I steeled myself and tried to enter this world with a clear sense of purpose—but I still didn’t know what I was facing or what I would be called on to do. Were there people to save? A dragon to slay? And what weapons did I have at my command? My wits? My fists? As my overactive mind sorted through the variety of possible scenarios I saw myself beating up on Wes, slamming my fist into his face and breaking his jaw, and kicking him in the back as he lay curled up on the floor, and I couldn’t decide if that was ridiculous or inevitable.
One of the bartenders caught my eye. Like the bouncer he was heavily muscled and wore a tight polo shirt. He looked at me with an inquisitive glance, his eyebrow lifting with three shaven stripes along its length, signaling that he was ready to answer a question or take a drink order, whichever I preferred.
“Where’s the karaoke bar?” I asked, loud enough to be heard over the dance music, and feeling like a gunslinger in one of those spaghetti westerns.
“Downstairs,” he said, his words coming to me more through the movement of his lips and the tilt of his head, the pulsating music drowning out his actual vocalizations. It added to the surrealism, like maybe Sergio Leone had hired an Italian extra to play the Cuban bartender in this scene. I turned in the direction he indicated, and I saw a wide flight of stairs heading down. It was flanked by two pillared banisters, each topped with a carved eagle, their hooked talons gripping the heavy oak, their wings extending wide, and their beaks and grim stares greeting anyone foolish enough to rise up out of the depths. A wooden sign, faded and in need of repainting, was hung crookedly on the lip of the upper floor directly over the stairs. It read, “Karaoke - 8 PM to close daily.”
About halfway down the stairs the bellowing Karaoke music from below met the pulsating dance music from above and again I felt suspended as if between two worlds. There was a landing up ahead, and a sharp turn to the left, and after that God only knew. The voices I heard were almost entirely female, and their raucousness conjured up in the mind a prurient image—a chorus line of deeply intoxicated women, arms wrapped around each other in bacchanalian excess, incoherently shouting the words to a pop anthem, and Wes Howard in the center of them all, prancing with them like a satyr, squeezing their flesh and rubbing his crotch against them whenever the opportunity presented itself.
I steeled myself against the distasteful possibility, looking as forward to confronting Wes and his coven as I did to removing dead mice from the traps I put out in the garage. As my foot touched the landing, however, I stopped—frozen in place by the braying and unmistakable laugh of Amy Crawford, howling out over the din like the shriek of a banshee.
Amy Crawford? My mind raced to keep up with the beating of my heart. Amy Crawford? Didn’t Don fire her? What the hell is she doing here in Miami Beach?
It didn’t take long for me to realize the answer to my own question. Just one heart-stopping plunge into a pit of understanding too deep ever to think of climbing out of again.
Jesus...Fucking...Christ. She actually is sleeping with Wes Howard.
I felt a slap on my shoulder and someone hustled past me on the stairs. “Hey, Alan,” a man’s voice said from somewhere outside my consciousness. “You coming down to join us? The ladies are really getting wild tonight.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He was around the corner and down into the Karaoke den before I even knew who he was, and it wouldn’t be until much later that I would connect enough dots to realize it was Jeff Hatchler, treating me like the fraternity brother all men in that situation were, regardless of their position above or below you.
But I didn’t move for many more seconds, dots of far greater import connecting themselves in my head like a computer virus running amok in my synapses. She’s sleeping with Wes Howard. That’s why she’s here in Miami Beach. She’s probably staying with him at his hotel, going out drinking and getting it on every night. He’s middle aged, rich, and married, but his wife’s not here, and she’s single, aggressive, and hot as hell. What’s to stop them?
Certainly not me. It was less like I decided that and more like it had been decided for me. This was out of my league. I was a supervisor—with Susan and Michael gone, supervisor to probably half the women down there—but the worst I’d ever dealt with was people not showing up on time and taking things that didn’t belong to them from the office refrigerator. This was something entirely different. This was automatic termination. This was illegal. This was downright dangerous.
Not thinking that I would come to regret it, and not realizing just how scared I was, I turned around, hopped up the steps two at a time, and got my ass out of there.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
No comments:
Post a Comment