Summer in Galveston

I'm writing this for some friends. I hope they like it!

All characters are over 18. Contains lots of drug use.

* * *

Chris mopped his forehead, glancing behind him in the weirdly-lit side avenue in Church Street. The houses here looked sinister in the moonlight, squat shapes on short stilts, most of them run-down. A dog whined a few streets over.

Summer on the Gulf, when the air at nine pm still felt like the soupy, greasy mess it had been in the afternoon. It was like the setting sun had no effect at all. Fucking weather. His eyes squinted ahead, under a buzzing streetlight up at the end of the block, toward where Broadway Annie had told him she'd be.

Well. More like "implied." That was the problem, dealing with druggies: they were always so unreliable.

She loomed up from between a couple of houses as he stepped through the broken glass in the gutter, smiling that gap-toothed smile of hers. "Hey, Chris. Long time no see."

"Yeah." She was clearly bad with faces, or maybe her mind was scrambled by blow; he'd bought from her not even a week ago, before that big party at the old Ft San Jacinto site. The Last of the Raves, they'd called it, which (as it turned out) was not really a theme geared for cocaine. Ecstasy had been everywhere, though, old-school like the early '90s, and that had been okay with Chris too.

Until the cops showed up.

He'd wormed out of there among the swampy, bug-infested grasses, slinking away west toward the ferry, his stash already given to a couple of girls who'd spent the rest of the night ignoring him. And now here he was, back for more, trying to score off what little he could spare of his week's wages before this weekend's Party Like It's 1999 event over at Wayne's house. He had no idea what to make of that theme: after all, it was 1999. But he figured they'd at least play some Prince, and that was good enough.

Especially if he showed up with an eight-ball. "I'll take an eighth," he muttered, ducking out of the streetlight. Not that this seemed like an area the cops usually came to. Seemed like an area with plenty of knife crime, though.

"No shit." Broadway Annie licked her lips doubtfully. "Prices are high these days, my friend. Four-twenty."

"Bullshit," Chris barked. "The pot number?"

"Funny coincidence, huh?" Annie spat on the scraggly lawn beside her. "If you want, you can go try to score off Lars over on P Street or whatever. Or I've got Scuzzy Joe's beeper number. But they'll tell you the same deal, dude."

"I only have, like, three hundred," Chris lied. A big drop of sweat fell through his eyebrow and puddled on the bottom of his glasses lens. Fucking summer in Galveston...

"No you don't," she giggled. "I know what they pay you at Blockbuster, dude."

"But I had to pick some up last week," he hissed pointedly. "From you." His head swiveled around, not liking this neighborhood at all. Not one bit.

"Oh. That's right." She frowned, cocking her head. "Can you do four?"

"Three-fifty. Maybe." It was more than he wanted to spend, by a damn sight, but what else could he do? Showing up at a party empty-handed was never a good plan. He was a nobody from nowhere, and this was the most marginal of party towns; he needed the help. "Possibly."

"Fuck, dude." Annie scratched at her belly, under the ratty crop-top. "I mean, this shit's pure. I can't do three fifty." She watched him closely. She was obviously high, but that hadn't blunted her business sense. "Three-eighty. And then you'll be able to clear out of this piece-of-shit part of town," she wheedled, "head on back up to, like, Cedar Lawn," she brayed, laughing loudly, "or wherever the fuck you live."

"You suck," he groused, burrowing into his back pocket for his wallet. Goddamn, she was so loud! She'd draw attention. "Three seventy-five."

"Fine," she laughed, "and you? You swallow." The deal was done swiftly under the cloud of mosquitoes as the dog kept barking in the next block.

* * *

He slunk his way into the party a couple nights later, his eyes already bulging from the coke, wearing an outfit that would have looked about right five years before, at a Nirvana concert. Now it was a little bit dated, but who gave a shit? This was Galveston, not New York. Nobody cared how you dressed.

Chris walked through a welcome cloud of Prince, looking for Yu, Jen, and Miles; they were always cluing him in to parties they never ended up going to, which Chris thought was kind of shitty. But he forgave them, since he usually ended up getting laid. Or eating pussy, anyway. Sometimes he got tip-offs from Patti, too, or Lolo. Kara had some hookups, and Mark. But for the most part, he usually ended up with Yu, Jen, and Miles, though to be fair they all tended to leave in different ways...

It was a typical house down near the Beach, on those monotonously regular checkerboard streets in that part of town. The farther you got from the Gulf the lower the tax bracket, and this place was about four blocks back. Stilted, like all the rest of the city, with a nice sloped front lawn leading to a mini-plateau that held the house, now garish with purple strobes.

Chris patted his pockets, making sure he still had his coke, then wormed his way toward a bucket full of ice and beer. Perfect: it was Pabst, which was basically water. Because water was what he was craving, and he took the can down in one long, foamy pull. "Thanks," he said to the shifty-looking kid behind the bucket.

"Yeah." The kid looked like a loser, like he was some kind of medical resident or something. "Fifty cents, dude."

"Whatever." Chris tossed him a couple of quarters, then filched another can before diving into the tangle of bodies in the front room, where the strobes were at their most psychedelic. It stank in there, sweat and puke and hormones, and Chris soon found himself grooving randomly with his stolen beer held high.

About five songs later, Chris felt his gums start to regain their sensation after that first long snort off the dashboard of his car. Patting his pocket once again, he slipped out from among the random writhing bodies to head for the bathroom. His can, long emptied, he tossed into a corner beside a couch as he marched from the room, pointedly ignoring the glare from the weasel at the Pabst bucket.

The bathroom, its door wide open, contained a skinny man barfing in the toilet while a short, sprightly blonde girl sat perched on a bathroom counter strangely devoid of a sink. Chris did a double-take as he made it through the door and saw the girl's skirt bunched around her upper thighs. Then he figured out why he couldn't see the faucet. "You're peeing in the sink?" he marveled.

She shrugged and nodded beside her at the puking guy. "Toilet's taken," she explained.

"Makes sense." She had a friend, he saw now, wedged in there behind the door with a vapid look on her face and a skimpy tanktop on her body. "Um. Do you mind? I was just going to do a line." He gestured toward the counter next to where the pissing girl's hip curved enticingly down toward her butt.

She peered back at him with interest. "Wait. You've got blow?"

"Sure." Chris drew himself up and felt a wide, foolish smile spread over his mouth as the girl hopped off the sink and jerked her clothes back on in one practiced motion, leaving just an eyeblink for him to see where her mound swept smoothly down to a hairless pussy.

"Eyes up here, man," she laughed, adjusting her miniskirt; she didn't sound offended. He obeyed, lingering on a pair of breasts pushed up by what had to be a bra of impressive design, the kind of bra made to give maximum cleavage from minimum raw material. Her face had broken into a cute smile by the time he reached it. "Go ahead, man, do your thing," she added, waving an airy arm toward the countertop.

Chris had played this game before; the spark in her eyes told him that she had, too. He thought of his lost $375 a split-second before he thought of that tempting glimpse of bare pussy, and obviously the money had no chance. "I'm Chris," he winked, the cocaine and that cute smile making him bold. "Care to join me?"

The skinny guy retched on, unnoticed.

"Fuck yes!" Simpering prettily, the girl in the miniskirt turned to her taller companion. "Come on, Ashley! Meet my new best friend Chris!"

"New dealer? What now?" Chris glanced at the girl by the door, who now drifted the few steps across the room to put her arm around her friend. "So nice to meet you, honey. If you're chopping up, do me one?" She fluttered long, shiny lashes. "Pretty please?"

Chris found himself gawking at the girl's tits, displayed just as impressively as her buddy's. They stood there, young and flushed and confident, and without even thinking about it Chris reached straight into his pocket for the rest of Broadway Annie's merchandise. He cleared his throat and raised his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. "You're, uh, Ashley?"

"Fuck yeah." The taller girl watched him carefully as he went through the ritual: the credit card, the baggie, the quick rhythm of the lines. "My shameless friend with no patience for the toilet is Megan."

"Charmed, I'm sure!" the blonde bubbled. She arched her back impressively, and Chris felt his grin grow.

Three lines. The rest of his stash. He didn't think about the money it represented. "Be my guest," he told them grandly, waving an extravagant arm at the counter. All three of them ignored the puker at the toilet, now panting into the bowl. "Um. Here. Let me get a twenty," he added vaguely, his hand slapping his back pocket; he hoped he had more than just a single.

"Nah, we're good." Ashley breezed forward with a rolled $20 bill, hips swinging as she crossed to the counter, and Chris watched as she bent at the waist and took a healthy snort. "Holy shit," she gasped, eyes wide. "Feels fucking good."

"Move your skinny ass, bitch," Megan purred, but Ashley ignored her; she only had eyes for the mirror, where she was dabbing at her nostrils as Megan curled around her with the twenty. One long sniff, and almost a hundred of Chris' bucks disappeared up the girl's pointy nose as he watched. "Mmm," she moaned, straightening, her eyes alight. "Thanks, Chris."

He was impressed when she leaned forward and gave him a cool, open-eyed kiss on his mouth, her lips light and airy and very confident. "Don't mention it," he murmured, but then her smirk was back as she passed him the rolled-up bill, and he was on that last line like it was all that tethered him to whatever was good and cute and sexy in the puke-stenched bathroom, the powder slipping up into his nose with its usual silky ease.

The house pulsed around him as he straightened, the music feeling like it was welling through the walls. "Fuck," he managed, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his flannel, but then Ashley's thin arm was winding around his waist and Megan had taken his hand and they were whisking him back into the purple-strobed heat of the party.

They danced predictably: take the kind of woman who'll piss in the sink, then snort back a line, and add some creative lighting and loud Prince, then see how she dances. That's what Chris got, in spades, as Megan and Ashley flung their bodies around in time to the crashing beat of "Let's Go Crazy." He did his best to keep up, the two of them bookending him firmly with a heady mix of churning hips, thrusting tits, and sweaty faces.

He didn't even realize he'd put his arms around the both of them until, quite unexpectedly, he found himself with two handfuls of equally impressive ass. Megan giggled loudly, her breath in his ear; Ashley was already leaning absently in to brush her lips across his neck, and even as the dance went thrashing on Chris felt his cock stir, then twitch, then begin to stiffen.

His nose was full of the smell of them, wending up through the powder, shooting straight to the part of his brain that was becoming more and more sure he'd get laid tonight. And probably by two at once! He'd never done a proper threesome before, and as his mind started filling with fantastic possibilities, his cock made a bigger and bigger lump in his Levi's. He turned his head blindly, assuming he'd meet Megan's parting lips, the evening shaping up quite nicely indeed...

A large, unpleasant hand clapped onto his shoulder. "What the fuck, asshole?" came a loud, belligerent voice in his ear.

"Hands off my girlfriend, you little shit!" A second voice, along with a second hand on a second shoulder. When Chris' eyes snapped open, he caught a dreamy, knowing look on Megan's face as her eyes slid sideways to one of the guys behind him.

"Oh hi, Kevin," she purred. "You guys are late."

"Obviously." That first voice, apparently Kevin's, dripped sarcasm. "It this little bitch bothering you, Meg?"

"Yeah." The second hand tightened. "Get. Your. Fucking. Hands. Off. Her."

Chris could practically hear Ashley's rolling eyes as she replied. "Calm down, Derek. This is Chris."

"No." Derek had a raspy voice. "This is fucking dead meat." Chris felt himself pulled violently backward, the bodies around them glancing curiously over before shrugging and getting back into the party.

Kevin's voice was a brutal snarl from the other side. "Why don't we head outside, Chris?" The hands were claws. "Maybe we can have a little talk out there, about how you should and should not treat my Meg?"

Chris just stared helplessly at Megan, who shrugged; he swung his head around to turn his pleading eyes on Ashley, but the taller girl was already taking Megan's arm, the two of them continuing to dance with not even a glance at Chris.

Fuck. Chris had played this game before, too. He usually lost.

And, as Derek and Kevin hauled him unceremoniously from the living room, past the vapid Pabst kid, and straight out the front door and down the steps into the muggy air of yet another sticky Gulf night, he knew he was about to lose this time, too.

* * *

"Dude." Miles was sipping yet another whisky, which he clearly knew all about. "Your face looks like shit."

"Even worse," Jen agreed from the other end of the couch. She was enjoying the single-malt too, though she clearly knew nothing about it. She was more into rye.

"I mean really, Chris," Yu went on in his usual reasonable tones, "if you're going to go to these parties and get beat up, you should learn to box. Or at least wrestle."

"Definitely," Jen agreed. Chris scowled.

"Or, fuck," he suggested, "my good buddy Yu could come along to one of these parties once in awhile and, you know, help me out?"

"I was busy," Yu sniffed. He shrugged apologetically. "You know how it is. Girls..."

"Look, there's another party in a couple weeks. Over near the university." Miles sipped once more at his drink, then frowned. "Would you describe this as 'smoky,' or more like 'dark?'"

"I'd describe it as 'whisky,' you fucking yuppie," Chris growled.

"I'll go with smoky." Miles kept a notebook. "Anyway. This party... it's going to be fucking sweet."

"Flooded with girls," Jen giggled.

"I'm told there are going to be, like, dancing chicks. In cages..." Miles' eyes took on a faraway look. "There's a concept I can sink my teeth into, now that I think of it. If you know what I'm saying."

"Well, shit," Chris mused, "I can certainly sink my teeth into some dancing-girl pussy." He rolled his eyes, the left one still all swollen. "You guys won't even show up," he groused.

"Oh, come on. Relax. It'll be great." Miles raised his eyebrows. "Do I need to say it again? Girls? In cages?"

"Whatever."

* * *

Scuzzy Joe had come through with another eighth, and it was a damn good thing too; Annie hadn't been answering her pager lately. "Look, man," Joe had said proudly, "I've got a keyboard on my new cellular phone! Like, an actual keyboard!" He'd flipped the long, black phone on its side and cracked it open. "I paid like eight hundred, man. Well, like, in trade. For some blow."

Chris had frowned. "Every phone has buttons." He'd heard about these new phones, but he'd never used one.

"Nah, dude, a keyboard." Joe had winked. "Like a beeper, but you can type on it. I can even check my AOL."

"No shit?"

"Everyone's going to be buying one of these fucking things, man." Joe had counted Chris' money carefully before handing over the baggie. "Perfect."

"What about this Y2K shit, though?" Chris had read about it in the Daily News. "They say everything electronic is about to shit the bed."

"Well, whatever man. At least you can be flying high while your Dell is conking out, right?" He patted Chris' arm lightly. "Later, my man. Enjoy!"

So Chris had scampered out of yet another shitty part of town, the shadows long and the dumpsters smelly, headed for yet another party at yet another stilted house, with yet another eight-ball in his hip pocket, the sameness of this life starting to get so oppressive: it was time to move, he knew. Out of Texas, at least, up north to somewhere cooler. Literally and figuratively. Back to New Hampshire, maybe...

And the new century might just be a great time for a fresh start.

He dressed carefully, in his red-laced Doc Martens and his nicest jeans: the party was supposed to be a rager. Rumor had it there was a band, an actual band; Yu, who knew a lot of people on the local music scene, had been all pumped for it. The squared-off streets for blocks around were jammed with parked cars, which seemed promising, and the actual house itself had a big garage with a lift; the guy probably did customs. Its big metal door was wide open, and as Chris reached the driveway he stopped, dumbfounded, when he caught sight of what was inside.

Girls.

In cages.

They were more like kennels, actually, made of chain-link fencing. The host had put them up at the edge of the loft, and a long line of girls was waiting on a set of industrial-looking steps, waiting for their chance to dance. Probably there was some dude up there giving them ecstasy afterward.

He did make out Miles at the edge of the crowd in there, his face tipped dutifully up toward the cages, and with a sense of relief Chris stepped up and clapped him on the back. "Fuck, dude, you weren't lying."

"Right?" Miles looked mesmerized. "I'll remember this scene for years, man. Jacking off." He shook his head. "Look at them. The whole idea, man..."

"Jesus," Chris agreed, his spirits soaring, "there's pussy here for days." He felt that welcome surge in his pants. "Dude. How is it inside the house?"

"No idea. I'm not leaving this shit," Miles sighed, his eyes widening. "Fuck. Look at her tits, pressed up against the fencing..."

She was amazing, her hair bleached out like Lita Ford's from back in the day, her body writhing in the cage. "Phoah."

"I know," Miles nodded. "I've been staring at her for like ten minutes."

"Her friends, though..." The other two cages contained a matched set, a redhead and a brunette with short fluffy Roxette hair, the two of them snarling catlike at each other to the raucous cheers of the men below. Both wore shiny Spandex, lots of it. "Like, are those pros?"

"Who knows?" Miles licked his lips. "I'm not moving until those girls stop moving."

"Yeah." Chris glanced around, already parched. "I'm heading in for a beer. Want one?"

"In a bit, man. I'll see you later."

"Cool, cool." Chris' nose ran as he turned away and meandered across the driveway, paved with loose shells, and past a garden where some chick was already kneeling in the shadows by a palm tree, sucking off a guy with a mullet. Chris nodded at him as he went by, and the guy raised his beer bottle in reply.

Fucking great party, already.

He pulled open the cheap aluminum storm door, its screen already flapping at the corner where some drunk partygoer had shoved on it. The house shook with the power of the bass, which was impressive: it was a big house, built on one of those double-lots the developers had snatched up after the 1900 hurricane, when the whole city had been a clean slate. This place was tall, stone, with an air of solid majesty at odds with the blowjob he'd just passed in the backyard.