What does it take..

Our glasses were empty and the waitress still had not come to replenish our stores of temporary satisfaction. It was dark but I could still see, and the din was a complicated mix of laughter and droning from half a dozen tables and a few sofas strewn about the club. Men in currently fashionable shirts and women in flattering dresses mixed with the muscle heads and rocker scene stealers in jeans and pierced belly buttons. They all lay over the furniture like bull seals playing in the twilight on the ocean rocks.

There was no smoke, it was banned.

I missed that, but to hell with going outside and resuming my old death wish.

My bladder was as empty as the glasses I spied on the table, and Julie sat where I'd left her cross legged. Her hair was up. Her body was pointed at me but her attention was as departed as my previous flight to the bathroom. I stopped to admire the surroundings and the alcohol had started to activate my disregard for the flow of time and the way things operate around me. Things slowed down, it was nice.

Her profile was not perfect.

She could have used little less nose.

I mentally slapped myself for learning years of criticism from Drew. In this place I was not a casting director. She scanned the table to the right as I swam in her familiarity from across the room.

Those patrons to the right, arrayed around their table were the immaculate ones. A tall blonde norse warrior in a pin striped suit sat next to the shorter stocky guy with rolled up sleeves. Two women in small black dresses and ridiculously high shoes were anchored to each other in their booth, which was a cell without a fourth wall. Occasionally draped over the other, one woman was a picture of mirth laughing a little too loud. Her friend struggled in bitter solitude to suppress a bout of melancholy. They were taking of turns with a rolled up twenty dollar bill and the less than orderly lines of cocaine on the tabletop consumed them and their conversation with each inhalation.

Julie spotted me looking at them. She was previously fascinated with their display. All that trouble for a line of trouble. All this focused around a place to consume the rotting remains of vegetable matter in artistic glasses surrounded by people who were having a good time.

A good temporary time.

These people weren't my friends, even the ones I knew in the back weren't my friends.

Julie gave me a relieved smile that left me in a distinct amber glowed spotlight for a few seconds. I immediately remembered winter 1989 standing in the wings looking onstage watching an elegant pointy chinned blonde cascade over a silent leading man. Her breathing was the dog whistle pitched beginning of that way she'd work up a crescendo in a monologue. She burned through two or three pages of an expression of love for a man she didn't love and sure as hell I would not exhale until she'd finished her lines.

Actresses get me hard.

Our drinks were still not filled. This was substantial physical disparity between our table and the scene table with it's awkwardly arrayed white lines. In the darkness we saw only what we wanted to see, even the walls and the ceiling were obscured by the nightclub in what must be a horror show during the day time. I was sure that in the morning one could actually see that it was a prison.

Short term satisfaction was the drive of my life and that is for what most of us in the room felt a yearning. Tragically our search is one with no self awareness.

Was I alone in my amber glow of familiarity knowing that the woman at my table was the same one from nights of disaster and wine feasting on the improbability that I might just be in love with her in some hidden compartment in my emotions?

Mostly the search for the euphoric immediate buzz tended to kill connection to parts of me. Julie, Caitlin and the others, all except Estella. Or maybe except Julie also, and I was sad in the instant Estella crept back into my mind. I knew the lines of my mouth were slowly turning down because of the unconscious change in Julie's expression, we communicated my sadness without words.

When the fuck did I get so moody? Then alcohol is a depressant and somewhere in the universe that soul of Estella chooses to conjure her Baja beach and dance with me around the bonfire. However impossible that was physically, I could still be happy and sad at the same time. Julie heard my wordless communication and threw me a rope, she made a small wave gesture and I could drag myself back from that dark place into the newer corporeal dark place where our drinks were still empty.

Julie was still here unlike the others who, for some reason returned to the unknown back into the night. It was all my fault, but seeing her pixie shaped face and crossed legs and her joy at my presence I could believe that there was nothing I could do to make her leave. I'd been an asshole for fifteen years and she still sat alone in the club waiting for me.

The waitress was still in limbo somewhere outside of my periphery and I wondered what it took to get a drink in this place.