Gigolo | Page 2

of pointed ears
and pug noses and goat's feet. Nick's ears, to their fond gaze, presented
an honest red surface protruding from either side of his head. His feet,
in tan laced shoes, were ordinary feet, a little more than ordinarily
expert, perhaps, in the convolutions of the dance at Englewood
Masonic Hall, which is part of Chicago's vast South Side. No; a faun, to
Miss Bauers, Miss Olson, Miss Ahearn, and just Gertie, was one of
those things in the Lincoln Park Zoo.
Perhaps, sometimes, they realized, vaguely, that Nick was different.
When, for example, they tried--and failed--to picture him looking
interestedly at one of those three-piece bedroom sets glistening like
pulled taffy in the window of the installment furniture store, while they,
shy yet proprietary, clung to his arm and eyed the price ticket. Now
$98.50. You couldn't see Nick interested in bedroom sets, in price
tickets, in any of those settled, fixed, everyday things. He was fluid,
evasive, like quicksilver, though they did not put it thus.
Miss Bauers, goaded to revolt, would say pettishly: "You're like a
mosquito, that's what. Person never knows from one minute to the other
where you're at."
"Yeh," Nick would retort. "When you know where a mosquito's at,
what do you do to him? Plenty. I ain't looking to be squashed."
Miss Ahearn, whose public position (the Hygienic Barber Shop. Gent's
manicure, 50c.) offered unlimited social opportunities, would assume a
gay indifference. "They's plenty boys begging to take me out every
hour in the day. Swell lads, too. I ain't waiting round for any greasy
mechanic like you. Don't think it. Say, lookit your nails! They'd queer
you with me, let alone what else all is wrong with you."

In answer Nick would put one hand--one broad, brown, steel-strong
hand with its broken discoloured nails--on Miss Ahearn's arm, in its
flimsy georgette sleeve. Miss Ahearn's eyelids would flutter and close,
and a little shiver would run with icy-hot feet all over Miss Ahearn.
Nick was like that.
Nick's real name wasn't Nick at all--or scarcely at all. His last name
was Nicholas, and his parents, long before they became his parents,
traced their origin to some obscure Czechoslovakian province--long
before we became so glib with our Czechoslovakia. His first name was
Dewey, knowing which you automatically know the date of his birth. It
was a patriotic but unfortunate choice on the part of his parents. The
name did not fit him; was too mealy; not debonair enough. Nick. Nicky
in tenderer moments (Miss Bauers, Miss Olson, Miss Ahearn, just
Gertie, et al.).
His method with women was firm and somewhat stern, but never brutal.
He never waited for them if they were late. Any girl who assumed that
her value was enhanced in direct proportion to her tardiness in keeping
an engagement with Nick found herself standing disconsolate on the
corner of Fifty-third and Lake trying to look as if she were merely
waiting for the Lake Park car and not peering wistfully up and down
the street in search of a slim, graceful, hurrying figure that never came.
It is difficult to convey in words the charm that Nick possessed. Seeing
him, you beheld merely a medium-sized young mechanic in reasonably
grimed garage clothes when working; and in tight pants, tight coat, silk
shirt, long-visored green cap when at leisure. A rather pallid skin due to
the nature of his work. Large deft hands, a good deal like the hands of a
surgeon, square, blunt-fingered, spatulate. Indeed, as you saw him at
work, a wire-netted electric bulb held in one hand, the other plunged
deep into the vitals of the car on which he was engaged, you thought of
a surgeon performing a major operation. He wore one of those round
skullcaps characteristic of his craft (the brimless crown of an old felt
hat). He would deftly remove the transmission case and plunge his
hand deep into the car's guts, feeling expertly about with his
engine-wise fingers as a surgeon feels for liver, stomach, gall bladder,

intestines, appendix. When he brought up his hand, all dripping with
grease (which is the warm blood of the car), he invariably had put his
finger on the sore spot.
All this, of course, could not serve to endear him to the girls. On the
contrary, you would have thought that his hands alone, from which he
could never quite free the grease and grit, would have caused some
feeling of repugnance among the lily-fingered. But they, somehow,
seemed always to be finding an excuse to touch him: his tie, his hair,
his coat sleeve. They seemed even to derive a vicarious thrill from
holding his hat or cap when on an outing. They brushed imaginary bits
of lint from his coat lapel. They tried on