Middlesex

Behind the velvet rope rises a flight of stairs edged with blinking lights. To climb these stairs you must pay a separate admission of five dollars. Upon reaching the club’s second floor (Mr. Go has been told), your only option is to enter a booth, where it is then necessary to insert tokens, which you must buy downstairs for a quarter each. If you do all this, you will be afforded brief glimpses of something Mr. Go does not quite understand. Mr. Go’s English is more than adequate. He has lived in America for fifty-two years. But the sign advertising the attractions upstairs doesn’t make much sense to him. For that reason he is curious. The chlorine smell only makes him more so.

Despite the increased traffic going upstairs in recent weeks, Mr. Go has not yet gone himself. He has remained faithful to the first floor where, for the single admission price of ten dollars, he has a choice of activities. Mr. Go might, if he so desires, quit the Show Room and go into the Dark Room at the end of the hall. In the Dark Room there are flashlights with pinpoint beams. There are huddled men, wielding said flashlights. If you work your way in far enough, you will find a girl, or sometimes two, lying on a riser carpeted in foam rubber. Of course it is in some sense an act of faith to postulate the existence of an actual girl, or even two. You never see a complete girl in the Dark Room. You see only pieces. You see what your flashlight illuminates. A knee, for instance, or a nipple. Or, of particular interest to Mr. Go and his fellows, you see the source of life, the thing of things, purified as it were, without the clutter of a person attached.

Mr. Go might also venture into the Ball Room. In the Ball Room there are girls who long to slow-dance with Mr. Go. He doesn’t care for disco music, however, and at his age tires easily. It is too much effort to press the girls up against the padded walls of the Ball Room. Mr. Go much prefers to sit in the Show Room, in the stained Art Deco theater seats that originally belonged to a movie house in Oakland, now demolished.

Mr. Go is seventy-three years old. Every morning, to retain his virility, he drinks a tea containing rhinoceros horn. He also eats the gall bladders of bears when he can get them at the Chinese apothecary shop near his apartment. These aphrodisiacs appear to work. Mr. Go comes into Sixty-Niners nearly every night. He has a joke he likes to tell the girls who sit on his lap. “Mr. Go go for go-go.” That is the only time he laughs or smiles, when he tells them that joke.

If the club is not crowded—which it rarely is downstairs anymore—Flora will sometimes give Mr. Go her company for three or four songs. For a dollar she will ride him for one song, but she will sit through one or two more songs for free. This is one of Flora’s recommendations in Mr. Go’s mind. She is not young, Flora, but she has nice, clear skin. Mr. Go feels she is healthy.

Tonight, however, after only two songs, Flora slides off Mr. Go, grumbling. “I’m not a credit bureau, you know.” She stalks off. Mr. Go rises, adjusting his pants, and right then the swimming pool smell hits him again and his curiosity gets the better of him. He shuffles out of the Show Room and gazes up the stairs at the printed sign:

And now Mr. Go’s curiosity has gotten the better of him. He buys a ticket and a handful of tokens and waits in line with the others. When the bouncer lets him through, he climbs up the blinking stairs. The booths on the second floor have no numbers, only lights indicating whether they are occupied. He finds an empty one, closes the door behind him, and puts a token in the slot. Immediately, the screen slides away to reveal a porthole looking onto underwater depths. Music plays from a speaker in the roof and a deep voice begins narrating a story:

“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming there.” The voice continues, but Mr. Go is no longer paying attention. He is looking into the pool, which is blue and empty. He is wondering where the girls are. He is beginning to regret buying a ticket to Octopussy’s Garden. But just then the voice intones:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the god Hermaphroditus! Half woman, half man!”

There is a splash from above. The water in the pool goes white, then pink. Only inches away on the other side of the porthole’s glass is a body, a living body. Mr. Go looks. He squints. He presses his face right up to the porthole. He has never seen anything like what he is seeing now. Not in all his years of visiting the Dark Room. He isn’t sure he likes what he sees. But the sight makes him feel strange, light-headed, weightless, and somehow younger. Suddenly the screen slides shut. Without hesitation Mr. Go drops another token in the slot.