Styrofoam Throne (12 page)

I had gotten a Code Gold a while ago but between the backed-up Greens and Yellows and having to take alternate routes in the walls, I was way late to respond.

“It’s about fucking time, Piss Bucket,” Dracula said, throwing his
Club International
porno mag at me.

“Dude, sorry. It’s crazy tonight.”

“Dude? Dude?! What the fuck do I look like? Do I look like a dude?” The half-empty bottle of scotch in the corner surrounded by a few beers let me know he was wasted.

“Dude, just, fuck, sorry . . . Colin.”

He cocked his head.

“Uh, I mean Dracula. So give me the bucket?”

“You know what? Don’t worry about that. Listen, I’m sorry about the way I’ve been acting. It’s just, well, being the most important person in all of Castle Dunes comes with its own pressures.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Here, let me give you a beer,” he said and handed me one from his stash.

Up to this point, I’d never had a beer handed to me and I thought a peace offering with Dracula was about the coolest way to do it. We toasted and I took a big slug, like when you tear into a soda. I took down half the can. But it wasn’t anything like I expected. It was warm and totally not bubbly.

“Fuck, man, what beer is this? It tastes like piss,” I said.

“It’s called Drac Daniels.”

“Oh . . . huh?”

“You dumb fuck, it is piss!” he said, laughing.

I gagged and threw the rest on the floor.

Dracula picked up the walkie-talkie.

“We’ve got a Code Yellow,” he said in it and kicked up another round of laughs.

“What the fuck, man?” I said. “That’s so fucked up. What the fuck?” I didn’t know what to do with myself because I wasn’t a fighter. So I just stared at him in shock. He walked up to my chest and whispered, “Drac. Attack.” And the red light signaling his performance turned on.

I slowly shuffled through an interior wall, so bummed. I had six ounces of piss in my stomach; should I puke it up? Is tasting it all over again, only grosser, better than digesting it? Is pissing Drac piss grosser than puking it? These questions seemed important. I just kept thinking about it and told myself that it’s just there “for now.”

My talents were being wasted. Being in the Castle was great but this Dracula shit was beyond a grind. I was ready to take a long, fuck-off break between the walls when my walkie blew up.

“Code Brown, Lizzy Borden.”

It was Melody. I was glad for the excuse to see her but grossed out why. There were still hours left on the clock and the place was already exploding with every bodily fluid imaginable.

I got to Lizzie’s Living Room where Melody was dressed up, sitting on the arm of a couch. It didn’t seem dirtier than any other room in the Castle.

“You called a Code Brown?” I said.

“I’m just fucking with you! Let’s do shots!”

I laughed and couldn’t stop smiling. A cool, hot chick that’s into funny, gross stuff.

“That’d be fucked-up though,” she said.

“Yeah, this is like Anything Goes night.”

“Hell yeah, it is.”

Melody pulled a flask out from between the couch cushions. She flashed the whites of her eyes while taking a drink. I took the flask without hesitation and chugged it, not expecting what it would be like. The burn hit me hard and I started coughing as my face went red.

“Are you okay?” Melody asked, laughing.

The burn of the booze changed to a warm glow in my chest. It tasted like hell, but when I stopped coughing, I felt it kick in and looked up from my hands.

“I’m fucking awesome,” I said. We were close enough to kiss but I was so frozen in rapture, I couldn’t do anything. Melody smiled through her Lizzie makeup and didn’t seem to feel weird at the silence that had formed. Was she waiting for more? My buzz had been confronted with a thick atmosphere of lust. Or love. While arguing with myself over whether to “go for it” versus “you’ll get shut down,” my walkie cut the tension.

“Code Somebody-Is-Passed-Out-in-the-Maze-of-Torment.”

“Ha! I bet it’s one of us,” Melody said.

Us.

“Yeah, I should probably go check that.”

As I was leaving, I told her, “Take it out.” What the fuck was that? What did I just say? Take it out? Take what out? I had tripped on my tongue. I meant to say take it easy or over and out, but they smashed together in a horrific accident. My eyes went wide at the wreckage.

“Huh?” she asked.

I didn’t actually want to leave but I needed to get out of there before I said anything else dumb or desperate.

“I gotta take this out,” I said nodding to my scooper. She looked at me like she was thinking, “How did this get weird?” I began to quickly walk out of the room. The shot may have loosened me up, but it didn’t exactly make me cool.

“Hey,” she said, stopping me. “So what are you doing tonight?”

“Nothing.” No one asks you what you’re doing and then doesn’t invite you to something. I had seen it unfold a million times at school. Always without me.

“Nothing? It’s Fourth of July. Let’s party, dude!”

“Awesome, yeah,” I said as the blood began draining out of my head.

“Meet ya out by the tables after work.”

“Tables,” was all I could say. It was all too easy. It was more believable that I was being set up as a joke. Did chicks just lay it out like that? Did it mean she wanted to hang like friends or hang like boyfriend and girlfriend? Any of it was better than none of it though. I had to figure out how I was going to act when this all went down. I had to consider all sorts of personalities. Which one would she like the best? Should I go with a cool type of thing? Or should I go with a more badass personality maybe? I just needed to be the guy who didn’t have a heart attack.

Later on, I got “Code Gooold” on the walkie. I wouldn’t respond. Why would I? Fuck Dracula. I decided to take my break instead. But Jack found me at the tables and said, “Is your walkie broken or can you not handle the job?”

The only way I could deal with it was by reminding myself that there was only an hour of work left. When I showed up behind the mantel, Dracula was getting blown by some chick. His cape covered her up and he was totally more plowed than before.

“Oh, sorry,” I said and began to leave.

“No, you stay here,” he said with a smirk. He didn’t seem pissed at all. The girl tried to turn around but Dracula said, “Don’t stop.” She got up anyway and ran off. Dracula didn’t seem to care.

“Another day at the Castle, huh?” he said, nodding to the bucket. I looked in it and there were four used rubbers floating inside.

This guy had everything, so what the fuck was his problem? It was the first day that made me ready to get the fuck out of the Castle at the end of the night. At least for a few hours.

When I got to the tables, I instantly realized that whatever I was doing with Melody wasn’t a real date or anything. Too good to be true, of course. There was a group of drunk cast members and Renaldo, all ready to keep partying.

“Donovan!” Melody shouted. I already knew a bunch of the other cast members. They all seemed pumped that I was going to join them, which made it the biggest group of people I had ever hung out with.

“Hey, so, we’re going to Brogi’s. Are you ready? I hope you’re wearing your pocket pants,” Melody said.

“What? Oh, ha. Shit, yeah, I can’t get in.”

Renaldo cut to the front of the group.

“No, but JJ can!” he said.

“Who’s JJ?”

“You!” he said, pulling out a fake ID. It said “JJ Doobie” on it and had my twenty-first birthday as tonight. I had gone from sixteen to eighteen to twenty-one in the blink of an eye.

“No way, dude! You rule,” I told Renaldo.

“Fuck yeah, I do. Let’s get wasted.”

“Are you sure it’ll work?”

“Dude, you could flash a coupon at Brogi’s and get in.”

We all walked over to the bar and Melody came up alongside me.

“Hey, so happy birthday, JJ,” she said and kissed me on the cheek. It left an outline of lip gloss that I wasn’t about to wipe off. Maybe this was a date? Melody was so untethered. The only thing concrete about her was all the free-floating ambiguity. I wanted to lasso it or become it, whichever came first. I wasn’t confident I could do either.

“Doobie. JJ Doobie,” Renaldo said like James Bond. I looked over at him the way you do at someone you’re riding
 
a roller coaster with, just about to take the big drop.

We got to the front door and the bouncer guy out front carded everyone. I was second to last with Renaldo behind me and handed my new ID over.

“JJ Doobie? That’s your real name?” the bouncer said.

“Yeah.”

“You look more like a Suds LeBrewski,” he said, laughing.

I stood there and waited for the blow of disappointment.

“I was born on—” I said.

“Whatever, dude. This is the best fake ID I’ve seen in a while. Come on in.”

And just like that, I stepped from the all-ages concrete sidewalk and into my first bar that didn’t double as a restaurant. The place was a dive, bathed in wood panels and red lights. The bar saved all their Halloween beer promotion signs from years past and kept them up permanently. The cast members washed off their roles with an avalanche of beers and shots but it was more like shapeshifting. No matter how wasted they got, you could see traces of their characters still lingering in their off-the-clock personalities. The gleam of a demon’s eye or the over-confidence of an executioner. But everyone was in a good mood and it was infectious. I’d already had the one shot at the Castle and wanted to be part of the team. Not under the bleachers. Not on the sidelines. But actually in it.

Melody bought me a beer and Renaldo made everyone sing happy birthday to me, including “Jaaaaay Jaaaaaay” as my name at the end of it.

Two chicks bet some dude cast members that they couldn’t do ten shots in a row. If they did, the prize was that they’d show their tits.

“JJ, you want to get in on this?” the Satan guy said.

Melody waited for my response.

“Nah, I already did like twenty shots and Melody showed her third nipple.”

“Okay, buddy. Stand back.”

Our group chanted the shot numbers out and they actually made it to ten. The chicks went to lift their shirts up at the same time Satan barfed and fell over.

I leaned over to Melody while keeping my eyes on the chicks. “This is the greatest night ever.”

“Oh you like that, huh?” she said.

“Oh, I mean, no. No. I think this stuff is degrading.”

“I bet.”

Renaldo and I dragged Satan out to the parking lot and propped him up on the curb. He seemed comfortable passed out on the concrete, so we left him there. As we were about to walk in, Renaldo spotted Dracula’s car.

“Dude, check it out, that’s Colin’s,” he said. The car was rocking back and forth.

“Is he banging in there?”

“Looks like.”

“Let’s fuck with him,” I said.

“Hell, yeah. I like your style, JJ,” Renaldo said, pulling a long strand of firecrackers out of his pocket.

“Give me that shit.” Renaldo handed me a lighter too. We crept up alongside Colin’s car and crouched down below the backseat windows. They were cracked just enough so they wouldn’t fog up and we could hear him inside talking to some chick.

“Yeah, baby, I’m the one from the commercial,” he said as the car bounced up and down.

“Ohhh,” the girl said.

“And I vant to suck . . . your tits,” Colin said in his shitty Dracula accent.

Renaldo and I had to cover our mouths to keep from cracking up but didn’t do that great of a job.

“What the fuck was that?” he said as the rocking stopped.

“I didn’t hear anything,” the girl moaned and started the motion up again.

I lit the huge strand of Black Cat firecrackers and threw them through the gap in the window. We ran like hell as we heard, “What the fuck! What the fuck!” and frantic scrambling. Renaldo and I got to the curb in front of Brogi’s, next to where Satan was passed out, and turned around. The fireworks went off loud as hell and lit up the backseat. The back door swung open. Colin tried to jump out but his pants were around his ankles and he fell on his face. The butt-naked chick he was with scrambled over him and disappeared off into the night. Renaldo and I were dying laughing as Colin cocked his head up.

“You could have fucking killed me!” he yelled. It seemed like he was trying not to cry at the same time.

“Dude, it wasn’t me,” I said.

“Wasn’t me,” Renaldo said.

The bouncer stepped between us and said to Colin, “Wasn’t me. Now get out of here before I call the cops on you for public indecency.”

It turned out that the bouncer and Renaldo had been tight for years. When I asked Renaldo why the dude was so cool, he just cryptically answered that he’d saved the bouncer’s life once. I could relate to that.

Colin jumped in the driver’s seat and peeled out of the parking lot as he screamed, “You’re fucking dead!”

We went back into the bar and kept celebrating my fake birthday and our small victory. The cast members were a blast to hang with and, as simple as it may sound, drinking kicked ass. I was a lot more talkative with Melody and things seemed to be going well. Not even Renaldo’s crude interruptions could derail it.

“Hey . . . Melody,” he said, leaning in close to her. “Donovan—I mean, JJ—has a huge dick. You should totally suck it.”

All the beers made me laugh instead of cringe.

“How would you know?” she said.

“Heard some chicks talking.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said, looking at me. I couldn’t tell if she was suspicious or turned on.

“No way, nobody has ever seen my dick.” I thought my defense was good until I realized it was an admission of virginity.

“Dude!” Renaldo said.

“Shit! That’s not what I meant, I mean, like, I’m not . . . doing . . .”

“Ha! You guys are retarded,” she said. “Wanna get out of here?” she asked me. “It’s almost closing and I hate it when the lights come on.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said and took her hand and started for the door.

“Suck that shit!” Renaldo yelled while headbanging us out.

We both stumbled out to the sidewalk but I was definitely drunker than she was. She took her flannel off and revealed a skin-tight shirt with a giant pot leaf on it.