Glitter & Mayhem

by John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas

  “But everyone’s gonna be at Neo…”

  Shirley folded her arms in the dim entry hall and gave her roommate a stern look. Her eyebrow was sore, but she tried not to touch it. “Be a little adventurous for once.” She started up the rickety staircase, not waiting to see if Caroline would follow.

  Above, flashing red lights and a screeching cacophony beckoned. Medusa’s was a four–story former tenement block on Sheffield, in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago. Shirley figured it must have been abandoned before the current owner picked it up for cheap and started knocking down interior walls. She thought she could still smell plaster dust beneath the cigarette and pot reek.

  She stopped in front of a mirror at the top of the long staircase, excited. Her private superstition was that whatever song was playing when she first arrived at a club was an omen for how the night would go, and she loved the song blasting from the room on the right, “Scary Monsters.” Through the door, a crowd of people in cracked leather and ripped jeans danced like marionettes to the strident, aggressive music. Their shadows cut spooky canyons through a shifting haze of hot, angry colors. More dissonant sounds churned from a warren of rooms to the left, and grainy gray light leaked down from the top of the next staircase.

  Her roommate crowded suddenly against her. “I don’t like this,” Caroline whined, almost shrieking to be heard.

  Shirley took a moment to inspect herself in the crazy light, with her leather jacket, plaid skirt, black Doc Martens, and all those piercings. She touched the new ring in her left eyebrow, which yielded a pleasurable spike of pain. She fiddled a moment with it, making sure it lay even with its two neighbors. Beside her, Caroline was looking tiny and timid in her ripped T–shirt and black spandex miniskirt. Not quite right for the surroundings, but not quite wrong, either. Being Asian and beautiful made up for a lot.

  “Look at us. Perfect,” Shirley said, swallowing a mouthful of envy. “Now come on.” She dragged Caroline through the doorway and into the churning crowd.

  They made a little pocket for themselves on the dance floor. Shirley groped for the rhythm with her feet and hips and elbows. The people around them, with floppy or spiky hair dyed black, didn’t pay them much mind. Eyes closed, Shirley let herself shake like the guitars were buzzsaws in her brain.

  “This could be the theme song for this place,” Caroline said, leaning in close.

  Shirley bared her teeth with what she hoped was ferocious menace. “Which are we — scary monsters, or super creeps?”

  Caroline shuddered, swaying back and forth. “New Bowie’s so much better than this.”

  “ ‘Let’s Dance’? Ugh, that sucks. He totally sold out.”

  “Did not.”

  “You just want to be his little China girl.”

  “I’m Taiwanese,” Caroline said, punching Shirley in the shoulder.

  Shirley grinned and turned in a tight circle as she pumped her arms. Caroline with her blood up was always more fun than killjoy Caroline.

  It didn’t take long for Shirley to work up a sweat. After several more songs, Caroline pantomimed thirst. A lot of people on the dance floor had plastic cups in their hands.

  “I’ll find something,” Shirley said. “You’ll be okay?”

  Caroline gave her a thumbs–up.

  There was a counter with a throng around it in the far corner of the room, near the DJ, but Shirley decided to see what she could find elsewhere. Not just liquid, she hoped, but maybe a new friend who wouldn’t mind standing her to a line of coke.

  She shimmied her way back to the door and made a cursory tour of the rest of the floor. The other rooms were smaller, darker, louder. Strobes filled one, whirling starfields another, creepy ultraviolet light and jumbled couches filled with shadowy loungers a third. It all seemed pretty cool, but that pearlescent light from the upper floors beckoned.

  As she climbed the stairs, “8:15 to Nowhere” by Vicious Pink was subsumed by New Order’s “Blue Monday.” She felt like she was breaking into the layer of calm air above a thunderstorm.

  It was more open upstairs, cooler. To the right was a room like the one below it, with people moving sinuously in the gray–white light to sounds that could have been recorded on a factory floor. To the left was a large area filled with ranks of dark couches, nicer ones than downstairs. Maybe a dozen people were lounging here, some passed out on the couches or the carpets. Shirley wondered if she’d just stumbled onto the heroin floor. She’d always wanted to try horse…

  She started picking her way through the open area. At its far end was a portable chrome bar, and in the corner on a raised platform sat a small grouping of armchairs and loveseats.

  She didn’t get a chance to check out the people sitting there, though. Before she was a third of the way across the room, the guy behind the bar caught her eye. He was the first blond she’d seen in here, and he wore a black dress shirt with a skinny gray–striped tie. He could have been as old as, say, twenty–eight. And he was watching her.

  Not just watching, though. He was trying to be seen watching her. Seen by her.

  As she caught his gaze — his blue, blue, electric blue gaze — he tilted his head to one side and swallowed. Shirley felt suffused with warmth, with longing, with being wanted…

  And Shirley feels herself shoved suddenly aside — straitjacketed and stuffed in a corner. She can’t move, but she is moving — turning, heading back down the stairs to the dance floor. It’s like someone else is driving. Caroline rushes up to her, asks about the drinks, but Shirley sweeps them both out onto the floor where they dance with abandon to the mechanical beat for what might be hours. Several times young men try to insert themselves between them, but every time it happens she shoulders past the guy and blocks him out. At last, she takes Caroline by the hand and the music ratchets them up the stairs to the gray lounge and Shirley watches in puzzlement and then horror as she backs her roommate up against a structural pillar and kisses her.

  Caroline shoves her, hard, with both hands.

  Shirley stumbled backward. Something wrenched unpleasantly at her brain.

  “What the hell?” Caroline snarled, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She glared at Shirley with disgust, then whirled and fled down the stairs.

  Shirley, confused, was too dizzy and exhausted to follow. Shakily she turned, in search of a place to sit. Across the room she saw the guy at the bar look down suddenly, a smirk on his lips. He brushed his eyebrow with his left hand, fingertip lingering for a moment, and busied himself mixing something.

  Fritz, she thought, wrinkling her brow. Your name is Fritz. But how did she know that?

  §

  “I know there’s good work in you,” said Joseph Lyon, adjusting his round glasses. Through the floor–to–ceiling glass behind him, peaceful water reflections rippled up the faces of the buildings on the north side of the Chicago River. “Now go back out there and bring it to me.”

  Shirley nodded once and stood up. She was biting the inside of her lip to keep from showing any emotion. She closed her art director’s door carefully behind her as she exited his office. She stopped at her cubicle only long enough to snatch her purse from the back of her chair, then walked straight out to the eleventh–floor elevator lobby and stabbed the down button. She couldn’t breathe. She had to get out in the open air, escape that constricting skin of metal and glass packed tight with water coolers and coffee machines and bullshit.

  It was barely ten on a Tuesday morning, and already it was shaping up to be the worst day since the fiasco at Medusa’s. It wasn’t bad enough that her newest layout for Chevy had gotten munched in the rollers of the wax machine, ruining all her careful work from the day before. On top of that, Joseph Lyon had called her in to inform her, in his smug, patronizing way, that Heinz had rejected all her paste–ups for the new mustard campaign.

  When the elevator doors had closed behind her, Shirley let out an inarticulate howl. God, what an asshole he was! That was excellent work she’d tu
rned in, but Joseph Lyon wouldn’t know good art if it beat his balding head in, shoved his glasses down his throat, and strangled him with his own stupid tie. He probably hadn’t even presented her designs to Heinz.

  Only eight months in this job, barely a year out of art school, and already she wanted to slit her wrists.

  Shirley felt like she was suffocating. As soon as the elevator doors opened again, she fled through the high–ceilinged lobby into the gathering heat of Upper Wacker Drive. She couldn’t even complain to her one real friend, because Caroline still wasn’t speaking to her after what had happened at the club Thursday night. That made life at their cramped Bucktown apartment uncomfortable, to say the least.

  The pedestrians on Wacker all seemed listless, heat–baked. Two blocks west, Shirley rested her face against the cool plate–glass window of a stereo shop, behind which a fat television was replaying yet again the clip where that idiot Ronnie Raygun joked about bombing Russia.

  “Fuck, I wish I were somebody else,” she said.

  She straightened up but stopped, fascinated to see the way her ghostly reflection in the window overlay the president’s face almost perfectly. There he was, with his slicked–back hair and wrinkles, wearing her silk scarf and bone satin blouse, his face studded with all her bright steel jewelry.

  And that was when the weirdest realization clicked.

  §

  As she hauled Caroline up the stairs, the first song Shirley heard was “Love Puppets” by the Legendary Pink Dots. She grinned. It was definitely going to be a good night.

  Caroline folded her arms when they reached the top, her face a mask of defiance in the gray light. Being a Tuesday, this would normally have been a Tuts night, but Shirley had convinced her they needed to try Medusa’s again, to get things straightened out. “You better not try anything,” Caroline said, practically shouting to be heard.

  By way of answer, Shirley led Caroline into the lounge on the left. Several people were lolling in the chairs on the riser in the far corner, one of whom jumped up and descended to his spot at the bar. Shirley tried to arrange her features into a hardened mask as they approached him.

  The blond man flipped his hair back. “This is a private party area, ladies,” he said, mustering an uneasy smile. He had a slight accent, but it was hard to tell what kind over the music.

  Shirley put both hands flat on the chrome surface of the bar. “That’s okay,” she said. “We’re here to party in private.”

  “Um,” said the man, who tonight wore a faded gray T–shirt. “Okay, then. The club’s dry, but in here you can just grab a beer from the tub and slip your cash through the slot. Honor system.”

  If she were at Exit or Neo, she’d know exactly how to ask for what she was looking for. Plus, at Neo she knew John, who’d always said he could get anything she needed for the right price.

  But in this place, she was at sea. “I don’t want a drink,” she said, trying not to stammer. “Whatever you did to me the other night. That’s what I want.”

  The man glanced sideways at the group on the riser. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Caroline beside her was tapping her foot, and now she grabbed Shirley by the arm. “Thanks for ruining my night again. Let’s go.”

  Shirley shrugged her off. “Oh, you know,” she said, staring into the man’s perspiring face. “You most definitely know — Fritz.”

  “This is totally bogus,” Caroline said. “I’m getting out of here.”

  But the man was shaking his head with a rueful snort. “No, wait,” he said, raising a hand. He finally met Shirley’s stare. His eyes were incredibly blue. “You really want that again?”

  Now it was Shirley’s turn to snort. “Are you kidding? I don’t want it done to me, dickface. I want to do it. I want to be someone else.”

  She held the man’s gaze for a full fifteen seconds, never wavering. Caroline looked back and forth between the two of them until the man at last looked down and let out a sigh.

  “Okay,” he said, waving a hand. “Let’s go present you to Seph.”

  §

  “Shirley, what’s going on here?” whispered Caroline as they followed the blond man over to the riser in the dim corner. “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe,” Shirley said. “We’ll see.”

  But she didn’t think so.

  The man indicated they should wait a pace back from the riser while he trotted up the two steps. He spoke in the ear of a woman with flowing black hair who was facing away from them in a leather armchair. After a moment the woman turned and peered at them around the side of the chair.

  Her skin was very pale and her eyes very black, though either or both could have been a result of the grayish lighting. Her gaze narrowed at Shirley, who had the peculiar sense of being looked through. The woman next studied Caroline, who flinched.

  Then she looked up at the blond man, spoke a word or two, and dismissed him with a wave. Caroline hugged herself, rubbing her arms as if she were slowly scrubbing them. Shirley could understand why.

  The man rejoined them. “Okay, you’re in,” he said, leading them to a vinyl couch in the middle of the room. “Commando Mix” by Front 242 was playing now, and a triumphant Shirley found it hard not to strut in time with the beat. The man took an armchair at a right angle to the couch and sat forward with his skinny ass barely on the cushion.

  “What are your names?” he asked.

  “This is Caroline,” Shirley said. “I’m Shirley.”

  She waited for the inevitable Laverne & Shirley comment, but it didn’t come. “My name is Fritz,” he said. “Kudos.”

  “Seriously?” Caroline asked. “Like Walter Mondale?”

  Shirley elbowed her, but Fritz simply opened his right hand. In his palm lay two mottled brown pills. Shirley touched the pocket of her jacket, where she’d stuffed the two hundred bucks she’d gotten from a cash station on their way over.

  “How much?” she asked.

  Fritz shook his head. “We’re not making money here, just having fun with a few clever friends.” He held out his hand. “Here.”

  Shirley reached for one of pills, but Fritz closed his fist and pulled it away.

  “But there are rules,” he said. “First, these pills never leave the club. Second, your mounts never leave the club either.”

  “Our mounts?” Caroline asked, nostrils flared.

  “You’ll see.”

  But Shirley thought she knew what he meant. “And what’s third?”

  Fritz held the pills out again. “There is no third rule. Just have as good a time as you want.”

  She picked one up. It felt rough and a little heavy, like a pebble.

  “So, we call these subs,” Fritz said. “They’re from Greece.”

  “Why subs?” Shirley asked.

  “Short for substitutes, I think.” A guy in pinstriped jeans set two cold bottles of Schaefer down on a low table in front of them, then vanished again. “Anyway, the best way to do them’s to have one ready in your mouth when you spot the person you want to ride. Catch their eye, and swallow at the same time you make eye contact. Might be easier to wash it down with the beer your first time.”

  Caroline snorted, eyeing her pill like it might suddenly hatch in her hand. “And then what happens? The two of you, like, switch places? Like Freaky Friday?”

  Shirley regretted having tried to explain the feeling in those terms, but Fritz only shrugged. “It’s not a swap,” he said. “I’ve seen that done, but it’s not a move for virgins. Now, ready to try?”

  The rational part of Shirley’s brain was with Caroline, telling her they were being fucked with, but she was shivering nevertheless, and her palms were sweating. She nodded.

  “Good. You first. Hold it on your tongue and pick up the beer. Now look around.”

  The sub tasted a little like mown grass and a little like dirt. Shirley looked out toward the opposite dance floor. Two guys with mohawks and ripped leather jackets had just reache
d the top of the stairs, and one of them was squinting into the gray light of the lounge. With her free hand Shirley waved at him. As he peered back and they locked eyes, she took a quick swig of the Schaefer. The pill scraped its way down her throat, and…

  And suddenly she’s standing at the top of the stairs, looking at the fat, beer–swilling girl on that sofa over there, trying to figure out if she knows her. When the realization hits that that’s her, she turns away in disgust — and exhilaration.

  The music is much louder here. Her companion has a stubbly face pitted with acne, and smells like a locker room. She punches him on the arm. “Holy shit, man,” she says around a tongue that feels thick and foreign. “Check out that foxy China girl in there.” She points at Caroline.

  A moment later the guy’s eyes widen. He turns to her, mouth open in shock. “Shirley?” he says, astonished.

  “Caroline?” she says back.

  Then they both squeal like little girls, grabbing each other’s hands and jumping up and down on legs weirdly muscular and powerful.

  §

  Medusa’s soon became a twice–a–week thing, and then a three–times–a–week thing. Though they never became a part of the group in the corner, Fritz seemed to take a real liking to Shirley and Caroline. At least, he seemed to take a liking to Caroline, and to tolerate Shirley, but as long as it got them their fix of subs she figured she had nothing to complain about.

  In the meantime, she gave herself a guided tour of the vice inhabiting every nook and cranny of the club. She danced like mad with the group doing speedballs on the main floor, dropped acid with the lamers in the booths near the DJ on the third floor, and smoked this new thing called crack with some really nice kids up in the back rooms of the fourth, all without leaving the relative safety of the gray lounge. She even got to sample heroin at last in the midst of a blissed–out huddle in one corner of the building’s dank, half–finished basement.

  But more than the access to no–consequence highs, Shirley loved the sex. She liked to wait for groups of two or even three people to appear at the top of the stairs, looking furtive or giggly on their way to one of the restrooms or random dark spaces at the back of the building. She might ride the girl into the back room, or maybe the guy, depending on her mood. She’d never been with another girl herself, but she came to love the borrowed feel of hard nipples against her palms, the rush of slickness against her fingers as she hastened a girl toward orgasm, even the taste of those juices through someone else’s tongue. And oh, did she learn what the big deal was about male orgasm.