Dawn Patrol

33

Yeah, she hangs, but that doesn't produce Tammy Roddick.

If Tammy is walking the streets of Ocean Beach, she's disguised as a wino, an old hippie, a middle-aged hippie, a young retro hippie, a white rasta dude with blond dreads, an emaciated vegan, a retired guy, or one of the dozen or so surfers waiting for the big swell to go off at Rockslide.

Petra talks to all of them.

Having established the point that she can talk to men, she feels obligated to do just that, and she gets a lot of useful information.

The wino (for two dollars) tells her that she has a lovely smile; the old hippie informs her that rain is nature's way of moistening the earth; the middle-aged hippie hasn't seen Tammy but knows a wonderful place for green tea; the young retro hippie hasn't seen Tammy, either, but offers to give Petra a Reiki massage to ease her obvious tension (and his). The white rasta guy knows exactly where Tammy is and will take Petra there for the price of a cigar, except that he describes Tammy as a five-foot-four blonde, while the vegan informs her that his clean diet makes his natural essences taste sweet, and the retired guy hasn't seen Tammy but offers to spend the rest of his life helping Petra look for her.

The surfers tell her to come back after the big swell.

“Guys will definitely talk to you,” Boone says when Petra tells him about her conversations. “No question.”

“And I suppose you, on the other hand, have produced a definite lead.”

Nope.

Nobody's seen anybody who looks like Tammy. Nobody on the street saw her leaving Angela's building. Nobody saw nothing.

“So now what do we do?” Petra asks.

“We go to her place of employment,” Boone says.

“I hardly think she's at work,” Petra snaps.

“I hardly think so, either,” Boone says. “But someone there might know something?”

“Oh,” Petra says. She looks at her watch. “But it's only two in the afternoon. Don't we want to wait until evening?”

“Strip clubs are open twenty-four/seven.”

“They are?” Petra says. Then: “Of course, I suppose you'd know.”

“Believe it or not,” Boone says as he gets back into the Boonemobile, “I really don't spend that much time in strip clubs. As a matter of fact, I rarely go to them at all.”

“Sure you don't.”

Boone shrugs. “Believe what you want.”

But it's the truth, he thinks. Strip clubs are interesting for about five minutes. After that, they're about as erotic as wallpaper. Besides which, the music is terrible and the food is worse. You'd have to be basically mentally ill to eat in a strip club anyway, “naked asses” and “buffet line” being two phrases that should never, ever, be matched in the same sentence. Guys who are coming off a prison hunger strike won't eat at a strip club unless they're actually brain-damaged.

Speaking of which, Hang Twelve had eaten like a starved baboon when they took him to Silver Dan's for his birthday. The kid scarfed the buffet like a vacuum cleaner, from one end of the table to the other.

“It's amazing,” said High Tide, no stranger to the sin of gluttony himself, watching him. “It's almost admirable, in a disgusting kind of way.”

“I feel like I'm watching something on the Nature Channel,” Dave said as Hang stacked a handful of luncheon meats on a Kaiser roll, spread a huge glob of mayonnaise over the meat, and started to eat with one hand while dipping a spear of broccoli into a tub of onion dip with the other.

“Animal Planet?” Tide asked.

“Yeah.”

“At least he's eating his vegetables,” Johnny said. “That's good.”

“Yeah?” Dave asked. “I wonder if he saw the guy that just had his hand on his package get to the broccoli first.”

“Over the jeans or under?” Johnny asked.

“Under.”

“God.” Then Johnny said, “He's going for the shrimp, guys. Guys, he's going for the shrimp.”

“I'll just dial 9-1-1 now,” Boone said. “That extra second could save his life.”

Hang came back to the table and set the heaping plate of food down. His goatee was festooned with crumbs, mayonnaise, onion dip, and some substance that nobody even wanted to try to identify. “Shrimp, anybody?”

They all passed. Hang consumed a couple of dozen shrimp, two huge sandwiches, some unidentifiable hors d'oeuvres that nobody even bothered to make the obvious pun about, twenty miniature pigs in a blanket (ditto), a pile of cottage fries, three helpings of Silver Dan's “pasta medley,” and some strawberry Jell-O with grapes (and God knows what else) floating around in it.

Then he wiped his chin and said, “I'm going back.”

“Go for it,” Boone said. “It's your birthday.”

“His last, ” Johnny said as they watched Hang work his way down the table again like a piece of machinery on a mass-production line.

“Over/under on the number of hairs he's swallowed?” Dave asked.

“Scalp or pubic?” asked Johnny.

“Forget it,” Dave said.

Hang came back to the table with a plate of food that would have dismayed a Roman orgiast. “Good thing I went back,” he said. “They put out fresh cheese.”

Boone looked at the fresh cheese. It was sweating.

“I need a little air,” he said.

But he hung in, staring at Hang Twelve with a mixture of awe and horror. The kid never came up to breathe; he just kept robotically shoveling food into his mouth as his eyes never left the stage. Hang's wholehearted devotion to free food and naked women was almost touching in its religiosity.

“We could get him a lap dance,” Dave suggested.

“Could kill him,” Tide said.

“But quickly,” Johnny said.

But none of the girls-any one of whom would have cheerfully ground her ass on Adolf Eichmann's crotch for twenty bucks-would go anywhere near Hang's lap.

“He's going to puke,” Tawny said.

“Puke?” Heather said. “He's going to erupt. ”

“Do you know there's a whole magazine devoted to that?” Dave said. “People who vomit to express their love? It's a whatchamacallit.

…”

“Mental illness,” Boone said.

“Fetish,” Johnny said. “And, Dave? Shut up.”

“I'm not going to puke,” Hang said through a mouthful of penne carbonara.

“What did he say?” Johnny asked.

“He said he's not going to puke,” Boone said.

“The fuck he isn't,” said a guy from the next table.

Tide instantly took up for Hang. “The fuck he is.”

“Here we go,” Boone said.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dave. “It's on.”

Yeah, it was. Ten minutes later, The Dawn Patrol (sans Sunny, who had adamantly refused to come and bought Hang an ice-cream cake instead) had five hundred and change on the table that Hang could consume another plate of food and keep it down for a period-established after a tough and bitter negotiation-of forty-five minutes. A number of side bets bypassed that issue altogether and focused on which would come up first, the shrimp, the penne, or the cheese.

“I have fifty on the cheese,” Johnny confided to Boone as Hang was devouring his third plate of buffet food.

“You have seventy-five that he's not going to throw up at all,” Boone said.

Johnny said, “I'm trying to make some of it back.”

“You think he's going to yank?”

“You don't?”

Well, yes, but you have to take up for your guy.

The next hour made its way into San Diego strip club lore as everyone in the entire club-horny guys, plain degenerates, sailors, marines, bartenders, waitresses, bouncers, and naked women-stopped what they were doing to observe a twenty-one-year-old soul surfer struggle to keep the contents of his bloated stomach right there in his stomach. Even Dan Silver took a break from counting money in his office to check out the scene.

Boone watched as Hang's face turned a little green and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. Hang shifted in his chair; he reached down and touched his toes. He took deep breaths-at Johnny's suggestion, based on two trips to the labor room with his wife-he panted like a dog. At one point, he let out an enormous belch…

“No vomit, no vomit,” High Tide quickly said as several of the official judges looked closely at the front of Hang'sJERRY GARCIA IS GOD T-shirt.

Hang managed to, well, hang.

The crowd counted down the entire last minute. It was a triumph, a ticker-tape parade, New Year's Eve in Times Square with Dick Clark as half of the onlookers counted the numbers and the other half chanted, “Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve…”

Hang's face shone with victory.

Never before in his life had he been the object of this much attention; he had never won anything, certainly never won a lot of money for himself or other people. He had never been the hero, and now he was. He was glowing, accepting the pats on the back, the congratulations, and the shouts of “Speech, speech, speech.”

Hang smiled modestly, opened his mouth to speak, and spewed trajectory vomit all over the innocent bystanders.

Johnny won his initial bet, plus the fifty on the cheese.

It was the only even semi -fun time that Boone had ever spent in a strip club.

But if Tammy were a nurse, he thinks, we'd be going to the hospital; if she were a secretary, we'd be going to an office building. But she's a stripper, so…

“You don't have to come,” he tells Petra, praying she'll take him up on the bailout offer.

“No, I want to.”

“Really, it's pretty sleazy,” Boone says, “especially in the daytime.”

If a strip club at night is tedious, in the daytime it's the birth of the blues-third-string strippers grinding halfhearted “dances” to a mostly empty room scarcely populated with lonely alcoholics coming off graveyard shifts, or horny losers figuring (wrongly) they have a shot with the C-team girls.

It's horrible, and, annoyed as he is with Petra's type A bullshit, he still wants to spare her the full hideousness.

She's having none of it.

“I'm going with you,” she insists.

“There won't be any male strippers,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “I still want to go.”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” she asks.

“Look,” Boone says, “there's nothing wrong with it. Personally, I think that-”

Petra's eyes widen.

Totally striking. Amazing.

“Oh, ‘Oh,’” she says. “I understand. Just because I'm immune to your Neanderthal anticharm, you jump to the conclusion that I therefore just have to be-”

“You're the one who wants to go to a-”

“On business!”

“I don't know why you're getting so worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you were this politically correct-”

“I am.”

“Look, around here it's all good,” Boone says. “I'll bet half the women I know… well, not half, okay, a tenth anyway… of the women I know play for the other-”

“I do not play for…” Petra says. “It's none of your business whom I play for.”

“For whom I play,” Boone says, correcting her. “Dangling… uh

…”

“Preposition,” she says.

Otherwise, she doesn't talk to him the whole way to the strip club.

Which makes him wish he'd thought up the lesbian thing a lot sooner.