Quarry’s Blood

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The Biloxi Strip hadn’t cleaned up its act at all in ten years. I’d been here in chilly early spring that time too, which meant the other strip — the white-sand one between shimmering Gulf of Mexico blue and four-lane blacktop — was mostly tourist free now, barely a bikini in sight. But on the north side of Highway 90, titty bars, cheap motels, tattoo salons, and massage parlors proliferated like mushrooms, the kind you can’t trust.

What had been Mr. Woody’s was emblazoned now with neon script across the face of a former warehouse:

The neon letters were switched on 24/7, but what you saw by day were the painted white letters behind buzzing pink electric ones. Two glass-brick windows in a facade of alternating vertical stripes of pink and black had on their either side angled announcements in red on a field of white:

Backing into a place, almost up to a wire-mesh fence, I parked the chocolate-brown 1973 LeSabre, which I’d bought for a grand-and-a-half cash at a low-end used car lot near the airport. I strolled from lazy sunshine shy of warmth into a cold smoky artificial night where “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” was booming. A bouncer at the door — a big black guy in a black shirt and a gold dollar-sign necklace, his eyes hooded but not sleepy — told me there was no cover. That meant the drinks would be steep.

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