Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter Page B

I’d gone to see Tamayo perform at the Duplex, I thought he was very sexy, dark, handsome, and funny. Edgy. Lenny Bruce meets Mel Blanc with a soupçon of Leonard Cohen. His brand of humor was really out there, sick but very funny. More importantly, he was the first man I’d been sexually attracted to since Eric.
    â€œYou begged me to introduce you,” Tamayo reminded me.
    Again, she spoke the truth. I had begged her, and she had pointed out that he was a nutcase and I was a nutcase and we were both very vulnerable at the moment because of failed relationships and maybe we should steer clear of each other for the sake of innocent bystanders like herself.
    So I begged her some more, and she introduced us. The first two dates were like a trip to Coney Island. Howard was really funny, we really hit it off. The third date he had a Fear of Intimacy attack. On the fourth date, we almost had sex, things went wrong, and the bloom was off the rose.
    â€œI don’t want to talk about Howard Gollis. He’s history. What are you working on?” I said.
    â€œThe nomination forms for the Dumb-ass Foundation Awards.”
    â€œDundas Foundation,” I corrected.
    â€œIf Jerry’s up for one, I stand by my pronunciation,” she said. “He told me today not to bring my personal problems into the office. So I told him he had a few personal problems too, but nothing ten large lesbians with baseball bats couldn’t handle. That’s no idle threat, because you actually know ten large lesbians with baseball bats, don’t you?”
    â€œIndeed I do,” I said.
    You can find them in my Rolodex cross-indexed under Lesbian Justice and Vigilantism—Gays & Lesbians.
    â€œJerry’s worse than that jackass Yamamoto I worked for on the Japanese game show,” Tamayo said.
    For someone in her mid-twenties, Tamayo had had quite a long and varied career. Before going to work for ANN in Tokyo, which had led to the job in New York, she had worked for a sleazy Japanese TV program called Amazing True Stories. They did features like “The True Living Gold Snake.” Tamayo’s job, as she summed it up, was “to paint the snake gold.” Sometimes, when Jerry asked us to do something journalistically dubious, we would turn to each other and say, “It’s time to paint the snake.”
    Before Amazing True Stories she had been a prize hostess for a Japanese game show she referred to as Humiliate Me for Pennies. What it entailed, I wasn’t sure, but she once said that at ANN she finally had a job that didn’t involve live tree slugs, styptic pencil, or welding glass.
    Humiliate Me for Pennies. Exactly how was Special Reports different?
    Just as she was about to leave my office, she turned around and said, “Did I mention that Bianca called, twice?”
    â€œI’ll call her.”
    â€œCall her now. It sounded urgent.”
    When I called Bianca back, she said, “Can you meet me? I’d like to talk to you.”
    â€œWe can talk now on the phone.”
    â€œOh, now’s not a good time. It has to be done in person.”
    â€œOh, all right,” I said.
    â€œLadies’ room near Sports, five minutes,” she said, and hung up abruptly, without good-byes.
    Bianca was waiting, and as soon as I got there she yanked me inside.
    â€œWhat—” I started to say but she clasped one hand over my mouth.
    â€œSsssh,” she said.
    Bianca, blond and blue-eyed with a Varga girl figure, wasn’t a bad news reader, although her appeal was perhaps best summed up by Dillon Flinder’s involuntary comment, made somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, “That mouth! Oh God, that mouth.” She had a great mouth—bee-stung, I think they call it—and she didn’t require collagen to maintain it.
    I’d already spent a considerable part of my day hiding out in bathrooms, including the ghost of a bathroom we now knew as