October 19
Twenty-Four Years Ago
10:00 P.M.
Just as Mish had predicted, entrance to the club was easy. No one even checked for IDs. They paid the five-dollar cover and walked inside. The first thing Leo noticed was the stench. It smelled like beer and urine and grime, with a toxic layer of smoke. Leo decided the overpowering smell of smoke was preferable to the stink underneath. There was a crowd in front of the stage, dancing, as the first band played through their set. The music was loud, deafening, but there was a frenetic energy to the place, a sense of mass celebration, and Leo suddenly understood why people gathered at these places. It was a ritual, an offering, a way of marking the weekend, with music, drinks, and laughter.
Brooks had thought to hide the beers in his backpack, so they huddled to a corner where the bartenders and security wouldn’t see, and they drank them. Leo’s was a little lukewarm, but it was okay. So this was what a nightclub was like. She felt grown up, so much older than when the night had begun. She’d been drunk, then sober, then high, and now she was here. Someone handed her a cigarette, so she smoked it.
“Let’s go to the other rooms,” said Mish.
“There are more rooms?”
“Duh,” said Mish, who, to Leo’s surprise, seemed to have been here before, many times. She grabbed Brooks’s hand and led them out of the main floor.
The club was made up of a warren of rooms; some were just rooms covered in garish paint, and people were sitting there, drinking and talking, and some were huge rooms with different kinds of music, and people dancing. Mish led them through each room, but she would shake her head and move on, dissatisfied, until they reached a back room that was almost completely dark, with a throbbing bass line and a packed crowd of people dancing in the middle of it. A few girls were dancing on little tables, letting everyone take a good look at them.
“This one,” said Mish with a naughty smile, pulling them into the middle of the swaying crowd. Brooks shrugged and moved from side to side, his approximation of dancing.
They danced for a bit, until Mish jumped up on one of the tables and pulled Leo up to dance with her. They danced in sync, and Mish began to gyrate her hips against hers, and Leo ground back, letting Mish’s hands move up and down over her body. She did the same.
Mish turned so that she faced Leo. They were almost the same height; it was strange to realize that, when Leo always felt so much bigger than Mish but she actually wasn’t. They were the same. People were always saying how much they looked alike. She was looking right into Mish’s eyes. Mish pulled her closer and closer, her eyes were glazed, and up close, Leo could see the sparkles in Mish’s eye shadow; they glinted in the light. Below them, Brooks took a pull from his beer and watched.
Mish put her hands on either side of Leo’s face. She did that sometimes, right before yelling at her to Stop Being So Uptight or Have Some Fun Already. But this time she didn’t yell. She just brushed Leo’s cheeks softly with her fingertips in a gentle caress.
Then she turned away, and continued to dance. Brooks removed a few more beers from his backpack.
They danced for a few more songs, but Leo got tired of that. Her feet hurt. “I’m going to look for Arnold!” she yelled into Mish’s ear so that her friend could hear her over the music.
Mish made a face. Why was she so annoyed with Arnold? Wasn’t Arnold an old friend of Mish’s? Was she just annoyed Arnold was paying attention to her and not Mish for a change?
“Fine, go, look for him, what do I care? I’m only your best friend, but if you want to hang out with him on your birthday, fine,” said Mish, pushing her off the table.
“Don’t leave without me,” Leo warned.
Mish rolled her eyes. As if.
Leo left her with Brooks, and went to see if she could find her friend.
The club was a maze, staircases going to dark caverns guarded by beefy bodyguards checking for the right wristbands that allowed access to the right VIP rooms, none of which she had. It was hard to see through the smoke and the crowd, but she tried. For a while she worried she’d lost track of time and her friends, and wondered how she would get home—she didn’t have enough money for a cab, but she thought she could walk maybe, or call her mom at the restaurant, although that wouldn’t be any fun. Which room was the one Mish and Brooks were in? They all looked the same to her, and for a minute, Leo panicked. She was all alone in a crowd of strangers, and she felt very young all of a sudden.
“THERE YOU ARE!”
A hand reached out of the crowd, on the dance floor, and grabbed her head, the fingers clasping around her skull.
She shrank from it at first, but when she looked up, the hand was attached to an arm and the arm was Arnold’s. He was grinning.
“Hey!”
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t,” she assured him.
“Where’s your posse?”
She shrugged. “Somewhere.”
“Mish doesn’t like me much,” he said.
“Who cares about Mish.”
“Come on,” he said, and pulled her from the dance floor. He took her to a ledge away from the speakers, where it was quieter. “This is where I work. Want some more?” he asked, handing her a vial. Arnold was the house dealer. Every nightclub had one, or several, to service the patrons who came to party.
She took it and snorted it.
“Cover it with your hands. I mean, girl, come on now.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, laughing.
“You’re all right.”
“Do you work here every night?”
“Some weekends, kind of dead the rest of the week, and I gotta take turns with the other dealers,” he explained. He kept his backpack nearby. Leo understood that’s where he kept the drugs.
They talked a little, and once in a while someone would come up to them.
“What you got?” they’d ask.
Arnold would tell them.
Then Arnold would tell them to meet him by the water fountain, and he would slip them whatever they asked for and stuff the cash in his back pocket.
Leo leaned back on the wall, affected a bored pose. Sometimes people asked her too. “You got smokes? Uppers? Blues?”
She’d nod over to Arnold.
She felt useful, like she belonged. No one looked at her twice. No one questioned her.
Arnold came back. “I like this song,” he said, when the music changed.
“Want to dance?” she asked him.
“Nah, I suck at dancing.” He looked a little sad. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said. And it was.