AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 24

Anesthetic Eric Des Barres came down the stairs with his bodyguard Philip.  Des Barres had a tired, terminally bored look about him, as befitted a career dandy.  But like a sexually insecure male or a DILLIGAF, he always wore his wealth.  Overdressed, in a formal black tuxedo so crisp and precisely worn that he looked like he belonged in a mansion during a cultured fancy-Dan dinner party, not here in the industrial Warehouse, at this raw, burgeoning Beauregard event.  A Gefica Sahara by Genta on his wrist.  A custom, copyrighted, signed, and catalogued earpendant hung from his left pierced ear: a thin, two and a half inch strip, a masculine (circa early 90s) waterfall of rare, multi-colored gemstones, proving that all that glitters is not gold.

Des Barres was an incredibly handsome, lean, young man; absurdly gorgeous, his face one of nature’s masterpieces.

Philip, his best friend and frequent companion, was an ugly thirty-one years, and only slightly larger than average sized, twenty-eight-year-old Des Barres; however, Philip was a Karate #5 black belt professional.  Philip tried to dress up to Des Barres’ standards, and came quite close to it, even to the thick gold bracelet and diamond earring.  It paid off in tail.  Des Barres was a kink with a prowess for debauching social butterflies.  Like a quartz clock, Des Barres had his club sandwich routines down to the second.  Des Barres had degenerated as low as serial rape on several occasions, purchasing postcoital yes with leftover diamonds; the decadent vernacular of high-rent evil.

Des Barres had strayed here from an uptown date (who refused to suck him off pre-show in his Lambourini Countach).  He summarily shoved her out of the car, and car-phoned Philip’s beeper with a message to meet him at The Warehouse.

But once immersed in this ‘exciting’ nightlife of fun and frolic, play and passion, Eric Des Barres wearily realized that he still felt nothing.  He wandered at random through the upper rarefied levels of The Warehouse, stared vacantly, impacted socially and irrelevantly with other trendies, saw the shaping up of the event and didn’t particularly care for it——but couldn’t really think of anything else that he wanted to do, either.  Philip tried to entertain him, but to no effect.  Des Barres began to consciously cruise for some action, but he found nothing that tickled his sexual fancy.  So he wandered down to the grunge on the bottom floor, more or less intending to leave.

“Hey, Kee-rist!” Philip said, popping him in the shoulder.  “Table pussy.”

Des Barres looked over the heads of the moving maniacs to where two girls were serendipitously spotlighted just inside the entrance.  He coughed gently, and agreed.  His voice was hoarse.  “Definitely table-grade, my man.  Shall we?”

“I’m cunt-struck, I swear.  Can you hang that dress?  She’s dripping for it.”

“Back off, Phil.  That’s the bitch I’m gonna bedroom.  Give me the pad with the names on it.”

“Not that shit.”  But Phil dug it out of an inside coat pocket, and handed the small pad and a pen to his boss.

Des Barres drifted around the edges of Beauregard’s bottom floor image bombardment, toward the two lovelies.  Philip followed in his wake.  The spotlight had pinpointed to zero on the reflective lady on the left, then reappeared elsewhere, but Des Barres had a hard-on for the honey on the right, a veritable mother lode of fabulous boobs, curves that promised a Taj Mahal of a swimming hole.

Humphery and Ingrid were now flashback-happy in Paris, at a 45-degree left-angle on a viewing screen composed of snarling, pretentious rockers.

Des Barres frowned as he saw two other males approach the targets and begin to socialize, but he did not slow his pace.  Animals.  Fire Island hip: combat boots, gym shorts, sleeveless undershirts.  The one had on a Yankees baseball cap, the other a battered combat helmet with the straps hanging loose.  The girls were quite obviously unimpressed.

Des Barres closed, tapping the one guy on his helmet, catching a whiff of his week-old odor.  Beauregard’s events were just getting too big; too much riffraff, too many low-lifes were getting in these days.  Des Barres motioned with his thumb for the low-lifes to shove off.

“Eff off, pussy-boy!” the guy under the helmet yelled.

His partner growled at Des Barres: not words; sounds.

Des Barres gently swiveled his eyes to look at Philip.

There was a fast blur of motion, and the combat helmet went flying back into the dance floor.  The guy who had been wearing it had an odd open-mouthed expression on his face; he fell onto his hands and knees, and struggled, trying not to fall any further . . . he took a step like a dog, and then his head crumpled forward onto the floor and he held his head in his hands, his butt sticking up in the air, moving back and forth, wagging slowly . . .

Des Barres repeated his gesture with the thumb, and said, “Disappear, dude.”  Des Barres was tranqed on cocaine and vodka; he passively watched as gang solidarity from behind the girls and to the left wall opened a butterfly knife and clicked open two switchblades.  So predictable.  Three vicious, scabrous anthropological curiosities acted out a male coming-of-age ritual, and charged forward.  What a bore.

Philip had already anticipated the potential, and took a single step to ready himself for any onslaught.

The wiseguy with the spotlight, zeroed in on the fireworks.  A moment later, there was a shrill blast of a whistle, twice, and Beauregard muscle was on the scene before any mayhem could develop.

Too bad.  Just when it was getting interesting.  The animals were herded out.  The whole occurrence affected Eric Des Barres very little: boring actually; if it had been a video he would have ejected the cassette and popped in another tape.

Recondite, Des Barres thought.  The Platonic Ideal situation for producing acquaintanceship with the opposing sex.

Des Barres closed in for the kill (fuck).  The mammaries were even larger and more lush than his initial perceptions!

“Crude, lewd, rude, and tattooed,” Des Barres said, quoting his father.  The other girl, the one with the Star Wars haircut, tweaked her neck sharply toward him, at his words, distracting him for a moment.  “Not proper representatives of Warehouse party-personnel.  So sorry about the necessary violence.”

Philip nicely presented himself close to the other girl.  Too bad they all had to nearly shout to be heard.

“Courty!  We just got here, and already they’re fighting over us!”

“Perhaps they’re just fighting,” the other girl said.

“We’re not fighting,” Des Barres said, “we’re collecting signatures.  This is a formal petition to abolish the Universe.  We need just two more signatures.  Please?”  He smiled warmly, handed the pad to the black-haired beauty in the skintight dress, and offered her the pen also.

“Sure,” she said.  “I’m Peach.  She’s Courty.  Bye-bye, Universe!  It was nice knowing ya.”

Rather than signing her name also, the one called Courty said, “Do you have names?  Or only fists?”  Eric Des Barres coolly appraised her hostility.  Her look was challenging, direct, at Eric now since Philip had looked away——her eyes were hot or cold, Eric couldn’t decide——the lines of her neck, strong and forceful.  By not signing, by just holding the booklet that had been passed to her, she was delaying his next line, reducing its effectiveness.  Times Square bitch!

“I’m Phil,” Philip said.  “This flake here is Eric.”  Phil stepped just a little closer to Courty, polarizing the quartet into two definite male-female pairs.

“Hummm,” Courtney said.  “I’m fond of endangered planets; I don’t think I’ll sign.”  She handed the pad back toward Eric.

Des Barres looked at Peach with an affected stern look.  “But you didn’t put down your phone number.  How do you expect us to notify you?  How do you expect us to transfer you into the new universe?”

Peach gave him a ‘What’s-the-matter-with-YOU?’ look, and lightly laughed, shaking her head.  “Just a minute, guys,” she told the boys, “we gotta talk.”  She pulled Courtney back a few steps for a private bit of girl-talk.

Phil was amused to note a look of real irritation on his boss’s face.

Eric watched Peach talking to Courty, evidently trying to talk her into something.  The way she moved her mouth, the way she absently flipped the tangle of hair away from her face, the way she hyper-dynamically tapped her left high-heeled shoe, her long muscular nyloned legs, the fuzzy soft-pink dress that seemed to grow on her in a way that revealed every succulent curve . . . what a piece!  He could tell just by looking at her that she would be great in bed.

Courty did not make a favorable first impression on Des Barres.  Dissonant vibes.  She was too defiant, too self-confident for his tastes.  Like a mustang, a feminist like her would have to be broken before she would be any fun for him to ride.  It could not always be done; and on the occasions when he had done so, the results had been disappointing.

Yet Eric found himself fascinated by the expressions on Courty’s face: first, Give me a break; then, a roll of the eyes, a nod; a short laugh at something Peach said; then Courty said something back, and both girls laughed hard about something.  Des Barres got the distinct impression that the girls were laughing at him.

The girls came back over.

“You had the pairings wrong!” Peach happily announced, grabbing hold of Phil’s arm.  The biggest smile in the world appeared on his face.

Eric looked blankly at Peach; only Phil knew him well enough to know that he was a fire of rage inside.

Courty stood close to Eric and looked at him warily.  In her heels, she was eye-level.  “Touching privileges have to be earned, Bub.”

This is antediluvian!  My girl goes for my fucking bodyguard, choosing brawn over brains!

But rather than explode into a tantrum, Des Barres instantly emotionally disconnected from the whole experience, and became anesthetic once again.  The memory of the emotion——his heart still beating——lingered.  Anything would do for conversation.  “What do you think of the bottom level of The Warehouse?” he asked Courty.

“Sewer rats and soy sauce,” Courty said.

The clipped remark only half made sense to Eric, until the five Japanese businessmen behind him walked into his field of vision, excitedly pointing and gaping at everything.  He smiled and almost laughed, and found himself minimally impressed——it was just the sort of thing he might have said, combining equal parts disdain and cool.

“What are you in real life?” Peach asked Phil.

“The deposed dictator of Haiti,” Phil said, reciting his favorite first reply to avoid the question of his method of earning a living.

“Let’s dance, dictator!” Peach said, pulling him into the writhing bodies on the dance floor.

“Let’s not dance,” Courty said.

“Would you like to go upstairs to the lounge?” Des Barres asked, wistfully giving the fuzzy, rounded, receding bottom a final look.

Going up the stairs, next to her, Des Barres idly began to contemplate the sexual possibilities.  Boobie-prize.  It had a brain, which detracted from the box.  He wanted to knock it off its pedestal.  Strip it right out of the cheap-shot pants, shove it down onto the dirt and grime, and floor-fuck it into submission.  Grab it by the stylish joke haircut, and teach it to lick dick.  It was beautiful, Eric now noticed, but in a highly individualized way; the face on it was classical rather than catty; its bod somehow . . . different . . . or maybe it was just the way it walked up the stairs next to him.  It walked up the stairs as though it had never even heard of sex.  The thing was definitely odd.  It was 100% warm-blooded woman, undeniably woman to the max, but it seemed to him . . . no, not virginal, that wasn’t it . . . no, it was feminine, but . . . that’s it: it was not thinking about sex, as if it didn’t have time to think about sex, and was concerned with more important things.

That was it: she moved in a way that completely disregarded the sexual aspects of what she was doing.  She was outrageous; she was at once free of the mating game, like a healthy animal breezing through stilted human conventions . . . or like . . . like her hairstyle; an otherworldly visitor . . . Was She Smirking At Him?  Did she think of him as just another primitive native?  That superior bitch!  He wanted to fork her: get her as sexually aroused as a crazed animal, begging for it . . .

By just walking up the stairs with Eric, Courty both angered and sexually excited him.

At the top of the stairs, he stopped her.  Laughter from the lounge was now louder than the music from downstairs.

“Let me have this,” Des Barres said, taking the plastic badge off Courty’s blouse, feeling her up slightly in the process——noting that her default breasts had a certain supple charm of their own.  “It’s a joke,” he explained.

“If you’re the punch-line, it wasn’t funny.”  She removed his hand from her breast, but allowed him to take the badge.

“Look around,” he said.  “Do you see many others wearing the badges?”

Courty looked; it was true enough.  Eric was not wearing one.  Most of the people on this floor didn’t have badges.

Des Barres smiled bright, knowing that now she had to remain with him just to stay at the party.  He had just established a subtle but real power over her.  Many more steps would soon follow, and he began to enthusiastically plan out her conquest.

With a sly chuckle of insider’s knowledge, Des Barres said, “Later I’ll introduce you to Beauregard.”

Courty did not speak.

“I forgot to tell you,” Des Barres added.  “I’m a multi-millionaire.  My father is Lincoln Des Barres.  The Lincoln Des Barres.”

She smiled, almost laughed, and then looked at him sadly.  “It’s true,” she said slowly, as if emotionally realizing the truth of it for the first time, “beauty’s just skin deep, but ugly really does go all the way down to the bone.”  She looked away.

“What?!”

But she did not respond.

Beauregard’s VIP lounge was dominated by Nathan Greenberg, and the crowd of people laughing with him, at his table and at the tables around his.  He could be heard and identified before he could be seen.  Once seen, he was the amazingly identifiable, amazingly tall, long hair down to his waist, Jewish film producer/actor/director, et.al.  Oh, and funny.  If you thought he was funny in films, forget it.  Remember TAKE THE WOMEN AND RUN, where he was a pimp with a penchant for Kierkegaard?  Or INSOMNIAC, where he was the warlock during the Dark Ages who invented light beer?  Forget it.  Those were movies composed of his left-over jokes: he functioned best in real-time in an informal atmosphere without any pressure to perform, and no medium would ever quite capture it.  His actress-wife, one of his ex-girlfriend/actresses, and several other semi-famous dudes were partying it down with him, having the time of their lives if laughter quotient was any measure.

Des Barres directed Courty to a semi-dark corner table.  “Would you like to meet Nathan?” he asked her.

“Perhaps later,” she told him.  “I’ll sign now.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your petition.”

He brought out the pad for her, and offered her his pen.  She wrote on the paper——taking a couple of minutes time, while hiding the surface from him so he couldn’t see what she was saying——and then folded the bottom edge over the writing when she was finished.  She smiled at him, stood up from the table.  “Wait here, please,” she told him.

“Very well.”  Des Barres wondered at the strong tone in her voice.

She walked straight away from the table, out of the lounge, toward the staircase, where she walked up.

Des Barres thought it was odd, since she hadn’t asked him for directions to the ladies room.  At first, he was amused.  She was going to get lost.  It was obvious; she had never been here before.  In a moment one of Beauregard’s employees would escort her down the stairs and out of the party.  He smiled his warmest smile of the evening, thinking of himself coming to her rescue.  This female had more depth and long-range sexual value than the fluffable-fuck one-nighter babe.  Yes.  The idea of corrupting her piece by piece was very, very stimulating.

But when he went to put the paper and pen away, his smile died and his face chilled Novocain-flat for exactly one second.

Courty had drawn a little thumb on the paper, motioning, with words under it that said: DISAPPEAR, DUDE!

Sudden flashes of snowlights blazed across his visual field, and his right ear buzzed like a prison admittance buzzer.  It was cocaine-induced but Courtney-triggered.  He felt violently ill; his muscles cramping, his stomach nauseous, his breathing fast and sharp; There Was No Oxygen In The Whole Room!

Eric jumped up to his feet so fast his chair crashed over backward, and the small table jiggled, the center candle nearly falling off the thing.

That bitch!  She doesn’t know who I am!  I’ll stomp her like a bug for treating me that way!

It took Eric a moment, but he became aware that his sudden action had halted the easy laughter and conversation in the lounge.

They’re smirking at me.  They saw everything.  They know what she wrote, I bet.  They’re laughing at me, all of them!

With great affected dignity Eric righted the wooden chair and reseated.

Disappear . . . like motherfucking shit, I’ll disappear!

His chronic cough suddenly raised hell and phlegm.  He yanked out a three hundred dollar hanky and coughed up dark blackish colored phlegm into the center of its ultra-virgin white silk.

COURTNEY, Chapter 25
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47