Opening Acts

  *** ***

  The Bau Bau room was in an unlovely part of downtown, near a lot of check-cashing places and liquor stores and greasy pizza joints and a few weird remnants of Felport's rusty industrial past: a machine shop, a small-engine repair company, and a place that sold chemicals.

  Marla found the ugliness comforting and familiar. With a name like The Bau Bau Room she hadn't exactly expected something swanky, but she'd worried.

  The club occupied one bottom corner of a squat three-story building with offices above, mostly for the kind of lawyer who advertises on late night TV, though there was also a private detective, which Marla found sort of interesting. She'd only read about such people, never met one, though she suspected reality would diverge from fiction pretty swiftly if she ever did.

  It was only about noon, but the front door of the place was unlocked, so she pushed her way in.

  The Bau Bau Room owed a lot to red velvet. Red velvet walls, red velvet booths, even ratty red velvet on the bar stools, worn through in places by years of prolonged ass-contact. There were a few booths against the walls and lots of small round tables crowded around the clear focal point of the room: a hexagonal stage with mirrors on the wall behind it and a vertical metal pole in the center. Marla had never been inside a strip club before, but she knew one when she saw it, even sans strippers.

  She hesitated, almost walked away, then thought of Jenny, all clean and together and unscarred, and went toward the bar.

  A middle-aged bald guy with a bushy mustache and a diamond earring leaned on the bar flipping through a newspaper. "We're not open yet," he said, then glanced up at her. "And you're too young to drink anyway. Beat it." He went back to his paper.

  Marla sat on the stool in front of him. "Are you Rollo?"

  He looked up from the paper again, this time more carefully. "You don't look like a process server, but to be on the safe side, who wants to know?"

  "Jenny sent me."

  "Who the fuck is Jenny?"

  That was not encouraging. "Jenny Click. Blonde, kind of skinny, long nose" - was that unkind? - "she said she got a job here a while - "

  "Right, firebug Jenny, sure." He looked at Marla more closely, then shook his head. "Shit. How old are you?"

  "Eighteen," Marla said promptly. Only a lie by 18 months or so. And she knew she could pass for older if called upon.

  Rollo wasn't buying it though. He shook his head. "You got ID?"

  "Not with me."

  "Not anywhere, more like it, or if you do it's a lousy fake. But if you're friends with Jenny, you probably can't afford a fake ID. That kind of stuff's for the rich north side kids, or the suburban ones. But, okay, maybe we can work something out. You want to work here?"

  "If the money's right."

  He snorted. "A waitress job, you get about half of minimum wage and whatever tips you can hustle. You can make more dancing, but we're full up right now."

  Marla shook her head. "That's fine. I'm not much of a dancer."

  "It's more, you know, undulating than actual dancing, but anyway. Okay, waitress it is, if you qualify. Let's see 'em."

  Marla frowned. "See what?"

  "Your tits, hon. You can learn how to carry a tray full of drinks and make change, but good tits can't be taught."

  Marla nodded thoughtfully. "So the waitresses are topless, too."

  "The dancers are more than topless, eventually, but, yes."

  Rollo didn't seem particularly interested in leering at her. He seemed to mostly wish she would go away. "No touching, right?"

  "What, from me, or the customers? From me, no. From the customers, no, not in theory. Sometimes somebody might get grabby, you just catch the bouncer's eye and we toss him out. Maybe you think you can make like a private arrangement with a customer, but the management frowns on that kind of freelancing. Now show 'em or go apply for a job at McDonald's, would you?"

  There was a perverse pleasure in the thought of taking money from drunken assholes - she assumed that would describe the clientele, imagining a roomful of men like her mother's innumerable boyfriends - and knowing a bouncer would toss them out if they dared to touch her.

  Marla lifted up her shirt.

  Rollo squinted, nodded, and said, "All right, you'd get better tips if they were bigger, but you're, what, sixteen, seventeen? Nobody's exactly gonna complain. And you're not so skinny I can see your skeleton, which was the main thing I worried about. We made Jenny go eat cheeseburgers and milkshakes for a week and come back when we couldn't count her ribs anymore."

  "So I'm hired?"

  "Come into the back room for a minute, and you will be."

  "I'm not fucking you," Marla said.

  "That's for sure. I prefer sleeping with women old enough to know their way around a little. Come on." He came around the bar and led her to an unmarked door near the back wall, then led her into the backstage area, where there were chipped vanity mirrors, cardboard boxes full of high heels and feather boas and miscellaneous bits of underwear, and a row of gray lockers. Beyond that was another door, with a cardboard sign reading "Office" tacked into the center. The room beyond was surprisingly spacious, furnished with dented filing cabinets and a big desk covered in paper clutter.

  Rollo opened a closet and took out a camera on a tripod, then tacked a dark blue cloth up on the wall.

  "Oh," Marla said. "You're making me a fake ID."

  "Gotta have ID on file for you, and since you don't have your own…" He shrugged. "The cops don't bother us much, but every once in a while somebody comes down and wants to see our records."

  "I can't pay for this," Marla said.

  "So no money up front, and we'll take it out of your earnings, all right? And you'll be able to buy your own booze afterward."

  Marla didn't drink much. She could rarely afford to have her faculties blurred. "How much will it cost?"

  Rollo shook his head. "You are one cautious kid. Tell you what, we'll call it half the tips you make tonight, okay?"

  Marla nodded. She was having a hard time seeing how one went from serving drinks topless to being detoxed and scar-free and apparently happy like Jenny was, but this didn't seem the time to ask.

  She stood for the camera, trying to "Look bored like you're at the DMV" as Rollo suggested. He took down her name and birthdate - "We'll just change the year" - and height and weight, and made her fill out some employment forms "Come back at 7, I'll get this laminated for you, and one of the other waitresses will show you the ropes. Not literally the ropes. It's not that kind of club. Don't fuck up tonight and you can come back tomorrow. Okay?"

  "Sure," Marla said. Then, after a moment's thought: "Thanks."

  "Thank Jenny," Rollo said. "You hadn't dropped her name, I'd have kicked you out the door on your ass."