Free Lizards: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy

Lizards
1
    T he music—The Pointer Sisters singing “I’m So Excited”—is way too loud. Some of the women are covering their ears. Hot Rod doesn’t care. He struts around mouthing the words. He has disastrous teeth, crooked and bucked, and there’s a gap on the upper left side where at least two are missing. Every time he reaches the end of the runway he flicks his tongue in and out and flutters his black cape to offer a glimpse of his long, pale penis. Emma is beginning to wonder if this is all he’s going to do when he raises his arms and starts pumping his hips. His penis flaps around like a noodle. Women scream.
    Not Emma. And not Marion, who can’t seem to see past his acne. “It’s all over his bum!” she shouts in Emma’s ear when Hot Rod turns to face the wall.
    “Watch out,” Emma says. Hot Rod has suddenly leapt off the stage and is dancing in their direction. But it’s the woman sitting on Emma’s other side that he targets. Two inches from the woman’s face he resumes pumping.
    “The ones on his neck look like shingles,” Marion says to Emma. She leans across the table to get a better look. “I guess you get what you pay for,” she says, referring to no cover charge.
    “That’s debatable,” Emma says. She is referring to what Hot Rod has just said to the woman. She tells Marion: “He said, ‘For ten bucks, I’ll stick it in your drink.’ “
    Marion slaps a hand over her wine glass.
    That was also the other woman’s reaction. The woman isabout Emma’s age, thirty. She keeps shaking her head until, as if out of revenge, or conceit, Hot Rod wraps it in his cape. The woman’s shriek is muffled. Hot Rod opens his arms, triumphant, then commences a frenzied, complicated flourishing of his cape as he backs up the three stairs and onto the stage. Under the fixed spotlight he turns away from the audience, lifts his arms and begins pumping his hips again. Faster, faster.
    The music stops. Not the way it’s supposed to but as if the needle jumped off the record. Hot Rod freezes, legs bent, groin thrust forward. A good thirty seconds go by and then the spotlight dims. Hot Rod still doesn’t move. Women begin giggling and exchanging looks of uncertain hilarity, and Marion elbows Emma, but Emma is thinking that from the back and in this light, he’s not bad … great shoulders, nice tight ass, long thighs …
    The spotlight and the house lights come back on, and Hal, who owns the bar, yells, “Let’s hear it! Hot Rod Reynolds, ladies!” Hot Rod leaps back around to reveal the semi-erection he managed while frozen, just a flash of it, then he hangs the cape over one arm like a toreador and strides offstage.
    “Show him you love him, ladies!”
    Generous applause, a few whistles. Even the woman who had her head wrapped applauds. (People in this town are so polite! When Emma and her husband, Gerry, moved out here from the city they had to learn that a stranger waving at you as you drove by wasn’t waving you
down.)
What’s going on now is more than good manners, though, as Emma realizes. It’s that the women
want
to clap, they want to have fun tonight, “Ladies Night,” Hal has called it, substituting the Bear Pit’s usual topless waitresses for what he says are Miami Beach boys. He says it now, trying to milk the applause. “All the way from Miami Beach, Florida!”
    Marion crouches over her drink and says in her thrilled waythat Craig, her new boyfriend, is going to kill her. She has a lovely, kind face and a grandmotherly manner that gives the pet store she manages a homey, animal-shelter atmosphere. What initially attracted Emma to her were her breathless accounts of horrific pet deaths. A border collie puppy goes missing when the hay is being cut and baled; months later, the farmer is breaking open one of the bales and out tumbles the dog’s rotting, mangled head. A budgie is flying around the kitchen and lands on the hot wood stove, where, instantly, its feet melt like wax and