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He slouched near a window, moped himself, and a sugary male voice sang.

Just a gigolo,

Everywhere I go,

People know the part I’m playing .. .

The song filled him with a soft kind of sadness, and he listened, forgetting things, feeling as if the music was a sad thing running through him.

When the end comes,

I know they’ll say,

Just a gigolo.

And he looked like he would be something of that, marrying Catherine without a job when she’d have more dough than he had. Hot, ragging, snappy jazz music broke loose, and Studs sneered at the sight of a kid of seventeen or eighteen, with down on his upper lip, snapping his fingers, shaking his shoulders, gyrating his legs to the music. Disconcerting and shrill static cut into the music, and then it beat again in quick rhythms. Studs tapped with his foot, dreamily thinking of himself as just going along the same as he had in the old days, strong and tough and with nothing serious to cramp his style and his fun. Studs Lonigan, hard as nails, chased by broads who just begged to lay down for him.

His lips twisted in a sneer at himself, and he thought that he was just a goddamn washed-up has-been. Sneezing again. He was catching cold, and he ought to go home and get in bed. The music softened into a slow and sighing sentimental tune, and it struck at Studs, made him brood with pity for himself, worry, regret. Lucy, Catherine, the days when he was a punk kid. A crooner sobbed with the music. Felt low, walking in the moonlight of a summer night, because she had left him. He now, well, he had gotten something else again. He smiled ironically. If Catherine had left him, he might have felt the song, but he wouldn’t feel like he did this minute. Vacant-eyed, he looked over objects in the window, music rolls, violins, saxophones, sheet music, Victrola records, piccolos, horns, tuning forks, mouth organs. He turned from the window. He clenched his fists and compressed his lips in explosive tenseness.

Goddamn it! he silently spit at himself.

What he needed was something to make him forget such things. A burlesque show. The hottest ones were south of Van Buren. He crossed under the elevated structure, and on toward the cheap shows on South State Street.

VIII

The urinal smell of the ten-cent burlesque show made Studs feel as if he would become diseased or contaminated just by sitting in it. Four beefy women in narrow strips of colored cloth slowly rolled and twisted their abdomens to the tune of catching, tinny music. The music beat more swiftly, and the belly movements of the dancers quickened. Studs clenched his hands, leaned forward in his seat located at about the center of the small theatre. He watched closely while the women stood, legs spread, orgiastic ally shaking their wobbly bellies. Washed-out, painted whores. But they sure could shake that thing. His whole body seemed to narrow into one canal of desire.

“Take ‘em off,” a man cried.

With a final beat of the music, and a last lascivious twist, the girls trotted off the stage, their large breasts bouncing with each step.

A page-boy placed a sign at the right-hand corner of the stage.

SHIMMY CONTEST

A peroxide blonde, with purple tights and breast cloth, heavily skipped to the center of the stage. She began slowly, worked herself into rapid, shimmying twists, flung her head back in abandon, stood with her feet planted widely apart, her belly thrust forward. Sick with desire, wanting to see, and imagining the sight of the woman’s hidden flesh, Studs watched the rippling of muscles beneath the purple tights. The woman let go completely, and with a final crescendo of jazz drew wild applause from the male audience.

“Take ‘em off. Take ‘em off,” a man cried, and Studs joined others who took up the cry, stamped their feet, clapped.

The woman removed her breast cloth deftly, shielding her breasts almost with the same movement, robbing her audience of the desired sight. She coyly winked, turned about, projected her fat buttocks to her applauders, wriggled them, trotted off the stage.

Just enough to make a fellow