Self Inflicted | Chapter 9
"The whole club seemed to know each other, and the more energy you were willing to expend, the more willing they were to accept you into their ranks."
It's best not to be caught taking a swig of the cooking wines when you are working in front of the burners, but in a pinch prefer a Marsala or Sherry or other fortified wine. Their higher alcohol content means you need to steal fewer sips to quell your not so quiet anxiety. People in the restaurant industry are squeamish about germs, so when you get caught definitely do not be caught with your lips wrapped around the mouth of the same bottle you just poured into the saucepan. Jonathan and Hector had just been promoted from being prep cooks to working in the dinner service two months ago, but the toll it was taking on Jonathan made Hector question whether he should turn in his compatriot. They started around the same time and he was a damn good chef, Hector thought, but he can’t even wait for break-time these days to do a line and smoke a cigarette like the rest of us, I don’t know what will happen if he messes up an order. Anything went, swept under the rug if necessary, at the one Michelin starred l'Érable so long as it didn’t compromise a customer’s order or the speed at which they received it. Were someone to do so, they would not only be kicked out, they would find themselves having to sneak drinks of sourer and saltier cooking wines at less and less prestigious restaurants.
Being a little bit tipsy, a little bit high, a little bit wired helps with the stress of the kitchen. The heat, the pressure, the quick turn around today having no bearing on tomorrow where you must once again bluster and rush and barely scrape by. Hector’s mentorship also included the tactical lesson on how to slowly increase his dosing so his energy and joy bled perfectly into a night-turned morning at clubs and afters and after afters. Tonight was no different, though their crew had half the usual members. Even Hector was thinking about getting an early night's sleep but Jonathan and the head server Pamela texted Pierre and Tanooj to come meet them outside the restaurant. Despite his protests and excuses of being tired, the fear of missing an evening with all of his friends, especially since Tanooj would only be in the city for a few more months (6, but Hector made a show of decrying daily things like, “I can’t believe you’ll be gone in two hundred days!” or “God, I’ll probably only see you trip on the front doorstep a few dozen more times” in a performance with false tears), helped him overcome his yawns.
“FINE, but I need like three espresso martinis.”
“At minimum we will get you a redbull, faute de mieux,” Pierre assured his landlord.
“A Vodka Redbull,” Tanooj corrected.
“I calls us and Uber,” Jonathan slurred.
The club’s two rooms were separated by a hallway that was more a line for the one bathroom than a passageway. The group had a long standing rule that anyone who broke the seal had to cross over to the other side after emptying their bladders. Pierre was the first to enter the red room. A recessed groove lined the entire ceiling of the room and cast a diffuse glow of red upwards. The only other light came from the circular DJ booth in the middle of the dance floor with its mirrored circular LED sign above reading in an enormous 2000 point red and white font, “RECORDING.” As he walked over to the bar he was momentarily blinded by a pair taking a photo of themselves with the flash on. The bartender was quick to come over, skipping other customers, something that Pierre did not notice. “Merci” he said to no one, as he turned away from the bar to wait for his order. He ran his hand through his damp chestnut hair and searched the crowd bouncing to the music for someone or something interesting. He saw a rowdy section of people surrounding a short haired woman in sequin wearing a golden sash.
“Is that woman famous?” he leaned over and asked the two girls standing at the bar next to him.
“What did you say?” The dark haired girl leaned her ear close to him.
“Zat woman,” he overemphasized the pronunciation, “is she a star?”
“Oh my god! Where are you from?” She said and pulled her other friend towards them as well. “This is Sophia,” she continued, ignoring his question.
Pierre was unsure if it was his accent, but either way, the woman in sequin was not important.
“I am Pierre,” he reached out his hand to shake hers.
He then had the same conversation he always had with Americans about where he was from and how they loved Paris when they visited some years ago.
“You know you look like an actress, Topanga,” He interjected to Sophia over the dark haired girl’s boring story of her travels.
“Oh really? What’s her name again I want to look her up.”
“Topanga.”
“How do you spell it?” She pulled out her phone.
Pierre turned and took the cocktail from the bartender and took a gulpful.
He smiled at the girls and raised his glass walking away without giving her the spelling. The spelling wasn’t important anyway, the music got a bit faster and the dance floor looked more fun.
Hector was feeling fucked up. He got annoyed at the older man standing in the bathroom line who was playing Facebook reels on his phone out loud. Somehow you could hear the AI generated real estate content over the mixing of the two DJs from either side of the dumbbell shaped club. The sound grated and he felt the onset of a headache. He gave the man a not so accidental shove with his shoulder and pushed past the line to cross into the red room to find Pierre. The music here was louder but the curtain that fell closed behind him blocked some of the dissonance of the competing speakers. He scanned the room for the tall pale boy.
“Shit, I should get a water first,” he thought.
The music in this half was all 80s samples remixed under a house beat. He took a beat himself to gather his strength, feeling a sense of hidden relief to have left Jonathan behind who had been pushing everyone to drink more than they had space for. He was like a hedonistic grandma pushing another helping of vice onto your plate, and it was difficult to say no with his bleating that he had already ordered the drink, and how you couldn’t say no on his birthday (it was not, but he convinced some others at the bar that it was and now leaned on them to add to the pressure).
“I love your dress!” Hector shouted after a chance meeting of a woman standing beside the bar’s gaze.
The woman turned away without so much as a smile. She may have even rolled her eyes, but Hector wasn’t sure.
He tapped her shoulder and repeated himself with a wider smile, “I love your dress!”
She gave him a quick tilt of the head, conveying a weak thanks and then took a step to the left, increasing the distance between them.
“Ugh! Some girls just think anyone and everyone wants to fuck them,” Hector complained when he finally found Pierre.
“Usually everyone does,” He shouted back over the music.
“What, do I need to dress in drag in order to be treated like a regular person? She got a complement on her Shein dress for the first time in her life–"
Pierre put both of his arms over Hector’s shoulders and cradled his neck, pulling him closer as he swayed to the music. Focus on the music, Pierre seemed to say with the shimmy of his head and his closed eyes. Nothing else matters. Nothing else even exists except right here and right now. The sound travels from your ears through your heart and continues down, quick as lightning, softening your knees and pushing down against the flaking hardwood floor through your shoes. The lazy dancers stay in this swaying bobbing state, with their feet planted to the ground, moving with the quarter notes. With just one more shot a dancer might lift his feet off the ground and perform a stomp, twisting around his centerline and stepping with opposing foot and shoulder. The DJ played a song in double time and the crowd of older folk who were there to celebrate their sequin clad friend’s sixty-fifth birthday were prepared to sweat, reminiscing about their nights out at The Loft and Paradise Garage, 1989. The whole club seemed to know each other, and the more energy you were willing to expend, the more willing they were to accept you into their ranks.
“Let the music TAKE! Let the music TAKE! Let the music TAKE CONTROLLL,” sang their neighbors on the dance floor, shouting out “take” with the singer Keith Nunnally.
A gentleman with platinum white hair joined Hector and Pierre and combined the left and right flick of his hips with a variation in height, going low on the one and the three and going high on the two and the four. Hector emulated the dance and they bounced in unison for a few seconds ending with a return to their baseline stepping groove amid an inexplicable shared laugh. It was Pierre who this time took the lead, communicated simply with his eyes that the rhythm had found a way to speak through his body. He craned his neck towards their new companion and locked eyes with him whilst his bounce slowly increased in amplitude. The man followed along until they were just about to leap off of the floor. The song suddenly dropped into a quieter buildup where the drums seemed to disappear and the beat simplified. The trio modified their bounce to be real low. They squat down and bounced as the DJ maintained the beat. The older fellow could not get as low, but it was no matter as just as quickly as the beat dropped did the riser crescendo up towards the revival of the clamorous arrangement. They, through simultaneous invention, or perhaps through a simultaneous merging with their underlying essence, and the rest of the club jumped.
The older generation were better at losing themselves in the music, Hector noted. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and dancing; there were no closed groups of people trying not to let others join their dance circle, people weren’t constantly looking left and right in search of a potential mate, and these Diamond Jubilarians had very few problems being touched by strangers or their perspiration. His own concerns about earlier being treated with “contempt” or even his discomfort with how wasted he felt melted once he surrendered himself to play alongside everyone on the dance floor.
Tanooj sat down onto the arm rest of a low sofa in the corner of the blue room. He pulled out his phone and saw only a calendar notification for a religious holiday from a shared calendar his grandfather had sent several years ago and an advertisement for an update to the rewards scheme from his credit card company. He unlocked it and swiped around. There's nothing here, he had to remind himself after a minute. There was nothing on his phone he needed to do, no one who needed a response at that moment, no social media post that would meaningfully change his life–especially not at four am. He put his phone back in his pocket and looked at the velvet blue curtains that draped with even pleating along the wall. He laughed thinking about the curtains Hector purchased for his birthday extravaganza. They placed the curtains one after another up the stairs in their apartment to create a disorienting effect where a person would not know what was going to come up or down the steps. No one took them down despite them being extremely annoying for everyone, and even a little dangerous. The blue curtains of the club were illuminated by huge spotlights that pointed up at them from the floor. Despite universal criticism, the club’s owner would not change their positioning. The light would momentarily blind you as you danced around, in its left to right oscillation. But as it was, in the blue room, very few people danced, instead preferring to shout into each other’s ears in small groups, talking and drinking.
“You come here often?” Pamela joked, finding Tanooj after escaping from a nonsensical conversation Jonathan started with a group of young men.
“No, but if you do I just might start.” He responded.
“OKAY! I didn’t know you had game like that.”
“I don’t usually play games, but I’ll play with you,” Tanooj offered.
Pamela laughed, “Yeah that one didn’t quite land.”
“I never said I was a pilot. But I am a damn good lover.”
“WHAT THE FUCK,” Pamela and Tanooj laughed together.
“You’re crazy.”
“We should go find Hector and Pierre and get out of here,” Tanooj said.
“Yeah, Jonathan is honestly pissing me off. He keeps offering me to random guys.”
“He is drunk out of his mind.”
“He’s BEEN drunk, like even in the Uber he was just blasting music and singing with the driver.”
“God, I never knew how absolutely blasted everyone in a restaurant was until I met all of you.”
“It's even worse in fast food. Your McDonald's order doesn’t just taste good, it literally has crack in it,” she joked.
“That's the real reason not to send food back. The guy making it will only be more inebriated the second time around.”
“Yeah, that and they will spit in it. Or low key I might too if the table are really being dicks.”
“What did you say?” Tanooj leant closer to hear Pamela.
“Nothing, let's go find everyone,” she shouted back.
They had to carry Jon down the stairs and out of the club. Pierre and Hector supported one arm each as they slowly worked their way through the crowd. The heat was not lessened by the late hour, and the June air was thick. They began to hobble towards a stoop nearby in order to put Jonathon down. He was really losing balance now, and flickered in and out of consciousness. Hector was a few inches shorter than Pierre so Jon’s right foot kept dragging, forcing Hector to bear most of the weight of the limp body. Hector himself felt woozy, but driven by his mission, did not allow the swirling world around him to distract him from his careful path towards the stoop. Tanooj and Pamela stood there ahead of them and used their arms as a sort of unnecessary guide pointing them towards their destination.
Then, Jonathan Kichimura gagged. His corporal form had to reset, purge itself of all impurities, cleanse itself so as to once again be accepted onto the bottom step of the stairway to God's embrace. The body acts, when it must take extreme measures, on the basis not of simple interdependent systems, but of spiritual desire. Like a male grouse ritually dancing in a lineup to catch the eye of their songbird, the body acts in ways a body must act, but does so to fulfill that great inner desire. The desire for wholeness, completion, unity. His abdomen knocked on the door to paradise. It knocked once, twice and into three dry heaves. Pierre picked up on the changing situation, but by jumping away only threw Hector further into the collateral. Three other people must also have been getting thrown up on at that moment–in a city as large as New York. Hector wanted to believe so anyway, that this was part and parcel of going out, and that everyone would have their turn under the spout of bitter gall. It covered his black pants and sullied his white shoes. And the body takes its cue from the world. If my friend needed cleansing, then maybe I do too. Hector dropped Jonathan who fell, by the continued survival instinct of his bones, onto his hands and knees, and returned the potatoes and the wheat and the cactus to the Earth.