Free Golden Orange by Joseph Wambaugh

was dark enough to camouflage nips and tucks and bad sutures and lumpy implants and curdled silicone.
    Winnie walked all the way around the rectangular midroom bar but couldn’t find her in the teeming crowd. He started looking at the people the way a cop does, noticing that a lot of the women had skin so taut they were frog eyed, with that look of perpetual astonishment. The older guys had their share of cosmetic surgery too, the kind that softens and smoothes the eyes. But instead of looking like young men they end up looking like old women. Old guys with old women’s eyes were a common sight even in Spoon’s Landing. What wasn’t common was the sight of a black face anywhere in The Golden Orange. The census always claimed there were a few, but nobody ever saw one. It was said that former baseball slugger Reggie Jackson lived around here but it was widely believed that by now he’d turned white.
    Winnie elbowed a space for himself at the bar next to a guy who was doing well just to hang on. The guy was very tall, wore an auburn toupee, and was swaying like a palm tree in big wind. He looked pretty old up close, and you could weave a dock line from his gray wiry nose hair.
    â€œBetter adjust the horizontal hold, partner,” Winnie said when the guy lurched into him.
    â€œI know you?”
    Winnie thought it was the worst rug he’d even seen, especially on a rich guy. “I’m new around here,” he said.
    Winnie was delighted when the guy waved to one of the harried bartenders and yelled, “Give my friend a …”
    â€œPolish vodka. On the rocks.”
    â€œDouble?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    When Winnie’s drink arrived, the drunk in the funny red rug said, “You won’t like it here. Superficial. Everybody’s superficial.”
    â€œWell, superficiality’s only skin deep,” Winnie said, standing on tiptoes, unable to spot her among the murky mob of drinkers.
    â€œLook at the lizards slithering in,” the guy said disgustedly. “Here to ferret out some lonely old broad before she gets Alzheimer’s so bad her lawyer has to slam a lid on the money box. This is the night of the lizard. Drinks’re cheap. Grab-a-granny night, we call it.” Then the tall drunk took a closer look at Winnie, swayed to starboard, and said, “Wait a minute. You a lizard? Naw, you don’t look like one.”
    Winnie caught him in midstagger and said, “You filed a flight plan?”
    â€œ Another drink for my friend!” the guy said to the bartender, who nodded and took an order for thirteen drinks from a perspiring waitress as the roar of the crowd increased in direct relation to the decibel level of the band playing in the other room.
    â€œAnyway,” Winnie’s sponsor continued, “you’re new, so you can hook your wagon to a star. Or your bumper hitch to a hearse. Some old broad with lips like wet clay and a house done in graveyard marble.”
    â€œI’m sorta always hooking my wagon to a wagon, is my problem,” Winnie said.
    Then the drunk pointed to a booth full of hot mommas on the upper level. They were sleek and slim and expensive, like Tess Binder. Women her age. Even across the room Winnie could see they were all looking for something.
    â€œStay away from them ,” the guy said.
    â€œWho they waiting for?”
    â€œNot guys like you. F.F.H. rich, not just seven-one-four rich.”
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œI tell you, stay away from those broads! None of them ever had an orgasm unless it happened on shop-till-you-drop day at South Coast Plaza. If local paramedics have to learn lifesaving liposuction it’s because of them. Conversation? They could trivialize trivia.”
    While Winnie Farlowe was watching them , Tess Binder strolled into the jammed barroom, walked directly toward them , kissed one of them on the cheek and sat down at their table.
    â€œDo you know that one?”