Except then Renee saw that the party wasn’t a one-room get-together, but a full-on convention—at a renovated mid-rise with condos that hadn’t been leased yet, the lobby full of college students and yuppies in designer clothes and even a few people their parents’ age—and she insisted that the least Clay could do was hang around until her other friends showed. There were, after all, date-rape drugs at these events. Did he want her to fall prey?
It was a hell of a phrase, to fall prey. What could Clay do? For all the changes his rehab counselors had invoked in him, they hadn’t removed his masculine desire to protect a damsel in distress.
Once in the building, they were ushered along by a pair of bouncers into a second-floor condo, where someone took their order in the living room and someone equally sketchy took Clay’s money in the kitchen; and in the bedroom a dealer calling himself Barry Right—an obvious play on the soul singer whose basso profundo was something the dealer had in common—looked Renee up and down, as if to beg her to fall prey, then sneered at Clay with his gold fronts and handed them a package concealed in brown sandwich wrap (noticeably less than what was promised, Clay saw, but did not voice) along with a key card to their own fourth-floor condo.
Up there, behind closed doors, Renee revised the script once again. They had failed to find her friends (and Clay should have known better—Renee never referred to people she did lines with as “friends”) and she told him, “You can’t expect me to do this by myself. People who snort alone have problems. They end up in places like you ended up. Pleeeeeease, love.” Clay had resisted. Of course he had. And Renee had risen to the challenge, kissing him, placing both hands inside his shirt, scratching gently. “I’ve been a good girl.”—Her eyes on him with a gleam he had never seen—“I want you to know I’ve been waiting for you… but I don’t want to wait any more.”
So they had snorted, laughing and singing Ramones songs, doubling the speed that Joey Ramone sang them, and they wrestled on a carpet that no one had ever set foot on, the fibers cushy and full of that new-carpet smell. Though he would have denied it at gunpoint, it was Clay’s first time, eighteen and still flying the scarlet V from his mast, and wasn’t it worth anything to rip it down and set fire to it, to know an orgasm that didn’t involve a self-manipulated palm, to understand what the subtle allusions and inside jokes and endless fuss was about? Floating on the jet stream of potent coke and the tactile pleasure of Renee’s pink-areoled breasts in his hands, Clay thought so. At that moment, he would have died for sex and drugs and… that other thing, the most important thing… which he’d be getting to soon enough. “I’m playing Jack White tunes all the way through now,” he bragged, post-coital, as Renee slid her bare foot up and down his calf. “Remember when I had to look down at my fingers? Now I can sing and play—”
The lights went out.
In the next condo, six to eight people offered a collective groan, and Clay listened to their “Ooooooo’s” a moment before chalking it up to faulty electrical, done fast and cheap—maybe that was why a lot of addicts were occupying these units instead of actual residents. Whatever the cause, Clay hardly cared; he was stiff again, on top of Renee, nibbling at her ear. “Hold up, love. Do you hear that?”
“Yes, that would be my tongue in your ear.”
She pushed him off, suddenly alarmed. “Seriously, listen.”
At first he had no idea what she was talking about and told her as much, in a voice that suggested there was no sound and they both knew it, the same way they both knew she had used her pussy to lure him back to her, to fund her habit and make it their habit again, and it wasn’t cool, dodging his desire, when everything inside him—in both of them—was surging.
Except then Clay did hear something. A muted shout—
A full-on scream. Someone was screaming, running up the building’s stairwell.
Their neighbors laughed again, imagining someone with the baddy-trippies. Then the stairwell door slammed open, and the screams arrived on their floor, in the outer hall, blood-curdling, desperate, and Clay cringed back against Renee. “Is that…?” Renee, muffled under his shoulder, didn’t finish.
Clay knew what she was going to say anyway. The screamer was Barry Right. And hearing that deep voice spike up three octaves might have been funny in almost any context. But in a strange, blacked-out building, not so. It killed their high faster than a police raid.
The dealer pounded up the hall, bouncing off walls, twisting knobs, begging for entrance to one of the condos.
“Oh, God.” Renee grabbed at Clay’s face in the dark. “I didn’t lock the door. Did you? Clay, did you lock the door?”
Clay’s pants were still around his ankles, but they slid mercifully off as he leapt up and sprinted through the unfamiliar rooms, colliding hard with a door frame on his way to the front. If Barry Right had chosen their door first, he’d have surely found it open and forced his way inside to make Clay and
