Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

“I got invited to the Fountain of Youth,” said Priscilla. She couldn't help it, it popped right out. “A gentleman asked me to join him in achieving something more than mere animal succession, in perpetuating indefinitely the distinctive personality, the individual self. What do you all think of the idea of human beings living to be a thousand years old? What do you think about death?”

A silence as thick as an Eskimo throw rug fell over the gathering.

Fingering her crucifix, Sheila Gomez looked as if she wanted to comment, but the air in the banquet room was so taut she couldn't spit a word out. Finally, Ellen Cherry turned to the new girl. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Are you sure Dear Abby is a man.”

The girl brightened. “Oh, yeah,” she chirped. “Bald old guy in a wheelchair. Lives in Australia or someplace.”

“How about her sister?” asked Doris.

“Huh?”

“The other one. Ann Landers. The sister.”

“Oh, Ann Landers,” said the new girl. She smiled triumphantly. “Ann Landers is a man, too.”

Conversation skittered along for a few minutes, Doris wondering, aloud, what university might have given the girl credit for reading The National Enquirer , and Priscilla wondering, to herself, when Ricki was going to arrive. Then President Joan Meep, the driftwood poet, called the meeting to order, and they turned to the business of awarding the grant.

“We have three contenders,” said Joan. “There's Amaryllis Tidroe, who wants to complete her portfolio of photographs of wrestlers' wives; there's Trixie Melodian, who, by the way, was a winner year before last, and she's choreographing a ballet based upon the social habits of lemmings—”

“Ought to have a spectacular ending,” put in Doris.

“—and there's Elizabeth Reifstaffel, who wants to research her master's thesis on the effects of the menstrual cycle on dream content. Okay. .”

“Wait a minute!” shouted Priscilla. “What about my project? What about me?”

There was a bloated pause, after which Joan said, “I'm very sorry, Pris, but Ricki Sinatra, who was your sponsor, called this morning and withdrew your nomination.”

Priscilla wept all the way home. Pushing her bike up Olive Way, her tears threatened to refill the puddles that the unseasonal November sunshine had been evaporating. At one point, she passed a dilapidated building in front of which Tito, the famous Spanish photographer, was posing some local fashion models. “No! No!” Tito screamed at an intimidated young beauty. “Do not smile! Do not smile! Look sophisticated .” Priscilla wanted to yell “Happy Birthday, Tito" — she wanted to yell, “Are any of you girls married to wrestlers?" — but her throat was too choked with sobs.

At the top of the hill, she stopped at a telephone booth and dialed Ricki. A few rings, then that mechanical click and the canned silence: “Hello, this is Ricki Sinatra. I've been stricken with eight varieties of virus, including the Mekong Delta chills, the Mongolian railroad flu, and the Hong Kong rubber pork chop. I'm under doctor's orders not to be disturbed. The AMA joins me in requesting that you honor. .”

“Screw her!” said Priscilla, slamming down the receiver. “Screw all of 'em!” Through the disappointment, the humiliation, the fatigue, and the guilt, there surged a voltage of defiance. “I have the bottle,” she said. “I don't need Ricki, I don't need her goddamned educated waitresses, I don't need Stepmother Devalier and her pickaninny. I don't need any of 'em. I have the bottle!”

But, of course, she did not have the bottle.

She made that devastating discovery immediately upon returning to her studio apartment, where the refrigerator made noises at night like sea cows ruminating, where the toilet sounded like the audio portion of a white-water rafting expedition, where fallout from fifty failed base-note experiments perfumed the peeling wallpaper, and where the Kotex box on the bathroom shelf was empty now, except for a couple of frayed and yellowing pads.

Priscilla did not have the bottle, not anymore, and if she hadn't the bottle, she hadn't hope or dream, and lacking hope or dream, why would she wish to live to be a thousand? Or twenty-five? for that matter. The bottle, once a flagon of fulfillable fantasy, once the repository of ambition and purpose, was falling into the category of galloping mind-fuck — and a woman really didn't need more than one “perfect taco” in her life. Monday afternoon, November 26: Priscilla Lester Partido traveled to Seattle's Ballard district, where despite pounding, kicking, and screaming that aggravated the murmuring hearts of every old Norwegian in the neighborhood, she was denied admission to the duplex of Ricki Sinatra.

Monday evening, November 26: Priscilla contacted police, who informed her that they could not interfere without a warrant. The judge on duty refused to issue a warrant directing authorities to search for an old perfume bottle for which there was no proof of ownership, which, by the complainant's admission, contained only a few drops of perfume, and which had been concealed, prior to alleged disappearance, in a Kotex box.

Monday night, November 26: Priscilla resisted the impulse to call Wiggs Dannyboy, for fear that he might doubt her story.

Tuesday morning, November 27: Priscilla met with an attorney. The lawyer telephoned Ricki, who assured him that she had no perfume bottle, never wore the stuff, was unaware of the existence of the antique bottle in question (having, in numerous visits to the client's apartment, neither seen nor heard mention of such a bottle), and invited the attorney to personally search her duplex, her car, and her locker at the Ballard Athletic Club. The attorney was convinced.

Tuesday evening, November 27: Ricki the bartender and Priscilla the waitress got into a shouting match in the cocktail lounge at El Papa Muerta, the waitress calling the bartender “a thieving, vindictive dyke” and the bartender characterizing the waitress as “a liar, a two-timer, and a clumsy slut.” They were separated by fellow employees and reprimanded by management.

Midnight, Tuesday/Wednesday, November 27/28: Priscilla found a note under her door inviting her to Thanksgiving dinner at the Last Laugh Foundation, where the celebrated French perfumer Marcel LeFever was to be feted along with Dr. Wolfgang Morgenstern. The note was typed and quite formal, but was signed, in an eccentric scrawl resembling the markings made by the muddy tail of a water buffalo, “Love and Kisses, Wiggs.”

Wednesday evening, November 28: A second heated exchange at El Papa Muerta, during which the waitress Priscilla repeatedly demanded that the bartender Ricki relinquish a purloined perfume bottle, resulted in the waitress Priscilla being fired. She was escorted from the premises and informed that she was to return her sailor dress within twenty-four hours or face prosecution. The waitress Priscilla offered to doff the uniform on the spot, but the manager, despite a twitch of prurient interest, insisted that it be laundered first, as it was badly dappled with salsa suprema . “That's ketchup and you know it,” said Priscilla.

Wednesday night, November 28: Priscilla stopped off at Ernie Steele's Bar & Grill, where she proceeded to get intoxicated enough to forget where she had parked her bicycle (which she then abandoned), but not so intoxicated as to give in to the burning desire to call Dr. Dannyboy.

Midnight, Wednesday/Thursday, November 28/29: Priscilla, on foot — and wobbling — returned home to find another note, this one imparting the information that Marcel LeFever, upon arrival in New York, had learned of the death of his uncle, Luc, head of LeFever Odeurs, and rushed back to Paris. Thanksgiving dinner was canceled. Wiggs added that he, nevertheless, hoped to see Pris soon. Accompanying the note was a beet. Accompanying the beet was a raunchy aroma. Priscilla hurled the beet the length of the hall. It rattled some innocent tenant's door, probably interrupting a Johnny Carson monologue.