Whores for Gloria

12. Jack and Dinah

Those Tenderloin hotel rooms were havens, not just worlds into which the Vice Squad looked and listened, bugging the elevators of the Hotel Canada for instance as everybody was convinced, so that Dinah was well aware that someday, some night, she might look through her window and see across the alley into a wall of many windows, and behind one of those windows the curtains would be drawn a little back and there she would see two glowing green circles like cat's eyes; but they were in fact Laredo's detective night-eyes, serenely horrible in their electronic night-vision goggles that magnified her in their circles as Laredo spread the curtains apart with her hands, not smiling, not frowning, but faindy green-glowing from cheek to chin like rotten algae. . yes, this hotel room was a real home — although, it is true, it was not a home of luxury where people could go to lie down when they were sick and listen to the soothing hiss of the teakettle, to watch their can of soup boiling on the stove when they were hungry and cold; but it was a home none the less; it was what Dinah and Jack had. If Laredo had in fact been surveying through her binoculars the ugliness of the room in the hotel where Dinah and Jack lived, with nothing in it, hardly, but a bed and a dresser and bloody scraps of toilet paper, she might have thought what animals, and how horrible, and what else is new, and when do I go back to Hawaii, until Jack got up and reached behind the window and brought over a record. No record player was anywhere near. The record was a version of Chopin's Nocturnes. It was Jack's favorite thing in the world. He read the performance notes on the jacket (which he knew almost by heart) and slid the record out a little so that its glistening blackness caught the light and then he pushed it back with his thumb and set the album behind the window again.

Dinah lay naked on the bed. Her body smelled like Jimmy's sweat. Her cunt was full of Jimmy's come.

I get hard just looking at you, Jack said.

Are you, dear? laughed Dinah.

We might as well play hide the salami, said Jack.

Dinah laughed. She clicked her stiletto in and out. Jimmy had given it to her. — Yeah, I like this, she said. Know what? I'd get a motherfucker and say come on motherfucker get with it gimme all your money gimme all your goddamned money right now. — She laughed and laughed.

Would you stop that? yelled Jack. Stop laughing like some goddamned sheep!

Dinah laughed and popped her stiletto in and out.

You sure are nothing to fuck around with, said Jack, half-amused. You're getting high fuckin' with that knife. Your little thing is starting to juice up and shit. Why, you vixen!

Jack

Jack looked great, although he had scars. He didn't have junky ways. He just had a 3 cc syringe. Every morning he woke up to something like morning sickness and had to get his speedball right away, but he wasn't addicted. If he didn't shoot up, on the first day his body would say all right you motherfucker I'm gonna GET you, but on the second day he would be OVER it, man; he would be healthy as pie.

Dinah

Leroy and Laredo caught Dinah the next night. — That's how it goes, said Leroy. Just remember the game. Tonight you got caught.

So what? Dinah said.

Tomorrow night you'll probably get away with it, Leroy said.

I'm not worried about it, Dinah said.

They drove her down to the station now, where streetlights shone down upon the sidewalk, and all the police cars were very black and white and logical.

You know what I want? Dinah said. I want to go to school at the community college with girls who think the worst thing in life is when their mothers won't buy them a new blouse. — Because she was drunk, she cried easily. — There are worse things in life, she said, but I don't want to think about 'em anymore.

Laredo and Leroy didn't say anything. They had heard that before.