The Oddball Gypsy Raconteur

About the Book

The gentleman who used to write all those columns for the Chronicle, he called Stafford a “two-bit tourist trinket trail transplanted from Canton.” That’s good enough. You’ll find it. In the middle of the block, a narrow gap separates a pawnshop known as the Electric Voice House from Low’s Import/Export Emporium. In the space between, hidden by a corrugated screen, a cast-iron circular staircase takes you down two full turns to a passageway that leads back twenty paces to the edge of a deep drop to an alley running parallel to Stafford. The alley fronts the service entrances to restaurants on Weaver Place, the next block over from Stafford. Functionally, the alley is a dump for the apartments stacked five high over the street-level businesses on Weaver. Somewhere in the chasm, there is always the misery of a plate scraped or a bucket thumped, laundry lines squeaking, and the vaporized aroma of cooling fat. A thousand radios come out and roost in window ledges in the summer. The view of all this is free. The arched door to your left is the English Department. On the other side you tell me what you want to pay for. I am the owner. I live in back.

I could describe myself as a professional dominatrix, or shorten that to “pro-dom,” or add a few letters, “pro-domme,” or drop the hyphen, “prodom,” or graduate a notch to a European designation, “la maitresse” or “die domina,” or go flat American affect with a straight businesslike, “punctuation management consultant,” but what’s important is I may be able to help you. If you are tall, dark, and handsome, with a trust fund and a yen for canings and a polite intelligent mode of expressing this yen, you might still have some troubles. The women in your life think they can fix your quirk, and you can count on it, your quirk is fun to talk about. It is going to get discussed at the office. At the English Department you receive the professional’s touch. Your secret stays in this room, and we do it your way.

************

She was in tight faded jeans, a Western long-sleeved shirt tucked in hard with a cowboy belt. The outfit looked like an effort at some virtual disguise. The shirt bore the vertical creases from the box like it was bought on the way over. She was around forty and African American, a light to medium black, and habituated to what would be an embarrassing gesture if she knew anyone was watching. Three times she unbuckled her belt, got the flaps of her pants open, smoothed the edges of the shirt down to her crotch and resealed the package. It’s as stylized and as prim and proper as that kind of thing can be done in public, or in private, and when it was finished I wasn’t sure I’d noticed anything different in kind than if she had bent over to tie her shoe. But twice and then a third time, I caught the faint nervous anguish that accompanied the gesture, a sense of futility that she’d never get the technique down perfect.

“I don’t know if it’s love or what. Love is in there somewhere or you wouldn’t have asked about my husband. You’re not Mrs. Clement, or you would’ve had the nurse sealed up and hauled off as a ton of medical waste. You’re maybe dreaming about it. You seem to be mixed up. Either you work for Clement or you don’t. You don’t seem to know. You have a son who needs a father. The professor? Love? There’s a twelve-step program for it. Get a sponsor. Go to meetings. Take it day by day. Minute by minute some days. Get your life back. Then you don’t have to slum around with money strapped to your arm in a dump like this.”

I clapped my hands, but only once, and let my breath out in a slow sad signal the answer was still no. And that’s final. Never in a million years. I was ready for sparks or drops of blood to break out on her eyebrows, but she hardened as if to stiffen her muscles, but she didn’t use them to get violent. I was ready for that too. Plus tears. But that wasn’t in her reper

About the Author