The huge illuminated Cinderella heel was blinking a few bulbs shy of a full deck above the
chipped entrance to the Silver Slipper Club at New York and Thirteenth. Congressman Slye and his latest Ecuadorian flame stumbled out the archway towards a waiting cab, nearly bowling over Elaine the exotic dancer.
“Well, I never,” she snarled, and then disappeared.
Elaine wasn’t feeling her best, having accepted a grilled cheese back at the Astoria from Ferret. That little sneak had brought the sandwich up from Cholo’s shop, but who knows where it really came from.
Slye burped, then gasped as Senator Hastings Marsh and Wanda the pinwheel-eyed reporter emerged from that same taxi.
“Why howdy, Congressman. Fancy meetin’ YOU down here–”
Then Marsh and the news girl dashed into the Slipper, showing no sign of reciprocal embarrassment. Backstage, Sopha, the Indo-Chinese “snake wriggler,” pulled Elaine aside.
“You don’t look so hot, honey,” she murmured, as the band struck up a perfunctory chorus of “Night Train.”
“Yeah, doll,” sighed Elaine, “but the show must go on.”
Elaine adjusted the polystyrene rosette at the center of her bustier, patted her nylon beauty mark, and took to the foot-candles with a wan smile. She shook her booty along with the phalanx of four other chorines. The red-faced men (Senator Marsh among them) laughed and clapped intermittently.
Outside, in the side alley entry, Jed Harris, sporting a fresh Curad on his right eyebrow,
where his head had impacted the dashboard of that dirty Lincoln in Mount Vernon Square, glanced about and pressed a wrinkled bill into the palm of Shorty the bouncer. “Marsh in dere,” he grunted.
Shorty nodded gruffly and pushed Harris into the bowels of the Slipper.
Meanwhile, Skipper Marsh was coasting in the general direction of Pinball Row, between the Rocket Room and Town Theater. Billy laid back in the shotgun seat, feeling mellow as could be, under the circumstance of being hooked up with this bodacious, unknown lady of distinctly major league origins–or so it seemed to him. “Where to, sire,” she inquired with a hearty chuckle.
“I bet you think I’m on the make, don’t you Lady,” said Billy.
“Call me Skipper,” she retorted. “Where d’you need to go, Mr. Luck.”
“Know the Silver Slipper Club?” was the reply.
Skipper pulled the Electra steering sharply to the right, and they turned the corner of
Thirteenth with a sharp squeal, and came to a halt beneath the marquee of the Silver Slipper. Billy just wanted to forget about the sleazy move his risky acquaintance Dio had tried to lay on him. His true love Elaine awaited him inside. “Should I come in, Billy, or what—?”
Billy rubbed his chin, then locked looks. “No, but you can check back at the Astoria
Rooms, if you like. I work downstairs, at Eve Books. He touched her face lightly, then moved back into the shadows. Skipper smiled ironically. A veritable Garden of Eden. She knew the joint. She had had similar experiences back home in Memphis, back in ‘Sixty-Nine!
(to be continued)
