Iâd 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 Iâd been sexually attracted to since Eric.
âYou begged me to introduce you,â 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.
âI donât want to talk about Howard Gollis. Heâs history. What are you working on?â I said.
âThe nomination forms for the Dumb-ass Foundation Awards.â
âDundas Foundation,â I corrected.
âIf Jerryâs up for one, I stand by my pronunciation,â she said. âHe 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 couldnât handle. Thatâs no idle threat, because you actually know ten large lesbians with baseball bats, donât you?â
âIndeed I do,â I said.
You can find them in my Rolodex cross-indexed under Lesbian Justice and VigilantismâGays & Lesbians.
âJerryâs worse than that jackass Yamamoto I worked for on the Japanese game show,â 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 âThe True Living Gold Snake.â Tamayoâs job, as she summed it up, was âto paint the snake gold.â Sometimes, when Jerry asked us to do something journalistically dubious, we would turn to each other and say, âItâs time to paint the snake.â
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 wasnât sure, but she once said that at ANN she finally had a job that didnât 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, âDid I mention that Bianca called, twice?â
âIâll call her.â
âCall her now. It sounded urgent.â
When I called Bianca back, she said, âCan you meet me? Iâd like to talk to you.â
âWe can talk now on the phone.â
âOh, nowâs not a good time. It has to be done in person.â
âOh, all right,â I said.
âLadiesâ room near Sports, five minutes,â she said, and hung up abruptly, without good-byes.
Bianca was waiting, and as soon as I got there she yanked me inside.
âWhatââ I started to say but she clasped one hand over my mouth.
âSsssh,â she said.
Bianca, blond and blue-eyed with a Varga girl figure, wasnât a bad news reader, although her appeal was perhaps best summed up by Dillon Flinderâs involuntary comment, made somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, âThat mouth! Oh God, that mouth.â She had a great mouthâbee-stung, I think they call itâand she didnât require collagen to maintain it.
Iâd already spent a considerable part of my day hiding out in bathrooms, including the ghost of a bathroom we now knew as
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