Bambi

Bambi, also known as Lotus Flower, is Jade’s close companion, former fellow inmate, and partner in an improvised life on the margins. Her story is marked by a tension between looking after Jade and joining her in risky company: she once tried to keep Jade out of trouble, yet her own enthusiasms and associations repeatedly draw them toward danger. When Jade worries that Bambi has vanished, Doc finds her not lost but flourishing on the Sunset Strip, where she has arranged a double date—only for the scene to end with the arrival of Jade’s pimp.

Identity and Introduction

Bambi enters the narrative through Jade’s account of a trip to see Spotted Dick, the English band whose followers and eccentric reputation have drawn Bambi in. She has heard that the group is staying nearby and insists on accompanying Jade, ostensibly to keep her friend out of trouble. The explanation already carries a comic contradiction: Bambi’s protectiveness does not make her cautious, and Jade recognizes that the band’s appeal includes its members’ unusual forms of recreation.

Bambi’s enthusiasm is material and immersive. Jade describes a room covered in Spotted Dick posters, with matching sheets and pillowcases, T-shirts, coffee cups, souvenir roach clips, and the band’s albums playing around the clock. The accumulation makes fandom less a passing preference than an environment Bambi inhabits. Her taste is also filtered through Jade’s dry account: Bambi is drawn not only to the music but to the band’s reputation for unconventional pleasures.

Life with Jade

Bambi and Jade first meet in Dormitory 8000 at Sybil Brand Institute. Bambi notices Jade masturbating and offers to perform oral sex in exchange for a pack of cigarettes, preferably menthol. On their next encounter, with the lights out, Bambi lowers the price to half a pack; as the encounter develops, she instead offers to pay Jade. The exchange shifts from a transaction to intimacy, and the two eventually share cigarettes without keeping accounts of who owes what.

After leaving the institute, they take a place together in North Hollywood, where they can spend their days and nights as they please. Their life is inexpensive, supported in part by a landlady who has herself been incarcerated and recognizes obligations of solidarity that others might not. They acquire a regular dealer who makes house calls and a cat named Anaïs. Along the Tujunga Wash, the women become known as trustworthy companions, the kind of people others can rely on in almost any situation.

That reputation coexists with instability. Bambi imagines herself as the one looking out for Jade, while Jade is closer to misadventure than she realizes. The contrast complicates Bambi’s protective role: her care is real, but it exists inside a shared life organized around risk, improvisation, and the fragile freedoms available to them after prison.

The Missing-Person Alarm

When Jade calls Doc from a street telephone, she says Bambi has been gone for two days and two nights and that she is getting worried. The length of the absence turns Bambi’s independent movements into a possible emergency. Jade knows the club FFO on Sunset, where Spotted Dick is playing that night, and guesses that if Bambi is anywhere, she may be there. Her reasoning draws directly on Bambi’s known attachment to the band, but the worry also shows the force of their bond: the friend who once presented herself as Jade’s protector has become someone Jade fears she may have lost.

Doc goes to the club and finds the apparent disappearance resolved in an unexpected, ordinary tableau. Bambi and Jade are lounging outside an ice-cream store up the street, talking rapidly and gesturing with enormous cones stacked with multicolored organic ice cream. Bambi is not isolated or in evident distress; she is with Jade, animated and at ease. The scene replaces the anxiety of an unexplained absence with the bustle of a night out, while leaving the cause of the two-day gap unstated.

Courtship and Exposure

Bambi has obtained passes for Spotted Dick and announces that she and Jade are double-dating. Calling Jade Lotus Flower, she says it is time for her friend to be fixed up with a class act, and names Shiny Mac McNutley as the man for the evening. Her language gives the plan the buoyant air of a social adventure, and her role is active: she has secured access and helped arrange the pairing rather than merely accompanying Jade to the show.

The change in mood comes with a snow-white chauffeured Rolls-Royce pulling to the curb. A voice from inside orders the women to stay where they are. Bambi identifies the arrival as Jade’s pimp. The interruption exposes the limit of the freedom suggested by the ice cream, concert passes, and double date: the two women can make their own plans, but Jade remains entangled in a coercive relationship capable of asserting itself in public. Bambi’s immediate recognition also places her close enough to Jade’s circumstances to understand the danger, even though the available scenes do not establish what she does next.

Relationship and Narrative Role

Bambi and Jade’s relationship grows from an explicitly negotiated encounter into shared domestic life, mutual trust, and a pattern of looking after one another imperfectly. Their bond is neither presented as a simple rescue story nor reduced to a single romantic label. The cigarette bargain that becomes a common stash, their North Hollywood home, the cat Anaïs, and their local reputation give the relationship the texture of a life built through practical arrangements and reciprocal allegiance.

Bambi’s character is defined by the tension between protection and appetite. She says she went with Jade to keep her out of trouble, but she is also captivated by a band associated with unconventional recreation and later organizes a night out that ends with Jade’s pimp arriving. The narrative does not resolve that contradiction into a moral judgment. Instead, Bambi’s attachment appears in concrete acts—sharing a home, entering Jade’s world, and arranging companionship—while the precarious conditions around them keep care from becoming control. Her reappearance after Jade’s anxious search offers relief, but the Rolls at the curb immediately reminds the reader that reunion and safety are not the same thing.