Read Online The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry - Free Book Online Page A

pimply kid from L.A. who had probably been gay from the moment he was born.
    “Rodney, I just asked,” Harmony reminded him and went on to the dressing room. Probably the trainer had been trying to make the old elephant learn something new. It didn’t like to and farted a lot on those occasions.
    Harmony waltzed into the dressing room to discover Jessie standing there in her G-string showing the other girls the little space between her teeth, though about the only one who was trying to be sympathetic was Cherri, the other three girls were basically more interested in getting their makeup on. Cherri was the youngest showgirl, she was only nineteen and by her own report had pretty much been happy all her life. Consequently she was sort of awestruck by the number of miseries Jessie came up with day after day. Cherri was from Houston and her breasts were sort of the envy of everyone, including people from other shows, they weren’t small and yet they stuck straight out, without the tiniest suggestion of sag. Even Bonventre, who had seen his share of breasts and had had horrible remarks to make about most of them, hadn’t been able to come up with an immediate criticism when he saw Cherri’s.
    “Well, I sympathize if you have to have braces, I had to wear mine till two days before I graduated,” Cherri said, leaning over and smiling at the mirror to make sure she wasn’t developing gaps.
    The dressing room was tiny, converted from a wardrobe closet actually, but Harmony didn’t really mind, she got undressed and got her G-string on and a bathrobe and sat down to do her makeup, something she had done so manytimes she was convinced she could probably do it okay even if she suddenly went into a coma or something. Jessie’s space was next to hers at the makeup table and when Jessie had done her eyes she sort of practiced smiles for a while, obviously trying to come up with a way to smile that wouldn’t show the gap between her teeth or maybe her braces if she actually had to have them. Of course it was ridiculous for Jessie even to fantasize that she could be a showgirl and wear braces, after all wonderful smiles were part of what made the show a gay spectacle. When Bonventre really wanted to fire somebody but didn’t want to bother to even think up a good excuse he would usually just say a waiter had told him the girl wasn’t smiling enough, or it could be a boy, Bonventre didn’t like men any better than he liked women.
    “Jessie, you’re getting on my nerves doing that, just put your makeup on,” Harmony said.
    “This is gonna give me bad dreams, I know it is,” Jessie said.
    In fact the dressing room was kind of gloomy. Linda, who was next to Jessie, was three and a half months pregnant and was going to have to quit in another week or two, plus Beryl who was English finally thought she had found a boyfriend only to have the guy inform her he had decided to be gay, after all. When Jessie got tired of looking at her teeth she turned around and began to look at her ass, having remembered that Genevieve had told her it was dimpled. Nobody in the dressing room was speaking to Genevieve except Harmony. Genevieve had even alienated Cherri, who was a perfectly friendly girl, by laughing sarcastically just because Cherri hadn’t understood about having to shave her pubic hair before she could wear a G-string. She had been very embarrassed, but Genevieve had just laughed and not been at all sympathetic.
    But then Genevieve’s lover, who was on the order offorty years older than she was, had recently lost his job and become a taxi driver, plus her child had learning disabilities, she tended to carry a lot of unhappiness from her home life into the dressing room. Even Murdo the ventriloquist hated her because she kept pointing out that she could see his lips move every time she happened to glance at his act. She wasn’t particularly pretty and the consensus was Bonventre only kept her in the show because he liked to have