Page 50 of Shadow Ticket
ev’ry side!
Uh huh,
Right up there where it counts,
Just, waitin to pounce,
It’s that Heavysi-i-ide Bounce!
“Yes it’s time for Rex and Rhonda, the Civilized World’s Most Sophisticated Couple, and ‘Speak of the Week.’ ” In which the two R’s broadcast remote from a different Manhattan nightspot every Saturday on into Sunday,and it’s really a show for everybody who’s stuck at home Saturday nights beside the radio, while the rest of the world’s out making whoopee—for those of us who like to hear about it even if we don’t get to do it, here week by week are the friendly bars of our dreams, a welcoming communion of regulars, romantic strangers, and traveling rogues who breeze in past the bouncers, cause some commotion, then vanish back into the unlit ether, bartenders reliable as the law of gravity, one of the more appreciated side effects of Prohibition being what a bartenderdoesn’tdo, and with how much finesse, sometimes genius, he doesn’t do it. You lean forward, radioside, you have your own supply of hooch, perhaps, as this is a drink-along show…
“And a Happy After Hours to radio sophisticates everywhere…Have you noticed, Rex, how the closer we get to Repeal, the less and less drinkable becomes the sort of thing they’re putting in bottles these days, it’s a disgrace, and we do hope you won’t be running across any of the shipmentwegot needled by this week…”
“Ever so true, yet what li’l Rhondayvoo here neglects to mention is how she in particular, with her willingness to drink anything she doesn’t have to pay for, has been doing her best, every night for the duration, to give alcohol a bad name—”
“Mmm, but Rex, darling, those who actually listen to what I say know what a gay old personality I can be, and those who don’t like it, well, do feel welcome to your choice of impolite suggestions, a sophisticate like you has surely heard them all—”
Continuing to bicker, at first charmingly, but then with more of an edge. Are they “fighting,” really, or only pretending to? Depends on how much radio listening you do. Audiences go for this, while at the same time secretly hoping that one day one of the two R’s will go so far as to murder the other, ideally while on the air…
“But somebody,” Hicks meanwhile has been trying to explain, “wants me 86’d clear out of the U.S.A.”
“Their money’s good,” shrugs Connie McSpool, “which if that’s not the problem then why worry? Horrors of the Deep, forget it, there’s plenty of shipboard activities to keep you busy, gambling casinos, glamoroustomatoes aplenty, why sure and you’ll be back on dry land again before you know it.”
“Yeah, but meantime instead maybe if I could just donate this boat ticket here to one of your cop benevolent funds—”
“Cash only, lad, sorry. Tradition and all.”
“It’s the bum’s rush.”
“I know. We just got a memo from the Home Office to that effect, requesting our assistance if needed.”
“Con, you wouldn’t.”
“Me, no I wouldn’t, but there’s plenty on the payroll these days who would, and I can’t speak for everybody, can I?”
19
About all Hicks can recall is having what he thought was an innocent beer, which in fact turned out to’ve been visited by a needle full of something in the chloral hydrate family, sending him off to dreamland before he could remember how to find a coaster to set his glass on. Next thing he knows he’s out someplace draped over what seems to be…something big, steel…moving around under his feet, smells like salt water, Diesel fuel no wait, nngghhh no, can’t be can it…
Sure can. Turns out to be the ocean linerStupendica, by now someplace well out to sea. He risks a nauseated, desperate look aft, as if there still might be land in sight, which there doesn’t seem to be.
“Little green around the gills, there.” Looks like a seagoing-type tomato, a species he doesn’t recall running across that often, smoking a Melachrino in a jade holder, doll hat in pale mauve perched over one ear, hair styled in one of those varsity bobs, curl dipping in at the eye kind of thing. In Wisconsin they’d say either too young or too East Coast.
Somehow Hicks seems to be still wearing his hat, whose brim he now gives a touch. “Swell, thanks, how about yourself?”
“Oh I never get seasick, this is only research, you know, working the rail, learning to tell the sports from the stiffs, the stomach never lies.”
Glow Tripforth del Vasto is here on assignment forHep Debutantemagazine, sending in a series of articles on how to be a Jazz Age adventuress on a Depression budget.
“Stick around, I may need some advice.”
“Ooh! poor thing, asleep on your feet, maybe you’d be safer in your cabin, do you think you can make it there all right?”
“My…”
Hmm, forgotten his cabin number too…Sparks of interest, all right. Some girls go for a man in uniform, but give Glow an amnesia case anytime. No ex-wives or old flames to brood about, can’t get much more romantic than that.
“All’s I know is is it ain’t Harlem, which last I knew it was.”
