I wanted to say that if he was going to be the waitress for the rest of the day, it was probably just as well that he’d lost the girl’s uniform. But I thought better of making the joke.

His eyes raged first at me and then at Nancy. “What did you say to her that would make her leave?” he implored. “Tell me! Why did she leave?”

I started to feel sorry for the guy and looked over the check that the vanished waitress had left us, figuring I’d pay half of it, just to be kind. I discovered, to my immense curiosity, that our waitress had known even as she took our order that she was never going to bring us our food, because at the bottom she had written “5,” which I took to be our booth number, and by it an “NC,” for “No Charge.”

I put two dollars down on the table and showed the check to Nancy, pointing out what I’d found odd about it.

“I agree,” she said. “If she wasn’t going to charge us, why on earth would she leave us the check?”

With that we departed the Centaur Luncheonette, which I vowed never to visit again. But as Nancy well knew, my vows were more than capable of being broken.

Chapter 21

21

The Gayway

Every high-minded exposition over the last fifty years (Nancy explained to me) has opened with great fanfare and received waves of public acclaim for its glorification of the noblest achievements and loftiest aspirations of humanity, its celebration of our greatest ideals and endeavors presented in edifying displays housed in grand galleries and pristine palaces.

And when that fails to draw a crowd, they bring in the girlie shows.

The amusement area of the fair, located next to the parking lot and behind Pacifica’s back, was officially deemed the Gayway. Ah, now we were in our element! Farewell Atlantis, hello Atlantic City. The smell of burnt cotton candy, the happy staccato of shooting galleries with the celebratory clang each time a bullet finds its mark, the sweet fumes of frying dough and frying tube steaks and frying onions, and the stirring polyphony of converging music: “East Side, West Side” on the carousel’s calliope concurrent with the penny arcade’s player piano spooling out a chorus of “Twelfth Street Rag,” while “Tuxedo Junction” emanating from a public address speaker on my left intersects with “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on the countertop radio at Bascomb’s Butter-Bathed Corn-on-the-Cob.

Across the way from Ripley’s Odditorium and the Hindu Temple of Magic, flanked by the Mystery of Life exhibition (where responsible parents could learn how babies were made) and a tropical drink stand (where Nancy and I pacified our appetites with frankfurts and grapeade) stood the proud effrontery of Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch.