“There she is!” It was a security guard. His name-tag said HEBBENS. He was a burly, exploding capillaried ex-linebacker type, Dick Butkus with a hair-weave and shiny Chiclet teeth, wrapped with sartorial menace in black suit, white shirt, blue shirt and ear-piece with the little wire running down under his collar. All eyes in the elevator turned on me. And I did, for that fleeting instant, feel that twitch in the liver that says CAUGHT. But caught doing what? Happily (sort of), it wasn’t me Security Chief Hebbens was staring at. It was Twink. She, clearly, was the guilty party. And she knew it. Otherwise, why would she have kicked the man with all the force her wiry little frame could muster, right in the shin? Three feet, four-and-a-half-inches of seething, pee-soaked rage.
“Fuck you and the horse that rode you in!” squealed the child, a variation on the standard epithet that, as per usual with Twinkette, rendered her either a genius or vaguely dyslexic in a way that may have foretold a career in advertising. People always love slogans, I once heard Joe Sacco say in an interview. They’re the closest thing we have to myth! Joe was the legendary ad man who coined “Stronger Than Dirt!” for the Ajax White Knight campaign in the sixties. (I wrote my master’s thesis on Arthurian Imagery in Contemporary Cleanser Ads, a field still, to my knowledge, pretty much wide open.) Whether or not Ajax could have neutered the urine-stench emanating from my niece’s micro-geisha was another question. But before I could give the query much consideration, Twink followed her shin-kick to the security guard with a well-placed fist that caught him dead center in what old-time sports announcers used to refer to as “the scrotal area.”
At that moment, oddly enough, I noticed Twink’s resemblance to my mother. It was uncanny. How could I have never seen it before? They both looked a little like Lucille Ball – though Twink was more of an early mini-Lucy, and my mother, currently miscounting cards in the Red Rock Casino, resembled Lucy in her dotage, after her voice dropped two octaves and she began coloring her hair ever more desperate shades of Bozo.
Security-man Hebbens let out a pained squeal, followed by a strange, high-pitched bark that sounded like he’d inhaled helium and sneezed. This prompted Twink to punch him again, in the same spot.
Shocked out of his professional demeanor, Hebbens managed to screech, “You little bitch!” and grabbed for my niece with cuffs already in hand. I remember thinking, ‘they look a little large.” But then, do they have kiddy cuffs? Or, when it comes to hand restraints, is it a one-size-detains-all situation? Not that it mattered. Twink was gone. Out the elevator, through the sputtering security man’s legs, leaving nothing more than a cloud of urine and a balled-up baby geisha costume in her wake.
All of this took maybe fifteen seconds. But, by the end of it, when we’d all worked back from the shock to the here and now, here was Hebbens with a little girl geisha dress in his hands – and there was Oliver, ever ready for litigation, snapping Blackberry pix of the flustered security man clutching the incriminating little girl party-wear.
“Oh this looks bad,” Oliver said, with the faux-compassion that’s driven me to blind rage since childhood, “this looks very bad.”
“Hey,” said Hebbens, already pleading his case. “You saw what she did!”
“She’s what they call a child,” I chimed in, “I’m sure they’ve had those at the Encore before.”
Not like her, I could imagine the poor muscle-head thinking. I was thinking the same thing. But family was family.
My brother handed me the Blackberry, so I could see the photo, and we both whistled at once.
“Mr. Hebbens, have you ever taken Depo-Provera?” asked Oliver, sounding suddenly like an out-take from a “Law and Order SVU” interrogation scene. “How long have you had these … urges when you’re around children? Did your Mommy and Daddy do bad things to you? Don’t hold back – it could help in court.”
Despite being half the Security Man’s size, Oliver’s tone came so freighted with conviction, it was all the big fellow could do to keep his chin from quivering. I wanted to tell Hebbens “It’s okay, my brother’s one of those dicks who just likes to shame people!” – but what was the point? I’d had to suffer Oliver’s abuse for decades; no doubt Hebbens could survive for five minutes. I just didn’t want to stand there and watch. Oliver’s voice made my hair sweat.
“I think I should duck out and look for Twink,” I announced. Not that anybody noticed.
Two hours later, I came to glued to a stool in some kind of sloth-bar, a half-slurped Manhattan in each hand. Pictures of adorable two-toed and three-toed sloths, hanging upside down from the rain forest canopy, graced every inch of available wall space. For one careening second, I thought that I’d somehow gone into a blackout and wound up in a Costa Rican lounge – with keno. Turns out, it wasn’t Costa Rica, it was still Vegas. And more surprising, Twink was on the stool next to me, sipping a Diet Coke through a straw, and eying me warily.
“Hey there Twink,” I said, “how about those sloths?”
“You’re drunk,” said the child, though not with any particular judgment. She was spookily sophisticated. As the fog cleared I had a dim, mortifying recollection of trying to impress a cocktail waitress with rollickingly (in retrospect) unfunny anecdotes about my celeb bro Bruce’s childhood Tourette’s. “He kept calling our mailman a whore – and he didn’t even know what a mailman was!” That kind of thing. Which made me want to bite my own face. There was nothing left to do but slink out and hope anybody who had overheard my idiocy was too old to tweet.
Grabbing Twink’s hand, I carefully left my stool and headed for the Red Exit sign, now whirling in dizzy triplicate.
“Let’s blow this popstand,” I said to my feral little niece. “How’d you like some ice cream?”
“I hate ice cream.” Then Twink stopped and stared at me, her tiny face screwed up in genuine disgust. “How come your eyes are bleeding? Your hands, too.”
“Stigmata,” I heard someone say, from very far away. And then my face hit the sloth-themed carpet.
