THE FIRST TIME TAJ ATTENDED A TAP PARTY, SHE hadn’t even known it was a TAP party. She and Johnny had received the invitation a little while after he’d posted a few of his songs online. They had gone out of boredom. Why not? he’d said one evening. Let’s go check it out. It was a party up in Silver Lake, at a sprawling house that she recognized from half a dozen horror films.
They’d paid their twenty dollars and hung out. They only had kegs at the party back then; the promoters—whoever they were—hadn’t introduced TAP the drink just yet.
It had sure looked just like any other party. Later she would remember the slight differences—the feeling of being watched, of being judged, the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of the party a real event was going on, but that they were somehow missing out on it without quite knowing why.
She and Johnny had wandered through the house and found a door that looked like it would lead them outside, where they could at least sit by the pool. Taj opened it and was surprised to find a kid with a flashlight standing guard instead. “What’s the word?” he asked.
From behind him Taj had seen a dark room filled with kids and heard the sounds of soft, intimate laughter and the thump of a dark, rich house-music beat, all bass line.
“Excuse me?” she’d asked.
“Sorry,” he said. “Private party.” He closed the door firmly in their faces.
Johnny and Taj looked at each other askance. When Johnny tried to open the door, it was locked. Huh. That was weird.
“Drug room?” Johnny asked, raising an eyebrow. Johnny had been practically straight edge back then. Music is my life, he’d said. I don’t need anything but my guitar to get high.
“No, I didn’t smell anything, did you?” she said. She hadn’t glimpsed anyone surreptitiously angling a dollar bill up a nostril either. Besides, no one ever locked the drug room.
Just say no? Please. This was Los Angeles. Rehab was a mandatory pit stop between dropping out of high school and starring in a music video. Promises weren’t a pledge to change; it was where you checked in after they kicked you out of Hazelden. Taj knew half a dozen kids who had burned out on dozens of illegal substances. She herself stayed out of the scene. Sure, she’d tried stuff—her motto was “Try everything once”—but Taj preferred clarity to oblivion. Like Johnny she favored a natural high.
They’d left the party soon after, not quite being able to shake the feeling that they had been cheated of an experience.
The next week another invitation had arrived in their TAP in-boxes. At the bottom of the e-mail, a password had been supplied: Inferno. Maybe this meant they’d made the cut this time, Taj had thought.
Johnny had laughed it off, saying who did these people think they were, the devillll? Taj’s curiosity was piqued against her better nature. She wanted to find out what it was all about.
Inferno had taken them inside the back room at a party up on Laurel Canyon. The room was pitch-black, and bodies were pressed tightly against one another in the dark.
“What’s going on?” Taj whispered. “Is this all there is?”
A red light shone on one corner of the room, and a girl stood underneath it, holding what looked like a needle. The music started—the bumf, bumf, bumf of the techno beat—and the show began.
“Shhh,” Johnny said, holding her hand tightly. “Let’s wait and see.”
They had done just that. Later, at the next party, they would even participate. Soon it got to be something that was simply part of their lives, part of the fabric of their existence. And just like the website, it was hard to stop once you’d started.
That evening as Deck drove them up through the curvy streets, Taj wondered if it was a good idea to stop by the back room this time. Maybe tonight I won’t, she told herself. Maybe tonight I won’t do it.
Benedict Canyon snaked up from Beverly Hills (where the street was simply called Cañon) all the way up to Bel-Air, where twenty- to thirty-thousand-square-foot villas—modern American palazzos—were the norm. It was a quiet, secluded, exclusive neighborhood; up here, Taj thought, even the air smelled fresher, as if even the ubiquitous Los Angeles smog wouldn’t dare pollute the reaches of the lofty district.
Sutton’s house was on a ridge high above the city. They drove up to a security gate, and Div quickly punched in the code. Hedges hid the house from the street, and as they drove up the winding private drive, it came into view: a large colonial mansion, intimidating in its size, with three-story marble columns, sparkling fountains, and lush landscaping. It looked like a resort or a hotel rather than a private residence.
They parked behind a long line of cars in the driveway, and walked inside to find the party in full swing. Groups of people were dancing wildly in the living room, the throbbing music piped through speakers that were invisibly installed in every corner of the house. There were kids everywhere—hanging off the balcony, assembled on the patio, smoking in the dining room, zoning out, and sitting down rolling cigarettes in the mazelike corridors that led to different wings of the house. Several tables by the side of the room were littered with open potato-chip and snack bags, half-empty handles of premium gin, vodka, rum, and whiskey, and plastic cups scattered every which way—dirty, clean, half-full, half-empty, full of cigarette butts.
Just your usual Bel-Air blowout. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Taj surveyed the guests—she didn’t see anyone she knew from school, but the slew of bodies parted as soon as the crowd noticed the three of them enter.
“That’s Queen CoolGaze,” someone whispered. A snarky website had given Taj that nickname after a photo of her and Johnny had run in the Los Angeles Times in an article about the burgeoning music revival. The hipster hottie who was reinventing rock and roll and his alterna-queen girlfriend.
Taj blushed. Those pictures were a joke. It was all fake. How could they not see it?
But even the high-maintenance high-school crowd had bought into it. The way they stepped back to let her pass was a sign of respect. She knew in an instant that these were private-school kids whose mommies and daddies toiled in the upper reaches of the entertainment industry and brought home money by the wheelbarrowful. The girls had hair the color of honey, smooth and buttery-perfect, golden caramel-delicious highlights painstakingly applied by a professional hand, and luminous skin that glowed from exotic spa treatments.
“We’re going inferno,” Deck said, thumbing toward the back of the house. Although the password changed every week, they always called it that after the first time.
“Already?” Taj asked.
“Yeah. I want to get my spirit on,” Div said, her color high and her hands already shaking with excitement.
“Go ahead,” Taj said. “I’ll catch up later.”
She wandered into the kitchen and picked up a beer from the Sub-Zero, forgoing the telltale red TAP punch that was available in a crystal bowl. She saw Sutton leaning by the counter; a tall, strikingly beautiful girl in a diaphanous silk dress, her shoulders tan and creamy, stood beside him. Taj remembered her from backstage at the Viper Room. He raised his glass and she walked over.
“Taj, do you know Maxine?”
“No,” Taj said.
“Maxine, this is Taj. The one you’ve heard so much about. Johnny Silver’s muse.”
“I heard you’re the one responsible for all of his songs,” Maxine said.
Taj raised her eyebrow and looked at Sutton. What had Sutton told her? But Sutton looked blank.
“Thanks,” Taj said icily, living up to her nickname. “Sutton, you haven’t heard from him?”
“I told you, Taj, the minute I do, I’ll let you know. I’m sure our Johnny’s just, you know, hanging out somewhere.”
For some reason this caused Sutton’s date to giggle uncontrollably.
“Great party,” Taj said, for conversation’s sake.
“You going in?” he asked, nodding his head toward the back room.
“Later,” she said.
“That’s my girl.” Sutton smiled.
“A lot of new people here,” Taj said, surveying the crowd. God, and some of those kids looked really young—fourteen, thirteen, even.
Sutton nodded. “Word’s spreading. That’s the way we like it.”
Taj took her leave and walked around the party. I won’t do it tonight. I won’t. I won’t. But she found herself in front of the door anyway. And when the kid with the flashlight asked for the password, she gave it up willingly.
She walked inside the dark room, smelled the pheromones from the people around her, the woody, cloying smell of incense. She unzipped her jacket and stripped down to a thin black tank top. They were playing a track from Johnny’s album. Someone handed her a plastic cup. Oh, well. What could it hurt. It was all-natural. Organic. It was good for you. It made you feel good. She drank it, savoring the familiar, sweet taste of TAP. No wonder Johnny had found it so alluring. This feeling of lightness, of joy, of ecstasy …
Johnny’s voice was amplified on the speakers. It was almost as if he were there in the room with her.
She took off the tank top and stood there in her black lace bra. Then she unhooked the straps from behind and walked with her eyes closed into the crowd.