AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 23

It was a small Friday night party at The Warehouse; no more than 250 invitations went out, easily five times that number of genuine Somebodies showed up.  There was simply not enough space for everyone who deserved to be inside.  Beauregard’s flunkies were gleefully turning the nobodies away and indulging in VIP-bashing.  Business (Art) as usual: one-upmanship rarefied & refined, practiced & perfected until the subtle niceties of the pecking-rituals took on weighty importance and became for many an end in themselves.

The latest trendy de-evolution of punk-rap music boomed through the open side-street door, across the sidewalk to the Unloading Only zone.

Peach and Courtney waited for a free shot at the doorman.  Peach was unusually quiet.  Bob wanted to go on in, but Kathy hung back too, wanting to see how Peach would crash it.

Without saying anything, Peach suddenly hurried toward the noise, and Courty scampered to catch up.  Peach presented herself to the doorman and said, “Let us in.”

“Oh, that should do it,” Courty told her, half hiding behind her.

The doorman, a bleak overgrown bearded specimen, looked Peach over appreciatively.  “I can see what this is.  It’s a jet-skirt.”  His eyes roamed a second time down and up the clingy material of Peach’s dress.  “But what’s this?”  He pointed at Courty’s head.

“Tonsorial semaphore,” Courtney told him, stepping out in full view.

He looked Courtney over carefully, but this time his look did not reveal what he was thinking as he looked.

She wasn’t really wearing anything special, just her precious metal outfit: orange metallic mania spandex pants with stirrups into white metal-frost medium-high heels, white metallic lame bustier, with her favorite featherweight metallic animal print shirt.  Sort of junkfood for the eye, vibrating between gutter & glamour, chosen for the occasion because it could crash through any dress code.  Twenty minutes of customize-to-be-cool eye make-up, a borrowed gold bracelet and necklace set.  Nothing to get excited about.  And Courtney didn’t really think she compared with Peach, who would be less obscene if she took the dress off!

Behind the doorman, back into the crowded walkway that disappeared off to the left side, stood two huge Black men, rapping with each other.  Bounce, bounce.  Nobody was crashing this party.

“Let us in!” Peach repeated.

The doorman folded his hands in front of himself.  “If the shoe fits . . .” he said, not finishing.

“Wear it on your head!” Courty quickly said.  What an obnoxious hog!

He slowly nodded, produced two laminate badges and handed them to the girls to wear.  Then he stepped aside: they were admitted.

The Blacks ignored them, were speaking a jive ‘native’ language.  The two young ladies stopped half-way down the narrow corridor, and waited for Kathy and Bob.  They attached the badges to their clothes.  The party had overflowed out into the corridor a little, where people were standing and talking; two people sitting on the tile floor leaning against the wall, talking or arguing.  The music from inside, booming and thudding and screaming——the light from inside, spilling around the corner, flickering and changing.

“Wait,” Courtney said.  “Something happened back there.”

Peach nodded, happily.  “Yeah.  We got in.”

“No, I mean . . . we shouldn’t have got in . . . but we did . . . what happened?”

“My God!  He’s vomiting on the floor!”

Courtney looked.  “It’s not a party until somebody pukes.”  A moment later she asked, “What’s a jet-skirt?  Or is it self-explanatory?”

“It means he can see my . . . cockpit.”

“Hummmm, not quite.  But you do seem to have picked up some static electricity.”

“Isn’t it great!”

“Well . . .”

A thin, intense weirdo walked by them from outside and went past them into the party.  His movements were strange spastic jerks that only incidentally resulted in a forward locomotion.

“Toby Ferber,” Peach said to Courty after he had passed.

“I see.”  She recognized the second most famous acid-head in the world.  “Looks like his Thorazine is wearing off.”

Peach giggled.

“What’s keeping them?” Courtney looked back, and received a shock.  Kathy was crying and Bob’s face was red; he was arguing with the doorman . . . Courtney couldn’t quite make out most of the words . . . something about the invitation having expired.  “Peach, what is this?  What do they do, just admit people at random?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve never been here before.”

“Peach!”

“Hey, if they’re not coming, let’s go in.  Somebody else is having MY FUN!”

“Peach, you said you come here all the time.”

Peach smiled charmingly.  “And you believed me?”

“My Goodness, they didn’t get in.”  Courtney was stunned, and felt empathetic hurt at Kathy’s tears.  Some other people were now talking with the doorman.

She allowed Peach to drag her inside.

The bottom floor was a Beauregard-made dance-bar, less alcohol.  High, wide and square, a department-store sized dance floor with New York’s scraggily ragged edge all over each other to the music (?) provided by a live band.  The raw sound was an abrasive sandpaper blast.  Visually, the scene was disorienting, and Courtney stalled, trying to make sense of it.  A silent Casablanca was being projected onto the rock band, a diagonal Bogie and Bergman, while the three-foot-width arc spotlight instead roamed the dance floor, highlighting the more outrageous of the guests.

Giant Beauregard silk-screens of the famous wallpapered every square inch of the walls, generously lit with integral neon lights and motorized appendages.  A crowd of strobes in a far darkened corner put the dancers there into a quantum universe of their own.

It was full circle: hip 60’s leftovers & 70’s trash back from the grave; all the old, obsolete stuff was now cool again.

The spotlight swung over the crowd and centered on Peach and Courtney at the corner entrance, blinding them.

COURTNEY, Chapter 24
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47