that she knew the kids and the kids knew her and weren’t they all having the craziest time? Like Eddie, thought Lon. Eddie going to Disneyland with the family after having gone before with the Cubs—anxious to point out the sights and let everyone know in a loud voice that he had been there before. Like a queer lavender Elsa Maxwell, Violet greeted the loved and the unloved, the staked and the cruising, disappearing finally into the packed room where the shadow-shapes clung to each other. Now she was singing in unison with the record: “Perhaps upon that Lonely Street, there’s someone such as I …”
Lon sipped beer. Sipped the new bitter taste and marveled at the way dry palm fronds and a raffia backing on the bar had given an exotic air to a cement-block garage. Someone had painted a Hawaiian hula scene on the wall above the bar. Someone had sketched a likeness of Rags on the opposite wall, and had framed it with bamboo. This is the way the clubhouse will look. This is the way we’ll fix up the recreation hall on the Island! She swigged from the bottle again, mellowing with the sense of a long-gone traveler at last arrived home. For the threesome at the other end of the bar were not unlike the traveler she had seen in mirrors, her own self.
They wore tan peggers, nonchalantly unpressed. Two in plaid flannel shirts, one sharper in an open-throated white job with a turquoise sweater vest. Lon envied them the clipped haircuts, the strong scrubbed faces. And ignored the lazy eyes and droop-cornered mouths.
“I still claim you owe me two-bits,” one argued.
“The hell you say.”
“You remember that girl, right here at this bar?”
“Oh, Jesus, yes.”
“You bet me a quarter I couldn’t make her.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, didn’t I?”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I’ve got a witness.” The first of them turned to the silent one. “Did I make her, Chuck?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you.”
They roared at this and then the loser paid her bill. “Here’s your goddam quarter. Just tell me one thing. Was she butch or fem? Christ, I couldn’t tell!”
“Smorgasbord. By the time she went home I wasn’t sure which I was!” Eyebrows wriggled up and down, implying secrets that could not be unveiled. Regular guys, remembering a girl and laughing it up. Regular guys, flicking kitchen matches with their thumbnails for a light, burrowing hands in the front-zipped pants for a crushed cigarette pack and belting each other in the back to punctuate a bellylaugh. Regular guys, and less than twenty years before, unknowing nurses had checked the wrong box on the hospital form that offered only Male and Female. For perhaps the choice was incomplete.
Halfway through the brown bottle, Violet came back. “I got a place at their table. This girl, kid—Jeez, she’s society an’ everything. Boy, would I like to get next to her. She’s here with some crazy dark one. I hate t’ say this, but this girl, wow, is she sharp.” Violet spilled the words breathlessly. “I got a spot at their table. Pray for me, kid.” Leading Lon from the bar toward the curtained room, frenzied with her dim hope of a conquest that escaped Lon. “Make out like I’m your girl. Act real nuts about me.”
They wove their way through the dancers. Pretty girls and crones at sixteen, old hands and neophytes, insatiable and satiated; Lon saw them in the darkened room where dreams were woven, seeing through the untutored, all-sensing eyes of the young, the clip-haired butches who looked as she herself must look, yet knowing the purpose of their maleness, shuffling to the agonized cry—“Where’s this place called Lonely Street?” Big, brawl-sized butches and tiny Napoleons, out to prove to the world: we are not small; we matter, we count! Hands clutching their partners as though someone might doubt their talents to possess, hip grinding hip.
And Lon heard, through the unplugged ears of the young, their spicy, pungent talk, as she tacked her way through the crowd:
“… took ourselves out on the lawn and I mean, almost froze …”
“… told that witch, in the future you keep your hands off my girl. Fun is fun and I’m no prude, but I’ve got my standards, honey …”
“… Okay, okay, we’ll go home. I said we’ll go home. Okay, so you can’t stand to see me have a little fun …”
And the shriek with its aftermath of hilarious commotion; somebody gagging somebody, everyone game for one more laugh.
Lon saw and heard with the inner awareness that transcends callow ignorance, linking phrase and gesture. So that she knew why they danced with such gay desperation, why they gathered here where a green door barred the inquisitors of that other world with a sign that warned and pleaded: MEMBERS ONLY. And Lon sympathized with the unclassified kids who needed a place “to dance.” For she was of them, so must be with them and for them. Of them, and belonging to their secret.
Four perspiring bottles graced the redwood picnic table provided by the limited budget of The 28%. Side by side on one of the benches, Lon and Violet faced a twosome conspicuous not only by their post-nineteen maturity but by the vivid contrast of their coloring. Violet had introduced them as Sassy Gregg and Mavis.
The Amazon’s pale-yellow hair fell in short careless waves over the wide brow of a face once deeply tanned, now faded. It was a face with the unravaged ruggedness of one who has enjoyed the outdoors in solid comfort: playing dedicated tennis, perhaps, or swimming lengths of a country club pool. Her features were carefully spaced, her grey-blue eyes unflinchingly direct. And the simplicity of her tailored shirt and slacks spoke quietly of elegance. Any doubt of her affluence was erased by the wide bracelet clamping the cuff of her long-sleeved shirt and the matching wide belt-buckle of hand-wrought silver and Mexican lava. Her nickname, Lon suspected, was backwash from early childhood; Sassy looked and behaved like anything but her name. A few of her yawns were deliberate; the rest seemed genuine enough.
Violet was tying herself into tortured knots in a pathetic attempt to impress the girl. “Honest to God, I think it’s terrif’ about you went ta collidge. Even if you on’y specialized in gym. Ain’t that what you mean by P. E.?”
Sassy’s gray eyes reflected more boredom than amusement. “Yes. I majored in physical education.”
“Yeah, but along with that you had ta read up on other subjecks. I’m that same way. Books! Jeez, I read ‘em by the carload. Anything that has t’ do with education, or if it’s artistical, it makes me flip.” She reached over to squeeze Lon’s hand in a show of familiarity and Lon flinched.
Sassy Gregg broke her cool reserve to wink subtly and knowingly at Lon. Who smiled a vague response to the compliment, grateful that Sassy was not seeing them as a pair.
Violet chattered on, parading her concept of intellectuality, and the analytical eyes of the older girl veiled with a patronizing contempt. Lon turned her attention to Sassy’s friend. “Did you go to U.C.L.A. with Sassy?”
The colored girl spoke with a joyless calm. “No, we met this place I work. Used to come round, hear me play jazz piano. Come with ‘er fiance.”
Lon had missed the sparkle on Sassy’s powerful hand. “Oh, sure. She’s engaged.”
Mavis smirked. “Reason why escape me jus’ now.”
Lon
