8763 Wonderland

“No, sweetie, you don’t understand.” She leaned into the red jar candle on the table to light her Benson and Hedges. “I’ve never had a prosthetic arm. Never.”

“Do they allow smoking in here?” Trace said.

“From what I know they don’t allow smoking indoors anywhere in California.”

“Aren’t you going to get in trouble?”

“Honey, I’m the star attraction. I don’t get in trouble. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, nobody’s gonna say anything.”

There were no windows in the small bar on Lankershim Boulevard and the owner didn’t believe in a brightly-lit room. Dim spotlights suspended from the ceiling shone on the stage to the left of the bar where a bikini-clad dancer was shaking her cellulite-infested hips to a Rick James tune on the old jukebox.

“Why is it so dark in here?” Trace asked as he lit a cigarette.

“Skokie likes to keep the lights down low, says it hides the girls’ what he calls ‘imperfections’.”

“Skokie” was Skokie Bismark, a man Trace knew and had little respect for. Skokie spent five years as a suitcase pimp, the name given to any husband, boyfriend, second cousin, putative father or other interloper of the male persuasion who leeches onto a porn star’s career, crowns himself her manager, and then generally runs her career into the ground with all the reckless glee of a suicide bomber.

When Stella and Skokie divorced after six years of ill-advised marriage, Skokie surrendered all of the Stella Bismark websites to her in exchange for full ownership of the bikini bar they bought with her money. The rumor was that Skokie was bi-sexual and used the bar as a front to meet and date his prospective male lovers. At that very moment, Trace noticed, Skokie was sitting at a table in a far corner near the scratched and scarred pool tables with an awfully feminine looking young man so perhaps there was some truth to the rumors after all.

“Speaking of imperfections– ” Trace said and sipped his beer.

“It was a farming accident when I was a kid,” she explained.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Trace scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad.

The one-armed dancer laughed. Trace liked her smile. It lifted her stooped shoulders and made her eyes dance. He could see that once she must have been very attractive but now gravity was playing havoc with her natural D-cup and her long legs were a road map of varicose veins. Her face bore all the unkind ravages of substance abuse. He had it on good authority that she could suck a golf ball out of a garden hose but he also knew that she had been living in the same crappy and run-down apartment in North Hollywood for fifteen years, that her twenty-year-old son was a meth addict living on the streets of Hollywood, and that she was suffering from Hepatitis-C, so either her fellatio skills never served her well or she had been giving it away all these years.

“Seriously,” she said. “I grew up on a farm in Iowa. Your readers don’t wanna know the details, honey. Let’s just say it was nasty and my arm was lopped off right at the shoulder. Pretty much a clean cut.”

She snuffed her cigarette out in a plastic ashtray and lit another.

“Do you find that your — ” Trace groped to find the right word.

“My defect?” she offered.

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“Is it a draw?”

“Yeah. I mean, are there guys that are into — ”

“Honey, there are guys that are into everything and anything. If you’re asking if I’ve had guys who asked to fuck my stump I’d have to say yes.”

Trace smiled. “I don’t want to know what your answer was.”

“Let’s just say they don’t make the kind of underarm deodorant I need.”

Trace heaved a sigh and closed his notebook. He needed to get out of there and into the light. He swallowed the last of his beer and stood.

“Did you get everything you need?” The look on her face was imploring.

“Yeah. Just make sure that you get those photos over to the magazine in the morning. Skokie has the address.”

As Trace carried himself to the door she spoke to his back.

“Y’all come back now,” she said. And then she laughed.