The five best pinball wizards in the Broadway amusement center were gathered around Sean, as he slammed the front of the 'KISS’ machine with his groin and bumped the legs with his thighs. None of them had ever seen anyone play with much intensity and they nodded appreciatively each time the scoreboard tocked another free game. Sean was on a roll, then the arcade’s front door opened for a frigid draft and a deathly thin player commented, "Damn, one of them Minnesota girls has come in from the cold."
"She’s heading this way,” a young boy in a thin jacket stated anxiously and an older voice said, “Man, she’s a twin for that teenage slut from TAXI DRIVER.”
“A little redhead?” Sean asked, as the steel ball blurred between the top bumpers for several seconds before diving toward the death zone only to have him save the impossible ball with a deft flick of the flippers.
“You have eyes in the back of your head, mister?”
“No, ESP.” Tammi’s reflection was framed in the glass scoreboard and she had reincarnated Jodi Foster’s carnal role in Martin Scorcese’s film right down to the cheap spandex sheath and a ratty rabbit fur jacket. “She's with me."
“Lucky with pinball, lucky with the ladies,” the young boy said with envy.
“Hey, Sean. You ready?” Tammi asked from behind him.
Neither man nor machine could resist her power tonight and the ball caromed off a side-panel to scorch through his double-flipper defense into the death hole. Sean slammed the glass top and Tammi asked innocently, "Did I do that?"
”No, the game did it itself.” Sean stared at her eyes and noticed that they varied in color; one green and the other an agate brown with gold flecks. Her eyelids were smeared with a vivid red shadow and a smear of maroon glistened on her lips to accentuate her new hair color. She was trying to look older than her years, but subtracting the cosmetics he figured that she had been born during his second year of grade school which was the year of JFK’s victory over Nixon.
"I-I-I almost hit a million." Sean stepped away from the machine upset by her interference.
"If you want to spend the rest of the night with a pinball machine instead of me, knock yourself out?" Tammi clumsily shifted her weight to one hip and nearly toppled off the towering platform shoes.
“No, I came her for you and I’m leaving with you.” Sean gestured for the young boy to finish his remaining games and exited from the amusement center with Tammi.
“How was your night?” His leather jacket needed a lining against the cold wind.
“Spending eight hours as bait in a crab pit isn’t much fun, but I made good money and that’s what the Dollhouse is all about making money.” She hooked her arm with his. A woman on her own was a target on the Strip and even well past 2am Times Square wasn’t ready to call it a night.
Men were crowding into a nearby theater featuring the hit XXX film BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR and a pimp strutted across Broadway with two ladies in skimpy silks. Tammi shut her borrowed fur jacket with a shiver.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Tammi shut her borrowed fur jacket with a shiver.
“There’s not another place like it in America.” Boston’s Combat Zone was a Boy Scout jamboree in comparison. A pair of purse snatchers were eying the redhead and Sean lifted the bass over his shoulder. They moved away to seek easier prey
“We better take a taxi to my place.” Sean should have stuck the teenager on a bus back home, but he told himself that GTH needed a lead singer. It was an easy lie to believe after having seen her naked tonight.
“Where’s the Sharkmobile?” Tammi had felt safe in the Olds 88.
“It disappeared two nights ago.” Sean walked toward 42nd Street and Tammi struggled to keep pace on the platforms.
“Too bad, it was a good ride. So tell me about this band?"
"I’m on bass. Johnny on guitar, Frankie on drums, and this rich kid, Charles Ames III on keyboards."
"This isn't a cover band?" Anytime she had sung in the shower she had visualized herself in front of a band performing songs that no one had heard before.
"No, we have our own material. Not soft rock like Seals and Croft, but punk like the Ramones.”
"One of the girls at the Dollhouse was talking about them.” Tammi loved the sound of this band and leaned into the ex-hippie for protection from the wind.
“They play hard and fast music." Sean liked her close to him and didn’t care how wrong feeling this good was with a girl her age.
"Then count me in." Singing in a rock band was an unexpected promotion from her career as a teenage runaway stripper.
"I’m not promising anything. You have to do an audition."
“I know that.” Getting a job at the Dollhouse had simply entailed a willingness to take off her clothes. Singing lead for a band required a talent that only Sean saw in her.
“Johnny wants to hear your voice tomorrow.”
"Then we should rehearse your songs."
“Now?” His fingers were burning from the steel strings.
"I'm too young to be tired this early, but if you have to meet your girlfriend, I can get a room at the Lark.” It was less than two blocks away.
"I don’t have anyone anymore." Sean dropped his face to hide the hurt. "That girl ran off to Paris."
"Whenever I had a busted heart, all the songs on the radio sounded like they were written for me, even POPCORN." His bad news was good news for her
"POPCORN?" Sean had been brainwashed by the infectious pop instrumental on a cross-country drive in 1974 and he tried to pin down her age by asking, "You couldn’t have been any older than thirteen then?"
"No, I was fifteen and a date took me to this drive-in, where the lady next door sold popcorn off her porch. Eating it with my head on his shoulder was so dreamy that the song POPCORN makes me all misty inside." Tammi skipped the part about her date spreading a rumor about his hitting a ‘home run’ with her. They had only kissed a little, but the girls at school had elected her the class fast girl by calling her ‘Bases’.
"URGE FOR GOING brings tears to my eyes." Sean meant the Tom Rush version.
"Men cry hearing Joni Mitchell?” No boy in Kittery had ever admitted liking her.
"I don’t let anyone see me." Sorrow he buried beneath rage. Tears were special. On the corner of Seventh Avenue he flagged a downtown taxi. They got inside and Tammi slid across the seat to Sean.
"I'm simply sharing body heat, so don’t take it the wrong way."
“Their wives served as bedwarmers for guests.” He had read about this hospitality in Peter Freuchen’s BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS.”
“I’ll save that information next time I sit on Santa’s lap.”
Tammi actually appeared happy and Sean asked, "Did you think you'd meet me again?"
"In some ways I haven't.” She touched his ragged hair. “You’re a not hippie anymore."
“Shit, crazy bastard!” The driver swerved the wheel to avoid hitting barely a bare-chested man standing in the avenue, as if he were facing a hail of bullets.
Tammi swiveled her head.
"Did you see that?"
"Yeah, and I know who it was. He’s the bass player for a band from Cleveland." Johnny had told him Dead Boys had signed a deal with CBGB’s owner for the bar tab and a percentage of the door.
"Really?" Tammi drew Sean closer than he had imagined possible. Despite the cigarette smoke in her hair and the tang of sweat on her skin she smelled young and Sean said, "There's a lot you haven’t seen before."
"Namely?" Two nights and three days in Times Square had exposed her to an underbelly unexplored by sophomore Social Studies and she slipped an icy hand inside his jacket.
"Beautiful transvestites and David Bowie hustlers in black leather coloring their hair red and blue."
"Sounds like my new home away from home." She was never going back to Kittery.
“The bands are great, the people wild, they’re open late, and Johnny knows everyone.”
“Johnny’s the guitarist, right?” She was losing track of everyone in the band.
“Yes, and he stays at the Terminal too.”
The taxi reached the Terminal Hotel and the driver asked, "You young people staying in this dump?"
"I have a room with a view and it's warm."
"Tonight that sounds like heaven." Tammi jumped out of the taxi and a biting flurry pursued them into the hotel lobby, where ragged men were huddled on the floor next to the heaters.
"Guests are five dollars extra." Ernie pointed to a sign on the wall.
"She's coming to sing a few songs." Sean didn’t see the need to pay more money for a few hours and suspected Ernie was working a hustle.
"You young people find a new word for ‘it’ each generation. She goes to the room, you pay the five. I’m just following the rules of management."
"Same as with your guests?" Sean pointed to the sleeping pig-pile smelling of Sterno.
"They usta stay in the Bowery Missions, then the state cleared the nut houses and the bums got the short end of the stick.” Wino Liberation was a cause dear to his heart.
"Sorry, man, if I insulted your favorite charity." Sean handed over five dollars.
"Staying here for a buck beats freezin’ to death on the street.” Ernie pocketed these extras without reporting the take to his boss.
"I get a receipt?" The Terminal Hotel seemed to operate without paper.
"She have an ID?" Ernie countered with a raised eyebrow.
“Not with me.” Tammi had kept the ID in her leather jacket.
“Then try not to disturb any of our guests by playin' too loud." Ernie wasn't writing any receipts for money going into his pocket instead of the cash register.
"I have to move out of this dump," Sean said for the tenth times in two days.
"It's quieter than where I spend the past two nights." She had expected someone to break down her door the entire night at the Lark.
“No place is quiet in New York.” There were too many people.
Unlocking the door to room 301, he was glad to see that his breath wasn’t visible. Tammi shucked her rabbit-fur jacket and wanted to strip off the itchy spandex jumpsuit. Tomorrow she had to buy new clothes and she flicked one strap off her shoulder. Sean was watching her every move and she fought from smiling.
"You said you have a few songs. You write down the lyrics or are they stuck in your head?"
"No, I wrote them down." The tightness of the spandex jumpsuit revealed she wasn’t wearing a bra or panties, Sean resisted kissing her and gave her three sheets of paper.
Tammi read the scrawled words.
"They're good poems.”
“Thanks.” He strapped the bass over his neck.
“But they suck as songs."
"How so?" No one else in the band had insulted his lyrics.
"Usually the finishing syllable of each line has to rhyme and the lines should have the equal measure. If line A has eight counts and B has seven, C and D should match A and B." English was her one A subject and Tammi scribbled on the paper with a pencil.
"What are you doing?" Sean wasn’t accustomed to grammatical corrections from a high school dropout.
"Changing a few words."
"This is the modern world, not Shakespearean England?" Sean fingered the GAD chord progression Johnny had taught him and kept the beat with his foot. Playing the bass without a mistake was almost impossible. He was no musician.
"I don't care if it's a bunch of cavemen grunting around a fire. You do it the right way and it's easier to sing. This song TAKE ME HIGHER works, if you change "Don’t want to go to London or Rome. Can't call any of them my kind of home." to "Been to London, Paris, and Rome. Looking for a place to call my home." Tammi stared at Sean for approval and he had to admit, “It’s better.”
“And more so to music.” Tammi sang the altered lyrics to his plodding bass. She was as good as he remembered for the car and he broke into a grin.
”Are you making fun of my singing?” Tammi pouted with a young girl’s petulance.
“No, I really like your singing, but I’m surprised that you never sang before.” Sean laid his bass on the bed and Tammi lowered her head, anticipating the worst. "A little in the shower. Am I that bad?”
“No, you’re good and in truth better than good.”
"I can't recall anyone saying I was good at anything." Her stepmother was all right, but she was stuck with Tammi, because no one else would have her.
"Well, my mother was a great singer.” Sean omitted having seen Grace Slick or Janis Joplin in fear that their names might date him further into the Sixties.
“She sing with a band?” Tammi imagined his mother singing him lullabies.
“No, my mother performed at theaters in Boston and Portland, but abandoned her career to raise a family. Once she silenced the cathedral choir during AVE MARIA. I heard the voices died one by one and the bishop stopped serving Mass. I was embarrassed at the time. Now I realize it was an incredible moment. Your voice is nothing like hers, but you have something special.
"Thanks for saying I could sing.”
“Good and special. I don’t know whether I can handle all these compliments.” Tammi stared at the mural on the wall. The naked man was Sean. His girlfriend had lived here and Tammi grabbed her rabbit jacket to leave. Sean blocked the door. "Why you leaving?”
"I can’t stay here." She was liking Sean too fast for her own good.
"I paid the five dollars for your guest privilege." Not everyone in America had experienced a happy childhood and he vowed to tread carefully around her past. "Plus the two of us together could help each other by splitting the rent for this place.
”I don’t need anyone’s help.” Her eyes silently reminded him that she had been mistreated at home.
“Everyone needs help.”
“Not me.” She had been alone in this world ever since her father's OD.
"If you want to go, I won’t stop you.” He stepped away from the door. Room 301 was not a jail.
"And if I don’t go?" Tammi bit her lower lip.
"Then neither of us will have to sleep alone." Sean's answer was as basic as he could make it.
Two nights ago the teenager had been willing to stay with him. He was much nicer than any of the boys in Kittery. Neither of them were saying that their sharing a place to live was a permanent arrangement and Tammi sat on the bed.
"I'll stay on a couple of conditions."
"Conditions?" He hadn’t expected any demands.
"The girls at the Dollhouse smoke and shot any drug they can find, legal or illegal. My father was a dope addict. I can’t live through that nightmare again, so if we live together, I can’t have you doing drugs.”
Sean had started smoking pot at 18, dropped acid over fifty times, snorted coke ten times, and huffed glue twice in 6th Grade.
"I’m not really into anything, but beer, although Johnny and Frankie are a little religious about drugs."
"I'm not living with them."
"Anything else?"
“One more thing.” Tammi had overheard the other dancers’ horror stories about their boyfriends and issued her 2nd Commandment, "No stealing from me."
"That’s a two-way street. You need money, ask.” Sean touched her skin. It was smooth as a river stone and softer than a dinner bun. “Me, I have one request.”
Tammi braced to hear a sick sexual perversion only to have Sean pluck away her cigarettes.
“These are as deadly as dope and you look ridiculous smoking.”
“I need those.” They calmed her down.
“If I’m stopping drugs, so can you.” Sean threw the pack into a wastebasket.
“You didn’t wait for the answer.” Tammi felt like he had thrown away her teddy bear.
“There was only one.” Sean joined her on the bed. “Anything else on the list?"
"Just this?" Tammi kissed Sean, busting the fragile seams of his heart.
He hadn’t expected such passion from the teenager and breathlessly he pushed back the young girl. "Slow down."
"No slowing down. You and me are living for today and I’m not missing a second of it." Tammi was setting the pace for both of them. Each caress and every kiss scrapped away their past, as their hands tore off their clothing. They fell naked into bed naked and words ceased to exist in room 301, for they were the only two people left in a city of millions, until the sun rose on another new day and sunset was hours away from now.
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