Beauty Queen

brought her up to think poorly of it too. She got right out on the streets, jobhunting. Two days later, she had a job as a waitress in a women's restaurant, Ouika's, on Ninth Avenue and 14th St. It was better than nothing.
    She felt so naked—stripped of her uniform and her gun and her beautifully maintained car. Of course, she still had the uniform and guns at home, since they were hers. But without the shield and the ID, they were junk. If the PBA didn't get her reinstated, she would have to sell them. She could see the ad in Spring 3100 now:
    WOMAN'S UNIFORM AND EQUIP: Fits 5'9", 135-pound frame, all leather goods, cuffs; 38 S&W 4" barrel Service Rev. Laid off. Will sell separately. 469-5503 evenings.
    The other members of the NYPD Four dealt with the employment problem each in their own way.
    Jewel said the hell with being a cop. She wrote herself a beautiful resume, based on her reporting experience at Spring 3100, and she landed a $12,000-a-year job at a small New York publisher.
    Sam had his pension, but he also had the problem of how to fill his days. He wound up going over to the Church of the Beloved Disciple every day to help catalog his cherished books. Just handling them was apparently a balm to Sam's wounded soul.
    Mary Ellen secretly wondered how well he would get along with the spiritual-and-art-minded group of men who ran that little old gay church. To her surprise, Sam reported to her that he was getting along with them just fine.
    One day just out of curiosity, she went over there with him. The church was now located on 23rd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and was the only gay church in the city that actually owned the real estate where it operated. They walked around in the modern Gothic chapel, very moved, looking at the stained glass windows, at the columned high altar rich with color and gold leaf.
    Sam said he had been very impressed when he first saw it.
    "Nobody would let those fellas have their own Gothic cathedral. So they built it themselves. They made every inch of this place with their bare hands," he said. "It's their own Saint Patrick's. Never seen anything like it in my life."
    She spent an hour in the library room upstairs, drinking coffee with Sam and a Gouple of the deacons. The famous collection of books, having survived its "Perils of Pauline," now reposed on many new shelves on four sides of the room. Sam was cataloging the books, and weeding out a few mavericks that had somehow gotten stuck in.
    "This one here is a black sheep, for instance," he said, pulling out a biography of Harry Truman and throwing it scornfully on the long library table in the middle of the room. "The only book about 'Give 'Em Hell Harry' that should be in this place is Merle Miller's."
    The deacons cracked up laughing. Mary Ellen could see that they all adored Sam, adored his curious blend of streetwise tough guy and sixty-year-old naivete.
    She could also see that Sam was getting his first closeup look at long-time male love relationships. Two of the men who ran the church had been together all their lives. Sam
    was obviously touched by this, though by no means sure that he could make a start on relationships this late in life.
    While she was sitting there, Mary Ellen was also struck for the first time by the importance of those books. She had never been much of a bookworm herself and had always diminished Sam's rage for reading as part of his cop-out.
    The deacons impressed on her that this was one of three major gay book collections on the East Coast, another being owned by a famous activist and still another by an anonymous private collector. And there were rumored to be two important libraries on the West Coast.
    Mary Ellen touched the backs of the books gently, realizing she was in the presence of something larger than life, almost holy. The books were an effort by gay people to rebuild their history, which had been shattered by the persecution of the Jeannie Colters back through the ages. They ranged from serious works on psychology to current bestsellers to cheap awful unliberated paperbacks of the 1950s, to august Victorian tomes of poetry, bound in leather and published in England.
    "It's like our Library of Congress, see?" said Sam, showing her a first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. "Or like that library in ... where was it? Alexandria, I think it was called. All kinds of books of history and philosophy written on sheep hides, in the old days, right? Somebody burned the