So he flouted celebrity acquaintances. In New York City this was not so unusual. Everybody Lucy knew was connected, by one or two or three degrees removed, to somebody famous. Zane had bought himself some famous friends, paid for the right to intone their names, invoke their sacred celebrity presences at the dinner table. And so with bloody steak on her plate she had been introduced to Robert De Niro, and to Lance, one of the boys who long ago danced for Madonna in Truth or Dare, and to Harvey Keitel and his girlfriend, whom Lucy had seen a million times in the health food store on Prince Street. A white-haired David Byrne had nodded as he passed the table, Matt Dillon had waved, and so had Lenny Kravitz. Stars!
They ate on. Lucy put down her glass, and Zane filled it again, finishing off the second bottle. His gleaming smile no longer looked so empty.
By the time they rose up, half-drunk, stuffed and glazed in that way only red meat and red wine can accomplish, and strolled outside, Lucy admitted to Zane, in a last moment alone while Patty did her face again, that she had moved from negative to neutral. Inspired, he grabbed her for a celebratory hug, and a kiss to which he added a little snakelike flick of his tongue. Lucy clamped her lips shut. He stood back and gave her a moist, transparently lustful look. After an ostentatiously long goodbye kiss of Patty, with Lucy poised on the curb with a waiting taxi, he ended on a gentlemanly note, sending them off in his limo to Parkistan and taking the cab himself.
This didn't suffice to take the taste of his tongue off her lips. As they lounged in the limo for the ten block ride to Parkistan, Patty said, "So what do you think?" Lucy played for time.
"Think? Of what?"
"C'mon, Goose. Of Zane, who else?"
"He's...charming," Lucy said. "But they said that about George W. Bush too."
"Jeesh, knowing you Luce, those are fighting words...I...you seemed to enjoy the dinner, and..."
"Hey, I like a slab of beef with a handsome stranger every now and then, hon. It's just that...he...oh, he's like half the people I know in this town. Too self-important for his own good."
"Well, he is a pretty major player."
On the tide of wine Lucy rode a surge of anger. "Player? What kind of player? What the fuck does that mean?" What was it about Patty that made her willing to settle for cliches in lieu of truth, or at least awareness?
"God, lighten up, Ripken. You know what I mean. You saw all those people he knew. He is important. He's got a lot of money, and this great house at the beach, and..."
"You've been there?"
"No, but I've seen pictures."
"Have you ever been to his apartment?"
"No, he likes to come to my place. He says it's more intimate."
"You're talking about marrying this guy and he's never invited you to his home? What if he has a wife there, Patty?"
"There's no wife, Lucy. I've, well, you know, I've been with enough married guys to know the patterns—the sneak calls, me skulking like a burglar in the background, four a.m. departures, all that baggage. He doesn't have to report to anybody. I know that much."
"Well, that's great but it ain't enough. Check him out a little more before you take the plunge, hon. Please. Just do it for me."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, Lucy-Goosey," she said lightly, having decided not to take Lucy seriously. Following suit, Lucy put Zane Smithson out of mind. "Wow," Patty went on, as they pulled up in a swirl of limos and taxis in front of a building on the west side of Tompkins Square. "This must be the place. Look at the crowd!"
Cars delivering would-be revelers had backed up traffic, and the honking horns ratcheted up the excitement level, already high with the milling horde surrounding the velvet ropes which outlined an empty rectangle of sidewalk and held at bay the unanointed, unhip, and unconnected. At a checkpoint in the velvet rope, a steer-necked goon with a sheaf of guest lists and a predictably important attitude scanned his classified documents while anxious would-be entrants stood like supplicants before the king, begging for mercy. No matter how cool you might feel yourself to be, if you weren't a recognizable celebrity inevitably this moment at the door arrived, when you weren't sure—when the goon with the list held your fate in his hands. Judging by the crowd jammed up against all three sides of the velvet rope, and the half-dozen oversized back-up goons keeping everybody at a distance, this was a night for listees and celebrities only. "Damn," said Lucy, forgetting protocol and opening the limousine door for herself. "I thought this foolishness stopped years ago. Oh, thanks," she added, as the limo driver came around the back of the car and grabbed the door handle and held it open for Patty, emerging. "I forgot. Sorry." She wondered if she was supposed to tip the guy, and decided to let Patty handle it. She knew more about this sort of thing.
Patty ignored the driver. Lucy followed suit. He closed the door and went back to his seat and drove off. "Sure hope Nina wasn't bullshitting about getting me on the list," Lucy said. "I'm not into this kind of ritual humiliation."
"Really," said Patty. "Can you imagine waiting out here to be selected for entry?"
They pushed through the clamor and tumult towards the gatekeeper. In the background sirens wailed, horns honked, and bums begged for dollar bills, not change, from the assembled mob. Upfront, she got the man's eye, and announced, "Lucy Ripken. Should be..."
"Which list?" said Mr. Gatekeeper, Brooklyn accent thick enough to cut with a cleaver.
"I was about to tell you, Bub...should be a plus one, on Vadim's." Vadim was the manager, a man-about-downtown with one name and a talent for nailing the trend of the moment and injecting it into the ambience of the current club. He had hired the boys from Kremlin to do this one, Nina said, thereby transforming them, overnight, into designers to watch.
The slabhead with the documents flipped over a couple of well-marked pages, and found the right list. "Ripken, Ripken, uhhh..."
"That's with an R," Lucy said. He looked at her.
"Hey, I know, lady, just a minute." He continued his scanning. Lucy, reading upside down, could see her name clearly.
"There," she said, stabbing at the list with her finger. "L. Ripken plus one."
"Oh yeah," he said. "Huh, I didn't see it." He unhooked the velvet rope, let Lucy and Patty through, and closed it again. Lucy checked her watch as they entered the club. It was just past midnight and the place was jammed.
They flowed through the club with the crowd, a classic New York mix of uptown and down, drag queens and old hippies, beatniks and bad boys, fashion victims and fashion mavens, Park Avenue wives slumming and East Village dealers dealing, plus a small horde of post-grunge kids in their unself-conscious jeans and flannels and dirty hair. Most of the hundred or so people Lucy recognized from ten years of club scenes lurked in the important corners. Parkistan consisted of two main rooms, with some subsidiary drinking and lounging zones. The first room was blockily Constructivist in style, black and deep red in color, and obviously—to Lucy's practiced eye—done on the cheap. Nobody put more than the basics into clubs these days—not with the fickle crowds shifting allegiance to a new one every couple of months. There was a bar at one end, with neon signs in some sort of Islamic or Arabic text. Beyond this Constructivist room was a second, larger Central Asian-themed room with a low stage at one end; the walls were covered with fabrics painted in a vaguely Oriental motif. A Byzantine-looking chandelier hung from the high ceiling, and banks of stage lights played over the stage. People crowded the dance floor, throbbing surrealistically in strobe light to the beat of industrial hip hop. Lucy dodged among the dancers and the club workers in their Olde Arabia-style uniforms, and led the way through an arched opening into the icon grotto—a dark, labyrinthine warren of small spaces furnished with overstuffed sofas and chairs occupied by club kids in various states of sexual disarray or drug-induced stupor. Each of these little rooms was illuminated by candle-like bulbs which threw flickery faint warm light on walls decorated with Russian icons—fakes, no doubt, but still effective in their evocative mystery, stylized two-dimensional s
aints and Mary and Jesus heads surrounded with three-dimensional layered gilt and jewels. Even the tables had saints and Christs resined into their surfaces. Inspiration for this stuff had originated in the Middle Ages in the Russian Orthodox Church; now it was mood material in a New York nightclub. Lucy wondered what she'd tell Nina. These dingy rooms would be a bitch to photograph, they were thematically unrelated to the rest of the club, and these and the other, larger main rooms would all probably look utterly shabby in the chic pages of SPACES MAGAZINE. But it was this season's hotspot, and Nina would most likely snatch it up and run it on four pages of glorious color, not wanting to miss out on what, she imagined, was happening.
Within an hour of arriving, they'd seen enough, greeted a few acquaintances, and checked out the genderless bathrooms, where condom machines glowed under neon Safe Sex signs blinking on the wall. They stood at the bar in the Constructivist Room, Patty nursing a blue bottle of Welsh designer water and Lucy drinking beer. "I don't think the Central Asian thing is going to play in the design world," Lucy said. "It's too..."
"Depressing," Patty finished for her. "Grim religion, brutal politics, and no fun. I can’t believe they’d think this could be hip after nine-eleven." She looked at her watch. "Hey, listen, Luce, I think I'm gonna cash it in. It's after one and I've got..."
"What, no Wet Prophets? C'mon, when was the last time you saw a good rock n' roll band live in a nightclub, Patty?"
"It's been a long time—and there's a reason for that."
"Yeah, yeah. I hear you. Me too. But what the hell, we're here, so I'm gonna stick around. You got something better to do? Other than sleep, I mean?"
She looked embarrassed. "Well, yes, actually..."
"Wait, don't tell me. Zane...you're meeting up with him."
"Two a.m. at my place." She looked at her watch. "Which means I've got to run. The place is a mess and..."
"Whatever you say, Doll. Go on, have fun, give the man my regards, and call me tomorrow with a full report."
In an effort to energize herself after Patty left, Lucy hit the dance floor for a few minutes, but it was no use. She was running on empty. By 1:45, when the Wet Prophets finally took the stage, she had a major headache and no desire to listen to the thrashing racket of a loud rock n' roll band. Except that the lead singer for the Wet Prophets looked quite interesting, actually, in a Dionysian sort of way. He had long black hair, and wore a pair of old jeans way down low on his hips, and big black Doc Marten boots and nothing else except a silver snake bracelet on his left forearm and several earrings on each ear; he was skinny, muscular, beardless, with a thorny rose tattooed just below his left collarbone; he took the mike, and said, beginning softly, ending with a shriek, "Hi, we're from Spokane, and fuck you, New York!" Then the guitar player smashed out a chord and the band took off.
Lucy's headache went away; or rather, she forgot about it, so enraptured was she by the Wet Prophets, and particularly by the maniacal energy of the lead singer, who moved like a drunken snake, like Jagger in his youth but with more rage, less finesse, and no training but the right instincts for timing the pelvic thrust, the rebel yell, and all the other moves and noises of basic rock n' roll. Lucy was transfixed, and hardly noticed the shrieking, bobbing, slamming, and thrashing going on all around her as she drifted, song by song, closer to the mosh pit at the foot of the stage, eventually ending up six feet away from the boy as he closed out the hour long set with a cover of Light My Fire, chasing the ghost of Jim Morrison out the door.
Exhausted, Lucy looked out the window of the cab. Rain fell, smearing the light on the streets. She was headed north on 6th Avenue with a 23-year old budding rock star named Tim Bob Yarber, alias Chain Saw, lead singer of the Wet Prophets. They were bound for the Chelsea Hotel, where the band was staying. "What am I doing here?" she mouthed silently to the faint reflection of her face in the Checker cab window. She shrugged, and turned back to Tim Bob Yarber, who stared out the opposite window. He'd put on a t-shirt after the show, and a ragged sweater for the cab ride. He was a strikingly handsome boy, and had nailed her within minutes of ending the last song, when they were both still high from the music. The first thing she noticed was that she liked the smell of his sweat. After two beers and a little chatter he'd found out she was from Oregon, and the deed was practically done. Several beautiful children had flung themselves at him wantonly, but he had chosen Lucy as the one. Now she wondered, headed up to his lair, if she was ready to do the deed with this handsome young rock n' roll stranger. It had been a long time since she'd ventured anything this dangerously spontaneous. Well, maybe not that long. There had been that night in the jungle in Costa Rica…'New York's an ugly town," he announced. "I don't see how you can live here."
"Hey, it's the Big City, man," Lucy said. "Look out there. It's three a.m. and the streets are still jumping. You don't see that in Spokane, dude—or even Seattle."
"So, how long have you been here, Lucy?" He asked.
"God, seems like forever sometimes," she said. "Eleven, twelve years."
"Jesus." She could practically hear him figuring, Damn, I was twelve when she moved here. She must be really old.
"It's sort of addictive," Lucy said.
"Like dope, huh?" He grinned.
"Yeah, something like that."
They arrived at the hotel. He jumped out and headed in, forgetting to pay the cabbie. Lucy took care of it and followed. She found him in the bar negotiating a six pack of imported beer out of the bartender. They got on the elevator with an old man in a suit and a young woman wearing a very short skirt, high heels, and a translucent blouse filmily covering her large breasts. Nobody said a word. The old man glowered at Chain Saw. Chain Saw smirked. The young woman looked back and forth from Lucy to Chain Saw, making her calculations. Lucy kept a lid on her urge to push the emergency button, stop the elevator, and run for the fire stairs. Twisting the top off a beer bottle, Chain Saw pulled it out of the six pack and started drinking. "Aaah!" he said, as the elevator lurched and halted. "Care for a beer, dude?" he said to the old man, who shook his head, still glowering. They all got off on the same floor. Lucy followed Chain Saw down the hall. The old man and the young woman went the other way.
"Shit, what was that old fart doing with that babe," he said to Lucy, as he fumbled with the key to his room.
"Paying for a party, I would guess," Lucy said.
"You mean she was a hooker?" he said, sounding surprisingly naive. Spokane speaking.
"What do you think, Tim Bob...or am I supposed to call you Chain, or what?" Lucy said as she followed him into the room.
"Mr. Saw to you, lady," he said, then laughed. "Just Tim's fine. Here, have a beer," he handed her one. "Sorry about the wreckage," he waved at the dishevelled scene.
"I've seen worse," Lucy said. She threw some clothes off an armchair and sat down. "So...how'd you become Chain Saw, Tim? Did it come to you in a dream, or was your dad a logger, or what?"
"Fuck, I don't know. It's pretty stupid isn't it?" he said, cracking himself another beer. He went through them fast. "I guess we were...I was trying to jumpstart the Northwest image or something, you know, after Nirvana and Pearl Jam hit it every fuckhead with a guitar within eight hundred miles of Seattle thought he was gonna be a star, so..."
"I like Wet Prophets, but Chain Saw doesn't cut it, Tim. Pardon the pun. Plus Kurt Cobain’s like 20 year’s gone, amigo."
"Yeah, well, maybe I'll change it, just for you, Lucy," he said softly, waxing romantic as he perched on the arm of her chair and gave her a look. She put the beer on the table and waited for him to make a move. Her stomach, full of meat and wine and beer, felt simultaneously bloated and nervous. Not a good combination, especially mixed with a headache. Oh for the blind lust of yesteryear, she thought, gazing into his eyes. Oh for a night of unself-conscious sex. He sort of fell on her.
Fifteen minutes later they were naked on top of his king size hotel bed. Even as she touched him all over, awed and aroused by the astonishing musc
le definition and tone of his white young body, Lucy was wondering if and when she should get the condoms out of her purse. Thus far the indicators had suggested there was no hurry; and now, as he flopped onto his back and sighed, it became clear there was no rush at all. "Shit," he said. "I can't do this." He looked down at himself. She followed his eyes. He was very relaxed.
"What's the problem?" Lucy said. "Am I..."
"No, it's not you," he said. "It's...I just get...worried, is all. Everywhere I go these girls expect me to be...some kind of sex god, and...sometimes all I want is a little company, you know. I'm...tired of this rock star shit..."
Lucy kissed his chest. So that's why she'd been chosen. She was unthreatening. Oh well. She liked this vulnerable boy. "Do you want me to...?" she lowered her head.
"No, it's not that. I..." he trailed off. "Listen, maybe you should, you know...I've got a gig in Boston tomorrow night and I should get some rest." Lucy decided to ignore him, and moved lower. She'd been told more than once that she was good at this. Not that it required a hell of a lot of talent. After a moment she gave up. "I told you," he said wearily.
"I'm sorry," Lucy said. 'I thought that..."
"Forget it, Lucy. Listen, leave your number and I'll give you mine. I'm living in Seattle now, so if you're ever out there, we'll..."
"Sure, Tim. Sounds good." She got up and dressed quickly, Tim Bob Chain Saw Yarber stretched across the bed, watching. By the time she was ready to leave, he'd fallen asleep. He looked like a rock n' roll angel, white body sprawled, long hair streaming across his face and chest. Lucy came over for a closer look. Diamonds and gold rings glinted in a row up his earlobe. He had no hair on his chest, and barely had cause to shave. Pretty boy, just a child. She found a Seattle number on a piece of paper on the nightstand, and exchanged one of her cards for it. Then she touched his face, kissed him softly on the lips, turned out the light and left.
Lost in New York: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 5) Page 3
