Carlos was the first person to give me coke, but he certainly wasn’t the only person I could get it from. I had savings from babysitting jobs, allowance, a little bit of cash my great-aunt left me when she died. I could easily buy cocaine from other people, so one afternoon, after he shoplifted a Lunchables from a grocery store and offered me a small block of processed cheese, I broke up with him. I knew he had other girlfriends anyway, ones who didn’t insist on using a condom every time. So he didn’t try and convince me to stay with him.
My new dealer was a security guard at my high school, Miss Duvet. Rumor had it she would deal near the flagpole during lunch. And like most rumors, this one was true. The first time I bought a gram from her, she chased me down through the second wing of the dilapidated beige building. Fuck, I thought. This is all some sort of setup. A sting operation. Now I’ll never get into Yale! But she was chasing me down to return a ten. I had overpaid. Miss Duvet might have been dealing schedule II narcotics to high school children while on the clock to keep them safe, but she was an incredibly honest businesswoman with integrity.
Six months into my cocaine-fueled bender, I was back in the Denny’s parking lot, the easiest meeting spot to connect with friends and decide on the plan for the night. I wanted to go to Kremlin, a small gay club with the best techno and most beautiful boy go-go dancers. I felt at home at this club because, with just one bar and one dance floor, it seemed intimate and contained. Everyone in one room dancing to the same music, a way to control an uncontrollable world. And no one there was interested in groping me or leering. It was mostly gay men and the occasional lesbian smart enough to stay away from me because she knew I was way too young to be in there in the first place. The closest I got to anyone flirting with me there was when friendly drag queens would coo over my long, thick auburn hair and matching eyes.
I spent so much time at Kremlin that I actually befriended the woman who manned the coed bathroom all night selling gum, mints, candy, lollipops, spritzes of cologne, and condoms. She was worried about me since I was extremely underaged. She smiled, to let me know I had a friend in this world. And while I waited for a stall, I talked to her. I asked her about her day, her week, her life. Did she even like techno music? Did the bartenders give her free shots? She was happy to chat with me since most people came in and out and barely acknowledged her. Techno was not her favorite, but it was okay. And smelling vomit eight hours a night had definitely ruined her love for alcohol, so she did not partake in her free end-of-shift shot. Her hair was always in a tight bun, showing her beautiful, delicate features. She told me she was from Haiti, her name was Jesula, and she had been in Miami for only a year. She was petite and trim, with high cheekbones and deep-set, friendly brown eyes that seemed wise beyond her thirty years. Her strong, long fingers wiped down the sink after each use, handed people paper towels once they had washed, and kept things tidy and organized. She kept that bathroom so clean I would have done a line off the floor.
But that night my friends, Amy and Erika and Hannah and Sharon, were tired of Kremlin. They wanted to go to the enormous new club, Rox, that had just opened in Coconut Grove and flaunted a different music style on each of the five floors. They wanted to bounce from hip-hop to reggae to emo and be groped by cheesy straight men who would buy them overpriced, poorly muddled mojitos.
I would have been happy enough to go to Kremlin by myself, but something that night allowed me to be swayed. Maybe it was a deep and hidden sense of self-preservation pushing me to stay with my friends. We piled into Hannah’s dad’s Mazda and made the drive into Miami, over the causeway. As far as I was concerned, leaving South Beach to go to a club in Coconut Grove was like leaving Rome to go eat pasta in Cleveland.
“Don’t be such a snob,” Sharon said to me.
“She is so not a snob. Have you seen the guys she goes out with?” Hannah was a master at the fuck-you compliment. Building you up yet putting you down at the same time. Like, “Ruby, your French braid actually looks good today!” But I had to laugh at this one. She wasn’t wrong. As I did a bump in the back seat, I reviewed my taste in boys. It was often peculiar and always inconsistent.
When we arrived at Club Rox, I realized it was eighteen-and-over night. That was the worst. It meant lots of other fifteen-year-olds would be there, and nothing about the night would feel advanced. Amy and Erika, each only children, blond best friends since kindergarten who pretended to be sisters since they wished they were, headed right to the third floor. I could hear Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” blaring. Hannah, tall and lanky and pale, dyed-black hair in a high ponytail to show off the shaved underside of her head, wanted to go to the fifth floor because she had heard the goth-themed area had an S&M room and she wanted to see if it was true. Sharon, her giant natural boobs pushed up to maximum capacity in her new push-up bra, went straight for the first-floor bar since her immediate objective was to meet a guy and get a free drink.
I had schlepped to this god-awful place to spend time with my friends, so I decided to stick with at least one of them. I worked the bar with Sharon, and we did some shots with a couple University of Miami guys. I looked at their puka-shell necklaces in disgust and wondered why it was that to me a neck tattoo of a spiderweb was sexy but these douchebag adornments were nauseating. Who was I to judge? I did another bump.
We went to the fifth floor to find Hannah. We all watched as a hot chick got spanked and flogged by a guy in cheap pleather pants. I did another bump.
Sharon, Hannah, and I made our way to the eighties-music floor and found Amy and Erika dancing. I gave up on wanting to be too cool for school and joined them. I danced and danced, the movement feeling good for my heart. I was trying to keep up with it, to give it a good reason to be beating so fast. I was having fun. Giggling and jumping and goofing around with my four best friends. Dancing to songs I loved but usually pretended I didn’t. It was the closest thing to being a normal teen that I’d experienced in a long time. So I did another bump.
I had started the night with a little over a gram. I wasn’t sure how much I had left. Like the ring in Frodo’s pocket, the remaining coke seemed to be calling out to me, distracting me from enjoying everything else. I thought, Maybe I should just do it all now. So I don’t think about it anymore. I can snort it up, dance like crazy with my girls, then drink it off before I even head home. It was a good plan.
Rox was not cool enough to have coed bathrooms. And the line for the women’s room on the third floor was way long. So I took the stairs, two at a time, to the fourth floor. Classic rock was playing. It was the Doors. I knew this because Ellie had made it a priority to teach me about what she considered to be good music. She would put on songs and quiz me: “Who . . . is this?” If she paused in a certain way, I knew it was a clue, and the answer was the Who.
The women’s bathroom was empty except for one woman. She was old. Like forty-five. But she looked much older. Haggard. Years of baking in the sun unprotected showed on her leathery and splotchy skin. Deep wrinkles around her mouth were evidence of chain-smoking cigarettes. Her gaunt face could have once been plucky but was now hollow. Her legs looked frail, patterned with varicose veins and sunspots. Her cheap, long, bright pink acrylic nails were not helping to detract from her swollen fingers but instead brought attention to them. She was skinny and bloated at the same time.