Diary of an Alligator Queen Read online

  “Babe!” A young guy in jeans and a dark blue cowboy shirt entered from stage left, jogging down the street to catch her. He cupped his hands around his mouth calling out to her in that cajoling tone men use that’s like chucking pig shit at an industrial fan. The homeless man ducked back into a shadowed doorway.

  “Leave me alone,” she snapped.

  “Babe!” he shouted, way too loud for the silent street.

  The woman tried running faster, but four-inch stilettos are no match for a twenty-five-year-old in Nikes. He swooped in behind her and grabbed her by the waist, hauling her off her feet and spinning her around. Her dress rode up over her hips, hot pink panties peeking out from underneath, which was my cue to get the fuck out of there.

  She was laughing by the time he walked her back against the building, the wet, sloppy sounds of their kissing amplified against bricks. I fought the urge to cover my eyes as I started down the stone steps, back toward my own empty apartment.

  Movement flickered in my side vision and the man in the doorway stepped out into the light again. He watched the two of them as the kid ran his hand up her thigh and under her skirt. She leaned her head back against the brick, gripping his shoulders while he nibbled a line down her neck.

  It’s important to note here that the street was deserted except for me and the homeless man, and neither of us was flashy about our presence. Plus, sex and excrement is just a part of city living, even in the newer, ‘classier’ South.

  My Yankee ass knew better than to get involved in situations I had no business getting involved in. Especially when those situations involved either public sex or excrement, but while I was busy keeping to myself, the other man moved a little closer to the couple. Slowly. So slowly you could barely tell he was moving. Good God that fucker gave me the willies. It was the way he held himself so still, like Olive stalking a beetle. If he’d had a tail, the tip woulda been twitchin’. He was into them. Really into them. And they had no idea. On impulse, I crossed the street to their side.

  “Hey, get a room,” I shouted as I passed, my words a cold hose that echoed down the street. The girl laughed again, and the guy pulled away from her, yanking her skirt down.

  The Olive impersonator stepped back into the doorway, but he wasn’t all the way hidden and I saw his face when I walked by. Our gazes met. His wasn’t friendly.

  I walked a few more yards and heard the girl’s shoes moving behind me. Then they stopped.

  “Something on your mind, brother?” the younger man said behind me.

  I looked back over my shoulder.

  The older man stood, dead center on the sidewalk in front of the couple. His hair was blond and matted, falling to his shoulders in those inadvertent dreadlocks that come from not washing. He was as tall as the kid, maybe even a few inches taller.

  The younger man reached into his pocket and passed the other a few wadded bills, pressing them into his slack hand. “Get a meal, huh?” he said, taking the girl’s elbow and starting forward.

  The man turned to watch as the couple skirted around him and our eyes met again. He tipped his head back, just a little, and sniffed. To my surprise, I heard it—the soft, quick intake of air. He took a few steps toward me.

  The younger man made a clucking noise with his tongue when he saw me and looked me up and down. “Hey, sweetheart. You lonely?”

  His girlfriend slapped his shoulder, but he smiled at me anyway.

  He had dimples.

  I loved dimples.

  Neither of them had a clue I was the one who put an end to their party.

  “It’s not a great idea to walk around in this neighborhood alone at night,” he said, glancing back at the other man. “Creepers all over.”

  He studied my top like he was working on a plan to get me out of it. Out of it and into a naked sandwich with him and his homecoming queen. Jesus, guys like him were a dime a dozen in the South. Handsome, ex-First Assembly of God youth group boys who played football in fall, baseball in spring, and thought the world was their deli.

  Ten years ago, he’d have spelled trouble. Age and maturity made it possible for me to simply imagine licking his dimples and file him in my spank bank.

  “I’m just heading back to St. Catherine,” I said, grinning.

  He threw his free arm over my shoulder without an invitation.

  “Well then,” he said. “I’m your man.”

  Chapter Three

  The ID tag I used to breeze through the security line at work every day pegged me as the Assistant Curator for The Old Assembly House Museum and Center for Cultural Diversity. Sounds like a highbrow gig, right? Like I spent all my time discussing politics, sociology, and art.

  I didn’t.

  Instead, I spent almost all my time fundraising. I was the random email newsletter subscription you’d forgotten to opt out of five years earlier: random, irrelevant, and nearly impossible to get rid of. A rich man’s telemarketer.

  The worst part was that most of the time I didn’t even sell to people who appreciated art, history, or cultural diversity. They liked status. I sold connections. Networks. And while sobriety is important for bus drivers and neurosurgeons, when you spend your days trying to wrestle money from reluctant millionaires, it’s not always a bad thing to be half in the bag.

  I wasn’t quite that far gone when I dragged into work at a quarter after nine that morning, but I wanted to be. The boy from the street had offered to buy me a drink… or three. I made it home, with my honor intact, just in time to catch the first commuter report at five-thirty. Some cities like to get their partying over by three a.m. My city was just hitting its stride at that hour.

  “Mornin’, Glory!” Lacey, my administrative assistant, sang, sauntering into my office with her wiggle walk. “Did the doctor keep you up all night?”

  My boss, Kevin, sat working on a troublesome computer in our outer office. Except he wasn’t working; he was watching. Watching Lacey’s butt make its way toward me. He leaned back to see better and two wheels of his chair came off the floor.

  “I wish.” I moved my 32-ounce latte so she could plant her ass on her favorite spot; the corner of my desk.

  Kevin’s chair fell over.

  Lacey glanced back at him, struggling to get up, and sighed, rolling her eyes.

  At twenty-nine I still had trouble matching socks. Lacey, on the other hand, left the hospital in cashmere and lip gloss. Brown leather boots stopped just under her knees and a pink and tan plaid miniskirt, along with a matching pink sweater set topped off with a pink pearl necklace, hugged her curves. She had flawless skin and wore black liquid eyeliner in precise wings I couldn’t apply if I had fifty years and Rembrandt’s paintbrush. Her mascara was equally perfect, dancing the line between just right and spider legs.

  “You know,” she said, pouting, “you shouldn’t have bags like that under your eyes unless you got them doing something really fun.”

  “I fell asleep early.”

  She winced. “Again? Doll, haven’t you ever heard of Red Bull?”

  I cleared my throat. “How’s the… ah… research coming?”

  She leaned down close, whispering. “I got Helen Taft’s inaugural ball gown on loan.”

  “Shut the front door!”

  “Seriously.”

  “I don’t even want to know how you made that happen.”

  “Oh yes you do. You want all the nasty, dirty, little details.” She scooted off the desk and picked up my outgoing mail, slapping the envelopes against her palm like a ruler. “But you can’t have them. No, no. You don’t deserve them, falling asleep on your man like that.”

  My desk phone rang.

  “You look like hell by the way,” she said, turning back at the door. “Just in case I didn’t mention it before. You need to go tanning. You’re almost more cracker than Kevin.”

  “Lacey!” Kevin raised his hands, incredulous, standing just outside my door. “I’m sitting right here for crying out loud.”

  “I
thought you were on the floor.”

  “I was fixing the cables, but regardless—”

  “Oh, pop tart, you know I’m just teasin’.”

  Kevin’s jaw fell open. “Lacey, you can’t call me that.”

  I picked up the handset as she made her way back to her desk, Kevin trailing after her.

  Kevin was two years younger than me, but being a local in possession of a penis, and connected by family to certain board members, he’d grabbed the head curator position three years earlier. I’d worked my ass off for that position, and it had been mine right up until the moment Kevin applied for it and the guys at the top of our food chain jizzed in their five-hundred-dollar slacks. It would have been easier to hate Kevin if he’d been bad at his job, but he loved what we did. And he was good at it. Really good.

  “This is Nadine,” I said into the receiver.

  Jackson groaned on the other end.

  “Is that an apologetic moan?” I asked.

  “Am I the one who should apologize?” he croaked.

  “You sound awful.”

  “I threw up.”

  I made a sympathetic noise. “I’m sorry.”

  “What the hell happened to you last night?”

  “I fell asleep.”

  “Again?”

  I grimaced.

  “Babe, haven’t you ever heard of Red Bull?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Do you want to make it up to me?”

  “That depends,” I said. “Does making it up to you involve your special present?”

  I don’t feel it’s necessary to explain the euphemism here except to say Jackson’s special present was one I’d been pretty familiar with for about ten years. When I’d finally checked his messages from the night before, there were a couple pictures of it included with the texts… wearing a cape made of a cocktail napkin. Ba-dum-bum.

  “By the way, I didn’t mean that about your mother.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  I heard his bedsprings creak over the line and he grunted. “So, I switched shifts with Monroe for this evening.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If I come by at six you think you might be conscious?”

  I fiddled with the antique compass on my desk, always a little surprised that north was behind me when I sat in my chair. For some reason, I always assumed I faced east.

  “Jackson?” I asked.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “Am I different now? I mean, is this normal? All this… sleeping and not sleeping?”

  “I can write you a prescription.”

  “Not yet. I just want to know if this is okay.”

  The bed creaked again.

  “Babe, you survived a seriously traumatic animal attack. It would be surprising if there wasn’t some kind of emotional fall out.”

  “It wasn’t an animal,” I whispered.

  “Nadine, we’ve been through this. There is no way a human could have done that to you. We don’t have the right equipment.”

  “Prosthetic fangs?”

  He chuckled. “I don’t think so, honey.”

  I blew out a huge lungful of air. “Well, it was either a real vampire or there’s a two-hundred pound, hairless bulldog out there with opposable thumbs.”

  “I’d lay my money on the bulldog,” he said.

  We spent the day working on an early floor plan for the First Ladies exhibit. There’d been some pushback on it from a couple of board misogynists, and I don’t mean just the men, but it was a brilliant idea and Kevin fought for it ferociously.

  It was easy to get lost in the planning, the truly fun part of our work. Lacey’s Taft gown was a major score, but it wouldn’t stand on its own. We needed more. At two-thirty, I thumbed through my contact list, looking for a friend in New York with access to some of Eleanor Roosevelt’s lecture materials.

  Lacey grabbed my phone out of my hand and shoved it in my purse, passing me a card for a tanning salon on Canal Street.

  “Best bulbs in the state,” she said and yanked me out of my chair, walking me by a class of preschoolers and toward the employee entrance.

  “Red Bull,” she yelled and pushed me out the door, slamming it in my face.

  I lucked out and got a parking spot right in front of the salon door. The front window was covered in pink and aqua signage with purple neon edging.

  Inside, the woman behind the counter gave me the stink eye, like I was a twelve-year-old trying to buy Jager with a fake ID. She tapped two-inch-long, fire-engine-red fingernails on the laminate countertop. Her hair color matched her nails and she wore it teased and sprayed into the crazy mess of blown back spikiness that had sunk its teeth into all southern salons twenty years earlier and never let go

  “Hi,” I squeaked and cleared my throat. “Can I get fifteen minutes in a bed?”

  She smiled and snorted, pointing to my pasty arm. “Seven minutes. And you’re lucky to get it.”

  “That works.”

  She pulled a pair of goggles off a plastic palm tree and slapped them on the counter, making me jump back a little. “Do you have an accelerator?”

  I blinked. “Like in my car?”

  She sighed, selecting a foil lotion sample from the basket to her left. “Compliments of Caribbean Queen Salon and Twenty-Four-Hour Tanning. You’re in bed three. Downstairs and to the right.”

  Room three resembled a closet I used to hide in at Gamma’s when she made gefilte fish—small, hot, stuffy, and paneled with a flimsy dark wood that went out with the seventies. No Caribbean Queen held court down there. There were no coconuts or tiki torches. Just a worn-out air freshener in the shape of a palm tree.

  The tanning bed looked disturbingly coffinesque, but I stripped down to my skivvies anyway, rubbed my lotion sample on, and climbed inside, settling the goggles over my eyes and hitting the start button.

  Blue bulbs ran along the top and bottom of the bed, flickering as they came on. A radio set to a Top 40 Country station came on as well, along with a small fan that blew UV-heated air around my face to distract me from the fact I was cooking myself.

  Just so you don’t think I’m a total loser, I had tanned before. Once. Jackson’s frat had hosted a cotillion and he’d suggested, very gently, that I might want to get a little color. I didn’t tan on a regular basis because I had no self-control and would have turned into a shriveled orange. Also, I felt an obligation to represent my pale, Yankee, Irish-Jewish heritage as long as I lived in the south.

  Two minutes into the experience, I realized something was seriously wrong. It started with a faint tingling on my back, and after about thirty seconds, I was absolutely sure someone was working a set of box cutters up my torso.

  I yelped like a scalded dog and sat up too fast, cracking my nose on the lid above me. Shoving it away, I hopped out of the bed, fanning my ass with my hand. A full-length mirror hung on the back of the door and I danced over to it.

  “Holy cow,” I whispered, twisting to look at my back.

  I was a starlight mint.

  A fucking candy cane.

  Bright red streaks ran down my back, legs, and—I discovered as I gingerly pulled my panties down—my entire butt. Both cheeks. Blisters rose as I watched. My front wasn’t as bad. I assumed it was because it was further from the fire and not smooshed against the bed as my back had been.

  Twenty minutes and a lot of tears later, I had my clothes back on and was limping my way back upstairs and to the counter.

  “There’s something wrong with bed three,” I told the woman, who flipped through a tabloid.

  She huffed without looking up. “What’s that?”

  “It tried to eat me,” I said, lifting my shirt so she could see.

  “Oh dear Lord!” She gasped and crinkled her nose.

  “Do you think it was the accelerator?”

  “Honey, I think you need a lot of aloe and a doctor.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said, making my way toward the door.

  “You gonn
a be okay getting home?”

  I waved my hand pathetically behind me.

  “There’s no charge for today,” she called, and I swear she was trying not to laugh. “Just don’t come back.”

  Best bulbs in the state, my ass.

  Chapter Four

  I drove back to my apartment half-standing in the driver’s seat and caught my reflection in the rearview mirror after I parked in the small lot behind my building. My nose was swollen and peeling already, a dark bruise spreading over the bridge and under each eye. The rest of my face was a bright, angry pink. Fuchsia pink. Nineteen-eighties bridesmaid dress pink. I carefully extracted myself from the car and walked around to the front of the building, scaring the shit out of Mr. Watkins, who lived in the rear apartment on the second floor.

  “Girl! The fuck you do to yourself?”

  “I went tanning.”

  “All day?”

  I waved him off, sticking my key in the front door. Home was an old converted five-and-dime store built back when grace in architecture still meant something, even if you were just building a five-and-dime. Violins and bows hung in the picture window of the ground floor store, an instrument repair shop, owned by the man who’d inherited the building some twenty years earlier. I never saw it open, but some evenings the brave, melancholy sound of a solo violin would rise up and fill my apartment.

  Access to the second floor was through an art deco style wood door that looked original to the building and weighed as much as a black hole. The foyer floor was penny tile, the ceiling was tin, and the staircase banister was actual wood.

  My apartment was less decorative but there were pieces of it I loved. Did I move in just because of the old porcelain hot and cold taps in the bathroom? No, but they helped. I even loved the dusky rose tub and toilet.

  I loved the cast-iron radiators, and had even built a little window seat for Olive over one in the living room. She sat there from November to February, cozy as a clam, watching people pass by. I loved the vinyl tiles in the kitchen, red and yellow checked. They matched the yellow flecked laminate table and clashed with the sage green cupboards.