Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

They huddled together in the doorway, no shelter from the November wind but their own bodies, while a boy with three silver rings in his lower lip checked the band’s guest list for their names.

“Come on, Jethro. You fuckin’ know I’m on there,” Theo said, her teeth beginning to chatter so that there were little hitches between her syllables. They had both begun to shiver, the coffee only a fond and dimming memory.

“I know you,” he said. “But I don’t know her.”

“ Niki Ky…N-i-k-i K-y,” replied Theo. “Come on man, I’m freezing my titties off out here.”

“You should have to sit on this stool for a few hours…” and he tapped down the list, name after name, with the eraser of a nubby yellow pencil.

“And you should have to suck on the drippy end of my fuckstick.”

“Here it is. Niki Ky,” and he drew a graphite slash through her name. “Show me your wrists, ladies.”

The rubber stamp left a fizzing green beaker on Niki’s skin, and she let Theo lead the way in, into air so suddenly warm and smoky she thought at first that she might not be able to breathe this new atmosphere. An all but impenetrable haze of cigarette smoke and the damp and sour reek of spilled beer underneath, almost masking the fainter, more exotic hints of pot and piss and puke. The sound system was blaring drums and meat-grinder guitar, something like Soundgarden, minus any trace of rhythm or melody or talent. Across a sea of heads and shoulders, Niki caught a glimpse of Daria, doppelgänger much too tall for Daria, waving, and Theo took her hand and pulled her through the crowd.

Daria was standing up in one of the burgundy-red Naugahyde booths and Mort was sitting across from her, nursing a Miller High Life.

“I don’t suppose you saw Keith out there anywhere?” Daria asked, shouting to be heard above the carnival din of music and voices. Theo shook her head and slid in next to Mort. He put one arm around her and kissed her cheek.

“Sit down,” Daria said to Niki, leaning close, and she obeyed. Mort reached across the table and shook her hand.

“Good to see you’re still with us,” he said. “After last night, I thought maybe you’d head for higher ground.”

“What the hell is that shit?” Theo sneered, one finger pointing up at heaven or the speakers overhead.

“Bites the big one, don’t it?” and Mort finished his beer and laid the bottle on its side, began to roll it back and forth with his free hand.

“That,” Daria shouted, “is Bogdiscuit.”

“The opening band?”

“The missing opening band.”

“Last seen in Lubbock, dropped off the screen somewhere in the wilds of Mississippi,” Mort added.

“Which means we have to go on forty-five minutes early and play two sets.” Daria was still standing, her Docs sunk deeply into the duct tape-patched and cigarette-scarred upholstery, still scanning the crowd for some sign of Keith.

Mort sighed and bumped the beer bottle against one corner of a glass ashtray. “But at least we’ve all been spared the live-and-in-your-face Bogdiscuit experience.”

“This is plenty bad enough,” Theo said. She laid her lunch-box purse on the table, opened it and began to rummage through the junk inside.

Niki tried not to notice Daria looming over her like a vulture or the way she kept sliding toward the gravity well of those boots pressed into the springshot booth. Instead, she watched the crowd, the sandshift of flesh and fabric, pretending she was also looking for the tall guitarist. But really she was just taking in these faces, same faces as New Orleans or Charleston or anywhere else she’d sat in crowded bars. A lot of the faces were clearly too young to be here, fake IDs or bribes or stamped hands licked wet again and pressed together, and for a second that passed like the lead-blue shades of sunrise, she felt homesick.

And then, across the room and tobacco veil, the Bogdiscuit-tortured space, she saw the girl with white dreds, punk-dyke attitude scrawled on her white skin and another girl with hair as unreal as Daria’s snuggled under one arm. Six or seven kids were crowded into the big semicircular booth with them, the white-haired girl at their center.

Niki leaned across the table, not taking her eyes off the clot of goths, whispered loud to Theo, “Who is that?” Indicated who she meant with one hitchhiker’s jab of her thumb toward the crowded back booth.

Theo looked up from the cluttered depths of her purse, lipstick tubes and tampon applicators and a Pink Power Ranger action figure, following Niki’s thumb.

They all looked like underagers, ubiquitous black and glamorous dowdy. Robert Smith clown white and crimson lips, bruise-dark eyes.

“Oh,” Theo said, quick, dismissive wave of one hand and then her eyes back down to the purse, “That’s Spyder Baxter, holding court over her shrikes.”

“Shrikes?” Niki asked, and Mort chuckled. He’d stopped rolling the Miller bottle, bread-dough kneading the tabletop, was now busy making spitballs from his cocktail napkin and flicking them over Daria’s head. She hadn’t noticed, or if she had, chose to ignore him. They sailed by, just inches above her scarlet hair, and stuck to the black plastic Christmas tree set up behind the booth, decorated with rubber bugs and Barbie doll parts.

“That’s what Theo calls our local death rockers.”

And Niki nodded, though she’d always hated that label, death rockers, more reminiscent of heavy metal, headbanger crap than anything goth.

“You wouldn’t think a chicken-shit city like this would have so many of them,” Theo said, found what she was looking for, a worn and creased emery board.

Niki had treasured the dark children who congregated in Jackson Square, who haunted the narrow backstreets of the Quarter, the same white faces and black-lace pouts as these, the same midnight hair. These could be the same children, she thought, transplanted like exotic hothouse vegetation, identities as blurred as their genders. Seeing them here only seemed to redouble her homesickness, the vertigo sense of being misplaced herself, a refugee.

One boy stood apart from the others, better dressed than the rest. Bell-bottomed stretch pants and a wide white belt, puffy white shirt with balloon sleeves and a lace jabot that looked purple from where she sat. He stood with his back to the others, staring out into the crowd with vacant intensity, back straight, as alert and detached as a bodyguard. They made eye contact, and she looked quickly away, back to Theo.

“Why don’t you like goths?” she asked.

“Well, let’s see now,” Theo answered without pausing from her furious work on a hangnail. “They’re shallow and vain and whiny…” She stopped filing and held the nail closer to her face for inspection. “…pretentious drama queens with bad taste in clothes and worse taste in music. How’s that?”

“Oh,” Niki replied, a sound soft and hard at the same time, and suddenly she was much too tired from the hours of listening quietly to Theo Babyock’s diva prattle, too tired to care if she pissed off Daria by picking a fight.

“HEY! ASSWIPE!” Daria screamed over her head, and there was Keith Barry, pulling free of the throng, blotting out her view of Spyder Baxter. His head was shaved closer than the night before, and his dull eyes squinted through the smoke and shadows, recognition rising as slow as the sun on a cloudy morning. He towed some blond chick behind him like a little red wagon, Aqua Net teased bangs and trailer-park makeup.

“Key-rist on a boat,” Theo hissed, having entirely missed the brief flash of anger on Niki’s face. “What the hell did he scrape her out from under?”

Daria scowled down at them, “At least he’s learning how to come when called.”