The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson Page A

Donna Summer kept moaning. The girl in the orange fur jacket kept shimmying with her back to the door. Then a wedge of uniformed cops streamed in. The jukebox went dead, and all Kitty could hear was trannies screaming and cops yelling.
    â€œAgainst the back wall, hands out, everyone hands out!”
    Cops were pulling girls out of the bathrooms and swarming behind the bar. When the lights came on, Kitty saw the cap-sleeved girl with the hi-top sneakers on the ground, a cop pressing her face into the muddy floor and twisting her arm behind her back. Another cop braced his foot against the threshold of the ladies’ room and yanked Janice out by both wrists. She made a break for the door, her eyes wide with fear or excitement, but he grabbed her by her waist and threw her against the back wall.
    â€œHands,” he yelled, “hands!” as he dumped the contents of her pocketbook on the floor.
    Anton and Kitty stood behind their table, ignored in the chaos. Finally, a cop came over and, despite the bright overhead lights, shined his flashlight over their faces.
    â€œIDs out,” he said.
    Kitty gave the cop her license. He passed his beam over it and handed it back. Anton dropped his wallet. When he stooped down to pick it up, his glasses fell off.
    â€œIt’s okay,” the cop said, holding up his hand. “You’re both free to go.”
    Anton didn’t call her, and she didn’t call him, though she eventually went through his whole list. At the Escape Room she met a woman named Diane who lived upstairs in the Kipling Arms. One-Eyed Jack’s was inexplicably closed on a Thursday night the first time she stopped by, but the next time she found it open and sat at the bar—a big square corral in the middle of a cement room. An old lady, mistaking the stranger on the next stool for Kitty’s date, tried to get him to buy her a rose.
    The Monte Carlo had a pool table. She shot a game of eight ball with a guy who was painting buildings that stood in all theplaces where Charles Bukowski had once lived. He showed her snapshots he’d taken of a Pollo Loco on Vermont and a blood lab on Hollywood Boulevard. “Right where we are standing,” he told her, “was a boarding house run by a Filipino man, and that man was Bukowski’s landlord.” She told him his reverence was misplaced.
    When she drove past the Searchlite, she sometimes thought she saw a familiar face among the girls smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, but she didn’t see Janice. Janice was back in Van Nuys at her father’s house, or she was washing trucks, or she was somewhere else in the city of night.

The Breakfast Shift
    I spent my twenties leaning over the classified section of the Globe , pencil in hand. Actually, though, I only ever got one job from the Help Wanteds: waiting tables at a greasy spoon over by Boston City Hospital. I reported to the address on Washington Street without expectation and filled out an application at the faux Fifties counter. I was so accustomed by then to thinking of myself as unemployable that I was shocked when the manager, a rheumy-eyed drunk with a thinning white pompadour, hired me on the spot for the breakfast shift. He told me to come back in the morning, and then he didn’t seem sure who I was when I tapped on the locked glass door at 5:45 a.m.—still half-dreaming but ready to work the six to two-thirty.
    Recession, a lack of ambition, and vague artistic leanings had stranded me in a low-grade bohemian funk, and it felt good to have somewhere to be for a change. My bicycle commute—through banks of vaporous streetlight, past the wet sidewalks and dark doorways of the deserted pre-dawn South End—felt spooky and glamorous, like I’d fetched up in a strange city. No one I knew went to bed at nine p.m. Friends, confused by my new schedule, stopped calling for fear of waking me up. A beer after work now meant drinking at 2:30 in the afternoon,