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BOY OR GIRL?

david mckenna


��Shanks looks north and south for methedrine as the stars come out. Bob Dylan is at Broad and Snyder, scrounging for butts in the gutter. Miles Davis is at 52nd and Market, sparring with an imaginary foe. Iggy Zeitz is nowhere to be found, though the chubby fellow in the Boot ‘n’ Saddle looks even more like Henry Kissinger than Iggy does.
��Kissinger stops haranguing the bartender and starts in on Shanks, who listens politely. America needs a great man to strike a balance of power in the post-Cold War era. Someone with an instinct for distinguishing between the permanent and the tactical. A Richelieu, supremely realistic, with an aversion to moralizing and a talent for adapting to adversity.
��“Yes,“ Shanks says, “but where’s the meth? Iggy promised to hold some for me.“
�� The pudgy policy wonk eyes him coldly through horn-rimmed glasses. “Every choice has a price,” he croaks, shoving Shanks. “Great men do not make favorable assumptions about the future.”
��Kissinger is Iggy’s brother Milton, the one who was a tail-gunner in World War II. Iggy is back in stir, nailed last week by narcs posing as methheads.
��“Ve have Grade-A her-on, but no methedrine,” Milton explains, waving him off. “Balance must be restored.”
��Shanks strikes out at every dive on Broad Street. No meth or even bootleg Beauties. Donna Summer is vamping in the Terminal Lounge. She’s got cocaine, a waste compared to meth, even when not cut with baby power or something worse. Good for a nervous buzz that never blossoms to a full-blown high. Coke is like almost getting laid.
��Shanks is tall and bent like a preying mantis. Donna sits him down on a barstool and plops a big black hand on his skinny thigh. “I got sumpin’ make you forget that fairy dust.”
��Chin stubble peeks through her heavy makeup. “An incurable disease?” Shanks says, backing away from the bar.
��“Don’t be such a fag, hon.”
��It’s a long drive home to Atlantic City. He cat-naps at the wheel and dreams of sex and food, like an amputee feeling pain where his leg used to be. Chastity is pregnant by some Puerto Rican who looks good in spandex and can juggle three butcher knives and a basketball. Swifty, the bartender/lifeguard, caught the Virus and has to be wheeled down to the beach to watch the ocean.
��Sickness breeds resolution. He’ll quit the A.C.-Philly loop. Look sharp and live large. Sunbathe on volcanic ash in Costa Rica. Eat kangaroo pizza baked in ovens fueled by brush from the outback. Find the beach on Cyprus where Aphrodite was born out of the sea’s foam. It’s just up ahead. He can smell the salt air. A group of pale swimmers is testing the waters. The clifftop tavern is crowded. Andreas, the innkeeper, beckons him with a backgammon board.
��The usual suspects on Pacific Avenue are holding only heroin. His casino sources are no help. Roger the floorperson hanged himself and Vincent the bookish bartender has been missing for weeks. If all else fails, he’ll try Bad Sal.
��Don Rickles is in Avalon’s main bar, pointing at a scrawny, four-eyed porter struggling with a huge bag of ice. “Look, it’s Woody Allen’s son!” Everyone laughs. It really is Rickles, on his way to perform in the upstairs theater where Chastity met her juggler. Shanks, tired from the hunt, orders a double bourbon and watches Woody dump ice into a steel sink. Booze will do till he finds a better parachute.
��His apartment is a stone’s throw from TropWorld. He finds a half-bottle of Jack Daniels and, after a ferocious search, a single 10-milligram Valium. Just in time. It feels like he’s been flayed and rolled in a bed of salt. He slumps at the kitchen table and lets the elegant blue pill dissolve in his knotted gut. The drug courses through him, numbing a billion neurotransmitters. A bomb in Gilead. He flutters like an apple blossom, reading People magazine, humming his grandmom’s favorite hymn.
��Now he’s strolling in the parade, in a pink crushed velvet and white lace dress, holding hands with Reba, his mother, and her friend Flo, wearing three pounds of dried flowers on her head. The baby’s breath is his favorite. It’s Reba’s Easter joke; only the three of them know. Last year, Shanks won the Pre-School Girls prize. Reba says he’ll be a star someday.
��The promenade becomes a stampede. The bassets shake off their baskets and bonnets. Synchronized skaters collide and fall. Musicians scramble up church steps. Shanks slips in just ahead of the slamming door. Rampaging bikers use a phone pole for a battering ram. The church echoes and shakes with each attempt at forced entry. Shanks dips his long, slender fingers into holy water and says a prayer to St. Theresa.
��The rhythmic thudding shifts to the ceiling, then smacks him in the chest. He lifts his head from the table and reaches for more bourbon, awed by the force of the collisions. It’s Bad Sal, in the bedroom above, with one of his whores. Sal’s headboard is banging against the bedroom wall and shaking the flimsy seashore house to its foundations. The noise continues for anywhere from ten minutes to two hours. When it stops, Shanks hears a door slam and the clatter of high heels on wood stairs.
��Discretion is essential. The landlord has two sons, Bad Sal and Good Sal. Bad Sal, his son by a woman he never married, is mortal enemies with the landlord’s wife and with Good Sal, the son he had with his wife. Bad Sal is in constant trouble with the law, but the landlord’s wife can’t persuade her husband to make Bad Sal move out. The landlord, ever eager to divert blame, will evict Shanks in a second if he finds him socializing with Bad Sal.
��Shanks creeps upstairs and asks Bad Sal if he’s holding. Bad Sal washes down a handful of blue Valiums with a beer and belches. “All I had was a few tens.”
��It’s an emergency for Bad Sal too. His girls can’t make money fast enough to feed his $200-a-day heroin habit. He owes every white dealer on the island. Shanks drives him to Kentucky Avenue. They hail a black guy called Sugar Pop. Bad Sal does the talking. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with his greasy hair in a ponytail. Snow flurries swirl around him in the T-Bird’s headlights. Shanks can feel himself wasting away, but Bad Sal radiates greatness. Conan the Barbarian with needle marks.
��Sugar Pop directs them to the Boardwalk. Bad Sal commiserates with E-Ram outside the Serene Custard and Golf, then pulls Shanks aside. “We’re in business if you front me.”
��The Valium has worn off. Shanks is shivering. His belly muscles coil like razor wire. He hands Bad Sal a wad of bills. “Get me something will take the edge off.”
��Bad Sal snaps his fingers and fidgets. “Boy or girl?”
��A challenge. Shanks retreats to a tin-roofed Caribbean hotel, to watch green fields of sugar cane roll to the sea. A pink sun is setting. Dinner is served: melon sweetened with Madeira, swordfish filet, lemon sorbet. Over coffee, Johnny Mathis invites him to spend the night at a gray-shingled mansion with manicured gardens.
�� Bad Sal repeats the question. Boy is an opiate, girl is meth. Bad Sal, like Milton, contemns stimulants and anyone who favors them. He says meth makes him flutter his eyelids and chatter like a canary.
��Shanks says, “Boy.”
��Money and product change hands. E-Ram slips away after engaging Bad Sal in an elaborate handshake. Bad Sal leads Shanks off the boards to a dim motel and unlocks the door of a unit that smells like sex and seaweed. He has six rock-hard pellets. Shanks wants to crush one and snort it, but Bad Sal pooh-poohs him. “You’d puke for three days.”
��Bad Sal uses water, spoon and butane lighter to cook up a pellet, then draws some of the liquid into a syringe. Shanks wraps a rose-colored stocking around his upper arm and pulls it tight. Bad Sal steadies Shanks’ bony forearm, pokes it, pulls blood into the syringe, pushes everything into the vein. The thumping resumes. Shanks huddles with Reba on the marble floor in the vestibule. The Best-Dressed Family tramples him. His petticoat rips. There, there, she says as the battering ram slams his chest.
��Shanks lets go the stocking, exhales and nods. Bad Sal shoots up on the sofa. The door opens and one of his girls enters with a middle-aged john. Their progress is blocked by Shanks, on hands and knees, gasping.
��The girl stops chewing her gum and looks at Bad Sal, who says, “I think he likes you, Meg.”
��They laugh. Shanks gulps air. “I can’t breathe.”
��The john says, “It’s indigestion.”
��“Drink some baking soda and lie down,” Meg suggests.
��Sal says, “Take a Bromo, wake up a homo.”
��Shanks staggers out the door toward the boards. Invisible blows to the midsection double him over. It’s an unusually cool night for the islands. He hikes past palm-shaded bungalows, among red gum and bastard apricot trees, breathing the sea breeze, anticipating warm beige sand and turquoise waves at daybreak. Dustin Hoffman is rooting through a trash bin on the outskirts of the mangrove swamp. Shanks would pump him for tips on breaking into the biz, but he’s shy.
��At least it’s not high season. He can stroll the golf course to the mansion, with its oval swimming pool and sculpted hedges, or hike a dirt road to the knobby hills and watch the sun rise. With any luck, the custard stand will be open by then. Just the thing for indigestion.



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