Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Read Online Free Page A

water. Naomi was restive at the Humbles. She went off to class in the morning (after Professor Humble had led the three of them in a long twisting labyrinth of prayer and a long march through the Book of Deuteronomy), wearing the requisite shapeless brown dress, and took a detour to a drugstore on Selby Avenue and bought a pack of smokes. She took off the brown dress, under which she wore a red dress with a swooping neckline, and she made the rounds of the gin mills along the avenue, Costello’s and Schmutterer’s and Nina’s and the Common Good Cocktail Lounge, and strolled through each one with a tin cup and sang “She Is More to Be Pitied Than Censured,” draping an arm around the drunks and letting them breathe on her, and earned enough money to buy herself breakfast and lunch and a couple of non-Christian novels. She liked to roost in a luncheonette at Grand and Lexington, sit in a back booth and eat apple fritters, and pore over Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler and Anita Loos (“Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse”) and was spotted one day by a fellow student who ratted on her, and she was hauled off to Chapel, where the entire student body gathered to pray for her soul, after which she was asked to repent, which she declined to do.
    “You preach about love, but none of you has enough warmth in you to melt snow,” she cried. “I don’t know how much of the Bible is true and how much is just a bad dream, but I do believe that if Jesus lived in St. Paul, he wouldn’t be sitting around in this school of sanctimony congratulating himself on what a nice person he is. He’d be walking up and down Selby Avenue just like I do.”
    And she marched out of Chapel and never returned, and when I met her three years later, she was dancing seven nights a week at the Kit Kat Klub near the Union Depot, a murky after-hours joint that catered to barge hands and railroad men who needed to get hammered and look at bare skin and shove dollar bills in the dancers’ underwear. The Folies Bergère it was not. Most of the dancers were long past prime and starting to sag, and Naomi was fresh-faced and perky and bouncy and she reminded those old galoots of girls they wished they had dated in high school and there she was doing the Hitchhiker in a sequinny G-string with smiley-face stickers on her nipples that she peeled off, and concluded her performance by tossing the G-string into the crowd. I took a fatherly interest in her and protected her from Dave the comedian (“Hey, who wants to see my tits????”)
and Jervis the manager, who liked to stroll into the dressing room without knocking, and
the mouth breathers who hunkered up close to the footlights, gaping at her, stuffing ten-dollar bills into her butt crack. The crisp new bills scratched her there, and she sometimes asked me to apply Vaseline to the affected area, which I did, respectfully, in a brisk businesslike manner, taking no liberties. I always bought her a beer after her shift and advised her on career matters—she wanted to become an actress and get into the movies—and I persuaded her to enroll at the University of Minnesota, and helped with her tuition, and I fended off her ex-boyfriends who hung around in the alley, pining. I told them, “She’s moving on, fellows, so wish her well and count yourselves lucky to have known her and now get the hell out of here.” She graduated from the U
magna non troppo
and I attended the ceremony and took her to dinner at Vescio’s and urged her to apply for the Mary Magdalene fellowship at St. Kate’s, and she did, and eventually she sort of drifted away, as so many do when they get a Ph.D.
    She quit stripping and joined the women’s studies department at the university and wrote a book,
Post-Masculine Dimensions,
in which she held my gender responsible for all human suffering—MENtal illness, MENstrual cramps, disappointMENt, MENopause, HISterectomies, MALEvolence, ballistics, penal colonies,