Cat In An Aqua Storm

The locker door bangs shut, leaving me in the dark lit only by the luminous strips of the locker vent. Talk about a slammer. The latch is on the outside, and three feet up. Discovery, I decide, is no longer my Waterloo, but my salvation.

14

Kitty City Nitty-Gritty

Temple lookedout from the cab at a windowless, bunkerlike cinderblock building whose only reason for existence seemed to be supporting the massive neon sign frame above it. Nothing was less glamorous than an unlit neon sign by daylight. The curved white-glass tubes that spelled out Kitty City looked dingy, and the cat shapes cavorting beside the name resembled ferrets.

Lindy wanted to pay the cabdriver, but Ruth wouldn’t hear of it. They spent a couple of minutes dividing the tab three ways, and Temple needed a receipt. The cabdriver was shaking his head and counting change by the time he watched them pussyfoot toward Kitty City.

Only a few vehicles dotted the asphalt parking lot—pickup trucks, a van or two, older coupes with their vinyl tops sun-blistered to a leprous peeling skin the color of a rusted orange.

Even from outside, Temple heard the brutal bass thump-thump-thump of a sound system at full throttle.

A canvas awning over the door featured a cat’s-eye graphic up front. The leering, green-eyed black feline face had none of Midnight Louie’s dignified intelligence, Temple thought somewhat smugly.

In the awning’s shade, Lindy pulled open a heavy, coffered door and moved into a blast of icy darkness throbbing with ear-piercing rock music.

Temple and Ruth followed, then stopped in the disorienting dimness, glimpsing clumped tables, the silver sheen of the obligatory slot machines and the glitter of a bar.

“It’s midday,” Lindy shouted. “Not too many customers. Come on.”

Leaning into the chill interior dusk and the wave of noise as if facing a north wind, Temple and Ruth followed Lindy to the relative haven of a table and chairs.

Temple exchanged her sunglasses for her regular glasses. As her vision adapted, she began to make out slim pale figures moving rhythmically in the darkness. One pranced on a low stage some twenty-five feet away, shadowed by her reflection in a semicircle of mirror behind her. Another was writhing around a chrome pole on the bar. Yet another danced on an empty table in the middle of the large room.

The scene reminded Temple of an Old Master’s evocation of a Renaissance Hell, especially when she inhaled and drew in the scent of stale smoke.

Gradually the room and its few inhabitants came into focus: men seated alone or in pairs at the scattered tables, and a glass-enclosed DJ’s booth above and left of the main, mirrored stage. True to the emblazoned but pallid TOPLESS! on the exterior sign, bare-breasted maidens writhed to the mind-numbing music on the various stages while a Big Mama of a giant-screen TV flickered images from a Western at the main stage’s right side.

A waitress wearing a long-sleeved French-cut black leotard whose bottom barely covered hers appeared from the dimness. A perky pair of cat—bat?—ears topped her brown shoulder-length hair. She had the fresh-faced appeal of a girl in a Clearasil TV ad after the medication had worked.

“Anything for you ladies to drink?”

Lindy ordered a screwdriver, Ruth passed, and Temple asked for a white wine spritzer, hoping that a wine buzz would help drown out the high-decibel rock music, not that one drink would do the job.

The dancers undulated in their own little worlds, cocooned in overpowering music. Some wore—shades of the long-gone sixties—white patent-leather boots. Others black high heels. Their G-strings were glitzy versions of thong-back bikini bottoms.

Temple didn’t know what your average red-blooded male mused upon when viewing this skimpy item of undress. She always wondered what kind of depilatory aid such scraps required, and how often. Did the women wax, pluck, shave, or simply napalm any offending body hair away?

After the waitress returned with the drinks, Temple insisted on paying for hers—and nearly choked to find out it cost six dollars. The wages of sinning, she guessed.

She was beginning to recognize patterns in the women’s movements—not the tried-and-true burlesque bump-and-grind announced by an emphatic drum roll, but a fluid undulation half belly dance and half sexual pantomime. Pelvises swiveled clockwise and counterclockwise. Arms lifted to show off torsos doing likewise. Bare breasts, less imposing than she had expected, pulsed like gentle molds of Jell-O to the motions.