Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

Dion Dragoumis had been sent to the bughouse, so the story went, to save him from his old man. His file had come not from Juvenile Justice but from some anti-racketeering office in Washington, where he had begged an agent to hide him.

So how did being in Rohring Rohring hide him? Basil “The Blowfish” Dragoumis still had to pay his bills and knew just where the kid was. Even we could tell Dion wasn’t cut out to be a gangster, and at first we considered this a point in his favor. But soon we kinda wished The Blowfish would apply some muscle to the case.

Dion loved himself all day every day, until sumpm better came along. Then he would drop his old self just like that for his new self. No way he would love anybody else’s self-he could only suck it up and swallow it and make it his self. He took Bertie’s slinky walk for instance, and my skeptical snort. He was so handsome he was ugly, and his tailor would come by the Adolescent Wing with swatches of sharkskin and shantung rippling with silvery light, and ruffled shirts and pointy tasseled shoes. The rest of us dirtballs stared.

The bughouse is no democracy, but in a way the buggy majority rules. To us other Bug Motels Dion was a doomed and laughable sicko in his Liberace clothes: We never realized that he was on his way, we were the flops, until later. Dion was all but useless on mission for the Bug Motels, since he refused to carry anything in his pocket, not even a key or a dollar bill, for fear it would mess up the line of his trousers. But he wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, well maybe he was but he didn’t think he was, and we had to admit he looked like one of the Four Tops, so he qualified for the Bug Motels.

Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, was eleven years old, weighed fifty-four pounds and losing, and wouldn’t eat for weeks, maybe months or years. Otherwise she was the pet of the place, Miss Dying Popularity we called her. So that was us on “the Adolescent Wing”-the east end of the sixth floor of Rohring Rohring-except for Mrs. Wilmot.

Why Mrs. Wilmot was still in the Teenage Ward after all these years, nobody knew. Wilmot was a skinny-shanked, potbellied old girl of around sixty, in a buttonless (or she’d have unbuttoned it) pink chemise, with skin like a wet brown bag sliding down her bones. Now that woman was crazy, which, come to think of it, did nothing for her prestige with us Bug Motels. Mostly what she did was sit on the bench just inside the entrance to the Adolescent Wing and pull up her dress and waggle the peapod, yes I mean her graypink coochie in its skimpy ring of grizzled whiskers, in full view of all of us.

Maybe they thought we teenage loonies needed some kinda callous on our sexual eyeballs and maybe it worked, anyhow it wasn’t sex we Bug Motels were conspiring on, at least not with each other, even though we had our beauty, O. And now I gotta tell you about O. Of all the girlgoyles I ever fell for, O was the most ridiculously urgent. She was a cross between Mary Hartline of Super Circus and the kind of drapette who would jump you at the bus stop and kick you in the shins and tear out your hairclips and throw your schoolbooks down the sewer. Her hair was like fiberglass snow in Hutzler’s window at Christmastime, mounds of ratted platinum, about fifteen pounds of it, frizzed on rollers, crackling with white electricity and a million shiny threads flying. She had on ballet slippers with little pink elastic bands over the arch like only a drapette would wear, and a sheath skirt that knocked her knees together so hard she had to scuff along pigeon-toed. Her eyes were big, dark, wet and ringed with blacking. She couldn’t see without glasses, which she didn’t even own, and she could hardly walk in that skirt, but she beamed agile violence, so that somehow I always thought of her walking like Mary Hartline upside down on a pair of jeweled daggers in her hands.

Every man O had known had tried to oink her-anyway she said so, that was her problem, that and working the Pratt Street bars from the age of twelve, for they had all tried and a lot of them had succeeded. And somewhere along the way she started to charge for it. And then, sumpm else happened, sumpm with a knife. O was a police case too. Probably everything she said was true, certainly she was the belle of the bughouse, where the dreambox mechanics told her: she had to stop thinking of men that way. Anyhow no suitor was too lowly for her chill, calm, slightly cross-eyed smile. Not even me.

You could go buggy from boredom in the bughouse, if you weren’t buggy already. But at least from fall to spring all five of us Bug Motels from East Six went to school. We really went, almost the way normal teenagers get on the bus and ride to school. And yes it was queer going to Girls’ Classical from the loonie bin, and even queerer to go from Girls’ Classical back to the bughouse every afternoon, but everything about a ritzy dreambox hospital like Rohring Rohring makes for strange combos.

A little yellow school bus just our size picked us up every weekday morning on the traffic island between trolley tracks at the Broadway entrance. If Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reginald Blanchard was the one sent to watch us off, and usually he was, we’d be smoking down the line of us like five twigs of kindling. Behind us loomed the ruby brick hospital, frilled with black iron lace like the fin de siècle society matron she was, and across six lanes of traffic was the livery stable of all the fruit and junk wagons left in the city, where a few late-sleeping ayrabbers (the lowest of the low except for us mental peons) were still straggling out the wide-open barn doors one by one behind their seen-it-all nags. Then the bus pulled up and we were off to our separate lyceums, Park School for Bertie, Mount St. Agnes for O, Faith Bible for Emily, Calvert Hall for Dion-I was the only one in public school, since Merlin wouldn’t have us think ourselves so grand, not even from the bughouse.

And at 4:45 we were all back on the traffic island, with tall red Reggie firing up our Luckies again, bending down the row of us with his lighter like a mother bird loaded with worm purée. And as we eyed that swanky Dunhill, inlaid with pearls and engraved not RB but lm cl, obviously cadged from some female ex-patient for favors large or small, we thought uneasily of all the ways Reggie wasn’t like a mother to us, for, all things being equal, he would rather please you than thwart you, but he had his price. Now he let us smoke, backs to the wind, while he turned up his own collar, and when we were through he delivered us safely back to Rohring Rohring, sixth floor, east end, the Adolescent Wing, and, wherever we had left it, our mission.

Even when you live in the bughouse, life needs a mission. Especially when you live in the bughouse. After all, here you’ve got no field hockey team, no terrarium for your reptile collection, no Broncos Marching Band, no Future Lawyers of America. We called ourselves the Bug Motels because we were a rock band, but we hadn’t gotten around to learning instruments yet. Junk food couldn’t be a project here. This wasn’t Camp Chunkagunk where you got a candy bar every two weeks when you turned in your laundry. We Bug Motels had pocket money and charge accounts, two restaurants, a snack bar and a gift shop with a six-foot-long candy counter in the basement. We rolled in malted milk balls, canned potato sticks, cheese and peanut butter crackers, pretzel rods, you name it. For a while we had the use of the doctors’ tennis courts in the afternoons and huffed around the sunless courtyard in parkas and gloves, but then it got too cold even for us. We needed a doper to refine and complicate our appetites and godzilla gave us Bertie Stein, not only an experienced dope fiend but a mastermind. Bertie funneled us into the Manhattan Project, the H Bottle, the Big Blue Bomb.