Skunk bottoms on ragtime dancers wave in my head. A confusing aura of smoke and liquor wafts through the air, making shapes of hips, thighs, and genitalia. Flash-bangs wouldn’t wake this crowd from their hypnotic slumber, nor shake them from their thumping music.

The basement is ideal: sweating walls, no lights, no cops. No room to check your wrist for the time, only to grab someone and romantically tussle. If you weren’t drunk or high before you came in, you most surely were now.

Not a real sound breaks through the silent hubbub, save for a burp, a drunken yell here and there, or a girlish moan of longing. Semi-automatic men start leaving, a few girls at a time. There is now enough room to stretch and vomit.

Somebody asks for a vodka, straight, no chaser. I try to imagine the jazz hitting the back of their throats, loud, rambunctious, and bold. It doesn’t work, so I get one, too.

Garish lights start looking like Dmitri Martin. Foolhardiness is the key, my brain elucidates, and I start looking for whatever scrap of the female population is left.

And then, I see her: the hell-kitten angel, providing me with a drink that made me want to fuck things I had never wanted to fuck before.

Waking up really, really sucked.

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