With a Little Help from My Friends

The night is young, and despite what I felt, so am I. I had to keep reminding myself that, and anchored my feet onto the footpath of the string of clubs lining the street. I stood at the very end of it, my legs quivering with the great force I was exerting over my traitorous feet, which would at any moment lead me back home so that I could curl up on the floors and wait for tomorrow to come.

I felt old. I felt ready to lay my head on a soft pillow and drift to sleep. I would have felt content sinking into a comfy sofa with a handful of movies.

This was not what life is supposed to be for someone like me. I’m young, well travelled, and single – what a killer combo. And yet I feel as if I’d had seen and lived through all there could be in my travels, and every girl I’d looked at wasn’t the one for me. I felt doomed – destined to die alone in my old age.

What’s a guy like me thinking about old age, anyway?

People my age are getting ready to get married, have careers, live life. I feel like I’ve gone about this the wrong way. I never finished college. I never had a sweetheart who made me feel like she was the be-all and end-all of my life. Hell, I don’t even have a career. The artist industry is a fickle thing – some people have a use-by date, and some don’t. I could be flipping burgers by next year, and my fans would probably have moved on by then onto some other new flavour of the month.

All this thinking is making me realise how disposable I am. And you know what I say to that?
Let’s get drunk.

As if by magic, my legs stopped quivering. My back straightened and a shit-eating grin spread across my face like wildfire.

I am getting fucked up tonight.

* * *

The club is playing some horrible techno, but nobody seemed to mind. Whoever was in tonight wasn’t likely to know who I was – these were all people my age coming out for a night of fun after spending all day at college lectures. One girl, sitting next to me at the bar, could not stop blabbing on about her course and some post-modernist bullshit between sips of her green apple martini. She was a rail-thin brunette, and though she had a pretty face, her body reminded me all too much of all the little girls who would throw themselves at me after shows. Needless to say, she repulsed me, and I felt bad – I really did. I wanted to like her, and I thought that maybe if I had a girlfriend again I could get my life on track, but I just couldn’t get over the revulsion I felt toward her. She reminded me of a child trying to act and dress grown up, which gave me a strong reminder of my former relationship.

She was a dancer. No, her name was not Lola, nor did we meet at the Copa Cabana. So full of life, bubbly and chatty and loving – I was an ogre compared to her, and yet she had enough good in her personality to make up for my lack of empathy toward anyone else. By the time I met her, things were already spiralling down. I could not stand looking at myself in the mirror. Magazines and reporters hated me for my one sentence answers and my cold attitude – I quote, ‘Seems like someone panicked! up HIS disco.’ Whatever. It didn’t even make sense at the time, but all it did was make me more bitter.

I was tired then, so very tired of the world, and of all the people in it. Now that I look back, the world I saw was filled with only teenagers and sometimes their parents and other musicians. If I were to change profession, the world would reveal itself to me as something less unpleasant, I’m sure of that. But on one night, I’d had enough of the world, and it was apparent that the world had enough of me. Brad, our manager, kept telling me to be nicer to the reporters because we were getting a bad rep – ‘I’m fucking sick of explaining what Panic! At The Disco means. ‘You’re a total wanker’, that’s what it fucking means, for all I care!’ I told him, and the reporter for some online music magazine was so disgusted with my attitude that he apologised and had a word to the manager – who took it out on me.
Then Spencer came up, all caring and emphatic like he usually is, and he told me in this completely steady voice that I had to calm down. And I told him to ‘back the fuck up’ and not tell me what to do. And Jon, being the ignorant asshole he was, decided to side with Spencer. As if my day couldn’t have gotten any worse, Brendon joined in, because he has to be included in fucking EVERYTHING. They all started at me, and their voices mingled until it was all just blasts of noise swirling into a cacophony in my head.

I stomped out of the room that day, and in my anger, I’d parked my ass outside the emergency exit of the venue, and that’s when I met her. She was smoking, and I didn’t know whether she was trying to play cool or not, but she seemed not to recognise me, and I had a decent conversation with her.

‘What’s wrong, Pet?’ She asked me, and a little creased formed between her brows.

I opened my mouth, and let out a torrent of verbal mush to this unassuming stranger. And she’d nodded, and given her sympathies, and laughed and cried and patted me on the shoulder. I knew I wanted to keep her, and so I did.

Little did I know that she wasn’t what I wanted.

I knew what she wanted, that’s for sure. She wanted to play house, live together and have barbeques and dinner parties and introduce me to her friends and family. She wanted so many things that she wasn’t ready for. She couldn’t sit still for more than a minute, she cried a lot, and threw more temper tantrums than I could count. She was forgetful, and young, and careless, and reckless, but fun. But I never got to keep the girl who’d lent me her complete attention when I was in dire straits.

Or maybe I’m just being old again. I’m looking down at people my age as if I’m their elder. I’m looking at girls as if I need someone to grow old with already. I feel senile amongst these people. My bones ached whenever I happened to look toward the dancefloor crowded by gyrating, drunk people. I couldn’t help but yawn with every minute the night passed.

So much for getting fucked up.

Yet, something compelled me to stay – sit at the bar and endure this girl’s ranting, even though she’s more than three sheets to the wind. She hasn’t noticed that I’ve stopped listening, and instead begins going on about some social theories, a pyramid or something or other, and is gesturing wildly with every word as if she’d made up her own kind of sign language.

Call me crazy, but I spy a flash of neon purple in a booth behind the dancefloor.

Very stupidly (or maybe cleverly?), I vacated my stool and disentangled myself from the bar, drink sloshing in my hand as I bumped past the people dancing to follow the source of the colour – maybe it was just a trick of the lights? But of course, it wasn’t. And, of course, Violet was sitting in the very same booth I saw from the bar, looking very bored while she sweet-talked a guy celebrating his 21st in between his twenty one shots. I guess his friends had paid her for the night to make the most of his coming-of-age, and as soon as the thought hit me, I felt disgusted. I hated the guy who’d had his arm draped around her. He was wearing a cheesy Hawaiian shirt and a pair of novelty sunglasses that were shaped ‘21’, one number to cover each eye.

I hadn’t even figured out a proper excuse for showing up by the booth full of strangers, but by the time I had gathered enough of my senses, I was standing right in front of her. Amazingly, nobody noticed me except her – probably because the other guys were too drunk and absorbed in their celebrating. But Violet looked up and smiled, and said something along the lines of, ‘Mr Lonely’. Though I couldn’t quite make out her words through the thumping music, I had to resort to reading her pale pink lips.

I leaned down so that I could whisper in her ear, “I’ll pay twice they’re paying.”

Her eyes widened for a fraction of a millisecond, and then a playfulness chased across her face and she smiled widely. “Honey,” She whispered back, holding her hand against my head to pull me close, “I don’t think that can be done.”

I emptied out my wallet, which I’d thankfully (or very stupidly) filled with money before I’d gone out for the night. I figured I should make the most of what I had earned, but I barely seemed to put a dent in all of it since I’d only bought two drinks and sat at the bar like a wallflower.

“Is that enough?” I asked, and the expression on her face was enough to indicate it was.

She nodded, turned toward her ‘client’ and whispered a couple of words before she left him, but not before she could scoop the money into her little handbag. He did not try to stop her, and after she’d risen from the table, he downed another shot as if she never left his side. Violet walked silently beside me as we left, though the music in the club would have prevented any attempts at conversation anyway. It wasn’t until we were well away from the club that she spoke.

“They didn’t have much on them, anyway,” She shrugged, taking out a cigarette from her tiny clutch. She lit up while I watched her. “Bunch of college students a long way from home.”

“What’d you tell them?” I asked, and she knew what I meant.

Violet shrugged again, “I told them my boss called. They’re scared of him, and they wouldn’t say anything about me bailing out on them. Besides, I’ll make more tonight taking you on, and he wouldn’t have anything to complain about.”

“Who? Your boss?”

Violet nodded. I laughed.
“I always thought they were called pimps.”

She laughed too, but it wasn’t an amused one. “I can’t bring myself to call him that.”

“So,” I began to say. I thought I should’ve felt nervous, but for some reason, the feeling never came. Violet’s full gaze was on me, and instead of flushing red, I looked back at her and felt only the empty spot of emotion. Maybe I was so used to people that I’d lost all ability to feel shy toward a stranger? I don’t know. All I knew was, that I didn’t want her to be a stranger. “Back to my place?”

A smile spread across her lips, broken only by the cigarette escaping through a corner, “I thought you’d never ask.”