“Look, I’ve never been here,” he said. “And direct Pru over to us as soon as she finishes.”

A deeply drunk man wandered from his table to the stage.

Pru sidled up to the drunk and, with her white boots far apart, did a rotational hip grind.

The drunk man beamed.

“He loves it!” said the d.j. “Show her some green for her trouble.”

Pru knelt and let the drunk customer drop folded bills down into the slingshot V of her G-string. She bounded up and resumed her dance.

“Does she have to do that part?”

“Incessantly,” said Raf.

He glanced around annoyed. He said, “You see how embarrassing this place is. You don’t wanna look but there’s Pru doin’ double backflips, yet you know she’s so bored she’s counting the seconds. So if you look, you’re a fool, but ignoring her’s insulting, especially when she’s a friend.”

“How many friends do you have here, Raf?”

“Only Pru. We came to pick her up one night and there were, you know, assorted wretchednesses ensuing.”

“A fight?”

“Not much of one,” Raf said. The iris of his glass eye picked up some of the red-pink lighting. “Mostly bad talk. All mine. You can imagine.”

“You want food?” he asked me. “They got chips, I’m sure, or they could Xerox a sandwich.”

“Pass, but thanks anyway,” I said.

In the mist of colored spots, Pru seemed unreal, more hologram than live woman. She looked tactile and dimensional, but at the same time a projected image.

I said, “I’ll grant this. She’s perfect.”

Pru twisted into a complicated painful-looking position. On her neck, the pressure of the pose made a vein bulge the size of my little finger.

A group of men whooped.

“ ‘The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the . . . something . . . of God,’ ” Raf said.

I helped him. “ ‘The wisdom.’ ”

“Right, and ‘The nakedness of woman is the work of God.’ ”

“But Blake never spent time in the locker rooms at the Y,” I said.

As Pru finished her act on her belly, she seemed passionately involved with the surface of the stage.

She left and was replaced by a garbed woman, soon to be ungarbed.

I had drunk my cola and risked teeth by chewing the remaining ice cubes.

Pru emerged from a dressing room. She strolled to our table; nodded hello to Raf, smiled bashfully at me. She wore mules and a dragon-lady dress, weed green.

“Never figured I’d see you back here,” she told Raf.

“My wife, Paige,” he said.

“No fuckin’ way. Really? You know I’ve read all the poems in that one collection of yours or the—what do you call it?—chapbook. ‘At the Clam Bar’ or something—that one.”

“And I’ve seen you dance,” I said.