Glitter & Mayhem

Home > Other > Glitter & Mayhem > Page 12


  She learned even more the time or two she rode her way into a guy–on–guy encounter. And if she went farther with any of these folks than they might have gone on their own? Well, what of it? It wasn’t like everyone involved didn’t have a good time, and when she dismounted after anywhere from two to twenty minutes, like removing her hand from a glove, there was no harm done. Maybe an awkward question or two in the mind of the mount, and a new resolve to kick the drugs for a while.

  What was most fascinating to her, though — most reassuring, and occasionally most depressing — was simply getting to sample the vast but amazingly familiar range of emotions through which her fellow clubgoers swam and sometimes flailed. It helped her feel like less of a freak.

  The nights when Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sensoria” played first always turned out to be her favorites.

  As summer gave way to Chicago’s too–brief fall, Shirley found it harder and harder to keep her mind on her job and off her clubland adventures. It was late September when Joseph Lyon summoned her to his office for another chat.

  “You started here with a lot of promise, Shirley,” he said, as sun warmed his office and cast his eyes into shadow. “But your work’s been mediocre in general, and lately I’ve sensed a kind of… distraction settling over you.”

  Shirley blinked hard at the man across the desk, this paunchy clown who, if he’d ever had any artistic talent to start with, had let it be systematically ground out of him over twenty years in the business. She found herself wondering if he still even had any of those recognizable human emotions she’d discovered inside so many other people.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Lyon,” she said, slipping into the persona of someone who gave a shit. “It’s — it’s been a rough time for me. I’ll try to do better.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll work out a progress plan to keep you off probation,” he said, taking off his glasses. “In the meantime, won’t you please call me Joe?”

  §

  “Guess what?” said Caroline, eyes shining. “We finally did it.”

  Shirley pulled off her cherry–red, twelve–hole boot and picked up one of her rental skates. “Do I want to hear this?” she asked dryly.

  Caroline clomped and rolled around in front of her, swaying to whatever moldy disco song was playing out on the roller rink. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean, that too, but no. Fritz and I did it, Shirley. We swapped.”

  “Interesting,” Shirley said, nodding, as she laced up her skates. In truth she felt a stab of envy. Caroline had been arriving early at Medusa’s for a while now, and even going on nights when Shirley didn’t. Shirley would have liked to try a swap, but no one ever asked her. “How was it?”

  “It was awesome,” Caroline said. “So amazingly intimate.” She rolled back and forth in front of Shirley’s bench. “So what are we doing here tonight?”

  “Something else awesome.” Shirley had lured Caroline here to The Rainbo late on a Monday night with the promise of something fun and different. She gestured out at the rink, where a spinning disco ball spread glittery shards of color over the handful of skaters. “Don’t you get tired of riding young, boring people every night? Look at this place! Everyone here’s so much more… you know…”

  “Old?” Caroline suggested.

  “Well, I was going to say mature. But ‘old’ works.”

  Caroline folded her arms, tapping one skate on the concrete floor. “But aren’t you forgetting something? The subs are at Medusa’s.”

  Shirley had dressed a little differently than usual for tonight’s adventure. She had on satin men’s pajama pants, silver with black and white stripes, that she’d hemmed into shorts for herself, plus a white T–shirt, a wide black belt, and white lipstick. She reached into the little white purse slung over her shoulder and took out two brown pills, displaying them proudly on her palm.

  “How did you get those?” Caroline exclaimed.

  “I have four,” she said with a sly smile. “Once a week I’ve been palming one and pretending, so we could go out on our own sometime and, well, do something like this. So let’s roll out there and get a feel for the scene.”

  “The feel is old. And lame.”

  Shirley laughed. “Okay, let’s get an old, lame feel for the scene, and then we’ll pick our mounts.”

  They tottered onto the rink to the strains of “Heroes,” which at least wasn’t too cloying a song. There were fewer than a dozen people out on the boards, and it didn’t take Shirley long to single out the one she wanted to shoot for. He was at least forty, with longish hair, widow’s peak, bushy, gray–shot sideburns, and cream–colored three–piece suit. He was apparently there alone, but damn, could he skate! Especially during the disco numbers, he would leap and pirouette and glide backward and do a squatting, spinning thing that reminded her of John Travolta and Dorothy Hamill simultaneously.

  She wanted to skate like that.

  But Caroline had picked out an aging diva wearing a tennis dress, sparkly tights, and a rainbow headband, and they both agreed she would go first. Shirley sat on a bench in the locker area with her arm around Caroline’s shoulders, her roommate slumped against her like a sack of potatoes as she rode. At Medusa’s it might be possible for two women to sit slumped glassy–eyed and catatonic without drawing attention, but not here. As it was, Shirley offered a shrug and an embarrassed smile to the one couple who dropped through to change into their skates.

  After ten minutes Caroline blinked, sat up, and grinned. “That was so cool,” she said. “Try it, try it!”

  Craning her neck, Shirley spotted her target out on the rink, then waited for the man to come sweeping around the curve of the low wall on his way past them. When he did, she cheered loudly and clapped. They locked eyes as the man sketched a little bow, and Shirley swallowed the pill, and…

  And now she’s flying around the rink, flying — not thinking about the moves but just letting them happen, jumps, spins, sweeps, one after the other in a sequence that seems like it might never end. And as she rides this improbably graceful body, she becomes aware of the memories overlaying this space, already ancient in its incarnation as the Kinetic Playground, the legendary rock club where she fucked herself up to bands like Zeppelin, MC5, Deep Purple, Vanilla Fudge, and the Mothers.

  And with that comes the sadness and the loathing for herself and all the things she’s done and all the things she’s lost, and her legs pump even harder because it’s all she can do to outrun those feelings and they’re not supposed to follow her here, not to this place, not those firefights and the guts and the mud and the Viet Cong and the pit and the bamboo and the battery cables and the not those not those get out get out get out get out GET OUT!

  Shirley spasmed and tumbled over backward, and it was all Caroline could do to keep her from cracking the back of her head on the concrete floor. Shirley pushed herself shakily to her knees. Unlike her usual graceful dismounts, this time she’d been forcibly expelled.

  “Are you okay?” Caroline asked.

  Donna Summer was feeling love now on the sound system, while across the rink the shaking man in the three–piece suit was leaning over the wall with both hands braced to keep himself from falling over.

  Shirley wiped spit from the corner of her mouth. “God, am I glad we’re young,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  §

  The next night Shirley had to work a little late thanks to some stupid remedial assignment Mr. Lyon had saddled her with — paste–ups for a Kotex Light Days campaign. Shirley brooded as she walked from the El, knowing Caroline would have been at the club for a while already. A monkey could have done those designs, and wouldn’t have had to put up with any gross insinuations from its boss, either.

  It was fully dark, and the air was chilly. When she turned the corner from Belmont onto Sheffield, she saw a big crowd ahead gathered outside Medusa’s, all looking up and pointing. She hurried up the block.

  “What’s happening?” she asked the first person s
he came to, but then she could see for herself with awful clarity.

  A woman out on the wide ledge beside an open fourth–story window. A small woman, dancing and singing, as if oblivious to the danger yawning at her feet.

  Oh, God.

  “Caroline!” Shirley screamed.

  People in the crowd were yelling up at Caroline, telling her to get back inside, and hands were straining out the window to reach her and pull her back to safety, but she spun away, nearly losing her footing.

  “Caroline, no!”

  But she recovered, spread her arms with a grin, and made a dainty bow to the people below.

  Shirley was shoving her way through the crowd, trying to get to the front door, when the voices around her started screaming in earnest.

  She looked up in time to see Caroline topple backward off the ledge, arms spread gracefully as she fell. People were scrambling to get out of the way, when it looked for all the world as if Caroline had expected them to catch her.

  §

  The hours stuttered past in a strobing kaleidoscope of images, each seemingly unconnected to the last. The shrieking crowds, the shrieking ambulance, the shrieking family at the hospital who blamed her and didn’t want her anywhere near their daughter. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been at Vaughan’s Pub when Fritz slipped into the booth across from her.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  Shirley peered up from her whisky through gritty, blurred eyes. “Fuck if I know,” she slurred. “Where fuck’ve you been, anyway? Wha’fuck happened? Who rode her out that window?”

  Fritz’s nostrils twitched. He breathed in sharply, then took a slug of Shirley’s whisky and slammed the glass down again. “The rules, Shirley,” he said, looking at the scarred surface of the table. “You took subs out of the club.”

  The corners of Shirley’s frown trembled. “So this is Caroline’s punishment? Jesus, what’s mine?” She looked around, suddenly nervous. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “It wasn’t her punishment,” Fritz said, drilling her with his blue gaze. “It was mine! I’m the one Seph blames, Shirley! You think this is some game? You don’t know what she is. She feeds off the energy we generate, stores it up. That club is her prison, and when she’s strong enough to break free…”

  “What?” Shirley said.

  He stood up abruptly. “They made me do it,” he said, glaring down through the dim, yellow light. He finished her whisky, then stood with his fist dancing in the air, white–knuckled around the empty glass. “Don’t come back to Medusa’s.”

  And he turned and stalked out.

  §

  She found herself at work sometime in the late morning, unchanged, unshowered, unable to make sense of the work on her drawing table. She felt numb inside.

  Until, that is, she sensed herself being watched and looked up from her sketch to catch Joseph Lyon staring at her across the bullpen through the glass wall of his office.

  She still had two subs left in her purse. Without thinking, she pulled one out and popped it into her mouth as she met her boss’s impassive gaze. She wanted a glimpse inside his…

  Head. That’s what she wants from the heavy girl who’s no longer quite as heavy as she was a couple of months ago. Her performance has been going from bad to worse, so now the only question is if there’s any way she can get head from the girl before inevitably firing her. Or maybe she can even fuck her first. That would be better.

  The thoughts are so focused and all–consuming that it takes her a moment to realize it’s herself she’s staring at from her office across the bullpen. When she does, her formless rage finds its focus.

  She touches the heavy stirring in her gabardine trousers, the bulge that’s beginning to stiffen and rise. It strains painfully against her zipper, so she slaps the glass with one hand while she undoes her pants with the other. Faces swivel toward her from all around the bullpen, and now her cock is free as she pumps it to the rhythm of the gasps and shrieks and hoots from beyond the glass. Some people are frozen open–mouthed outside her office, others are turning their faces away or reaching for their phones, but she doesn’t care. Oh, a part of her cares, but that part is crowded to the back of her skull, blithering in horror. Meanwhile, a geyser is gathering like a clenched fist deep in her loins, the pain of it white–hot and delicious, and in only a few more strokes its eruption will become inevitable whether she wants it to or…

  And that point of no return was when Shirley slipped clean out of Joe Lyon’s head, slipped her sweater on, and slipped out of the office for the day.

  §

  That evening she stalked into Neo like a broken old fighter. She hadn’t been there since summer, but “Work for Love” by Ministry told her to expect only a so–so night. The new–wavers bouncing and strutting all around her in the reddish–orange light seemed criminally cute and dorky. She wished she could somehow turn herself into one of them again.

  The song finished up as she skirted the dance floor. “Now a deep track off the brand–new Bowie record,” said a DJ who sounded approximately thirteen. “Check out this ‘Neighborhood Threat.’ ”

  She found John in his usual place, ensconced in a small, dark booth near the payphones. Someone had just sat down with him, a kid with spiky orange hair, but when John looked up he seemed startled by whatever he saw in her expression.

  “Sorry, you’re going to have to give me a couple more minutes,” he said to the kid, shooing him out of the booth. When Shirley sat down, he took her hands across the table, saying, “I heard what happened to your friend Caroline.” He looked no older than anyone else in the place, a moon–faced kid hiding behind his wooden Ray–Ban Wayfarers. “I’m really sorry. How is she?”

  “Not awake,” she said, squinting against the sting in her eyes. “Back’s broken, among other things, but they won’t really know the extent of the damage until she wakes up. If.” All this she’d learned from calling the hospital, since Caroline’s family still hadn’t allowed her to visit.

  “I heard it happened at Medusa’s,” John said, shaking his head. “That place is bad juju. We miss you guys here.”

  Shirley rubbed her face. “Look, John, I need something.”

  “Sure. Anything I’ve got.”

  She pressed her lips together in a thin line. Her hand shook as she took a slip of notepaper from the left pocket of her jacket and slid it facedown across the table.

  John lifted the top edge of the paper and read what was written there. He went white. “Jesus,” he said, sliding the paper back. “Shirley, I don’t have this.”

  She stopped his hand with hers. “You told me once you could get anything.”

  He looked at the facedown note like he was going to throw up. “Yeah, well… I mean, I can get this, sure. But I don’t think you can afford it.”

  Shirley reached into her right pocket and let John see her wad of bills. She’d cashed out the last of her savings and taken as much of an advance on her credit card as she could. She had more than a grand in her hand. She put it away again.

  John sighed, but this time the slip of paper vanished into his hand. “This could take a couple of days,” he said. He didn’t look her in the eye.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “No later.”

  He nodded, then reached out and touched her wrist as she slid out of the booth. “What are you doing, Shirley?” he asked.

  She stood up. “John,” she said with a grim smile, “I’m only dancing.”

  §

  The bouncer at Medusa’s the next night looked shocked to see her, but he didn’t stop her at the door. Climbing past the main dance floor, Shirley tried to disregard the omen in Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Upstairs,” a track she had no use for.

  Upstairs in the gray lounge, Fritz saw her coming and rushed out from behind the bar waving his hands at waist level.

  “I told you, Shirley,” he said, blocking her path through the middle of the room, “you can’t be here. Get out.”

  “The
y took her off life–support,” she said. “Out of my way.”

  Fritz’s face came near to crumpling. “Please, you can’t.”

  An imperious snap made them both look toward the riser in the corner. Seph, the black–haired women, was standing, looking at them both. “Let the girl pass,” she said, and her voice cut smoothly through the music and murmurs of the room.

  “Shirley, whatever this is, don’t do it,” Fritz hissed.

  But she slipped past him and continued to the riser, where she climbed the steps like mounting a scaffold. An ominous series of backmasked synth tones washed the room, trembling and delicate.

  Shirley didn’t glance at the four or five other people seated in the group. She had eyes only for Seph, whose loose black gown trailed all the way to the floor. Pale, pale skin rendered her beautiful and terrible at once, and her tresses moved in an unseen breeze as if each ringlet had a mind of its own. Shirley faced her from six feet away.

  “Seeking revenge, are we, dear?” The woman’s voice was like the bell that tolls to open a tomb. “You’ll find it a simple dish to prepare but not so easy to serve.”

  Every instinct told Shirley to run, but maybe she’d never been good at doing the smart thing. “I never had a chance to try a swap,” she said. “I guess I knew if I didn’t ask I’d always wonder what I missed out on.”

  Seph laughed. “You must know,” she said, tilting her head to one side, “that whatever you may have planned, I’ll know about it once I take residence in your head. You can’t surprise me.”

  “I only want to know what it’s like, just for one minute. Then I’ll leave and never come back.” Shirley narrowed her eyes. “Or are you that afraid of me?”

 

‹ Prev