with an arm. “The guy the Ayatollah wants offed? An ant. A literary microbe squirming in the shadow of the god.” He shuffled over and held out the book like the Bible itself. “‘He who makes a beast of himself,’ he said, quoting from the epigraph, ‘gets rid of the pain of being a man.’” He took a moment to stare us down. “Hunter S,” he said, “showed us all who we really are.”
“I got to give it to you one more time, Dink,” Basil said, slapping him on the back. “You poor fuckless fart.”
“Hey you guys,” Hickory said. “Guess what?”
“What?” Basil said.
“Lick my butt!” Hickory said, and burst out laughing. She was whacking on her knee like some old gal from Arkansas. “No, but seriously. Anybody here ever play Truth or Dare?”
“We won’t play,” Dinky said, “but we’ll sure watch.” He beamed at Hickory and made an effort to grin. “We like to watch.”
Hickory led Lucille to the center of the room and plopped down on the floor. “Come along now, Basil darling,” she said. “We’re dying to know your secrets.”
Basil scratched his balls. “I like a good dare every now and then. Keeps me on my toes.”
“Bring the hooch,” I said, “and whatever else.”
“Perchance we could change the music?” Hickory said. “And that abominable machine as well,” she said, indicating the TV. “Please.”
“‘4th of July,’” Basil said, “is one of the great all-timers.”
“Try the Jelly Roll Morton.”
Some talk went round how the old master thought a Haitian witch had cursed him. Dinky, back on the couch, said that in the end Jelly Roll had taken to acting like Howard Hughes.
“The guy never ventured out,” he said. “And nobody cursed him, either. He’d simply trapped himself in his own little cage of fear. At least that’s our view. For what it’s worth.”
“Break out the Jelly Roll, squeeze!”
“Damn it, woman,” Basil said. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that in public?”
Lucille squinted. “This is public?”
WE’D MET HICKORY AT A PARTY IN THE CITY. TO get inside, you had to take an ancient lift, the kind with a platform behind a metal door that wouldn’t budge without a couple of trolls to heave on some old chain. They even had a bellhop, in a red-velvet monkey suit and pillbox hat with a strap. For eyebrows the kid had little steel barbells, five or six per side, and for teeth real fangs, straight-up Lestat. And if that weren’t enough, he was running Maori-style ink on his chin, and every patch of his face but that was goofy with shiny dust.
Before us lay a massive room, probably two- or three-hundred yards long and half as wide, chockful with every type of gork in the book. Guys with bunless chaps ran around the place smacking each other with crops. Chicks, too, more than half of them decked out like Catwoman, scampered about with nipple clamps and whips and chains, wreaking all manner of hell. There were go-go dancers in bubbles and cages, Rastafaris, homeboys, deathrockers and mods, rockabilly kids, swingers and punks, not to mention your basic Haight Street hipsters. Jumbotrons swayed from the ceilings flashing clever retromercials, and thrift-store TVs lined the walls fuzzy with chickens in the slaughterhouse and Japanimation and big-time sex acts, the whole of it swamped in banks of chemical fog. Some heavy-duty industrial house provided the coup de grâce for this late-night get down, pumping so hard you could feel it from the marrow in your bones to the depths of your aching nards. The four of us snagged some drinks and split, the two traitors one way, Dinky and I the next.
We stumbled on our girl in some sort of cave, everyone but her stupid with dope. In her tight corduroys and glittering boots, she sat among thirty or forty crackpot fiends sucking fingers, faces, toes, whatever their mouths could hold. But what stung most was the guy beside her, an image to the T of my old toad in a picture I’d seen when he was a Hare Krishna. He had fierce blue eyes and a queue from his head, all the way down his back. He was even wearing bamboo thongs. Soon, however, he slipped off, and I forgot him and was glad. Jerks by the droves kept trying to get their paws on Hickory, but she sat among them cool as a queen, there, as she’d said, “to take in all the footage.” We never asked her name, and she never said. It was Dinky laid the moniker down. “You look like a Hickory girl if ever we’ve seen one,” he told her, to which she said, “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” All the while her face lay before us unreadable as Chinese kanji. I remember staring at her for a preposterously long time, asking myself just who in hell this willow was, with the ovate eyes and strong white teeth, and me like a doofus trying to smile.
So I’d known what I wanted before the game had begun. The problem was, having so much to want, I had to choose.
“What’s your name?” I said. “Your real name.”
No one but Dinky would’ve expected that. Neither Basil nor Lucille had ever known Hickory wasn’t Hickory. The day we introduced her, it was Hickory, meet Basil and Lucille. Their faces didn’t quite know what to do.
“I’ve always wondered,” Hickory said, “why none of you have asked.”
“It can’t be more fucked up than Hickory,” Basil said.
“Elmira Pugsley?” Hickory said.
“It’s different,” Lucille said. “That’s for sure.”
“It’s after my granny. But since the point here’s to be totally honest—and I’m a totally honest gal—the full name’s Elmira Beatrice Pugsley.”
Basil clicked his tongue. “Poor, poor girl,” he said.
“No wonder you go around letting everyone call you Hickory,” Lucille said.
Dinky burbled from the couch. “We don’t think that’s very nice, now do we?”
“Who asked you to wake up, hey moron?” Basil said.
“The middle name,” Hickory went on, “that was my father’s doing. They were farmer hippies.”
“You,” I said, “come from hippies?”
Hickory smiled. “I spent the first ten years of my life on a commune up in Oregon. We had beehives and everything. Organic bees. Organic everything.”
“Poor, poor girl,” Basil said.
Hickory put her chin in her palm and looked us over. When she stopped at me I knew what she wanted, but then she passed to Basil. “You, tough guy. Which will it be?”
“Toss a mop on the floor,” I said at Basil’s show of squirming. “See which way it flops.”
Even as I said this it struck me just how much we didn’t care what Basil did. We knew—or at least I knew, or thought I knew—that either way he turned wouldn’t change a thing. How could he choose when he had no choice, the difference between a Truth or Dare having collapsed beneath their emptiness? For Basil, to be honest meant to be daring. And however strangely, however sadly, daring was as close
