Hedonism

By Tony Fletcher

New York, the early 1990s. In a city spiraling out of control, megaclub Hedonism attracts the abandoned and the abused, kids who flock to Manhattan to invent themselves anew. When DJ Skippy is shot in mysterious circumstances, his best friend Holy decides to solve the crime himself... Hedonism is a fast action trip through a hard core underworld of pounding dance music, S&M sex and mountains of illegal drugs. It's a world populated by glamorous models, body-pierced dancers and heartless villains, a world where no-one sleeps and everyone is a suspect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780857121059

Book preview

White

NEW YORK CITY

SUMMER

THE EARLY 1990s

1

Saturday Night

So what do you say to the DJ?

James Brown is dead

So what do you say to the DJ?

Who is Jesus?

So what do you say to the DJ?

Jump mutherfucka jump muthafucka jump.

So what do you say to the DJ?

I’m bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher

in other words sucker there is no other

So what do you say to the DJ?

I’m the one and only dominator,

I’m the one and only dominator

So what do you say to the DJ?

FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!

So what do you say to the DJ?

FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!

I OUGHT to like this music. All things considered, I really should be into it. I’ve a well-known devotion to sequenced drum patterns, harsh synth sounds, robotic keyboard bass lines and so on. But here at Hedonism, in the heart of Manhattan, I just can’t relate. Blame its lack of meaning: at least my music comes with a message, however supposedly negative. Blame the crowd, that sickening Saturday combo – of clueless suburbanites paying twenty bucks a head in the hope of landing somewhere hip, and smug young trendies comped by brain dead promoters to fill the downtown quota. Blame the DJ, the aging Dan the Man, who stopped leading as soon as he gained a following and these days only plays what the crowd wants to hear. Blame the fact that this theme is beyond a novelty, that the Saturday night sound track has been injected with a poison, turned into an unending assault on the senses of nonsensical Euro techno. Blame it on my cynical and self-righteous personality, one of many reasons I answer to the name of Holy. And blame it, more than any of it, on my sense of irrelevance and unimportance, of failure and frustration, on my role here at Hedonism as nothing more than a bus boy, the lowest of the low.

As if to remind me, four slicked-up Guidos with watered-down cocktails look to the cage above us where Monkey’s doing her business and loudly proclaim her a dog. I resist the temptation to pour beer all over them, gather the tray of empties from the bar and start the long haul to the kitchen. Tyson steps into my path.

The Wire wanna see ya, he grunts. Now.

Like I don’t have work to do? The Wire thinks the world heeds his every call. He’s a DJ. Tell him I’m in the kitchen. He can help me rinse the trays if he’s that keen for company.

Now, demands Tyson. He means it. I carry the tray of empties to the kitchen anyway, throw the beer bottles in the trash can, rinse the tray of its Bud-stench, stack it on top of the others, tell the Dodger I have to take a leak and fight my way back through the throng and up to the DJ booth.

The journey takes a full ten minutes. Saturday nights it’s like the whole tri-State descends on Hedonism. That’s why the authorities impose fire limits – Hedonism’s is 800 according to the official plaque that hangs near the entrance – and that’s why the Count employs off-duty firemen at the front door. There to greet their working buddies if a rival club owner calls the Marshall on us. New York. You gotta love it.

By the time I get to the booth, which at Hedonism is in the heavens, up three flights of stairs, I find a gaggle of would-be scenesters gathered round the Wire. He’s clearly carrying some hot off the press news like his name merits, and when he sees me the Wire pushes straight through them to deliver it my way.

Yo, Holy, he shouts above the music, throwing his sweaty arm round my shoulder and clutching me like I’m his best buddy. Serious shit gone down, man.

I can’t hear you, I shout back.

He falls for it. The Wire turns to Dan the Man and shouts in the DJ’s ears just loud enough for me to hear. Yo, turn the monitor down, will ya. I gotta talk to my homie here. Dan sighs, smiles, turns his back on the Wire and calmly turns the volume knob. Clockwise. The casing of the JBL speaker, the type that does for front of house sound in any of my old Jersey bar haunts but is relegated to mere monitor status in this big city colossus, visibly buckles under the weight of the soundwaves.

The Wire shoots Dan a glance that’s meant to threaten revenge, then leads me out of the booth, past the Hedonism hangers-on, and into an off-limits stairwell where we can just about converse.

Skippy’s at Sinai, he says, clutching me tighter.

Never heard of it, I reply. Who’s the promoter?

Mount fucking Sinai, you moron. The hospital.

Shit. Is he alright?

Of course he’s not fucking alright. You think he’d be in the hospital if he was alright? He’s got a bullet in the fucking head. Why the fuck would he be alright?

I break free his grip. What happened? I stammer.

We got held up, that’s what happened.

Who by?

Three niggers with guns. I told you guys you wasn’t safe in Harlem.

The Wire’s from Staten Island. We never had a problem before, I say tersely.

You got one tonight, that’s for sure, he responds, more so.

So what the fuck happened? I repeat.

We was going to Euphoria, remember?

Sure I remember. He told me about it. What went wrong?

Nothing. Not at first. I met Skippy up at your crib. Like we’d arranged. We chilled a while, shooting the shit, spinning some tunes, then I called a car service. Long Island’s too far for a taxi. But the car takes for fucking ever, man, Saturday night and all that, so we bring the records down, open the front door to be ready. Next thing we know these three fucking spades are in our face, right in the fucking hallway.

You serious?

Do I look like I’m fucking joking, Holy? he continues, barely pausing to swallow the saliva he’s otherwise sprayed my way in his rabid excitement. I saw my fucking life pass before me, dude, that’s how fucking funny this scene was. There’s no way I’m ready to die, no way I’m taking ’em on when they’re packing neither, so I give ’em all I got on me. A thousand bucks.

Christ. That’s a month’s wages for me.

Yeah, I know, says the Wire, though it’s spare change for him. But Skippy, he don’t know the rules of the street. The whole world’s one big happy tribe to our Sydney surfer boy, ain’t it? He only tries talking these fucking niggers out of robbin’ us. That sounds like Skippy all right – though you can know he wouldn’t be using the ‘n’ word.

So then what?

"I’m saying to Skippy, man it’s only money, just give it to them. And there he is, calm as fucking fuck saying, yeah sure it’s only money, but hey, it ain’t cool for these people to come and just take it from us. I mean, he’s trying to reason with these fucking dudes, man. And they ain’t used to that. They start flippin’. This one spade’s waving a gun in Skippy’s face, threatening to blow his brains out, this other one’s standing further back waving his piece between Skippy and me. I’m saying, ‘Just give it to him, give it to him,’ then next I know there’s these two shots and Skippy’s on the floor, bleeding all over the place like a muthafucka. Niggers see the shit they just stirred and bust out of there."

How many times he get hit?

Twice, I think. The head and the leg.

"Skippy got shot in the head? Oh fuck …"

Yeah, but the leg was bleeding worse. Believe me. It was. I didn’t even notice the head wound at first. I just notice Skippy bleeding all over the hallway, and I’m wondering how the fuck I’m going to save the kid. I mean, he was out cold, man. Cold. And CPR, mouth-to-mouth? I don’t know nothing ’bout that shit. Just as well our fucking car service shows up. Finally. The driver takes one look at Skippy, rips his shirt off, ties half of it round Skippy’s leg – tourniquet or what the fuck you call it – and the other half round his head, sits him up in the passenger seat, and has us at Sinai in two minutes. Saved our boy’s life.

My heart’s beating at the tempo of the techno the Wire plays: crazy fast shit from Rotterdam called gabba. Skippy once told me that gabba starts at 150 beats per minute and goes up from there. I breathe deep to control myself. It’s not easy.

So what the doctors say? I finally ask.

They wouldn’t let me in to see him. I think they operated on him straight away. I spent the last hour being grilled by a cop instead, at the hospital. He’s asking me can I recognize these dudes in a line-up. I’m like, they’re three fucking niggers from Harlem. How’m I gonna tell them apart from the rest of them? I let the slur slide. The Wire’s a lost cause on that front.

So what happens now?

I’m off to Euphoria.

You’re doing what?

We can’t both bail, man. They’ll kill us.

Like that would really bother Skippy right now, I say.

Huh?

Skippy gets shot and all you can think of is playing a rave?

Yo, don’t come on to me like that, man, he’s my friend as well as yours. I’m the one just saw him get shot. I’m the one spent the last hour with the cops. Shit, man, it coulda been me lying in that hospital bed.

Yeah, well it isn’t. I can’t believe he’s off to Long Island to spin records after what’s just happened. Maybe he’s not. Probably promised the promoters a delivery of the love drug. Else he just wants to be first with the hot news.

They’ll probably know ’bout this already, he says, as if reading my thoughts. Word travels fast on this scene.

Specially when you’re the one spreading it, I say. The Wire looks at me like he’s trying to read me, then decides he’s been thrown a compliment and throws his arm around me again in a show of what my mom would call bonhomie. The stench of his sweat is overpowering. The boy’s permanently on edge but I’ve never known him like this. I slip from his clammy clasp and wonder if Hedonism management cares enough about its DJs getting shot to let me out for the rest of the night. I can’t afford to lose my job but there’s no way I’m dragging empty bottles round the club while my friend might be dying.

So where’s the Ocean? I ask the Wire as we start off down the stairs.

Five miles high, he replies, and before I can repeat my earlier nightclub faux pas, he elaborates. Flew out on the red-eye. She’s working Milan Monday. Just as well. No way she coulda dealt with that shit.

Just as well, I echo. We reach the lower balcony and I want out of here. But there’s something missing. I turn to the Wire. What did you do with the records?

I only had a shoulder bag, says the Wire. Kept it with me all night. He nods up to the Hedonism booth.

I meant Skippy’s.

He pauses before answering. Rare for the Wire. Ah, man, I blew it. I left ’em in the hallway.

Fuck, Wire, those records are his life!

"I know dude. Shit. I was more concerned with saving his life. They should still be there."

Sure. They’re perfectly safe in Harlem.

Ten minutes pushing and shoving later and I’m back in the kitchen, where the Dodger’s nowhere to be found but Jack-Ass is all too present and demanding to know where the both of us have been this last half hour. He tells me to restock all the bars pronto and when I get to the first of them, on the mezz, there I find the Artful one casually trying to pick up tonight’s new bartender, an Asian beauty way out of his league. Saving her the embarrassment of telling him where to get off, I slide in, grab the Dodger’s malnourished frame and haul him up against the nearest wall, at which I tell him I’m taking off for the night, and that if I lose my job ’cause he doesn’t cover for me, he’s losing his too. He knows I’m not bluffing. I was quizzed for hours last week about the missing beer inventory and swore I knew nothing.

At the back door Tyson’s on guard. When I tell him I’m going to the hospital he just nods. When I tell him he didn’t see me go, he nods again. He’s cool, is Tyson.

There’s no cabs to be had out on 29th, but I can see a yellow line stretching down Madison. I pull my Consolidated cap down over my spikey black hair and hope there’s a big enough crowd out front to protect me from view. There is. Hedonism has one of the strictest door policies in Manhattan which means that instead of an orderly line, at least two hundred people are gathered round the ropes, pushing, pleading and cursing, some waving twenty dollar bills. Like that will do the trick. Fifty’s the minimum to make Queen Bee lower her dress standards and reach for the magic ropes.

I head for the first cab I see but before I can open the door, someone else has done it for me. Good night and God bless, says a bum with false sincerity as he waves me into my seat. I growl, get in the cab and shout my destination – Madison and 100th, Mount Sinai – through the partition. The car door remains open. I try to pull it shut. The bum’s stronger than he looks.

Quarter for some food, man. It’s less a request than a demand.

I work here, I reply.

Come on, man.

"I said, I work here." I’m firm but not too loud. If the Count’s out front and sees me going AWOL I’m as good as unemployed.

The bum lets go the door with a curse. I pull it shut. The cab takes off with a squeal of rubber and immediately the driver picks up his CB radio and starts talking in some Middle Eastern language. I’m meant to lean back and leave him to it but some of these CB radios double as a trip on the meter. The driver turns the volume up, the fare ticks over. I lean forward purposefully and fix my eyes on the metal box ahead of me. If it clicks quicker than every four blocks I will do serious damage to this man.

Thoughts of violence and I think of Skippy. You know, normally, if I heard a Hedonism DJ had got it in the head I’d be celebrating right now. Arranging an after-hours party. Getting the Dodger to scam some Brut. I mean, I dream of dee jays dying. You know how some people think up sexual fantasies to get them through the night? Me, I get a hard-on thinking up new ways for dee jays to meet their demise: drowning in hellish pits of molten wax, beaten to a pulp by relentless beats, crushed by the weight of their merciless cool. There they are, making out like bandits for jerking off over their twelve inchers in the ivory tower of the DJ booth, while those of us who actually work for a living – bar backs, bus boys, bartenders and the like – figure we’re blessed if we can clear twenty bucks cash on top of minimum wage on an average midweek night. Then we can go to an all-night diner at five in the morning and maybe eat something.

But Skippy’s not your normal DJ. Jut a few months back, he was working alongside me and the other bus boys at the bottom of the industry’s food chain, hauling crates round Hedonism all night long. He might still be there too, like I am. Except Skippy knew his music. Knew it and loved it. Skippy could differentiate ten types of techno even from the distant depths of the drinks cellar when to me it all sounds like a 747 colliding with an express train at Grand Central during rush hour. While I kept my distance and worked the back bars, Skippy would bring the DJs their drinks tray, then linger in the booth, displaying a fan’s enthusiasm and an expert’s knowledge, earning the DJs’ friendship and trust – both usually impossible to come by and, as far as I’m concerned, ill-desired too.

The Wire took a shining to Skippy. Opposites attract and all that. Eventually the Wire let Skippy spin the first hour of one of his ‘Excess Yourself’ Thursdays while I covered his ass for Jack-Ass. Skippy so impressed at that public audition he was allowed to spin the opening hour every week – with management permission. Word got out that the kid had talent, that he even understood the concept of melody in a style hardly known for it. Soon Skippy was scoring bookings at other clubs around town and at some of these weekend raves that have spread like a virus up and down the east coast, and busing was but a distant memory. The coup came last month when the Count axed his middle-of-the-road Friday night dee jay and gave the gig to left-field Skippy instead. Fridays. Talk about rags to riches.

I should really be jealous of Skippy – ’specially as I don’t give a crap for this whole baggy jeans and lollipop rave scene that he’s been trying to bring in with his Friday thing, but my boy remained so down-to-earth in the face of sudden fame that I could only feel pride instead. Pride. And hope. Skippy proved to all us bus boys, bar backs, waitresses and the like, us who harbor dreams of acting, writing, music-making or, in my own case, painting, that we have it in us to see those dreams through.

And now he’s been shot.

The cab swerves violently at 57th Street to avoid slamming another which has hit the brakes without warning or signal to pick up a fare, and my driver leans out the window as he passes.

Motherfucking piece of shit! he hollers. And they say the cab drivers don’t make efforts to learn English. The meter’s ticking over at the right rate, though. Cabbies generally know when they’ve got a sucker and when they’re carrying a real New Yorker.

At Mount Sinai, I encounter serious attitude as I fight for attention alongside crack addicts, street fight casualties, homeless lunatics, and the occasional carrier of a genuine medical virus. It’s two in the morning, well past visiting hours, and the receptionist at emergency tells me the unidentified young white man brought in with bullet wounds is in intensive care and not fit to receive anyone. She’s like Queen Bee trotting out her favorite diss that it’s a private party and you’re not on the list.

But I’m his brother, I insist. I’m the only family he has in this city. This is close enough the truth: Skippy’s blood relatives are 10,000 miles away in Sydney and I have not a clue how to find them.

The receptionist reacts to my plea with a frosty stare. Either she pities someone with a brother like me, or she knows I’m playing loose with the term. Either way, she sees beyond the bullshit into my genuine concern and picks up a phone. Twenty minutes emergency room purgatory later I find myself escorted through a labyrinth of corridors and elevators by a white-frocked, brown-skinned doctor, who says nothing of note until he has brought me to an office upstairs in the Intensive Care Unit.

Your brother is lucky to be alive, he announces as we sit. The smell of caffeine in the air almost overpowers the sterility.

And he was unlucky to be shot, I reply, unwilling to surrender so early in the conversation. Can I see him?

No, I’m sorry, you can’t, he says. His badge identifies him as Gurishami, his clipped accent as someone still new to our country. He’s under sedation, recovering from surgery. He will be unconscious for some time yet.

You had to operate?

On the leg. He suffered extensive external bleeding from a bullet wound in the upper right thigh; we had to give him a transfusion of four pints of blood. Indeed, he could most easily have bled to death if he hadn’t been brought to the hospital so quickly.

So he’ll be alright then?

The leg wound was bad, and he may have serious mobility problems ahead of him – there is much nerve and tissue damage that we couldn’t correct in one operation – but at least it is not life threatening.

That’s good.

It’s the head wound we are more concerned about. That’s bad. The bullet there has lodged on the edge of his brain …

The bullet’s still there? I interrupt. You can’t take it out?

I’m afraid not, my friend, no. He smiles, as if he knows the words are no comfort but he wants to show he’s human. The bullet is very delicately balanced. A few millimeters further in and he would probably be dead already. If we operate and the bullet moves just those few millimeters the wrong way, well … And especially in his already considerably weakened state.

Gurishami sees what little color I possess drain from my face, and opts to move on.

So we watch and wait. Hopefully he will regain consciousness soon and we can go from there.

"You mean he might not regain consciousness soon?"

I prefer to think positive. He smiles again. You have to wonder how bad things can be in India for a guy like this to prefer the Saturday night shift at a New York hospital, here in the early ’90s, when violent crime has never been so popular.

Is there anything I can do to help? I ask, for real.

Thank you very much, yes, I’m sure that there is, he replies. The person who brought him here referred to him only as Skippy; they were perhaps just casual acquaintances? But being his brother, you can of course supply us with accurate information.

Of course, I bluff. Truth is, I have no idea of Skippy’s real name. No one uses them in club land.

But Gurishami is still looking at me. He’s got a pen in his hand and a form on his desk. He’s waiting for me.

Sampson, I fish out of pure air. Thomas.

He writes it down, and continues with a series of questions, from the easy ones – address, occupation – to the increasingly difficult. Medical history, mother and father, even date of birth is beyond me. As I dig myself ever deeper holes, I plead shock and emotional strain and ask if we can’t do this tomorrow. Gurishami smiles again and says that’s fine.

He escorts me to the elevator. When it arrives, I find a uniformed guard standing on duty inside, his gun holster brazenly on display. I guess sometimes people visit to finish off whatever it was they started. I feel crushed that I haven’t been able to see my buddy – my ‘brother’ – but relieved that he’s in what appears to be capable hands. The thought provokes me to extend my own. Gurishami accepts it and offers a final smile.

One last thing, he says, gripping my arm firmly as the elevator doors close on us. Does your brother have health insurance?

Who does he think he’s kidding? Sure he does, I reply, trusting it’s the answer he needed. The elevator doors close and we each return to our night duties.

From Mount Sinai I walk north. New York is full of unmarked boundaries that segregate communities, but none more noticeable than when you leave the double-digit Upper East Side streets for the triple-digit no-man’s-land beyond. From moneyed Manhattan to hard-up Harlem in a single block. The truly mad thing is how few people ever make the journey. Stay in their own locales their whole sad lives.

At the 23rd Precinct on 102nd Street, I come up against a desk sergeant who makes the hospital receptionist look like the guest list girl of my dreams. Still, better the two-three than west Harlem’s Dirty 30, recently exposed for having commandeered the crack dealing franchise from the local gangsters – along with the violent sub-contracting that goes with it. (Like that news shocked the locals.) There they’d probably have arrested me for the fun of it. Here, it takes me an hour to get any help at all, and even then I have to go through the same bull about Skippy being my blood. I ask if I can see anyone who knows about the incident and the desk sergeant tells me the detectives are all ‘in the field.’ I ask if there’s any report I can look at and he almost laughs. I ask if anyone’s been arrested and he tries to straighten his face as he shakes his head. No, he says, there have been no arrests.

I leave my number for the hell of it, then walk home alone, up Third Avenue, past the Housing Projects with their names suggesting freedom – Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Weldon Johnson whoever he may have been – and architecture impersonating prisons. Round the entrance to the last of these projects a gang of police cars, ambulances, and two fire trucks to complete the set are dealing with the latest Saturday night crisis. It’s brought the homies out en masse to see the show, forcing me into the street to avoid asking them to move aside, but I can deal. I’ve crossed the divide enough times to know both sides of it. I’m comfortable in the city. I’m resilient to its stresses and strains. Like those soaring skyscrapers with which Manhattan claims its fame, I might sway in the face of a storm but I never break. Or so I like to think. Skippy tonight, though, he got broken big time. Damn.

On our block a group of young teens sit on one of the few real stoops; the rest of East 111th is all straight-rising apartment buildings or run-down warehouses. It’s four in the morning now but summer’s here – you could fry an egg on the sidewalk right now – and these kids, they don’t want to think they’re missing anything, so they stay up all night, shooting the shit and acting tough. Trying to gain props off the real gangstas. They nod to me in recognition as I pass. Skippy and me generally got welcomed here. It’s like they think any white boys crazy enough to live in Harlem should be shown some respect. ’Till tonight, I guess.

Hey, any of you see the shooting? I ask.

What shooting? says one of them blankly.

None of you saw nothing?

They shake their heads. I didn’t see no shooting man, not on this block, says a kid who can’t be older than twelve. He’s wearing a Knicks cap and I know his name is Antony. In usual circumstances, you’d figure him growing up just fine. Saw someone getting carried into a cab though, he continues. That Skippy got hurt?

I nod.

Man he look baaaaad. How many times he got shot?

What shooting? I say, and walkon. One of these kids could have capped him for all I know. Everyone’s fronting in this city. Sometimes you tear that front down and there’s this whole other person behind it. Other times you tear it down it turns out that’s all there ever was – a front.

I reach our building – one of the straight-rising kind – and open the front door into the hallway. The Wire was right about the pool of blood. There’s almost enough to swim in. He was right about something else too. Skippy’s record case is still there, in a corner by the door. Weird, that, how you can get shot if you don’t empty your pockets quickly enough in this city but you can leave your livelihood out for the neighborhood to steal and they’ll let it be. Part of the contradictions that make this place what it is, I guess. The craziest city on earth. The place I always wanted to live.

I step round the edge of the pool, leaving bloody footprints alongside others who’ve done the same, pick up Skippy’s case – a rectangular silver metal box with one heavy silver buckle – and carry it upstairs. By rights, the super should have cleaned up the blood already, but I don’t blame him for putting it off ’till morning. At Hedonism, us bus boys are always trying to think of worse jobs than our own. We’ve been running out of new ideas recently, though. We’re pretty damn low on the employment totem pole.

Still, I can’t face going to bed with the thought of Skippy’s blood – my room mate, my buddy, one of the few people I can trust in this city – lying there in the hallway, so I decide to get a mop and bucket from under our bathroom sink and clear away as much remains of the night’s violence as I can. I carry Skippy’s case up with me, put it down again outside my door, fumble for my key, and as I pick the case up again, the buckle snaps open and the case falls forward, sending black vinyl careening down our railroad apartment’s hallway.

But the sight of Skippy’s work tools suddenly gives me an idea. I leave the records as they are, forget about the mop and bucket, and instead fetch my paintbrushes and a fresh canvas from my excuse for a bedroom, along with the sole bottle of Stoli I keep in the freezer for emergencies. I’m fired up now. Inspired, you might say. I return downstairs to the hallway, put the canvas on the floor near the bloodstains, kneel down and place my brush in a pool of red human ink. It’s congealing now, almost like an oil paint. It’s perfect.

I start painting and almost immediately find myself inside myself, lost in the artist’s coveted rush of creative adrenaline. As much as I can think of anything else while in this semi-trance, I think of Skippy and the sad fact that his own brain is barely functioning at all, but that only causes me to drop deeper into the interior and lose myself further.

The greatest thing about being in the zone like this is that you never know what you’re doing – you just place your faith in your endorphins to lead you where they want to. Which is why, without consciously preparing for it, without even sketching it, I find my brush painting the shape of a gun. I approach it from Skippy’s point of view, looking down the end of it, which makes it easier to ignore the precise details and concentrate instead on its emotional impact. There’s a certain pop aspect to this angle too, which would appeal to that part of my name associated with the most famous of all New York’s nightclubbing artists – if it was something I was genuinely considering. But it’s not. I’m simply venting my anger in the most immediate possible manner.

Finally, around dawn, I am finished. The canvas is covered with a replica of a revolver, viewed staring down its smoking barrel, dripping red in my buddy’s blood. What stains remain on the now dry floor I’ll leave to the super after all. Exhausted yet euphoric, I go to pick up my materials and then remember one last thing. I spit into a small stain of blood on the concrete and pick up some sand from the fire bucket by the door. It makes for a dirty paint, darker than the rest. I use it to give the work a title in the bottom right-hand corner, then I drag my materials up to the apartment where I prop the painting up at the foot of my mattress as I plop myself down. I stare at my creation, fully clothed, totally exhausted, swigging furiously from the vodka bottle, willing sleep to overtake me as the title and the image imprint on my increasingly drunken mind. Red. I will dream of blood tonight, if I dare dream at all.

2

Sunday Afternoon

I DON’T dream at all. The vodka did its job in blacking me out. But I wake to a surreal scene all the same. Monkey on my back. Socks in my mouth. Cuffs on my hands. And a rubber cock working its way up my ass.

I cry out – or try to.

What’s the matter? Monkey coos, pushing in harder.

I struggle to break free.

Hey. I thought y’all into this. She sounds offended now. Who’s being hurt around here?

I cry out again – or at least try to. I shake and I struggle and refuse to play prey and manage to make it so damn awkward for Monkey to get her rocks off that she gives up. She pulls out of me – fuck but that’s painful – and lies down alongside me. I don’t dare look to see her makeshift member flapping away in the breeze below her waistline, with God knows how much of my wastage attached to it. Feeling the thing was enough for now. She undoes the cuffs and pulls the socks from my mouth.

Fuckin’ A, Monkey.

"What?" She seems truly distraught that I wasn’t turned on. She also looks high as a kite on Mars.

Skippy’s in the hospital.

Oh. Right. Someone said something.

Someone said something? Someone told you and you still come round here and butt-fuck me?

But I thought y’all liked it.

When I’m in the mood, I do, Monkey. Not to wake up to.

Okay, okay, you don’t have to rub it in. She leans over to her bag, pulls out a pack of Marlboro Lights and a book of matches, lights up, then blows smoke rings into mid-air while stroking my cheek as we lie here catching our breath. She looks into my bloodshot eyes searching for signs of forgiveness. I look into her brilliant blue irises searching out her pupils.

Where you been, Monkey? I ask, grimacing and clenching my cheeks.

Just partying, she says casually.

What you been doing?

Just acid. I look at the radio alarm. One o’clock. She won’t have slept yet. I’m not sure I want to know where her missing hours have been spent. Monkey and me, we’ve been an item a few months now, but we’re only together when we’re together. When we’re apart, it’s a whole different story.

I sit up, gingerly. She follows, her natural full breasts rising with her, their jewelry hanging off them. Her hair is cropped close and, like her lips, colored bright blue to match her eyes, which settle now on the canvas propped up against the wall.

What’s that? she asks.

A painting, I reply. What does it look like?

It looks like blood.

What do I say to that: touché? I say nothing.

Whose? she now asks.

I take a deep breath. Skippy’s.

Oh. She’s silent for a moment, like she’s trying to piece this together, how Skippy’s blood ended up on my canvas. I’m half expecting her to ask if I shot him just to get some paint.

It’s beautiful, she says instead.

It’s blood, I reply. Now that I’m sober – and hungover – I don’t see any beauty in it. I don’t even see why I did it. I must be sick.

It’s beautiful blood, she continues, somehow enthralled. It’s a work of art. You’re genius.

And you’re still tripping, Monkey. Don’t tell me, you can see Jesus in the swirls.

Hey, that’s right. I think I can see the twelve disciples as well. It looks like they’re having an orgy. I’m just wondering what the hell I’m going to do with her for the rest of the afternoon when she cracks a smile, and the smile gives way to a grin, the grin to laughter and then she grabs my face with both hands and kisses me on the lips, letting out a deliberately exaggerated sucking sound in the process.

"So how is Skippy?" she asks, now she’s convinced me she’s back on planet earth.

Not good, last I heard. Something about a bullet in the head?

"Well at least I know why you don’t take acid, Holy. Y’all just spit it out all day. Can we go see him?"

We should. I just hope there’s someone still there for us to see.

We get up. Monkey removes the strap-on – with less concern than when most girls take off their bra. We get dressed. By rights, we should shower first, but it seems like a luxury time can’t afford us right now.

There is one thing I insist we do before we leave the apartment. Pick up Skippy’s twelves. He’d expect it of us. I mean, to say the boy cares about his record collection is like saying the Count likes to make money or the Dodger likes scams or Monkey’s an exhibitionist. You go up in the booth when most dee jays are spinning and the vinyl’s scattered around like empty beer bottles, sleeves poking out at odd angles from the record crates, the working jock moving so fast he’s got no choice but to pile them up wherever while he races through his bag of tricks in his allotted time span. Skippy though, I’ve seen him at work. Cool as ice, plays his way through his box, puts them all back in place when they’re done with. Never breaks a sweat, never misses a beat. There’s something to be said for not doing drugs.

None of these records have names, Monkey complains as she crouches on the floor and examines them.

Yes they do. Skippy just doesn’t want you to know what they are.

What do you mean?

Look. I pick up a twelve-inch. It looks like a white label. It is a white label of sorts. Skippy’s put his own white label over the printed label, which he’s crossed out for added measure. I explain this to Monkey.

But why? she asks.

Skippy’s in a competitive business. He has to have the edge. He can’t afford to give away his secrets.

Huh?

Look, you know Skippy, you been dancing Fridays. What does he play?

Dance music.

Yeah, but like what? What songs?

How should I know? None of them have words.

Exactly. No one knows what Skippy plays. They just know that Skippy plays it. That’s how he keeps his crowd. They follow him around to hear records they know nothing about except that Skippy – and only Skippy – has them.

And no one ever asks him what he’s playing?

Sure they do.

And does he tell them?

Sure he does. I point to the record in my hand, with a blue sticker on the label that corresponds to a blue sticker on the white, otherwise unmarked sleeve. This one’s ‘Blue 97’.

Is that the title or the artist?

Neither. It’s his own code.

Jesus, y’all know some strange people. She catches me looking at her. What? What’d I say?

Nothing, I reply, emitting my first smile of the day. Nothing at all.

We gather up the records and, where necessary, their corresponding sleeves. On half of them Skippy’s put his own white label over the printed label, even tearing the price sticker off the sleeves in case some wanna-be gathers which import store Skippy buys from. The rest of his twelves are real white labels, the limited edition advance copies record companies give dee jays in the hope of building a club vibe before they drop the song to radio. They’ve been doing it like this for years and it usually works. Just not with Skippy. If he knows other dee jays are pounding the same tunes, he pulls them from his box. Record companies hate him for it, but he don’t care. Skippy sets his own agenda. Result? The companies now give him their 12?s first.

Monkey’s fascinated. Until now, she’s only known Skippy like most girls know their boyfriend’s room mate – as someone to say hello to, to be polite to, to try not to show too much of yourself naked in the hallway to. Even though she’s danced during his set these last few Fridays, it’s not like she understands what he’s all about. The music she and I like we know on first note and ask for by name. This DJ elitism business is a whole new world to her.

We keep up a running commentary as we match the records up with the sleeves and place them neatly back into Skippy’s record case. Most dee jays cover their cases in every free record company sticker they can get. Makes them look hip. Skippy’s hipper than that. His flight case is bare.

Alright, says Monkey, picking up a fresh record and looking at the sticker on the label. ‘Green 46’?

Different colors for different styles. 46 is just the number. Somewhere in his photographic memory Skippy knows who made it, what it’s called.

A1?

First cut first side …

123? BPM. Beats per minute.

"Slash