Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Read Online Free Page B

dictators, prickly heat, et cetera. I bought ten copies and subscribed to
Estrogen Times
and read the articles she wrote, and a few years later I got an e-mail:
Guy darling, it’s your old friend from burlesque days (remember me?).
I did remember her, the way you’d remember the Washington Monument if you ever saw it lit up at night, or the French Quarter if you’d been lit up yourself.
I live over in Minneapolis now, near Dinkytown, and I have a problem. Could you help?
    I met her at Al’s Breakfast Nook, and she was stunning as ever, though she wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a black pinstripe suit to mute her allure. She missed the old life, she said: the smell of cheap gin and cigars, the gutbucket music, the grunts and whoops, and the rank odor of men in rut. “I felt empowered by showing my body to men. I felt no shame whatsoever. The power a girl has when she dares to undress is breathtaking. All those sad old faces turned up toward me in dazed wonderment as if they’d never seen a bare breast before, let alone a matched pair, and those gnarly hands reaching up for the flying G-string, and that look of transfiguration when I showed them what they had hoped to see. I felt so
iconic.
I fed their dreams. I gave them a beautiful sense of self-worth that they could carry back to the switchyards and endure the cold wind off the river and the back-breaking work of loading boxcars and barges. I feel deracinated in academia. Uprooted. And the pay is miserable. How can a person live on thirty grand a year unless you’re a nun? I want to ride first-class on the California Zephyr to San Francisco and stay at the Huntington and have oysters and champagne for breakfast and sleep on Egyptian sheets with a fabulous thread count and have someone bring me coffee in the morning and a massage in the afternoon!”
    Sitting over breakfast with her, I realized that my feelings for her were no longer paternal. I had fallen in love,
boom
, like an anvil dropping from a tree.
    I could take care of the coffee,
I thought.
And the massage. And I could sleep next to you and keep you from falling out of bed.
    The problem she wished me to solve had to do with her boyfriend, a novelist (unpublished) named Scott Marigold who believed that someone was scheming to steal his work and so he wrote in code, and now he’d forgotten the code, and he was bereft and had lost all interest in life, and would I please find a cryptographer who could decipher the work? She showed me a line:
    BIQ SUATRO MEECH KWERTY NISK REMPLON NAMLEREP TRIXLY SWISK THEBBRILIP PO ENNER SKWILM.
    “Child’s play,” I said. “This passage here,
Biq suatro meech kwerty,
and so forth, means ‘She had big bazooms, and I loved it when she spread peanut butter on them and knelt over me and whopped them upside my head.’”
    “Really? That doesn’t sound like Scott.”
    “It’s what he wrote.”
    “How could you figure it out so fast?”
    “I’m a savant. No social skills and I’ve never been able to win the love of a real woman, but I’m a whiz with complex puzzles.”
    She put her hand on mine and said, “Oh, Guy—”
    I said, “Don’t worry about me, darling, I’m glad you’re happy. Really.”
    “I didn’t say I was happy.” Big tears in her eyes. “I think Scott has found someone else. We have sex and I say ‘Thank you’
and he says ‘No problem.’
Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?”
    I nodded. A man who’s just had sex with Naomi should be breathless, stunned, astonished, singing “My Way” in French.
    “I wish he’d say ‘It was my pleasure’
or ‘I love you’
or ‘On a scale of one to ten, that was a nine-point-five’
—
anything but ‘No problem.’
‘No problem’
is what the carry-out boy at the Super Valu says when you thank him for loading the groceries into your trunk. I am not a bag of groceries, am I?”
    We said good-bye, and she clung to me for a long, wonderful moment. “I need you, Guy,” she said. I