Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She stands for a minute and catches her breath, then wipes the rain from her face. She’s on Maddox, just a couple of blocks from the Canal Zone. She starts walking quickly toward Rimbaud Way, rounds the corner and starts running for the Rib Room Diner. The windows are all steamed up ad the Open sign is glowing in the door.

She goes in, finds a booth midway down the aisle, slides in, her back to the door, pulls the zipper down on the slicker and dries her hands on her jeans. Tacked to the wall of the booth is another Jenny Ellis flyer and the huge, black letters that form the question Have You Seen This Child? feel like they’re demanding an answer from Sylvia. She looks away from the poster, puts the camera on the table and an old guy with an unruly mane of white hair bounces up to the booth with a coffeepot in one hand and a mug in the other. And Sylvia knows from all the photos in the Spy over the years that it’s Elmore Orsi himself, owner of the Rib Room and legend of the Canal Zone.

“You look,” he says, filling the mug and sliding it in front of her, “like you need a mug.”

She nods and says, “Thank you,” and he smiles and lingers. Part of the Orsi legend is that Elmore, now in his mid-seventies by most estimates, still has a weak spot for the young boho women who hang around the diner.

Sylvia sips the coffee and says, “Delicious.”

He’s pleased. “Hazlenut mocha,” he says. “Pain in the tush to get, but, you know, anything to keep my children happy.”

She knows that Orsi is thought of as this eccentric godfather to the art crowd and she wonders how much of his oddball shtick is genuine and how much is made up. He’s a vision here in front of her, done up in pleated white wool pants, black silk shirt opened wide to reveal a forest of chest hair and a fat, gold crucifix dangling by a chain around his neck, and red paisley vest.

Maybe because she can’t judge the artifice factor, she’s got no impulse to photograph him.

“You’re Mr. Orsi,” she says and he takes this as an opportunity to slide into the seat opposite her.

“In the flesh,” he says. “And you are not a regular. New to town?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve lived in Quinsigamond my whole life.”

“That’s wonderful. A real native. That’s tremendous.”

“Is it?”

He sits back jerks his head to the rest of the booths on the other side of the aisle. “All the natives want to leave these days. Everyone wants to move away.”

“Not you.”

“They’re going to bury me in this town. I want the wake right here in the diner. Two days. Open bar. I know it’s a big health code violation, but I’m an old friend of Counselor Campana. There are ways around everything, if you follow.”

Sylvia nods her unspoken understanding of the not-sosubtle back-scratching that powers City Hall.

“You’ve been down here in the Canal a long time,” she says.

“Opened the doors on September fifth, Nineteen fifty-seven. I was a goddamn youngster.”

“You’ve seen a lot of people pass through this place.”

“The famous and the not-so,” Orsi says, thrilled at the chance to bask in his own history.

“I’m more interested in the famous.”

“Another pilgrim,” he says. “I’m telling you, I’m waiting to be put on the historical register there. That has to be some kind of tax break, wouldn’t you think?”

She takes a swallow of coffee, then asks, “I’ve heard you knew Terrence Propp.”

There’s no flinch or balk. There’s no reaction at all and that’s as unsettling as if he’d exploded. He just shakes his head and says, “That’s an old rumor that just won’t die gracefully, dear. Every now and then somebody comes in here and mentions that name to me. And I’ll tell you what I tell them. I don’t even know who the hell this Propp son of a bitch is.”

“I heard you once claimed you knew him.”

Again, no anger, only, “Honey, I’ll say anything to fill this place up. I’ll tell you Jesus ate the last supper in here if it’ll sell more meatloaf and coffee.”

“But if someone really needed some information—” she starts and he shakes his head and says, “Then someone would be out of luck. Personally, I don’t even think there is a Terrence Propp. I think it’s all a kind of hoax. Another way to push some product. Nothing gets more attention. How could someone not want attention? Twenty-four hours a day we got people sticking their faces into your television and telling you more horrible crap about their lives than you ever wanted to hear. I wish I’d come up with something like this Propp idea— the Myth of Elmore Orsi. Christ sake, they’d be lined up down the block to eat the leftover chili. Put some faded picture of me on the wall, I could spend every day at the goddamn track.”

He laughs, runs both hands over his eyes, then refills her mug.

“You seem like a nice girl,” he says, somehow without sounding patronizing. “Don’t buy into this Propp nonsense. Find your own routine.”

He slides out of the booth.

“Routine?” Sylvia says, but Orsi just smiles at her and heads toward the kitchen yelling into the air, “Renata, clear table six.”

Sylvia looks up at the clock on the back wall. It’s over three hours until midnight and her meeting with Schick. She thinks about going to a movie and then catches herself and wants to laugh. Her eyes fall from the clock down to the huge cork bulletin board that fills most of the back wall. The bulletin board where she found the original ad for the Aquinas. The place where all of this began.

She gets out of the booth and walks to the rear wall. She finds the exact spot where she’d first seen the little 3 x 5 card filled with the black block letters that said PORTRAIT CAMERA. Where she’d yanked out the red pushpin that secured the card to the cork and where she’d felt that rush of delight as she pictured an Aquinas in her hands.

In that same place now is a new index card, but this is a glossy printed ad, like an oversized business card, with raised, multicolored lettering that reads

Lusty Lady Lipservice

“fulfillment is just a phone call away”

picture your dream woman & we do the rest

Call: 555-6628 / 24 hrs a day / 7 days a week

MC/Visa/AmEx

She rips the card from the board, turns it over, turns it back. It’s her own phone number.

She pushes the card into the pocket of her slicker and walks out of the Rib Room.

The rain has faded to an occasional mist and Rimbaud Way has filled up with marching women. They’re all wearing black armbands and chanting as they parade.

Intercourse is Genocide

Castrate, Castrate

Cut with Pride

their arms shooting into the air like angry cheerleaders. They’re being led by Paige Beatty, who’s setting the pace of their cry with her red police bullhorn.

An arm reaches out and pulls Sylvia off the curbing and into the throng and the next thing she knows a woman with a hook for a hand is linking arms and yelling, “It’s everyone’s fight.”

Sylvia looks to see a hefty woman with a baby supported against her other shoulder. The child might be about a year old and it’s burrowing into its mother’s neck, clearly more interested in sleep than political ideology.

Sylvia walks along, though she doesn’t chant. She cranes her neck to see everyone carrying white candles shaped like small phalluses. And they all have a small chalkboard, about the size of a dinner plate, bouncing off their chests as they walk, hung around their necks with twine and shoestrings. The boards all have male first names written on them — Sylvia notes Harold and Dennis and Karl and Antonio.