Behind me, I heard Audrey spit-take a mouthful of Jack and water.
I went on. “Don’t get your panties twisted, sister. Or are they still on the office floor?”
I know.
I shouldn’t have said that.
But c’mon. That was a good one.
Either way, I knew it was just about the dickiest thing I could have said the moment the words left my lips—good one or not.
So…whoops.
Dana looked back and forth at the two of us. “Ew,” he said softly, finally understanding what had happened while he slept in his alcohol-induced coma.
Ginny gave me a pretty solid right hook to the mouth and stormed out the door.
Dana gasped.
Audrey wheezed.
Burrito yipped and snapped at my fingers.
Dana followed Ginny out the door, off to who knew the hell where.
Audrey handed me a short stack of bar napkins and another shot.
I dipped the napkin into the whiskey and dabbed it against my lip. It burned like hell, but didn’t seem to be bleeding too much.
Audrey’s eyes were watery with the laughter she was holding in.
“Please don’t,” was all I said.
And it was all she needed. The dam burst and she spent the next ten minutes guffawing at me. “You got less game than the Special Olympics, Willie.”
***
The snow had started falling in thick clumps again, because, you know, fuck me and my life. As strong winds blew sideways, I relished the one advantage the Omni had over Junior’s Buick. Unlike Miss Kitty, the shitbox I was currently sitting in had an operational heating system.
Without warning, I was flooded with guilt at my disparaging thoughts toward Junior’s old car, and…a little grief?
What the fuck was wrong with me?
Junior was the sentimentalist amongst the two of us. Part of my varying and often self-destructive defense mechanisms was the ability to let go, to separate myself from the painful memories of my past, my childhood.
Junior embraced and expanded on them. Where my apartment and living conditions could be considered Spartan at best, Junior decorated his apartment with collector’s totems from the childhood neither one of us had.
One morning, after a particularly epic drinking session, I’d woken up on his couch with all the flavors of hell having an oily orgy in my mouth.
I went into his bathroom to find some toothpaste, mouthwash, anything to banish the unholies from my tongue. What I found instead was a trail of toothpaste on the floor to Junior’s bedroom door. Apparently, he’d tried an oral exorcism of his own.
I found Junior on the bed in his boxers, snoring like a water buffalo with emphysema, tube of toothpaste in one hand, the other down the front of his drawers. As I quietly shut down my gag reflex and attempted to remove the toothpaste from his paw, I saw the action figures in bed with him. In this drunkenness, he’d opened a half dozen of his precious in-the-box toys. Duke and Starscream and Magneto had met on the epic battlefield of Junior’s single bed. The single bed with the Justice League sheets.
Somewhere in his drunken lizard brain, the twelve-year-old Junior played with the toys that the angry, isolated kid at St. Gabe’s never had a chance to own.
The whole tableau made me sad, especially when my first thought was that Starscream wouldn’t have had a chance against Magneto.
That thought belonged to the kid in me who never had those toys either.
A small, ghostly hand crept over the side of Junior’s bed. The Boy’s fingers tried to close over the G.I. Joe figure, but passed through, unable to grasp the playthings.
I know. I really should see a psychologist at some point.
But on the other hand, fuck you.
It was the same emotion that filled me when I thought about that goddamn car.
Junior had infected me with his sentimentality.
And I didn’t have the time or patience for sentimentality.
I drove by Ollie’s place, hoping he could work what was technologically impossible for me, and crack Byron’s phone. I parked the car behind a big pile of snow in a spot that wouldn’t have been able to take half of Miss Kitty’s girth.
I knocked on Ollie’s door and waited, apology ready and my sword positioned to fall on. Nothing.
Through the slatted blinds, I caught a flicker of movement.
“Come on, Ollie,” I said to the door. “I’m sorry.”
No response.
“We need your help, buddy. We really do. I’m sorry if I made you feel…like you couldn’t contribute.”
Another flicker of movement.
“Really?” I said to the air. I knocked at the window by the door and tried to peek in when the blind shifted and I found myself face-to-face with an ugly orange tabby with a lazy eye. The tabby seemed as surprised as I was, jumping back and shifting the blinds over behind the couch cushion.
With the cat’s help, I could see into the apartment that clearly had no Ollie in it.
Where the hell was he now?
I felt a second of concern before I remembered nobody had any reason to go after Ollie, except to get at me. Amongst our peers, Ollie was as removed from the scene as one could be.
It wasn’t like Ollie brought dates to The Cellar.
Far as I knew, Ollie barely dated at all.
Far as I knew.
Jesus. Was I really so disconnected from his life?
I didn’t even know he had a cat. Must have been a recent purchase, since the last time we did a boys’ day kung fu marathon at his pad, there wasn’t a cat.
But the addition of a pet into his life was something I should have known about.
On cue, the cat returned to the sill and pressed his bright ginger fur against the glass. I traced my fingers along his ruffled pelt, feeling his deep purr vibrating on the window.
First animal this week that hadn’t tried to eat me.
Felt nice.
But where the hell was Ollie?
Chapter Fourteen
Blue Envy looked like it was drawing a decent crowd, considering it was Monday and considering the radio was calling for another snowpocalypse to drop within the next twelve hours. And also considering it was jazz.
I wrapped my coat tightly around myself and opened the door to another gust of bone-chilling winter wind. My knee immediately flared up, begging me to get back inside somewhere, preferably a place with a large supply of both whiskey and Bengay. The cold felt good against my stab wound, though, so it wasn’t all bad.
I walked over to the doorman.
“Twelve dollars,” he said, brows knitted together as he gave me the once-over.
Oh for chrissakes. I gritted my teeth and handed him a twenty.
He wasn’t someone I recognized from the circuit, so I couldn’t pull the old “club courtesy” angle and skip the door charge. I had twenty-six bucks left in my wallet after the cover, and I cursed myself for not at least pulling another hundred out of the doctored trumpet case. As far as blood money was concerned, fuck ’em. It wasn’t the blood of me or mine that was on the floor.
Yet.
Blue Envy wasn’t as frou-frou as Raja, but it was still several steps—several staircases—above The Cellar. Lot of dudes around me dressed nicely. And they all smelled nice. I couldn’t be sure, since it was my own stank that was filling my senses, but after two days without a shower, and one rough and tumble roll in the sack, I was reasonably sure I was raising a Pigpen-esque cloud of filth.
The bartender wore a vest and sported a pompadour that had more work put into it than an aging starlet’s face. “What would you like?”
“Jim Beam and a Bud?”
He hid his disdain fairly well.
Fairly.
He put the drinks in front of me. “Nineteen dollars, please.”
I was glad he’d told me the price before I’d taken a sip, otherwise my spit-take might have ruined his fancy haircut. I placed another twenty down. Prick didn�
��t give me change, then had the balls to look at the bar to see if any other bills has sprouted wings and flown their way onto the mahogany.
He sniffed, then went back to making a regiment of bright pink and green martinis that had some sort of fruit salad dangling off the glass.
That should have been my first hint.
I took my booze and walked down to the front by the small curtained stage. There were a couple of tables, but they all had paper tents with Reserved written on them in gilt cursive.
There I was, all up in the schmancy again.
I leaned against the wall and waited for the show to begin.
Then I got my first sense.
My internal bouncer alarms gave a light jangle.
All good bouncers, and many bartenders, have a highly tuned sixth sense. Science hasn’t proven it, but it was a fact. I’d heard it described along the lines of when you were a kid and you walked in the door and knew, just knew, that your parents had been fighting.
That feeling.
You do what I ‘ve done long enough, you can read all kinds of shit off people—in their expression, in their posture, in their tone of voice. A good bouncer could walk into a crowded room and not only be able to tell that something heavy was about to hit the fan, but would be able to pinpoint from what direction it was emanating within a second or two.
Junior said it had a smell. Testing his theory, I breathed deeply through my nose, but all I caught was a suissant of dirty balls. Again, those were probably mine.
Then, just as quickly, it passed. It wasn’t gone, but it passed, right as the first notes from a stand-up bass thrummed through the loudspeakers. A deep voice announced, “Please give a round of applause for Ellie Confidential and the Brass Balls Band.”
Well, at least they were starting the evening. I didn’t want to have to sit through opening bands if it was all jazz. That, and I couldn’t afford another drink. I’d just wait out the set and chat up a couple of the band members after. Assuming my ball stank didn’t clear the room first.
A lone trumpet note carried the opening into “My Funny Valentine.” Something warmed in my chest. Not only did I not know that the song was considered jazz, but the old Chet Baker album had been one of my mom’s favorites.
The curtains parted, and Veronica Lake’s little sister stood center stage. She was the one playing the notes, a trumpet pressed to her full lips. I guess they had a replacement ready to go for Byron. Being a Neanderthal, watching her on the horn nearly instigated a second puberty in me.
Ellie was hot, straight-up.
Then she put down the horn and began singing one of my earliest lullabies with Greta Garbo’s voice. Her thickly lashed eyes pressed closed, she breathed the song gently into the microphone. Ellie Confidential had some mad talent.
I closed my eyes too, and let the notes wash over me.
For a moment, only a moment, I was The Boy and he was me, and we were in a warm place inside my childhood. I couldn’t tell you how long it had been since music had carried me away so far from the moment.
Man, it was music to fall in love with. My mind drifted to Kelly, to the idea of what we could have been, could have had. The mental image started to float away toward the idea that she’d been playing Hide the Kielbasa with Ian Summerfield, but even that thought was calmed and washed away on the music.
Then the first red flag popped up in my head just as the mush hidden deep inside me was traipsing through a field of daisies. It popped up with such force, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole room heard the booooiiiiing inside my head.
I opened my eyes. Yup. There were no women in the room. Toward the front of the stage, couples were slowly dancing to the song.
Guy couples.
Uh-oh. Maybe that dirty-ball souissant wasn’t only mine. There were a lot of balls in that room. At least a percentage of them had to be dirty.
Shit.
This wasn’t Kansas.
And I was in a room filled with Friends of Dorothy.
Red flag number two billowed magnificently in the winds of my brain as that sixth sense kicked in again. My eyes darted from person to person. My eyes first locked with the Veronica Lake lookalike on the microphone. Her eyes were wide, locked on mine. A note warbled in her throat and she glanced to my right.
I turned and was met with a glare blasting cold hatred from a swollen face—purpled under the eyes, a line of new stitches over the right eyebrow. It took me a second before I could piece together the features under the beating and where the hell I knew them from.
Alex.
Remember him?
Took me a second too.
I’ll give you a minute.
…
…
…
…
Time’s up. Same for me.
As I remembered the little gay dude who’d caught a savage beating at The Cellar…
…just as the beginnings of an apology were forming in my head…
…somebody grabbed my left arm from behind and wrenched it back. I turned and saw Cornrows from my apartment assault, both meaty hands clenched tight around my wrist.
Rookie mistake, leaving me with one arm open. I clenched my right fist and readied a hook that was going to break his fucking jaw.
Then somebody grabbed my right arm and wrenched it back to meet the other. Fuck. Lineman.
The rookie mistake was mine.
That wrenching of my right arm was the one that hurt, pulling open the tape and my stab wound.
I cried out in the sudden pain before I could even say a word. And any word that might have followed was cut short by the bottle of Grey Goose that walloped me on the face. The thick glass—or my temple—made a loud crack that drew a long and horrified “Oooooh!” from the room.
Bright spots danced before my eyes and my knees buckled. The two goons didn’t let me hit the floor, but my falling weight pulled at my side again. The starburst of pain from my perforated belly took my breath away, but was the only thing that kept me conscious.
I didn’t think I was going to be so lucky the second time, in more ways than one.
(Here’s a Boo Malone Bouncer Fun Fact for ya! Most of the time, the impact from a bottle strike isn’t where the damage happens. It’s the glass. Say someone whacks you on the skull with a thinner-glassed bottle—Stoli, for instance—it’s going to shatter. At which point you’ve got a shower of glass streaking across your face. Then, what’s left attached to the bottleneck carves your face into ribbons. I’ve seen it. It ain’t pretty.)
Through my blurred vision, I could see a long crack along the vodka bottle from the impact on my head. The second shot, when that thick glass shattered, would fillet my face off like a chicken cutlet.
Self-preservation and my rage kicked in.
The room went red.
With a roar, I dropped all my weight down, pulling the goons halfway over with me. I didn’t care how many gym muscles you have, two hundred and forty pounds of dead weight is a bitch. They held their grips on my arms.
Good.
I ignored the pain in my side and the motherfucker of a headache that I’d been delivered via French vodka bottle and rolled back, mule-kicking my heel up along the length of my left arm. The bottom of my Timberland blasted Cornrows right under the chin. He was unconscious before he even had a chance to let me go.
I swung the same leg back behind Lineman and swept him at the knees. He pitched forward on top of Alex, and they both went down in a heap. I tried to spring to my feet, but still didn’t have my equilibrium back. I saw the exit, had every intention of running for it, but my looped brain decided to turn the floor into a listing boat on the high seas, and I toppled, doing a soft shoe the entire way, until my back slammed against the stage.
In the scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened, tactically. If I had to fight off a bar full of righteously pissed off gay dudes, at least I wasn’t going to have to defend my flank.
(And no, I wa
sn’t going for a rimshot there.)
(And no, I wasn’t going for one with my use of “rimshot” either.)
I put my fists up and readied myself for an ass-kicking I hoped would only send me to the hospital and not to a slab.
Sometimes being a man meant you just had to take that beating. But I was damn sure going to let these boys know they were in a fight.
Lineman disentangled himself from Alex and stood, reached into the back of his pants, and with a flick of his wrist, opened an extension baton.
This was going to hurt.
Lineman rushed me, the baton raised high.
I put my left arm up to block the baton, and cocked my right to throw a haymaker that would, with a bit of luck, take his head clean off. And then, I hoped, the sight of his bleeding neck stump and disconnected head would be such a shock to the room that it would buy me enough time to scamper out the door and run like a bitch.
As Lineman closed the distance, my mind went through the fastest prayer in history along with the thought that I was a dead man.
Five feet.
One foot.
KER-FUCKA-BLOOEY!
From behind and above me, the weighted bottom of a mike stand arced through the air and blasted Lineman right on the side of the face with devastating force. The bone structure of his face shifted unnaturally to the left, spinning him around as he nosedived to the floor. A pool of blood immediately fanned out from his broken face.
Somebody screamed, and the room fell into chaos.
I looked up and saw the Veronica Lake-alike standing over me like a Viking queen, the mike stand her sword. Through my concussed brain, she looked like Brunhilda come to deliver me to Valhalla. (Did Brunhilda deliver dead souls to Valhalla? Who the fuck knew.)
She tossed her improvised weapon to the side and reached under my shoulder, pulling me up onto the stage. “We’re going out the back, buddy,” she said.
I planted my other hand on the stage and pushed myself, rolling onto the stage.
Alex still had other ideas, despite his fallen henchmen.
With a yell, he charged us both from stage left, two bottles held high, one in each hand.
Veronica tore the blonde peekaboo hair off her head and tossed it into Alex’s face, blinding him with lustrous wigginess. Within the second that Alex’s vision was impaired, Ollie followed up with a straight right, square into the wig’s part—which happened to line up perfectly with the middle of Alex’s face.
Rough Trade Page 20
