Nightlife (5 page)

He had always found dusk the most supremely dismal time of day. Never sure why, only knowing that the advent of night felt like a painful transition. The sun bleeding into the horizon. Nature’s subtle reminder that death is inevitable, that the law of the jungle prevails even on asphalt.

He knew what was coming next. The moment was ripe for  it.

“Storytime now, I think,” Erik said. He remoted the TV volume to a whisper. “Okay?”

“I suppose there’s no way around it.”

Erik nodded. “I think I’ve showed enormous patience today. But hey, I do deserve a little more explanation about what went down in St. Louis. I get a phone call and my friend’s telling me that the entire U.S. system of justice is coming down on his head, I tend to wonder why.”

Justin pulled thoughtfully at his beer bottle. How to begin, how to begin. Erik knew the setup. . . .

College graduate Justin Gray, armed with his degree, a B.S. in advertising—never was there a more appropriately named degree. Returns home from the University of Illinois to St. Louis, lands an entry-level position with the agency Hamilton, Darren, and Stevens, annual billings in excess of twenty-four million. The creative department is good, allows business-world success without necessarily becoming a corporate clone. Wide-eyed Justin hopes he’ll become the wunderkind of the midwestern advertising scene, perhaps use St. Louis, then Chicago, as stepping-stones to New York. He does okay, nothing spectacular. Respectable. Solid. He sows his wild oats, then marries well, a blond-haired blue-eyed fashion merchandiser named Paula. The archetypical upwardly mobile couple. This, Erik knew.

“Well,” said Justin, “you know we’ve always been into better living through chemistry.”

“Sure.” Even now, Erik had a couple of joints rolling around on the coffee table. He hadn’t offered any nasal powder, so Justin assumed there was none around.

“So. Couple years ago, I started dealing. I mean, it was a nice secondary income. I wanted things, Paula wanted things. This was just a quicker way to do it. I kept it strictly small time, though. Friends, acquaintances, people at the office—that sort of thing. I figure don’t get greedy, keep it downscale, I won’t get caught. No hassles with anybody, no rough stuff. A kinder, gentler drug dealer.”

Erik had a hearty chuckle at that.

“And that’s the way it was, too. Paula felt a little weird about it. It wasn’t exactly approval, but it wasn’t disapproval, either. It was like, ‘This makes me nervous—but I sure do like these new toys we have to play with.’ A boat, couple new cars.

“Then in November we went to this party, and a guy turns some friend of his on to me that wants to score some heroin. So I made a few calls, made a couple stops, and came back with it. No problem, right?

“Wrong.” Justin felt the tears creep up to the backs of his eyes. He had reached the point where the threshold of memory and the threshold of pain were one and the same. “Some guy, some idiot . . . with an IQ about like his shoe size . . . he’d laced the junk with strychnine. Just to see what would happen, he said later. So I got to watch this eighteen-year-old nail up right in front of me and go into convulsions and die.

“All because I thought we had to have a better stereo system.”

He gauged Erik for reactions, for the loathing he had become accustomed to feeling directed his way from endless sources. Thankfully, it wasn’t there.

“So I got pinched that night. No way around that. A nice grueling four-hour interrogation. But. I was a little fish. They wanted big fish, and I was the bait. Cut a deal, and I could walk. So I turned state’s evidence and led them to some guys they
really
had a hard-on for. It was either that or manslaughter charges, on top of the dealing and possession and all that. So I rolled over and squealed like a pig from
Deliverance.
”

They both smiled. Sometimes it seemed their lives were one constant string of cinematic references.

“Everything else—job, home life, everything—it kind of went over like a row of dominos. Pretty soon I didn’t need a lawyer just for the bust, I needed him for divorce proceedings too.” Justin ran his hands through his hair, left it sticking up from his head. Shock therapy. “I’ve got to get my proverbial shit together, Erik. The trials, the testimony—it was all over three days ago. My first stop after I left the courthouse was the travel agency.”

Erik abandoned the love seat and wandered over to the couch. Sank in beside him, looped a brotherly arm around his shoulders.

“Tell you what. Stay here as long as you need, to get your head back together. When it feels right, we’ll find you a new job. There’s loads, this place is booming. And then I’ll fly back up with you, and we can both load up your stuff and road-trip it down here. Sound good?”

Justin shook his head. “No need for that, man.”

“I insist. It’s the least I can do.”

“When I say there’s no need, there’s
no need. ”
He hitched his thumb toward the corner, where the suitcases sat patiently. Still full. “That’s it. That’s my sum total of worldly possessions.”

It could have been the evening’s low point. The pit of despair. But for some reason, the thought of the quintessential yuppie reduced to traveling around like a gypsy caravan of one struck Justin as funny. He surrendered to laughter, and Erik quickly followed. It was like spitting into the eye of Fate. Gallows humor.

And Justin hoped, prayed, that he would be smart enough to keep lightning from striking twice in the same place.

The name of the club was Apocalips, and the name said it all. Too many lights, too much glitz, too many speakers with too much wattage. An exercise in sensual overkill.

On the other hand, Justin loved it.

Given the turn of events in St. Louis, it had been a long time since he had tasted any sort of nightlife. He’d not realized how much he missed it, like someone whose hunger doesn’t surface until the first crucial bite of food.

True to his word, Erik had managed a sizable turnout of friends to welcome Justin to Tampa. Most of them didn’t seem to have needed much coaxing. There were nine or ten in all. Hard to keep track, though, with everybody on the move. Drinks, dancing, some of them taking trips to the johns to powder noses from the inside.

They had pulled a few tables together inside a chrome corral elevated above the dance floor, creating a home base of sorts. A core group of four or five stayed at the tables at any one time.

Names, faces—too many to pair together. He’d have Erik quiz him tomorrow until he had them down. A few stuck in mind, though. Angel, a blond tigress on the dance floor. She showed him her signature, a halo above the
A
and a devil’s tail tipping the cursive
1.
Trent, perpetually wired and hyper and suffering from a self-induced runny nose, rarely still for three seconds at a time.

And then there was April, at once cool and animated, drinking margaritas at a pace of two per hour. She seemed much less the exotic goddess she had appeared in the photo, and for this Justin was grateful. Exotic goddesses lean toward the unapproachable.

“Ask her to dance, you weenie.” Erik had to hover close to his ear to be heard over the music. “We’ve been here nearly three hours. You’re disappointing me.”

Justin, sucking from a Killian’s Red bottle, nodded. “I’ll get around to it.”

“Not later.
Now.”

Justin set his bottle on the mauve table. “Answer a question first.”

“Sure.”

Justin glanced sidelong at April. Her attention was elsewhere. Good. He hated discussing someone when he thought they knew it.

“She hardly seems like someone
you
wouldn’t go for. Tell me the truth. Was there ever anything between the two of you?”

Erik bit a knuckle, frowning. “You perceptive little cuss, you. Well . . . yeah, sort of. For a couple weeks after she broke up with Dickless. But it just didn’t feel right. We were friends first. By the time we tried lovers, we thought it made more sense not to risk killing the friendship.” Erik played priest, made the sign of the cross. “You have my blessings, my son. Now move your ass.”

So much for pep talks. April sat on the other side of the tables, three chairs down. Shouting across the distance seemed less than suave, so he stood. Mohammed must go to the mountain.

The floor thumped with basslines, swirling lights glinted off chrome and glass. Across the packed dance floor stood a wall of video monitors, thirty in all, each playing the same image. Like a fragmented worldview through multifaceted insect eyes in B-grade movies. INXS blared from the speakers; good dance music.

Distance crossed. Nerves steeled. Justin smiled down at her.

“Would you like to dance?”

She smiled back, nose crinkling a bit. “No thanks.”

It shotgunned the smile right off his face. His eyes darted to Erik, who was talking with Angel. This was Erik’s fault.
He’s a dead man, I will
kill
him.
He started to grope for a graceful way out, knowing such dignity was hopeless.

“I’ve watched you out on the dance floor tonight,” April said. She seemed friendly enough—what gave? “You don’t
really
like to dance. Do you?”

“Sure I do. I wouldn’t have . . . asked if—”

She grinned, hazel eyes sparkling. She was enjoying this torture! After Erik was dead, perhaps he’d turn on her. “Don’t lie,” she gleefully warned. “Liars go to Hell.”

He let his arms hang limp, palms out in surrender. Here stands a complete and utter fool. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t, really.”

“Neither do I.”

He was starting to catch on to her game. Perhaps this could be salvaged after all. “So would you like,” he ventured, “to sit one out with me?”

“I’d love to.” April motioned to the empty seat at her right, and he took it before they could slip back into retrograde progress. The conversation was anyone’s ball game. He punted.

“So why the aversion to dancing?” he asked. “You look like you’d be good at it.”

“I am, I guess. Oh, it’s not dancing per se I don’t like. I dance a lot at home, alone. I just don’t like all the little games it entails in public. You know, a dance, then a drink, then . . .” She seemed too shy to blurt out the last one.

“Debauchery?” he tried. Words were his life. Used to be, anyway.

“Yeah! Close enough.” She looked relieved.

April gazed out over the bodies clogging the dance floor, some graceful, some spastic, some exhibiting moments of both. Then the spectators and their glasses and bottles. Closer still to home base: Trent, a chair away, nervously tapping an empty coke vial against the tabletop.

“Did you ever think about the function a place like this serves?” she said. “Not the shallow surface stuff. Deeper, I mean.”

“A marketing ploy for hangover remedies?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not even close. But I have this theory—why society in general is so screwed up today.”

“This should be good.”

“It’s because we don’t have any more rituals. Sure, we have weddings, and baptisms, and funerals. But how many times a year do any of us go to something like that? I mean everyday rituals.”

He nodded, if only to be polite. He had no idea what she was talking about. This was the most bizarre first-time conversation he could recall ever having had with anyone, male or female.

“Now look at primitive cultures,” April continued. “They sing, they chant, they take hallucinogenic drugs, they have established dances for different occasions. And they’re happy! You don’t see
them
needing mental health centers.”

This girl was a challenge of Alpine dimensions. He had a sense that she operated on a slightly different plane than most everyone else. And yet he was starting to grasp what she meant.

“Come to a place like this, and you’ll see the exact same sort of behavior.” April was really into this, had completely forgotten her drink.
“Exactly.
Only there’s more desperation. We’re so far removed from the primal part of ourselves that we mix it up with all this other stuff. Scoring on somebody, seeing who can drink the most or snort the most. Making someone jealous by dancing with someone else. Stupid stuff like that.” She shook her head, smiled in summation. “We need to get reacquainted with our primitive sides.”