Midnight Marauders

Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Mar 09, 2006

Roaming aimlessly along like this on the public street with all kinds of people, he always had a strange feeling as to who he was. As he had said to the Lions types there in the hall, he looked like a doper when out of his scramble suit; he conversed like a doper; those around him now no doubt took him to be a doper and reacted accordingly. Other dopers—See there, he thought; “other,” for instance—gave him a “peace, brother” look, and the straights didn’t.

You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you’re a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

It kills you sometimes: going out when all you want to do is curl up on the couch and cocoon for the rest of the winter. You’re the extroverted introvert, going against all your natural instincts. But something—you don’t know precisely what—drives you into the night; something makes you brave the frigid, howling abyss that is mid-winter New York.

And, really now, for what? To collect yet another sordid tale? To document yet another misdeed?

Fuck yeah.

Female genitalia stretched across hi-rez flatscreens. Undulating dancers. Nipples and tits and cunts and asses. Backdrop to this life you sort of have.

The pretty black stripper wants something from you. Give her a cigarette and she’s your dark angel, head wreathed in a twisting, sinuous halo of smoke. Such a shame—you’d fuck her but it has to be organic, unsullied by commerce—and anyway for a couple hundred bucks you could have a girl over for an afternoon; take pictures even. Have her all to yourself.

It’s all models and bottles, as Anya will describe this sort of affair to you days later. Models and bottles: fake tits and fake hair and fake tans, dudes in suits(!), the stink of moderate affluence trailing them along with cheap cologne. Somehow this isn’t entirely off-putting—it’s just The Big City on training wheels, a different subculture of voyeurs and newbies and weekend tourists outta longeyeland.

Talk to some people you know. Watch your fiancee slink around in that sheer red dress of hers, all tits-n-ass, nothing on underneath.

Time for a change of scenery. Whoville at Love, an underground cave-like structure complete with an indoor waterfall that scents the air like chlorine and makes your skin feel a little clammy. Jimmy’s there, and Lisa, and Porno Jim and the whole crew of midnight marauders. People are in costume. Time to rock your orange shades.

Time to play the fool, the fixer, the charlatan, the good-times-guy, the seen-it-all-before-guy. The idiot. If this is your business then your business is monkey business.

People pose in front of a wall covered with glow-in-the-dark material. A bright light clicks on, then off. People move on and leave their shadows behind, set in relief against luminescent green. You decide there’s probably a metaphor in this somewhere, a rainbow story perhaps, but you don’t care—instead you’re watching your fiancee lock lips with some sweet young thing, a refugee from the Rated X party.

“Lex!” another girl says to you later.

Wha?

It’s the raven-haired Swedish lass, your bathroommate from whatever night that was (they all seem to run together, don’t they?). She says she’s been thinking of you. Get the correct number this time and watch as she whips out her cell and calls you via Sweden. Funny how everything works these days.

Take your fiancee’s hand and leave with Porno Jim and Dicey. Go back to their pad and watch porn and talk and inhale THC out of a strange device called a Volcano. In addition to the weed there’s a whiff of expectation in the air. Didn’t see that coming, did you genius? It doesn’t play out that way though. You’re too out-of-it. Too mellow. Ride it out until the wee hours, until the underwear-party couple arrives to whisk you uptown in a hippie van and you find yourself in a diner staring at a plate of corned beef hash-n-eggs, trying to hold up your end of the conversation.

Your body’s winding down now. Your brain’s melting. The clock on the wall reads half-past-ten. The couple’s female half looks at you, curious. “How do you guys manage to stay up all night without doing any real drugs?”

It’s a damned good question.

More: Voyeurism | Sex Party | Drugs | Marijuana | Costume | Swingers

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