Dog Day Afternoon by Patrick Mann Read Free Book Online Page A

the gays in the last few years as they came out of the closets, a change to being natural like the blacks. The slogans were almost the same: “black is beautiful” and “gay is beautiful.” One promoted Afro hair and looked down on skin-lightening and hair-dekinking as a form of slave mentality. The other, among gay males, led to dressing like men, perhaps a bit freer and more creative than most, and looking down on drag queens.
    Well, that was Lana. The bitchiest drag queen of them all. And Littlejoe had her.
    Maybe drag queens were on their way out as part of gay life. Maybe not. In any event, it was too late for Lana, with her silicone-injected breasts. She had lived the life so long now that she was comfortable only as a woman.
    “Real dumb,” she murmured and rolled away from Joe’s stroking.
    “You okay, baby?”
    She had taken on quite a load even before Joe had found her in the back room of Mick’s Number One bar. And it hadn’t been till maybe four stingers later that she’d been willing to pull herself together and go home with him—or, rather, let herself be carried away.
    “Last of the big-time unreal spenders,” she said very distinctly now, spitting out the words with an excess sibilance that told Joe she was angry.
    “Yes, baby.”
    “Couldn’t even spring for a whole, entire cab,” she went on viciously. “’S’matter, didn’t your welfare check come in, Daddy Warbucks?”
    “Next week, baby.”
    “Carrying me through the Village like a common baggage.” She had started to sniffle. “Unreal little jerk-off.”
    “Now, baby.”
    “If you loved me,” she said, suddenly whirling to face him, “you’d think enough of my reputation not to expose me to every insane prying eye in the Village.”
    He saw that her mascara was running in black rivulets from under her eyes. Because she was lying on her side, the black was running sideways from the corner of her lower eye into the hair around her ear. He watched, fascinated, as the mascara from the upper eye began to run over the bridge of her rather large, aquiline nose.
    “If you really loved me,” she was saying, “there’d have been a cab. How much, I ask you, does a cab cost? Can it possibly be more that one of those insanely overpriced stingers that Mafia cousin of yours sells? Um?”
    “No, baby.”
    “What is he charging these days, three whole dollars a whole entire blast?”
    “That’s about right.”
    “Everybody knows the drinks cost, like, unreal, because nobody goes there to drink. They go there to look up my asshole. The old tunnel shot. I really showed it to them tonight, too.” She shifted from a sob to a giggle and wiped her eye, smearing the wet mascara into a blotch like a black eye.
    “If you honestly loved me,” she went on then, in a calmer voice, shifting out of her high register into a throatier one, “you would somehow get it all together for a change and help me with my problem, wouldn’t you?”
    “What’s that, baby?”
    “What’s that?” Her voice slid up an octave in irritation. “You of all people have the insane nerve to ask what my problem is?”
    “Oh, that.”
    Littlejoe lay in silence for a while. She was back on that again. He’d checked it out with friends. Even if you could get them to do it for you in the States, say at Johns Hopkins down in Baltimore, it still cost about three grand. That included the whole thing, castration and the making of a cunt. If you had to take your problem to Casablanca or Stockholm because the doctors in Baltimore said no dice, it cost less for the surgery and hospital but you had the air fare thrown in. So it always came to about three grand. And what for? Some whim of Lana’s? Who needed the whole thing?
    “You’ll love me when I’m a real woman all over,” Lana said then, her voice dropping to a point where it was lower than Littlejoe’s, and very arousing to him.
    “No I won’t.”
    “You’ll adore me, baby.”
    “You’re fine just the