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Snake Dancer
By
Robert F. Bradford
It was 1973, six years after the Summer of Love. We were all jaunty scarred veterans of the city by now.
I ran into Lulu, my downstairs neighbor, on the front steps. She invited me in for a smoke, and my antennae started quivering. It was a perfect autumn day, basking between the San Francisco summer fog and winter drizzle. Lulu was wearing a skimpy pink halter top and skimpier white short shorts. She looked unbalanced, with her colossal pudding-mold plastic breasts that didn't jiggle and her skinny dancer's butt.
She wasn't my type, to put it mildly, but ever since we'd met, she had provoked a series of the most intriguing and disturbing dreams.
"How come y'all quit playin' so early last night?" She still sounded like Lou'siana. "Damn, the boys were hot. And I swear your chick singer sings better than Janis."
Lulu was the ideal neighbor for an unsigned rock band whose studio was the living room above her head. I rarely got a chance to talk to her alone, though. She was usually surrounded by her menage: girlfriend Chris with her duck's ass haircut, who looked like somebody's handsome bashful kid brother but who fought like a man with fists and feet when she got drunk, and who ran the lights when Lulu did her snake dance at a North Beach strip club; Michael, Lulu's ex-husband, a long-haired photographer who dabbled in porn; and their gorgeous monstrous brat of a three-year-old daughter.
"Chris went groc'ry shoppin', and Michael" -- she pronounced it MAAH-kul -- "took the baby to the park. Is today Tuesday?"
It was. She sighed and took a baby mouse with its eyes still closed out of a little box and put it into a big box, where her six-foot boa constrictor, Kachina, lived when it wasn't onstage slithering around Lulu's undulating limbs and torso.
"That makes me feel icky," said Lulu, closing the cage, "but a girl's gotta eat. Well, sometimes I forget. I mean my meals, not Kachina's. 'Specially when I been chippin'. Would you believe some people say you can't chip heroin 'thout gettin’ hooked? Hunh! I been chippin' every day for five years, and I ain't got hooked yet."
But she didn’t invite me in just to chat; she wanted my advice.
"Do you know where we can find some kind of negligee that'll cover up the tattoos on Chris's arms, but show the rest of her? You ought to see her when she takes off her binder and puts on one of my wigs. We could turn some double tricks for big bucks."
I had no idea where to find such a thing, and what Lulu really wanted to tell me was:
"I got a new lover. A boyfriend. Just on the side. He's this tall handsome Japanese kid. I mean, he's really an American, not like one of them Japanese tourists. 'Course, I like them better than most Americans, 'cause they're clean and respectful and just happy to have a blonde with big tits. But he's a local kid. He's got this big motorcycle, and he takes me ridin' up and down the hills, and we go to his mother's house when she's at work. But Chris is gettin' suspicious. I told her he's a john, but she knows johns don’t ride motorcycles. What do you think?"
I thought she didn't really want my opinion. I thought she just wanted to brag. Of course, I was too polite to say so.
But after that, the dreams stopped.
Copyright © 2006 Robert F. Bradford
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