Ladies' Man Read Free

thrill crazy.
     
    We arrived at Fantasia just about four o'clock. The sun had begun to go down about three and it was as cold as a snowball's ass. Even though they didn't take sign-ups until five there were already about ten of us yo-yos in what looked like a bread line. Everybody was hunched down into winter coats, hands in pockets, faces pinched in pain. We got on the end and watched everybody on Third Avenue watch us. La Donna was wearing a big fur coat and too much make-up. She held a manila folder between her elbow and ribs containing a 8-by-10-inch studio picture of her dressed in a Suzie Wong side-slit number with la donna printed below the photograph in bamboo letters. She also had a letter of recommendation from Tony Randall, the story behind which kept changing every time I heard it.
    "Well, you know, if you don't believe in yourself, if you don't have confidence in yourself, nobody else will."
    "Oh, I have confidence in myself."
    Some black kid standing in front of us in aviator glasses and a long coat with a fake fur collar was lecturing to a blond chubby teen-ager carrying sheet music for "September Song."
    "I believe in myself. I really do." The blond kid sounded like he was trying to convince the jury. The black kid seemed skeptical, arching his eyebrows with self-importance like He Really had self-confidence. I slipped my hand under La Donna's collar, grabbing the nape of her neck. "You got self-confidence?" ' She hissed and turned her head away. No sense of humor.
    "I'm gonna smoke, okay?"
    "I'm not your mother," she said, still looking away.
    I dropped my hand from her neck.
    "Why don't you get fuckin' Tony Randall to stand on line with you?" That I muttered to myself.
    In front of the two kids, an older guy in a gravy-colored raincoat was leaning against the building. He was short, fiftyish, blubberized and toupeed. His nervous darting wall-eyes made Peter Lorre look like a squinter. Every time a cab honked he" started blinking in spasms. In front of him, two other guys were talking. One guy was tall, dressed in baggy chinos and a lightweight dungaree jacket. He had the longest, pointiest head I'd ever seen; it was shaped like a slip-on pencil eraser. His hairline began a good two inches above his temple as if his hair had been glopped on like whipped cream on Jell-O. He wore bottle-bottom glasses, the heavy black frames held together with rubber bands at the joints, and his elevator forehead was sprinkled with pimples. The guy he was talking to looked like Rasputin's dwarf—a Mad Russian. About five feet even, scrawny, dressed in a pea coat, he was balding but combed his hair forward in sparse bangs over his eyes like Moe of the Three Stooges. He held one arm across his gut supporting the elbow on the other arm, which was slowly stroking a goatee that looked more like a collection of long chin hairs than a beard. As the guy with the glasses talked, the Mad Russian kept massaging his chin and staring up at him with hungry gleaming eyes as if trying to figure out how to knock out that big turkey so he could cook him in a pot.
    "I—I feel kinda good today." He had a meek voice. "I wrote a new joke. My cousin is so dumb"—he pushed his glasses up his nose—"my cousin's so dumb he had to take a color-by-number course in graffiti."
    The Mad Russian didn't laugh, only smiled wolfishly licking his lips and rhythmically tugging his chin hairs.
    The comic shrugged, embarrassed. "I don't know, I kinda like it, and I also picked up this." He took a switchblade out of his back pocket, shook it in front of his face and out snapped a comb. The fat popeyed guy jumped, but nobody noticed. He started combing his bird's nest as if to illustrate further that it really wasn't a knife.
    La Donna stared at all of them, horrified and ashamed. She looked like she was ready to walk. I felt sorry for her and put my hand on the back of her, neck again, but she shook it off. A hefty-looking Jewish chick emerged from a taxi,