short fiction, five

A gogo dances all night and she’s tired but pushing up through the tired is excitement about what comes next. Webster Hall just closed so she’s waiting in the room next to the stage in the basement with the burlesque girls and the other gogos and the photogs and the other usual after-hours people and they’re drinking the bottle the owner brought back to them and posing for photos and laughing and screaming. She stays a little detached from it, tries to act too tired to join them when they will eventually all go to Vesalka for breakfast. She has other plans. She won’t be going to breakfast. She’s the one a little too involved in whoever she’s texting, whose foot is tapping, who keeps checking to see where the DJ is with the money, who’s getting impatient. Eventually he sweeps into the room with Morissey playing in his head, wearing his boots and his pompadour, all grand gestures and dance moves and jokes, and she’s on her feet instantly. She signs the paper he puts in front of her and takes the envelope with the name her best friend made up for a photographer at Fashion Week two years ago written on it. She kisses everyone and makes excuses for leaving. “I have a paper due Monday. You know I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I just can’t be spending this money on breakfast right now.” She’s running up the stairs in her six inch black patent leather pumps, she’s outside hailing a cab, she’s saying something witty to the bouncer who complimented her outfit because her trench coat’s blown open and under it she’s still in the black bra and panties, thigh high fishnets, and hot pink suspenders she worked in.
“The Bowery and Delancey” and the cab pulls away. An old friend’s music video plays on the screen in the backseat and her phone is vibrating with texts from people she didn’t say goodbye to back at Webster. She shakes her head just slightly and silences both and watches 3rd turn into the Bowery. As she crosses Houston a smile forms in the pit of her stomach and pushes up her throat and by the time she’s sliding a credit card under the screen it’s splayed across her face.
She calls him as she walks the half block back up Delancey to Elisabeth and he meets her at the door of his building with a partially filled trash bag in his hand. He tosses it to the curb and doesn’t look at her and she flicks her cigarette butt and walks into the building behind him. They don’t acknowledge each other as they climb the three flights of stairs to his apartment. She follows him into his bedroom and sits on the edge of his bed and her feet dangle about a foot off the floor. He sits in front of his computer and pulls various tools to him from around the desk.
“I just love how it smells in here. I’ll never get over it.”
He looks over his shoulder at her and smiles and the smile spreads from her spine around each rib and warms her insides.
“One or two, Monkey?”
“Oh, two. There was a whole group of Jersey guys downstairs tonight and they were awful.”
She hangs her coat and purse on the post at the foot of his bed and watches the tv hung on the wall above his head.
“Ugh. I don’t know why they let those guys in.”
He’s emptying two little wax paper packets into the lid of a Pellegrino bottle.
“Right?? They get so grabby when they’re wasted and they’re always wasted.”
She lies back on his bed and plays with her phone.


“Ready, little monkey?”
He pushes himself up, grabbing the hypodermic from where it had been cooling on the windowsill. She jumps off the bed and follows him through the living room. In the harsh bathroom light she holds her arms out for his inspection. He taps the right one and hands her the strip of rubber.
“You dance like this? You should at least put some makeup on these or something.”
She’s wrapping and tightening the rubber around her bicep with her left hand.
“I know. It’s dark in there so it’s not incredibly noticeable. I am thinking about getting some long gloves though.”
She watches him sink the needle into her purple vein and pulls off the rubber when he tells her to. She makes it a few steps out of the bathroom before she sinks down into a couch and all the air pushes out of her. He laughs and keeps walking into his room.


She’s in his bed the next day, staring at the bookshelf at the foot of his bed, and he’s lying next to her, staring across her nearly-naked body at the tv on the wall. She’s talking, slowly, each of her words separated by long spaces which make them sound like distinct sounds dripping into his mind, about how they’ll be friends even after the drugs, when they have real lives. She’s forgotten that this became his real life when he was her age, that ten years have passed like this for him, that she’s the only new part. He rubs his head against her shoulder.


That night her phone wakes her around 2. Everyone is out! At TriGrand! At Don Hills! At the new Saturday night at Savalas! Where is she?!? She closes her phone and laughs softly at the answer to that question. He’s at his computer again, his headphones around his shoulders playing one song while the computer speakers play another. He hears that she’s awake and asks if she’s hungry. He passes back to her a foil take-out box from MacBar. She sits up and has a few bites of carbonara mac and cheese.
“I think I’ll take three in the next one.”
“No way. You just slept three hours on two.”
“Yeah but I want to feel it hitting before it knocks me out. I want it to hit me harder.”
“two and a half.”
“ok…”
He loads the needle and doesn’t lead her into the bathroom when it’s ready. She gives him her arm and when he pushes into her vein he tells her that most junkies are just trying to stay a little high all the time, but that she scares him because she’s that rare kind that’s really chasing something. He pulls the needle out and releases the rubber for her and turns back to his computer.
She smiles at what he said, and thinks that she should tell him, and she falls back into the bed, and keeps falling through the white down comforter, through the padded mattress, and the warmth and the softness get warmer and softer and the light is sliding over her skin and she’s still smiling at his warning. Smiling and sinking.