Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  It is only twenty after seven. I had hoped it was closer to ten, so I could justify going to bed. I resolve to go to bed anyway and make a move in that direction, which causes the phone to ring.

  “Hey. Let’s go to Billy Rocks.” It’s Shepp. I can tell he already has a buzz on.

  “It’s late, Shepp.”

  “It’s seven-thirty.”

  “It’s a school night.”

  “What are you, twelve?”

  “I’m working on my lesson plans. And I hate the music at Billy Rocks.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t have a car and my entire family was just killed in a plane crash and I have a nasty case of typhoid fever.”

  “Meet you there in twenty minutes. Bring Mae along.”

  “Okay.”

  I hang up the phone and stare at it stupidly for a full three minutes.

  Shit.

  * * *

  For eight o’clock on a Monday night, Billy Rocks is crawling with people. I am surprised at this, and then surprised at being surprised. Billy Rocks is always crawling. I suppose that what really surprises me is not that everyone is here – the parking lot is always full –, but that this is where everyone wants to be. Everyone who is here is actually here on purpose. It would make more sense if these people had been yanked off the streets and plucked out of their homes and sucked out of the shopping malls and movie theaters by some malevolent force – al Qaeda or the Scientologists – and then imprisoned inside Billy Rocks as hostages. That would be just a little easier to swallow than the idea that people – human beings – come here of their own volition; that Billy Rocks beat out every other place that there is to be.

  I pay the cover and shoulder my way through an oily, smoke-laced clot of humanity just inside the front door. It’s been at least a year since I’ve been to Billy Rocks and I feel as though I have never left. This is the same depressing mob I had to shoulder my way through the last time.

  The air is acrid and screaming with Electric Mayhem, the aptly named house band. Electric Mayhem has been its name for only about five years. The band wanted a clean break from a bad image and so it changed its name. The bad image stemmed from an incident in which the bass-player stupidly negotiated a crank sale with an undercover police officer and then accidentally shot off his own hand in the ensuing melee. So much for playing the bass. Back in those heady days the boys of Electric Mayhem went by the name Sonic Hurl. I’m an undiscerning neophyte when it comes to amplified retching, but the music – I say this in the loosest sense of that word – sounds about the same to me.

  The short hallway from the entrance empties into a large circular room that is writhing and pulsing with people, all of them on the make for someone or something. Billy Rocks has it all: gay and straight, glam, punk, head-bangers, leather and flesh, heels and boots, tattoos and ties. Tattoos everywhere. Small ones, big ones, line drawings, multi-color, glow-in-the dark, ankles, shoulders, torsos, butterflies, hearts, skulls, flags.

  I thread my way between three women shouting and laughing at each other over their drinks. They choke off their conversation long enough to let me through but re-erupt in laughter once I have passed.

  One of the women has eyebrows over-sewn with metal wire. The other has a ring through her lip.

  Tattoos and body metal. Everywhere.

  We are well on our way to Shrapnel Nation. Six out of every ten people I see has something obnoxious rammed through some part of the face. The third woman in the group looks clean and attractive, but the scary part is that piercing has become so common – not yet mainstream but so solidly ensconced in the suburbs of mainstream – that I can no longer identify the women who have clitoral pierces simply by looking at them. It used to be easy, like spotting lesbians or Republicans. Social acceptance, however, leads headlong into seam-less integration and then deviance, old deviance, simply melts away. The men who have chosen to invest in scrotum bars are still a snap to pick out of a crowd, but I suspect that is changing too.

  To make matters worse, considerably worse, I feel shallow and judgmental for begrudging the acceptance of these skin-staining, body-piercing self-mutilators. I am a product of the tyranny of politically correct sensibilities – drowning in the backwash of the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution. Judge not anyone or anything, lest ye be branded a bigoted, small-minded asshole who is probably also a racist. My condemnatory faculties have been hobbled by my sense of self-loathing for having such an inhibited perspective that I cannot see the value or beauty in punching extra holes in my face and genitalia so that I might thread them with iron ornamentation. Who the Hell am I to judge? My choices are the product of my upbringing, which is a product of my parents’ socio-economic and cultural strata which they, in turn, inherited from their landed Caucasian forbearers and which is not something I should be arrogantly waving under the nose rings and nipple propellers of the commonsensically challenged.

  I so want to be the judgmental prick I fear I really am.

  For a good minute or two I spin in place, turning and looking, turning and looking. Shepp is, as far as I can tell, not here, although there is a men’s room and nooks and crannies of Billy Rocks that I cannot see.

  The room around me is, literally, cavernous. Mr. Rocks, Billy, if that is really what he is called, has done all he can to trade on his igneous namesake. The entire establishment is made to resemble a cave. Three stories of 21st Century steel and concrete have been hollowed out into a single domed grotto. The walls and ceiling are one hundred percent imitation granite, pitted and crenellated with all the authenticity of the boulders hurled with disarming ease by salt monsters and hyper-libidinous Vulcans in early Star Trek episodes.

  A collection of those same boulders – albeit heavier and conveniently shaped as tables and chairs – juts out from the north wall of the cave to partly encircle a large sunken dance floor, illuminated from beneath by a mottled, muddy-blue light to resemble a subterranean pool. Thin forests of long, orange conical lights hang stalactitically from the upper reaches of the domed ceiling. At least a dozen of these lights are flashing like inverted electric highway safety cones.

  I cannot tell whether they are supposed to represent radioactive limestone deposits or long drips of oozing hot magma, but the color contrast with the murky blue of the dance pool is dramatic. Rising out of the east end of the mosh pit is a platform-studded, multi-level stage where lots of amplified screaming and spasmodic leaping takes place.

  One quarter the circumference of the cave is lined by an enormous granite bar, glowing orange from inside as though the bartenders stood in a pit of flame, which is just about how I would conceive of regular employment at Billy Rocks. The muscle-ripped man who takes my order, however, seems perfectly content. I silently assess that the likelihood of a scrotal ring on this guy is about an eight on a scale of ten. He slides me a beer and an empty frosted glass on a bamboo coaster, which, I suppose is to prevent me from making a mess of his bar. Which is made of granite, so...

  The air around my head is so packed with jagged, shrieking sounds that I send a telepathic apology to my neighbor with the melodious buzz saw. Electric Mayhem is gyrating its way through an astonishingly uncoordinated version of some song that sounds vaguely familiar. The lead singer’s apparent effort to induce vomiting with a microphone inhibits my recall. Eventually, the lyrics, in their guttural rasp, bring it home:

  The lunatic is in the grass! The lunatic is in the hall! The lunatic is in my head!

  The bassist begins pulling savagely on the strings with his teeth.

  And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too…

  Perfect. I have heard it all now. Electric Mayhem dismembering Pink Floyd. Why create something truly awful when you can desecrate something decent that already exists and punish the world with that instead? Half the work and twice as offensive.

  My beer is half-gone and there is still no sign of Shepp. Glowing orange blobs, made to look like jeweled amber, are scatter
ed across the bar. There is one on every table and on every imitation shelf jut-ting out of the walls. They are easy to see in isolation through the dark, smoky cave, so much so that even one drink too many would lead someone to think he was hallucinating spots.

  I attempt to pick up the glowing reddish-orange blob in front of me but it is firmly affixed to the bar. I put down my beer and use both hands to see just how firmly affixed. Mr. Muscle shakes his head in calm disapprobation as he empties two bottles of something over some fruit in a blender.

  “It really looks like real amber,” I shout at him by way of apology, as though my enthusiasm for aesthetic geology had – once again – over-powered my judgment. He stares at me over the scream of the blender and I can see that he cares nothing for my explanation. Because bars have a way of turning me into a certifiable idiot, I follow up a bad apology with bad humor.

  “Should’a called this place Billy Resin’s.” I am the only one who laughs.

  The bar is a flurry of orders. Singles and doubles and cliques of people who seem to swoop in sharply from somewhere behind me, shouting and pointing and laughing and staying only long enough to grab a glass or a bottle and slap a bill on the bar before bouncing back out into the fray. I am the only constant. The only bar-hugger. I am self-conscious about what this says about me. I am different than the others. I do not belong.

  God-damned Shepp.

  A woman leans in next to me. A girl. Woman. A womanly-girlish creature leans in next to me and winks at Mr. Muscle and his probably pierced scrotum. He mixes her a 7&7. She sucks on an ice cube as she waits for her change.

  “You making sure no one steals the bar?” It is the playfully derisive tone that I hate but that always manages to keep me off balance.

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t want this thing to wander off.”

  “Waiting for someone?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Stood up?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Women,” she says with mock disgust. She gives me a wicked look and cracks the cube between her teeth. She fishes another out of her drink with two fingers and pops it in like candy. This is my first good look at her. She has the face of a sixteen-year old girl and the barely clothed body of a woman straight out of the mind of a fourteen-year old boy. Her hair is short and dark and matted to her skin with sweat. She has obviously been dancing. I know her legs are naked, but I resist the urge to look.

  “True enough, but I’m waiting for a guy.”

  “Really? Say it ain’t so, Joe.” She pretends to look crushed. “Just friends, I promise.”

  “Much better. Let’s dance.” She brushes my hand with her wet fingers.

  “Thanks. No.”

  “Gotta watch the bar?”

  “Not a dancer. Believe me, it’s for your own protection.”

  “I’m Sam.” She extends her hand, locking her elbow in an overly formal gesture.

  “Dave,” I say, our palms flattening together. The contact is awkwardly prolonged and unnatural. The bartender stops by and gives Sam her money. He points at my beer with a question on his face. I shake my head and tell him I am on the way out.

  “What? Leaving already?” she says.

  “Fuck your friend. Stay and make some new friends.” She smiles and clasps my face between her hands. “And then fuck them, too.”

  I can feel myself blushing. She lets go and I take a long pull on my beer. It is a transparently defensive gesture that only accentuates my lack of balance. I am thinking of Mae. It’s too soon. I am not ready for this. But this is not about Mae. Mae is just an excuse. I am never ready for this. It is hard-wired into my brain that getting laid is a daunting and complex proposition. Something that requires sophisticated contingency planning, back-up support and shit-loads of luck.

  And yet, when sex turns out to be a shockingly certain reality, the dissonance is paralyzing. I know this because more often than not, getting laid, at least as an adult, has never really been that difficult.

  Fairly certain prospects have presented themselves at regular intervals in my life, requiring me to simply assent. And, almost without fail,

  I find myself suspicious and distrusting of the opportunity, precisely because it is so damn easy.

  Sam does not wait for me to recover.

  “Seriously, Dave. You could stand to lighten up a little. Look. I’m here with some girlfriends. The real party is gonna start at my place in about an hour. Why don’t you join us? You can leave all your inhibitions here to watch the bar.”

  “Uh…no, really. I need to be going. School tomorrow. I should probably be getting back and getting home and going on back home because there’s school tomorrow and its getting late so, you know, I should leave before I have difficulty, you know, getting back before it’s too late to go home. Before school. Tomorrow. Really.” I have become Rainman.

  I want to flee, screaming from the building. Or at least start over with advance warning. I’ve always been bad at this. I need lots of lead-time. Advance preparation. Cue cards and mnemonics. I can play the sexual banter game all day long as long as I know it is not for real. But as soon as something is at stake . . .

  “School? You’re still in school?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Oh. Good.” She leans into me, fingers on my leg, pressing her chest into mine and whispers, her lips brushing my left lobe. “We wouldn’t want to fuck a little boy.”

  “No. Uh . . . we?”

  “Yeah. Like I said. Me and my girlfriends.”

  “Oh. Well, uh . . .No. No, probably not a good idea.”

  “What, not into the whole group sex scene?”

  It takes a moment – a couple of silent beats as Electric Mayhem continues to scorch the air. Sam is smirking at me as the realization hits. I whip my head around and scan the room. I should have guessed this.

  And there he is. Shepp is draped over a chair at a table near the wall. He is laughing so hard, his back is hyper-extended over the arm of the chair and he is clutching the edge of the table to keep from falling over. He couldn’t possibly have heard our conversation, but he obviously didn’t have to. My body language was loud enough.

  “Shepp gave me twenty bucks to do this, Dave. But if it’s any com-fort, I’d have done it for free.” Sam kisses me on the lips and lightly squeezes my crotch before she slips off into the crowd.

  My beer is empty. I know this. I take a swig of nothing anyway. I am angry and embarrassed, two emotions that greedily exchange notes and encourage each other. I am so ready to storm out of this disgusting pit, this sorry excuse for a bar, this asylum for narcissistic, self-mutilating, sexually rapacious freaks.

  But I don’t dare. I look at Shepp laughing and I don’t fucking dare. I steel my nerves, leave the empty bottle on the bar and thread my way through the throngs of dancing, screeching, laughing, sweating, glandular imps to Shepp’s table.

  “Very funny,” I say.

  I am as cool and nonplussed as I know how to be. Shepp tries to pull it together in staccato fits and spurts. The girls with him, two on each side, are laughing too, although at least as much at Shepp and his mirthful seizure as at me.

  “Dude,” more laughter, hands over the eyes, head on the table, and then a Herculean effort to stop.

  “Dude, you have more restraint than I will ever have.”

  “Obviously.” I open my arms in a gesture that is meant to encompass Shepp and his fawning entourage. “I’m not sure there is any-one in the history of the world who has less restraint, Shepp. Caligula comes to mind. Of course, Caligula was brutally assassinated by his own friends.”

  “Oh God, stop with the history already. Calm down. Just a little harmless fun. Have a seat. Tell us what you and your friend were talking about over there.”

  “I think not.” No way am I sitting. “How long have you been here?”

  “I saw you come in. Took you long enough.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problemo, dude. I’ve been dancin�
�� up a storm.” Shepp leans back and rakes his fingers through his hair, pulling it out of his eyes.

  “Where’s Mae?”

  “Flu.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad. Like the barfing kind or just...”

  “Technicolor.” There is an uncomfortable squirm from the ladies.

  “When I left she was trying to get it out of the carpet.” Groans all around.

  “Whoa, Dave. T.M.I. We got the picture. I guess your evening took a serious turn for the better, huh?”

  “Honestly, Shepp, it’s a horse race.”

  “You’re just pissed that Sam got those ol’ juices flowing.” This is good for a hearty squall of laughter from all five of them. I stand patiently and let it pass.

  “Okay, enough of that,” he says. “I apologize. Sit and have a drink. I’m buying.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Johns, have a seat!”

  It is the “Mr. Johns” – in all of its discordant, alien clunk – that pulls me up short. The voice comes from the second woman on the left; the one nearest to me. She is patting the empty chair that is to be mine. But this is no woman. I stare at her stupidly. My brain scrambles on all fours up a hill of loose rocks for a better view of all I am sup-posed to know. This is a student. Third period... second row... in the back. Then it hits me.

  This is Ashley’s friend. Ashley of the purple gum and the rolling eyes. Ashley of the Society to Protect the Historical Significance of Madonna. And yet, there is nothing about this creature that belongs in a high school history class. I am a teacher. I should be used to this. I should be hip to the state of the American teenager. Hell, I should be an authority on the subject. And yet the dissonance between my preconception of a high school sophomore and the... the... vixen pat-ting the chair before me is so profound that I am actually disoriented.

  Amid the confusion, my resolve to remain standing dissipates and I heed the instruction of her painted fingertips.

  “You’re...,” I begin. I almost say Mozart.

  “Brittany. Third period.”

  Unnecessarily, from all of eight inches away, she waves at me with one of those hawkishly coquettish two-finger wiggles so popular among conniving playmates who make their living preying on stupid rich men. Brittany is a ways from pulling off the look, but she is disturbingly further along than she should be.