chapter 5
bottle club

The bottle club shrouds them from a force that is dark and globular and might be their own mumbling manifestations. The glob is infused and invigorated by the condescending thoughts of all the good people who sleep in their big box store bed sheets and tucked their deviance safely in their sub conscious where it emerges some day as heart disease or cancer.

The Pensacola night life begins to circle the drain and reaches a state where the spirits inside its remaining cavaliers decide they must all congregate in one single, glorious establishment - the bottle club. Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday all the rednecks, squids, prep stanks, wanna Gs, brown ones, ravers, drag queens, fruitys, birkenstockers are shit from the ass of Pensacola’s bars and into the bottle club. It is the best option after presented with, "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

A bald man with paranoid tenancies and a magic marker gives them an affliction they will have to scrub off before employers, clergy or family see it the next morning.

Julio drops his beer off to the hottie barkeep. He has cheap domestics to sell for $2 to revelers who neglected to make it to the store by 2 a.m. He has a 6-pack of imports for his private stash. His years of inadequecy and tonight's social blunders will be scrubbed clean here, in the bottle club. It's dark. It's loud. There are places to hide.

Little Nasty Fred is chattin’ up a wastoid and she lifts up her skirt for him and Julio and they see her cute natural thatch. Fred reminds Julio of this two days later. Nudity is more common at the bottle club than on late night cable.

Somehow, Julio will try to turn the bottle club into some moonlight dance but “jaded” is his adjective. There’s whats-her-name. Did she love him once? Or did he love her? Whichever, he didn’t sleep with her. “I always knew you’d grow up to be a beautiful girl,” he tells her and she says back, “That was the perfect thing to say.” .

Julio doesn't know if she walked away. He just knows she was gone and with her, the glow.

“You sellin' beer man?”

“$2”

Julio's beers are gone before he is. A girl in stockings beckons him to the lady's lounge. There among the bathrooms, with their slices of poetry, Julio lost his night and was discovered wandering around aimlessly up by the rafters, too wasted to go to the diner.

His last memory was that fence net nubile popping the pill into his drunk mouth. She wanted $2 but he traded her a beer instead. There is a faint image of the drag queen Georgianna Starlington cradling him and saying“Its alright baby, It’s alright.”