Concrete Underground, Moxie Mezcal [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

the lines, and I stepped up and took my bump.

"Jesus Christ, yuppies and coke, does it get any more clichéd?" I asked before passing the straw over to Violet.

"I said don't fucking blaspheme," Anthony repeated.

"You know, I can never tell if you're trying to be funny when you say that."

After leaving the bathroom, we headed over to the hors d'oeuvres table. The other three began picking over the sundry offerings, but I didn't feel much like eating. Then Anthony and Violet started feeding each other little puff pastries and brie en croute, and that just killed my appetite even more_. _

On stage, the trio had moved past instrumentals and onto vocal songs. They were in the middle of a song I recognized but couldn't quite place. It had a jaunty, staccato guitar rhythm, over which the piano player crooned in a scratchy, whiskey-drenched voice:

Pray for you, pray for me, sing it like a song,

Life is short, but by the grace of God, the night is long.

"Fuck, who sings this song?" I asked of no one in particular.

"That guy does," Columbine replied, pointing up at the pianist.

Violet erupted into uncontrollable giggles, and Col and I simultaneously turned to see that she had spilled some caviar onto her cleavage and that Anthony had playfully leaned in to lick it off.

"Didn't this already happen?" Columbine whispered.

I grabbed two glasses of wine and pounded them both in quick succession.

"I take it you're not on the clock tonight," Violet said.

"This is how I do my best work," I muttered gruffly in response.

"Didn't this already happen?" Columbine repeated and giggled softly.

She was right, there was something familiar about this moment, but I couldn't quite place it. My head started spinning, and everything felt fragmented.

I held up my empty glass and looked inside.

"Jesus, is someone putting something in my wine? I don't think cocaine is supposed to do this," I mumbled as I staggered away from the other three.

I ended up back in the bathroom. Saint Anthony had given me a little plastic bag of my own. I wasn't really sure when that had happened. But at any rate, I had it now, and I was digging the white powder out with the key from the Porsche and sniffing it straight out of the grooves.

"I tell you," I said to the man in the next stall, "the profession just hasn't been the same since Thompson offed himself. He was the last of the titans. No one has any balls anymore. I mean, 'embedded journalist' - what the fuck is that?"

I reached into my pockets to dig out my cigarettes, but fumbled the pack and dropped it into the toilet. "Motherfucker!" I shouted.

The man in the next stall kept our conversation going, unfazed by my outburst, "The problem is that there's nothing hidden anymore, so there's nothing real to report. Everything's out in the open. People still cheat, steal, backstab, and even kill to get ahead, but now they'll do it live on prime time network TV. Everybody ODed on scandal - Watergate, Iran-Contra, blow jobs in the oval office - it's too hard to maintain such a high level of outrage indefinitely. Eventually fatigue sets in and it becomes easier just to look the other way, so long as I'm not personally hurt by it. Nothing's shocking."

"Shit, you're right," I said, taking another bump off my key. "What am I doing with my life? I'm stuck in a dead profession. I've got to get out of this bathroom and make something of myself."

I wandered back to the band's platform, hoping to find Columbine and the others, but they weren't there. I decided to light up a cigarette while I waited for them to come back.

"Wait, did this already happen? Was this before I dropped them in the toilet?" I mumbled to no one in particular, my lit smoke bouncing up and down between my lips. A waiter in a gunmetal mask walked up and asked me to put the smoke out. I tossed it into one of the glasses on his tray, then grabbed two others off it and pounded them both in quick succession.

The lights dimmed, and a spotlight fell upon the platform, illuminating a woman with voluminous blonde hair and tight, red sequined dress clinging to her tall, lithe frame.

The piano began the introduction to "Superstar" by the Carpenters. Then the rest of the band joined in, and the woman began to sing.

And then I realized she wasn't a woman.

His voice was soft and smooth, barely whispering, but still deep. I stood there, transfixed, and watched him perform.

About half way through the song, I finally recognized that it was Max.

Max and I walked together through the party. He was still in drag and trying to explain his theory about the last episode of Twin Peaks. It involved something to do with time having a physical shape like a Möbius strip, only the shape existed in a different dimension that we can't see, the way that a sphere exists in a dimension that a circle doesn't.

"Or it's like, what a Möbius strip is to a figure eight drawn on a piece of paper, that's what time's shape is to a Möbius strip. Four-dimensional."

"What the fuck are you babbling about?" I demanded as I drained another glass of wine.

"I'm telling you how the last episode could take place twenty-five years before the dream Cooper had at the beginning of the first season."

We walked past Violet and Anthony. They were pressed against a wall in an embrace, feeding each other hors d'oeuvres. A dollop of caviar dripped off a cracker onto Violet's cleavage, and Anthony leaned in to lick it off.

"Wait, what?" I said, looking away from them and back to Max.

"Look, did you ever see the long version of the pilot?"

I sat next to Max on a red velvet couch. The room was dimly lit by a trio of candle fixtures on the wall. A beautiful woman in a black corset and stockings walked toward us slowly, seductively. She had long, jet black hair and light mocha skin. Her face was obscured by a gunmetal mask like the servers downstairs, except hers was a half-mask, exposing her full, ruby red lips.

Max turned to look at me with knowing grin.

"Wait, this didn't happen yet," I said.

"What didn't happen yet?" the strawberry-blonde next to me asked.

"I don't know, I'm starting to get a little rough around the edges," I replied.

She shook her head. "You shouldn't have drank so much before coming down here. Maybe you should just hang back; it can get pretty dangerous."

We were sitting around in a sub-basement under the Highwater Building, which was full of crates and metal storage containers. There were a little more than a dozen of us, but we had all broken into smaller groups to socialize while we waited for the game to start.

My clique consisted of the strawberry-blonde, who was about my age, and another man in his late-thirties. She was the head of governmental affairs at Abrasax, and he ran R&D for Inspiratech. Both were card-carrying member of the Highwater Society.

They both looked like athletic types and were dressed like they were going hiking or rock climbing or something. The woman was wearing a tank top and cargo pants, while the man had on a flak jacket over a t-shirt and camouflage pants. Both were carrying backpacks loaded up with serious outdoors gear - flashlights, ropes, carabiners, pulleys.

"He can't back out now," the man replied, shaking his head. "Especially not his first time."

The woman had engaged me in conversation because she thought I was someone she knew from high school. Even though we quickly figured out that she was mistaken, she still invited me to stay and talk with them.

I decided to accept the offer, honestly, because she was the best looking of the women in my immediate field of vision. She wasn't exactly my type, but attractive nonetheless - a peppy, girl-next-door type with big green eyes, a china doll face, and a pair of tits just a touch too large for her slight frame.

My appreciation of that last feature was not lost on her companion, who would periodically catch me looking and respond by moving in closer to her, as if marking his territory. When he did this, she would wait just long enough not to be rude, and then take a couple steps herself, reestablishing the distance between them. I took it less as a signal to me of her availability, and more as a signal too him of their boundaries.

"Are you nervous?" the man asked me.

I shook my head. "Should I be?"

He smiled and shrugged. "I guess we'll see."

"Do you remember your first time, how nervous you were?" the woman teased. "I thought you were going to shit yourself."

The man chuckled and explained to me, "A colleague from work - really he was more like my mentor - convinced me to start playing as a networking opportunity. The next thing I know it's two in the morning and Max is teaching me how to break into a bank."

"It's really not that hard once you get the hang of it," the woman chimed in.

"Why does Dylan Maxwell need to know how to break into a bank?" I asked. "He can't need the money."

"It was part of the game," the man replied, drawing out and over-annunciating every word to indicate the answer should have been obvious to me. "The object was to see who could find the most interesting thing in a safety deposit box. The guy who won found an actual human heart; it had been treated or whatever to preserve it, but Max had it checked out and verified it was legit."

A few minutes later, a hatch door in the ground opened up, and Max emerged from the opening. "We're good to go," he announced. "Come on down."

One by one, we descended into the hatch down a ladder, which brought us into a decaying room that looked like it might have once been a bank vault. Max led us out of the vault into another room, which indeed could have once been the lobby of a bank, but looked as if it had been built in the 19th century and left to rot ever since.

Which, as Max explained, actually was the case.

"This town was first founded in the shadow of the east foothills," he said. "It was just a stopover on the trail to the gold mines up north, a place for men looking to make their fortunes to stock up and refresh themselves. The mining supply stores, banks, and gold brokers did pretty good business; the bars and whore houses did better."

We walked through the bank lobby and out what was once the front door, which opened into a large tunnel about a story high buttressed by concrete. The length of the tunnel was lined on either side by the remnants of the facades of old buildings. Directly across from the bank was the storefront with a painted wooden sign for McPherson's General Store.

"This used to be Main Street," Max continued. "You see, the