Free Golden Orange by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

Winnie asked the tall drunk.
    The guy swayed again, looked over the heads of the crowd at Tess Binder and said, “No, but they’re interchangeable. Choosing between any two of them’s like choosing between Iran and Iraq.”
    Two minutes later Winnie was standing at the booth full of hot mommas. Corky Peebles, in a torso-hugging cotton turtleneck, took a sniff but passed. She knew poverty when she smelled it.
    â€œWin!” Tess said, beaming up at him. “Sit. Have a drink.” Then she turned to the other hot mommas and said, “Everyone, this is Win Farlowe.”
    Winnie caught a few names, and sat down to hear the end of Rita Fisher’s tale of tragic divorce, which everyone knew to mean she’d not been able to get Graham Fisher to abrogate the prenuptial agreement.
    â€œ... so there I was wandering around Crystal Court,” Rita explained. “Alone. I mean, really alone in a crowd. My house on Lido? Gone. Even my birthday present? My five-sixty SL? Gone! Stolen by that barrel of guts! That heartless, three-hundred-pound monster. Him, he’s still decimating herds of beef. Me, I’m living on tarragon sprigs!”
    Tess said, “You should’ve put mad money aside every chance you got. Next time, get a secret safety deposit box.”
    Rita sighed. “That doesn’t work for me. Mad money’s harder to keep boxed up than Elvis Presley.”
    A few of the women clucked and murmured sympathetically, but Winnie noticed that none of them stopped eyeing the new prospects who passed through the packed lounge in an endless flow.
    â€œI told you, you should never’ve married that greedy swine!” said the ever-sensitive Corky Peebles. “People like him, and Castro and Qaddafi, and Ted Kennedy, and …” She’d just run out of famous people she hated. “They should all be put in a country where they only have a Sears store to shop in! They should have to live with mall withdrawal forever!”
    It was clearly the worst fate that Corky Peebles could wish on another human being.
    â€œAfter a while the need to shop sort of goes in remission,” Tess consoled. Then she turned to Winnie and said, “Shall we go to dinner?”
    As Winnie and Tess pushed through the crowd and got to the door, the drunk in the red rug was boozier yet. He was sharing the door table with a dog-eyed hot momma so thin you could pick her up like a beer mug, by her collar bones. He was saying to her: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be! That’s Robert Browning.”
    The skinny momma, her silicone bursting out of a creamy pink silk blouse, had just eyeballed better pickings in the form of a rollicking up-and-coming mortgage banker. She jumped up and said, “Mister Browning was correct only if you have a personal trainer, a good cosmetic surgeon and a great portfolio. Bye-bye, darling.”
    The disgusted drunk spotted Winnie leaving with Tess Binder and cried out, “Don’t think yours is any different! They’re so predictable! An organ grinder shows you more variety! Their natural inclination is toward spike heels with ankle straps and fishnet stockings! Don’t be fooled, my friend! Hookers! All of them!”
    â€œWho was that delightful man?” Tess asked, as she and Winnie walked through the lobby toward the parking lot.
    â€œGuy I met at the bar. Wore those five-hundred-dollar ostrich shoes with warts on ’em? Went to the Andrei Gromyko charm school. So pessimistic he should wear a shroud.”
    â€œA real sweetheart. I could see that.”
    He’d never stood beside her until now, and she was taller than he’d thought. In high heels, she was exactly at eye level with him.
    â€œWhere we going to dinner and do they take overdrawn Visa cards and when was the last time you rode in a VW rag-top that runs worse than New York City?”
    â€œDon’t worry about a thing, old son,” she