Shickie ran from the butcher's room to snag the closing doors of a plush elevator, joining the more genteel company of a heavy-boned transvestite in a pink sequin cocktail gown and half a dozen inebriated conventioneers throwing her passes. On the way down, he wiggled a toe though one of the holes in his thin silk socks and cursed softly over the gangbang he'd received from the trio in the room above.
Disgorged into the Caesar's Palace lobby, he joined the pressing crowd migrating to the labyrinthine, gonging, dinging, and neon-blinking vastness of the casino.
"Yeowch!" A dagger of pain shot through his foot and up his spine. He grabbed an ankle; fell to the carpet, onto his back. He extracted the quarter-inch post of a cheap, dime-size pearl earring from the flesh of his big toe and flung it in a flash of anger. He drew momentary satisfaction from the yelp of an elderly slots player who swatted her neck and hurled withering looks at a passing Shriner.
Shickie giggled. Out of control, he rocked on his back like a flipped tortoise, nearly wetting his pants, until a deep "Sir?" gave him pause. He cocked an eyebrow at a looming six-and-a-half-foot Roman centurion, bare-breasted as was Shickie, although deeply tanned, far more fit, and carrying a spear to boot. The centurion jabbed Shickie in the ribcage with the spear's rubber point to assure his attention.
Shickie assumed a doleful look. "Et tu, Brute?"
The centurion boosted Shickie to his feet. "It's not polite to throw things at our guests, sir. Perhaps we've done a bit too much celebrating? What say we help you to your room."
Shickie tried to shake free. "Fine with me," he said. "I'm at the Kabul Wonderland. How about a piggy-back ride over there, since I ripped up my toe on your crummy carpet?"
The centurion gave Shickie's shoulder a meaningful squeeze and nodded toward a distant point in the seemingly infinite arena. "Exit's that way. Best you move along. If you can't make it, I'll see you get some help--understand?"
Shickie left the centurion speaking into his spear handle, and limped through the gamers. He paused to massage his throbbing toe, gave a quick one-finger salute to an eye in the sky, and resumed his trek to a camouflaged exit. He finally emerged from the casino into waning daylight and boarded a raised and canopied moving sidewalk. Under the stony gaze of colossal, ersatz Roman statuary, he glided over an ocean of parked automobiles toward Vegas Boulevard.
At the conveyor's end, he emerged from the sidewalk canopy into late afternoon sunlight. He blinked, stumbled, went afoul of surging pedestrians, and tripped over a stroller. To the sound of parental wails, a toddler rolled west, Shickie Doone, east.
Shickie came to rest, chest to concrete, face over the gutter, nose to a wind-blown brochure for out-call Asian coeds. Staring at a blurry Filipina bottom speckled with wind-blown grit and street grime, he sobbed.
Rita Rae and Orlando
This was to have been
a celebratory lunch for Rita Rae and Orlando, but so far there had been
no hugs, no making-up-for-lost-time kisses, no feelie-feelie. Spine stiff,
Rita Rae had been chilling the air with a grim silence since the taxi
from Miami International Airport dropped her off at the South Beach sidewalk
café.
She chewed her lip again, slammed a fist into her red Fendi handbag,
and finally spoke: "It's that damned dog's fault." At Orlando's
bewildered shrug, she snatched the pink flamingo swizzle stick from the
Cuba Libre he had ready for her, snapped it in two, and flung the pieces
at his chest.
Orlando, lean and dusky with slicked back hair, ten years younger
than Rita Rae's thirty-nine-and-holding, shook the plastic shards from
his open-to-the-waist, pink silk shirt. He downed a shot of tequila, locked
his dark eyes on Rita Rae's, and, with no music in his voice, said, "Dime.
¿Que pasa, quajira?"
"Pasa this . . ." Rita Rae tilted her head back, coyote-fashion,
and shouted, "Shickie Doone. I'll kill the little rat."
Ginger
Ginger Rodgers peered from a thick stand of mountain laurel across
the road at the Prince of Light's Gatlinburg home, thirty feet up the
mountain. Still only one light on. She moved forward, crouched behind
a parked car, well shaded from the street lamp. "I am not a stalker,"
she assured herself.
Wobbling on the first spike heels she had worn in a dozen years,
an image flashed before her eyes of herself at eleven years old, gliding
across the linoleum with her mother in their made-over garage rec room.
Her father, as usual, had passed out on the recliner, a bottle cradled
at his chest. Young Ginger wore the blue satin dance gown her mother had
made for her confirmation. She spun on her little girl pumps, wavering
as usual, while mommy, in formal Fred Astaire drag, hair slicked back,
lifted Ginger's hand and led her into a fox trot turn.
"Steady, for chrissakes," mommy urged in her Fred Astaire
voice. "Don't be such a klutz. Be a star, baby."
Ginger did her best. She had the looks, or so men told her, but
the rest of it? How many times had she watched those old movies with hopes
her namesake's verve would rub off? Maybe that D in Ginger's last name
stood for Doomed. Doomed to be a nobody. One letter away from being a
star.
Ginger had, however, talked herself into tonight's daring adventure,
and that counted for something, didn't it?
She had first seen the Prince a scant three Sundays ago during
a sermon in the hilltop Temple of Light, a former National Guard armory
overlooking touristic Gatlinburg. She knew from that moment their destinies
were linked. So far, the nearest she had been to him was forty feet, standing
in the third row of the choir loft. Although, during services, and in
her apartment, many times since, she had visualized walking right up to
him after the closing prayer and telling him in the same no-nonsense way
Madonna told Juan Peron in Evita, how very good she would be for him.
The Prince was Ginger's man, her Fred Astaire. He just didn't know
it yet.
At eight, Ginger had wanted to become a saint (the not being Catholic
part seemed less an obstacle than her mother's aversion to "fish
eaters"). In high school, she joined every club and activity that
would have her. After graduation, she dearly wanted to labor on a kibbutz
in Israel with the sun-bronzed Chosen, but her mother put a stop to that
("It's all Jews over there, baby--no gentility.") In college,
University of Tennessee, she had thrown herself into T.M., even considered
transferring to Marharishi U. She joined the Hari Krishnas, but the chanting
and begging had been too embarrassing. She had, in turn, wandered in and
out of numerology, reflexology, and astrology, and would have gotten into
phrenology if she hadn't been a hundred years too late.
Ginger had yet to become a star, or, for that matter, to find a
constellation she could call home. She was twenty-nine. Three months ago,
she moved to Sevier County, Tennessee, the birthplace of Dolly Parton,
for inspiration. Dolly possessed the sweetest voice Ginger had ever heard,
sweeter than any angel in heaven, and Ginger loved to sing. She sensed
a connection. Mere weeks ago, she heard about the Children of Light, popularly
known as the Fireflies, and their choir, the finest in Sevier County.
Ginger promptly joined their number.
The Firefly congregation was over a hundred and growing fast. They
believed their leader, the Reverend Shickleton Doone, the Prince of Light,
was a great prophet, perhaps the second Messiah. The Prince performed
miracles, turned staffs into snakes, produced coins from thin air, even
sent a goat to the Holy Land in a poof of smoke. And, wow, could he sing.
Ginger knew her destiny and the Prince's were intertwined the moment she
laid eyes on him.
. . . She tugged unconsciously at her micro-mini and adjusted her
bra, smoothed the snug white cashmere sweater, re-fluffed her long, wavy
blond hair and, Good Lord, there he was. The Prince of Light himself.
Standing on the narrow walk across the street, admiring his house. As
well he might, Ginger thought. Graceland itself was hardly more impressive.
The Prince's home looked like something out of Gone With The Wind, almost.
Although the two-story house had been built along the lines of
a Swiss chalet by a once flush, now gone-bust used car salesman, the Prince
had added four impressive, fifteen-foot-high white fiberglass columns
and a long plantation porch across the front.
The Prince approached the wide central stairway, casting wary looks
left and right. Surely, he didn't know she was here, did he?
Time to move, Ginger told herself, before he gets to the door and
disappears inside.
High above, a dark cloud scudded across a crescent moon, drenching
the landscape in ink. One of Ginger's hands went to her hair and worried
an errant wisp as she remembered the words her mother had repeated over
and over: "Men are lecherous bastards, baby. Stay away from them."
Ginger shook away the memory, took a deep breath, clacked the heels
of her red pumps together three times for luck, and stepped from the bushes.
