Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"Afraid you'll get mistaken for one of the acts?" Temple rolled her eyes. "Not likely. I'm afraid I'll get taken for having unnatural inclinations."

By then they had reached the elevator. Electra pushed the mother-of-pearl button. With a weary wheeze, the elderly car came creaking upward. Both women faced forward, contemplating the noises.

"I think making crank calls to a cat club is weirder than women going to a strip club," Electra said fi nally.

"Nowadays," Temple said, sasha ying into the wood paneled car fi rst, "probably."

Broad daylight made no bones about the purpose of the building at Paradise and Twain: "Strip joint" was written all over it in the rude graffiti that covered the boxy, windowless, stucco exterior. An u nlit neon sign loomed over the fl at roof like scaffolding abandoned by da Vinci and ceded to Peter Maxx.

"New name," Electra noted, impressed.

"New female management," Temple said. "'Les Girls.' I like it, much classier than 'Kitty City.'"

"I can't imagine why that greasy Ike Wetzel agreed to sell after all his shenanigans to blackmail his old dancers and control the strippers' contest."

Temple glanced at Electra. In broad daylight there was no overlooking the silver hair worn in a modifi ed Mohawk and streaked with stripes of royal blue to match the surreal palm leaves in her muumuu pattern.

"I doubt old Ike had much to say about it," Temple admitted. "The stripper murders brought up so much bad old business in his personal and professional life that Lindy was fi nally able to buy him out before someone drove him out. Let's go see what wonders worker-ownership can do for a strip club."

"'Whatever," Electra said, "it takes major money to run a place like this, however humble-looking. l don't see how a bunch of strippers managed it."

"Consort ium, Electra, consortium of ecdy siasts," Temple corrected her in airy tones as they strolled into this showcase of female fl esh. "You'll never make a P.R. person without the politically correct spin."

Dark as Hades, Still, Cold as an archangel's breathes . Still, Loud as a den of drummers, s till.

Temple and Electra stopped at the chill dark inside the door, waiting for their eves and their body temperature to adjust. Their ears were another matter. Rock music blared at concert pitch.

Temple leaned close to Electra. "Do you think it's a tad less loud?" she shrieked .

Electra nodded her two-toned head, her sliver streaks painted a glowing lavender by the ultraviolet lights above the stage.

A cocktail waitress--pert, blond and attired in something unbelievably brief and interesting, even to other women, merely from a technical point of view, like "How does she get into it without dislocating anything essential?" and "Can yo u wash it in a teacup, really?" -- ankled near enough to be perceived in the perpetual twilight.

According to the movement of her mouth, she was asking, "Drinks?"

"Lindy," Temple both mouthed and screamed back, hop ing that was not the name of something new and trendy and alcoholic, like a Lindy Hop, Or a Lite beer, maybe?

A pert blond nod and the two women were following a mostly unveiled rear to the front of the establishment.

Me n, alone and in twos and threes sat scattered at the tables. Now was the pre - noon hour, a predictable dead zone in the stripper business. Lethargic girls gyrated at poles distributed atop the bar, fanning themselves with their ghostly Seven- Year-Itch skirts (literal knockoffs of Marilyn Monroe's white, circle-skirted, halter-top dress immortalized in the hot updraft of a sidewalk grating and the camera's icy, ogling eye) . They left less to the imagina tion than Monroe had managed to do.

At a side table, Lindy Lukas was waiting wrapped in a cigarette fog. Strip palaces and their habitues were not wor ried about such wimpish concerns as secondhand smoke.

"Sit down," Lindy panto m imed with proprietary gestures of both hand and mouth. She lifted a glass afl oat with urine-colored liquid. Both Temple and Electra shook their head.

Lindy stood, smiled , and beckoned them across the fl oor, past the raised stage where a woman wearing a scant collec tion of glitter-dusted rubber bands was writhing to the shrill promise of "She Works Hard for the Money."

In moments they had ducked through a curtained door way----not the o ne used by performers to enter-- and were abl e to shut a door behind it and fi nd themselves in the plain- jane women's john: two cubicles and a sink.

"Ooh," Electra said, now that conversation was possible despite the bass t hump-thump-thump beyond the graffiti-deco rated door. "That costume on stage looks as if it would hurt!"

"It doesn't if you're in shape," Lindy said cheerfully.

She herself was retired from stripping and had gone hap pily to overweight and jogging suits adorned with outrageous say ings. Today's was "Get It Up Before I t Gets Up and Leaves."

Her dyed hair was as matte-black as the drugstore eyeliner choking her eyes into smoky slits. The cigarette rode her fi ngers like a favorite rin g, fogging her voice with world weary harshness. But her hazel eyes brimm ed with excite ment.

"Wait'll you see what we've done in the dressing room," she told them. "Don't ask any questions; just look."

She fl ourished another door open. Temple prepared her self for the long, dispirited all ey of facing mirrors, furniture - less space, concrete fl oor studded with cigarette butts, and battered lockers at one end.

"Oh. This is nice." Elec tra edged over the green indoor outdoor carpet like a pleasantly surprised realtor, "Very cozy. '

"Look." Lindy waved her cigarette hand at one wall, a magician drawing smoke away from an illusion.

A sign-in board had blanks for each performer's name and hours. Another board held an array of combination locks for the lockers, unheard of in the stripping business, where privacy was a bad joke from beginning to end. A third board, labeled "Miscellany," held tacked-up plastic baggies fi lled with safety pins, Band-Aids, tampons, sample perfume vials, dark makeup for tan marks, light makeup for bruises, nail fi les, run-stop-- everything the improperly attired stripper might need in a pinch.

"Neat." Temple studied the array, hunting ideas for her own travel kit-cum- tote bag. Then she looked down the once-naked facing count ertops flanked by mirrors. Light weight metal folding chairs painted in rainbow colors lined up along both sides, like would-be perches for Walt Disney butterfl ies.

"It could be any chorus girls' dressing room," Temple said in amazement, remembering the bus-station rest-room air that had haunted this dressing room the last time she'd seen it, when it was as if the women who used it were not worth a mom ent's convenience. No food stamps littered the floor like unused bus transfers. No dreary, gray functional pall draped everything like a spider web.

Lindy's beaming smile could only be called maternal. "You're right. Classy, Ike would have--" She glanced nervously at Electra's venerable silver hair.

"You remember 'Moll Philanders' from the Over-Sexty Divisi on of the contest," Temple said, "Black leather and the silver Hesketh Vampire ."

"--shit a brick. " Lindy, though shocked, suddenly relaxed. studying the now-demure Electra. "Hey, that was some bitchin' number you did with that motorcycle."

"Thank you, dear," Electra said modestly. "Not everybody has to go undercover by uncovering, but I managed. This is very homey."

"Yeah, thanks." Lindy whirled back to Temple. "Oh, and did you notice the Midnight Louie shrine?"

"Louie? A shrine? He would be pleased. What do you mean?"

"Well, he nabbed the strangler, didn't he, with his own personal claws? We hav e only one unlocked locker, and it's all his."

She pointed. One of the repainted lockers--royal blue--stood ajar, its bottom lined in turquoise crushed velvet, the kind usually found on overstuffed sofas in seedy furniture stores near downtown bus stations.