9.
At night, the Strip came alive. During the day it was just another shitty part of town, a run-down street with cracks in the sidewalks and greasy corner stores like The Pharmacy, which sold Adderall, weed, and designer drugs to the neighborhood kids and junkies if you knew who to ask. Bums and heroin addicts lingered, shooting up and begging for change, shaking their coins around in their tin cups…the musical clatter of San Juan Boulevard. The guys and I only went there to get weed and booze from the shops that didn’t card. It was creepy in the daylight.
Once we were walking around there around noon and a short little guy with a scrunched-up face stopped us, gesturing for us to see his wares. About a dozen kitchen knives were carefully laid out on a little fleece blanket. “Nice present for your abuela,” he’d said, gesturing to the knives. His left eye was bulging out of his socket and twitching profusely. Max tugged on my arm to keep walking, but I’d felt his stare follow me all the way down the street.
There were a few tacky clothing places and coffee shops that catered to the locals on the Strip, with bizarre characters like the man who wore a python around his neck, and the woman who wandered up and down the road, cradling a plastic baby doll in her arms. She was always humming and staring straight ahead at something the rest of us couldn’t see.
But at night, all the creeps and weirdos seemed to fall into the background. That’s when the Strip lit up in a million neon candy-colored lights, when the bars opened and the crowds filled in, high school kids and twenty-somethings, the occasional sugar daddies looking for their next fix. We hung out there a lot at night, a good place to smoke up as long as you knew where the cops were. They’d hired a lot of young asshole guys on the force around that time, big tough-boys fresh out of community college who liked to push people around and make a big scene. As long as you steered clear of them, you were usually good.
Toby’s creepy uncle owned Bazingo, the nightclub with the flashing marquee outside that pumped out rap and dance music and drunken, sloppy fights into the streets. Connor, Max and I got in with little more than a quick glance at our fakes. Pretty girls in tight skirts and stilettos drank fruity cocktails, grinding on the stripper poles in the center of the dance floor. Men huddled around, leering at their half-naked bodies over cups of pale ale and Bud Light. The guys and I had brought Jess and her friends once, against our better judgment. When they arrived they instantly had stars in their eyes, chattering excitedly, so thrilled to be in a real-life nightclub. They let all the older men and frat stars feel them up until Toby bought them a round of shots, then another, and another. They got so drunk they spent the night puking in the Pepto Bismol pink bathroom stalls that smelled like urine and something that had died forty years ago. Toby and Max went to creep on college girls while I took turns holding Jess and Anna and Lizzie’s hair, rubbing their backs as they retched and vomited every ounce of liquor till their stomachs were raw.
Sometimes I just couldn’t stand it, that ache that I felt deep inside my chest, that utterly hopeless feeling that crept into my head and bogged me down day after day. High school was monotony, repetitive, dull. They said the real world would be harder, more intense, less forgiving. Would I end up moving on after school, leaving this shitty town and never looking back, or would I become some drug addict, some deadbeat on the Strip peddling for loose change?
Sometimes the only thing I wanted was neon club lights and a thumping bass, cheap liquor in my system that worked like engine fuel. Bazingo was the place to do it, the place where you could snort some lines behind the counter with the bartenders and let the hollow sound of the music swallow you whole. It was easy to see how you could escape into all of that, how you could go into that world and never come out.
Connor loved the Strip the first time he came with us that night in April. Of course he did. He loved the lights, the girls, the action. Me, him, and Max drank warm beers wrapped in brown paper bags, watched the hookers in tight skirts waiting for tricks in the loop-de-loop, their pimps watching from the shadows. I knew for a fact that Toby had slept with at least three of them. I wondered what kind of STIs he had. Toby didn’t answer any of my texts or calls. We hadn’t heard from him since Gabriel broke that glass and D’Angelo creeped on Connor. I hoped that he was fine, just busy cooking with his cousins. Or even better, getting some sleep.
Connor loved Bazingo, too. That night he met a redhead who was so drunk she could barely speak, and hung all over him throughout the night while I did shot after shot of Fireball to drown it all out. We all stumbled home to Max’s house, a peaceful place with nice parents who let Connor and I crash on the couch and the floor. They even brought us blankets. I fell asleep drunk and dizzy on a white shaggy rug, the living room tilting slowly, Connor’s arm just inches away from mine, the static between our skin electric.
10.
Toby texted me bright and early the next morning, when I was sound asleep on Max’s floor.
Meet me at Albert’s at 10. Business meeting.
I found him there, holed up at Albert’s Diner on Jane Street, high
