SANDWICH RUN by Peter Nolan Smith

New York nightclubs closed at 4am in 1979, however many people didn't want to go home after Studio 54, the Mudd Club, Xenon or CBGBs. The Mafia ran the after-hour clubs like the Cisco Disco, the 82 Club and the Nursery on 3rd Avenue. Drinks were served with an undesirable degree of danger, so when nightlife impresario Arthur Weinstein announced the opening of an after-hour club in his apartment on New Year’s Eve, the city’s elite flocked to the Jefferson Theater on East 14th Street to celebrate the coming of a new decade.

After convincing his wife that this illegal venture would coin good money, Colleen transformed their loft with a little paint, mirrors in the wall, art-deco furniture, and eclectic lighting into an Eden after midnight.

Arthur's good friend, Scottie was the bartender, his wife acted as hostess, Arthur spun records, and I worked the door. 11pm passed without anyone entering the Jefferson. Midnight came and went. The four of us drank champagne and Arthur shrugged an apology.

"So it wasn't such a good idea."

Nearing 2am we feared the worst, then super-model Christie Brinkley strolled up the stairs and kissed Arthur on the cheek.

"I hope you're ready." She was with two gay friends.

"Ready?"

"I invited everyone from Studio." The blonde cover girl turned to Coleen. "I love what you did with this place. It's so 40s."

"Everyone?" I whispered to Arthur.

"Anyone mentions her name, let them in for free. For tonight only." Arthur knew his business.

Within the hour taxis and limos pulled up in front of the Jefferson, which immediately became home away from home for those late-night revelers unwilling to call it a night. Movie stars, musicians, models, bankers, politicians, go-go girls, punks, gays, cops, and dealers danced till dawn as if the second-story club was the Noah's Ark of decadence. We thought the party would last forever, then again most of us were loaded on drugs.

Arthur saw it different.

The precinct cops were on the take. Internal Affairs were investigating their involvement at the Jefferson. After-hour clubs had a short life in New York and slightly before Memorial Day Arthur warned his wife to stay away from the club.

"Anything wrong?"

"Just a hunch."

His premonition was on the money.

Two nights later the police raided the club at 3am.

Scottie slinked out the front door through a gauntlet of police and Arthur climbed down the fire escape under a black Halloween cape. Not everyone got away free.

Internal Affairs arrested two 9th Precinct officers, a sanitation cop, a bag man for the fire department, two transvestites, a circus clown, two barboys, the son of a CIA agent, three female bartenders, and me. The sanitation cop put up a struggle. The cops hauled him into the back bedroom and broke his leg with a baseball bat.

They were playing hard ball.

"Anyone else want some." A plain-clothed officer waved the baseball bat at us.

We shook our heads.

Thirty minutes later an ambulance arrived for the injured cop and the officers led the other arrestees into a paddy wagon. We were arraigned in the morning and the judge released me without a charge, recognizing me from the West 4th Street Basketball Cage..

Arthur, Scottie. and I that night at the Ritz. They surveyed the bar with a visible nervousness. A psycho cop had visited Arthur in the morning. A double blast from a shotgun had punched a hole in the ceiling.

"He was from the 9th."

"Guess they want you to keep your mouth shut." I had been slipping their bagman $200 a night.

"What Internal Affairs say?"

"They didn't ask us anything."

"No names?" Scottie wore the same jeans, shirt, and jacket as the previous night. His hair stuck straight up in the air, so he resembled a hobo on the run. He could use a shower.

"They knew your names. Mine too. They said they would be taling with us."

"But not tonight, but you never know." Arthur couldn't help us. We were on our own.

The Jefferson closed its doors forever. Those arrested never went to trial and the story of crooked cops was buried in the back pages of the newspapers. No one said nothing. I tried to find another job, but the summer was a tough time to get work.

Within a month we were broke. Arthur kept talking about opening another place. His wife thought he was crazy, but agreed to decorate the next venue, if he could find a place.

"Think about how we can do if it was bigger." Arthur told Scottie and me. "Bigger means more money."

"Bigger means more trouble too." I was familiar with the West Side precincts, but I had nothing going for me and said, "

“We’re with you all the way.”

Arthur’s search for the right spot took time.

Scottie glommed the bar at the Ritz and I stood at the door of the Mudd Club in the sweltering August heat.

I contemplated getting a day job, then things fell into place as Arthur found an abandoned garage on West 25th Street along with investor to finance the Continental. Arthur informed the landlord that he was opening an art gallery.

Coleen, Scottie, and I were the first people to see the place.

"It just needs a little work." The floors were caked with oil. The walls sagged with mildew, and the ceiling panels hung from the ceiling like limp tongues. "We don't have to make it livable. Only good enough to serve drinks. We can open by Labor Day."

"Who's going to do the construction?" Scottie asked, since the only time we used a hammer was to chip the ice out of the freezer.

"You guys and your friends," Arthur said without saying how. "I'm no contractor."

"How much are you going to pay?" I was only interested in money.

"Not much." Arthur was living on the edge. “But you’ll have a job at the end of it.”

"Throw in lunch and you got a deal."

"Deal." Arthur's word was good enough for Scottie and me.

Werthel, a lanky 19 year-old from the Five Towns, wanted to join the work crew. During the last months of the Jefferson his drug use had gone from daily to hourly. This job was going to be his rehab.

"Why don't you go to real rehab?" Scottie asked at the apartment that Werthel shared with his friend, Richie Boy. "Your father has money."

"I don't want my old man to know about it.” His father was a dentist. He expected big things from his son. Werthel was swearing off blow forever. He gave us the last of his stash. "Have a party."

"You mind if I take some change too." Scottie stared at a bowl filled to the brink with quarters on the glass coffee table.

"Sure, but only as much as you can grab with one hand."

Scottie snatched a handful and Werthel grabbed his wrist, so hard that Scottie's take was decreased by half.

"You're the meanest man in the New York," Richie Boy declared from the sofa. Werthel and he were schoolmates from kindergarten. No one knew him better.

"Do you guys think I'm mean?" Werthel seemed hurt by the accusation.

"I won't, if you let me take another handful." Scottie was ready for double or nothing.

"You had your chance."

"He gets another. No interference. None."

Steve glowered at me, but let Scottie have a free go at the quarters. My nickname wasn't 'Maddog' for nothing and I said to Scottie, "Let's get out of here."

The coins covered a sandwich at the nearest deli. The cocaine went fast at AM-PM, an after-hour club, abutting the exit for the Holland Tunnel. Free cocaine always had a funny way of making you too many new friends.

Breakfast was a coffee and a bagel at Dave’s Luncheonette. There was no lunch.

On Monday morning we showed up to West 25th Street. The street shimmered with heat. Arthur's craggy-faced partner waited for us. Paulie was a model, whose face had graced the cover for a Time Magazine's article on Herpes. We nicknamed Paulie HP.

"You were supposed to be here at 8." HP stood with his twin brother and a friend. Both of them wore very professional carpenter belts with hammers and nails. HP asked us, "Any of you have tools?"

"Tools?" Scottie's only tool was a beer-opener. Mine was sheer muscles.

"I'll take that as a no." HP gave the carpenter friend $40. "Go get some hammers and shit. The rest of you I don't want you talking to anyone about what we're doing. I also want you here on time. 8am. We finish when we finish. No overtime."

"What an asshole," Werthel muttered under his breath. As the meanest man in New York he could have knocked all three of them.

"We work at our pace."Working construction for below-minimum wage was my version of Hell.

Thirty minutes later we were tearing down the walls. Scottie and I loaded up metal onto a trolley. Werthel pounded the walls with a sledgehammer. Decades-old dust covered our bodies and acrid sweat poured out of our skin. Arthur showed up at noon.

"You look like asbestos miners."

"Is it lunch time yet?" Scottie was exhausted from the first physical work that he had done in years. I wasn't in much better shape, however Werthel was running on fumes of his spent addiction ready for more.

"It’s lunch when I say it's lunch." HP countermanded Scottie’s suggestion.

"Who elected you god?" Arthur snidely demanded in our defense.

"I’m paying for them to work. Not have a picnic."

"Don't be such an asshole." Arthur was our union rep and stuck out his hand to HP. "Cough up."

“Cough up what?"

"Lunch money." Arthur was counting on lunch too.

"I never said anything about free lunch." HP was a stingy as a thirteen year-old boy on his first date.

Werthel, Scottie, and I muttered 'asshole' under our breath. Arthur examined the scrap metal.

"We'll get rid of the scrap and be right back."

Arthur and Scottie rolled the trolley onto West 25th Street. The temperature would have been 95 in the shade if there were any trees. The trip took them 20 minutes. The junk dealer had given them $9. They came back with three cheese and mayo sandwiches. Werthel had brought his own, a salami and cheese with pickles on a roll. I could smell it from ten feet away.

"Lunch is over." HP complained about us taking too much time.

"I’ll talk to him." Arthur was good with people, only HP wasn’t people. By week's end we wanted to quit.

Arthur begged us to reconsider.

"You quit this asshole won't hire you at the club." Arthur was powerless to stop HP from being an asshole. I picked up a steel pipe. Arthur shook his head. "We need his money."

Werthel was supposedly attending summer school and his mother gave him a weekly stipend.

Scottie and I ate a $1 slice of pizza. We were losing weight and Werthel was getting stronger. We tried to schnorr his left-overs, but he theow the half-eaten sandwiches in the trash. Scottie and I were too proud to dig out his scraps. He was our friend, but we transferred our hatred from the model to Werthel.

The demolition got harder and dirtier. None of us knew what we were doing. Scottie was nearly decapitated by a falling slab of sheet rock, Werthel fell off the ladder, and I mashed my thumb with a hammer. Arthur suggested that I go see a doctor. HP wouldn't pay for the visit and I wrapped my thumb with a torn tee-shirt.

Worse was our constant hunger.

One day Scottie and I were begged Werthel for some money and he said, "I'll race you for a sandwich."

"Me?" Scottie was short, but very fast.

"No, Maddog." He pointed to me.

I had been a cross-country runner in high school in 1969. My best finishes were 3rd and 4th place. I had drank until dawn with Richie Boy. Vodka drowned my every pore and my legs wobbled in the heat. Werthel was wearing fresh Adidas. "Two sandwiches versus I getting your day's wages."

Arthur and Colleen got out of a cab. HP and the rest of the crew stopped working.

"You're on." My cheap work boots weren't made for a race on cobblestones.

"I'll take some of that bet." HP yelled from the loading platform. "But you have nothing to bet."

"I do.” Arthur pulled $100 from his pocket and Colleen slapped his hand. The money was meant for an over-due bill.

"Straight up." HP was giving no odds.

Arthur looked at me. "You can do it, kid?"

"No problem." Arthur was 35. I was twenty-nine. His saying 'kid' made me feel younger. I loosened up my body.

"Scottie, you hold the money." Arthur and HP handed the c-notes to Scottie. The model glared at Werthel. "If you throw the race, I'll welsh on the bet."

"I’m not throwing any bet. I’m the meanest man in the New Work.” Werthel tossed his sandwich in the trash. This race was a final test of his drug treatment. "You ready?"

"100 yards,” I said, because he was definitely faster for the first 50.

"100 yards it is." Werthel dropped his tools. Scottie was the referee. Werthel and I walked off the distance in the middle of the street. Workers from the street stood on the sidewalk. More bets were placed on Werthel. The odds were in his favor.

"You know we don't have to do this. You could give me the money for the sandwiches and I'll be your slave." I was more hungry than proud.

"No way, Maddog." Werthel walked to a manhole cover and crouched like Jesse Owens, while I stood at ease, both arms at my side.

Scottie shouted from the finish line. "On your marks. Get set. Go."

Werthel and I burst down the street. He pulled ahead. One yard. Two yards. I dropped my head and pushed harder. My feet slapped onto the hot pavement. Shouts filled my ears. We were neck and neck. Scottie was only ten yards away. I leaned forward and beat Werthel across the line by a foot. Colleen screamed with delight and HP called for a rematch. Arthur grabbed the two $100 bills.

"No rematch, Herpes Boy. He won fair and square."

I thought so too, then Arthur winked at Werthel. He gave me $10.

"Maddog? You won your sandwich. Enjoy."

Arthur handed Scottie and me $20 each. The sandwiches from the closest deli were terrible, but victory was a powerful condiment.

That Friday HP said he'd pay us at his apartment. We went to One 5th Avenue after 5. The doorman said that HP had flown to Paris to shoot a commercial about acne. We didn't see him till the following week. After Herpes paid us, Werthel called him an asshole.

"You’re fired."

"You can’t fire me. I quit." Werthel chucked a hammer at HP. The hammer quivered in the wall.

Werthel stomped off the site and HP said, "Don't even try to come to this club."

“Asshole.” Arthur was a good judge of character and we echoed his sentiment with a chorus of mutters.

Later that night we visited Werthel at his apartment. Richie Boy had a good laugh at everyone's version of the race and Scottie asked, "Werthel, how it feel to lose to an old man?"

Werthel put down his Diet-Coke.

I didn’t lose. I threw it?" "You don't like losing at anything. Even checkers when we were kids." Richie Boy was speaking from experience

"I made it look like he won." Werthel folded his arms across his chest.

"Shut up already,” Arthur sat forward on the sofa. "I saw your face. You wanted to win and thought you could beat a drunk and maybe if you hadn't eaten your sandwich before the race you could have beaten him, but he won, because he was faster."

"I could beat him now."

Werthel was right. I had drunk 5 beers. My feet, legs, and heart were on the disabled list.

"Maybe." Arthur wasn’t letting Werthel slide. "But this afternoon who was faster? Maddog was." Werthel waited several seconds and grunted with an off-center smile. "He was faster."

I have a good eye for winners." Arthur was looking at Werthel with a sly grin. "And an even better one for losers and no one’s a big a loser as HP."

"Asshole." We clinked glasses and drained our drinks. Werthel finished his Diet coke and turned to me.

"Sorry being the meanest man in the New York."

"Herpes boy HP is the meanest man in the the city. Not you." We’d get back at HP once the club opened for business. "Thanks, but I can be meaner than HP."

"As long as it's not to us, who cares." Arthur added, because while Werthel might be the meanest man in the New York, he would always be one of us and to this Werthel had nothing to say. He could only smile.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 2 By Peter Nolan Smith

Two weeks after Labor Day the Continental opened its door without a liquor license. Limos lined West 25th Street well past dawn, as models, actresses, and strippers danced with abandon to the city's best DJs. Movie stars snorted coke with two-bit dealers and national politicians seduced Amazonian TVs on pop-art sofas.

Few revelers cared about the illegality of an after-hours club. The precinct police were on the take. Sanitation inspectors glommed drinks with big-hair wives, plainclothes cops strong-armed bribes, and Jimmie Fats siphoned the cash cow for the firemen. Greed blinded the bagmen to Arthur's wearing a wire for Internal Affairs and the FBI investigating our Russian investor for counterfeit twenties. I was counting the days until it all went bad and hoped to not be there then, but $100 tips pushed my day of departure back weekend by weekend.

By Halloween I had $5000. By mid November that amount reached $6000.

A week before Thanksgiving Arthur sold half his share in the Continental to three men in black suits.

"You been talking about leaving. It's a good time for you to leave."

Arthur paid me $500 for the week.

"I don't know where to go." My pockets were crammed with cash. It was getting cold, but I still hadn't spoken to Lisa."

"Anyplace, but here." Arthur nodded at his new partners.

Their shoes were FBI issue.

"I'll leave after Christmas." Another month was worth $3000.

"Don't wait too long." He was trying to tell me something only I wasn't listening as long as Lisa's Nordic profile, blonde hair and sculptured shoulders dogged my peripheral vision.

She was a siren and to other men as well.

Vadim’s bodyguards exercised Slavic etiquette to these suitors in the alley. My obsession rejected fear and I cornered Lisa once, when Vadim was out of town.

"All I want is explanation." It was almost Thanksgiving. The anniversary of her leaving.

"Of what?" She had embraced the comfort of amnesia.

"Why you left and never came back." I had thousands of answers. None of them added up to one plus one equaling two.

"If I explained that, then I would have to tell you everything." She looked through me as if I were glass and wearily walked away, saying "Sometimes you don't get answers."

Refused an answer, I slipped my hand into my pocket for a quarter.

Flipping a coin was another way to see the future.

Heads meant yes. Tails no.

"Does she love me?"

It came up tails.

A spike jabbed my heart like a junkie's hotshot.

"Will she come back to me?"

Tails.

I was plunged into darkness.

"Will we have sex again?"

Heads.

My limitless obsession accepted these 50/50 replies as the truth, especially since Lisa's neglect was a game and she chose to exploit a pawn in December.

The winter dawn broke on the club's fire escape. Danny was playing the Members' SOUNDS OF THE SUBURBS. I stood on the rusting steel, watching the stars fade from the night. High heels clicked onto the steel grating. Lisa wore a black sable fur coat. It was open and her silk shirt was unbuttoned to her waist.

"I needed some air."

Her flawless skin was the color of the first snow.

"It's cold this time of year." I started for the door.

"I'm from Buffalo and it's not that cold in this coat." She leaned against the door. "Don't worry. Vadim is too high to care what I do."

"What about his bodyguards?"

"They're drunk too. Russians like their drink." She reached out for me. "Hold me."

I melted into her like a nuclear core going China Syndrome through the Earth.

After a breathless kiss the ashen blonde claimed, "I haven't stopped loving you."

"Me neither." I wished our bodies were wrapped in silk sheets instead of buffeted by an alley wind.

"I can't give you any answers." Her hands spoke with desire and she looked over her shoulder as if her eyes could see through the steel door.

"I don't want words." It was a well-rehearsed line.

"Good." She pulled me closer and we embraced like lovers in a silent movie for a half-minute. Her heart was bare to my hand and her heart beat like a clock ready to sound its alarm.

"I have to go."

"I understand."

"I wish I didn't have to go."

"Then leave with me. I have $6000. We can go anywhere. Europe, LA, Florida. Anywhere."

"$6000 goes fast." The narrowing of her eyes revealed that she was adding up the pros and cons of my proposition.

"We can rent a house in Key West. I'll work at a bar. We'll watch the sunsets from the pier." I loved the sea. It was only one of a million possibilities, if she said 'yes'.

"Vadim says poets go nowhere." She was weighing my worth.

"Only because I've been waiting for you."

Applause from NYU co-eds had rewarded my poems about two days stranded in Garrison Junction, Montana, yet a drifter's code wasn't tattooed on my skin. "I could get a real job. Move into a nice apartment."

A nine-to-five held little glamour to someone who has travelled first-class through Europe and her icy stare announced her final appraisal. Her hand withdrew from mine.

"Sean, it's a nice dream, but life's too short to live a dream."

My one minute of overtime ran to zero.

"Why you never call?" Asking questions was not part of my daydreams.

"Your phone got shut off." An unpaid bill was only partially the truth.

"You could have sent a postcard." This plea cut the scene short.

"The last thing I need in life is someone who lives for breaking the score of CBGB's pinball machine." Pity was not her forte.

"I'm good at pinball." I owned the record for the SLASH machine at CBGBs.

"But your name isn't Tommy." Lisa fled inside the club and joined Vadim and his partner, Viktor Malenski, in the VIP lounge.

Before I broached the velvet ropes, his two Ukrainian bodyguards created an immovable barrier. I possessed other means of touching Lisa and went to the DJ booth with two beers.

"Nice entrance." Danny sported a broken nose and two black eyes. His hailing from Old New York money more than compensated for a crooked beak with the girls at the Continental. They loved him all the more.

"I wasn't trying to be discreet." "I can see you're treading on razors." Danny touched his nose. "I'm not worried about Vadim's thugs." "Really? The big one punched me for speaking with Lisa. I learned my lesson One punch had taught Danny to keep his distance from Lisa. I think you'd get hit a little harder than me." "I've been hit before." I pushed him away from the turntables and picked out an LP. Danny grimaced at my choice of the Romantics' WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU. "That song only has an audience of one." "Two. You're forgetting me." Two years ago the Romantics had played Hurrah. Hundreds of young women packed the uptown rock club to see the Detroit band. I took a break from the door to check out the show. A blonde stood before the speakers. Her beauty belonged in a fashion magazine and I leaned forward to smell hair fragrant as peaches dipped in burnt tar. Mere mortals didn't stand a chance with her, but she backed into me, as the group played their hit song. Her intent was more than flirtation and I should have retreated to the club's entrance.

My hillbilly girlfriend waited at our East Village apartment. She said she loved me. I ignore her declaration of devotion and grabbed the blonde's hand. The encore of their hit accompanied our sex in the stairwell.

Now Lisa laughed, as if the song was for someone else. The dance floor emptied quickly. Arthur frowned at the DJ booth and slashed his hand in the air to cut the song short.

"Sorry, but I get paid to make people dance." Danny didn't need another broken nose.

"Put something else on." I accepted its failure.

Danny segued to Chic's LE FREAK and ransacked the EPs for a floor-filler to his next tracks.

"There are other women out there."

"And I've been with more than a few." Vixens lounged on the club's over-stuffed sofas in a languid mockery of foreplay and braless teenagers danced like they had graduated from stripper training school. I had slept with several. None of the one-nighters succeeded in erasing the ruins in my head. There had to be a magic word. A gesture. Something to change the present into another now.

"You ever hold something in your hands and know it belongs nowhere else?"

"My Little League baseball bat." Danny grasped an imaginary slugger. "Women are mist on the water and no man can hold onto a ghost."

"Lisa's flesh and blood."

"A zombie is the one ghost you can never raise from the dead."

"She told me she loved me." I watched, as she led Vadim onto the dance floor.

"No phone calls, no letters, and a Russian boyfriend don't spell love in any language."

"Not if you're only reading the subtitles." Lisa swayed to the music without looking my way and Vadim moped like a trained bear. I danced better than him and I had read her TS Eliot in the bed of a Niagara Falls Hotel. Poetry under the sheets had to count for something, but cutting in was not an option. The bodyguards glared at me.

"She never said she was going away forever."

"Never can change to forever in a heartbeat. You were a poet a year ago. Your shit was funny. Why you stop?"

"I walked into a bookstore. Thousands of books were on the shelves. At least five hundred said what I felt."

Self-pity delivered a coup de grace to my muse.

"So now you're a thug."

"And Vadim is a gangster." Vadim and Lisa stopped dancing and went to the coat check. They were leaving for the night. My quitting time was dawn.

"If a woman has to choose between the lesser of two evils then she'll always go for the money."

"Love's not about money." Not at the moment of orgasm.

"That coat is worth more than you earned last year." Danny focused a light on Vadim covering her shoulders with a sable fur.

"So?" My memories of Lisa rotted like a Playboy pictorial left in the rain.

"So no matter how much a woman loves you, she'll always seek the safest harbor."

"And my life's too messy to offer a woman shelter." My apartment was in a ghetto, my bank account languished in double figures, and my plans for the future extended no further than breakfast.

"You're a storm at sea." Danny spun TAINTED LOVE and revelers thronged onto the dance floor.

Arthur waved for me to return to the door, as a flat-chested brunette in a slick black leather dominatrix outfit slinked into the DJ booth. Several men on the dance floor recognized Sherri. My cousin had starred in scores of XXX movies. Her most famous role was as a teenage runaway. I had seen the film twice. We had met in a Times Square bar after she tilted my pinball machine. Our mutual affinity for self-destruction determined that we were better off friends than lovers.

"Hi, cous." Sherri greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

Sherri was more than a hellbound succubus. The porn star was smart and very funny. We had good times together. Claiming a family tie avoided any explanation of our relationship.

"You've really have to give her up. No woman will cross a bridge she’s burned." Sherri followed my eyes to the couple exiting the club.

"What if I walked across water?"

"We're sinners and sinners can only perform sin, not miracles." Sherri's failures in love rivaled my debacles.

"I can change my ways like St. Paul."

"St. Paul was chasing redemption, not another man's woman."

"Your cousin thinks Lisa's and his bodies were created for one another." Danny almost played James Brown's IT'S A MAN'S WORLD and then switched to Sly Stone's TAKE ME HIGHER. "Like Adam and Eve."

"I don't care what is written in the Bible, God created the first woman for himself. Adam had to make do with the animals until God got tired with Eve." Sherri's opinion of men hovered below the ground.

"I'm not saying Lisa was created for me."

"No woman is created for any man." Sherri preferred girls. Her fans felt the same way.

"And worst you think there are only two kinds of women other than your mother."

"Only two." I had thought there were at least five.

"Marlon Brando has his way Blanche in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and two minutes later is calling out, "Stella." Your ex-girlfriend looks like a virgin, except she’s sleeping with another man. Men can't choose between the virgin and the whore. You have one. You want the other. No woman can be both. Not the Virgin Mary. Not even me."

"Okay, most men are suckers, but all I want is someone to love." I was hoping that she possessed a secret potion, instead Sherri said, "Your first night with Lisa you supposedly 'made love' five times. At least that's what you told me." Danny's eyes widened in admiration.

"My heart was on fire."

"Yes, and that 'five times' has been a yardstick for involvement with a woman. Lust is not love. Lust is lust. See the girl in the boa feathers."

A scantily-clad redhead teased a circle of leering worshippers. Che Chasta was the leading lady in Sherri's films.

"I told her you were good in bed."

"How would you know?" Danny turned up the volume.

"If I'm great, then my cousin has to be at least good." Sherri tapped my cheek.

"Are you two really cousins?" Danny had a thing for Sherri. "You don't look alike." "That's, because I was adopted, but our blood is still thicker than thieves." She dragged me from the DJ booth. The hopes of the redhead's admirers were dashed by Che's kissing my cousin like a boa swallowing its prey.

"Che, I think you should go home with my cousin." The two women were more than on-screen lovers, but Sherri wanted to keep her distance. "He needs some TFC."

"And I'm an expert at 'tender fucking care'." Che's feathery caress scintillated my marrow. "Anything stopping you?"

Lisa had left with another man. The sexual revolution was burning the moral tenets of America. Everything was 'go' and not 'no'.

"Just a second." I went up to Arthur. "I need to go home."

"I can see why." The wily owner glanced over my shoulder at the waiting redhead. "Good luck."

Envy accompanied my departure. The bouncers flicked thumbs up, as we got in the taxi. Che gave the driver a show on the way to a Tribeca loft. In the elevator she stripped naked, singing Rick James' SUPER FREAK, "I'm a Super Freak, Super Freak."

"You're really sexy." Her lingerie smelled of cigarette and Estee Lauder perfume.

"I hear that all the time."

"You have anything else you want to tell me?"

I spoke dirty. She cooed with a little girl voice and caressed herself with a shiver. The elevator door opened and she danced into the loft. Cameras and lights were arranged around a large bed.

"Tomorrow Sherri and I are shooting two sex scenes." She unzipped her boots. "Tonight I need to rehearse."

Che lay on the sheets. Her breasts flattened on her chest. I peeled off my clothes. I knelt between her thighs. Her tongue licked at her lips and hands guided me inside. I shut my eyes. Men across America would have killed for this moment of heaven, except my erection withered under a phantom's stranglehold and I faked a premature ejaculation. "Don't feel so bad, softies happen to a lot of men with me," Che consoled me with an expertise forged by cinematic sex. "Let me fluff you for seconds." Che expertly tried to arouse me, but something was broken. After three minutes she stopped and asked, "You're not gay, are you?" "No, I'm sorry." I didn't want to discuss about my futile fixation and deserted the sex icon, for my East Village apartment, where I scissored women from glossy stroke books to construct a Frankenstein collage of Lisa. Our reunion was the one lie I believed, as December collapsed towards Christmas.

I lived off cocaine bribes from customers and sold the excess to customers. My $6000 rose to $8000, but I wasn't leaving, despite things going downhill fast.

Sherri was arrested by the precinct police for possession. My threat of snitching to Internal Affairs prevented her being the station house’s party favor. Vadim ODed on heroin. My reviving him earned scant thanks from Lisa, although the Russian stopped cease to consider me his enemy. Danny's parents threw him out of the apartment after he stole a family heirloom. He crashed on my couch. We were our own worst enemies. Inexplicably outsiders viewed our lifestyle as glamorous.

A French magazine front-paged my photo and their journalist wrote that I was a legend at 29. Bernard based this title on my urban exploits without any knowledge of my stalking Lisa from her apartment on East 73rd Street to Vadim' Central Park penthouse or tailing the couple's ricochets around Manhattan.

Vadim never spotted my gaze, as he met with Odessa diamond traffickers and his thugs visited gulag violence on complete strangers. Lisa endured the beatings with heartless sighs, but I wasn't the pair's only shadow.

Right before Christmas Vadim's partner was arrested by the FBI. Viktor refused to talk. The precinct police were hauled before Internal Affairs. They maintained a silent wall of blue. These harbingers of the approaching end failed to pierce my narco-ambulation. My wake-up call came on New Year's Eve, when Viktor Malenski was shot dead in front of the club.

This execution bared the Continental to a public frenzy fed by the city's newspapers. I had only heard the shots, yet my name skirted the periphery of the widening scandal of drugs, fame, and beauty with NYPD's Internal Affairs drawing lines between the dots.

Lisa came to my apartment. We stayed in bed for an entire day. She swore that she hadn't pulled the trigger. I believed her every word and pleaded ignorance nothing during a police interrogation.

"Don't leave town." The Internal Affairs sergeant wasn't buying my version.

Nineteen cops were suspended from the force. I knew half their names. Arthur knew them all. A phone call from Paris averted my appointment as state's witness.

Bernard told me that the magazine Actuel wanted for an American to work a nightclub in Paris. Bad French was a prerequisite for the position of physionomiste. A round-trip ticket was waiting at Air France. My passport was up-to-date and I asked Lisa what I should do.

"You have to go. We won't be safe here. Not from the police. Not from Vadim's gang." She lay in my arms naked. Her skin smelled of tar. "I'll meet you in Paris five days from now."

"Notre-Dame." It had to be easy to find.

"At noon." She sealed the pact with a long kiss.

The morning of the flight I felt like Ingrid Bergman's leaving Rick in CASABLANCA.

Lisa walked away from East 10th Street, saying. "Twelve noon."

"In five days." I tried to trap her scent in my lungs, but exhaled as her taxi merged with the traffic on 1st Avenue.

Sherri drove me to the airport. Che was in the front seat. They were heading cross-country to set up a life in LA. I sat on the rear seat with Sherri's parrot, Boo.

"Best thing about this trip is your leaving that blonde bitch." Sherri dodged a truck. She was colorblind and couldn't see brake lights.

"She's meeting me in Paris."

Both women groaned and Boo cackled, "Ha-ha."

"You really think she's going to meet you?" Sherri glanced in the rear-view mirror.

"She says she loves me." That shifted the odds to 50/50.

"You buy her a ticket?" Che swung her head to the back.

"No, she said she would get it from her agency."

"Make that 9 to 1."

"Which are better odds than I had before." Slush on the Grand Central Parkway slowed traffic. I leaned back in the seat. Paris would be our refuge. I would write a book. Lisa would grace the cover of ELLE. We'd practice French in bed, drink espresso in small cafes, and wander along the Seine in the rain.

"Everything will be fine." Sherri turned on the wipers.

"Whenever I'm in her, I feel like she is a glove." Lisa's scent simmered on my skin as burnt fruit. "She has to feel the same way too."

"I’ve been hundreds of men and I've never found one who fits me. On the other hand women are another story." Sherri reached over to Che. Boo screeched her support.

"This will work out."

"Cous, don't bet your heart on a long shot," Sherri was glad to say it about someone else other than herself.

"I promise I won't."

Sherri braked before the Air France terminal. We hugged good-bye. I said she should visit Paris. She told me the same thing about LA and then drove away into a flurry of snow.

I half-expected the police to stop my boarding the Air France flight, but I got on the plane and within in an hour the 747 was banking north over the northern tip on Long Island.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 1 By Peter Nolan Smith

New York in the summer of 1981 was everything it wasn’t in the winter of 1979.

The sun boiled the asphalt. Punk had been replaced by New Wave and somehow the city had escaped bankruptcy. Money flowed on the streets and even the East Village exhibited signs of regeneration, since abandoned tenements can only be burned so many times before ashes won’t catch fire.

People had work.

Mine was menial construction on an after-hours club along the Hudson River.

After paying rent, I had enough money for either Chinese take-out or beers at CBGBs. I lost weight and thought about robbing a bank. Whenever I entered one, guards placed their hands on the guns like they were mindreaders. I was no Jesse James.

Daytime employment seemed the solution to my desperate situation. I had a college degree. My record was clean. I’d worked nine-to-fives before and knew they didn’t kill you, however Arthur, the nightclub owner had promised the work crew various jobs once the International opened its doors.

At his previous after-hour club I had coined $500-700 a night. We hoped to open before Labor Day. On August 13th the club was $20,000 short of our goal. Construction lurched to a halt. I started reading the New York Times’ Help Ads.

The International was saved by the arrival of a criminal refugee from Odessa. His money was rumored to come from smuggling Tsarist icons. The source was unimportant. The club was a dead issue without his help.

Arthur said Vadim had a beautiful blonde girlfriend. "Almost cover girl pretty, but too short to succeed on the runways."

"Sounds like your old girlfriend." Danny Gordon, the DJ, had heard that she came from Buffalo.

"No, couldn’t be."

A year ago Lisa had left for a modeling job in Milan. I hadn’t heard from her since. No calls. No letters, although when I spotted her in a French lingerie magazine, I almost flew to Paris, except she could have been in London, Milan, or Munich, so I remained in New York to be haunted by her distant footsteps on cobble-stoned European streets.

“She’s gone for good.”

“No one leaves New York forever.”

Native New Yorkers like Danny considered anywhere else purgatory. “She’ll be back.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Up to now I had been forgetting Lisa piece by piece. The smell of her skin after sex. She laughed, as if I told a bad joke, but I recalled her stilted dancing to the Psychedelic Furs in London, our buying leather jackets together in Camden market. Hers had been white, mine was black. I remembered everything, because some memories had lives of their own. No matter how many drinks and no matter how many years.

“Still it would be funny if it was her.” Danny wasn’t letting go either. He had a thing for her. Any man would if she looked his way.

“Funny, but not ha-ha funny.”

I hoped it wasn’t Lisa, but despair told me it was and I chucked a hammer at his head. The missile missed by a foot and put a dent in an op-art sculpture from the 60s. Arthur noticed the damage a week later. Danny and I denied any knowledge of how it got there.

The Russian’s cash accelerated the final stages of the construction. The walls were painted lilac purple and the sound system was wired through the club. A Labor Day opening appeared realistic and on the hottest day of summer the Russian came to inspect his investment.

We were tearing down a last section of the ceiling. It was a dirty job. Rat dust caked my sweating flesh. Danny and I couldn’t have been lower of the feeding chain of Manhattan.

“Guys, I want you to meet Vadim.” Arthur shouted from the entrance.

The gang on the scaffolding stopped working and sucked on bottles of water before glancing through salt-stung eyes at a muscular man in his late-20s. Vadim wore a pastel linen suit. He was clean. The crew muttered hellos. Mine was silenced by the sight of a slender blonde in snug Versace. Lisa’s b-grade beauty was as haughty as a dethroned princess checking into a Holiday Inn.

“So much for the lack of coincidences.” Danny nudged my ribs.

“It’s a small world.” My throat tightened under a garrote of lost memories. “And a long life.” “Think she recognizes you?” Danny wiped a layer of grime from his face.

“Not unless she looks my way.” My body was black with soot.

Her head turned to our perch. A dice roll of jade green eyes indicated my lack of social progress had not disappointed her low expectations for a punk poet.

“No, she hasn’t forgotten.” Danny laughed at my pained expression, as Vadim, Lisa and Arthur disappeared into the office.

Right before our lunch break, Lisa and Vadim exited from the office. She covered her mouth with a scarf. Vadim did the same with his hand. They left the site without a glance in our direction. After lunch we resumed work at a faster pace. By 4pm the ceiling had been replaced and Arthur called it a day. He was easier to work for than his other partner, a model who was on the cover of Time Magazine as a herpes sufferer.

As the rest of the crew filed from the club, Arthur pulled me aside. “This isn’t going to be a problem?”

“What?” I played dumb.

“You and Vadim’s girlfriend.” He was serious.

“Lisa?” Over the past year her name had floated in my mind a million times. This was the first time I had said it.

“Is it a problem, kid?” Arthur was risking his health by taking on Vadim as an investor. Russian from Odessa were no punks.

“No, she’s nothing to me.”

“Good, then stay away from her.”

“That what I intend to do.”

“Good.” He lifted a finger. “Vadim is a piece of work.”

Obeying his advice wasn’t hard. Lisa ignored me and I couldn’t blame her. I was a failure and not even 28. The Continental might change that status. Three months as the doorman would earn $5000 in tips and salary. That amount could finance a winter in Maine to write my first novel about a free love community in the 1840s.

WATCHIC POND was destined to garner the best-sellers lists. The world would worship my words and Lisa would run back to my arms. Self-delusion rarely offered any options approaching the truth, especially since there is no lies more believable than those you tell yourself.

The Arthur Of Light

Arthur Weinstein was a master of light.

His gift was to transform empty space into cathedrals of color.

His miracles remained entrenched in my memories of Hurrah, the Jefferson, Continental, and Milk Bar.

Tomorrow is his birthday and anyone who was his friend will know how to celebrate his joyous life.

Long live Arthur Weinstein.