At last my hand found its way into the drop zone, but — aarrrggghhh! — there in the cleft of a tight little buttocks lay a package bigger than my own. It was true, for sunshine’s sake, I’d been played like a Mississippi catfish! My furious little fiend had herself a furious little appetite, yes indeed, and time was moving on. For the tiniest instant, I thought, Hell, maybe I should just go along with this little snowqueen. After everything else I’d done to get in this spot, it seemed I deserved whatever came my way. And if that weren’t a death blow, I looked around to find me ditched by Bruno. I was on the verge of losing my bird when from out of the crowd stepped Alex, my friend from down-unda, purveyor of smart drugs extraordinaire.
“Drinks are on me,” I told my little he-she as I rattled my glass of ice.
“Don’t go!” it said. “Cammy don’t want nothing but you!”
“Worry not, my sweet,” I said, sounding like some dickweed Marlow, and bolted.
“You’ve got to help me,” I told Alex.
“Easy now, mate, easy.”
The bastard was sporting a boutonniere, of all things, a carnation garishly red. He adjusted this now with stoned aplomb and stepped back to take me in. Between the X and my terror, my peepers had gone Marty Feldman. From every little cranny nodules of color grotesquely pulsed, and the odor of booze, goddamn, the joint was packed with the stuff to the gills, manhattans and martinis and margaritas and woo woos, and wallbangers and grey hounds and midoris and macs — booze and more booze wherever I turned — and the gut-deep bass and calliope of synths, no horn or string could shape such sound, like the syncopated wailings of alien babies and alien dogs, and the cigarettes and cigars, the perfume and dope and hair spray and mints jostled with the stench of so many wet wool coats — well, stab me in my eyes, the works made me zany, I was itches and sweat, a guy built to spill, no shit, and Alex had not a hint or clue. From a fancy silver case dense with glyptics and birds he selected a smoke and tapped it out and lit it. Then he sat there inhaling the thing like a man who loves cheese, very sauve, very dramatic, his watery eyes aglimmer through the fuzz.
“What’s the problem, mate?” he said.
“I am in deep doo-doo, man, as in up to my neck.”
“You said that.”
“I mean serious.” It took everything I had to keep from looking at Cammy the Man. “This thing,” I said. “It’s after me.”
Alex puffed out a line of smoke-rings and surveyed the room. “I see a lot of blokes doing their best to snare a little piece running round here. Where’s these things?”
“It’s not a thing, Alex. It’s a ghoul.”
“Now it’s a ghoul.”
“No,” I said. “Not a ghoul. A dude.” Alex kept up with the fancy inhalations and watery stare. “In drag,” I said.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” This was all so extremely amusing to him, just another whacked-out night in the city.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t look now.” Cammy had been staring at me, licking her filthy hungry chops as she wriggled and spun. “The tiny thing with the black wig,” I said. “With the halter top with sequins?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Alex said, his eyes grown noticeably wetter. “If that’s a bloke, I am Sherilyn Fenn.”
By now my horror had all but caved to anger. I was near ready to slap this guy. “I’m telling you, man,” I practically wheezed.
Alex laid his hand on my shoulder and drew me near. “AJ,” he said. “What are you on?”
“Nothing,” I said, and studied my feet.
“Nothing, eh? How come nothing’s never got my orbs looking like a set of mum’s best chiner saucers then?”
“Just a little X is all,” I said. “Hardly any.”
“A bit of the X, he says.” At this point the room was whirling. Alex narrowed his eyes. The guy reminded me of James Bond, early Connery even, say from Dr. No. “Here’s what I’d do if I were you,” he said, patronizing as hell. “Go right back over to that little honey and tell her you’re in love. Then take her back home and give her a shank on the kitchen table.” He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me round. “Look at her,” he said. “She’s a bloody beauty, mate. Forget you’re tripping and step to it.”
“That bloody beauty, as you call it,” I said, snatching him up by the collar, “has got a cock the size of your kangaroo-spanking arm.” Malapropos, really, Cammy now decided to shimmy her way over. “Are you going to help me out,” I said, “or what?”
“Sure, mate,” Alex said, baffled. “Sure.”
“I don’t care what you say just so long as you say it.”
Cammy rubbed my ass. “When you come back, sugar?” she said. “I miss you.”
“Cammy. I want you to meet my good friend, Alex.”
“He handsome, too,” she said.
“Hello, love,” Alex said in that exceptionally Aussie way of his. He extended his fancy case but Cammy waved him off. “Listen,” Alex said. “Do you think I could keep your beau for just another minute or two? We’ve been discussing a bit of business here, and we’re just about concluded.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to Cammy. “I almost forgot about that drink.”
“No drink,” she said. “Just dance.” She licked her filthy chops and took my hands, pulling me toward the floor. “Come dance me, sugar. Come.”
“Just give me two shakes of the old lamb’s tail,” I said.
Cammy must’ve been as high as the rest, else she would’ve seen me for the fool I was. Her face assumed a corny pout. “You make me so sad,” she said.
“I promise you, love,” said Alex. “I’ll have your chap back in a New York minute.” He put his hand on my shoulder and headed toward the bar. “We’ll just be right over here,” he said, and smiled yellowly. We eased away at a steady pace until Cammy had returned to the floor. Then we broke into a trot.
“The least you could do,” Alex said, seeing I’d already forgotten him in my rush toward the exit, “is offer the bloke who saved your arse a drink.”
I handed him a fiver. “I don’t want to take any chances,” I said.
And now the coat check girl was giving me grief. It turns out I’d lost the ticket for my leather.
“Last time I gave a coat back without a ticket,” she said, “I nearly got canned.”
She had a web of tribal-style ink creeping from beneath the collar of her vintage coat, some Channel cut with a damask print. She worried her hands on the counter before her, smoothing out a piece of invisible cloth.
If I hung around too long, Alex’s slippery doings might go to waste. My little fiend could materialize anytime now, slurp, slurp.
“Maybe I could tell you what it looks like,” I said. The girl paged through a magazine. “I can tell you what’s in it,” I said. “Whatever you want.” She kept up with this dumb act until pretty soon a sleek Cleopatra-type gal approached. Of course she had her ticket. The check girl disappeared behind a rack and returned a minute later with a leopard fur coat. “Don’t you remember me giving it to you?” I said.
“You give me a ticket,” she said, “I get your jacket. Capiche?”
If the word capiche was bad enough from the mouth of a guy, it was ten times worse from the mouth of some poseur of a girl making six bucks an hour. “But what,” I said, “if I never find my ticket?”
The girl shrugged. “What if?”
I wanted my coat, but out even more. Cammy hadn’t surfaced. I gave the room a final sweep, then checked my pockets. Turns out the fiver I’d slapped on Alex was the last of its kind. All told, I had some matches with a phone-sex girl, a smattering of lint balls, and $2.50 in change, pennies included. That at least would get me a pack of smokes. If nothing else I could hunker down against some warehouse to wait for the return of Bruno and Co.