I got dizzy, looking around at people as they ripped their tickets and threw them into the air. Confetti. They angrily sucked back the rest of their drinks, gathered their purses, racing forms, car keys. Pissed, pissed, pissed. So very pissed.
At the bar, I realized I was broker than I thought. Shit. I looked down into the empty folds of my wallet and worried about work. Finding another job. Would I have to deliver office furniture again?
Seth came back and sat and drank.
Within ten minutes, OTB was cleared out. Only the winners remained. A handful of us.
“Twenty three hundred bucks,” Seth said low into my ear.
“Get outta here.”
“Most money I’ve ever had in my life at one time. It barely fits into my wallet.”
“Let’s get going then.”
He bought himself another beer, and as we left, he had two fresh road sodas in his hands. I clipped the curb pulling onto the highway. We laughed as we headed east towards the blinking lights of Seaside Heights, the boardwalk.
As I drove, Seth said, “I think my jinx is lifted.”
“What jinx?”
“Exactly, man. What jinx?! We’ll be in California soon. Sunset Strip. Shows lined up for us. It’ll be sick.”
“You think?”
“I know,” Seth said. He took the money out and whipped me on the side of the head with it. “Here, I owe you two hundred. Take it.”
“‘Bout time. Holy hell.”
We drove in silence over the Seaside bridge. The Ferris wheel loomed ahead. Its green lights twinkled. Our windows were down, and the cassette deck was so loud it was ruining my speakers.
I parked at a meter but didn’t put any quarters in. Then we walked down the boardwalk, bar to bar to bar.
The night took on a neon quality. Two thousand dollars in his pocket, Seth bought everybody beers. Then shots. Friends everywhere. We kicked around the boardwalk until nearly dawn. Around two a.m., I started to feel less like a friend and more like a babysitter, but I didn’t care. I led Seth as he stumbled from place to place. We ate pizza and talked to any girl who was standing around and seemed to be in possession of a pulse.
When the bars closed, we piled back into the F-250 and made the trip back towards Lagoon House. We took back roads and were careful to avoid all the lots and nooks where the local police liked to wait (even though I was stone sober).
The marsh stunk as we got nearer Lagoon House. The water was too low. The mud and rotting cattails reeked. Seth claimed he couldn’t even smell it anymore. He’d lived back there a year now. I’d only been there two months.
“Another month or two, you won’t smell it either.”
“You think the house will last that long?”
“You sure you’re not drunk?” He began to hiccup.
“I can punch you in the stomach if you want, that might help your hiccups.”
“Won’t be the first time I puked on you.”
I parked the truck. As we walked around the side of the house. I wanted to go hang on the back deck; there was a full moon, low and good heavy. I wasn’t ready for bed even though it was 3 a.m.
When I got to the deck, it was gone. It’d been demoed out. We’d been warned by DiSanto this was gonna happen.
“Shiiiiiiiiit,” Seth said.
Well this was it — they were starting to demolish our house.
Feral lid (slid?) open the door. Thankfully, it was still there.
“Can you believe those fucks?! They leveled the whole thing in like an hour flat!”
“You didn’t try to stop them?”
“What was I gonna do? There were four guys, and they had hammers. I wasn’t gonna battle four guys with hammers.”
I climbed up into the sliding glass door. Seth fell onto the shag rug.
Feral looked down at Seth. “Have some self-respect, young rocker. You need a beer.”
Denise
It was raining. Man, was it raining. Wind gusts slapped red rocks violently against the vinyl siding. Lagoon House shook. The world as I could feel it flinched in unequal jolts as the bay lapped against the bulkhead, rising ominously across the marshes.
Denise Santalucia materialized from that storm, tapping on the door in the middle of that havoc like a field mouse. I barely heard her knock over the lull of the stereo.
I opened the door trepidatiously, the way somebody would open a gate to let in a lion.
“Hey,” she said, stepping in to get out of the downpour. She’d parked a few blocks away so that her car wouldn’t be in the driveway in case Ethan came looking for her.
“Seth here?”
She had a way about her now, like she just couldn’t help herself. I like that in a person — however it presents itself. Her long hair was soaked, and the water rolled off as she wrung her hair out onto the floor.
“You need an umbrella.”
She shook her head, her hair flew everywhere.
“I need more than that.”
I looked for a towel, but we didn’t have that kind of thing in our house.
“Sorry about the other night,” she said with softness in her voice. Her eyes were warm, genuine. “I guess that was pretty weird, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Weird is good.”
Denise set her purse, the color of a yellow highlighter, on our table, and pulled out her cellphone and a paperback romance novel. The cover featured a shirtless pirate guy clinging to a red-haired siren.
“Look, you got me reading again.”
“Always a good thing.”
I thought about her on my bed without sheets, the way she’d stared at my bookcases, shirtless.
She touched my arm then pointed to his room.
“Seth here?”
I nodded. She left me, opened his door without knocking, vanished inside. I heard their low voices in there. Talking. Murmuring. Laughing. The rain came down harder. I turned the stereo up.
The lights flickered. Held.
I was goofing around on a busted-up acoustic guitar in the living room. It was missing three random strings. I was just making some noise, taking my mind off things.
When the door opened again, Feral tumbled in with Trish. They were soaked, hollering and laughing their heads off. Trish cradled a 30-pack of PBR like it was a baby calf. Feral pulled off his soaked, Bad Religion t-shirt and said, “Holy mother of the god I don’t believe in, it’s raining like the world is ending.”
Trish, in her tie-dyed dress and white girl dreadlocks, set the baby calf down, gave me a big, wet hug. She’s heavy and always hugs real good. I hadn’t seen her for a while. The three of us sat around the living room for a while. The beers never even made it into the fridge. We just kept popping them out of the cardboard box. Ducks in a row — knock ‘em all down.
“I’m glad it’s raining like this,” Feral said. “They’d be knocking down the house if it was a nice day.”
“What,” Trish said.
We gave her the lowdown about the house getting demolished. She just sat there with her jaw dropped, asking us what we were gonna do. It was funny, and it was sad, but we didn’t have any kind of explanation.
“Somebody’s phone is ringing,” Trish said.
It was coming from the kitchen. She went out there brought Denise’s phone and handed it to me, thinking it was mine. When I took it, my fears were confirmed: Ethan was calling. I set the phone down onto Seth’s bongo drum next to the coffee table and tried to get the two of them to talk about something. But the mood was tense, and we kept getting interrupted by the phone; Ethan kept calling. Left voicemails too. The phone kept ringing. Ding-dinging.
Trish shook her head then looked into her beer can. She wasn’t friends with Ethan, but she was too good a person. Loose lips sink ships. We were doomed. Our band was doomed.