“No. Don’t worry about it. You’re with me.”
“Whatever. Lead the way. All I know is, I need a drink.”
Before we reached the door, it was opened from the inside by a large, well-dressed bouncer in a black suit and shirt. He was shaved bald, but had a peach-fuzz mohawk atop his head. This guy at the fancy bar was just one big muscle in a three-piece suit. He shined a flashlight in our faces. When he got to mine, he grunted.
“Don’t worry, Hyde,” said Anthony, “he’s cool. He’s a legend.”
Anthony palmed this guy a twenty, and he let us pass. The inside was a large room lit only by candles placed on every surface. The walls were wood. There was a full bar, and maybe eight or ten small tables with just as many chairs. In the back were two doors. One seemed to lead to a kitchen, or a storeroom, the other, I didn’t know. Probably a bedroom.
There were four well-dressed men seated individually at tables, drinking. Classical music was playing softly on a stereo. What caught my eye more than anything were the girls. There were five of them, all young, all pretty. One was wearing a black body stocking, one wore nothing more than a red bra and thong. Another was wearing a schoolgirl’s skirt and white shirt, and the other two were wearing negligees—one blue, the other black.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Am I still a fag?” asked Anthony, smiling.
“I don’t fucking care,” I said.
“You never knew about this place?”
“If I did, I’d live here.”
Anthony led us to an unoccupied table, and we sat down. The girl in the schoolgirl outfit came over.
Anthony said, “Hi, Samantha. You look nice.”
“Thanks,” she said robotically. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Marlowe Higgins.”
She and I shook hands. My hand had its own, separate orgasm—a tingling upon touching her, like when you carry heavy groceries for too long.
“You look a little rough,” she said to me.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her body. I couldn’t respond.
“Wait, I think I know who you are,” she said. “You work at Long John’s, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Great food,” she said.
“Thank you. I don’t recall ever seeing you.”
“I don’t dress like this every day,” she said, as if I were an idiot for not realizing that. “What would you guys like?”
“You,” I said.
“Actually,” said Anthony, “this is my friend’s first time here, so I think we should start off with a couple of wet kisses.”
“Sounds good,” she said. “Who would you like?” Anthony whispered in my ear, “She’s the hostess. Let me do the talking, okay?”
“Sure,” I whispered back.
“Can you get me Sharon, and, uh, for my friend here, uh, let me see … Marley, who looks good to you?”
“Jesus,” I murmured.
“Samantha, if you could get Patty over here for my buddy, that would be great.”
“Sure,” she said, and padded off.
“Anthony, what did we just order, and how the hell am I going to pay for it?”
“Don’t worry. I got you covered.”
“You trying to butter me up for your fucking book or something?”
“No, man. You just don’t get to meet a lot of cool people when you’re constantly traveling.”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t care, one way or the other.
At the least, I was getting free drinks, and at the most … I couldn’t even imagine. Before long, the girl in the body stocking and the girl in the red thong came over to our table. The Red Thong carried a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses. Body Stocking took a seat on Anthony’s lap. The red thong came up to me and straddled me in my seat.
“Hello,” she said.
She nestled into me while Anthony and Sharon talked, and she poured out a shot of whiskey into the shot glass. Then she passed the bottle to her friend, and she did the same. Anthony was running his hands up and down that girl’s body, and no one was doing anything, no one came over to throw him out of the joint for getting fresh, so I put my hands on Patty’s hips and rubbed her legs.
She knocked the shot back, then came forward and put her mouth to mine. She spit the shot into my mouth. I drank it out of her, then sucked at her sweet lips for what was left. At my right, Anthony was doing the same.
It had been years since I had a drink, and after that long, that one shot hurt me like fire. It burned my throat, my chest, and burned a fire behind my eyes, like a preview of what hell would be like. I could immediately feel the stuff swishing around my brain, making me a little stupider than I usually am, but I didn’t care, because my friend was dead and my life had gone completely down the toilet. I’d lost my job, the girl I loved didn’t want anything to do with me, and unless the Rose Killer popped up somewhere and said, “Here I am,” the wolf that lived in the place where my soul used to be was going to kill some innocent person in five days. I think I was entitled to a drink.
In the back of my mind I saw one of Pearce’s memories. In it, I was a little bit younger, a little more angry, and he was pointing at me, saying, “God gave you a choice, man. You don’t have to drink.” He truly believed it.
We had seconds on the wet kisses, and then the girls left the table, leaving the bottle of whiskey behind. I started laughing, caught up in a rush of hormones like a teenage boy.
“You like?”
“I love,” I responded.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Women,” he said. “For hundreds of years these creatures have struggled with the ‘male establishment’ to have their equal rights and their equal wages, and to not be seen as women in a man’s world. They’ve tried to do whatever they could do to erase the supposed myth of chicks being sex symbols. Burning bras and all that. But one look at any magazine blows all that women’s-lib shit right out the window, and then you walk into someplace like this and you see that absolutely nothing has ever changed and it never will. Women are always going to be looked at in biblical terms, as seducers, as temptresses, as creatures who can’t be trusted, and it’s all their own fault. It’s amazing. They’re all crazy. Every single one of them.”
“That’s a pretty dank view, man. Especially after having a drink fed to you by a girl that looks like that.”
“It’s true. I mean, I’ve worked in big cities, man. New York, L.A., all over the place. And lately, I’ve been going all over the goddamn country for this photo book, and truly, there are some unique places in this world, but it really is the same everywhere. It really is. It’s sad.”
“I know,” I said. “It is the same everywhere. There ain’t a good place left anywhere in this goddamn country.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Anthony. “Lord have mercy.”
“Never has, never will.”
We knocked back our shots.
“What’s it cost to screw in this place?”
“More than you and I have,” said Anthony. “But that’s the point. Keeps the low-bloods away, and the few yuppies in this town coming back. The yuppies know that they’re the only ones that dip their wicks in these broads. I guess it makes them feel like these broads are some more things that they own. That pair of wet kisses was twenty bucks, times two, plus tip.”
“Damn. And you don’t want anything in return? You’re a better man than me.”
“Probably not,” he said.
“How did you find this place? You’re not even from around here.”
“I keep my ear to the rails. I listen. And I look. I like being nosy, I like exploring. That’s the whole point of the book, is the finding of places that no one’s ever seen or heard of. Kind of like an unknown America kind of thing. The obscure. The little things that people don’t see, I see. And I take pictures.”