The party. People who’d eaten downers were all over the penthouse in various states of crumple and drape, chins slick with drool; the upper-eaters were all over the place, too, but like a band of rhesus monkeys, and they wouldn’t shut up, and were responsible, it turned out, for one hundred percent of the damage done to the apartment’s bathrooms and bedrooms. It was a subset of the speed freaks, a few cranked-up former residents of the Apelles, who decided that the building’s most spirited and dearly departed ritual should be revived without delay. When they threw open the terrace doors, the storm welcomed itself into the living room, snow plastering Franklin the bartender, and a great insane greeting, something between a groan and a whoop, rose from the crowd, each individual reacting uniquely to the blizzard conditions as a result of the aforementioned intemperate approach to the intake of psychopharmaceuticals and alcohol. Pandemonium at the doorway, as if an air lock had been sprung and suddenly everyone was flying out into space. There were tornadoes of snow on the terrace. Thunder rumbling across the shrouded sky. Everyone pitched their drinks into the white void over West End. A pause, and then a man in a tiger costume hoisted a wooden chair aloft and hurled it over the edge. It arced gracefully down until the wind blew it into the building’s façade at the tenth floor, where it caught an outcropping, ricocheted, and went into a tight spin before vanishing into the swirling snow.
Bombs away, baby! cried a white man dressed like Jimi Hendrix. Another chair went over the edge.
It all went—the rest of the chairs, the table. The crowd cheered every time something new disappeared over the parapet. The twin concrete planters, leaden with frozen earth, required teamwork, two guys each, and after they’d wrestled them onto the top of the railing, the crowd counted down from ten and over they went, synchronized sumo divers. On the way down, a percussive crack as one took out a gargoyle on the eighth floor. Holy shit! several someones cried, not unhappily. This marked a turning point in the exercise, the moment at which their exultation in the freedom of flight was eclipsed by the joy of destruction. In a corner of the terrace was a French café table, a little wire job, and some iron chairs. They were passed forward, hand over hand, floating across the top of the crowd like leaves on a river, the revelers closest to the edge simply handing them along to the blizzard. Down, down, down.
Short of Bo’s Finnish smoker, they emptied the terrace of everything that wasn’t bolted down. A couple of guys were itching to rip off the doors or dismantle the crosshatched wooden pergola down at the other end of the terrace, already heaving in the wind. They eyed the smoker. But they held off. Maybe they’d satisfied their urges. Maybe they’d decided to call it quits before they killed someone. Maybe they’d decided that whoever was going to cut Bo and Jane a check in the morning was already in hock for enough as it was. Okay, okay. Enough. We’re not savages, after all.
And it was then that Sid Feeney appeared on the living room threshold, having field-humped Albert Caldwell from the bedroom where he’d found the sick son of a bitch naked on the bed next to me, holding my hand, mere seconds from committing an act of perversion that Feeney had himself repeatedly been subjected to as a child, though he’d never spoken of it to a soul, an act of perversion that had left him with an undetectable internal injury that had led to a lifelong struggle with malfunctioning reproductive equipment, and a surely not unrelated pear-sized prostate—the very prostate that had sent him on a quest for an unoccupied bathroom in which to relieve himself, the urgency of the situation reaching critical levels as he frantically crab-walked door to door, the ticking bomb in his gut clicking ever closer to detonation even as he gobbled up eyefuls of the same orgiastic scenery Vik had, shouting mangled encouragements he’d picked up on visits to brothels in Bangkok and Kyoto, before trying to bulldog his way into the hallway bathroom, which had attracted even more participants since Vik’s visit, Feeney going in low and fast not for fun but for relief, that sweet expulsive release, rebuffed due to space limitations despite his insistence that it’d just take a goddamn minute, his feverish worry swelling as the pressure in his pelvis increased, leading to his decision to utilize the next amphora or Ming vase that swung into view, hell, any old receptacle into which he could coax out the dribble that would, over an agonizing stretch during which it was not uncommon for him to get through a liberal sampling of J. P. Sousa’s greatest hits, reduce the searing pain in his abdomen by increments so subtle as to render the process of urination a kind of cosmic joke. It was in search of such a receptacle that he burst into the bedroom where I was asleep.
I’ve been told that once incarcerated, when time was available at a discount and reflection was encouraged as a means of reducing recidivism, Feeney claimed to have given the matter a great deal of thought and arrived at the conclusion that his actions had been redemptive. He expressed amazement that his own life—an old creased map he’d hardly even bothered to consult anymore—could have surprised him so. By his reckoning, it was his own
