Ignatius snorted at the movie credits. All of the people involved in the film were equally unacceptable. A set designer, in particular, had appalled him too many times in the past. The heroine was even more offensive than she had been in the circus musical. In this film she was a bright young secretary whom an aged man of the world was trying to seduce. He flew her in a private jet to Bermuda and installed her in a suite. On their first night together she broke out in a rash just as the libertine was opening her bedroom door.
“Filth!” Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. “How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”
“They sure got some funny people at matinees,” a lady with a shopping bag said to her companion. “Just take a look at him. He’s got on a earring.”
Then there was a soft-focus love scene, and Ignatius began to lose control. He could feel the hysteria overtaking him. He tried to be silent, but he found that he couldn’t.
“They’re photographing them through several thicknesses of cheesecloth,” he spluttered. “Oh, my God. Who can imagine how wrinkled and loathsome those two really are? I think I’m getting nauseated. Can’t someone in the projection booth turn off the electricity? Please!”
He rattled his cutlass loudly against the side of his seat. An old usherette came down the aisle and tried to grab the cutlass from him, but Ignatius wrestled with her, and she slid to the carpet. She got up and hobbled away.
The heroine, believing her honor to be in question, had a series of paranoid fantasies in which she was lying on a bed with her libertine. The bed was pulled through the streets and floated across a swimming pool at the resort hotel.
“Good grief. Is this smut supposed to be comedy?” Ignatius demanded in the darkness. “I have not laughed once. My eyes can hardly believe this highly discolored garbage. That woman must be lashed until she drops. She is undermining our civilization. She is a Chinese Communist agent sent over to destroy us. Please! Someone with some decency get to the fuse box. Hundreds of people in this theater are being demoralized. If we’re all lucky, the Orpheum may have forgotten to pay its electrical bill.”
As the film ended Ignatius cried, “Under her All-American face she is really Toyko Rose!”
He wanted to stay for another showing, but he remembered the waif. Ignatius didn’t want to ruin a good thing. He needed that boy. Weakly he climbed over the four empty popcorn boxes that had accumulated before his seat during the movie. He was completely enervated. His emotions were spent. Gasping, he staggered up the aisle and out onto the sunlit street. There, by the cab stand at the Roosevelt Hotel, George was keeping a surly watch over the wagon.
“Jesus,” he sneered. “I thought you was never coming outta there. What kinda appointment you had? You just went to see a movie.”
“Please,” Ignatius sighed. “I’ve just been through trauma. Run along. I’ll meet you at one sharp tomorrow at Canal and Royal.”
“Okay, prof.” George took his packages and started to slouch away. “Keep your mouth shut, huh?”
“We shall see,” Ignatius said sternly.
He ate a hot dog with trembling hands and peeked down into his pocket at the photograph. From above the woman’s figure looked even more matronly and reassuring. Some broken professor of Roman history? A ruined medievalist? If only she would have shown her face. There was an air of solitude, of detachment, of solitary sensual and scholarly pleasure that appealed to him greatly. He looked at the scrap of wrapping paper, at the crude, tiny address. Bourbon Street. The undone woman was in the hands of commercial exploiters. What a challenging character for the Journal. That particular work, Ignatius thought, was rather lacking in the sensual department. It needed a good injection of lip-smacking innuendo. Perhaps the confessions of this woman would perk it up a bit.
Ignatius rolled down into the Quarter and, for a wild and very fleeting moment, pondered an affair. How Myrna would gnaw at her espresso cup rim in envy. He would describe every lush moment with this scholarly woman. With her background and Boethian worldview, she would take a very stoic and fatalistic view of whatever sexual gaucheries and blunders he committed. She would be understanding. “Be kind,” Ignatius would sigh to her. Myrna probably attacked sex with the vehemence and seriousness that she brought to social protest. How anguished she would be when Ignatius described his tender pleasures. “Do I dare?” Ignatius asked himself, bumping the wagon absent-mindedly into a parked car. The handle sank into his stomach and he belched. He would not tell the woman how he came across her. First, he would discuss Boethius. She would be overwhelmed.
Ignatius found the address and said, “Oh, my God! The poor woman is in the hands of fiends.” He studied the facade of the Night of Joy and lumbered up to the poster in the glass case. He read:
ROBERTA E. LEE
presents
Harlett O’Hara
The Virgin-ny Belle
(and pet!)
Who was Harlett O’Hara? Even more important, what kind of pet? Ignatius was intrigued. Afraid of attracting the wrath of the Nazi proprietress, he sat down uncomfortably on the curb and decided to wait.
Lana Lee was watching Darlene and the bird. They were almost ready to open. Now if only Darlene could get that line straight. She wandered away from the stage, gave Jones some additional directions about cleaning under the stools, and went to look out of the porthole of glass in the padded door. She’d seen enough of the act for one afternoon. The act was really pretty good in its own way. George was really bringing in the money with the new merchandise. Things were looking good. Too, Jones seemed to be broken in at last.
Lana pushed the door open and hollered out into the street, “Hey, you. Get off my curb, you character.”
“Please,” a rich voice answered from the street, pausing to think of some excuse. “I am only resting my rather broken feet.”
“Go rest them someplace else. Get that crappy wagon away from in front my business.” “
Let me assure you that I did not choose to collapse here before your gas chamber of a den. I did not return here of my own volition. My feet have simply ceased to function. I am paralyzed.”
“Go get paralyzed down the block. All I need is you hanging around here again to ruin my investment. You look like a queer with that earring. People’ll think this is a gay bar. Go on.”
“People will never make that mistake. Without a doubt you operate the most dismal bar in the city. May I interest you in purchasing a hot dog?”
Darlene came to the door and said, “Well, look who it is. How’s your poor momma?”
“Oh, my God,” Ignatius bellowed. “Why did Fortuna lead me to this spot?” “Hey, Jones,” Lana Lee called. “Quit knocking that broom and come chase this character away.”
“Sorry. Bouncer wage star at fifty dollar a week.”
“You sure treat your poor momma cruel,” Darlene said out the door.
“I don’t imagine that either of you ladies has read Boethius,” Ignatius sighed.
“Don’t talk to him,” Lana said to Darlene. “He’s a fucking smart-aleck. Jones, I’ll give you about two seconds to come out here before I get you picked up on a vagrancy rap along with this character. I’m getting fed up with smartasses in general.”
“Goodness knows what storm trooper will descend upon me and beat me senseless,” Ignatius observed coolly. “You can’t frighten me. I’ve already had my trauma for the day.”
“Ooo-wee!” Jones said when he looked out the door. “The green cap mother. In person. Live.”
“I see that you’ve wisely decided to hire a particularly terrifying Negro to protect you against your enraged and cheated customers,” the green cap mother said to Lana Lee.
“Hustle him off,” Lana said to Jones.
“Whoa! How you hustle off a elephan?”
“Look at those dark glasses. No doubt his system is swimming in dope.”
“Get the hell back in there,” Lana said to Darlene, who was staring at Ignatius. She pushed Darlene and said to Jones. “Okay. Get him.”
“Get out your razor and slash me,” Ignatius said as Lana and Darlene went in. “Throw lye in my face. Stab me. You wouldn’t realize, of course, that it was my interest in civil rights which led to my becoming a crippled vendor of franks. I lost a particularly successful position because of my stand on the racial question. My broken feet are the indirect result of my sensitive social conscience.”
manwithoutqualities 