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Four cold beers at his old girl's place, then he fell into his first long sleep. He slept for days, thirteen to be exact, in her bed, rising only to relieve himself or swill a glass of tepid water. But not so much sleeping, he said, but dreaming of sleep and dreams. He ran dreams like movies with intermissions for a leak, then right back to the film – war, honor, love, the past, the future – ru
Back to the guitar and the bottle for a couple of months, then the music became enough. He sang professionally now, four thirty-minute sets six nights a week in a small sometimes coffee house sometimes bar, Harps on the Willows. He had never been better. More faithful to the box he played than the one he slept with, he barely noticed when she drove her small sports car back to Boston. But people were noticing him, and Morning never denied liking that. He played student gatherings on off-nights, then an occasional party at an English professor's house. He grew a beard to go with his long hair, and was soon a minor rage among new rich, pseudo liberal, culture vultures in Phoenix, even out in simple, suburban Scottsdale, and there he met his fear face to mask, Linda Charles.
The party was at a large, rambling house on three acres of clipped, watered grass. It was an engineer's house, filled with electrical gadgets, a button to flush, a button to roll off a neat amount of paper, ice makers, drink makers, and wired from asshole to elbow with sweet stereo. The floors were laid in rugs as thick as bear skin, and peopled with people fighting the way they made their money, the hesitantly liberal, the casual un-Godly who occasionally would quietly say "fuck" for special emphasis and quietly slap a fist into the other hand, and the women very careful not to blush. Morning came here, his credentials not much better than these who received him, came in a buckskin shirt stained with someone else's sweat, scuffed cowboy boots, and faded, frayed Levi's. He sang the soft protests, a few old English ballads (he could make me cry with even old hat "Barbara Allen"), then some wild bawdy Scotch songs, some popular comic snatches, then the dirtiest Irish roar he knew, and came on in the finale leading the group in "We Shall Overcome" like an intellectual cheerleader. He knew his audience. After him came the Twist as the crew-cuts and drizzle-heads paired off. He worked two sets, then a little mixing with the crowd, a few casual references to the Movement, and a crisp fifty from the hostess whom he had screwed in the English professor's bathroom four times before she hired him. Out here, though, he made gentle verbal passes at all the pretty women, flowers caught in plastic paperweights, but he never followed them through. He knew his audience.
But this particular night the Movement was moved out by a wonderful bit of risqué humor and singing by the hostess' personal friend, the famous female impersonator, one Linda Charles.
He remembered her (he couldn't keep himself from thinking her instead of him) and saw her across the room, prim in a high-collared sleeveless black dress, sitting on a white sofa, alone because the men were afraid; and the women, either envious or unconcerned, stayed away too. The hostess led Morning across to her, introduced them, then fled. Morning shook her hand, trying not to examine it for any trace of male hardness, but finding none in spite of his failure. She said hello very softly, offered the seat next to her with a slim white arm. Morning hesitated, but she said, "Oh, hell, sit down. I may have balls but I don't bite." She laughed with such a sense of her own vanity and foolishness, such an ease, that Morning did sit, feeling it would be square not to, sat in the seat next to her, and all that was to come, with open i
"You're pretty good," she said, "a professional, shall we say, phony. You didn't get those hands as a passive resister, jack."
"I beg your pardon," he answered, stupidly, not knowing what to say.
"I beg your pardon," she mocked, tilting her head with a musical hit to her voice. "You are a straight arrow square, aren't you?"
"I just didn't know what you meant."
"You're as much a fake as I am. Those old clothes, sweat stains, scuffs, and holes. I'll bet you bathe every day and would rather die than wear dirty shorts. Your beard's too neatly trimmed, too," she said, but smiled quietly as if they were conspirators in the same plot. "You're obviously as hip as Richard Nixon, but you're good enough to fool these johns out here. Your father is probably an accountant and your mother sings in a church choir, and that's where you learned to sing, in a damned church choir."
"Yeah," he answered, "you're right, but you've been talking to old bumble butt about me," he said, pointing a thumb at the hostess.
"Need to know what my competition is up to."
"You, too?" Morning said, amazement clear on his face.
"She's the kind of broad who says, 'I want to experience everything in this world at least once before I die,' never knowing she was stillborn. Of course me too. What do you think I'm doing here? Don't be square forever."
"Well, I'm learning every minute," Morning said, lighting her cigarette.
"Really," she said, leaning back on the couch and raising a delicate eyebrow behind a stream of smoke. "Then be a good boy and run get me a drink."
Morning started to rise, then slouched back and said, "Screw you, jack," but said it with a grin.
"Save your strength for bumble butt," Linda said, smiling too. "I guess you are learning. Let's go back to Phoenix and I'll buy you a real drink to kill the taste of this cheap punch bumble butt calls booze."
Morning had just noticed fifteen or twenty heads turned in his direction, heads which turned back when he faced them, trying to conceal looks and smirks puckered in oatmeal faces. "What?" he said, turning back to Linda.
"Don't sweat it. If you read your Kinsey, or Ellis, or whoever, you know that true transvestites aren't queer. I got problems, but not that one, man." She spoke without hardness, without pushing, and a small verticle line pinched between her wide green eyes made her look discriminated against, told of being mistaken by narrow minds. "Besides," she continued, a sad touch of a grin at her mouth, "it will be good paper for you. Raise your fee from what, fifty, to one bill for sure."
"For sure," he said. "Let's split."
"I know I'm lovely, but I'm not built that way, really," she said, white teeth holding her lower lip off a smile.
Morning laughed, then as he stood, he involuntarily offered his hand. She looked at it, her head cocked to the side like a puzzled puppy, he looked at it, then they chuckled together.
"That's all right," she said. "Sometimes I forget too." She rose without his help, then walked toward the door, movements neat, trim, fluid, hip motion not exaggerated but terribly feminine.
The son of a bitch practices, Morning thought, Jesus.
Outside she offered to let him drive her XK-E. When he whistled at the metallic blue car gleaming under the desert moon, she said, "There are lots of burly chaps who are quite happy to pay a ten buck minimum to see some crazy cat in drag. Plus my mother left me about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, bless her drunken hide."
As he drove, Morning told her about his fight with the huge queer in San Francisco.
"What a flaming queen he is, honey. He makes Mardi Gras every year so he can go in drag. What a riot. Smokey the Bear in hose and heels. Too much," she said.