Looking for a parking place, Travis said, “It means their girls dance entirely nude and that, during the dance, they spread their labia to show themselves more completely.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“My God. I don’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it-but I don’t believe it. What’s it mean-’Extreme Close-Up’?”
“The girls dance right at the customers’ tables. The law doesn’t allow touching, but the girls dance close, swinging their bare breasts in the customers’ faces. You could insert one, maybe two, but not three sheets of paper between their nipples and the men’s lips.”
In the back seat, Einstein snorted as if with disgust.
“I agree, fella,” Travis told him.
They passed a cancerous-looking place with flashing red and yellow bulbs and rippling bands of blue and purple neon, where the sign promised LIVE SEX SHOW.
Appalled, Nora said, “My God, are there other shows where they have sex with the dead?”
Travis laughed so hard he almost back-ended a carload of gawking college boys. “No, no, no. Even the Tenderloin has some limits. They mean ‘live’ as opposed to ‘on film.’ You can see plenty of sex on film, theaters that show only pornography, but that place promises live sex, on stage. I don’t know if they deliver on the promise.”
“And I don’t care to find out!” Nora said, sounding as if she were Dorothy from Kansas and had just wandered into an unspeakable new neighborhood of Oz. “What’re we doing here?”
“This is the place you come to when you’re trying to find things they don’t sell on Nob Hill-like young boys or really large amounts of dope. Or phony driver’s licenses and other counterfeit ID.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes, I see. This area is controlled by the underworld, by people like the Corleones in The Godfather.”
“I’m sure the mob owns more of these places than not,” he said as he maneuvered the Mercedes into a parking space at the curb. “But don’t ever make the mistake of thinking-the real mob is a bunch of honorable cuties like the Corleones.”
Einstein was agreeable to remaining with the Mercedes.
“Tell you what, fur face. If we’re real lucky,” Travis joked, “we’ll get you a new identity, too. We’ll make you into a poodle.”
Nora was surprised to discover that, as twilight settled over the city, the breeze off the bay was chilly enough for them to need the nylon, quilt-lined Jackets they had bought earlier in the day.
“Even in summer, nights can be cool here,” he said. “Soon, the fog rolls in. The stored-up heat of the day pulls it off the water.”
He would have worn his jacket even if the evening air had been mild, for he was carrying his loaded revolver under his belt and needed the jacket to Conceal it.
“Is there really a chance you’ll need the gun?” she asked as they walked away from the car.
“Not likely. I’m carrying it mainly for ID.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see.”
She looked back at the car, where Einstein was staring out the rear window, looking forlorn. She felt bad leaving him there. But she was quite certain that even if these establishments would admit dogs such places were not good for Einstein’s moral welfare.
Travis seemed interested solely in those bars whose signs were either in both English and Spanish or in Spanish only. Some places were downright shabby and did not conceal the peeling paint and the moldy carpeting, while others used mirrors and glitzy lighting to try to hide their true roach-hole nature. A few were actually clean and expensively decorated. In each, Travis spoke in Spanish with the bartender, sometimes with musicians if there were any and if they were on a break, and a few times he distributed folded twenty-dollar bills. Since she spoke no Spanish, Nora did not know what he was asking about or why he was paying these people.
On the street, searching for another sleazy lounge, he explained that the biggest illegal migration was Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan-desperate people escaping economic chaos and political repression. Therefore, more Spanish-speaking illegals were in the market for phony papers than were Vietnamese, Chinese, or those in all other language groups put together. “So the quickest way to get a lead on a supplier of phony paper is through the Latino underworld.”
“Have you got a lead?”
“Not yet. Just bits and pieces. And probably ninety-nine percent of what I’ve paid for is nonsense, lies. But don’t worry-we’ll find what we need. That’s why the Tenderloin doesn’t go out of business: people who come here always find what they need.”
The people who came here surprised Nora. In the streets, in the topless bars, all kinds could be found. Asians, Latinos, whites, blacks, and even Indians mingled in an alcoholic haze, so it seemed as if racial harmony was a beneficial side effect of the pursuit of sin. Guys swaggered around in leather jackets and jeans, guys who looked like hoods, which she expected. But there were also men in business suits, clean-cut college kids, others dressed like cowboys, and wholesome surfer types who looked as if they had stepped out of an old Annette Funicello movie. Bums sat on the pavement or stood on corners, grizzled old winos in reeking clothes, and even some of the business-suit types had a weird glint in their eyes that made you want to run from them, but it seemed as if most of the people here were those who would pass for ordinary upstanding citizens in any decent neighborhood. Nora was amazed.
Not many women were on the streets or in the company of the men in the bars. No, correct that: there were women to be seen, but they looked more lascivious than the nude dancers, and only a few of them seemed not to be for sale.
At a topless bar called Hot Tips, which had signs in both Spanish and English, the recorded rock music was so loud Nora got a headache. Six beautiful girls with exquisite bodies, wearing only spike heels and sequined bikini panties, were dancing at the tables, wriggling, writhing, swinging their breasts in the sweaty faces of men who were either mesmerized or hooting and clapping. Other topless girls, equally pretty, were witnessing.
While Travis spoke in Spanish with the bartender, Nora noticed some of the customers looking at her appraisingly. They gave her the creeps. She kept one hand on Travis’s arm. She couldn’t have been torn away from him with a crowbar.
The stink of stale beer and whiskey, body odor, the layered scents of various cheap perfumes, and cigarette smoke made the air as heavy as that in a steambath, though less healthful.
Nora clenched her teeth and thought, I will not be sick and make a fool of myself. I simply will not.
After a couple of minutes of rapid conversation, Travis passed a pair of twenties to the bartender and was directed to the back of the lounge, where a guy as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger was sitting on a chair beside a doorway that was covered by a densely beaded curtain. He was wearing black leather pants and a white T-shirt. His arms seemed as large as tree trunks. His face looked as if it had been cast in cement, and he had gray eyes almost as transparent as glass. Travis spoke with him in Spanish and passed him two twenties.
The music faded from a thunderous din to a mere roar. A woman, speaking into a microphone, said “All right, boys, if you like what you see, then show it-start stuffin’ those pussies.”
Nora twitched in shock, but as the music rose again, she saw what was meant by the crude announcement: the customers were expected to slip folded five- and ten-dollar bills into the dancers’ panties.
The hulk in black leather pants got off his chair and led them through the beaded curtain, into a room ten feet wide and eighteen or twenty feet long, where six more young women in spike heels and bikini panties were getting ready to take over from the dancers already on the floor. They were checking their makeup in mirrors, applying lipstick, or just chatting with each other. They were all (she saw) as good-looking as the girls out front. Some of them had hard faces, pretty but hard, though others were as fresh-faced as schoolteachers. All were the kind of women that men probably had in mind when they talked about girls who were “stacked.”