Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  “Totally,” she said sweetly, sipping through the straw.

  “Could you text Cath and ask where she is?”

  Debra frowned. “Why don’t you text her?”

  I sat back. “Because I want to surprise her. You know how she is.”

  A devilish look came into Debra’s round brown eyes. “Totally!” She flipped open her Sidekick again and thumbed out a message. It seemed that Debra really did know how Cath was—which was good because that made one of us. “She’ll write back quick,” she said. “She always does.”

  I killed off my vodka. Maybe things were looking up.

  “Thanks, Debra,” I said.

  “So.” She took another sip and leaned into me. “How come I’ve never seen you at Sorted?”

  I shook my head. “What’s that?”

  “What’s that?” she scoffed. “It’s the party I throw every week! Carlos from Interpol spun last time, and before that was James Iha. And next time is the chubby guy from Franz Ferdinand!”

  “Wow,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster.

  “Yeah,” she purred happily, “it’s awesome. You should come! I’ll stamp your hand and you can drink free Amaretto Sours until one a.m.!”

  I gagged a little at the thought but tried to smile politely. I was trying to think of something productive to say when a howl interrupted me. I’d never been so relieved to hear the wolf. Debra scanned the message and looked back up at me.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “She says she’s watching you DJ.”

  “Me? Where?”

  “The Madrox.” Debra scrunched up her eyes and looked suspiciously at me. “How could you be here if you’re DJing there?”

  “Ah,” I stammered. “Well…” I was interrupted by a thunderous crash from the bar that caused the record-player needle to leap entirely off the wax, blanketing the room in deafening silence. I turned around. The DJ was nowhere to be seen. Franta stood in his usual spot but with a look of terror on his face. He was staring straight down.

  “What the hell?” said Debra.

  I jumped up and ran over to the bar. Franta stood, frozen.

  “Oh my, oh my,” he said. “Franta is gonna get sued this time.”

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “David,” Franta said without looking up. “David, you are witness. I say I hate rapping music but I don’t hate red-haired boy! Red-haired boy is OK with Franta!”

  I heard a low groan of pain from behind the bar. I propped myself up with my hands and peered over the row of glasses toward Franta’s feet. The trapdoor to the basement was open but the basement light was off, making the gaping hole in the floor nearly impossible to see unless you were looking for it. Lying in a heap on the wood stairs that led down was the red-haired DJ. He was conscious but not moving. He groaned again.

  “Ryan!” Franta said to the DJ. “Why you gotta come back here when I’m working! Why you gotta fall through the floor like that!”

  Ryan let out a low moan. “I needed something from my bag,” he said slowly.

  Franta knelt down. “What you need so badly?”

  Ryan spoke softly and carefully, as if volume would finish the job on his spine that the stairs had started. “The new…Ghostface…record!”

  “You almost die for this!” Franta said, slapping his forehead. “You almost die for black rapper!”

  I figured now was as good a time as any to make my exit.

  “Thanks for the drink, Franta,” I said. “I’m gonna go.”

  But he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “I can’t feel my lungs,” Ryan said weakly.

  With a wave to Debra, I turned and left the Satellite Heart.

  The Madrox was located directly west of the Satellite Heart on Ludlow Street and was, generally speaking, its polar opposite. Its name (derived from some obscure Marvel Comics character) wasn’t nearly as transparent as the names of some trendy East Village bars—say, the Hole, which was genuinely filthy, or the Cock, which was a pretty reliable place to find…well, you know—but it was equally underlit and profoundly underdecorated. Though only open for a few months, its instant hipness was a minor miracle of Tipping Point–style anti-marketing. The first time I was there, a few weeks after it had opened, the walls were as clean as a dinner plate and the air smelled of Pledge. The second time—for Pedro’s birthday party, two months or so after the first visit—it was a zoo specializing in that most elusive of species native to the East Coast of America: Hipsterati alcoholicus. It became, quite suddenly, the VSC’s standard late-night spot, the number-one bar for indie-rock afterparties, the venue of choice for aging British rock-stars-turned-DJs, and the preferred place for squeaky-clean pop singers to be “accidentally” photographed canoodling with Canadian heavy-metal screamers. It was so perpetually crowded and cool that it was becoming almost uncool. It was, in a word, insufferable.

  It wasn’t even nine p.m. when I arrived, but the line to get in was already spilling onto the sidewalk. The door was blocked by a wall-like black man, as wide as he was tall, who was checking IDs like he was staring at a Magic Eye painting. But not even his massive girth could block the defibrillating levels of bass that poured out from behind him into the hot, crowded night. The glimpse inside I managed when the bouncer moved his mammoth arm to allow entry made me woozy: Tank-topped, sweaty-faced girls were three deep along the bar, waving twenties and clamoring for attention from the overwhelmed bartender. I was grateful, then, for the severity of Franta’s cocktails. Maybe he was right: Detective work did demand hard liquor. Entering the belly of the beast demanded a bellyful of something beastly. No wonder film-noir gumshoes were always knocking back shots of rye or other nasty-sounding, old-timey drinks in between trips to Lauren Bacall’s house.

  I felt a tap on my right shoulder.

  “Hey, can I bum a smoke off of you?” I turned and the girl that faced me was as tall as I was but couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-one. Her skin was a deeply burnished brown, her eyes were bigger than coasters, and if she was sweating to death in her red velvet blazer, she certainly wasn’t showing it.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t smoke.”

  “That’s OK,” she said, smiling. “I don’t either.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then why did you ask?”

  “Because I only smoke when I’m drinking.” She let loose a throaty laugh that sounded caught somewhere between a hiccup and a gulp.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well.”

  She pushed her curly hair off of her forehead and halved the already tiny distance between us. “You were playing really good stuff in there.”

  Undercover, I said to myself. Gumshoe. Lauren Bacall.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I try.”

  “Yeah, it was really hot.”

  “It was?”

  She hiccup-giggled again. “In there, I mean. Really hot in there.”

  “Yeah,” I said sagely. “This place is hot.”

  “So,” she said, and sort of rubbed my left arm.

  “So!” I said back. I was close enough to play connect-the-dots with the freckles on her cheek. I heard a taxicab honk from the street, and people continued to push by us on the sidewalk in both directions.

  “Do you have to, like, go back in there now?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, half regretfully. “Right. I guess I do.” I paused. Her giant eyes were still locked on mine. “Um,” I started. “Have we met before?”

  Hiccup-laugh. “I don’t think so,” she said, extending her right hand into the four and a half inches of space we had between us. “I’m Zaina.”

  I took her hand; it was roaringly hot and brittle like spun sugar. “I’m David,” I said. “Zaina is a lovely name.”

  She blushed. “It’s Persian.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Like the cats.”

  “Yup,” she said. “Or the empire.”

  “That too.”
>
  She squeezed my arm, leaving a red mark. “Bye, David. See you in there.”

  “OK,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  My eyes lingered on her skinny frame for an extra moment as she rejoined her friends; then I stepped down two stairs and took up position in the back of the entrance line. Whatever my doppelgänger had done so far, I had to admit it wasn’t all bad.

  I wasn’t waiting in the line for long.

  “Hey!”

  I glanced up and around.

  “Hey!”

  “Me?” I said meekly, peering around the line toward the front where the voice was coming from.

  “Yeah, you!” It was the bouncer. “Get the hell up here!”

  “OK,” I said, giving sheepish looks to everyone I passed.

  “I told you when you got here, Gould—you don’t need to wait.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Thanks, man.”

  The bouncer snatched a driver’s license from a gawky blond mod at the front of the line and inspected it. “I know I’m a man,” he said. “My name is Clarence.”

  “Thanks, Clarence,” I said. And walked past him into the Madrox.

  My first reaction was to the heat: It hit me like plastic sheeting, wrapping itself around every exposed inch of my body and instantly coating me with other people’s sweat. Next was the smell: It was, I imagined, the odor of a baseball locker room after the pennant has been won, when the usual aroma of jockstraps is, however briefly, washed away under a tidal wave of cheap champagne. Finally was the noise: If I thought the red-haired kid had been generous with the volume at the Satellite Heart, my doppelgänger was an audio philanthropist on the level of the Rockefellers. “Jacqueline” by Franz Ferdinand buzz-sawed through my eardrums and drew blood in my brain. I could feel the low end reverberating in the bottom of my sneakers. The empty beer bottles and glasses that lined the tables and the bar skipped and lurched with every downbeat, forcing them on a Bataan-style death march toward the floor.

  The place was packed to such a degree that the words “fire hazard” had long since lost their meaning and the sign on the wall noting the lawful occupancy as eighty-five seemed more like quaint, outdated advice than a binding legality. It was exactly the sort of scene that I, David Gould (the first), abhorred and avoided. Which of course made it exactly the scene that my double lived for. I pushed forward through the crowd in an attempt to buy a drink. I wondered, briefly, if they served shots of rye.

  Eventually I made it to the front of the drink line and managed to make eye-contact with the tender, a sallow-faced young woman with mousy brown hair that framed her face in a ’70s shag style. She was wearing a white and blue baseball T that said WINGER across the front in big, ironic lettering. I started to speak, when she leaned across the bar and gave me a lingering kiss on my cheek.

  “Hey,” she yelled over the music and the crowd. “Great set.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I was about to order a beer when she disappeared for a moment, then returned with a lowball glass filled with clear liquid.

  “Stoli rocks with a splash of tonic, right?”

  Maybe this place did have something in common with the Satellite Heart. I nodded, then motioned her back and leaned in close to her ear. She smelled like bubble gum.

  “Do you think I could get a lime, please?”

  “Sure,” she said, and gave me a flirtatious wink.

  I moved away from the bar and slurped the first few centimeters off of my vodka. It wasn’t a bad drink, really. It lacked the calming fire of whiskey and the solid, carb-filled grounding of beer, but it seemed to quiet the terror in my gut and provide a pleasant, energetic hum to my head. The air was cooler in the back, so I dodged the bathroom line and leaned against the wall. The Madrox was divided into two rooms, and the DJ booth was located in the other one. I decided to get my bearings for a bit, get another drink in me before risking a very public confrontation. Also, I still had no idea what I was going to say. “Shattered” by the Rolling Stones started up and I tapped my foot to the rhythm.

  “There you fucking are! I’ve been looking all over you.”

  I turned and saw Pedro pushing through the crowd to get to me. His face was shining and his head was freshly shaved. Behind him was a miniature man who, as he approached, revealed himself to be the oldest person I had seen in months. His long face was lined with deep crevices, and the purplish skin that surrounded his eyes seemed to be crumbling away. He had three hoop earrings in each ear, a leather vest over his sunken chest, and a red bandanna tied around his upper left arm.

  “Hey,” I said. “Here I am.”

  “I thought you ran off, baby. I knew it couldn’t take you that long to get cigarettes!” Pedro gave me a half hug, then threw his arm around his friend. “This is Screwie Louie.”

  I offered my hand and shook something clammy and calloused. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you, David,” said Screwie Louie in a high-pitched voice eerily reminiscent of Señor Wences. “I hear a lot about you.”

  Pedro grabbed my drink, took a big sip of it, then coughed dramatically. “What the hell is this? Vodka?”

  “Yep,” I said, taking it back from him.

  “I thought it was water!”

  Screwie Louie giggled like a schoolgirl.

  “Yuck,” said Pedro, wiping his mouth. “C’mon, finish that up and come with us.”

  “I just got it,” I said.

  “Finish it, bitch!”

  I raised the glass to my lips and did as I was told.

  “Good boy,” said Pedro. “Now come with us.”

  He grabbed my wrist and led me toward the very back of the bar, past the line right up to the bathroom door. A guy on deck, dancing back and forth from leg to leg, grabbed at us as we passed.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “There’s a line here! What the fuck?”

  “Sorry,” said Screwie Louie, patting him on the back. “Health inspectors. We won’t be long.”

  Without even pausing, Pedro led us all inside the tiny bathroom, then slammed the door shut and bolted the lock. I felt sweaty and more than a little drunk.

  “Pedro,” I said.

  “Shhhh,” said Pedro. “Don’t worry. This is the good stuff I promised you.”

  Screwie Louie reached deep in the front pocket of his jeans and extracted a small plastic bag filled with white powder. He handed it to Pedro, who in turn handed Louie a wad of twenties.

  “This is the good stuff, right, Louie? I don’t want that baby-powder shit.”

  Screwie Louie giggled. “I promised you—don’t get uptight.”

  Pedro removed his keys from his pocket and dug one of them deep into the bag. When he pulled the key out, it was crowned with a generous mound of white. In one quick motion he raised it to his right nostril and inhaled the entire pile. He fell back a bit, snorted air. Shook his head. Then he looked up at both of us with a maniacal grin.

  “Oooooooh,” he purred. “Mama likes!”

  Screwie Louie smiled a toothy grin. “What’d I tell you?”

  I had been around people who were on it, but I had never actually seen someone take cocaine before. It was—like fistfights, breakups, and the city of Los Angeles—almost depressingly the same as it was in the movies.

  Pedro hit his other nostril, then offered me an equally generous bump. I stepped backward.

  “No, no.” I said. “Thanks. I’m cool.”

  Screwie Louie giggled. Pedro frowned.

  “What do you mean, you’re cool?” he said. “You asked me to go get it!”

  “I did?”

  “Of course you did!” The pile of white balanced precariously on the key between us. It was flaky and almost sparkled in the harsh bathroom light. “Whose money do you think that was, anyway?”

  Jesus, I thought. Someone pounded on the door, causing Pedro’s hand to shake, and a dusting of white fell onto the tile.

  “Don’t be a bitch, David.” Pedro leaned
in closer. “Time to take your medicine.”

  Undercover, I said to myself. Belly of the beast.

  Tentatively, I hovered my nose over the key. The last thing I wanted to do was be like Woody Allen in Annie Hall and sneeze it over the entire room. I raised my hand to my face and pushed my left nostril closed as I had seen Pedro do, then sucked in the powder with my right.

  Screwie Louie giggled.

  I felt nothing at first, just a taste in my mouth like dissolved aspirin. Then a burn back in my sinuses and a trickle down my throat.

  “Beautiful,” said Pedro, as someone outside resumed pounding on the door. “Now one more for the road…”

  I found it much easier to talk to Screwie Louie after our trip to the bathroom together. Actually, I found it much easier to talk to everyone. It’s not that I felt particularly different from when I had arrived—though I noticed by the empty glasses that I had somehow put away two more vodkas in between return trips to the bathroom—I just seemed to be enjoying myself more. A lot more. Gone was the burning desire to go into the other half of the bar and confront my evil doppelgänger. Gone, in fact, was the burning desire to do anything other than sit here with my friends—old and new—and talk. About anything. At length. And at great speeds.

  The DJ—me? Andre? the red-haired kid with the broken back?—was playing a tune called “Beating Heart Baby,” and I had never heard it before but it seemed to be one of the two or three greatest songs ever recorded. Pedro was sitting to my left on the black banquette telling me about his latest conquest, the closeted lead singer of a screamo band that he was being paid to publicize. He kept rolling his eyes and laughing hysterically. He kept hitting my knee. I wasn’t following the story—my brain was focused on the music and how I felt like the blood in my head was surging to the beat of the drums—but I agreed that whatever it was he was telling me was definitely hilarious.

  I heard someone shout my name from the bathroom line, and I looked up. It was a tall, skinny Arab woman with curly hair and legs like skyscrapers. She said my name again and smiled and waved. I smiled dumbly and waved back. What was her name again? The one who didn’t smoke? Cats. Empires. Zelda?

  “How do you know Zaina?”