The Insiders

by J. Minter

  Their first stop was Local 13 on West 13th Street, where Patch sometimes went to score weed from a bartender called Tuddy. But the four boys couldn’t get in because they didn’t have any girls with them.

  “No problem,” David said. “Let me take care of this.”

  “What?” Jonathan asked.

  Mickey and Arno were busy just then, ogling a model who was ogling them back. With Arno in his jacket and Mickey in his jumpsuit and goggles they looked like a Polo ad gone berserk.

  “I’m going to slip by you and check in with Tuddy, for five minutes,” David told the bouncer, who was some kind of ex-pro wrestler.

  “No,” the bouncer said. But David just stood there, a cool smile on his face. Waiting.

  “Fine, in to see Tuddy.” The bouncer held the door open. David patted Jonathan on the back as he slipped into the club, as if to say, get ready for the new me.

  Inside Local 13, David brushed against a girl who was dancing with some girlfriends. The place was entirely blue—blue walls, tables, chairs, ceiling, lights. They could get away with it because the people were so good-looking.

  “’Scuse me, baby,” he said, just to see how it sounded.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the girl said, and ran her hand over his chest. David smiled. Yeah, the new me.

  “No, I haven’t seen him,” Tuddy said when David got to him. “But I’ve got fifty grams of something special I grew myself—”

  “No, thanks,” David said. “Right now I’m high on life.”

  “That’s weird,” Tuddy said. He rubbed his shaved head for a second. David had met Tuddy once or twice before.

  “What is?”

  “You didn’t sound like a total idiot when you said that.”

  “Yeah, man,” David said. “I’m in a good place right now.” David smiled and began to go back the way he came.

  “Hey, where you going?” the girl he’d brushed by asked when he attempted to brush by again.

  “Where do you want me to be going?” David asked.

  “Nowhere fast.”

  “Sounds fair,” David said. He started to dance with the girl.

  “I like your hoodie,” she said.

  “You should see what’s underneath.”

  “You’re bold,” the girl said. “I’m Chloe.”

  She poked him in the chest while they danced and David grabbed her hand and bit the tip of her finger lightly.

  “Ooh,” the girl said.

  “You remind me of somebody when you say that.”

  They kept dancing. David thought, I’m tall and handsome. And for the second time in his life, David forgot his friends.

  the search party rests for the night

  “I don’t think David’s coming out,” Mickey said.

  “You may be right,” I said. “What the hell is going on with him?”

  “He got with that Ooh girl, and now he thinks he’s the shit,” Mickey said. He was only looking at me when he said it, but I could feel Arno next to me. He was right there and then a second later, it was like ppphht. He’d deflated.

  “He did it to get back at me,” Arno said. “No wonder he hasn’t bothered to confront me. He’s playing a complex psychological game with my feelings.”

  “Um,” Mickey said. “I think maybe that wasn’t totally nice of me to say out loud, but when I saw those two together, I didn’t think they were thinking about your feelings at all.”

  “I wish your cousin would go home,” Arno said. “I can’t stand having her around and I love her so much.”

  “If there was a person exchange somewhere, and we could go there and trade Kelli for Patch,” I said, “believe me, I’d do it.”

  I looked around and there were twenty people or so milling around the velvet rope, and since they had nothing better to do, they were staring at us. Because, as far as I was concerned, we were younger and cooler than they were.

  “Let’s just go. I don’t know what he’s up to but it’s been half an hour,” Mickey said.

  So we began to walk east. I think we all knew one thing, which was that we had absolutely no clue where Patch was. Then I heard this sniffling noise next to me. I looked over and Arno was crying. Crying? Arno? I threw my arm around him.

  “Dude, I’m going home. I think we should call the cops,” Arno said through his tears.

  “Stop it,” I said. I mean, it was one thing for David to cry, but for Arno—that was too much. “Get a grip!”

  “We’re not calling anybody yet,” Mickey said. “We’ve got about thirty hours. And I’m going to find him. I’ve got some hunches.”

  I looked over at Arno. Mickey was barely allowed back in school and he was still swinging around his cast. Maybe he did have some hunches. But I couldn’t imagine what they were.

  “Well, I need to go to sleep,” Arno said. I checked my watch. It was about three in the morning. I yawned.

  “You’ve hit bottom,” I said to Arno. “I promise things won’t get any worse for you.”

  “Thanks,” Arno said, and it sounded like he meant it.

  We walked over to Fifth Avenue and just sort of stood there. Some cabs went by and I knew I should probably shovel Arno into one and call it quits myself. We’d find Patch tomorrow, for sure. There were people’s houses we hadn’t checked, kids at boarding school we hadn’t called, ice cream parlors we hadn’t visited.

  Then a big black Chevy SUV drove by really slowly. Mickey saw it and before Arno or I could say anything, he jumped on the fender.

  “I’m going to go home to get my Vespa and tool around,” Mickey yelled.

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked as we watched him disappear around the corner. His goggles were on and his jumpsuit was rolled up at the wrists and ankles. He curled himself around his cast and he looked as if he were going to take off like some kind of superhero.

  “Well, that takes care of him,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

  “I’m sorry about what I’ve been doing,” Arno said.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll do something that will make everyone like you again.”

  “Really?” Arno looked up at me. His black hair was sticking out in all directions and his eyes were dried out and puffy. But he was still a really good-looking guy. Anyone could see that. I really didn’t believe he’d meant to do as much harm as he had.

  “Well, if you don’t think of anything, I’ll make up something nice for you to do,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  Arno was still sniffling when I packed him in the back of a cab and said goodnight to him. He said something I couldn’t understand to the driver, who immediately smiled and began to chatter.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Farsi,” Arno said. “Kinda neat, huh? I learned it from David. I really hope we can still be friends.”

  saturday morning, sunny, sixty degrees

  mickey pardo, p.i.

  Mickey came to on a torn velvet couch in the back of Save The Robots. He’d have checked his watch if he’d had one. Save The Robots was a revival of an old East Village after-hours club where people went to do drugs and doze. And this was definitely after hours. He looked around him, and he knew the gray light that came in at the sides of the blacked-out windows was the dawn. He heard a scratching noise and checked his cast, which he’d been ignoring. A mouse was gnawing on it.

  I should jump, Mickey thought. But he didn’t. There was a brown drink cradled next to him on the ugly sofa. Guinness? Maybe. He took a sip and spat it out, whatever it was. Man, was his dad ever going to kill him. That is, assuming that his dad hadn’t gone out to Montauk the day before, or the day before that. He wished he kept better track of these things. No, wait. He’d had dinner with his dad last night. Shit. Maybe they’d gone to Montauk after dinner?

  He looked around him and saw little knots of people talking, still awake, incredibly. And then he recognized someone. Randall Oddy was there with some guys and a few women and a young girl who had
a lot more energy than anyone else. Ooh. Mickey stood up. If he could have connected the dots, he would have. But the last thing he remembered was hanging off the back of an SUV and making a sharp right into the East Village. Then … that was it.

  “Hi!” Kelli said.

  “Ooh,” Mickey said.

  “Enough with that,” Kelli said.

  “I didn’t mean—” but Mickey stopped. He’d meant Ooh, there’s a mouse on the floor near your feet. But he wasn’t ready to explain that, not just yet. If Kelli was the kind of girl who could have a mouse nibbling on the fringe of her leather boot and not notice, that was her problem.

  “Come and sit with me and Randall and the gang,” Kelli said. “We were just discussing the right place to get some food. I’m sick to death of Florent.”

  “You’re tired of Florent? You’ve been here a week and a half!” Mickey said. “Calvin Klein’s been here for about ninety years and he still goes to Florent.”

  “I know,” Kelli said as she shook the mouse off her foot. “I was talking to him about that last time I was there.”

  Kelli had Mickey by the hand and she led him to sit down with Randall Oddy and his crowd. They were all discussing who’d been accepted into the Whitney Biennial art show. Mickey watched Kelli nod intensely, as if she had a clue what they were talking about.

  “Man,” Mickey said. He’d looked down and he had a notepad with a bunch of information on it. This notepad told him two things—that he’d actually spent some time researching where Patch had gone, and that he’d done a lousy, drunken job of it. Because the words on the page looked like nonsense—they could have been in Farsi for all he could make of them.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” Randall Oddy said. Mickey brought him into focus. Oh, he thought. This clown.

  “It’s cool,” Mickey said.

  “What’s that?” Randall Oddy asked. And he and his friends all gathered around to see Mickey’s pad.

  “Cool,” someone said.

  “Look,” Mickey said. “I know all you art guys think these are like my little drawings and whatever, but the truth is my buddy Patch is missing. And clearly I wrote all these notes about it last night, but because I’m on, um, pain medication, now I see that they’re gibberish. So it’s not what you think.”

  “Not art,” Oddy said.

  “No.”

  “What did you say your friend’s name was?”

  “Patch. Patch Flood.”

  “Funny name.”

  “So is yours.”

  “You know something?” another guy asked. He had a high voice and his hair was all down in front of his face. “I think I’ve heard that name recently, at Graca’s house.”

  “Graca?” Kelli asked. Even Mickey could tell she didn’t like the sound of another woman’s name. A hush surrounded the group.

  “If your friend is who I think he is,” the high-voiced guy said, “he’s the luckiest guy in the world.”

  “That’s him,” Mickey said. “No doubt.”

  what do you wear to a search party?

  I met David at his house on Saturday morning and we caught a cab to Barneys.

  “This is crazy,” he said, but it was the fifth time he’d said it, so I ignored him. He kept staring out the window as if he were seeing Manhattan for the first time.

  We got up to Barneys and of course I had to keep reminding myself that this shopping trip wasn’t for me. It was for David. He’d called me around nine on Saturday morning. I was planning not to move till at least noon, but then he’d said he needed to get some cool clothes. That perked me up, I’ll admit, but I still went back to sleep for a while. I was fairly sure that Kelli hadn’t arrived home yet. Our mothers were away again, staying with old family friends, the Caufields, at their estate in Westchester.

  “What you’re looking for,” I said to David, “are clothes that give a nod to what a terrific, all-American basketball-playing guy with a sensitive streak you are, but still say hey, I know how to put on a pair of pants. Do you see that?”

  “The thing that I realized last night,” David said, “is that I’m still in love with Amanda.”

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t even remember when I’d last seen Amanda. Who had she gone off with? I could ask Liza, but no. Was Liza even my friend anymore? And Arno? My foot began to shake uncontrollably.

  “I know that, deep inside. I didn’t know it when I was fooling around with your cousin, but later, when I was fooling around with that girl at the club, I knew it. And she did, too.”

  “What about Arno?” I asked.

  “He’s in love with Kelli, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He was last night, anyway.”

  “Then maybe he’s suffered enough.”

  We were up at Barneys by then and we both hopped out, but we didn’t go around the corner to the doors to the men’s side. I like to go through all the women’s stuff on the ground floor, because a lot of those women who offer you perfume and stuff are hot.

  “How’d the girl at the club know you were in love with someone else?”

  “We were kissing, and she said, ‘I can feel that you’re thinking about someone else.’”

  “Maybe you’re just a lousy kisser,” I said, because we’d arrived at men’s sweaters and I was suddenly distracted. It smelled like fall in there, of cashmere, of deep browns and leafy reds. The glass cases glittered at me like great chunks of rock candy.

  “Shut up, dude. I need to change for Amanda. It’s like, I can’t always be brooding all the time and acting so, so self-indulgent.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. We were passing some new John Varvatos jackets and I couldn’t listen to David anymore right then.

  “So that’s why we’re here. So I can change.”

  “I see.” I drifted onto the third floor, and we checked out the sneakers. David chose a pair of Miu-Miu slip-ons and asked for his size. We sat down on the squishy leather and rubber chairs and waited.

  “You’ve really helped me to discover who I am,” David said. “Thanks for that.”

  “Honest?” I asked. I squinted at him. I couldn’t remember doing anything like that. I’d actually been sitting there wondering if I could slip away from him and go down and check out the new Crockett and Jones slip-ons in the loafer area. But I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea—considering I’d bought a pair of shoes yesterday.

  “What about Kelli?” I asked as I stood up. “You didn’t have sex with her, did you?”

  “No—we didn’t get very far either. She told me I was in love with Amanda, too.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You are awfully sensitive.”

  A guy was coming over with his sneakers and I left David then. I was pretty well amazed at what a good mood he was in, but fooling around with two girls in one night and waking up in love with your ex-girlfriend can have that effect. It was a very cake-and-eat-it-too kind of feeling, I imagine.

  I went over to the Crockett and Jones display. So expensive. But also so cool. I shook my head and went for my credit card.

  “Can I help you with that?”

  I looked up from the display and there was this girl there. She was probably nineteen—and was clearly one of those girls who went to Barnard and worked two or three shifts at Barneys during the week, because the commissions are outrageous, and she was pretty in a pink-sweater-with-pink-cardigan-over-it kind of way. “Really, can I help you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. She was shorter than me, and she had these great bangs, cut high over her wide almond eyes. I had this weird thing happen to my head then, as if somehow I was not just discovering this girl, but had always known her.

  “I’ve seen you here before,” she said. “I’m Fernanda.”

  “I’m Jonathan,” I said. We shook hands. She smelled of something really good involving daisies. The store got real quiet then, and I think the noise I was hearing was like a harp or a mandolin. At that moment, David moon-walked by us in his new shoes.

  “I lo
ve these!” he yelled. The salesman who was helping him was clapping and doing a human beat box routine. But I was completely focused on Fernanda.

  “You like shoes,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “Sometimes after the store closes for the day, or early, before we open the doors, I like to come over to the men’s section and just hang out. I bet you’d enjoy that.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I really would.”

  We were totally grinning at each other like idiots. Soul mate. And then, while David picked out a couple more pairs of cool shoes, Fernanda and I exchanged numbers.

  “There’s a party tonight,” she said. “I’ll call you and let you know where it is.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  David and I left, and went down to check out khakis for him.

  My phone rang. Mickey.

  “I know where Patch is,” Mickey said.

  “You do? Did you just find out?”

  “No, it was this morning, really early.”

  “So why’d you wait till now to tell us?” I asked. David pulled on my shirt. I pointed at the phone and crossed my eyes.

  “Because he’s in a good place,” Mickey said. “And I just woke up. Why don’t you guys come over here around six or so and we’ll have some drinks and then go get him.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s in Montauk.”

  “You want anything?” I asked, because I was suddenly feeling really happy. “We’re at Barneys.”

  “No, you freakish clothes-hound, I don’t want anything from Barneys,” Mickey said, and ended the call.

  “Mickey found Patch!”

  “That’s good news,” David said. He held up a pinstripe running suit from Marc Jacobs. “I’m going to get the sneakers, but I don’t think I’m going to buy this. If I do, they’ll never let me back on the basketball team.”

  arno goes back to what he’s good at

  Arno spent most of Saturday afternoon in his room, watching George Clooney movies. He knew he didn’t have quite that kind of style, not yet anyway. But he liked watching Ocean’s 11. He liked the attitudes and he loved the idea of being very smart in a criminal-minded sort of way.