I sipped glumly at my drink and watched as one woman straddled the other, pinning an arm behind her back and mounting her rodeo-style. Then Gesh emerged from the men’s room, pushed his way through the crowd at the bar, and slipped me the vial of cocaine. I took it, retired to a stall in the men’s and did two quick toots. Within moments, I felt better. Immeasurably better. I was no archfiend, no blighter of lives or robber baron: I was just a regular guy, out on the town, feeling good, an entrepreneur providing a service for society. That’s all. No harm. I ground my teeth and fluffed my hair in the mirror, the exhilaration returning. I was handsome, healthy, soon-to-be-rich, and I was sowing some oats. Big deal. When I shoved in beside Gesh at the bar, a murmur of appreciation rose from the patrons, and I turned to see that the mounted woman was forcing her antagonist’s face into the mire while simultaneously slapping her flank like a jockey coming off the wire.
The next place had a pool table and smelled of hot grease. Two black dudes in purple pants and a silver-haired character in a suit sat at the bar. A frazzled blonde was shooting pool, the TV was tuned to a sitcom and a web of falsetto voices crooned from the jukebox over a thumping disco beat. Gesh went to the men’s room. I ordered beers and pressed two quarters to the rail of the pool table. The blonde never even glanced up.
When she finished, I racked for eight ball and she broke with a shattering crash that sent a pair of low balls leaping for the pockets. I never even got to shoot. Gesh was next. She ran six and then missed. Gesh came back with a run of five before blowing an easy setup in the corner pocket. She missed. He missed. Then she sank the two remaining balls and made a neat cross-table cut on the eight to win it. “Nice shot,” Gesh said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Tanqueray martini,” she said. “Straight up.”
Gesh introduced himself.
“Chinowa,” she said, extending her hand.
“And this is Felix.”
She turned to me, her mouth a pout of concentration, eyes like ceramics. “Rack ’em up.”
We played her for the next hour or so, alternating games, and she never relinquished the table. She never seemed to lose control, no matter how much she drank, the cuestick flicking cleanly through the nest of her fingers as if it were tapped into her nervous system. Gesh and I, on the other hand, grew progressively weaker as the alcohol, in combination with the methaqualone, began to affect our coordination. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to enjoy humiliating us, neatly cracking down ball after ball, executing tricky bank shots and wicked side-pocket cuts, while we lurched around the table, spilling beer and fumbling for the chalk.
We hung on. I don’t know why — for her sake, I guess. I had begun to develop a deep and abiding appreciation of the way her calves flexed as she leaned over the table, the percussive clack of her heels dancing a cha-cha in my head. My third beer went down like water. I swallowed another Quaalude — for poise — and began to construct a scenario for the evening. Chinowa, who with her strong fingers and sure stick was obviously a bundle of seething erotic appetites, would phone her tall lusty roommate, the four of us would hit a few clubs and then retire to my apartment for foreplay and afterplay. Gesh leaned over a giveaway shot on the eight ball, his eyes dulled, tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth, and I knew he was envisioning a similar scenario. He would beat her with a flick of his wrist, beat her finally and authoritatively, and we could all relax and get out of this dump. As the Fates would have it, however, he miscued, the white ball skewing off impotently to kiss the far cushion and then perversely dribble back to the center of the table. Chinowa’s laugh was sharp and disdainful. She bent over the eight ball and slammed it into the pocket as if she were hitting a punching bag.
We were reacting to this, tugging at our beards and fumbling for the necks of our beer bottles, when a short lilting whistle — the tinkle of a door chime, one note up and one down — penetrated the miasma of castrato “baby-baby” emanating from the jukebox. Slowly, like turtles cooking in the sun, we rotated our heads in the direction of the bar. Mr. Silverhair had pushed himself up from the barstool and stood smoothing his locks for a moment, and then, without a backward glance, strode purposefully out the door. Our heads swiveled back to Chinowa, who at the first fluttering note had straightened up as if she’d been slapped, dropping the cuestick to the floor with a clatter. Now she snatched her purse from a stool at the bar and hurried out the door, the clack-clack-clack of her heels echoing like gunshots in the sudden dramatic silence between songs.
“She wasn’t worth a shit anyway,” Gesh said, cramming the nether end of a three-pound super-chicken burrito into his mouth. We were outside, on the street, holding take-out burritos the size of skeins of yarn. “Yeah,” I said, wiping guacamole from my face and fighting to talk, chew and maintain my balance all at the same time, “and besides, it’s too early to get pinned down for the night yet.” It was nine o’clock. Gesh examined his watch carefully, as if it could not only tell him the time but plot the progress of every available female in town to boot. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, we got to get to these clubs, man, and start dancing.”
It was a noble sentiment, nobly expressed. Unfortunately, as he formed the syllables of the final word, a word that connotes motion and grace, he lost his balance and staggered back against the window of a Chinese herbalist’s shop. The shop was dark, the window resilient. The burrito, however, was not so resilient. It dropped from his hand and split open like a rotten banana. On his shoes. The shoes, and the cuffs of both pant legs, were smeared with a méeAlange of salsa, chicken, green chilis, sour cream, beans, onions, guacamole and rice. Gesh merely stared down at his feet, as he’d stared a moment earlier at his watch, a look of dim incomprehension creasing his features. He could have been the village idiot, puzzling over his intertwined shoelaces. A motorcycle snarled down the street, someone shouted from a second-story window. Finally Gesh waved his hand in a vague gesture of dismissal and said “Fuck it,” his voice thick with retardation.
The events of the remainder of that evening — and especially their sequence — were never quite clear to me. But I can say with assurance that we drifted in and out of a number of clubs that featured heavy metal, new wave disco, punk, blues, blue-grass, reggae and bossa nova, and that we lurched across various congested dance floors with various women and made lewd, drunken proposals to all of them. Our breath was foul, our legs unsteady. We slammed into doorposts, stepped on people’s feet, were twice refused service. At one point, I recall, Gesh took umbrage at the appearance of a massive, iron-pumping, head-cracking bouncer at a tidy little club in which everyone was neatly dressed and behaving himself. “Fucker looks like a neutered cat,” Gesh growled, jabbing his finger in the direction of a young giant who lounged watchfully in the corner, his arms folded against a chest so muscle-inflated he might have been wearing a lifejacket.
Suddenly I was sober. “Are you crazy?” I said. “That guy’s arms alone are bigger than my entire body.”
Gesh’s eyes were glazed, his face hard. In the candlelight, the scar that split his eyebrow had a dull sheen to it, like the white of a hard-boiled egg. For answer, he merely shrugged. I knew Gesh well enough to appreciate his volatility — I had only to think of his confrontations with Vogelsang, his impatience with Dowst, the rage that consumed him when the pump broke down or the Jeep failed to start — and I could see that something had set him off, could see that he was looking for trouble. “Come on,” I said, “this place isn’t for us. Come on, let’s get out of here.”