A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [20]
A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi’s and saw linguine with clams. All week long I’ve been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies’ room. It’s a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There’s a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and shuts her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I’ve got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we did before wasn’t really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band we’ve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn’t completely stop at the stations—it just slowed down so people could jump off or on. I go, I want to see Africa! and Lou goes, Maybe we’ll go together, the three of us, and it seems like this really might happen. He goes, The soil in the hills is so fertile it’s red, and I go, My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil, and Jocelyn goes, What about the mosquitoes? and Lou goes, I’ve never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon, and I realize that I’m beginning my adult life right now, on this night.
When the waiter brings my linguine and clams I can’t take one bite. Only Lou eats: an almost-raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. He’s one of those people who never stops moving. Three times strangers come to our table to say hello to Lou, but he doesn’t introduce us. We talk and talk while our food gets cold, and when Lou finishes eating, we leave Vanessi’s.
On Broadway he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people inside the Casbah, the strippers lounging in doorways of the Condor and Big Al’s. Punk rockers rove in laughing, shoving packs. Traffic pushes along Broadway, people honking and waving from their cars like we’re all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like I’m a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.
The door guy at the Mab recognizes Lou and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Mutants, who are playing later on. Inside, Bennie and Scotty and Joel are onstage setting up with Alice. Jocelyn and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Lou’s already introducing himself to the band. Bennie shakes Lou’s hand and goes, It’s an honor, sir.
After the usual sarcastic introduction from Dirk Dirksen, the Flaming Dildos open with “Snake in the Grass.” No one is dancing or even really listening; they’re still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they came for start playing. Normally Jocelyn and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand in back, leaning against a wall with Lou. He’s bought us both gin and tonics. I can’t tell if the Dildos sound good or bad, I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Lou’s face, he’s grinding his teeth.
Marty comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he crouches to replug it with his plumber’s crack displaying. I can’t even look at Bennie, it matters so much.
When they start playing “Do the Math,” Lou yells in my ear, Whose idea was the violin?
I go, Bennie’s.
Kid on bass?
I nod, and Lou watches Bennie for a minute and I watch him too. Lou goes, Not much of a player.
But he’s—, I try to explain. The whole thing is his—
Something gets tossed at the stage that looks like glass, but when it hits Scotty’s face thank