I knew the dame was trouble the moment I laid eyes on her. In my experience, most dames are trouble, but this one was in a league of her own—a femme fatale if ever I met one. She struck me as the type who would wait to poke holes in the condom until some poor bastard was wearing it.
The door to the club swung open, and in she stepped. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky outside, illuminating a silhouette of her slight but somehow still imposing frame. "Odd," I thought, "not a lot of lightning in Oregon. It's as though someone put it there on purpose to inject dramatic tension." Damn. I hate dramatic tension. I felt an ache creeping up from the pit of my stomach—the kind of ache you wind up with on the back end of a Taco Bell shame bender. I had a hunch I’d really be earning my paycheck tonight. As the door closed behind her, her perfume all at once saturated the club with the sickly-sweet stench of gardenias, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. I finally got a good look at her face; her eyes were wider than I figured her eyelids had any business allowing. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d ever blinked once in her life. “Christ,” I mused, “she smells like a grandma and looks like a mugshot.” Her sultry voice dripped like honey from pouty lips plump with entirely too much injected collagen: “I’m here to audition.” Maybe it was the electricity in the air from the lightning or intuition sounding desperate alarm bells in my mind, but the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
As I checked her ID, I prayed a silent prayer to the universe for a lifeline of some sort. Expired ID, under 21, something...anything to give me a reason not to go forward with the audition. To my dismay, everything checked out. "Damn the universe, anyhow," I spat under my breath as I fetched an audition form and a pen. I hesitated momentarily before handing her the pen; the wisdom of placing a pointy object in her hand felt tenuous at best.
I breathed a sigh of relief when she completed the form and returned the pen without incident. I showed her to the dressing room and excused myself. I took a seat at the bar, and the bartender sauntered over. "That gal weirds me out,” she said.
"You and me both, dollface," I responded, “something stinks here, and I don’t mean the gardenias.”
"Don't call me dollface," she demanded, “and stop trying to talk like Bogart. You’ll never be as cool as Sam Spade, so give it a rest.”
“Sheesh, broads these days,” I muttered.
The bartender arched an eyebrow as her pretty little lips drew back into a snarl. “What was that?” This particular broad was clearly hard of hearing. I repeated myself, loud and slow, so I knew she’d get it on the second go ‘round.
My cheek burned red with the bartender’s handprint as I made my way back to the front door. A few minutes later, a young man wandered in off the streets. Small, illegible scribbles covered half his face, no doubt put there by a tattoo artist willing to barter his services for whatever pills a person might offer in trade. I sighed and asked him for some identification. The picture came together crystal clear when the goon handed me his prison ID. I glanced at the name. “Chuck,” I said, “sorry to tell you this, but I can’t let you in on a prison card.”
“What say you let it slide,” he replied, “just this once? I can’t get my driver’s license back until I get off probation next week. I just want to watch my girlfriend audition.”
His girlfriend. Why was I not surprised? Birds of a feather and all that. “No can do, friend,” I said, “the liquor control boys would tap dance on my balls like Gene Kelly for that, and I don’t much care to be singing soprano in the rain.” He made a halfhearted attempt to bribe me with a variety of drugs, then made his exit after I politely declined. My grade school D.A.R.E. officer would have been proud—this time, at least.
The dame made her way out of the dressing room and over to the DJ booth to pick her songs, her outfit leaving a trail of marabou and glitter in her wake. The DJ vetoed the first half a dozen songs she requested, a list of real stinkers that would have cleared the place out, had they been played. They finally settled on some dreadful mumble rap number, followed by a depressing Lana Del Rey tune.
Her set started off okay enough, and she made it through the first song without a hitch. By the time Ms. Del Rey’s husky voice crawled seductively from the speakers, the dame was dressed only in her shoes. She climbed up the pole and executed a pretty impressive series of pole tricks. “This gal might be alright after all,” I thought. At that moment, things went bad quick, fast, and in a hurry.
She dismounted the pole, and as her feet hit the stage, the straps on one of her shoes busted, throwing her off balance. In the process of trying to catch herself, she took a step forward, but her shoe stayed behind. The height difference between one foot, which stood on an eight-inch heel, and the other as bare as the rest of her sent her tumbling off the front of the stage. The centrifugal force generated from somersaulting ass over elbows ejected her tampon from her body, launching it across the room and into a customer's drink.
Against my better judgment, I turned to the dancer next to me and cracked wise. “A bit late in the day for a Bloody Mary,” I quipped. The dancer, who had just taken a sip of her drink, did the mother of all spit takes and erupted in laughter.
The dame, who had by now collected herself off the floor, didn’t take kindly to that. Her cheeks flushed red as she screamed, “You think that’s funny, bitch? I’ll kill you!” She snatched a drink from a customer’s hand and hurled it at the dancer. The dancer ducked, and the red brick wall behind her exploded in a glimmering shower of ice and broken glass.
The twenty minutes or so that followed were a blur, but I finally got everyone separated and calmed down. The dame got dressed, and when she emerged from the dressing room carrying her bags, her demeanor betrayed no hint that anything had happened—probably courtesy of one of the several different drugs her boyfriend had offered me earlier. "So," she asked cheerfully, "did I get the job?"
“We’ll call you,” I answered.
As she disappeared at long last out of the club and into the night, I took several deep breaths, gulped down a fistful of ibuprofen, and fetched her audition form. I thought a moment, picked up a pen, and began writing in the comments section: “I knew the dame was trouble the moment I laid eyes on her...”
Nate Hazen is a writer, bouncer, and tragically not a 1940s film noir-style hard-boiled private eye. He hates dramatic tension and the smell of gardenias and works at X Exotic Lounge, where auditions take place Tuesday through Sunday between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m.
