The Evil Inside (15 page)

Clubs

Hell or High Water

APT | Find Tickets
419 W 13th St (between Ninth Ave and Washington St) Meatpacking District | Map
212-414-4245
Subway: A, C, E to 14th St; L to Eighth Ave | Directions
http://www.aptwebsite.com
Tickets: $20

Description

‘Ahoy, me hearties!' and get down and dirty to everything from hop-infused sea shanties to bowdlerized Broadway ditties and turbo-charged pirate rock. The awesomely authentic ship deck dance floor throbs with beautiful buccaneers of both sexes – NB To gain admission, you have to dress ‘pirate' – while the seriously sexy staff help create a swashbuckling ambience that actively encourages debauchery. (Though be warned: the basement area known as ‘Davy Jones' Lockers' is only for the seriously adventurous … or truly ‘sea sick'!)

This month's visiting guest jock from Maui, the tastefully top-hatted Sir Orpheus, brings a treasure chest filled with fabulous funk, Hawaiian voodoo, Brazilian and Latin beats, high-end house and torrid techno. As well as all the usual ‘fucked-up' sea shanties. Go to aptwebsite.com for more info.

When
Tomorrow from 11 p.m.

*

The Hell or High Water was cleverly fitted out like the deck of a Spanish galleon, replete with a full-sized mast, curved canvas sails, small side bars masquerading as longboats, old rusty cannons, coiled snakes of rope, rum barrels, a massive self-turning wheel behind the dance floor, Jolly Rogers (with a Jagger tongue protruding from the skull's mouth) fluttering under hydraulic fans, and lithe semi-clad club staffers scampering across the rigging like so many sea monkeys on heat. There was a prow overhanging the main bar and galley with an evil-eyed Medusa figurehead threatening to lash out at the revellers below. On a huge screen on the far wall, a breeched and booted Errol Flynn came swinging down on a rope like vengeance itself.

I looked up. In the crow's nest, there was a statuesque black woman wearing only white bikini bottoms and a scarf around her head, peering through a telescope at the heaving hordes below and gyrating to ‘Pirate Love' by the New York Dolls. Standing next to her, Sir Orpheus, the top-hatted DJ, was grunting like a gorilla over the chorus.

‘Where do ya reckon they keep the rum rations on this tub?' Jim shouted.

‘Drinks ho!' Nadine pointed ahead to the bar with the rabbit ears of her blouse. ‘Follow me, landlubbers!'

I managed to lose Nadine and Jim as we swam through the crowd. When I finally reached the bar, I bought a drink with my credit card and took in my surroundings.

Pirate theme aside, the dance floor thronged and thumped under the bouncing lights like a thousand others. But when you peered into the club's darker recesses, into the cordoned-off corners or behind the ‘longbars', or peeked behind the skimpy velvet curtains of the ‘private cabins' on the forecastle, there was a whole other world of libertine activity going on.

I drew back the curtains on one heavily cushioned cabin and saw two stunning topless girls – one Asian, one redhead – kissing enthusiastically as they stroked each other through silky red slave girl pants. I watched them trade tongues and fingers for a while. Then I checked out the scene in the next cabin, but there were two men in British naval uniforms and wigs cosying up in there so I sauntered on another cabin or two and spied on a curly-haired blonde pirate queen in a three-cornered hat and ruffled shirt on her knees blowing a big-biceped boatswain.

‘She seems to have a pretty good handle on things, old Long Sally Silver,' I said, bumping into Nadine again.

‘Good to her mates,' she agreed.

‘Where's Jimbo?'

‘Gone to the Buoys.' She pointed with her glass across the crowd to two neon signs on the other side of the club: Buoys and Gulls. ‘I've just been in there myself – they're just separate doors leading to the same bathroom. Funny, huh?' She rubbed under her nose. ‘They even have a sign in there saying ‘The Dispensary' and a dealer dressed up like an admiral selling ‘gun powder' and a special barrel for sniffing it off. What a hoot!' Have you got any cash on you? We might need to top up later and I don't think the admiral takes credit card.'

Just then, a captain with bad skin and a fake moustache that looked like it was stuck on upside down bumped into me, sloshed his drink and scowled. I locked eyes with him but didn't feel up to a physical confrontation in my current state.

‘Why don't we head upstairs where we can hear ourselves think?' Jim suddenly reappeared. ‘I'll bring the next round of rums up.'

The Upper Deck was the club's designated chill-out zone: Gianni Versace channelling Joseph Conrad. Jim and Nadine fell together into a hammock while I rolled into the one opposite, each of us slopping some rum overboard in the process.

‘So did you blast your nose off with the gunpowder?' Nadine wrinkled her nose at Jim like Samantha from
Bewitched.

‘Not me,' Jim said. ‘You know I've been trying to live healthier lately.'

‘Oh yes – on the “New Wonder Beer & Doughnuts Diet!” Nadine scoffed. ‘Well maybe we need to up the ante a bit.' Nadine flashed her naughty schoolgirl smile. She tried to sit upright in the hammock, untying her blouse, which she'd tied pirate-style as we'd entered the club.

‘I've already seen your tits,' Jim said. ‘And I'm sure Guy remembers them from spas gone by.'

‘Yes but you haven't seen these, smart-arse!' She extracted a small plastic packet from inside her leopard-skin bra. Inside there were a number of small hexagonal-shaped blue pills with the letters PHY stamped on them.

‘Where did you get
those
?!' Jim threw up his hands and looked across at me for support. ‘It's like living with fucking Keith Richards in drag!'

‘I brought them back from Ibiza,' Nadine said coyly.

‘
Brought them back
?' Jim was incredulous. ‘As what, hand luggage?'

‘No,
boob
luggage: in my
bra
!'

‘In your bra? We could have been arrested and jailed! For years!'

‘But we weren't, were we, darling?' She sprinkled three of the little blue pills into her palm. ‘So just calm down and join me in a little phantasy! That's what the “PHY” stands for.'

‘What does it do?' I asked, holding my hand out.

‘It's two-thirds ecstasy, one-third heroin. They're meant to fire you up and chill you out at the same time. Keith Richards would approve, I'm sure.'

Jim reluctantly held his hand out as well. ‘You sure they're not Blue Meanies?'

‘
You're
the only Blue Meanie round here,' Nadine laughed. ‘Loosen up a little, will you? We're trying to cheer up Guysville here, remember?'

A slow song came splashing over the bulwark as we each swallowed our little blue pill.

‘“Dites-moi” from
South Pacific
!' Nadine squealed with delight. ‘My mum used to love musicals!' She suddenly looked beatific in the ambient light; a fallen angel. ‘So, Guy,
dites-moi
what the fuck's really been going on with you and Mia and little Callum? You said some strange shit has been happening since you arrived here?'

Bill had an early brunch planned the next morning with his new Japanese girlfriend so had excused himself from coming to the club with us. Without his manic energy distracting us, I could now talk to my friends more seriously if not soberly.

So I began to tell them about our first few weeks in New York. About working with Anthony and Bill – but not about Lucy. About winning coolcams. About how everything had seemed so wonderful and shiny and new. But then, with cold, clipped words, I told them about Mia's suicide attempt and how it related to that awful night at the hospital before we'd left Australia.

As I'd told them at the time, we simply ‘lost the baby' without going into any of the murky details or my part in them.

‘Oh God!' Nadine said, wiping her eyes. ‘You poor things. It must have been just been awful!'

Jim just shook his head and stared down through the ropes. And then, as I started to feel my inhibitions peel away, I began to tell them about the wonderful world of Callum. About him constantly reminding me of Bubby, unwilling to let her memory go. About the foetus appearing on the TV screen at Arcadia while he was sitting right there next to me on the couch; about his unnerving drawing and his disturbing little sculpture. I started to tell them about his kamikaze Buzz Lightyear doll, but checked myself when Jim broke in and said, ‘Yeah, losing a baby like that is gonna do some strange things to your head.'

I suddenly realized that in our current semi-coherent, quasi-euphoric condition, Jim and Nadine simply wouldn't get what I was trying to explain. That all the incredible Callum-inspired occurrences could be real and not imagined. It'd be as fruitless as a bunch of stoned, beaded hippies in New Mexico trying to convey the reality of a UFO sighting to the local redneck sheriff.

So I told them about Esmeralda's accident instead. At least that event couldn't be construed as something delusional or made-up.

‘Your nanny fell and went into a fucking coma?' Nadine sat bolt upright, almost catapulting Jim out of their hammock. ‘How, for Chrissakes?'

‘A freak accident. She was adjusting the curtain.'

‘Jesus,' Jim groaned, putting one long leg on the floor. ‘You guys have really been through the bloody wringer.'

‘And now you and Mia are having troubles – no wonder,' Nadine surmised, also stepping ashore. I looked down at the giant video screen. Peter Pan and Captain Hook were crossing swords as some shitty punk band that not even Nadine would recognize massacred Rod Stewart's ‘Sailing'.

‘It's like Sid Vicious doing “My Way”,' Jim cringed, unaware of Anthony's nickname for him. ‘Let's go back to our place. This music's making me feel seasick.'

‘OK, but I need to swing by the Buoys first,' I said, slipping out of the hammock. ‘I'll meet you at the front door.'

The truth was that talking about everything that had gone on with Mia and Callum and Esmeralda had sent my mind spinning. I needed to take a psychic breather and be by myself for a bit, especially before the PHY started to kick in.

In the interests of cramped-cabin authenticity, the ceiling of the Upper Deck was sloped and low. As I stood up and turned around too quickly, I banged my forehead very hard on a serious crossbeam. It was exactly the same place I'd hit myself with the fire extinguisher.

Lucky I'd had a few drinks.

Apart from the couple fucking in the corner, the ‘Buoys' and ‘Gulls' was empty. But then, as I unzipped, in the mirror I saw the admiral that Nadine had mentioned walk in behind me holding a small wooden treasure chest. He resumed his station under the Dispensary sign, took a clear plastic bag filled with coke out of the chest and sprinkled long white lines out across the polished top of the powder keg.

As he straightened up the lines with a little gold dagger, he caught my eye in the mirror. ‘Be lookin' for some gunpowder, sailor?' he asked with a wink. ‘Fresh from the Spanish Main.'

*

On the three days a week that my grandmother took care of Raine, my mother worked at an illegal abortion clinic – they were pretty much all illegal back in those days.

Located in a separate dirty little building in the overgrown backyard of a suburban medical clinic, it was euphemistically called ‘The Dispensary'.

Because that's what they did in there: they ‘dispensed' with sad little lives.

I only went there once: my father dropped me there unexpectedly one day because he had to attend an urgent ‘business meeting' that somehow involved the fishing rods and slabs of Melbourne Bitter hidden under the picnic rug in the back seat of his green FJ Holden.

I sat there for hours in that grey little waiting room – which wasn't much bigger than the sodden welcome mat – flicking through tattered copies of the
Women's Weekly
and
TV Week
and watching my mother walk weeping young women to the gynaecological gallows. A photograph of a rose-cheeked young Princess Elizabeth being crowned hung crookedly on the wall, as if giving her sad and tacit sanction to the unfortunate business she saw before her.

My mother wore a puce-coloured hospital apron and had her hair tied back in a hard little bun. She hit me with a rolled-up magazine whenever she wanted me to give up the chair to a new red-eyed admission and told me to shut up when I asked what the doctor – though in his careworn gabardine cardigan and scuffed Hush Puppies he didn't really look like much of a doctor – was doing to the yelping young woman behind the door.

Sometimes my father would come home smelling of infidelity and goad my mother with a voice thick with beer, dark with guilt: ‘So 'ow were things down at the hatpin factory today, eh, Vile-et?'

He'd then point his bottle at Raine, rocking happily in the corner. ‘Looks like one of 'em got away.' And then turning the bottle to me like a rifle, ‘Maybe two.'

Raine and I were related in his self-loathing repugnance for us: a girl without hope and a boy without heart.

‘Stop it,' Violet would say wearily. ‘Just stop it, Ray.' She'd start fiddling with my sister's hair.

But this was just the preamble, not the kicker. The kicker was Ray grabbing the last beer out of the fridge, screeching the FJ backwards out of our driveway and disappearing for a few days.

Because that's when my mother would decide that it was high time she washed our hair.

‘Bath time!' she'd yell. ‘Get here now or else!'

She'd always do Raine first.

My sister actually quite enjoyed it – she loved the water. And when my mother finally let her head up, she'd splutter and laugh at the fresh air, as happy as a porpoise. She thought it was a game.