by Sam Wiebe
Mark took mercy on me and switched from Ableton over to his iTunes, putting on a Hot Snakes record at low volume. There were twenty-four green bottles of Landecker around the living room, kitchen, and bedroom, which we’d collaborated in cleaning up and turning into a secondary hanging room for the party, carrying the couch over from my apartment on the next block and leaning the mattress against the wall. It looked pretty good in there.
“You going to do the tent?” Mark asked. He was sitting on this beautiful leather office chair with a circular base that his dad had given him, a piece that looked alien on a carpet we’d been staining into an accidental pattern and between the two living room couches, both road salvage—this was before bedbugs reared up big-time and made street furniture an idiotic risk.
“If I need to,” I said.
Mark just looked at the ceiling, taking a pack of Belmonts out of his pocket. He’d gatewayed into smoking last—after booze, which we started with when we were fifteen and playing in a shockingly bad death metal band in Kamloops; weed, which we’d dealt to pay for gas money for two summers of touring cross-country in our slightly better prog-rock band; and MDMA, which we both embraced eagerly when we sold our Orange amps and Les Pauls for the laptops and decks we needed to start making money in the clubs. We pirated all the software.
Esther, unwrapping a sleeve of red plastic cups in the corner, looked over at us. “What Mark means is, Could you please set up the tent, Raj, neither of us have the basic skills required.” She was three years older than Mark and me, about ten years better at communicating, and Mark would collapse mentally if she left him. Esther didn’t need him at all, and all three of us knew it, but she got something out of hanging out with the two of us, watching us knock heads, develop, devolve. She got paid double what we did for the same gigs and was worth it. Rivko had her sub in for him when he couldn’t do the doo-wop night, and she’d gotten to open for Steve Aoki once, Diplo twice. Guys we mocked endlessly and envied deeply.
I headed out back with the tent canvas, seeing through the kitchen window that the poles were already out there, probably from an earlier rage-filled attempt by Mark to get it up. It was a big one, tall enough to stand up in. I had it rigged in twenty minutes, and Esther and Mark carried a white table with folding legs out into it right as I finished up. We put three bottles of Landecker on it, and Esther took three steak knives out from where she’d tucked them into her belt.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“We need to ventilate the sides or it’ll just become a hotbox for cigarette smoke, especially if it rains, which it’s supposed to. I want to be able to tell people something nice if they try to smoke inside and complain that there’s no covered porch.”
“It’s the point of the fucking tent,” Mark said.
“Did we have some fight I don’t know about, dude?” I said. Even with just the three of us in the tent, it was markedly hotter than it was outside.
“He’s just stressed about the party,” Esther said. “His hero Rivko’s coming. So’s Lana.”
“Lana’s Occasional Lana?”
“Yep.” Lana took party pictures, good ones. Instant social capital for events, people who did parties, deejays. Enough notice for us, scored piecemeal through these pictures, through people talking about what we did for parties, could eventually mean regular higher-paying gigs, could mean avoiding getting a job. The point of all this shit.
I took a steak knife and started poking and slicing the sides of the tent my dad had given me when I moved out to go to college. I’d only gone camping once the whole time I was out here, anyway.
* * *
It was rammed by nine thirty, and had been pretty busy since eight, people stopping by to predrink our vile Landecker before properly going out for the night, then clocking that most of the people they wanted to see were in the room with them, the drinks were free, and Mike and Esther were doing pretty great on the music. So people stayed and the rooms filled up.
Landecker, I should say, truly is disgusting. I just tried some again at the Opus Hotel last night, where I was waiting for an LA commercial-director pal to turn up. First time I’d had any since the party, and I was wondering if it was just the memory of what we had to do later on that night that tainted its taste in my head. No. It tastes like Jägermeister with Scope and Palmolive notes.
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.
“It’s hundreds of thousands,” Mark said, pretending he wasn’t out of breath as we carried the body around to the backyard. “Those were hundreds, down to the bottom, I swear. They’re coming back for it.”
“They’re not,” Esther said, as we arrived in the tent and set the body down. “They’re sending a signal to other dealers that they don’t care about the money. This is about the territory. Cops and the papers will report that the cash was just left there.”
“That’s some TV crap, Esther,” I said.
“No, that’s some my-father-is-a-lead-investigator-on-gang-related-crimes-in-the-Lower-Mainland crap,” Esther replied. “Phil’s car’s not here, and if there’s no cash and no drugs and no body in the apartment, then he’s a missing person to the cops. It can work.”
“If Rivko knew he was dealing, then other people know,” I said.
“And that helps us,” Esther countered, impatient. “Means that the same guys who took the drugs killed him and made him evaporate, and the cops will either look for him through those connections or just not bother. They won’t look where we’re going to put him.”
Instead of steak knives this time, she had shovels, but just two. Mark and I dug, the booze sweating out of us and the tent getting incredibly hot, Phil facing away from us until we rolled him into the four-foot-deep hole and put the dirt back on. Esther came out to arrange the rolls of grass back over him: she was better with the precision stuff.
I had Crissie’s number in my Razr, and I texted her when I got out of the shower. It was too quick to be doing that, desperate, but I wanted to do something normal and human.
hungover as fucc / glad you came
She didn’t answer for another three hours, but it was nice when it came. Sincere. She even punctuated.
Me too.
* * *
When the cops came two days later, driven by desperate calls from Phil’s parents, they barely bothered with us, it was so clear that this was unsavory drug gangster shit. I don’t know the story they pieced together—Esther wasn’t afraid of much, but she feared her dad’s perceptiveness, even though she’d inherited it. She never asked him anything so we don’t know what the official take was, just that they asked us about the party, took a look around and in the tent. (Esther had insisted we leave it up, said it made sense of any disturbance in the dirt they found. She was right, they barely looked.)
“What do we do with this money?” I asked Esther when the cops left.
“I told you, we buy this place with most of it, keep some to spend,” she said.
“I mean now, what do we do with it? How can we spend it without—”
“We clean it through the after-hours, through Rivko,” Mark said. “He barely claims any of his income, he knows this shit.”
“Exactly,” Esther said.
And that’s what we did.
* * *
Rivko asked very few questions, just took a little cut and did the work for us. I asked my dad for the rest of the cash we’d need to buy out the landlord, which was less than we’d worried when we approached the old Sikh guy who owned the place but still drove a cab fifty-five hours a week. A vanishing-likely-drug-murder knocks a high five figures off any property value. And my dad was so proud to see me making a strong practical move that he signed the check the same day I asked.
The party worked too. The money I brought to Rivko plus the crowd we got out at the Landecker thing and the next few gigs gave him enough faith in me to ask for a trial run as VP of his new events company. Within six months I was barely deejaying at all—just booking Diplo, Aoki, Oizo, and taking a slice of profit, instead of trying to be them. Mark quit too, finishing his conversion into the housing game by taking his real estate licensing exam. It was Esther and Crissie who kept going, joining up to play shows, flying out to Europe on Phil’s dime, eventually getting bigger in town and huge in Germany and Italy, packing out mega-clubs over there. Mark, Esther and I us
ed a second mortgage on the place to buy and flip our first house, then our second, and just kept going.
Esther and Mark now live out on Saltspring, on some enormous compound they designed themselves. Crissie and I live in the place on 16th. We refurbished the shit out of the inside, of course, but I lied to Crissie about the yard.
“Permitting hell to relandscape. I’ve tried with the city a half-dozen times,” I told her last year.
“We can’t have a garden?”
“Two more hoops and we can.”
* * *
So tonight, with Crissie playing a solo gig in Vegas, Esther and Mark came over. I’d bought a bottle of Landecker for the occasion, but wasn’t sentimental enough to demand that we kill it. I already had the tent set up, exactly the way it was before, pulling it out of the storage shed in the yard.
Esther got there ahead of Mark, wearing a YSL sundress. She rolled her eyes when I looked at her questioningly.
“I’ve got a tracksuit in my bag.”
“Should have known, sorry.”
Mark got there a second after her—he’d been nostalgia-eating a slice from Zaccary’s. We just sat there in the living room for a second, and right before I was going to make a joke about the Landecker, Mark spoke up.
“Is he bones yet? He must be by now.”
“Yeah,” I said. He must be.
Burned
by Yasuko Thanh
Yaletown
Paula’s always been a hard case. She’s got those eyes. A.C. is her pimp and she makes bank even though there’s something dead about her: like I said, those eyes, and her laugh is cold and hollow. A meanness hides beneath her top layer of pretty, fragile as a porcelain doll.
