Eleven. Next
Sitting on a giant hill that rose up from the harbour, K Road was the top of the bottom of town. It used to be a high-end shopping district, but as the rest of the world hitched its wagon to the big development boom that followed the Second World War, K Road, in all its self-important isolation, sank the opposite way. Motorway projects bulldozed the area and shoved out its inhabitants, leaving nothing but abandoned storefronts. Then as it always goes in places that get left behind, there came the drug stores, mafia fronts and sex shops. There had been a concerted effort to take back the neighborhood after all the other parts of town got too expensive. But nothing lasts like the red light district.
By day and without the wig, Karma was known solely by the name his mother gave him, Nick. He lived on K Road in an old department store with wooden floors and a thousand doors. I stood lost on the grand staircase spiraling up the building when the door marked with the letter K flew open and Nick strode out. He drew me into his apartment with his arm draped around my shoulder, and a cigarette dangling from his lips.
“What took so long? I’ve been drinking for ages!” Nick shoved a dirty glass of white wine into my hands. “But what does it matter? You’re here now! Let me show you around!”
The place was rather small, but that didn’t stop Nick from pulling out all the stops of a grand tour. “This is the living room,” he said, which we had been standing in ever since he opened the door. Behind the still bouncing cigarette Nick noted how the low beige walls tastefully matched the cigarette burns on faded carpet, and the kitchen swept up into a closet.
“And this is my room,” Nick said as the door thumped against the foot of the bed. The room was all bed and dresser – which not a bad allegory for Nick’s life at large. He was either fabulous or fast asleep and never in between.
“I can’t wait for tonight,” he said, plopping down onto the ground and reaching for a magazine. After a few moments of flipping he gasped and flipped the page. “Class A have come out with new stuff. We have to try it.”
“What’s that?”
“Legal narcotics.” Nick sucked at a cigarette. “You get them at dairies. Next to the milk.” Then it was as if the channel in his head changed again. “Now there’s a premiere tonight and we have tickets. You are going to look fabulous.”
Nick opened a giant white pad and thumbed through loose sheets until his eyes doubled in size. He grabbed at the paper and held it to my face. “It’s perfect!” Nick spun towards the closet. He turned back on his heel, a giant pipe clenched between his teeth.
Piles of clothes sprouted up in the hallway and spilled out from the closets in towering heaps as Nick fussed around the edges, pulling this and straightening that, bobby pins pointing outwards from his lips, one shoulder forever shaking in unbroken time with his hips.
He threw open the hallway closet and mounds of tulle and lace exploded forth like hungry tongues. There were corsets in black, and silver, and mauve, with plastic lining and lace-up backs, or fastenings, or spaghetti straps, tossed in a pile over stockings with runs and fishnets.
Given the humble size of the place, a striking amount of things got lost. A naked mannequin was on the floor, the cords of multiple straighteners wrapped around a nearby but dismembered arm.
“Chlamydia, you selfish vixen!” Nick roared. “If you do that one more time you get the closet.” The channel in his head changed again. “We are going to have so much fun tonight,” he promised.
To be drawn into Nick’s world was like being sucked into the eye of a hurricane. The only hope you could have was to hold still, shut your eyes, let him do what he wanted and pray you were still alive at the end.
In the mirror it was like staring into the eyes of a stranger, but I thought, what the hell. Nick turned lazily between drags from his cigarette and gasped. “You look like an angel!” He ran for my camera.
“There’s not very much light,” I insisted. Nothing more than formless shapes in a clouded haze. Outside with the unsteady light from one blank white bulb, he peered through the lens with one eye, awkwardly jamming the other shut, sticking encrusted silver eye shadow to mascara and lashes. A manicured finger decisively slid across the camera, and the shutter snapped shut.
There were deep swigs of beer and deep breaths of air as we savored the quiet before the long night spell. Then we clicked our heels out the back door and headed towards K Road, where a shop glowed orange on the corner.
“Karma Chaos!” The clerk insisted when Nick pushed open the metal door.
“Do you have any of the new stuff?” Nick asked.
I stared at the endless rows of packets and plastic bottles under the glass counter.
“How about this one?” The clerk slid out a lime green pack. “It’s our bestseller.”
“I want the new one,” Nick said. “And don’t try to sell me any different.”
“You sure you don’t want to try these?” Nick’s lids grew heavy with intolerance as the clerk held up a bottle. “Twice the pills and half the price.”
Nick waved them away. “Those make me vomit.”
I gazed around the shop in shock. “How long has this been around?”
The clerk didn’t seem to understand my surprise. He scrunched up his nose. “A few years?”
“Diamonds and Chargers and Ice, oh my!” I held up the package. On the back the package said Extreme twisted nights. Drink fruit juice. “These are like Freedom?”
The clerk gave a short laugh. “I wouldn’t exactly go that far.”
I flicked a packet. “What do they do?”
“Don’t worry.” Nick fanned himself with his twenty. “The whole road will be on them.”
A giant broken clock that towered over the street glowed even though it had lost the time. Fire engine screams cut through the air and the tar sizzled with the enamel glaze of rain.
As we approached the first bar I felt a steady uncertainty – like a nervous itch ready to leap into a sprint.
“Those pills we took,” I began, rolling my shoulder to shake the effect off. “What are they supposed to do exactly?”
“Who knows?” Nick laughed. “That’s part of the fun.”
“You don’t have a favorite?”
“It’s different.” Nick shrugged. “That’s all that matters.”
Once the sun set, a new world slunk out of the buildings. Poets and do-nothings smoked with anarchists and trannies. Everyone came. Here the ground was level again – on K Road everyone was the same.
Black coats and cowboy hats swigged beer from the awnings that jutted over the rogue cabs that crawled on the pavement. A pair of baby-faced cops stood on the corner, looking lost and out of place.
Nick’s striding figure carved through the chilled air, his collared shirt billowing in the breeze. “Those incompetent cops,” Nick snorted. “They never spend their time doing anything important.” Then the channel changed again.
A wave warbled through my body. “What’s the plan?”
Nick was swaying to the guitarist in the street. “Who knows? Go there, get drunk, and see what happens.”
We headed for the churning carousel that exploded, sucked and grabbed at every creature that passed by the first bar. Nick kissed and grabbed at the air and introduced me with a wave as his American. A glistening set of teeth laughed like we were old friends and reached in for all the pleasantries of a hug with none of the contact. “A pleasure, darling!”
“I like your dress,” I remarked. “It’s very postmodern.”
“Never heard of it!” she yelled over the music. “But I got this at the mall!”
It took about an hour to make it to the back, but once we were there Nick was ready. He planted himself in the courtyard on a white plastic chair.
“At last,” he affirmed between strikes of the lighter. “I have everything I need.” His trusted supplies – a tall golden drink and a steady stream of smoking things – were stocked on his left. He wouldn
’t move for hours.
“I cut my hand the other night.” Nick lifted his palm to reveal a red ribbon line. “The bar girl kept saying, ‘Oh my God, do you need to go to the hospital?’” He shook his head. “I told her, honey – if I slit my throat I’d still be on K Road.”
I nodded at a gorilla as nuns in fishnets skipped past. And I had become some kind of American princess. One word out my mouth and everyone wanted to touch my hair and hear what I had to say. At one point I found another American and had been talking for only a minute when I noticed two boys I had never seen before staring.
“It’s like being inside a television show,” one said to the other in a reverent hush.
“You’re so far from home,” the other said cautiously. “Do you miss it?”
“Hell no!” I cried. “This place is amazing.”
The boy reacted as if she had been slapped. “This old thing? Compared to New York?” I nodded, adding that New York can be a very gray place.
“I want to be in New York!” The first cried. “Where they make all the movies!”
I let out a gasp. Their home was so beautiful... but no one could see.
I wanted to howl at them, "You fools! The people in New York would give ANYTHING to live like you are now. Do not be loathe to leave the paradise you have. And pry all those filters off your eyes, that tell you that this place is boring or dull or stupid or ugly or not special." But it was not enough. There was something in New York that called to them.
“Anything is possible in America, eh?” his friend purred. “It’s pretty big.”
America! To them the word was magic. But I knew the secret of their heavens. I had seen the bad side of the stars. At its worst, New York is THE worst, I tried to tell them. New York with all its speed and crowds – people banging up against one another in fantastic amounts, all of them directionless, harried and lost. But I was the only one who had been there. To them the city was a beautiful dream. I was the only one could see.
“What do you do in New York?” I admitted, mostly read. His face fell. “The last thing I read was probably in grade school.”
Such things used to appall me. But now it seemed like it didn’t really matter. This was so much better than a place where people recited Hemingway to each other. All that energy I had saved for crying over the Romantics was now pumped into the world, the NOW. There were no divisions here, only THE NIGHT! “How is your night?”
It was as if K Road, this backwards little nowhere, was the only place that really got it. The crowd, the grins, the gods and sinners, the tortured visions of philosopher kings… I felt something undeniable in the whole thing. It was as if everyone had just turned to one another and said, “You know, competition isn’t going to lead us to salvation.” And so life was no longer about staying in your one box room in a stacked box building within the greater city box. We had all found a better game.
We bantered and caused nonsense and spun our mythologies in the shadows, and out from the morass seemed to appear a common thread, as if from all the separate weaving of our tales there came a fabric, sinuous as silk, which threaded us together under the fallen night sky.
But Jack, where was Jack… the last few days had been the longest stretch that I had gone without seeing him since we met.
Outside people were spilling everywhere. Glittered faces towered in crowns exploding with feathers and golden beads. A cluster of kings in deep purple robes shifted and swayed. The streets were filled with chaos and boxes and coins and blood and strangers becoming best friends and then fading away again. Anarchists mingled with poets, debutantes and drag queens. Nobodies were celebrities and celebrities were nobodies. Everyone stayed on the move.
I was about to head back inside when a familiar name boomed from the heavens.
“Jack Anodyne!” Morgan swayed on the rooftops. “I thought that was you!”
“Throw down your bottle!” Jack called from the ground. Just like that, there he was again.
Morgan shook his head, swinging his dreadlocks under a cowboy hat. “Come up for a drink!”
Jack found a ladder and we climbed to the torn velvet couch on the awning that came out just under the windows of an apartment. I had a beer, Jack had a cigarette. We took a seat, touched beer to cigarette and switched.
“This is the way to be out here,” Jack insisted. “Not crawling with cabs all over the pavement.” I gazed up in rapture at wide open blackness and smiled at the dusty clouds of stars spread across the sky. The stars had come back! Where I once saw only constellations, few and far between, keeping to themselves in a large and empty black sky, there were now smears of stars in an endless game of play.
“Why is the world such a lonely place on the other side?” I asked Orion as he did cartwheels in the sky.
“It’s lonely in America?” Jack cried.
“Something makes everyone lonely,” I insisted. “All together and all at once.”
There we were, two darkened figures, burning embers the only source of light. Jack stood in the blackness and whipping wind, striking a flint under creased eyes. The burning embers shone across his dark silhouette. The sky slowly turned back to that sweet light blue as we sat folded on the couch, heads leaning, watching light break across the water.
This is what it feels like to reach the center of the world, I thought as we stared out at the fading night. And know you have to come back out again.
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