Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) (3 page)

I think about my rent.

I think about
Mamah.

I think about being cold at night.

I think about Mr. Bernstein’s
letter.

I think about
Savva’s final note, her last words to the
world—“it”:

I believe in you, baby. I only wish I believed in
myself as much as you do. I’ll be looking out for you from below.
Don’t be such a screw-up like I was.

Your best friend, in this life and in the next,

Savva

I scratch my eye.
“I’ll take it,” I say.

“
Awesome. Now, baby, you gonna have to
brave the fine streets of Brooklyn to get here because, well, I’m a
little incapacitated at the moment, and there ain’t no train that
comes this way. If I picked you up it’d be DUI in a
whole
new way of seeing things, if
you catch my drift. Got some good shit for you if you
want—”

“
Xavier.”

“
Sorry. Old habits.”

“
Where’s the party?”

“
Abandoned warehouse on Grand. By the
Newtown Creek Bridge. If Randy accepts you, you’ll be on at about
one A.M. He’ll want to hear you play for him beforehand. Thirty
minutes or so. I mean, he’s desperate, but he’ll never put an
untested DJ on without hearing him first. Sorry,
her
. And he’s
willing to do the set himself if it comes to that. He’s not the
best, but he can spin a few tracks if worse comes to
worst.”

“
How long’s the set?”

“
As long as you can stretch it, and as long
as NYPD don’t shut us down. You’ll basically be covering for two
other DJs. So, who knows, could go till seven, eight. You sure you
don’t want some uppers?”

“
I’m sure.”

“
Can you get here?”

“
I’ll be there in twenty. What decks do
they have?”

“
CDJ one-thousands.”

One model below mine, industry standard. I
pause for a second, feeling like I’m looking down
from the top of the
Oro 2
Skyscraper
.

House Market
. Regardless of mine and Xavier’s history,
it’s an opportunity like no other. Hell, I’d do the fucking set for
free just for the exposure. “Xavier, I hope you’re not too trashed
to appreciate the full gratitude I feel for this.”

“
Yeah, well...maybe I owe you. Who knows.
Now hurry that ass of yours before Randy gets cold feet. No matter
how high he’s flying, his head somehow always stays straight when
it comes to business—and to music. Or maybe it’s his heart. Dunno.
My skills don’t work on him when it comes to the music and to these
parties. I know he loves these parties more than he loves the
goods. Anyway. Get here. Before he changes his mind.”

The goods
. From a “consultant.” With
“skills.”

I stare at the phone for a second after
Xavie
r clicks off. Two
lights are on in the apartment building next door.
Her
apartment
building
. The rest have
been vacated. Soon those two will be gone as well.

My skin goes cold.

I pack my MacBook Air in my backpack—also
given to me by Patryk the Painter after he left. When I get
downstairs, I ponder—as I always do when I walk the streets at
night—how disastrous it could be for me to be robbed of it. Not
even Craigslist and eBay have good deals for the models I
own.

But what would life be without risks?

Declan
Cox

“
PAAAAAARTY!!!!!” I close the door of my
newly bought second-hand 2010 XL Ford F150 truck. The thing’s
a
bewt
. Silver, no
scratches on the body, purrs like a horny kitten.

Hard work. Hard labor. I earned this baby.
And now it’s mine. As is the profit I turned last week after
three and a half years of
fighting to keep my head up from water. Three and a half years
since moving out of that cesspool of an apartment with pops and his
squeeze in Canarsie. Three and a half years of lugging
furniture.

And here I am. Making it. Not rich, but
making it.

“
Yo, Deck, let’s get walking before you
have an orgasm, bro.” That’s my best friend, Trev Perkins. Baddest
QB to ever play for Penn State. Baddest QB to play for all of
college Americana in my opinion. Good thing Penn State had their
scholarship sanctions lifted in 2013. Trev took them to two
back-to-back Bowl Championships (ahem,
College Football Championships
as they’re now called),
throwing a mind-staggering five-thousand-two-hundred yards last
season!

That’s another thing we’re celebrating.

Or maybe we’re just celebrating that he’s
up here for winter break.
I could come up with many other reasons to go out tonight
and trash my mind on this freezing Saturday night.

Trev, Skate (another homes of mine that I
play Semi Pro with), and I head on over to the
House Market
party. Randy Dhawan’s baby. I cross the
chain-link fence of the abandoned parking lot and already I feel
the anticipation in my blood. The anticipation of the fresh rush of
E under my skin, sending thrilling goose bumps across my scalp and
over my flesh. And I haven’t even taken the thing yet!

“
So, Trev, you’re on ground control,
right?” I ask.

Trev’s eyes flicker briefly toward me,
then away. I can tell he was maybe hoping I’d be going it clean
tonight.
“Nothing’s
changed, bro. I still gotta get that college degree.”

I don’t push
him. He used to drop a little with me before he
made it to Penn State, a few party-pills maybe twice the entire
year, but then stopped. Too afraid someone would find out and not
renew his scholarship. Makes total sense. College has always been
his dream. I can respect that.

Me, I’m a chipper
(that’s like a baby user) all the way.
Never done more than five times a year since I left home. In high
school I did a little more. But things were different
then.

Tougher
.

“
No sweat, homes,” I say, “so I’m
definitely rushin tonight, in case you were wondering. Skate here,
too.”

“
I figured. Like I said, I’ll be the ground
man.”

“
You know I respect that,
right?”

“
Say what?”

“
I mean, you know I respect that you don’t
drop ’cause of your scholarship an’ all, right? Actually, if you
were to come to me and say you were gonna drop, I think I wouldn’t
let you. You’re the smart one, Trev. You always were.”

Trev
gives me his best Will Smith smile. Then he punches me on
the shoulder. “You’ve become so emo since I left you. Or are all
white people like that? Besides, you know that ‘you’re the smart
one’ crap is running old by now. Lincoln woulda never accepted your
out-of-zone ass if you didn’t have nothin up here!” He taps his
forehead.

“
I still think they took me because they
kn
ew you’d have no hopes
on the football field without me.”

He hits me again! So I try slap the back
of his head, but he ducks, and before I know it I’m in a
headlock!
I struggle and
land a light punch on his ribs. “You
bastid
!” he says.

He lets me go and then ruffles my hair. “Hey!
Watch the do!”

Skate is standing back, hands in his pockets,
blasé and bored. “Are we gonna go to this fuckin party or
what?”

N
ow both Trev
and
I
run after his ass!

But w
e give up quick, because the music’s calling, and I can
already hear it from here.

The air is icy. Nothing compared to that
Polar
Vortex shit we had
back in ’13, but still, it freezes my pores as I head bravely
through it in nothing but a sleeveless tank and some denims. I’ll
be overheating in less than an hour, so I left the jacket and
sweater in the car.

We parked about a ten minute walk away. I
can hear the
thump-thump
of
the bass. We pass a gutted warehouse that looks like it might
topple over from the wind, then a shuttered Deli on our left. Then
two places I assume are auto shops. There’s pictures of cars on the
brick walls but the signs are in Chinese or Japanese or
Korean...

The music’s so loud now I can
almost
taste it. I see
two babes with electric blue hair, and less clothes on than me,
standing out on the sidewalk, sharing a smoke. They check out my
sleeve tat, and I let them. I give ’em my best smile and they smile
back.
Oh
yeah, it’s gonna be a good night, baby!

A dude in plastic shades drinks
Modelo
beer from a can. I smell the
cloying stench of weed, see the zombied-out faces of
artistes
leaning against the wall, baked
on
Downtown
Brown
(because they
can’t afford the good shit.) You know:
Because art and self-expression and
all that “are all above the fundamentals and laws of basic
economics” and shit—yeah man, wow, peace
.

And then I see the lights from the
dilapidated
warehouse’s
cracked windows—blue and red and strobing in time to the
beat.
House
Market
. We visit the
dude at the door who is probably supposed to be the bouncer (I’m
twice his size, Trev almost three times) and show him our
Approved for
Entrance
tickets. We get
inside. Outside it might’ve been freezing.

But in here, I’m already
sweating.

Skate
sees the Candy Man and brokers me the X. White strobe light
glimmers off his shaved head. The snake tat surrounding his neck
pulses.

Trev’s already jamming next to me. Dude
can dance, I gotta give him
that. He scopes out a ready-for-it blonde and starts
grinding against her. She grinds back—yes,
like that
. I’m about to drop The Doctor, the pill already
on my tongue, when the music shifts...

And so does the dance floor.

And so does my heart...

Little
did I know, that in less than twelve
hours, so would my entire world...

I pause, the round white tablet,
with the little engraving of a
heart on it, poised between my front teeth. I look up at the DJ
box, see only smoke and laser lights, covering it in a hazy
glow.

Could it—?

I squint my eyes. Too much smoke, too many
strobes.

The energy in the crowd has already
lifted. There’s a lightness in the air. A
power
of some sort.

Who is this DJ?

Meanwhile my
heart sings. Trev’s going wild next to me, blonde
babe ever getting closer to him. Because the shit coming through
the speakers now is not that Electroclash New Wave
Synthpop Dubjet
grimy
crap that’s so
dominant in the commercial club scene in NYC right now. None of
that
speedcore skank-mank
trash that you need to be tweaking on fifty keys of glass
just to discern a rhythm out of.

This stuff
has
groove
.

An angel sings from the speakers, backed
by a deadly thump that’s so old school we could be in one of those
Deep House underground parties of way back in the nineties that
people like you and me only get to read about. Or hear about. Or
watch a
YouTube
video
about.

Then the beat changes again.

I crane my neck, wrapped in the
warm
sound-blanket
reeking of Chicago House buried in a bassline so resonant that my
legs can’t help moving to it.

I take the E from my lips, stick it in my
pocket, look around at the dance floor. A circle has formed. A babe
in high denim shorts swings her legs in the center of it, cheered
by the rhythmic claps and drumming hands of ecstatic
dancers.

“
Oh, yeah!” someone groans.

“
Oh. Hell.
Damn
!”

And then, almost like a lion
on Crystal getting fucked
sideways—and having a groaningly good time of it—someone growls:
“Oh, GOD!” Only,
GOD
becomes a
Germanic sounding three syllable word of “
GOWAHHHET
!”

The music wraps its fingers around
me.
Who is
this DJ!?

I recognize the vocals in the song:
Gabrielle Aplin, Indie rock. Mixed to a
House
beat?

Fucking g
enius...

I need to get me a mix
tape of this jock before I
leave.