“Two Jäger shots!” Rob yelled over the whooping and howling of the Bulgarian Bar’s Saturday night crowd. The bartender, a petite brunette with a vague whiff of the international about her, nodded impassively and put two shot glasses in front of him. He leaned in against the bar and ran his fingers through his hair. “Make it three. One for me, one for mi amigo Daveed, y uno también para ti, mi amor.”
Earlier that evening, as they consumed a dinner of french fries with mayo and grappa at Le Père Pinard, Rob had described the Bulgarian Bar to David. “It is super-cool, it is like pure chaos. One of the few places you can experience pure Bacchic chaos in our technocratic society of today,” he explained, gesticulating and lighting a new cigarette with his old one. His English vocabulary increased suddenly, as though he were quoting something. David nodded, although this sounded suspiciously like the form of extreme therapy that his father, Sam Grobart, had helped pioneer in the seventies.
It was a cold night, and they had to walk through a slushy pile of snow left over from the storm to get to the entrance. The place was on the second floor of a building on East Canal Street, and the klezmer/punk/dance music was already deafening as they came up the stairs. David was secretly relieved to see how dense and manic the crowd was. He’d been feeling self-conscious about his usual Nikes/jeans/white T-shirt uniform all night. But the atmosphere inside the Bulgarian was riotous enough that David could be pretty sure nobody cared what he was wearing.
David stood fidgeting behind Rob, who was laying it on thick with the bartender.
“Salud!” Rob yelled, elbowing David to pick up his shot. They threw them back. David shook himself back into focus and saw that the bartender was smiling at him mischievously. Before he could think what to do, she leaned across the bar and kissed him full on the mouth. He thought guiltily about Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, his still-sort-of-girlfriend. But then all he could think about was how good kissing somebody new felt. The bartender pulled away and winked at him, and before he knew what he was doing, David leaned over the bar and was kissing her heavily.
When he stepped back, the crowd around him erupted in cheers at the public make-out session. Rob patted him on the back appreciatively. “Next girl’s mine, okay?” he whispered to David, sounding like he was half kidding. Then he turned back to the bartender. “Another round, bella,” he said, waving a twenty in the air. “And two Heinekens.”
“Those are on me, boys,” she said in a hard-to-place European accent.
They took their drinks, the bartender still smiling coyly at David, and headed to one of the booths in the shadows.
The center of the room was like a high-fashion mosh pit. Skinny Polish girls were being swung around by the jumping, yelling dudes. The music was just about the loudest David had ever heard. They watched for a minute, and then Rob yelled, “C’mon!” and tried to pull him up and onto the dance floor. Before David could say “I don’t dance,” he was swept up into a very fast, very drunk crowd of people.
Girls started to come up to them from the dance floor. David looked over and saw that Rob was dancing pretty suggestively with some girl he thought he recognized from Potterton. Another girl, slightly round with a shock of bleached blond hair and wearing a much-safety-pinned wife-beater, approached David and put her arms around his waist. She looked up at him and smiled a wide, careless, dark-red-lipstick smile. She didn’t move very much, just sort of twitched her hips and kept her eyes down. David tried to follow her rhythm and let go a little bit.
Finally the music stopped while a new deejay set up. The dancing mob dispersed, and David looked around at the room. The walls were paneled with fake wood, and the ceiling was strung with Christmas lights. There were plastic cups and beer bottles all over the floor, and the tracked-in snow was melting into the spilled drinks to make a dirty lake at their feet.
“I’m Caroline,” the girl said, looking up, but not taking her arms away from his waist.
“David.”
“You want to come over to our table?” she asked. He nodded, and looked around for Rob. Where’d that dick go off to? he wondered.
Caroline dragged him to a booth crowded with glam-punk types who managed to look very bored despite the raucous crowd all around them. They squeezed in, and she began introductions: “David, this is Leo, Moira, Rex, Bill, Sandra, and February.”
“February?” David’s mouth hung open.
“David Grobart,” Patch’s older sister, February Flood, said, tossing back her spiky hair. “What in the hell are you doing here?”