Fact and Fiction
Inflating a Dog, Chapter 11:
I was distracted by the bartender, who, bored without a barful of barflies, had entered a photo booth at the back of the bar, the kind of booth equipped with a camera that produces a strip of black-and-white pictures. She hadn’t closed the curtain fully, and through the narrow opening I could see her making faces, as people are inspired to do inside those booths, while three flashes went off. Then, just before the fourth and final flash, she stood up and lifted her skirt. . . .
The bartender emerged from the booth, skirt in place, and waited until the strip of pictures dropped from a slot on the side and landed in a hemispherical metal cup. She plucked the strip from the cup, began waving it in the air to dry it, and sashayed back behind the bar. She stuck the strip of pictures into the frame of a mirror there, where, I noticed now, there were others, strips of grinning faces, patrons mugging for the camera after they’d pickled themselves sufficiently to become inspired to mug for a camera and discovered that, thanks to the foresight or experience of the proprietors of the Silver Hound, there was in the back of the room a camera for which to mug.
“Want another round?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, and when she had shaken the drinks and began pouring them I added, “and I’d like to see those pictures.”
She pulled the strip from the mirror and held it out for us to see. “The last one’s a little naughty,” she said, girlishly, as if she might start giggling.
Albertine and I bent over the strip and examined it closely. The first three pictures were like the others stuck around the mirror, but the last little image showed her from waist to mid-thigh, naked. It was a black-and-white picture, of course, but the tone of the grayness of her pubic hair allows me to report with certainty that it matched the red of the hair on her head.
“Yes, it is a little naughty,” I said, “but on the whole quite nice.” The three of us chuckled amiably.
I happen to know that this scene is drawn from life. It reproduces a few minutes from one of Eric and Madeline’s visits to the Lakeside Lounge in New York’s East Village.
Nate Schweber, “Gritty Musical Mainstay in the East Village Fades Out,” The New York Times, April 22, 2012:
For 16 years, the Lakeside Lounge employed a formula that never changed: a handpicked band every night, a jukebox loaded with classic songs, a cadre of quick-witted bartenders working under strings of colored lights, and an old-time photo booth that spat out strips of pictures shot using real film.
See also:
Fact and Fiction TG 30
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