Palm trees reach into the sky like mutant cocks. The sky is yellow.
“Is that?” My driver, Usnavi Rojas, who’s stoned is nodding and smiling like he sees someone he knows. His eyes look past my shoulder to whoever it is sitting a few tables away from us here outside Doggi’s Arepa Bar. “Yea—yea, I think it’s this guy, Leonardo Padrón. He’s calling us over to his table.”
“Is it possible to ignore him?” In Miami, it’s best to keep your head down. I’ve seen people get hypnotized by things here only to wake up years past their prime with pot bellies covered in Tommy Bahama.
“I can’t, he’s locked on.”
An hour later we’re at Leonardo’s table eating cachapas and drinking our third round of Santa Teresas over ice. Leonardo is apparently one of the most successful and famous soap opera writers from Venezuela. He wrote a book too but to much less acclaim.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says now, blowing his nose into a napkin. Alcohol has soaked in deep and bloated his big red head. Patches of white hair are sticking out straight from the bloating. I lean back to avoid these quills of goatee and brows and crew cut.
“OK,” I say. Anywhere to give me a break from the one long speech that seems to be this man’s life.
Over the course of lunch, his speech has mostly been about his writing. From what I’ve gathered, it’s a shiny birdhouse he’s tinkered over carefully in his sterile bunker underground. It currently sits on a shelf for him to point at and it’s precious. He holds every word in high regard. I can’t imagine a worse way to go about it. For writing to be any good, it needs to bleed into the world and mix with the great river of come and snot and shit. Writing should mix up with you until you can’t point to the parts that are fake or real.
After a short swerving drive, we pull into a parking lot. Usnavi is both drunk and stoned and we go straight over the parking chock. Sparks.
Looking out the window, there’s a long thick building squatting there like a kidney. It’s pulsing. We’ve arrived at Club Pink Pussycat.
Inside we get a table and Leonardo orders a magnum of champagne. I’m relived because his speech is now pointed at the girls and they have to listen because they are being paid.
“How are you?” I whisper to Usnavi. His eyes are closed and he’s mumbling something under his breath.
“I think I took too much,” he says holding out an Altoids case. It’s where he always hides his stash of good synthetic mescaline.
I take my pinky and dip it into the powdery crystals. “Don’t mind if I do.”
The day shift at all-nude revues is much more tolerable on potent psychedelics. Or at least it all gets much more clear. The mescaline comes on slow, but after awhile I start to see the monsters in the stands hurling money. Frothing and farting. They have heads full of eyes that never blink. We’ve been surrounded.
When I peak it all gets peeled back. It’s real blue-collar work happening at 3:30 p.m. Christmas Eve in the strip club. These dancers have to be here. They have to dance for rent and for food. A sinister vibration is in the air. Smells like key lime pie from Versailles.
Horrible creatures, carnivorous Miami turtle-men that have evolved with extra glands in the nose to smell and hunt such desperation, start to swarm the stage. Like there’s chum in the water. They sit here and there and start to leak out of their collars and socks and fill up the place with juices. Digestive stuff. Somehow, I’m unaffected so I swim over to the bar for a drink.
“Seven and seven,” I tell the bartender.
The drink doesn’t help. All around me women are drowning. They’re trying their best but the juice is thick and it’s up around their ankles. Some fall in and sink. My God! It’s no mere liquid. I lift my feet up from the gurgling floor. This is blob. Sentient purple glitter that’s hungry. And it’s got a tooth for the vulnerable.
As the place starts to fill up, I can feel my blood pressure also rising and the veins in my neck are bubbling out like a frog. Leonardo is laughing and his head has grown to the size of a microwave. He’s taking the bones of girls dissolved in the blob and hucking them down his throat. Down in the darkness of his belly, I hear a droning. It’s his self-important voice droning on and on. Down in the darkness, even these girls’ skeletons are forced to listen to people like him. His speech sounds a lot like the Venezuelan Christmas song, Burrito Sabanero.
The situation requires action. I grab a candle from the table and wave it in front of me to clear the way—I know these turtle-men have a deep engrained fear of fire. “Back! Back, you devils!” I stick my hand out for the remaining women on stage to come with me.
With four or five dancers in tow, Usnavi and I get to the car. Usnavi is alert again and we tear out of the parking lot with knife-like precision. The undercarriage sags from going over the curb and again sparks churn from either side of our 69′ GTO like the bow of a tugboat cutting through pulpy water.
