Sinners Circle (3 page)

“Yeah
that’s true, so does The Beatles’ ‘Revolution Number 9.’ Played backwards the
words are ‘turn me on dead man turn me on dead man.’ Crazy shit, huh?” Carl
pushes the neck of his beer bottle into his chest and scratches his nose.
Turning to the guy sitting beside him, the guy wearing brown leather
everything, bright pink sunglasses
inside
the club, Carl nudges him and says, “Stairway to Heaven, I think goes something
like, ‘there was a little tool shed where he made us suffer sad Satan.’”

The leather man, his drink clinks
against mine as he lifts it off the table, up to his lips.
“
Gotta
think about it, man.
Led
Zeppelin, man.
They knew what they were writing...”

I take a swig of my beer, try
cracking my neck as I look over at a blonde waitress who once told me she was a
model or something. I put the bottle back on the table and inch over a bit
towards Alison, who looks about as bored as I am. “Well you’d think that, but
Zeppelin technically never
wrote
‘Stairway to Heaven.’” Carl rolls his eyes and shifts in his seat as I lift my
beer again. “It was actually written by a band called Spirit in nineteen
sixty-seven. Spirit toured with Zeppelin but the band
kinda
fizzled out and Zeppelin just stole it from them.”

Carl and the leather man are
quiet for a minute, then leather man says, “
‘They
give
him a six
six
six
.’”

I shake my head, “No, it’s ‘He’ll
give those with him six
six
six
.’”

Leather man heaves a sigh, “They
didn’t
steal
it from Spirit.” He
stands up and staggers off towards the dance floor, his feet vanishing inside a
cloud of fog being sprayed into a mob of dancing drunken nobodies.

Alison is peeling the label off
her beer. Carl kisses her shoulder and runs a hand through his hair. “Is it
Saturday speeds tonight?”

I shrug, chug my beer. “No idea.
Fuck that shit, speed dating is for queers.”

Carl laughs but Alison doesn’t.
She keeps peeling the paper label off the beer she isn’t drinking. She scowls
at me, “You know this is a gay bar, right?”

The waitress-model-blonde girl,
whatever she is—she’s all legs anyway—she winks at me as she walks by holding a
tray of pints and shot glasses gleaming like razor blades. I smile and sip my
drink, turning away from her, looking at Alison. “Well, no
shit
.
Really?”

She rolls her eyes, quickly
looking at Carl, at me, back at her peeled bottle. I point at it. “It’s a sign
of frustration, you know.”

Alison’s head doesn’t move when
she looks at me. “What?”

It’s hard to hear with all this
music so I lean in. “What?”

“What?”

“What are you talking about?”

She tears a big strip off the
glass, rolls it between her fingers. “What’s what?”

I lean in closer. “
What
?”

She rolls her eyes again. The
song playing, a bad remix of some top forty sensation cuts out as she shouts,
“What’s a sign of
frustration
?”

Her whole face goes red as about
twenty people turn and look at her. Another rotten club mix
comes
pounding out of the speakers as I lean back into the padding of our tiny semi
circle booth, flicking little balls of torn paper off the table.
“Peeling the labels off your drink.”

Carl laughs and pokes her in the
ribs, “Yeah I heard this somewhere. They say it’s a sign of sexual tension. You
aren’t sexually frustrated, are you babe?”

She glares at him. “Says
who
?
Who
says it’s a sign?” He shrugs and
drinks his beer, his glassy eyes wandering over to the dance floor where two
skinny girls with pixie cuts are kissing each other.

I tap the table with two fingers.
“Well to be fair, it’s a sign of anxiety, really. And anxiety is believed to be
released through sexual intercourse. So put two and two together and bingo,
you’ve got a common misconception.”

“What?” She smirks, biting her nails.

“Ah, never mind.”

She shakes her head, spits a few
nail fragments onto her jeans, the table. A fleck of white lands on my wrist,
when she brushes it away her fingers are wet and when she sees she’s got spit
on my hand she looks like she’s about to cry. I smile and rub the back of my
hand clean on her jeans, her thighs clench when I touch her and looking at her
face I notice that she’s only wearing one earring. “You OK?”

Carl looks back from the dance
floor, at her, at me. “She’s OK. We did a bunch of blow earlier. I think the
shit was cut with something bad because she’s been acting like this since we
got here.”

Her mouth twitches as she says,
“No I haven’t.”

He flicks a rolled wad of
Alison’s label at me. “Well, since
you
got here anyway.” He takes a slow drink of beer.

I look at Alison, she looks down
at her lap and then back at Carl. She looks nervous.
Real
nervous.
“No I haven’t. It’s since
we
got here. Not since Amanda got here.”

I lean in, “What?”

She waves it off, “Never mind.”

I nod and look for the waitress
but I can’t see her anywhere.
There’s
too many scrawny
gay guys and fat lesbians in the way, so I can’t see a damn thing. After a
couple minutes of this, I get up and slip through a sea of exposed midriffs,
facial piercings and pungent odors, a stinking cocktail of dozens upon dozens
of different perfumes, hair products and body sprays, the stench of sweat and
body odor permeating everything.

I’m not sure how anybody can
breathe while standing this close to one another. Every person in your elbow
space, every person vacuuming up the oxygen around you, and if stealing it away
from the vicinity isn’t enough, they’ll shove their tongue down your throat and
suck it right out of your lungs.

I wave at the bartender, shout
out for three more beers. He gives them to me but when I hand him a twenty the
waitress, the blonde-leggy-model-
thing,
she snatches
the money from him and pushes it back into my palm. There’s so many people
around I can’t hear what she’s saying and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me
or the bartender, so I just pocket the twenty, raise the beers to her and nod
appreciatively before slipping back into the crowd of colliding queers.

Back at the booth I put the booze
on the table and sit down. Carl and Alison are gone, but I can see them mashing
into each other on the dance floor, not noticing the dirty looks being shot at
them by the surrounding dykes bopping up and down on the floor. I
chug my
beer and sip
the one I brought for Alison.

In this light people look like
faded versions of themselves.
Pale skin flashing in and out
of focus under a disco ball of revolving burden, everybody looking like a color
photocopy of their actual self.
Everyone swinging
their bodies to the same beat, the same chorus, yet each vessel of mirrored
flesh swaying out of synch with the others.
In my opinion, the only kind
of dancing that makes any sense is choreographed dancing.
Choreographed dancing
is the clear sound of human rhythm. It is the course essay of human body
language.
The careful comb of final edits.
Martha Graham said that dance is the hidden language of the soul. Ruth St.
Denis described dance as being used as communication between body and soul, to
express what is too deep for words. Looking at the small mob of men and women
flailing this way and that, knocking into and another, I see nothing inspired.
I just see
what is probably a thousand dollars worth of booze
swishing about inside the bellies of these serial one night standers
.
Angela Monet once said that those who danced were thought to be quite insane by
those who could not hear the music, I guess this is true in my case, because
the more I watch these strangers straddling one another on a foggy floor, one
that hides their feet entirely, I feel colder and colder inside my skin, I feel
frozen at the bones, chilled in the guts. I feel alone, empty and apathetic.

“...ends in about ten minutes.”

I look up; the
waitress-model-blonde thing is standing in front of me waving her cell phone in
front of her. “Mind if I join you after?”

The beer I’m holding is empty. I
look from my hand to the vacant seats around me. Carl and Alison still bumping
and grinding each other in the fog, under the disco ball.

The waitress touches my arm,
winks and walks away, her body swallowed up by the crowd. I go to the restroom,
stand around and watch she-males stroke layers and layers of mascara onto fake
eyelashes until a stall opens up and I can take a piss. On the wall someone’s
written ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me.
So throw me down, and tie me up and show me that you like me.’ Underneath is a
heart painted in orange nail polish. I push my thumb in the middle of it and
when I take it away, my print fades away instantly from the cold scarred steel.

Outside the stall a girl is
pounding on the door next to mine, talking to her friend who’s bent over the
sink and leaning right into the mirror. I can see them through the little space
between my door and the wall. The girl pounding on the next door, she’s saying,
“Hurry up! I
gotta
go so bad I have to take a number
four!” The chick inside on the toilet says, “What the hell is a number
four?
”

Pounder girl just keeps hammering
on the stall, “I
gotta
go!
Hurry up asshole!”

The girl on the toilet clicks her
heels on the
floor,
I hear her farting a little. “Fuck
off, bitch!”

Pounder slaps the door one more
time, walks over to her friend at the mirror who says, “Where did you get that
shirt?”

“I know!
Nice,
huh?
I like it. It looks great right?”

“Yeah, but it would look better
in the garbage.”

I flush the toilet and don’t
bother washing my hands on the way out.

Alison and Carl are still
dancing. I wave at them as I walk by, but they don’t see me. I think about
going to the bar and getting more beer, but I don’t want to have to fight the
crowd for one
more lousy
bottle, so I just walk back
to the booth. Some
drunk
guy is falling down close to
some tables and reaching out for anybody to help brace him, he sees me, goes
for a grab, I step out of the way and he topples over, his head slamming into the
leg of a high stool. I think about maybe going for that beer again, but I see
the waitress sitting at my table, her legs crossed. I’m too close to just walk
away so I walk real slow up to her and slip into the booth, she reaches under
the table and
squeezes
my knee.

“Amanda, right?”

“Hi.”

“You remember me?”

I smile. “
You
remember
me
?”

She purrs like a kitten and
slides over towards me putting an arm around my shoulder. “How could I forget
these eyes?” A polished fingernail glides over my eyebrows.
“And
this hair.
Goddamn, is it this dark naturally or do you
dye
?”

“I never
dye
.
I’m naturally black.”

“I see. How do you get it so
straight?”

“I straighten it.”

“With a hair
straightener
?”

Up close her tits look a lot
bigger. She’s got them pressed against me so close I can feel the rise and fall
of her breath. She doesn’t seem to care that I’m staring at them. She smiles
when I smile because she thinks I’m thinking about sucking her milk makers. And
she’s half right. I may be looking at her jugs, but I’m also looking for an
entry point. It’s said that the human heart creates enough pressure while
pumping to squirt blood thirty feet into the air. Looking at her heaving chest,
I’m wondering if this is true.

“Uh huh.”

She cocks an eyebrow, grinning as
she leans in to kiss me.

She tastes like vodka and
watermelons. Her hair smells like jasmine drowned in ammonia. She slips a
finger between our lips giggling and nibbles at my earlobe. I think of Alison
tearing at her nails, wiping her spit on my hand. I kiss her fingertip anyway.
A lot of people think that after you die your hair and fingernails continue to
grow. Although entertaining, this isn’t true. What happens is the skin
dehydrates and pulls away from the nails and hair. It looks like they’re getting longer, but it’s really the opposite. The
body is shrinking.

She leans away, smiling, her eyes
falling down to her lap, her teeth biting her lip. “You’re so cute...in that
way.”

I kiss her. “Oh?”

“Huh?”

“In what way?”

She grins again, her eyes moving
across my face, she’s talking to my neck when she says, “That creepy way. Like,
all dark and pale and...” She giggles. “...I’ve always had a thing for
Wednesday Addams.”