Chapter 10
10
All week, I dreaded the club excursion. I reminded myself that varied experiences would enrich my character, making me a more appealing prospect to the plane who’d turn out to be my soulmate. I also held a grudging curiosity toward San Francisco’s nightlife scene. The club was located in the SoMa neighborhood, a terrain of old warehouses that had undergone a rebranding effort in recent years. Now condo buildings had been erected, along with hip lunch restaurants catering to the tech workers whose companies were headquartered downtown. I knew this from internet research, as I’d never visited SoMa myself, preferring to stick to my well-worn channel along the city’s western flank.
Friday night, I stood before my mirrored closet door, auditioning various garments and settling on a flimsy flower-patterned dress I’d bought at H&M years ago, which might in fact have been a long shirt. Beneath the dress, I wore a pair of black leggings my mom had sent from her defect pile. They were fine, aside from a large hole in the crotch, which would provide pleasant ventilation. Over it all, I draped my men’s camel coat from Goodwill. From my closet I unearthed the gold-sequined clutch I’d purchased on my shopping trip with Karina, glad to finally have an occasion to use the stupid thing. Into the clutch I tucked my ID, my debit card, the tube of lipstick from my mini-makeover at Sephora, and of course my chunk of 737, which I never left home without.
Karina had said she and Anthony would pick me up “around nine,” and at precisely 9:00 p.m. I went outside to await the Honda’s arrival. I feared Karina might want a tour of my cube, which I was unwilling to provide. By waiting outside, I could take control of the situation, steering us into the car and accepting no further delay to our journey to the club. With the sun’s departure, the temperature had plummeted, and the avenues were bathed in fog. I heard the howl of a plane above me, his form hidden behind dense clouds. I checked my flight-tracking app, which revealed the plane was a 787 Dreamliner inbound from Taipei to SFO. I wished I could see the handsome fellow rather than only hearing his call, which seemed infused with melancholy, as though he, too, cursed the clouds that separated us.
After twenty minutes, the Honda pulled up, with Anthony driving. Karina hopped out, wearing a tight sequined dress whose hemline hit just below her labia. A layer of cosmetic sparkles covered her skin, so that in the salty streetlamps, she glimmered like a healthy trout. She threw her arms around me.
“Yay! I’m so glad you’re coming!” she said.
At first, I thought she’d gotten out of the car to properly greet me, but then I recalled the Honda had only two doors. Karina pulled the lever that moved her seat up, and I wedged myself in the back. She returned the passenger seat to its original position, entombing me snugly.
“Sup, Lindy,” Anthony said, turning down the music, which featured heavily thumping bass. The car’s interior was thick with smoke. “Everyone strapped in?” he said in a charmingly maternal way, and when we confirmed we were, he drove west, toward the Great Highway, and then north along the coastline. Karina relit their cannabis cigar and handed it to me. I inhaled shallowly, then passed it to Anthony, who was still attempting conversation in spite of the wind whipping through the open windows and the ponderous bass line of the music he’d turned back to full volume.
“These guys are sick,” he said. “You heard of them, Lindy?”
I gathered this was the same musical act that would play at the club tonight. Karina had sent me a link to their SoundCloud, but I hadn’t clicked it. “No,” I yelled. “I don’t know much about music.”
“What?”
“She doesn’t like music,” Karina said.
“Yes, I do,” I said, though I wasn’t sure this was true. I rarely listened to music deliberately. Songs would lodge in my brain after I’d heard them at Safeway or from the device of a troublemaker on the bus, but I’d resent their presence, as they’d tunneled into my ears without my consent. All I cared to listen to was the siren call of a turbojet engine.
From the Great Highway, we turned onto Lincoln and zipped along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park, then continued east on Oak Street with its stately Victorians, past Market to Folsom Street and the warehouses of SoMa. I overheard snippets of a story Anthony was telling Karina about his shift that day at the pizza place. A teenager attempted to steal a five-dollar bill from the tip jar, but Anthony told him to put it back, and the boy obeyed. I sensed Anthony hoped to convey a message through this story, something about himself as a masculine figure whose authority was respected by comparatively powerless strangers. “Good job, baby,” Karina said, sounding sincere.
Anthony found a parking spot on Howard, a dark stretch of concrete that sparkled with the shattered glass of cars that had dared to park there before. Karina sprung me from my tomb, and I joined them at the trunk, which was full of boxes I assumed held the infamous T-shirts.
“My buddy’s the promoter, so he lets me sell here even though it’s not technically allowed,” Anthony told me. Then he paused, his eyes twinkling, as if only now fully appreciating my presence. “What’s good, Lindy? Long time no see.” He drew me in for a hug. I smelled his cologne and beneath it, the scent of his body, a pleasant mingling of sweat and bacteria.
We each took a box and began walking to the club, Anthony a few steps ahead of me and Karina.
“The promoter’s kind of a creep,” Karina told me.
“Ryan?” Anthony said. “No way. He’s solid.”
“He was a dick to Judy when they dated.”
“That was high school, babe. A decade ago.”
Karina and I exchanged a private glance. She must have remembered her resolution not to kill his vibe. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s cool he’s letting you sell shirts here.”
The club loomed ahead, a concrete box along whose side stretched a line of people, most of them inadequately dressed for the brisk evening. Luckily, we didn’t have to join those shivering commoners. Anthony led us to the head of the line, where he and the bouncer bumped fists conspiratorially. Inside, the space was dark and packed with bodies. Music blared, and in the sensory chaos I had the impression of sound adding density to the air. We pushed through a throng of men in polo shirts and women in short tubular dresses similar to Karina’s.
After journeying through several rooms, all flashing with multicolored lights, we arrived at a ledge cut into the side of one of the dance floors, onto which Anthony began laying stacks of T-shirts. Karina held up a neon-green shirt, shouting, “We’ve got T-shirts! New designs! Anthony Gutierrez originals!” She shimmied around like a game show model. On the front of the shirt was a depiction of Jesus riding a skateboard. In a curvy, hippie font, letters proclaimed, RIGHTEOUS DUDE . I recalled the crucifix hanging above Celia’s couch and wondered if Anthony shared his mother’s religiosity.
A crowd gathered at the ledge. It seemed Anthony had a following. He high-fived two men wearing shirts I gathered were also Anthony’s designs, one neon pink with psychedelic frogs, the other neon yellow with a cartoon pickle wearing a backward hat. Karina began conversing with a petite woman whose hair was slicked into a high ponytail.
I set down my box, though I was reluctant to relinquish the prop that had given me a sense of purpose. As long as I held it, I could pretend I was a worker hired to carry boxes, rather than someone who fancied herself a clubgoer. My outfit was all wrong, every inch of my skin covered by the leggings, boots, shirt, and giant coat. Karina had forgotten me, immersed in conversation with the ponytailed woman, so I went off to find the coat check, where I surrendered my outer garment. Without its carapace, I felt exposed, but less conspicuous. I sat on an open patch of bench off the main dance floor, wishing I had a drink but too timid to approach the crowded bar. I opened my flight-tracking app and zoomed out to view the map of the entire United States. I was comforted by the teeming nest of yellow icons, each representing a plane currently in flight.
“What are you doing?” Karina stood before me. “Let’s dance.”
“What about the shirts?”
“Anthony’s got it handled.”
She grasped my hands and pulled me onto the dance floor. I allowed myself to be swept along. I’d always avoided scenarios that involved dancing, but Karina’s enthusiasm was infectious, and once I was surrounded by similarly enthused clubgoers, I found myself moving my body, and enjoying it. The DJ was playing the same type of music from the car—thumping bass that paused occasionally while a woman wailed, her voice hanging in the air for a moment before the bass thumped again. I mimicked Karina’s movements. Periodically a man approached her from behind, and she ground her ass against his crotch for a brief interval before politely shrugging him off. A different fellow attempted a similar maneuver with me, but despite my attempts to move my body sinuously against him, the effect must have been unpleasant, as I soon felt him depart.
After a few songs, Karina shouted that she needed a drink, and did I want anything. I requested a gin and tonic, the only cocktail whose name I recalled in the moment. Karina slithered from the dance floor. In her absence, my self-consciousness descended. I looked at the enraptured faces of the clubgoers and felt embarrassed for us all. I sought refuge on the bench, figuring I should remain in the room so Karina could find me, by the same protocol one was urged to follow if they’d survived a plane crash and been stranded on a mountain. Better to stay in one place than to wander and risk never being found.
Time passed, and my thirst increased. I wondered what was taking Karina so long. I approached the threshold of the room with the T-shirt ledge and saw Karina, drinkless, talking to Anthony with rapid hand gestures. Nearby stood several young women in skater pants and crop tops. One of them seemed familiar, and as I observed her face in the strobe light, I recalled its inclusion on Karina’s board, with the eyes x-ed out. So this was Beatrice, with whom Karina suspected Anthony was cheating on her, emotionally if not physically. I felt ill-equipped to render assistance in this fraught situation, recalling my clumsy attempt to intervene on Karina’s behalf at the VBB, so I went to the bar, where I purchased a gin and tonic from an unsettlingly attractive female bartender. It cost fourteen dollars and was served in a ribbed plastic cup like the kind they have at the dentist’s office. I returned to my bench and sipped my drink through a tiny black straw. Soon I’d consumed all the liquid, and I was crunching ice between my molars when a male form sat beside me and slung an arm across my shoulders.
“Linda,” a voice spoke directly into my ear, and I turned to discover the voice belonged to Dave Kinney.
I would not have recognized him in the crowd, so distant were we from the context in which we’d first met. He was dressed in what I imagined was his weekend attire, a pale blue button-down shirt with little sailboats on it, unbuttoned over a white undershirt, which had a brown stain dribbled down its front. His glasses were gone, giving his face an obscenely naked look. I saw he was intoxicated, his eyelids heavy, his lips curving in a dumb smile. Though his clothing was youthful, he struck me as older than he’d seemed when I met with him in the conference room, perhaps due to the contrast he presented with the club’s other patrons. Admittedly we’d both aged several weeks since we last saw each other.
“Crazy running into you here,” he said. His arm remained around my shoulders, and though I wished to escape its weight, I didn’t know how to accomplish this without offending him. I could feel his armpit sweat seeping into the thin cloth of my dress.
“Do you come here a lot?” I asked.
Dave gazed at the crowd. He didn’t seem to have heard me. “I hope you’re making the most of your youth,” he said.
“I’m thirty.”
“Thirty! You’re a baby.”
He closed his eyes, a pained expression on his face.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Never been better. Never, ever.” He leaned close to me. “We pregamed with scotch at the Fairmont,” he whispered. “Plus a little coke and some ketamine, which was a new one for me.”
“Who are you here with?”
“No one, anymore. I came with a friend, but he left with some girl. I’ve been abandoned! Can you believe it?”
I checked my phone. It was ten forty-five. Only an hour had passed since our arrival, though it seemed a flaccid lifetime.
“Are you having a good time?” Dave asked me.
“Not really.”
“Me, either! I fucking hate clubs.” We watched people dance. The crowd had grown denser, bodies appearing to move as a single organism. I wanted to go see how Karina was doing, but I remained pinned beneath Dave’s biceps. I prayed she’d remember my existence and rescue me. She would know how to extract me from the situation without incurring professional damage. But I was also afraid for Karina to see Dave in this state. He seemed to be having a personal crisis, and I wanted to protect him, though in an impersonal way, as I would wish to spare anyone from humiliation.
“If you could do anything in the world right now,” Dave said, “what would you do?”
“I’d take a flight,” I said without hesitation.
He laughed. “That’s fucking brilliant. I’m game. Where should we go?”
I hadn’t expected this. I wasn’t sure he was serious, and knew what I said next would be critical. As he was presumably normal, Dave would be drawn to the prospect of a destination, rather than the flight itself. At this hour, our options were limited. I remembered there was a nightly red-eye to Houston, departing at 11:55 p.m. If we left now, we might make it.
“Houston?” I said.
“Hmm. I was thinking Paris, but Houston works. I’ve never been. Let’s do it!”
I was stunned. “Are you sure?”
He was already standing. At last, I was freed from his arm. “Yeah, fuck it. Why not?” He extended his hand, just as he’d done a few weeks ago at the office. “It’s on me, Linda.”
I knew better than to question a deal, especially one that had been engineered by the universe. I’d glued Dave’s image to my vision board, and less than a week later he’d manifested at the club, presenting me with an opportunity to fly for free. I fetched my coat and led us out the back exit, avoiding the T-shirt ledge. Once we were safely in an Uber bound for SFO, I remembered how invested Karina had been in my presence at the club. I’d abandoned her, just as Dave’s friend had done to him. I texted Karina, Left with a hot guy , and tucked my phone into my clutch, fearful to see her response. I brought out the chunk of 737 and held it in my fist, bringing its edge to my lips. Nothing else mattered now. I had a flight to catch.