You’re all I’ve got tonight


 

Liz looks just like David Bowie, if Davie Bowie was a girl.

She loves his look as much as she loves his music and comes to the club each night looking at much like him as Pauly tries to – the band insisting he put on makeup to fit in with the new hip trend of looking gay.

He hates the look as much as he loves the music; he loves the money he gets for singing even more, loves the pot the money buys -- which is why he agrees to go to Liz’s house in Montclair after our gig because she says there will be pot there.

I go because I’m the one who’ll have to drive him home if Hank craps out and Garrick gets as drunk as he usually gets at these kinds of parties, only I get stuck driving Liz there first, so I don’t get lost and leave Pauly stranded.

“She’ll show you the way,” Pauly tells me. “Then you’ll be able to find your way back.”

This isn’t a part of Montclair I’m familiar with, not so ritzy as the places on Upper Mountain Road, but not so down and out as the rooming house on Valley Road where I live, or even Pine Street where Pauly lived for a while with Jane – until she left him.

Liz’s house is an ordinary house, where she lives in the basement while her parents live upstairs.

“My folks are away for the weekend,” she tells me as I drive through the unfamiliar streets from a part of Montclair, I am familiar with. “That’s how come I can have a party.”

She promises Jon and Jay cocaine, which is why they come, though when I ask if she bothered to invite any girls, she shrugs.

“Who needs girls?” she asks and smiles when I glance over at her seated in the passenger side of the van, her long legs spread, her sharp fingernails glittering red in the reflected light as does her lipstick.

She looks hungry, not for food the way Garrick always is or for pot like Pauly or even the coke Jon and Jay seem to crave. She reminds me of Hank and how hungry he looks when he talks about our hunting for girls.

This scares me.

It feels like I’m sitting in a fish tank with a shark, and I’m the fish the shark wants. We’re all fish, I think, as Liz directs me to park in the driveway of her all-too-ordinary house, where the lights are lit, and I hear music pouring out the front door, David Bowie music, and I feel like Major Tom floating in a tin can, and we find Jon and Jay, Pauly and Garrick, Hank and Rob already in the living room, already partaking of the offerings Liz kindly left on the coffee table for us to consume.

Liz lied about the girls since some of her girlfriends from the club have latched on to Jon and Jay, sniffing up lines of coke Jon or Jay pours onto the painted face of a David Bowie album cover, lines that quickly vanish into the end of a straw.

Garrick drinks a beer; it is not his first, giggling over some joke Hank tells though he claims it isn’t funny.

Pauly puffs like a magic dragon, already so far gone he doesn’t know quite where he is or who he’s with nor does he care as long as the pot holds out.

I puff a little, drink a little, then try to become invisible in a chair in a dark corner, from which I watch everybody else, including Jon and Jay, who eventually disappear into one of the bedrooms with the girls.

Liz waits and watches, pretending to laugh at Hank’s bad jokes, touching Garrick’s knees but he doesn’t notice – he eventually pulling himself up to see if there is any food in the kitchen, while Pauly’s head droops after having finally inhaled more pot than even he can handle.

Hank, still giggling at his own jokes, eventually nods off as well, leaving me and Liz as the last survivors on this shipwreck of a party – David Bowie’s voice droning on about thinking his ship knows which way to go – as we seek deeper and deeper into gloom.

“It looks like you’re all I’ve got tonight,” Liz said.

She sounds disappointed.

I don’t even look like David Bowie. I certainly can’t sing.

“Something’s better than nothing,” Liz said, takes my hand and leads me down the stairs to her room in the basement.

 


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