Pelican Tracks

2 Drink Minimum

  Drink Minimum Not often, and only when a double sawbuck rubbed its Jackson against your jeans, would you go straight from the late shift to Bourbon, lightbulbs racy around the Creole or the Tiger’s Den or the Gay Paree, where barkers flashed the front door on a sigh of thighs, a splitsecond chance at flesh. Back in the dark tier where you sat, the B-girls buzzed from tips to table, rows away from the raised stage, its blue spot fixed on flanks like pink siding, Maypole for a partner in the hump and sway. You chose a club too cheap for union scale, for those old farts blowing up a storm of stale airs; Top  s came crackling through the kinks of the low-tech speakers— a sass of saxophones smeared on the jailbait beat, or teen crooners pouring out their loneliness through the nose. At the limit of your own slim means, and the toll of entry so high, why suck on Jax or Dixie, both bottles gone warm at once, swaddled in sweat,  before the first even cleared your throat? You took two shots of Scotch, rocks and a thumb of hard water, pale and slippery as a bar of old soap on the tongue. Though rumors claimed these women, Sextana and Belle Bottom and Cherie la Femme, were all dykes in spiked heels and flame-retardant hair, who could watch them tease off layer after layer, a kind of onion arousal meant to resurrect the dead center of your dreams, and see nothing but a slow death in drag? In that spin of fringe from pasties taped to the nipple, and the hips strung down to a thin glitter like ice, and the grind of sharp shoes bracing a body that could put your eyes out, you got the point. Well after the stroke of midnight and the last stutter of drums, the drinks no more than memories in your marrow, you rose through smoke, through the sour slipstreams of heat, and found the streets now gleaming in a wet hiss of wheels, and heard behind you the catcalls rising, the dance still fanned by applause, steamed up like a rancor of sudden rain. ...