In One Person

suppose—is she your type?”
    “Yes, definitely,” I told him. (I thought the lime-green strobe pulsing on the dancer was a little tacky.)
    It wasn’t exactly a strip show; the dancer had certainly had her boobs done, and she was very proud of them, but she never took off the thong. The crowd gave her a big hand when she exited the stage, passing through the audience—even passing by the bar, still in her thong but carrying the rest of her clothes. Bovary said something to her in Spanish, and she smiled.
    “I told her you were a very important guest, and that she was
definitely
your type,” the little man said mischievously to me. When I started to say something, he put an index finger to his lips and whispered: “I’ll be your translator.”
    I first thought he was making a joke—about translating for me, if I were later to find myself with the transsexual dancer—but Bovary meant that he would translate for my father. “Franny! Franny! Franny!” voices in the crowd kept calling.
    From the instant Franny Dean came onstage, there were ooohs and ahhhs; it wasn’t just the glitter and drop-dead décolletage of the dress, but with that plunging neckline and the poised way my father carried it off, I could see why Grandpa Harry had a soft spot for William Francis Dean. The wig was a jet-black mane with silver sparkles; it matched the dress. The falsies were modest—small, like the rest of him—and the pearl necklace wasn’t ostentatious, yet it picked up the powder-blue light onstage. That same powder-blue light had turned all the white onstage and in the audience a pearl-gray color—even Señor Bovary’s white shirt, where we sat at the bar.
    “I have a little story to tell you,” my dad told the crowd, in Spanish. “It won’t take very long,” he said with a smile; his old, thin fingers toyed with his pearls. “Maybe you’ve heard this before?” he asked—as Bovary whispered, in English, in my ear.
    “
Sí!
” shouted the crowd, in chorus.
    “Sorry,” my father replied, “but it’s the only story I know. It’s the story of my life, and the one love in it.”
    I already knew the story. It was, in part, what he’d told me when I was recovering from scarlet fever—only in more detail than a child could possibly have remembered.
    “Imagine meeting the love of your life on a
toilet
!” Franny Dean cried. “We were in a latrine, awash with seawater; we were on a ship, awash with
vomit
!”
    “
Vómito
!” the crowd repeated, in a unified cry.
    I was amazed how many of them had heard the story; they knew it by heart. There were many older people in the audience, both men and women; there were young people, too—mostly boys.
    “There’s no sound quite like the sound of a human derrière, passing a succession of toilet seats—that
slapping
sound, as the love of your life approaches, coming nearer and nearer,” my father said; he paused and took a deep breath while many of the young boys in the audience dropped their pants down to their ankles (their underpants, too) and slapped one another on their bare asses.
    My father exhaled onstage and said, with a condemning sigh, “No, not like that—it was a
different
slapping sound, more
refined
.” In his glittering black dress with the plunging neckline, my dad paused again—while those chastised boys pulled up their pants, and the audience settled down.
    “Imagine
reading
in a storm at sea. How much of a reader would you need to be?” my father asked. “I’ve been a reader all my life. I knew that if I
ever
met the love of my life, he would have to be a reader, too. But, oh—to first make
contact
with him
that
way! Cheek to cheek, so to speak,” my dad said, jutting out one skinny hip and slapping himself on the buttocks.
    “Cheek to cheek!” the crowd cried—or however you say that in Spanish. (I can’t remember.) He’d met Bovary on a toilet, butt to butt; how perfect was that?
    There wasn’t much more to the show. When my father’s story, about the love of his life, was finished, I noticed that many of the older people in the audience quickly slipped away—as did nearly all the women. The women who stayed, I realized only later—as I was leaving—were the transsexuals and the transvestites. (The young boys stayed, and by the time I left the club, there were many more of them—in addition to some older men, who were mostly alone, no doubt on the prowl.)
    Señor Bovary led me backstage to meet my father.