"Darling Jo" – Navil Gomez
The smell of sweat filled the club along with the lingering scents of scotch, whiskey, brandy, and ale; beer, tequila, vodka and rum. The lights flashed. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. The music so loud that not even the DJ could remember the words to the song, just that the rhythm pulsed throughout the floor and into people's feet and up their spines in a tantrum sensation allowing fluid movements of arms and legs, limbs and fingers, reaching out to touch one another.
The clientele of The Cave were mostly strung out teens and twenty-year-olds all too young and drugged out to deal with the world in the morning. So they came here, washing themselves in sin and tonic.
Seth was not one of them. He was twenty-three years old, sober, wearing clothes that fit and didn't glow in the dark and he was there looking for his brother.
There was no plan other than go into the club and search. Seth realized just how stupid it was when he was already inside, pushing against and away bodies, searching for a glimpse at raven hair and gray eyes.
" Hey baby, ain't cha on da wrong side of town?" A thick, Brooklyn accent filled his right ear when arms wrapped around his shoulders. Seth was quick to jerk back, throwing off who ever the voice belonged to.
" Go find someone else to molest."
" An' if I only want yous?"
“ Then you’re going to have to…” The sentence was left unfinished when Seth turned around and recognized a face he thought he’d never see again. The blond hair with black streaks, the matching the skintight shirt ripped at the hems, and the jeans so torn he wondered how they were still on, all alluded to a complete stranger but Seth knew only one person with mismatch colored eyes. The right eye green, left eye brown, it had to be… “ Joseph!”
“ Baby, I don’t go by dat anymore. Jus Jo.” The man once known as Joseph smiled, flashing pearly white fangs. Seth’s mind went reeling, of all the people he’d thought to find, Joseph Wheeler was the last he’d think to find in The Cave.
“ What’re you doing here?”
Seto went back six years to a night there were no stars because the city’s pollution choked the sky. It’d been two weeks after their high school graduation and Seth and Joseph were sitting on the truck bed of a ford pickup, compliments of the latter’s alcoholic father.
“ Baby, you’re in my playground now, I get to push the swings.” Jo closed any and all distance between them as he reached out to touch Seth, slithering his hand up and around the back of the other’s neck, caressing the smaller hairs. “ What’re
you doin’ here? If you kept on the straight n’ narrow, ya shouldn’t end up here. ”
“ That’s more than I can say for you.” Seth spat. He felt incredibly uncomfortable and not because Jo was so close he could see the boy’s beads of sweat drip from his forehead but that the contact was welcomed. In any other circumstance, with any number of other people, he would have shoved them away and continued on but he was trapped. Trapped by the two-colored eyes and the boy he hadn’t thought was still alive.
“ You mad?” Jo smiled, taking his other hand and sliding it opposite the other in Seth’s hair. “ You don’t know the half of it Baby.” He leaned in a little closer, their lips almost touching and looked Seth straight in the eye. “ What’re you doin’ here?”
For two seconds Seth forgot himself. Forgot who he was, where he was, why he was there at all. All he could think about was the fact that Jo’s breath smelled like vanilla caramels and Jaeger. “ Micheal.”
“ I knew it.” And just like that, Jo let go of Seth, taking a few steps back and bumping into a couple dancing so close together you could smell the sex radiating off of them.
“ You’ve seen him?!” Seth’s heart leaped into his throat if at least metaphorically because it could have easily been the music.
Jo held out his hand. “ I saw a pretty boy tonight an’ thought about you. Hair jet-black like yours an’ da same pair of sad eyes. He was on the wrong kind of high Baby, you sure you wanna see ‘im?”
“ He’s my brother! ” Seth screamed, the music had become louder, faster, and the bodies were beginning to thrash about. He sought Jo’s hand afraid he’d be eaten up by the masses. He felt thin fingers slip into his and tug.
Six years ago, he’d have followed Joseph anywhere, anytime with a bubble of anticipation of what trouble they would get into next. That was six years ago when they were still best friends. They lived in each other’s world even when one was pissed off at the other or when they ended up with broken legs because the idea of jumping off bridges was a good one. Even when one was in love with the other and it was the best-kept secret since the brain tumor his father had been silently suffering from.
Now he was following Jo into the depths of The Cave, surrounded by people so far gone from this realm they would be offended if referred to as humans. The music grew louder before it faded and lights stopped flashing only to pulsate. There were less and less bodies and more and more hiding places. Seth could hear the noises of people having sex, laughing, arguing, fighting, screaming, murmuring, snorting lines of coke.
“ Why are you here?” Seth asked, his head too fill with questions not to at least ask one.
“ Long story Baby. Long story.”
“ Stop calling me baby.” Jo made no response, verbal or otherwise.“ Give me the cliff notes.”
“ You’re here for Mikey, not me.” Jo continued to tug Seth further and further down a hall, his feet knowing all too well where they were going to end up. “ You’re coming with us.”
“ You jus decided dat for me?”
“ You’re coming.” Indeed he had and he wasn’t going to change his mind now.
“ You were always da dumb one Seth.” Jo’s free hand reached for a door and pushed it open. Seth looked over his shoulder but saw only the corner of a desk before Jo closed the door back up.
“ Is he in there?” Panic boiled over somewhere inside the pit of his stomach where all the knots were sitting. Seth was scared shitless. Afraid he’d been too late. Two weeks late since Micheal had first gone missing.
“ Ever changed ya brotha’s diaper?”
“ What?” “ Sometimes seein’ too much of someone is bad, no matter how much you’ve known ‘em.”
“ Joey, you’re not making…”’
“ Jo.”
“ Jo! What the hell are you talking about?”
“ Sometimes, ya don’t need ta see people doin’ certain things.”
“ What is he doing?” but Seth was already reaching for the door. Jo squeeze his way in between and pressed right up against taller man.
“ Do you rememba da night I left?”
“ What! Jo is he in there or not?!”
“ I ask ya somethin’. Do you rememba da night I left?”
“ Yes of course I do, what does that have to do….” Seth trailed off. Jo’s hands were encircling his waist and his eyes were staring directly into his. No more fangy smiles but sincere pleading.
He tried to remember the night in the pickup. The night no stars were out, all hidden beneath pollution. They’d been driving for hours and ended up on some dusty hillside just outside the city. It had reached the darkest of night and even though they lay right next to one another, they could only make out one another’s outlines.
“ Do you rememba? Everythin’.”
He remembers kissing Joseph for the first time. He remembers the taste of whiskey and wanting to end the kiss quicker. He remembers being shoved. He remembers feeling utterly rejected. He remembers tears still running down Joseph’s face. He remembers why they ended up there in the first place. He pushed Jo aside and threw the door open, looking wildly around for his brother.
The room was set up much like any other back office. Shelves of binders, books and drug paraphernalia lined two quarters of the walls. There were two leather bound chairs and a wide desk. It was who was on the desk that made Seth’s skin turn cold.
Micheal was eighteen but he looked more like a twenty-odd year old girl. Pale skin, long black hair, long eyelashes dancing around grey eyes, and small curves always confused people. It never really bothered him. He even went so far as to go along with it when he wore women’s clothing to get into clubs and have his drinks paid for. He also used his androgyny to help maintain his meth addiction. Tonight was no different.
“ Micheal!” He felt arms before he realized the familiar voice was his brother. Seth pulled him off the desk, pulling down his dress as he did so. “ You’re fucking sick!” but Seth wasn’t yelling at him but at that guy. That guy that Micheal couldn’t honestly remember his name, just that he had syringe full the euphoria.
“
Seth, let me go. I’m okay. I’m okay. I got this. I want this. Just one shot. Just one shot. I’ll be good. I’ll come home. Just one more shot.” In Micheal’s head he sounded perfectly normal, words spoken incredibly calm for the current amount of tension in the room but to Seth, it sounded like nothing but the rabid pleas of a junkie.
“ Hey, look. He came to
me okay?” The man with a name that neither brother cared about didn’t even attempt to put his pants on, just sat there in his underwear.
“ I don’t want to hear it!” Before Seth did something along the lines of breaking his fist against the man’s face, he walked out with his brother still pleading and mumbling and squirming in his arms.
Jo watched from his corner outside the room, surprised nothing else happened. When he was younger, he knew Seth to be one of those men who was secretly an explosively violent; the kind that would beat the shit out of his alcoholic father if he saw Joseph come to school with a black eye or two.
(to be continued...)
