Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [46]
“I have fifty on the cheese,” Johnny confided to Boone as Hang was devouring his third plate of buffet food.
“You have seventy-five that he’s not going to throw up at all,” Boone said.
Johnny said, “I’m trying to make some of it back.”
“You think he’s going to yank?”
“You don’t?”
Well, yes, but you have to take up for your guy.
The next hour made its way into San Diego strip club lore as everyone in the entire club—horny guys, plain degenerates, sailors, marines, bartenders, waitresses, bouncers, and naked women—stopped what they were doing to observe a twenty-one-year-old soul surfer struggle to keep the contents of his bloated stomach right there in his stomach. Even Dan Silver took a break from counting money in his office to check out the scene.
Boone watched as Hang’s face turned a little green and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. Hang shifted in his chair; he reached down and touched his toes. He took deep breaths—at Johnny’s suggestion, based on two trips to the labor room with his wife—he panted like a dog. At one point, he let out an enormous belch.…
“No vomit, no vomit,” High Tide quickly said as several of the official judges looked closely at the front of Hang’s JERRY GARCIA IS GOD T-shirt.
Hang managed to, well, hang.
The crowd counted down the entire last minute. It was a triumph, a ticker-tape parade, New Year’s Eve in Times Square with Dick Clark as half of the onlookers counted the numbers and the other half chanted, “Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve.…”
Hang’s face shone with victory.
Never before in his life had he been the object of this much attention; he had never won anything, certainly never won a lot of money for himself or other people. He had never been the hero, and now he was. He was glowing, accepting the pats on the back, the congratulations, and the shouts of “Speech, speech, speech.”
Hang smiled modestly, opened his mouth to speak, and spewed trajectory vomit all over the innocent bystanders.
Johnny won his initial bet, plus the fifty on the cheese.
It was the only even semi-fun time that Boone had ever spent in a strip club.
But if Tammy were a nurse, he thinks, we’d be going to the hospital; if she were a secretary, we’d be going to an office building. But she’s a stripper, so …
“You don’t have to come,” he tells Petra, praying she’ll take him up on the bailout offer.
“No, I want to.”
“Really, it’s pretty sleazy,” Boone says, “especially in the daytime.”
If a strip club at night is tedious, in the daytime it’s the birth of the blues—third-string strippers grinding halfhearted “dances” to a mostly empty room scarcely populated with lonely alcoholics coming off graveyard shifts, or horny losers figuring (wrongly) they have a shot with the C-team girls.
It’s horrible, and, annoyed as he is with Petra’s type A bullshit, he still wants to spare her the full hideousness.
She’s having none of it.
“I’m going with you,” she insists.
“There won’t be any male strippers,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I still want to go.”
“Oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” she asks.
“Look,” Boone says, “there’s nothing wrong with it. Personally, I think that—”
Petra’s eyes widen.
Totally striking. Amazing.
“Oh, ‘Oh,’ ” she says. “I understand. Just because I’m immune to your Neanderthal anticharm, you jump to the conclusion that I therefore just have to be—”
“You’re the one who wants to go to a—”
“On business!”
“I don’t know why you’re getting so worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you were this politically correct—”
“I am.”
“Look, around here it’s all good,” Boone says. “I’ll bet half the women I know … well, not half, okay, a tenth anyway … of the women I know play for the other—”
“I do not play for …” Petra says. “It’s none of your business whom I play for.