Miss Misery (15 page)

“Isn't that where My Chemical Romance is from?”

She nearly choked on her drink. “Holy shit, how do you know that?”

I laughed. “I have a friend who loves them.”

“Holy shit,” she said again. “I love them too. They're killer.”

I nodded. Then she nodded back. So I nodded again. Then she nodded. It could have gone on all night if the wolf hadn't resumed howling.

“Sorry!” she said. “One sec!” She flipped open the Sidekick and started mashing buttons with her thumb.

“Sure,” I said. “Gotta feed the dog.”

“Ha, ha,” she said, typing. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “So, do you have any idea where she might be?”

Howl. Type. Howl. Type.

“Who?” she said, not listening to me.

“Cath,” I said, patiently.

She laughed at something that appeared on her screen. “Oh,” she said. “No. No idea! Sorry!”

“Right,” I said. Back up by the bar the red-haired DJ wrapped up his Cam'ron set and launched into something even louder and vaguely crunk.

Debra snapped the Sidekick shut again and turned to me. I had a strong urge to grab it and drown the wolf to death in her vodka cranberry, but I resisted.

“God,” she said. “Could the music in here suck any harder?”

“Probably,” I said. “Give it time.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Debra,” I said, “could you do me a favor?”

“Totally,” she said sweetly, sipping through the straw.

“Could you text Cath and ask where she is?”

Debra frowned. “Why don't you text her?”

I sat back. “Because I want to surprise her. You know how she is.”

A devilish look came into Debra's round brown eyes. “Totally!” She flipped open her Sidekick again and thumbed out a message. It seemed that Debra really did know how Cath was—which was good because that made one of us. “She'll write back quick,” she said. “She always does.”

I killed off my vodka. Maybe things were looking up.

“Thanks, Debra,” I said.

“So.” She took another sip and leaned into me. “How come I've never seen you at Sorted?”

I shook my head. “What's that?”

“What's that?” she scoffed. “It's the party I throw every week! Carlos from Interpol spun last time, and before that was James Iha. And next time is the chubby guy from Franz Ferdinand!”

“Wow,” I said with as much sincerity as I could muster.

“Yeah,” she purred happily, “it's awesome. You should come! I'll stamp your hand and you can drink free Amaretto Sours until one a.m.!”

I gagged a little at the thought but tried to smile politely. I was trying to think of something productive to say when a howl interrupted me. I'd never been so relieved to hear the wolf. Debra scanned the message and looked back up at me.

“This doesn't make any sense.”

“What?” I asked.

“She says she's watching you DJ.”

“Me? Where?”

“The Madrox.” Debra scrunched up her eyes and looked suspiciously at me. “How could you be here if you're DJing there?”

“Ah,” I stammered. “Well…” I was interrupted by a thunderous crash from the bar that caused the record-player needle to leap entirely off the wax, blanketing the room in deafening silence. I turned around. The DJ was nowhere to be seen. Franta stood in his usual spot but with a look of terror on his face. He was staring straight down.

“What the hell?” said Debra.

I jumped up and ran over to the bar. Franta stood, frozen.

“Oh my, oh my,” he said. “Franta is gonna get sued this time.”

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“David,” Franta said without looking up. “David, you are witness. I say I hate rapping music but I don't hate red-haired boy! Red-haired boy is OK with Franta!”

I heard a low groan of pain from behind the bar. I propped myself up with my hands and peered over the row of glasses toward Franta's feet. The trapdoor to the basement was open but the basement light was off, making the gaping hole in the floor nearly impossible to see unless you were looking for it. Lying in a heap on the wood stairs that led down was the red-haired DJ. He was conscious but not moving. He groaned again.

“Ryan!” Franta said to the DJ. “Why you gotta come back here when I'm working! Why you gotta fall through the floor like that!”

Ryan let out a low moan. “I needed something from my bag,” he said slowly.

Franta knelt down. “What you need so badly?”

Ryan spoke softly and carefully, as if volume would finish the job on his spine that the stairs had started. “The new…Ghostface…record!”

“You almost die for this!” Franta said, slapping his forehead. “You almost die for black rapper!”

I figured now was as good a time as any to make my exit.

“Thanks for the drink, Franta,” I said. “I'm gonna go.”

But he didn't seem to hear me.

“I can't feel my lungs,” Ryan said weakly.

With a wave to Debra, I turned and left the Satellite Heart.

 

The Madrox was located directly west of the Satellite Heart on Ludlow Street and was, generally speaking, its polar opposite. Its name (derived from some obscure Marvel Comics character) wasn't nearly as transparent as the names of some trendy East Village bars—say, the Hole, which was genuinely filthy, or the Cock, which was a pretty reliable place to find…well, you know—but it was equally underlit and profoundly underdecorated. Though only open for a few months, its instant hipness was a minor miracle of
Tipping Point
–style anti-marketing. The first time I was there, a few weeks after it had opened, the walls were as clean as a dinner plate and the air smelled of Pledge. The second time—for Pedro's birthday party, two months or so after the first visit—it was a zoo specializing in that most elusive of species native to the East Coast of America:
Hipsterati alcoholicus.
It became, quite suddenly, the VSC's standard late-night spot, the number-one bar for indie-rock afterparties, the venue of choice for aging British rock-stars-turned-DJs, and the preferred place for squeaky-clean pop singers to be “accidentally” photographed canoodling with Canadian heavy-metal screamers. It was so perpetually crowded and cool that it was becoming almost uncool. It was, in a word, insufferable.

It wasn't even nine p.m. when I arrived, but the line to get in was already spilling onto the sidewalk. The door was blocked by a wall-like black man, as wide as he was tall, who was checking IDs like he was staring at a Magic Eye painting. But not even his massive girth could block the defibrillating levels of bass that poured out from behind him into the hot, crowded night. The glimpse inside I managed when the bouncer moved his mammoth arm to allow entry made me woozy: Tank-topped, sweaty-faced girls were three deep along the bar, waving twenties and clamoring for attention from the overwhelmed bartender. I was grateful, then, for the severity of Franta's cocktails. Maybe he was right: Detective work did demand hard liquor. Entering the belly of the beast demanded a bellyful of something beastly. No wonder film-noir gumshoes were always knocking back shots of rye or other nasty-sounding, old-timey drinks in between trips to Lauren Bacall's house.

I felt a tap on my right shoulder.

“Hey, can I bum a smoke off of you?” I turned and the girl that faced me was as tall as I was but couldn't have been a day older than twenty-one. Her skin was a deeply burnished brown, her eyes were bigger than coasters, and if she was sweating to death in her red velvet blazer, she certainly wasn't showing it.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I don't smoke.”

“That's OK,” she said, smiling. “I don't either.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then why did you ask?”

“Because I only smoke when I'm drinking.” She let loose a throaty laugh that sounded caught somewhere between a hiccup and a gulp.

“Oh,” I said. “Well.”

She pushed her curly hair off of her forehead and halved the already tiny distance between us. “You were playing really good stuff in there.”

Undercover, I said to myself. Gumshoe. Lauren Bacall.

“Thanks,” I said. “I try.”

“Yeah, it was really hot.”

“It was?”

She hiccup-giggled again. “In there, I mean. Really hot in there.”

“Yeah,” I said sagely. “This place is hot.”

“So,” she said, and sort of rubbed my left arm.

“So!” I said back. I was close enough to play connect-the-dots with the freckles on her cheek. I heard a taxicab honk from the street, and people continued to push by us on the sidewalk in both directions.

“Do you have to, like, go back in there now?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, half regretfully. “Right. I guess I do.” I paused. Her giant eyes were still locked on mine. “Um,” I started. “Have we met before?”

Hiccup-laugh. “I don't think so,” she said, extending her right hand into the four and a half inches of space we had between us. “I'm Zaina.”

I took her hand; it was roaringly hot and brittle like spun sugar. “I'm David,” I said. “Zaina is a lovely name.”

She blushed. “It's Persian.”

“Cool,” I said. “Like the cats.”

“Yup,” she said. “Or the empire.”

“That too.”

She squeezed my arm, leaving a red mark. “Bye, David. See you in there.”

“OK,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

My eyes lingered on her skinny frame for an extra moment as she rejoined her friends; then I stepped down two stairs and took up position in the back of the entrance line. Whatever my doppelgänger had done so far, I had to admit it wasn't all bad.

I wasn't waiting in the line for long.

“Hey!”

I glanced up and around.

“Hey!”

“Me?” I said meekly, peering around the line toward the front where the voice was coming from.

“Yeah, you!” It was the bouncer. “Get the hell up here!”

“OK,” I said, giving sheepish looks to everyone I passed.

“I told you when you got here, Gould—you don't need to wait.”

“Cool,” I said. “Thanks, man.”

The bouncer snatched a driver's license from a gawky blond mod at the front of the line and inspected it. “I know I'm a man,” he said. “My name is Clarence.”

“Thanks, Clarence,” I said. And walked past him into the Madrox.

 

My first reaction was to the heat: It hit me like plastic sheeting, wrapping itself around every exposed inch of my body and instantly coating me with other people's sweat. Next was the smell: It was, I imagined, the odor of a baseball locker room after the pennant has been won, when the usual aroma of jockstraps is, however briefly, washed away under a tidal wave of cheap champagne. Finally was the noise: If I thought the red-haired kid had been generous with the volume at the Satellite Heart, my doppelgänger was an audio philanthropist on the level of the Rockefellers. “Jacqueline” by Franz Ferdinand buzz-sawed through my eardrums and drew blood in my brain. I could feel the low end reverberating in the bottom of my sneakers. The empty beer bottles and glasses that lined the tables and the bar skipped and lurched with every downbeat, forcing them on a Bataan-style death march toward the floor.

The place was packed to such a degree that the words “fire hazard” had long since lost their meaning and the sign on the wall noting the lawful occupancy as eighty-five seemed more like quaint, outdated advice than a binding legality. It was exactly the sort of scene that I, David Gould (the first), abhorred and avoided. Which of course made it exactly the scene that my double lived for. I pushed forward through the crowd in an attempt to buy a drink. I wondered, briefly, if they served shots of rye.

Eventually I made it to the front of the drink line and managed to make eye-contact with the tender, a sallow-faced young woman with mousy brown hair that framed her face in a '70s shag style. She was wearing a white and blue baseball T that said
WINGER
across the front in big, ironic lettering. I started to speak, when she leaned across the bar and gave me a lingering kiss on my cheek.

“Hey,” she yelled over the music and the crowd. “Great set.”

“Uh,” I said. “Thanks.”

I was about to order a beer when she disappeared for a moment, then returned with a lowball glass filled with clear liquid.

“Stoli rocks with a splash of tonic, right?”

Maybe this place did have something in common with the Satellite Heart. I nodded, then motioned her back and leaned in close to her ear. She smelled like bubble gum.