"Like I said, you're a fuckin' freak. At the Paradise, every single stripper was a hardbody with huge fuckin' tits! Perfect fuckin' tens, all of them! This place looks like a goddamn freak show. The girls should pay us to watch them."
"Whatever, Kenton. I totally disagree," said Kelsey. "Do you mind if I stay here?"
"Kelsey, you've always done what you've wanted no matter what anyone thinks. Don't tell me you're going to start changing now." He rolled his eyes. "Besides, I think we'll get more attention from the bitches without you monopolizing things." He motioned to his buddies, who were all clustered around the bar, finishing the dregs of their drinks. "Let's get the fuck outta here."
Kenton saluted Kelsey as his friends followed him out the door. They were all whispering and shaking their head, ostensibly at Kenton's weirdo little brother's taste in girls.
At first after Kenton left, Kelsey had a pleasant, nondescript night. He drank another rum and Coke, got a couple of lap dances, and chatted with his favorite dancers. It was a typical night at the Kitty until a tall, dapper man with alert, deep blue eyes and a young-looking, attractive face that contradicted his stuffy three-piece suit requested Kelsey's presence in the Champagne Room. The Room was a bordello-like enclave in the back of the club. Clients who paid two hundred dollars could be entertained by their stripper of choice in a manner that mere twenty dollar lap dances didn't offer, drink free champagne, and--usually--do drugs.
Kelsey walked towards the back of the club, guided by a cocktail waitress who had been dispatched to bring him to the Champagne Room. "Here he is," the waitress said.
The man was holding a cocaine spoon to the nose of a slender, tattooed dancer with olive skin and a chin-length purple wig. Kelsey had never seen her before. She pinched one nostril and inhaled deeply with the other, then looked up at Kelsey.
"Hey, hottie," she said. "Jean-Paul here has paid your admission fee. I'm Simone."
Kelsey held out a hand to each of them and introduced himself. Simone shook his hand, and Jean-Paul kissed it. The businessman then busied himself with the champagne bottle, pouring three glasses. He distributed them, then raised his own. Simone and Kelsey did the same.
"A toast," he said, in a vaguely French accent. "To a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl. What else is there to live for?"
They drank their champagne, and then Jean-Paul held the tiny spoonful of cocaine under Kelsey's nose. He inhaled willingly--an amount that small wouldn't fuck with his heroin high the way an intravenous helping of coke in his spoonful of dope would.
A Deftones song was booming from the stage. Jean-Paul began kissing Simone and rubbing Kelsey's back. He moved his hand to Kelsey's thigh. I watched you change, the singer moaned.
Simone got up. Jean-Paul moved closer to Kelsey and held his arms out. She spread her legs and threw one slender thigh across Jean-Paul, one across Kelsey, and began gyrating.
Kelsey sighed and threw his head back. The cocaine was making him extremely horny. Simone licked a trail from his chin to the dog tags that hung near the hollow at the base of his neck. He reached forward and cupped her ass. Jean-Paul stroked her collarbone, and then dipped his fingers close to her breast. Simone pulled her black slipdress down so that her small firm tits were exposed. Jean-Paul traced the small circle of areola that ringed her light brown nipple.
"You, too," he nodded at Kelsey.
Simone grabbed at Kelsey's tight three-quarter-sleeve New Order T-shirt, pulling it up to expose his stomach and slim, hairless chest. She raked her fingernails from his sternum to his bellybutton, and Jean-Paul used his other hand to play with the silver ring pierced through Kelsey's nipple.
"How much would it cost for an after-hours dance from both of you?" Jean-Paul asked. "I have a beautiful suite at the Four Seasons."
"Three hundred dollars for an hour," Simone said definitively, as if she had done this kind of negotiating before. Kelsey was surprised, but not judgmental. All of the dancers he spoke to at The Kitty swore up and down that they would never accept money for sex. He believed them completely, but couldn't imagine that every dancer had this policy. Why should they?
As for him, though, it was another story.
"I'm not...into getting money for sex," Kelsey said weakly.
Jean-Paul laughed softly. "Oh no? Then why are you back here with us?"
Kelsey shrugged. "A free pass to the Champagne Room?"
Jean-Paul pulled at the sleeve of Kelsey's shirt. Kelsey noticed a Rolex gold watch on his wrist. He yanked the sleeve up above Kelsey's elbow.
"What a surprise," he said, in a voice that somehow managed to be both sarcastic and gentle. "I will pay you then with heroin."
Simone looked utterly unsurprised as well.
Kelsey looked down at the crook of his arm. A telltale trickle of blood that he had neglected to wash away had dried amid his lacerated scars.
"I can get the heroin myself, you know," he mumbled softly. But he seriously doubted that any dealers would still be out this late, and he didn't have anything left. To make the proposition even more tempting, he realized that he had brought his kit in his vintage messenger bag.
"But you cannot get the kind of heroin that I have brought from Montreal," he said. "China white. Pure powder. Not the tar merde that has scarred your beautiful arms. When I come to Seattle, I always bring a bit of it for the situations like these, and it never disappoints."
Simone was smirking at Kelsey's indecision. Kelsey closed his eyes, concentrating on the music that emanated from the stage: Why can't we not be sober?...Why can't we sleep forever?
Kelsey sat, subsumed between action and reaction, for what seemed like forever. Then, The Kitty's DJ announced, "OK, guys and girls, that's it for tonight. Go home, have some good sex, and come back tomorrow!"
"Look," Jean-Paul said quietly. He cupped Kelsey's chin in his hands and stared into his eyes. "You are very beautiful. I'm sure I don't want to do anything that you wouldn't want me to do. I just want to touch you a bit, see you play with the beautiful girl, and get you off, okay? I can tell you are like me, into both men and women. I can tell you are attracted to both of us. You would do what I want for free, no?"
Kelsey stared at the stained carpet. Jean-Paul was right. He nodded his head almost imperceptibly.
"Meet me out back in the alley behind the club in ten minutes," Simone said.
Jean-Paul stood up and held out his hand. Kelsey took it, and Jean-Paul pulled him upright.
Two hours later, Kelsey had entered the Fairmont, high as his first time, thanks to Jean-Paul's super-pure China white heroin. He was shocked and surprised to see Marissa seated in a corner of the lobby, staring out the hotel's floor to ceiling picture windows. She was nursing a bottle of Ketel One. The hotel staff either did not see her drinking openly, or was choosing to ignore any indiscretions committed by the main event of tomorrow's wedding.
He went over to her. Could it be that Kenton and his stupid friends still hadn't come home yet, and Marissa was still waiting for him?
"Marissa, hey," he said. "Why don't you go upstairs? You're supposed to be married in, like, nine hours."
He was shocked when Marissa drunkenly threw her arms around his slender hips and grabbed his ass.
"Shit! Come on, Marissa. You're really fucked up. Let me take you upstairs."
She looked up at him, her eyes glazed with wild drunkenness, and then reached up to muss his hair with fingers that had been buffed and manicured at the hotel's salon.
"Oh, and you're not incredibly fucked up?"
"Point taken," he said. "But still. I'm not getting married tomorrow."
"Fucked up tonight and always, I mean. Kenton's really worried about you, Kelsey. He thinks you have some kind of drug problem." Marissa was slurring her words, but this sentence was all too clear to Kelsey.
"Whatev--hey!" he shouted. Marissa had just grabbed his nipple, as Jean-Paul had done earlier.
"I just think you're hot," she said contentedly. "I always have."
Kelsey's eyes widened. "Come on, Marissa," he said. He guided her into a standing position. The China white made this action effortless. He supported her and pulled her towards the elevator. He needed to get her into her bridal suite--whether or not Kenton was home--and then slide under the million thread count sheets in his room. He needed to begin the process that would hopefully result in him forgetting about the night's events, or at the very least, eventually viewing them as a distant and foggy aberration.
"Where's Kenton?" he asked, pressing the button for the top floor.
"Fucking a stupid whore, I'm sure," she giggled, then threw her arms around his neck. "I wanna fuck you, Kelsey."
He was shocked to hear this, but he couldn't help but think Why? You wanna fuck a stupid whore too? Marissa clung to him, but was quiet throughout both the rest of the elevator ride as well as the walk to the bridal suite. Kelsey wondered if what she had said was a joke, until he opened her suite with the card key he found in the outside pouch of her purse. "Goodnight, Marissa. Sleep it off, and I'll see you at your wedding tomorrow."
"Last chance, Kelsey," she said. The slur in her voice was gone.
"I can't do that to Kenton," he said, not mentioning that he had no desire for Marissa. Not in the past, not on the eve of her wedding, and certainly not after his night with Jean-Paul and Simone.
Marissa never mentioned to Kenton what she had tried to do the night before their wedding. Thereafter, she treated Kelsey with a chilly impatience that Kelsey thought was the result of what she interpreted as him rejecting her. The few times that Kelsey had seen his brother since the wedding, Kenton had repeatedly tried to bait him to admit that he was a drug addict. He had also recently told Kelsey that Marissa referred to him as 'my husband's fucked up little brother'. Freaked out about Marissa's position within the anti-drug juggernaut as well his already-tenuous position within his family, Kelsey had, of late, tried to ignore any of their attempts at communicating with him.
Presently, Kelsey tried to shake the memory of the night before Kenton and Marissa's wedding out of his head. Whenever he was in need of medicine, the war his body raged upon him--the miserable physical symptoms, the life sentence of embodiment--was his dominant concern. However, his thoughts and emotions were twisted and intensified by withdrawal as well. His worst memories were always broadcast in surround-sound in the television in his head, the one he could only turn off with heroin. The drug created a lovely eternal now in which one could sink, unimpeded by the past and relieved of the future. In contrast, the lack of the drug fomented a dizzying space/time warp where miseries from the past and fear of the future became an endless circle, an ourobourus that looped around and bit the ass of the present.
Kelsey was breathing hard, sharp gasps that cut into his ribs as he scaled the final blocks up towards Capitol Hill. A nasty mist was beginning to fall. He stood at the intersection of Pine and Summit, folding his arms around his chest against the chill. He stared up at the stark, brittle trees as he waited for the interminable traffic light to change, surprised to see Christmas lights choking their emaciated branches. It wasn't even November yet.
As a child, Kelsey had always been in charge of uncoiling the knotted Christmas lights which, along with the ornaments and other tree-trimmers, had been placed in a cardboard box in the garage the previous New Year's Day. He didn't know exactly what year brought the torments of puberty upon him, but he did associate furtive masturbation sessions, a sharp decline in his health, and an inexorable moodiness with the holiday season that his father wordlessly proclaimed that Kelsey had failed at his usual job. Kensington Manchester narrowed his eyebrows and pursed his lips at his younger son. It was a facial expression that would grow to speak volumes over the years.
"What? What did I do wrong?" he'd asked, a question that would soon become customary in his dealings with his father.
"Don't you see the two dead bulbs on the string of lights, Kelsey?" his father asked, stalking to the back of the Christmas tree, the portion that was utterly unviewable by the typical observer.
"Well, yeah," he said. "But I put them behind the tree! Nobody's going to see them!"
"Take the whole string off the tree. We'll have to get some new lights tomorrow."
"Really?" Kelsey asked. "I thought I hid the dead lights pretty well."
Kensington Manchester shook his head. "No. Hiding the broken parts aren't going to do any good. Once one of the bulbs goes, the others aren't far off. It's a lesson for life, son. When one part weakens, it'll eventually destroy the others, and then the entire system is useless. The weak bring down the strong."
to be continued in part two of chapter 2. leave kit (a.w.) a comment as to how you like this story so far!
note on "cost": i know that we have recommended this novel before, but here we do so again, noting that robinson's novel of a family dealing with the heroin addiction of one of their own has strains of the same writing style as a.w.'s. the only downside is that we feel the book is a bit too anti-drug and that the author could have done a bit more research on the average heroin user...still a great book.