Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [45]
But it’s the truth, he thinks. Strip clubs are interesting for about five minutes. After that, they’re about as erotic as wallpaper. Besides which, the music is terrible and the food is worse. You’d have to be basically mentally ill to eat in a strip club anyway, “naked asses” and “buffet line” being two phrases that should never, ever, be matched in the same sentence. Guys who are coming off a prison hunger strike won’t eat at a strip club unless they’re actually brain-damaged.
Speaking of which, Hang Twelve had eaten like a starved baboon when they took him to Silver Dan’s for his birthday. The kid scarfed the buffet like a vacuum cleaner, from one end of the table to the other.
“It’s amazing,” said High Tide, no stranger to the sin of gluttony himself, watching him. “It’s almost admirable, in a disgusting kind of way.”
“I feel like I’m watching something on the Nature Channel,” Dave said as Hang stacked a handful of luncheon meats on a Kaiser roll, spread a huge glob of mayonnaise over the meat, and started to eat with one hand while dipping a spear of broccoli into a tub of onion dip with the other.
“Animal Planet?” Tide asked.
“Yeah.”
“At least he’s eating his vegetables,” Johnny said. “That’s good.”
“Yeah?” Dave asked. “I wonder if he saw the guy that just had his hand on his package get to the broccoli first.”
“Over the jeans or under?” Johnny asked.
“Under.”
“God.” Then Johnny said, “He’s going for the shrimp, guys. Guys, he’s going for the shrimp.”
“I’ll just dial 9-1-1 now,” Boone said. “That extra second could save his life.”
Hang came back to the table and set the heaping plate of food down. His goatee was festooned with crumbs, mayonnaise, onion dip, and some substance that nobody even wanted to try to identify. “Shrimp, anybody?”
They all passed. Hang consumed a couple of dozen shrimp, two huge sandwiches, some unidentifiable hors d’oeuvres that nobody even bothered to make the obvious pun about, twenty miniature pigs in a blanket (ditto), a pile of cottage fries, three helpings of Silver Dan’s “pasta medley,” and some strawberry Jell-O with grapes (and God knows what else) floating around in it.
Then he wiped his chin and said, “I’m going back.”
“Go for it,” Boone said. “It’s your birthday.”
“His last,” Johnny said as they watched Hang work his way down the table again like a piece of machinery on a mass-production line.
“Over/under on the number of hairs he’s swallowed?” Dave asked.
“Scalp or pubic?” asked Johnny.
“Forget it,” Dave said.
Hang came back to the table with a plate of food that would have dismayed a Roman orgiast. “Good thing I went back,” he said. “They put out fresh cheese.”
Boone looked at the fresh cheese. It was sweating.
“I need a little air,” he said.
But he hung in, staring at Hang Twelve with a mixture of awe and horror. The kid never came up to breathe; he just kept robotically shoveling food into his mouth as his eyes never left the stage. Hang’s wholehearted devotion to free food and naked women was almost touching in its religiosity.
“We could get him a lap dance,” Dave suggested.
“Could kill him,” Tide said.
“But quickly,” Johnny said.
But none of the girls—any one of whom would have cheerfully ground her ass on Adolf Eichmann’s crotch for twenty bucks—would go anywhere near Hang’s lap.
“He’s going to puke,” Tawny said.
“Puke?” Heather said. “He’s going to erupt.”
“Do you know there’s a whole magazine devoted to that?” Dave said. “People who vomit to express their love? It’s a whatchamacallit.…”
“Mental illness,” Boone said.
“Fetish,” Johnny said. “And, Dave? Shut up.”
“I’m not going to puke,” Hang said through a mouthful of penne carbonara.
“What did he say?” Johnny asked.
“He said he’s not going to puke,” Boone said.
“The fuck he isn’t,” said a guy from the next table.
Tide instantly took up for Hang. “The fuck he is.”
“Here we go,” Boone said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Dave. “It’s on.”
Yeah, it was. Ten minutes later, The Dawn Patrol (sans Sunny, who had adamantly refused to come and bought Hang an ice-cream cake instead) had five