We drank beers and watched the dancers take their g-strings off and had a good time. At first, things seemed normal. But after the first hour, we noticed something was amiss.
The first indication that something was wrong was when Sondra missed her dance slot. The DJ announced her. Played her song—Gwen Stefani again. The house lights dimmed. The red spotlight swiveled, searching the stage—but the stage was empty. No Sondra. The DJ called her name again, but she didn’t show. There were a few boos and jeers from the crowd. Some of the bouncers looked pissed. I sat up in my seat and glanced around, confused. The DJ called for Sondra a third time and when she still didn’t take the stage, he quickly covered.
“Change of plans, folks. Sondra will be with us a little later on. You’ll want to make sure you don’t miss her. Meanwhile, please put your hands together for the lovely, luscious Lakita! Let’s give her a big Odessa welcome. Make some mother fucking noise!”
A young black girl hurried out onto the stage. Unlike the other dancers, she was fully clothed, as if caught unawares backstage. She seemed bewildered, and it was easy to tell that she wasn’t used to dancing to this song. But she recovered soon enough and writhed around, losing more clothing with every verse.
Tonya walked by us, on her way to give a lap dance to a customer two booths away. I stopped her as she passed.
“How you doing, guys?”
“Okay,” I said. “But what’s up with Sondra? She sick or something?”
“Awww,” Jesse teased. “Larry misses his girlfriend. Ain’t that cute?”
He and Darryl elbowed each other, snickering.
Tonya ignored them. “Don’t know. She was here earlier. But I haven’t been in the back all night. Maybe she’s in the bathroom or something.”
I nodded. It sounded reasonable enough.
“Got to go,” Tonya said, and then hurried away. The guys at the other booth whistled as she approached them. I turned back to Darryl and Jesse.
“Maybe she got her period,” Jesse said. “Can’t dance if she’s bleeding.”
I didn’t respond. Instead, I got up and started to walk away. Darryl tugged my elbow.
“Where you going?”
“To piss. Be right back. Save me a beer.”
Nodding, he turned his attention back to Lakita, who’d managed to win over the crowd. I headed for the bathroom.
The men’s room at the Odessa was filthy, and I hated it. After the first time I’d used it, it was easy to understand why we’d seen guys pissing in the parking lot. The parking lot was much nicer. Cleaner, too. The restroom had three urinals, three commode stalls, and two sinks. All of them were covered with grime and stains. The toilet seats were pitted and loose. They wobbled when you sat on them. One of the urinals had a leaky pipe, and there was usually a pool of water on the floor beneath it. A paper towel dispenser and a condom machine hung on the wall, along with a cracked mirror. The linoleum floor was pea-green and my shoes stuck to it. The toilet stalls and the walls were the same sickly color as the floor.
There was an old guy using the urinal on the left. He leaned against the wall with one hand, drunkenly swaying back and forth. About every fourth drop of piss hit the floor, rather than his intended target. His nose whistled when he breathed. Ignoring him, I picked the urinal on the right, putting one between us for distance, and hurried to do my business. I tried not to step in the puddle beneath the urinal. I wondered again where Sondra was, and why she’d missed her set.
The wall was covered in graffiti. People had etched it into the paint with keys and knives or written on the wall in everything from black marker to shit. Some of it looked very old—ancient hieroglyphics from the late-Nineties. Other missives looked fresh. None of them had ever been painted over, as far as I could tell. They’d been left for posterity, I guess.
The old man flushed and walked out of the restroom without washing his hands. I didn’t blame him. The urinals were probably cleaner than the sinks.
As I pissed, I read the wall. Some of the graffiti looked like Russian. A few of the letters were written backwards. ‘Chobo Meptbbin’. I wondered what it meant. ‘Ctopoha cnhrk aeno 555-0673’. Gibberish. I read the English graffiti instead. ‘This is shit’. ‘I got the Aids’. ‘Legalize it’. ‘Who farted?’ ‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Tony was here’. ‘For good head, call 555-9081’. And the ever popular ‘Here I sit, broken hearted. Tried to shit but only farted’. Then there was an entire exchange between different people: ‘I love them hoes’. ‘Your Mom is a ho’. ‘So is your mom, fucker’. ‘You fucked his mom, too?’ ‘This is his Mom’. There were several that were either cryptic or crude—or sometimes both: ‘Have you seen Teddy and Frankie… call 555-6667… ask for Kaine… Cash Reward’. ‘My pussy ate my thong’. ‘My crabs have crabs.’ ‘Jesus saves, but Ob rulz’. And then there were doodles—a big-nosed Kilroy looking over a wall, the President with a gap-toothed grin and enormous ears, a smiling dog, weird occult symbols like you’d see on a Slayer disc, a smoking bong, and lots of male and female genitalia, all of them larger than life. Some of them made me laugh. Others made me cringe. Some made me do both.
Finished, I shook myself off, zipped up, and turned the sink on with my elbow. I was afraid to touch the knob with my hand. There was a layer of black scum and pink hand soap on top of it. I rinsed my hands off under the water, and then used my elbow to work the lever on the paper towel dispenser. It was empty, so I wiped my hands on my pants.
As I was heading out the door, a bouncer pushed past me and charged into the bathroom. I had to slink against the wall to avoid being run over. He paused, then turned around and looked at me.
“You see girl inside?”
His accent was thick and I had trouble understanding him at first. He leaned closer. I could smell his cologne.
“Girl,” he repeated. “You see her?”
“In there?” I shook my head. “Just me and an old guy. Maybe she’s in the stalls?”
“Da.” He started to turn away.
“Who you looking for?” I asked.
“No one. You go back to table. Enjoy show. Look at pussy. No worry.”
He walked over to the stalls. Shrugging, I let the door swing shut behind me and made my way through the crowd. There was a lot of commotion. Most of the bouncers had disappeared. I wondered where they’d gone. Whitey was standing outside his office door talking to Otar. They leaned close together. Whitey kept jabbing the bigger man in the chest with his finger, shouting something in Russian. Even though Otar was twice his size, he seemed scared of Whitey. The bouncer headed for the front door. He seemed worried—the first expression I’d ever seen on his stone face. Whitey scanned the crowd. His eyes lingered on me for a moment before moving away. I didn’t like how they made me feel. I hurried to the table and sat down. Lakita was on her second dance, gyrating to the latest by Fergie.
“What’s going on?” I asked Darryl and Jesse.
“Don’t know,” Jesse said, “but it must be something important. The bouncers took off backstage and Whitey looks pissed as shit.”
“About what? Was there a fight or something?”
“Nope.” Jesse shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe one of the girls stole some money or something.”
“Got to keep his pimp hand strong,” Darryl said, his eyes never leaving Lakita.