Ace Atkins - Dirty South

He got up and strutted away, his football jersey un-tucked, and took a long swig from his forty before wrapping his long arms around two of the dancers.

I found and followed a hallway through a back room where flickered patterns of red and blue lights played in small, individual coves.

ALIAS lay on a round bed with a young girl, really beautiful with her long black hair partially covered in a black bandanna and long slender legs. She stretched out on top of his back, hugging him tight almost like he was a life preserver, as he – oblivious to her – worked out some aggression on a video game with dragons and knights.

“You ready?” I asked.

“You get what you need?”

“No.”

“I told you, Old School,” he said, pulling on his baseball cap. “You wouldn’t listen. These people done gone. No faces. No names. How you supposed to come through for Teddy? You best call him now and tell him to take a long ride out of New Orleans.”

“Maybe.”

“What else you gonna do?”

“I’m workin’ on it.”

“Better work fast.”

“Come on.”

He patted the young girl’s right hand that gripped him tight, her body prone on his, and she slowly slid off of him. Wordless. Her eyes accusing me for taking him away. She tucked her hair back into her bandanna and stripped off a long shirt to reveal a complicated array of belts, garters, lace, and buckles.

She was fourteen and then she was an adult.

ALIAS checked himself in the mirror, grabbed a Saints ball cap that was perched on the edge of the chair, and nodded at me. “Let’s roll.”

ALIAS WAS HUNGRY and I was fresh out of ideas. But I’d made a ton of calls and hoped Curtis’s countryfied lyin’ ass would come through for once. I checked the cell phone, willing it to ring, but it didn’t while we sat at the counter of the Camellia Grill waiting on ALIAS’s hamburger. I’d ordered an omelette and a cup of coffee. It was about ten o’clock and I was tired. I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water and returned to the seat where ALIAS was already eating. I thought about Maggie’s porch and these great old green chairs she had where we kicked back and talked all night.

The Camellia Grill was a little diner in a small white house at the end of the streetcar tracks near the turnaround in Carrollton. After being in the humidity all day, the air-conditioning felt nice, and for a long time, ALIAS and I didn’t talk.

“You trust Malcolm?” I asked.

He nodded and took another bite.

“What about Teddy?”

“Sure.”

“Malcolm ever ask you for money?”

He shook his head, looking confused. I passed him some ketchup and asked the waiter for some Crystal sauce. Just right on an omelette.

“Is Teddy gonna die?” ALIAS asked.

“No.”

“How you know?”

“’Cause Teddy can talk his way out of anything.”

“What you mean?”

“I mean Teddy knows how to survive.”

“So why you workin’ so hard?”

“Just in case.”

“Cash is evil.”

“How do you know?”

“Me and him know each other. He offered me money to get on his label.”

“You gonna leave Teddy?”

“Don’t know.”

“What do you want to be when you’re grown up?” I asked.

“I am grown up.”

“You’re fifteen.”

“I’m a man,” he said.

“You like women?”

“They a’ight.”

“Just all right.”

“Yeah, I like them.”

He looked away from me and dabbled a fry into the ketchup.

“I have a woman in Mississippi that’s pretty pissed at me.”

“You fuck someone else?”

“No.”

“Get drunk?”

“No.”

“Then what she bitchin’ ’bout?”

“It’s my birthday tomorrow and she had something planned.”

He finished off the burger and carefully poured more ketchup in a neat little pile. He liked to keep everything separate. There was no mixing of ketchup and fries till he was ready.

“Who was that girl at the club?”

“Tamika.”

“Who is she?”

“A friend.”

“She’s a kid.”

“Maybe,” he said. “She use her sister’s driver’s license so she can dance. She ain’t bad. She can shake her ass and shit.”

The streetcar passed underneath the oaks outside. A priest and a woman with a bruise under her eye walked in and found a seat by the bathroom. I finished the omelette and drank some more coffee.

“Where we gonna head next?”

“I don’t know.”

I excused myself and walked outside, trying Curtis again. The phone rang about six times before he answered. He sounded out of breath.

“Stella got me doin’ this exercise tape, got that black dude that’s some kind of big star in Hong Kong. You know he got that funny head that look like a turtle? Man, that shit kickin’ my ass.”

“What you got?” I watched my truck across the street and a couple of kids skateboarding around it. Crime lights scattered on my hood and I heard some bottleneck guitar playing at a biker bar in the crook of St. Charles.

“Pinky’s Bar.”

“Where?”

“It’s in the Marigny but ain’t no fag place or anything,” Curtis said. I heard Stella yelling at him. “Ask for Fred. You’ll get what you need.”

PINKY’S SPECIALIZED in kick-ass punk music, explosive drinks, and a Tuesday-night bondage show, or so I heard from Curtis. I’d left my leather mask back home and I never owned a whip in my life but decided I’d be safe. I told ALIAS he could wait in the truck, but he said he wanted to see this place. He said freaks were interesting and wanted to know if it was like that shit in Pulp Fiction . I’d parked off Elysian Fields and Chartres by a methadone clinic and a vegetarian restaurant that offered discounts to same-sex couples. A few years back, I wouldn’t have even driven through this neighborhood; the gunshots and violence were constant. But a few years ago, the homosexual community had taken over the Marigny, cleaning it up and making it their own. But now the historic district right by the Quarter was going through another change. Gentrification. Now it was hipper than Uptown and way too cool for the Quarter.

And Pinky’s, I think, was supposed to be too cool for anyone.

A nice neon sign of a forties pinup in a pink nightgown hung over the vinyl padded door with a diamond glass for a window. Nice curvy butt and shoulders and blond hair on top of her head in ribbons. She winked at you, holding a hand of cards. Pink neon surrounding her body. From inside, Johnny Cash was singing “That Lucky Old Sun,” the Ray Charles number.

A grizzled white dude with multiple piercings and a shaved head smoked a clove cigarette behind the bar and flipped through a copy of Newsweek . A photo of George W. Bush on the cover looking intense. He nodded along with the article as I waited for a little service.

“What’ll it be?” he asked. He was British.

“Two Cokes.”

“I want a beer,” ALIAS said.

“One Coke and a Barq’s.”

“Man, that’s root beer.”

“No shit.”

ALIAS walked off to the jukebox.

“I’m also looking for a guy named Fred Moore,” I said.

“She’s not in.”

“She?”

“She’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “She had to pick up the band.”

We waited as the bar really opened up. The lights dimmed. More pink neon. Black-and-white photos of forties B actors and movie posters for these noir films that I didn’t even know lined the walls. A few Bettie Page flicks. Some sixties Roger Corman stuff. ALIAS loaded up the jukebox with some rap music I’d never heard.

The waitresses walked in and started getting ready for the night. Brunette and blond. They were all beautiful and young and hard as hell. Their pasty white faces never saw the sun. Deep red lips outlined in black and hair up in Andrews Sisters configurations. Tight black Ts with glitter sayings: BITCH and HOT STUFF and double dice on snake eyes. They all wore combat boots and black socks.