of the younger guys were talking low and snickering among themselves, but the older ones just sat and smoked and stared at the nude paintings on the wall or down at their own shoes. Even through the smoke and the scent of incense candles, you could detect the faint odor of disinfectant and a musky hint of sex.
Mrs. Lang came toward me with a bright red smile, blond hair braided in a bun at the back of her neck, gold hoops dangling from her ears. She gave me a quick hug and said happy new year and been so long and so forth. She had bright green eyes and a wide sexy mouth and looked pretty good for a woman in her forties. She gave my briefcase a curious look—not a lot of guys carried a briefcase into a whorehouse—but said nothing about it. As she led me toward the bar with her arm hooked around mine I asked if Felicia still worked there.
“She surely does, honey. She just this minute went upstairs. But sweetie, we’re just so busy tonight, you’re going to have to wait a bit. Another fella’s already waiting specially for her too.”
I wasn’t disposed to wait. I slid a twenty out of my pocket and slipped it to her.
“My, we are in a hurry, aren’t we?” She slid the bill up her sleeve. “But you know, baby, the other fella waiting on her is in a hurry too. It’ll be awful hard to explain things to him just right.”
I gave her another ten and said she ought to at least have the decency to pull a gun on me.
She laughed and patted my arm and discreetly tucked the money in a side pocket of her skirt. Then looked across the room at a big guy leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. The bouncer, a different one from the last time I’d been here. A young guy wearing an open coat over a black T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. He caught Mrs. Lang’s look and straightened up, made a little nod and began cracking his knuckles.
Mrs. Lang fitted a cigarette to the end of a long holder and I lit it for her, then bought her a glass of sherry and had a beer for myself while we waited for Felicia to finish up with whoever she had upstairs. Over the next few minutes three guys, almost one right after the other, came out of the upper hallway and down the stairs and only one of them waved so long at Mrs. Lang before scooting out the door. Each time a guy came down, she nodded at another one in the parlor and he’d go up to the girl waiting at the top of the staircase. Most whores couldn’t remember your name from one minute to the next, but they had damn good memories for faces, and madams had the best memories of all, never losing track of their customers’ order of turns even on the busiest nights.