Object of My Affection by Stephen McCauley

Author:Stephen McCauley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

15

A couple of hours later I felt an intense craving for a drink. A chill had entered the room, making it feel more like a cold-storage closet than ever. Joley was lying under the covers on his narrow cot complaining of a headache from the long drive north.

“You go downstairs and get a drink,” he said, “if you really have to.”

“I don’t have to,” I said as I got dressed. “I want to.”

“You go then, George. Go right ahead.”

“I intend to.”

I went through the sweater display Joley had neatly laid out in one of the bureau drawers and put on a thick Missoni pullover that hung off my body like a nightshirt. I bounced down the four flights of steps to the basement imitating a tap step I’d seen in a Shirley Temple movie. Once I almost knocked down a woman trudging up the staircase wearing a T-shirt with the words ASSUME NOTHING emblazoned across the front.

The disco itself was a long, narrow room without a window or any visible signs of ventilation. The air was stuffy with the smell of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke even though there was only a handful of people in the place. The person who’d decorated the lobby must have had a part in beautifying the basement because all the walls, the carpeting, and even the ceiling were in various garish shades of red. There was a string of blue Christmas lights twinkling against the mirror behind the bar and threads of silver tinsel hanging from the shelves lined with bottles. The ceiling was so low I could effortlessly reach up and touch it.

The crowd, if you could call it that, was an even mixture of men and woman of all ages, some of whom looked as if they were dressed for a loft party in Soho and the rest as if they’d spent the day, if not their entire lives, chopping wood in front of a cabin in the mountains. The men were mostly lined up along the bar holding onto drinks, while the women were seated in captain’s chairs at tiny square tables pressed tightly against an opposite wall.

I recognized our host standing at the far end of the bar with his arm wrapped around another man, swaying from side to side to the music blaring out a speaker hung precariously over his head. He had changed out of his green pants and turtleneck into an identical outfit in black, with the sunburst medallion still banging against his chest.

“Hey, kid,” he called out when he saw me standing in the doorway. “Come over here for a minute. Come over here and meet someone worth meeting.”

I crossed the narrow room, choking briefly on the smoke, and shook his sweaty hand. The top of his head was covered with a greasy, pitch-black toupee that drained the color from his face and gave his complexion a jaundiced shine. “I want you to meet Tommy,” he said in a drunken slur. “He owns this dump with me.

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