Vancouver Noir by Sam Wiebe

Author:Sam Wiebe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Landecker Party

by Nathan Ripley

Mount Pleasant

They’d opened another American Apparel on this side of the bridge, this one a fifteen-minute walk away from our place. Glass, plastic, primary colors, sex as branded by a Montreal megalomaniac pervert who’d drive his own business into the ground in just a few more years. I bought a gray T-shirt from a girl named Crissie who I’d seen last Tuesday at Rivko’s doo-wop night at Shine, and around the city for the last few months, roughly since the start of the 2007 school year.

“You hear about the Landecker party?” I asked her while shaking my head no to the plastic bag she was offering.

“Who’s Landecker?”

“It’s a booze, not a very good one. It sells okay back east, and now they’re trying to make an impact out here, I guess. Anyway, Landecker threw us a sponsorship—my friend Mark and I do shows—for a house party. Free drinks. It’s our place, 16th and Oak-ish. I can write down the address if you want to come. Friends are cool too. Not many, but feel free.”

“Cool,” she said. Crissie was nineteen, tops, about four years between us. “Getting booze to sponsor your party is like, it’s like—getting food to sponsor your dinner, or something. Sorry, that’s lame.”

“I’ve been trying to make the same kind of joke for the last week and I still can’t get it to work.”

* * *

Mark and Esther were still playing around when I got back, mixing some brutal new-country Tim McGraw shit with a pretty great house track, creating a sickening aural soup that made them giggle and made me want to pour a warm Coke onto Mark’s PowerBook. We were on the lower floor of a shitty two-level, and Mark and Esther had the music cranked already, hours before anyone was due here.

The upstairs neighbor had been gone all week, his Jetta missing from its usual parking spot. Nice dude, a kid from Taiwan who near as we could tell was AWOL from his Sauder School of Business program and waiting for his parents to find out and haul him back home. We were surprised he was living in this place, one of the last true dumps on the block, instead of one of the endless condo buildings, only about half of which were tarped and scaffolded up for leaking roof repairs. He’d introduced himself to us when he moved in over a year ago, told us his name was Phil, waved off our occasional invitations to driveway beers, but clearly did some extremely committed partying of his own. In hangover he metamorphosed into a disapproving phantom, leaving us imploring Post-its about needing sleep. He’d knock on the door and run back upstairs, leaving notes on our door that said things like, Pls turn down your Call of Duty. But I’d seen Phil at an after-hours in the West End no less than three times in the past month, a booze-free and drug-heavy space where Mark and I netted five hundred dollars to split for playing from two to seven.

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