Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“Yeah, well, you’d better keep her away from Charlie here. I think she was about to give him a hummer,” Tremens said.

Charlie looked at the wall while Sol inspected him. Sniffed. “I know you. You’re Sam’s little lapdog, from the summer. You couldn’t get head from a cabbage.”

Tremens laughed, but Nicky Chaos said, in a steely voice, to leave Charlie alone. “Yeah, well, tell him to stay away from my girl,” Sol said. Then he turned and stalked away, grumbling about the soundboard.

“Sounds like someone’s got the property disease again,” Nicky told the girl, who had opened her eyes at something someone had said. “It’s counterrevolutionary. Preposthuman. You’ll have to work on him.” Then, to Charlie: “Hey, were you planning to drink that?”

Charlie gulped down half of the beer, aware that at any minute they could tire of him and ask him to leave, and then he’d no longer be fucking hanging out with Ex Whatever. The drummer, Big Mike, had now wandered in, along with the new organ player, each nodding at Charlie as if they’d been expecting to find him here. The pop-tops of Rheingolds exhaled contentedly, and another cold one found its way into his hand. He wondered where they were coming from: a fridge, a cooler, some inexhaustible aluminum tree sprouting deep in the warren of wonders that was “backstage.”

Listening to them talk about who was in the audience reminded him that this was their first real performance. That gallery fag Bruno was out there, did you see him? And Bullet’s Angels, scary dudes, man, scary dudes. Plus the dissertationists, your Nietzsche Brigade. But has anyone seen Billy? Little bastard is probably too … Hey .… All the while, the girl on the sofa, sitting up again, gazed at Charlie. “So you know Sam,” she said. “You never told me that.”

“Yeah, we’re like best friends.”

Nicky seemed to grow interested, though Charlie had the feeling he was trying to hide it. “Sam Cicciaro? She here with you?”

“Well, she was, sort of, but she had to run uptown to take care of something. Hey, do you guys know where the 72nd Street IND is? I’m supposed to meet her up there if she doesn’t show soon,” he said, importantly. “I’d hate to miss the second set, but …”

S.G. got to her feet. “Speaking of which, let me go talk Sol down from the ledge before he fucks up your mix. Come on, D.T. You’ll be too fucked up to play.” Charlie made to follow her and the guitarist until she stopped him. “Sol can get pretty jealous. Probably not the best idea he sees you with me.” Laughter throbbed in the little chamber of the room.

“No, I just—” Except she’d left him behind. He wanted to explain to the newcomers, She was decent to me, but instead found himself saying, “She was going to give me a …”

Nicky Chaos laughed, and this was enough to drown out the little voice of self-hatred. “That’s good, man.”

Someone else said, “Oh, man. Charlie’s just a baby.”

“He needs a handle, though.”

“A handle?”

“Yeah. Like your lady friend there. How about Backstage Charlie?”

“Charlie Boy, Charlie Baby,” Nicky said. “Charlemagne. Don’t Squeeze the Charmin.”

“Or Charlie Blowjob. Chuck Fellatio.”

Charlie couldn’t see what was so funny, or whether they were laughing with him, at him, on him … Nicky Chaos’s hand on his shoulder was reassuring. “Come on, Char-man Mao. I want to show you something.”

Pretending not to see him wink, Charlie let himself be led deeper into the bowels of the club. There was no beer tree — just ceilings getting lower and lower, naked bulbs and dangling flypaper. “Watch your step,” the singer said. All kinds of crap crunched underfoot: wires, chicken bones, bits of shadowy brick. Charlie was getting nervous again. It was, what was the word, sepulchral. Catacomb-y. They stepped over the threshold of a tiled and doorless bathroom. “We’ve still got to play another set,” Nicky Chaos said. “You know what that means?” He drew a bit of plastic from his pocket. “Zoom zoom.”

That summer, with Sam, Charlie had had a clear line in his mind, like the line on a strip of litmus paper, separating their dalliances with controlled substances from the hard stuff. Hazel liquids, grayish mushrooms, bright red canisters of unshaken Reddi-Wip, milky blue spansules of painkillers that made his mouth water: all fair game (except the thin green confetti of Washington Square ditch-weed, which he couldn’t smoke on account of his asthma). But they swore off anything white. He’d seen Panic in Needle Park; that shit ruined lives. Then again, he’d never imagined himself here, in the sub-sub-basement of a former bank, alone with a man who at any minute would ask him to cement their friendship. It was as if that thumb-sized glassine pouch contained not ordinary drugs, but some magic substance, a chalk-white eye of newt or the powdered tusk of a narwhal.

The spell had overtaken Nicky Chaos, too. His expansive gestures turned all business as he wrenched tight the dripping faucet, as he took off his tee-shirt, as he used it to wipe any moisture from the industrial sink. With all those tattoos on his superhero physique, he was like the Visible Man, but he seemed utterly unselfconscious — unaware even that there was anyone with him. Charlie could already see that he would go onstage like this, swept up in the moment, half-naked, and that his disregard for interpersonal niceties would be part of the power he exerted. His face was tight with concentration and yet somehow also vacant as he pinched open the slit of the plastic pocket and used an index finger to tip a little white onto the sink’s steel lip. A switchblade came out of his back pocket, and with the dull side he combed the powder into two distinct middens, one large, one small, the brightest things in the room. The knife clattered down into the sink, but was still open and in plain view when he turned to Charlie like a newly rich man showing off his mansion to poor relations. “You done coke before?” The muddy tile amplified Charlie’s cough into a small grenade. Music throbbed distantly overhead.

He lied. “Sure, yeah, one time.”

“Well, have at, then.”

A vision of himself toothless and sleeping in a cardboard box flared within Charlie, but there was also something deeply attractive at work, the glamour of a long slow dive into an empty pool, and the faces of all the people who’d let him down looking on, regretting their powerlessness to stop him. The face of Mom. The face of Sam. “Oh, you can go first.”

“Hospitality, hombre. Guests before hosts.”

Charlie took a breath and bent down to level his head with the sink. He thought you put a finger over each nostril, and then a single sniff did it. But someone else was watching from the doorway behind him.

“Give the kid a break, Nicholas.”

It was a smallish man with a motorcycle jacket and a mass of black hair and a record sleeve clasped weirdly under one arm. The right side of his face was puffy, the eye swollen a deep purple, which was why it took Charlie a minute to recognize that this was the great Billy Three-Sticks.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” Nicky said, but he’d straightened up radically, at attention.

“Guy walks into a bar.”

“I mean, I knew you were whipped, but not like literally … That even apply? Whipped?”

“Nothing was going to stop me from checking out your latest antics.”

“You’re awful generous with your time,” said Nicky, with some heat.

“Pure selfishness. I had to make sure you weren’t ruining my good name.”

“You wouldn’t let us use your good name, remember? But you’ll be glad to know the first set was fucking amazing. Go on, tell him.” Nicky nudged Charlie, but Billy Three-Sticks was unconvinced.