The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [7]
Bobby looked around, saw, as his eyes adjusted to the light, what was happening.
They were kids. The whole fucking crowd. Not one of the customers clamoring for drinks over the upstairs bar looked to be over seventeen. They were everywhere: chunky girls with teased hair wearing camisoles, skinny boys with baggy jeans and sneakers that glowed in the dark — teenagers, shirtless, dressed up, dressed down, in makeup, wearing wigs, sunglasses, drag, full nightclub battledress — and they were running wild. In pairs, in packs, eyes lit with X, with booze, with animal tranquilizers, ketamine, Mom's pilfered Valiums, ephedrine, mushrooms and God knows what else. Every one of these little bastards was a potentially ticking time bomb. At the small bar, they signaled noisily for Long Island Iced Teas, Kamikazes, tequila shooters, Lite beers and rum and cokes. Bobby could scarcely believe it.
"You gotta do something about this," said Del, in despair. "And look . . ." he added, "check this out." He drew Bobby over to the booths running along the mezzanine wall and yanked back a curtain to reveal a short blond girl, legs in the air on the middle of a dinner table, her drunken boyfriend in a warm-up jacket grunting over her, his pants down around his ankles. Another boy sat slumped in a chair by her head, unconscious, his mouth open, snoring. The girl looked right up at Bobby with uninflected, porcine little eyes. She was chewing gum.
"They're going at it everywhere," said Del, disgustedly. "I found two in the air-conditioning room before. More in the dry goods area. They're fucking all over the place like little bunnies. Can you believe this shit?"
A young girl in a brassiere and blue jeans hurried past them, fell to her knees and vomited into the base of a potted palm. "Remind me to never have kids," said Del.
"You have kids, don't you?" said Bobby, reaching for his radio.
"Yeah . . . well, remind me to not let them grow any more."
Bobby trotted to the lobby, calling into his radio for Tiny Lopez on the street security detail.
"Tiny! . . . What's your twenty?"
"I ousside, man. Whassup?" said Tiny, a three-hundred-eighty-pounder whom Bobby had placed out front for crowd control.
"We're shutting it down. Tell the friskers. I'll let them know at the desk," said Bobby. He squeezed past a long line of kids who were ascending the main staircase, signaled the downstairs bartenders that something was up, drawing a finger across his throat to give them the sign to stop serving. The lobby was packed. It took him two solid minutes to make it the last few yards to the front desk, where Frank, a silver-haired charity-case pal of Eddie's, was stamping hands, standing next to two young promoters in shiny sharkskin suits. Bobby shouted to the security men at the door to close it down, alerted Tiny to what was going on over the radio, and had the two friskers move together to block off access at the choke point.
"Shut the doors," he said, "Nobody gets in."
One of the promoters was in green sharkskin, the other, orange. Green sharkskin looked up. "What the fuck, man?" he said. "What are you doing?"
Bobby pushed through the crowd of bodies until he towered over him.
"That's it. Show's over," he said. "I'm shutting it down."
"What?" exclaimed orange suit.
"You heard me," said Bobby, struggling to keep his voice under control. "Frankie," he said, "who's been carding these people?"
Frank nodded at the two promoters, neither of whom looked to be of age themselves. "Eddie said they was in charge of the door. They . . . they said that Eddie said it was okay."
"What the fuck you think you're doing here?" Bobby demanded of green suit — clearly the alpha male of the two. He saw right away that the kid was going to get up in his face. Orange suit moved closer, shoulders back, trying to look bigger than he was. Bobby outweighed both of them together.
"Whass goin' on?" said orange suit in a whiny voice. "Why we stopping?"
"You costin' us money, bro'," protested green suit.
Bobby slapped him across the face