At the party, we discovered that it tasted okay if you mixed it with Diet Coke. I sent Dave Proskich, an Emily Carr kid who badly wanted to be our friend, out to the Sunshine Market to get a half-dozen two-liter bottles. Later that night Dave got really wasted and took multiple pictures of his dick with the disposable camera that Lana always left at parties. He had a weird, trollish little thing, and hadn’t realized that the limited-edition Vans he wore every day were visible in every shot. Lana told me a couple years after that that he’d paid her a hundred bucks to take the pictures off her site.
By the time Crissie turned up, it was beyond standing-room tight in the house. Mark’s dad’s office chair had two girls sitting in it and a guy on each arm — we’d discover the next day that the base was mangled and the chair permanently angled, useless. Mark started crying when he sat in it, but Esther and I just left him alone. He’d earned a decent cry, and if he wanted to attach it to the dead chair, that was fine.
“Is there any left?” Crissie asked. She wasn’t wearing any AA, and looked almost businesslike compared to most of the other people in the room. A nice collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black jeans.
“Any what?”
“The free booze you promised was really gross.”
“It’s drained. There may be some in the tent, actually, come with me.” I was drunk enough to take her by the hand and lead her through the party, Esther laughing in my face when I walked by the deejay setup.
It hadn’t rained, so the tent had gone mostly unused, people choosing to smoke out front in the driveway or just scattered around the yard. There was an untouched bottle of Landecker on the table. I unscrewed the lid and Crissie and I swapped sips and revulsed expressions.
“That’s really impressive in there. You guys throw parties all the time?”
“No, not really.”
“You should charge.”
“Would defeat the purpose. Plus, no one knows who the fuck we are. We want people to like us first, so we can get hired to play more stuff, rely on turnout. That’s why this was important,” I said. It was my longest conversation of the night so far — even Rivko, who I’d been meaning to corner, I’d only up-nodded to, him inclining a Pilsner bottle back at me. He was having a good time, which meant more than me talking to him.
“So I’m a statistical quantity?” Crissie asked.
“No, of course not. I wanted you to come. You, in particular.” We looked at each other for a second and I was about to push my luck. Instead, I took another sip of the Landecker and passed the bottle over, then said we should go back inside.
Mark was waiting in the kitchen. “Neighbor’s here, and it’s weird,” he said.
Crissie saw a friend, a narrow guy with unwashed Cobain hair who worked at her same location, in the living room. She pointed to him and made a talking motion with her hand to me, and I nodded and smiled.
“What’s the problem? Phil’s fine. And he weighs like eleven pounds, he’s not a problem.”
“Yeah, but he turned up with like six randoms.”
“Total randoms?”
“Mostly people I recognize. All okay. But one of them looks rough. And Phil looks fucking half-dead.”
Rivko came into the kitchen behind Mark. Rivko, back then, was so handsome it made you look at your own shitty body in shame as soon as you saw him. I don’t think he’s that good-looking anymore, but maybe that’s from spending every day of the last eight years in the office with him during the day and the clubs with him at night. When you spend enough time around it, beauty disappears the way a smell does.
“That guy’s a heavy dealer,” Rivko said.
“The big guy?” Mark asked.
“No, small Asian dude in the leather jacket. Big importer as of a few months ago. I think he got a few pounds of amazing MDMA muled to him from somewhere or another. Extremely delicious.”
“That stuff we did last week?” Mark asked.
“Yep,” Rivko said, drifting out of the kitchen. It was packed with people, incredibly warm, so many conversations happening that you could yell at the person in front of you without any fear of being overheard.
“You didn’t tell me you got high with Rivko,” I said.
“You’re a jealous girlfriend now? I was trying to get us that Justice after-party, so we hung late, super late.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Let’s get these sketchy dealers out of our house, okay?”
Mark and I walked into the living room to find that the problem had vanished. Phil and the big guy, a random, were gone, leaving only the other five people behind. Mark and I walked out front to share a smoke and talk about Rivko. I think that’s what we were going to talk about, anyway. We didn’t get to it.
The door to Phil’s unit was open, wide open, the light off in the stairwell leading up. There were some footsteps, and the guy Mark had been talking about came down. Big gut, massive beard, black T-shirt, sleeve tattoos. But he didn’t have the friendly headbanger smile that usually went with that outfit. He was carrying four huge black backpacks, two in each hand, his biceps bulging and forearm veins popping from the weight of them. He walked past us, looking down, but he did say one thing, in a surprisingly friendly tone.
“Don’t look at shit and don’t say shit’s my advice,” he said, then walked across 16th and toward a silver car. The back passenger door popped open as he got there and he gently set the bags down, then slid into the front passenger seat. The car drove away, leaving its lights off until it got to Oak, flicking them on along with the right turn signal.
The noise of the party, which made the big cheap single-pane bay window in front of our living room seem nonexistent, must have made us feel safer than we should have felt, because Mark and I started walking up the stairs. Mark laughed halfway up, and I said, “Don’t touch anything.” We got to the apartment.
It had the same layout as downstairs, just with more, and nicer, furniture. And a black Samsonite full of unbound and crumpled money, and Phil lying facedown on the floor, except his face was looking three-quarters of the way back at us, on top of a broken spine.
We went downstairs and closed the door to Rick and Phil’s suite, went back to our party. There was no consultation, just entering the room and going our separate ways, me finding Crissie and starting to ask her questions about what she did, what she wanted to do, how much her current job sucked, anything. Mark went over to Esther and tapped her out, taking over the music, looking straight down. He was getting really good, good enough that it was just a matter of months before he quit, same as he quit songwriting and the band.
Mark never started anything without knowing when he was going to quit, and he taught me how to do the same. Not some subtle, observed, by-example thing: it was a spoken strategy to avoid stagnation and to get onto the next thing, the next “arena of accomplishment,” as he said. He would write great self-help entrepreneurial crap if he had the stomach for it. Finding Esther had been part of his next-thing plan: someone better than him, smarter than him, less weak where it counted. Halfway through a reliable Eric Prydz banger, Mark gestured Esther over and started whispering to her.
The party wound down at about four thiry, leaving us with one hour of darkness to pull off what we wanted to do. Not enough time, but we were drunk enough to think it was. Esther went out to the tent and made the precise cuts in the grass, rolling back the sod, while Mark and I headed upstairs. It hadn’t rained after all.
Gloved up, but knowing we could excuse any DNA presence in the apartment as the residue of a friendly neighbor visit, we carried Phil, toes and lolling head facing the floor, down the stairs, checking to be sure no pedestrians were out there.