Lady Spain

"Hey, man," said Sam Bowers to the tough thing with long black lashes and a navel she didn't bother to manage, who stood singeing a fern frond with her cigarette, "don't you realize plants have feelings?" She raised her eyes.

"That's why I'm doing it," she said. A prickle of fern curled, browned, shriveled.

Sam shrugged. He was past 30, too old to save the vegetable world. He could barely even think about the dolphins. He had his own problems with closer relatives and this castrating plant sadist wasn't his type, anyway. Nevertheless, on a warm evening in San Francisco, as the Holy Kazoo reverberated inside the mansion, curiosity--over 30, yet irreconcilable--reared its gray-flecked, slit-eyed head. "Why?" he asked the lady with finicky tobacco, with untrammeled exposed belly button above low-riding cutoff velvet pants. She moved her current weapon from fern to lips. She drew. She exhaled.

"Fuckers," she said. "Bored, I'm so bored, man."

"Then why'd you come?"

" 'Cause I like to watch the assholes, perform," she said.

This unpromising meeting was taking place on the steps of the Victorian wooden mansion of Danny Doomsday, distinguished dope lawyer, a house that was precariously balanced on the backs of skinny, speedy, tirelessly crunching San Francisco termites, a law practice that was supported by the devoted and profitable defense of underprivileged former college-boy and Third World narcotics millionaires. A party was in progress on a Saturday evening. The counterculture never sleeps, never rests, even on Saturday night, heading into the Sabbath. It was a benefit for the F.C.C., Free Cocaine Conspiracy, a non-Red Feather Agency.

Among the many red and runny noses present was that of Stella Spain, who happened to be standing with can of Bud in one hand, cigarette in the other, her belly in black velvet pushing out a little (she was swollen with annoyance), grabbing a toke of evening air, when Sam Bowers, record producer, shambled up at midnight. He had been working late on a mix at the studio. He was a little depressed. He had recently gotten a divorce (well, they weren't ever legally married) from the three girl singers called the Epitomes. Due to backward California laws concerning bigamy, they had never been able to take out a license, which now only made the divorce more painful. Somehow it would have helped to find a legal final chord to this ballad of young quadraphonic love.

Sam was tired and sad, although rich.

Stella was morose and irascible, although poor.

They met under this hanging spider plant as Stella tried to burn the frond of an adjacent male fern with her lighted cigarette. She might have napalmed the spider plant, too, but she was too bored to lift toward a suspended pot, and besides, she believed spider plants have got their shit together, they're not such pigs, they're bisexual. She was not a botanist.

And if she lifted her arms, some creep was going to cop a feel--tits, ass, exposed belly button--at least that was her experience and judgment of matters.

"No, they're cool," said Sam.

"What do you know about it? When were you last a woman?"

"OK, OK," said Sam. "Let's agree about one thing right away. You got all kinds of mads ahead of us. You can wipe all over me."

"I can smell assholes," she said.

"And I know these people," he explained patiently, "and they're not into grabbing a female whilst she's busy incinerating the flowers. But personally, maybe because I'm older, I'm interested in the background of the crime."

"You mean you're horny?"

"No."

"You think I'm an easy fuck, some kind of life's reject?"

"Not at this point in time," he said, doing his famous H. R. Haldeman imitation.

"You sound just like Johnny Carson," she said. "Oink, oink."

"You'd like me to leave you in peace here on the firing range?"

And suddenly, at the crucial moment, in fact, past the point in time of no return, she flashed a perfect country-girl smile at him--clean, friendly, brilliant, with just a couple of honest, slightly crooked teeth at each corner. "No, you're nice, I heard of you, let's talk," she said. "Only thing is, I might as well confess to you, I've got no small talk."

"You do all right. I'm tired of crooners, anyway."

"You been hanging out with Rudy Vallee, man?"

"No, just different performers. Two sopranos and an alto."

"College girls?"

He nodded. No point in going into it now. Orthodontists had put their retainers on, the smiles were even and capped, they looked like sisters and even performed like siblings, but their smiles all together didn't add up to one storm-clearing jagged grin like this crazy child's. Await developments, he thought, unused to dealing with a single.

"College girls. Not me, I was nigger-poor, man, grew up in Elko on a cactus ranch, cooked up that cactus and tried to say it was mescaline, it wasn't, came late to the Fillmore, didn't even go to Vassar like all your friends--"

"You're smart. Somehow you got educated. Many people can't express themselves."

Slit-eyed gaze of scorn. "You interrupted, mister. You can interrupt with questions, but don't you tell me about myself. I'm just a shy child of the desert. I learned to talk from faggots and spooks, the Beautiful People, man, the old Haight, but I'm also a feminist, and I don't like being interrupted. Can you imagine what it was like to tell my story to that tall, indifferent Nevada sky? Contrary to what people think, there was no Gregory Peck or Kirk Douglas riding the range. It was some slobbery host of a talk show in the north-forty corral at best, driving a Toyota pickup, whose big thrill was turning the sheep upside down and pinching off their oysters. And all I got was dry skin, peeling nose, empty squeeze bottles of Jergens lotion filling the back yard behind the trailer, where the goats bunged each other and my half brothers chased me around the Bendix--hey, what are you?"

A short, bullheaded, bearded old man was stumping up the steps of the Victorian mansion. Two men with parted lips accompanied him. They were eager; he was important. "Hey, what are you, man?"

"This is Judge Craven," said one of the parted-lips escorts, "superior court of San Diego District."

"Hey, Judge, what do you think of victimless crimes? You convict? I'm going up before one of you. I'm a victimless criminal, Judge, I'm a whore, I suck, wanna meet me later?"

The judge looked happy, and spoke the truth. "Pleased to meet you, miss. Call me J. C. I'm off the bench at the moment." The two lawyers, like sucker-fish, were tugging him up the stairs. They didn't want to lose him in the stream. They nibbled at his elbows, his shoulders, they pushed and tickled a bit. He followed obediently. He was a wounded older man, injured by too much flesh. But he had always known Frisco would be like this, just the ticket to pull him out of the postprostatectomy slump.

"Hey, Judge! Every dude should do something bad once a month. I'll be here if you need me, Judge."

Wistfully she watched him into the crowd. "Shit-ass old fart," she said sweetly, and as he looked back hopefully, she waved to him. "First he wants to see if there's anything better 'n me inside. Fine. Let him," she said with deep inner peace. "There ain't."

"Maybe he thinks we're together," Sam said. Her repertory of deep-inner-peace riffs reminded him of something between Berkeley before a riot and the Haight after the Tac Squad has rendered its comment on social dissent and sidewalk penny tossing with the aid of Mace, cattle prods, fire hoses and dogs bred for savagery.

"Um," she said, but there was something wolflike, tooth-sharpened, and dissonant in these alpha waves of hers, although she remarked: "He's a type B. Can make do without me. Not one of those determineds who suicides himself out of love, just because I'm very exceptional." She diddled a singed fern with her little finger. It crumbled. She didn't bother burning the stump.

"You know where I been working?" she asked. "San Rafael! Where I made up this hit tune, since you're a record producer, big man in your own estimation, here's my hit tune:

O where the hell

Is San Rafael?

Unless you're aiming for Top Forty, AM, car-driving music, man, in which case we can make it: 'San Rafeck can go to heck.' But I'll tell you this, Mister Horny Youthgrope Music Producer Man: It won't even make the charts if you cut it down that way--" (continued on page 192)Lady Spain(continued from page 86)

"What you taking? Speed?"

She slowed down around the curve. "Shit no. Beer. A little coke, but it's wearing off already."

"You got a healthy metabolism."

"It was my desert-country, clean-air up-rearing. I tuned in, turned on and dropped around, which is how I'm able to survive life as a fallen woman in San Rafael. 'San Rafael, does it ring a bell? I'm just a girl whose heart is tore; a socio, psycho, metaphysical whore,'" she sang. "You like it?"

What's to like about this hyperactive motorcycle-freak Hell's Angel bull-dyke style? What, if anything, to like? And yet, and yet.

"I like you," he said.

"A dude who smoked a pipe said that to me once," she remarked more softly. "He was my freshman advisor, University of Nevada at Reno. He just crinkled up his friendly little eyes like you do, nice smile, sweet face, smoked a pipe, said he liked me and also liked me to go down on him after conference."

"Ha-ha, ha-ha," said Sam.

She sang again: "Lady Spain I adore me, Lady Spain I deplore me."

The midsummer, midnight trees were flowering, or at least pollinating, in the close musky heat of the Tenderloin. Rarely does a San Francisco evening shudder with this humid warmth of an Eastern summer, but this was one of those rare nights. Mites rose in a swarm from the alley nearby, where sunflowers scraped against a gutter; cats stood watch, hurried before the lurch and sprawl of winos; the mansion, which had stood here since the earthquake of 1906, might not survive the good vibes of the rock band industriously at work within. A redwood sign, Law Offices, D. Doomsday, ESQ., Associates: Brenda Quintilla, Bud Williams, Booker T. Washington IV, swayed along with the stomping of the celebrants. Benefits for a worthy cause usually develop like that. A skinny little tycoon, who had driven up in a Bentley, swept out of his carriage in a floor-length ermine cape to greet Sam. "Hey, man, remember me? I used to park your car in the righteous autopark next to Enrico's."

"I remember, I remember. How'd you get all ... all this?"

"This? Oh, I was a lousy parker, got fired for fender violations. So I took up dealing."

"Doing OK?"

"OK. Two arrests, out on thirty thousand bail--diplomatic pouch off a Peruvian diplomat, man. Doing OK."

"What's your goal?"

"Listen, I ain't greedy, man. Two hundred thousand or my next birthday."

???

"I mean, when you turn eighteen, it gets serious. So even if I haven't fulfilled my game plan, man, I quit on October twenty-nine. Cold fucking turkey on the international trade scene, man. I can do it. I'm a Scorpio."

"You don't seem worried."

"Why should I worry? I got the house, the wheels, the friends, the lawyer. Plus about four hundred thousand. Plus a little dealie in blank airline tickets. Who, me worry? A seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Scorpio in a world of tired old straight-arrow narcs with sludge in their arteries? Man, don't you remember how I put that dent in your, what was it, that Alfa Romeo and I just said, 'Who, me?' So that's what I say now I'm a coke tycoon: Who, me? My style hasn't changed that much, man. Scorpios are like that."

Sam just admired the little tycoon on his high cork heels. The heels were no higher than the soles, however. The kid had style.

"So next time you need your car parked," said the tycoon as he entered the party, "whyn't you call on me, for old time's sake, man?"

Sentimental strutting little cork-lifted, coke-lifted seventeen-and-a-half-year-old tycoon disappeared into busy clasp of benefit celebration. Stella watched and said, "It's Tums for the tummy to see a real man like that, paid his dues."

"So there are some people you like," Sam said.

She shrugged. "Didn't say I like him. Said I dig him. Maybe admire a little. He's a creep, though. I'm a new woman, man. Smart, ignorant, I take no shit, I'm just like that little creep, I'm not going to type hundred words a minute for no asshole. I got an I.Q. of 164--we should park cars? So I'm not going to be an executive or a fucking executive assistant. I'm going to run round the whole thing. I'm a whore, only I forgot to kiss the guy on the lips before I took his money. The cardinal rule Margo taught me. So I got entrapped by a goddamn vice-squad pervert who gave me the public's money to blow him and then busted me. You are looking, man, at a victimless criminal."

"I'll tell you the truth. You look more like a graduate student who went to Mexico once with a spade drummer and thinks she can talk dirty."

"Ha-ha. I can also talk clean." She caught a glimpse of the car parker emeritus unsteaming the window with his ermine sleeve. She waved. Sam realized it was polyethylene ermine, because the tycoon wasn't the sort who killed animals other than two-legged or four-wheeled narcs. He gestured to the music thundering within. She kissed her fingers and made a lip motion that meant Later, man, or not at all. The tycoon vanished within. "Clean," she said. She curled a little finger, pulled in her belly and remarked mincingly, "Oh, dear, don't you think here by the Brentwood Pool, it's so gauche of that silly thing over there to wear her bikini and show those stretch marks? She's only had three fiancés, you know, which doesn't even add up to one husband."

"I guess you've had your fill of life experiences."

"I'm going on twenty-eight. I been in and out of the Life. Trouble is it's an attractive nuisance--the money, the loving, the snare and the delusion. For example, when I was nineteen, dropout that first time, up in San Rafael that first time, my first John said he was a director, could get me into the business, I believed him. He told me the truth, man, that's the sad part! But he was a funeral director. When I found that out, I wanted to stiff him. Oh, he apologized, he was in love, he wasn't really the type, it was a family business. Only thing wasn't stiff around him was his little dingie, man. So I decided to depart from San Rafael."

And she hummed the theme from her hit song.

"Funny thing is you're nice," he said.

"Funny thing is you're sinister," she said. "You say you're a record producer--FBI records? CIA records? Police records? And you say you're divorced--is it from a group? 'Cause if you were married to a group, 'less it was the Supremes or those Pointer Sisters in there, I don't wanna dig it, I don't wanna be a part of your crazy fantasies. I got my own, man. I dream I'm a pretty young thing instead of a twenty-eight-year-old old old old old whore." She moved closer and brushed shoulders with him. "But I'm nice. I can do you good. I am not too old to smell sweet, not too young to smell ignorant. I'm jussssst right." She pronounced right raht, nearly rot, but her accent was no more consistent than her intentions.

Judge Craven popped gasping out of the throng. His mouth was open. His teeth were startling--bright, even and true. He looked ten years younger than he had looked a half hour ago, but he still looked old. He had examined the crowd, ducked his lawyer escorts and returned to the front stoop with its injured fern. He said to Stella: "I feel I'd like to discuss your case a bit further, miss. I'm not sitting in my district till next week."

"I feel an appeal coming on," she said.

"In hallucinogenics, illegal search and seizure does the trick," he said. "In, uh, your line, entrapment usually can handle it. Now, did the vice-squad officer present himself as enticing, seductive, uh, anxious to make, uh, out?"

"He entrapped my little search in his seizure, Judge."

"Just call me your Honor, ha-ha," he said. "I made a joke, like Dr. Kissinger did once. Henry. Miss, if you want me to handle your case a little, I think we might could meet privately--"

"Right now?" He nodded. "I thought so. So you might could get me to seize your little searcher, ooh, ah, that sort of scam, Judge?"

"Uh," he said, gulping like a fish. Sam believed his teeth gleamed a little less with inner radiance. The cruising patrol car, red Cyclops eye turning--noise control, abate the nuisance, buster--double-parked in front of them. He stumped down the wooden steps. "I'm Judge Craven, superior court, San Diego district," he opened up on the officers. "I believe the relevant neighbors have been invited to the, uh, religious and legal celebration...."

The cop car slithered away. He stumped back up.

"They'd rather deal with noise and whores like me"--the judge was wincing as she explained--"because it's not dangerous, noise and cunt don't pull guns, and they can shake us down."

"I know. I know, you have many legitimate, justifiable complaints against our legal system as she is constituted," the judge purred, rotating his rump in clockwise fashion, slowly, like a tired hand-operated egg beater, in such a fashion as to put his warm, soft buttocks between Stella and Sam and thereby to sweep Sam away. Sam knew enough to ride with the flow. "Mumm, mummm," the judge was humming. "We should speak of this in chambers, my child. You are perhaps an orphan?"

The poor child rolled her eyes. "One mother and about seven fathers, the last a veritable bull of a man--a machinist. My legal father, who conceived me, is professor of poultry at Cal State, Hayward. I see him now and then. He hears about my life and, man, he clucks."

"Tch, tch," said the judge and cleared his throat. He was slitching between his teeth a little, not clucking like Dad, and his rump was working hard on the subtext--get away, Sam, abate, move.

"Dere went de judge," said Stella.

"Do we have to be antagonists?" Judge Craven inquired. "Won't you let me help you, my dear?"

She rolled her eyes at Sam, asking if he was going to let this old lecher help her. Because if he let him, she would. She was just a defenseless innocent female, free on bond in a felony charge, lost in our troubled society of today. Man, said her eyes, her downturned lips, you gonna just stand there?

"Well, I gotta get going," Sam said. "Give my greetings to Danny, spent a lot of time out here with you folks."

"Sam," she called, "ooh, Sam, before you go. Where'd you say I could apply for that shot of penicillin?"

Sam stopped dead at the doorway. The judge's buttocks took a rest. Sam started to laugh and said, "OK, OK, Stella, you win, I'll listen to the rest of your sad story."

She turned sweetly to the judge. "Sir, would you mind waiting just three to five days? I believe the danger will be over by then. Unless you think you haven't got that much time till your stroke."

Judge Craven was exhausted. He had always known San Francisco was like this--infected, degenerate and left-wing. Back to the surfer boys of La Jolla. Sam and Stella watched him stumping down the street toward Van Ness, looking for a cab to the Jack Tar Hotel, where surely he could find something to give him rest.

• • •

There was this unaccustomed silence between Stella and Sam as the judge retreated. The music within the house swelled to meet the warm and humid silence with out. "I think he liked you," Sam said.

Stella touched the fern. She sighed. It would grow back. She had singed only the extended tips; it was like a fern treatment, a veritable singe job. "Naw, not so much he liked me," she said, "so much as nothing inside he could cross a state line with, or even get past the elevator operator. ... Sam?" she said tenderly. "You know how you tell a vice-squad cop bent on entrapment?"

"The shoes?" Sam asked.

She shook her head sadly. Oh, movie stuff. Here was this distinguished record producer, so hip, smart, rich and slim, and he thought cops still give themselves away by wearing black brogans. Oh, man, the morbidity of it all. Next he'd say shoulder holster. Well, every celebrity has feet of clay. Time to pour a little water on his feet. "Kiss him," Stella commanded.

"I never kissed a cop," Sam said.

"He goes stiff, back like a board. Ooh, don't want it on the lips. Just-doing-my-job kind of stiffness. Lemme show you."

An electrocuted death spasm of body hurtled against his mouth and ricocheted away.

"I see. Could break a front tooth. But I thought most guys don't really like to kiss," he said, "you know, just pay their money for. ..."

"Haw! Believe that, believe anything. You believe in Executive privilege. You believe in sinister forces. Shit, no, man, they're all boys like you, sad, lonely, shot-up kids, loving they want, to get honeyed, kissed, loved, licked, man! You think they just want to get their rocks off? Man, you're sick!"

Sam wished to defend himself. "Perhaps I just lack understanding," he said.

"Let's hope so. Me, too, I should of kissed that cop before I took the money from him. One thing I hate, it's a hard dingie with no insight at all. Wow, that's so old-fashioned, man. How old are you?"

He decided to play this cagey. "Bob Dylan's generation. Over thirty, I guess."

She shook her head at the additional wonderment of it all. More fun to torture this overage record producer than to singe a fern or a superior-court judge. She watched the quiver run through him. She thought it desire; he believed it to be masochism. This Hell's Angel lady would know the meaning of the word and the deed. The sanity of his grief for the close-harmony trio, O lost for all but one more recording date, was slipping away. The Epitomes had sometimes, scared him, but essentially they were just normal good kids who happened to like tricycle behavior. They would meet the contract for one more LP like little troupers. No more reptilian back-bending juicy inventions; just music, plus a quarrel about royalties. But this single lady was dangerous. He had better strike back fast.

"What do you like best, men or women?" he asked.

"Depends on what I'm with. Sometimes it depends. What are you?"

"You're bisexual? Groovy."

"Shit, I don't know. Have to take a test, I guess. Far as I know myself, my opinion don't matter."

Sam considered departing within for dope, food, music, easy converse, a less complicated antagonist. She would let him go, he knew that. She knew he was considering ending their struggle. It was only words, anyway, words, words, words, plus dear life. He could end this lifetime on the stoop by merely saying, Well, see you. He could depart. If he didn't need the Epitomes, who needed this brinky creature? He knew who he was. He was the best producer, including sound mixing, in San Francisco. He was somebody's man, his own, 32 track. He didn't need single trouble when he had barely escaped triple trouble. He was intact. He was not going to have his back broken again. She tipped the empty beer can slowly into the fern box.

"Say, Mister Record Producer, you know the test'll tell me what I am?"

He stared. They were belligerents again. Maybe this was the crisis. He knew better than to talk, since she always won the conversation Olympics, Put Down, Outdoor Standing. He hoped for divine intervention, instead. Here it was. A girl in a greenish, yeasty, fermenting fur jacket, over little else up top except wild eyes, asked: "Which way he go? that judge? Where he go?"

"Jack Tar Hotel, room eight-six-four," Stella said.

"I thought I was going with him," the girl whined and shrugged, shedding mites into the air--her fur dated from the time it was OK to kill, eat and wear animals. The girl from olden times went inside to drown her judicial sorrow in brownies.

Sam smiled. He was less fretful now. The world was full of delights, so why did he hang around on a Victorian front stoop with this champion nag? Inside there were skinny chicklets with confused eyes, stately Black Panther newspaper vendors, tense but knowledgeable lady lawyers, the Pointer Sisters in their Thirties flash, undone rock-'n'-roll aspirants to the crown of Janis Joplin, even Ms. Grace Slick herself, splendid in Maoist drag--well, in his present state, better confine himself to bringing a momentary glazed blue clarity to one of the corn-yellow-haired groupies who were waiting for lightning to strike. She could be his magic, he could be her lightning; let's go, tasty morsel.

Stella wins the Standing Outdoor Insight Title, too. She watched the reel unwind among the wounds of Sam's cortex, a confusion of ganglia and electrical impulses, memories and dreams, expectations and undischarged primal screams. She sighed. "I got to go home, there's something I got to tend to."

"Uh. Want to see my place?"

"I'm sure your place is nicer 'n my place. But I said I got to go home."

He shrugged.

Her voice slipped down off the raucous into a little whispery low gear near his jaw. "However, you could help me tend to it at my place. And it's only a short walk through unsafe streets from here, down Eddy two blocks, across to Ellis and we're there--"

They were walking. Judge Craven, who might have aided her case, had disappeared the other way. They were just strolling through the Tenderloin on a summer's evening, just a guy in leathers and a gal in logorrhea, no song there unless you wanted Vic Damone, a gal who liked to explain and thereby had kept him from getting any farther into the benefit than the front stoop. He'd send a check on Tuesday, when his secretary came in. The streets were rather quiet. Eight motorcycles started at once in front of Brucie's Down Under. Too much metal for racing cycles, too many studs, too much hype. She was watching the cycles thrum-thrum-blawww! and murmuring, if he caught it correctly, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female. Paul, not Paul McCartney. Galatians) 3:28. No goddamn peyote in the cactus out back in Elko, so sometimes I read the Bible to get high. We are all one in Christ Jesus. They made the unisex scene in Israel before Women's Wear Fucking Daily, man."

"No one's listening, Stella."

"I reach when I'm nervous, Sam."

Silence. Humid. Warm. Distant cry of ambulance siren, dying fall of Honda. She had taken his hint and walked the last half block in a state of meditative grace, falling in step with her escort. His thumb, as he held her hand, swept back and forth against sawed-off black velvet.

Relapse: "So here's my pad. You'll find it comfy. I cleaned up since the old digger rear guard came and camped last week, I had to sweep them out, hosed it down and everything. Somebody put a foot through one of my speakers. I think you'll find it cozy. I told you I had to tend to something, just take me a minute."

• • •

Her cats.

She had to tend to her cats.

Her little pussies, quite a lot of them.

Otherwise the place was bare--a pallet on the floor, a skeletal stereo rig beached like a crumpled helicopter, a pile of records in a Sunkist crate, the floor boards painted battleship gray, the walls whitewashed and one lonely footprint on the ceiling--the abominable peglegged spider man of the Tenderloin? Oddly enough, there was also a fern in the corner near the window that gave on the alley, and its leaves were sharp, green, comblike, unwounded by fire.

The place was clean and silent and still, except for a pile of newborn kittens in the corner. They made little peeping noises as she fussed and tended to them. What the devil made her think she was needed? Momma lay sleepily alongside, blinking in her dream of maternity as the pink muzzles nipped at her.

Well, it was nice of Stella to hope to be needed by some things. She looked up. Christ, it was just like Judge Craven, a night for the years slipping off. She was ten years younger. She looked 18 with her injection of mother love for these cats.

"Say, Sam, you ever make it with my kitties, I pour kitties all over you?"

He wasn't sure.

"It's nice and warm, Sam."

When she bent over, her cutoff velvet pulled up just above the T formations of her behind, and his eyes followed up her strong back, over the shoulder, down--Sam leaning to look--and there was the box of newborn kitties. They squirmed and nestled like pink furry maggots. No, he had never made it with a bunch of kitties. "Won't they get smashed?"

"Won't we be careful?" she inquired.

Tender crisp little kitty bones and pink flesh all over them both. "Guess we will be," he said.

Somehow this Hell's Angel needed to make a love guaranteed for tenderness by the chaperonage of seven newborn pussies. She picked up the momma and kissed it and nuzzled it a lot and locked it in the kitchen. "There," she said. She returned and stood looking at the kittens. Then she looked at Sam. Then they began. It was anxious but nice. It was slow and easy but sweet. Warm larval stirrings all over and around them. Mewlings and, on her mattress pitched on the floor, one high-pitched shrieking meow of relief.

Neither slept. The dawn light (go back to Homer for evocations of early morning). The ceiling of the Tenderloin flat unfolded before their wide-open eyes. A janitor rattled down the alley, coming home, not cleaning up. Cleaning up belongs to another generation. This was 1974, and the janitor worked nights at the P.O., feeding the Zip Code machine. The kittens stirred contentedly. They milked. In their pussykitten ganglia, they had never imagined it would be like this to be born in San Francisco.

The ceiling was as good as a fireplace for dreaming at dawn. They dreamed, they touched, she clasped his hand, it wasn't necessary to talk but Stella did, anyway.

She stated that she liked him a lot and did he mind that their relationship began in this sordid, cat-haunted flat?

He answered briefly, begging to differ with her, that their relationship began near a carefully singed fern and a superior-court judge on the front stoop of a legal benefit and he liked her a lot for her spirit, pluck and conversation.

"Um," she replied. She showed him a torn match cover on which she had scribbled: "J. C. Rm. 864, Jack Tar, Wed. check-out." She tried to be prudent.

He stated nothing much. Perhaps he dozed. Not to be jealous of Judge Craven. When he came back to alpha-wave life, or perhaps it was beta--he didn't go out on dates with his machine--she was trying to draw conclusions. She had a fabulous, modified-feminist way of turning real life into open discussion.

"Now that I'm in love," Stella said, "true love at last, you know what? I think I'll give up the Life. Peddling your ass is OK when you're young and fancy-free, but it's time to get serious now. I got a brain. I got imagination. I got a way with words. I bet I get probation for a first offense."

"What'll you do next?"

"You'll support me a little 'cause you like me." He nodded. That's right. "So it's sort of like a scholarship. I'm not going to be just another chick, live off my man, let him buy me my cat food and Kitty Litter. No, buster. Prepare myself for the future and do a little good for the world, besides. Not so much to earn money, hell, you got plenty of that. But as a warning to other women."

"You're going to work in a V.D. clinic?"

She sprayed a look of heat and energy all around him. A whiff of sadness. A perfume of tender bitterness. A fallout of longing and desire. A subtext of irony, a chortle, a sob. A complication.

"How I was brought up in cactus, lost my education through impatience and my own hostility, ran the risks of victimless crime and cared only for my kitties, but through them, learned the value of true love and now I have a chance, just a chance, depending both on myself and one other, to make it on through," she said. "I'm going to find me a writer and tell him my sad story. Lady Spain, he'll call it."

He listened, a 32-track sufferer, an arranger, a hearer out. She had no man. She gave up her chance for her very own superior-court judge. She was lonely. In this empty flat with its battleship-gray-painted slats, its whitewashed walls, its fern in a redwood pot, its hungry kittens, she came to the end of her act. She pulled the rumpled sheet over them like a tent, she put her hands on his shoulders--none of that outrageous horny and stagy groping--she looked into his sleepy, suddenly wide-awake, worried eyes. "Just give me a kiss like you mean it, Sam. Don't stiffen on me. I don't care what sex you are, what you like, what you think you are, I'll even work for you, I'll even pay you. I don't need anybody, I got used to it since I was brung up with the cactus, I was the nutty one even in that state campus of mine, even with the spooks and faggots, they thought I was nuts, so just mean it, Sam, be nice, be nice for once, I'll even shut up for you, be nice to me, someone--"

He put his mouth against hers on that mattress on the floor. Larval kittens came to squirm against the long warmth of bodies. This overage kid had his work cut out for him. Lady Spain.