A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“I don’t think so,” she said without enthusiasm. “I saw one last night.”

“Do you want to have something to eat?” was my next proposal of entertainment.

“I had something just a little while before you came along,” she said to that.

I had nearly run out of suggestions by now. “Well, do you want to have a drink, then?”

This, for the first time, was met willingly. “Sure, if you want to yourself,” was the way she put it.

“The only trouble is,” I had to admit, “I’m new here. I don’t know where any of the speaks are.”

“I don’t know where the speaks are myself,” she said, making a distinction. “But I do know a place we could go.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Know what a gin-flat is?” she asked me in turn.

I thought I’d heard the expression before, but I wasn’t sure of the exact meaning.

“A friend of mine uses the place she lives, her own flat, to sell drinks in,” she explained. “She won’t admit strangers, that way she stays out of trouble, but if you know her you can get in.”

I wondered if it would cost very much. I didn’t say it aloud, but she seemed to read my mind.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said tactfully. “If you run out, I can always get credit there. We’ve known each other a long time.”

That sufficed, and we started out without further ado.

I no longer recall which streets we took to get there. All of San Fran was still so new to me that their names wouldn’t have meant anything anyway. I do remember that the flat- or apartment-building was situated at the intersection of two streets that came together at an angle instead of squarely. In other words the house was wedge-shaped. One of the two streets ran down the slope of a hill at a breakneck incline; the other was on the level.

We went in, rode up I think three floors in an automatic elevator, got out, and she pushed a doorbell. You could hear music and a welter of voices coming from the other side even before it opened. But toned down below the point of creating a disturbance.

It opened and a harridan of about fifty-five stood looking at us. There wasn’t a single personable quality about her to my twenty-one-year-old eyes. Her hair was as coarse as rope, and bleached to the same dirty color. She looked tough, she walked tough, and she talked tough. Even when she stood still, as she was doing now, she was tough standing still. She stood with one hip-joint thrown out of whack, and a hand planted on top of it.

“You,” she said to the girl who’d brought me. She flipped her head curtly. “Mon in,” she said. Then she said to her, “Wherej get the young one?”

The girl ignored that. She whispered to me, “Slip her a couple bucks. It costs a buck a head admission. Then after that you pay for the drinks as you get them.”

“You know the way,” the proprietress or whatever you’d call her said, and she turned aside into an open doorway and left the two of us on our own. She evidently didn’t mix with the paying customers. I caught a glimpse of a tall white refrigerator and a tabletop studded with empty carbonated-water bottles in there where she’d gone.

She’d taken the living-room of her Hat — or rather had had a carpenter do it for her — and knocked up a row of wooden partitions along one wall. Each little enclosure they formed held benches and a clamped-down table. They were all taken except one, down at the very end, and we slipped into that one. Next to us there was a party of four, two sailors and their girls, very noisy but good-natured about it. Then there was a girl wearing an orange dress with black polka-dots, farther down the line somewhere. I can still remember her; you could see that dress a mile away.

And that was about all there was to the place. A haggard waiter with one of these ineradicable subcutaneous blue beards and blue eye-pouches to match. A record-machine to play music, a cigarette machine so you could smoke, and the floor left bare so you could dance. Two baby-spots trained down on it from opposite corners, one swathed in red tissue-paper the other in blue, so you could have atmosphere.

I thought it was the cat’s pajamas, as they said at the time. I thought it was the bee’s knees. I thought this was living it up. At twenty-one you’re easily pleased.

So the evening began. The evening I never forgot all the rest of my life.

They played the songs that were hits that season — Moanin’ Low and Mean to Me and Tiptoe Through the Tulips, which Nick Lucas had introduced in one of the big musical movies that were just beginning to come out. Once we got up and danced, but I had never been a good dancer, and to my surprise I found out that she wasn’t either. I had always thought it was second nature to most girls. She was sort of rigid, hard to push around. After that we just sat there and let the gin do its work.