Journey to an 800 Number (11 page)

“You’re bloody well tied down to that beast,” Trina Rose said. “Well, aren’t we all? Tied to one damn beast or another?”

Father then told Trina Rose that just because he couldn’t stay in her hotel suite was no reason for me not to.

So I did.

I moved into Suite 1424 where there were two
bedrooms as well as the sofa in the living room making into a bed. I slept in a bed that was room-sized in a room that was pool-sized, Olympic pool-sized.

Once there I settled into my Vegas routine. I called it my Vegas routine, not Las Vegas, because all the pros drop the
Las.
It was not what you would call a basic routine because the hours were not basic and because Trina Rose is no routine person. Except when she was on stage. And then she made sure that everything moved like clockwork. And she had to OK everything down to the stage lights. As a matter of fact, to hear her carry on about them, you would think that she was Picasso and the stage lights were tubes of paint. “They set the whole bloody mood,” she explained. And then she whispered in my ear, “and if they ain’t right, I can look downright obese right up there on stage.” I asked no further questions. How should I know how she sees herself?

My Trina Rose Vegas Routine:

I got up about ten in the morning. Trina Rose would still be asleep. I would order room service. I would get dressed and wait for room service out in the hall, because I didn’t want them to knock and possibly wake up Trina Rose. They would bring whatever I ordered. I signed my name and Room 1424 and added
TIP
$2.00, because Trina Rose told me to do that. I would carry my tray into the living room and eat it all up.

Trina Rose worked very hard and very long and she deserved her sleep. She did everything long and hard, including sleep.

After breakfast I would go down to the hotel lobby and watch the people. People from all over the world come to Vegas, but people from the United States come the most. The lobby of the Pyramid Hotel had an easel near the registration desk, and on the easel was a sign that told what meetings were being held in what convention rooms. From where I sat in the lobby, I could see the registration desk as well as the gambling casino. Since I was under-aged, I was not allowed to enter the casino, but I could watch. The cashiers give the people who are playing the slot machines their coins in a paper cup. The people who play roulette or blackjack get chips. There is something unreal about everything in Vegas, but nothing seems more unreal than the money.

There were three kinds of people who registered: one, the people who were worried about the cost of everything; they spent their time checking on the price of their rooms. They would later wander down to the gambling casino and take the free cigarettes whether they smoked or not. Two, the people who wanted to seriously gamble; they pulled on a few slot machines before they even located their luggage or checked into their rooms. And third, the conventioneers. They stayed at the registration
counter the longest because (1) they all seemed to arrive at the same time, (2) they had as many as four people (sometimes from four different states) staying in one room, (3) they arrived so early that the rooms had not been cleaned up from the people before them.

I got my Vegas education from noon until about one-thirty when I would return to Suite 1424 to start the awakening process, for Trina Rose would start getting up about two o’clock in the afternoon, and I liked to be back in the suite when it started.

First there came a ring on the telephone from Mordred, her manager. I would answer the phone and assure Mordred a basic fifteen times that I would indeed see to it that Trina Rose would get up that very day. I would then go into her bedroom and call her name and gently poke her until she began to move. She moved wondrously slow. First she set all the bedsheets to rippling. A lot of things about Trina Rose rippled. Her laughter, her stomach, and most especially her singing. When the rhythms of her getting-up movements broadened from ripples to waves, I called room service and ordered a large glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee to be delivered. Slowly, slowly, one eye, one shoulder, one arm showed itself above the covers, and finally Trina Rose rose. It was like she gave birth to a new self every day. By the time she was
sitting up in bed, room service had delivered the juice and the coffee, and I had signed my name and Room 1424 and had added
TIP
$2.00.

Then I carried the tray into her room and poured a waterglass full of juice. Trina Rose would drink it, and I would pour her a cup of coffee. She would take the coffee and issue her first
bloody
of the day. Something like this: “There was a bloody capacity crowd last night,” she would say. “I sang my bloody lungs out—not because I loved them. I had to, just to be heard.”

Then we would talk. I was anxious to learn about when she was Baby Bloom and had traveled with my mother from Frisco to Taos, and although she told me some things, she never told me enough to give me a clear picture of how my tailored mother had once been a girl named Sally Ghost. She asked about me, and what I had been doing since I was Maximilian and mother was Sarah, and I found that what I talked about the most were the things that had happened to me since Smilax.

When I told her about Manuelo, she said, “Tough, Bo, tough. The only thing you can bloody do is to remember how much you hate yourself sometimes and be careful not be such a sticky smart ass next time.”

When I told her about Sabrina and Lilly, the travel agents and the Lambda Gammas, the freaks and the eccentrics, she said, “Now, that Sabrina sounds like someone I’d like to know. Take me. If
I weren’t so bloody talented, I’d just be a fat lady who sings. You’ve either got to be two kinds of freak or none at all.”

When I told her about Denver and Ruthie Britten and how Father had abandoned me, she said, “Abandoned you?”

“What would you call it?”

“Oh, Bo,” she said, “Woodrow bloody Stubbs is the last person in the world that you can say abandons anyone.”

“You’re probably thinking of Ahmed and how he didn’t abandon Ahmed after Lucky Blue ran off with Dove and left him at the ranch.”

“I’m only partly thinking of that,” Trina Rose said. “Only partly.”

After we talked and after Trina Rose drank all her coffee and her juice, she would get up to shower and to dress. She mostly just got dressed in a bathrobe. While she was doing that, I would call room service and order her real breakfast and my lunch. We sat at a table in the living room to eat that

After that Mordred would come and discuss business, or she would actually put on some out-of-door clothes, which—truth to tell—did not look too different from her housecoats, and we would go out to shop.

Trina Rose loved big discount drugstores. She bought lipsticks and junk jewelry and hair brushes for herself. She bought combs and wallets and key chains for me. One drugstore had a record department,
and Trina Rose took out a felt tip pen and autographed all her own albums. At the check-out counter, she said, “Some bloody broad just signed her name all over Trina Rose’s albums. No harm done. It’s just on the cello wrap. It’ll pull right off.”

The checkout girl said, “There’s more weirdos in this town than in a state mental institution.”

Trina Rose leaned over the counter to whisper in the girl’s ear, “Listen, dear, if you want me to, I’ll just go on back there and write
not
on top of every bloody one of those Trina Rose autographs. Everyone in his right mind knows that there’s no such person as Trina Rose. I’m the real thing: me, Catarina Rosenblum.” She then pushed her
VISA
card with the name
CATARINA ROSENBLUM
under the girl’s nose.

“Sure, honey,” the girl said.

To okay the credit card the girl had to ring for the manager. While she was waiting, she kept glancing over at us. Trina Rose turned to me and said, “Bo, honey, let’s you and me buy all those autographed bloody albums. Those signatures could be real. You go on back and pick them out for us.”

There were seven of them, and I brought them up to the counter. By then the manager was there, too.

“Add these to my bill,” Trina Rose said.

The manager asked for three pieces of identification and okayed the bill. Trina Rose took the ball point pen and signed
Catarina Rosenblum,
and
then took a felt tip pen out and signed
Trina Rose
under that.

“They do match,” I said.

Whereupon Trina Rose burst into song.
“Cry! Cry!
Cry for baby love,” she sang in that voice of hers, the likes of which there is no basic other.

Then as the cashier and the manager checked the charge slip with
Trina Rose
scrawled across it, we walked out. Just remembering the look on the face of the clerk and her manager was a day’s entertainment.

Wherever we might be during the day, you could be sure that Trina Rose was backstage by five-thirty. She was loose and unhurried and always on time. She was something remarkable. Everyone backstage was, but she was the most.

Part of my Vegas routine was my reunion with Father, which took place every evening backstage before the early show. I would help him decorate Ahmed with pompoms in a color that matched Trina Rose’s mood or costume. After we sent Ahmed on stage with his star on top, Father and I waited until Ahmed was led backstage by one of the showgirls while Trina Rose stayed on stage and belted out one song after another.

I found the showgirls interesting. After only a few performances, I found them more interesting than what they weren’t wearing.

I concluded that there are two kinds of chorus girls: rose ones and gray ones. And their color has
nothing to do with their color. It has to do with their behavior. The gray ones are hard.

“You’re right,” Father said. “You can almost see their steel core.”

Trina Rose, the star of the show, was rose and violet with just enough brown and gray to make shadows. Stars are variegated people.

I went up to our suite after the early show and ordered room service. Trina Rose and Father would come along, and we’d have supper in the living room. They’d go back down for the midnight show, but I wouldn’t. I was a growing boy, and I had to take care of my health. I would stay in the suite and read or watch TV or think.

There was a lot to think about. There was my mother most of all. Having her marry F. Hugo Malatesta had seemed the most normal thing in the world while I was in Havemyer. And that seeming normal made her being friends with Trina Rose and her once being Sally Ghost seem abnormal. I wouldn’t say freakish. Maybe I would say freakish.

One evening after dinner when Father and Trina Rose had returned backstage, I remembered that I had left a paperback book from that day’s shopping trip in our hotel suite. I wanted it to read while we waited backstage, so I went upstairs to get it. When I returned, I heard Trina Rose saying, “I would have thought that Sally Ghost would bloody well have told him by now.”

Father said, “I don’t mind. She’s not ready to.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It seems she told him that her parents died in an auto accident.”

“Was that after your divorce she told him that?” There was a pause. Father must have nodded. Then Trina Rose said, “She’ll make it into respectability land with this F. Hugo Fart. I just don’t know, Woody. I just don’t bloody know. Sally Ghost was my good friend, but I don’t know Sarah Jane Whitley Stubbs Malatesta at all. But what the hell. I like the kid. Balls! Woody. I goddam love that kid.”

They stopped talking as soon as they saw me. I said nothing because I knew that I would upset Trina Rose, and she didn’t take kindly to being upset before a performance. I just said, “hi!” as though I hadn’t heard anything, and I hung around and waited for her and Ahmed to go onstage before I asked my Father.

“Do you mean that Mother lied when she told me her parents died in an auto crash?”

Father shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe your mother lied, but maybe they died.”

“Wouldn’t you think you would care enough to find out and at least send a sympathy card? After all, Mother was your wife; Mother is the mother of your child. That’s me, in case no one told you.”

“I have never met your mother’s parents. I didn’t even know their name until your mother and I applied for a marriage license. The girl who came
to stay at the ranch in Taos was known to me as Sally Ghost, and I didn’t ask questions.”

“I notice that you don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Ask questions.”

“When we went to get the marriage license, I found out that your mother’s real name was Sarah Jane Whitley.”

“Don’t you think that Grandma and Grandpa Whitley would have wanted to send congratulations? Or a wedding present?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Your mother tried calling them, and they wouldn’t talk to her.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Do you know what pregnant is?” he asked.

I was shocked. I said, “That shows how little you know about me. Of course I know what
pregnant
is.”

“Of course you do. I shouldn’t have asked. You see, when I do ask questions, I ask the wrong ones. But the thing of it is this: your mother was pregnant when we got married.”

I was a little bit shocked at that. Of course, they never mentioned their wedding date because they never celebrated it. Of course, if they had not gotten divorced and had celebrated their wedding date, I could have counted the months between my birth and their wedding and found out that I was
pre-expected. I swallowed my surprise and said to Father. “So what? I’ve joined the crowd. I’ll bet half the first-borns at Fortnum School can’t add nine months between the time their parents got married and the time they were born. Is that what made Mother’s parents ashamed? Do you think she lied about her parents dying in an auto crash?”

“I don’t know, Bo. Maybe they rejected her again, and she had to pretend to herself they were dead. I haven’t any idea at all about them. No idea if they’re alive or dead.”

The chorus girl who led Ahmed on stage returned with him. Father took the guide rope from her and thanked her. Then he began loosening Ahmed’s bridle, and I went up to Room 1424 to think.