The most hideous thing in this hideous situation was that we had to return to that same club in less than six hours. To put it mildly, I felt uneasy about it, and if I thought a little bit more, it even felt like the end of the fucking world. The problem was that since I had done so many shitty things during the past few days, none of which I remembered adequately, I just didn’t know whose toes I had stepped on and where the danger might come from. Regrettably, though, after I had the recklessness to inform Lara about my little chat with the bartender, there was absolutely no way to talk her out of our second visit to the place.

For her part, my assistant admitted that instead of being in the restroom while I waited for her downstairs, she had had a milk run on the second floor, where she had found “many interesting things” until “the stupid janitor ruined it.” When I asked her to be a little more specific, she just grunted a couple of times and said something too vague and meaningless, making me think she had actually found nothing substantial there—probably only locked doors or empty rooms. Anyway, I had already made the mistake of fueling her imagination enough, so there was no escaping—we were definitely going back to the club.

We spent the rest of the afternoon loitering around the area, visiting coffee shops and fast-food restaurants, and during the entire time, I tried to forget that eight o’clock was coming. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to drive this thought out of my head, and my cruel imagination was so zealous in reminding me of it that I eventually overdosed on caffeine, which made the situation worse. I began biting my nails.

Somewhere around seven, feeling dejected like a prisoner going to the gallows, I started the engine of our Ford and slowly drove us to Eternity. I drove relatively well despite my nervousness, and I only scratched the car twice and got our right wheels on the curb once. Fortunately, Lara was already used to my style and paid no attention to my stunts. While driving, my hands were so sweaty that I had the feeling I was about to lose my grip on the steering wheel and we would have a more severe accident any minute. Nevertheless, despite all my subconscious efforts to sabotage our mission, I failed in breaking the Ford irreparably, and eventually, we arrived at the designated place of my execution.

This time, we saw too many cars outside on the street, making me think there was a special occasion in the club. Such a possibility instantly fueled my ongoing fears and encouraged my imagination to produce more. I managed to persuade Lara that we should hang out in the vehicle for a while longer to gather some intel, but it didn’t help much. While we were sitting there, gathering virtually nothing, I kept thinking about how many complicated situations in life could have been avoided if apes had dug their heels in and stayed in the African rainforest at some point in evolution. In this case, many things wouldn’t have been invented, including sketchy bars in sketchy neighborhoods where dumb blondes with big breasts would get nice dudes like me mixed up in various troubles.

Nevertheless, eventually, I had to step out of the car and follow Lara outside because it became obvious that we were just wasting our time. We slowly walked around the building to the backside, where a concierge met us at the door. Since there was no such thing the previous time we visited here, I stopped in front of him, surprised and confused. He was a tall and lean guy in a black tailcoat and red silk shirt with golden braids. He didn’t say anything and just examined us from head to toe.

My assistant was still wearing my checked pants and yellow shirt, which hung loose and unbelted on her torso, making her look like a clown from Ringling Bros. who had just survived a terrible tornado. Naturally, she had only three buttons of the shirt buttoned up because she had never cared about such stupid and trivial things as decency, and their task to hold her breasts in check was now almost mission impossible. To make matters worse, she also didn’t have a bra on. On my part, I wore my stylish white shirt—smeared with ketchup to a reasonable degree—and a pair of dark evening slacks, which had no more than a couple of inconspicuous mayonnaise stains. I definitely looked elegant and discerning compared to my sloppy companion.

After watching us thoughtfully for almost a minute, the concierge gave us a brief nod and roughly pushed us toward a side door, which was obviously a staff-only entrance. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but he probably took us for performers—maybe because of our impressive “costumes.” We didn’t say anything to explain the situation to him on our part and walked through the door and up the staircase behind it. I thought we would step into the main hall shortly after that, but as it turned out, we needed nearly half an hour to find our way out of an endless string of cherry-red corridors, which confusingly poured into one another. By the look on Lara’s face, I could tell they were actually the “interesting things” she had found here a couple of hours ago, and I could see how disappointed she was now to discover the real purpose they served—to accommodate dressing rooms.

As we roamed through the terrible labyrinth, we met a lot of people—strippers and second-class singers and dancers. I hadn’t been behind the scenes of a place like this, so to speak, and I was genuinely impressed. I instantly realized the magic of showbiz—all the glamour, the vanity, the naked flesh, and the willingness to use sex as a tool for advancing up the ladder of success. Since no one knew who we actually were, almost everyone we met cast a horny look at Lara or me, depending on their sexual orientation, as if we were famous producers or critics and not just nobody. At some point, I started to believe we would end up brutally raped here! Anyway, after what seemed to me an eternity of pointless wandering around, thank god, we finally solved the corridor puzzle and conquered the last staircase. It led us right into the middle of the main stage, which was quite in the order of things if you think about it, but still, it caught us totally unprepared.

We abruptly stopped there and looked around, flabbergasted and confused at the same time. The hall was full of big shots and dandies whose suits, evening dresses, and hairstyles were worth at least a thousand bucks each. If we added the shoes and handbags, the total would have probably tripled, and if we counted their jewelry and the watches… well, that would have been a whole new level. I doubted that even Fort Knox would have been enough to match the final sum.

Since we were so nervous and shocked, we stood on the stage long enough for all the talks to quiet down and for the audience to turn toward us in expectation. After we had everyone’s attention, we still didn’t do anything because we were simply unable to move—just like the wax figures in the museum of Madame Tussauds. We only kept watching the people silently, and they kept watching us until everyone in the hall felt awkward, and then the men and women applauded us hesitantly. And again, we didn’t move a finger.

It all went on like this for another two minutes. When, eventually, the hand clapping died down, and everybody started to feel awkward for a second time, we spontaneously bowed. It was a terrible mistake because our stupid gesture dragged us into a second round of applause. To spare us further embarrassment, I secretly poked my elbow into Lara’s ribs and urged her to get off the stage. She obeyed me, and we quickly approached a vacant table near a fake palm tree, where we sat down. The cheering promptly dissolved into confusion, and then, at last, it was finally over—we were left alone. Despite our unpleasant experience, I almost felt sorry that it ended so soon. Figuratively speaking, these were our fifteen minutes of fame, and they had just gone!

Everything else afterward went quite smoothly, and it was no different from what we would have done if we had entered the club the ordinary way—through its main door. We ordered a dozen shots to wash down the memory of our unsuccessful performance, and Lara gulped her share—all the glasses of whiskey—in one go. Her never-ending passion for liquor made me remember our turbulent escape from this place earlier that day and brought up in my mind a ton of grim anticipations about the near future. I shuddered unpleasantly, wondering how to prevent my assistant from drinking.

After quenching her thirst, Lara grinned happily and relaxed back like a Roman patrician who had just finished feasting and now waited for the orgies to begin. As I watched her, I realized that maybe it was too late for safety measures, and I suddenly felt doomed. This feeling never left me from that moment on. Soon, my nervousness was so intense that I started looking around in every direction, hoping to glimpse Sonya somewhere in the crowd, grab her, and get out of this place while I still could. I acted like a meerkat at night watching, and I definitely attracted attention with my behavior. Unfortunately, I knew my hope was totally unrealistic and couldn’t force myself to believe it even for a moment. After a while, Lara noticed my extreme anxiety and leaned toward me, roaring angrily into my ear, “You’re squirming like a virgin in a gynecologist’s chair. Take it easy, for fuck’s sake! Lean back and relax!”

And when she said that, she unexpectedly punched me in the chest so hard that it made me open my mouth, and since I was just trying to swallow my drink, it literally burst out, spraying as if the gin factory had exploded. The result was devastating. I won all the attention I had not yet attracted to me, and I felt so stupid that I forgot to close my mouth. I sat there drooling like a baby for probably two minutes!

Eventually, I managed to pull myself together, but my nervousness remained. To calm down and stop acting weirdly, I decided to scan the tables for familiar faces and analyze where potential threats might come from. It was more than evident that we attended a high-life party here because I saw almost no ordinary people around—we were among the few exceptions. Between all the big shots and their glamorous ladies, I felt like a snail, crawling uninvited right into the middle of their snack table. After examining the guests for five minutes, during which time I was terribly afraid that my dandruff-haired friend might catch sight of me and come to suffocate me in a cloud of skin particles, I marked the most suspicious characters in the club.

My first subjects were a couple. They were an obese and extraordinarily pale-skinned, blond-haired man and woman sitting at a table in the most distant corner of the hall. When I noticed them, I first thought they were staff members because of their choice of clothing. If our “costumes” were just weird, theirs were simply absurd, and I couldn’t even imagine how they had passed by the concierge at the door dressed like this. The guys wore Hawaiian shirts and flower-patterned Bermuda shorts, just like Icelandic tourists returning from their unsuccessful vacation in Alaska, where they were robbed of their luggage right after hitting the beach for the first time.

Even more dubious than their dress code was that they weren’t talking to each other or even moving, and they only sat in their chairs like a pair of Easter Island statues, gazing into the ocean in front of them with empty eyes. I saw two tall glasses of Martini on their table, as evidenced by the olives on the cocktail spikes, but none of them was drinking. The weirdos remained indifferent to their surroundings, and I actually had the obsessive feeling they were gazing at me, which was very strange because we hadn’t met before. I, too, stared at them for a while, but since they didn’t react, I moved my attention to other suspicious subjects—a bunch of bodybuilders in the game room who were making too much noise. I was afraid I might find my tough, dandruff-haired friend among them.

I gave the group a closer look. All the guys were strapping young fellows, half wearing tank tops while the others had Breton shirts on, with which they looked like cartoon characters. Their game, on the other hand, didn’t seem cartoonish at all. They had fun throwing scary-looking knives at a tiny target hanging on one of the walls, and every time someone scored, the group cheered, agitated, all the participants exchanging money and watching the winner pose stupidly, showing off his muscles. Given the erratic lighting in the game room, it was amazing that there were no victims yet. I watched the party for a while, but then I decided to switch to the next batch of subjects, and when I did, I had to look around worriedly for cover. I saw Marilyn and the Asian guy at one of the VIP tables!

Since it was too late for Lara and me to move to another table, I promptly slid my butt toward the edge of the seat, lowering my body and attempting to hide behind the nearby palm tree. It was a stupid attempt anyway because the guys had probably seen our weird performance on stage a while ago. And since I couldn’t do anything more right now, I just tried to take a better look at the couple.

This time, the girl wore a stunning red dress with a tulle jacket, which looked gorgeous on her. She had somewhat sad eyes and remained silent as she listened to the Asian talk, nodding her head indifferently every now and then. Her gloomy expression didn’t correspond to the typical character of a shallow-minded doll with which gangsters usually hang. The entire time, she didn’t smile once.

For his part, her companion kept explaining something to her, and he never looked around. He wore a dark violet tailcoat, burgundy shirt, and black bow tie. His hair was oiled back as usual, and he looked like a clown in his extravagant outfit. However, his confident manners and aggressive gestures compensated for the lack of style, and it never occurred to me to laugh my ass off about his unconvincing appearance. I was almost sure he owned this place.

I held my attention on the guys for a few minutes, but when the Asian took out his checkbook and started writing in it, Marilyn suddenly raised her head and gazed at me. It took me by surprise. A few seconds later, she unexpectedly nodded toward the restroom. It was a barely noticeable gesture, but it scared the shit out of me because, from what I saw, the club owner definitely had intimate relations with this chick, and the blond-haired thug secretly adored her in some way. And now she wanted to do me? It was a sure recipe for disaster! On the other hand, it was also a rare chance to dip my nose into the shady business of these bastards here, and besides, the woman was quite cute, which was a tough argument to beat in a man’s mind.

Naturally, no matter how much I wanted it, I wouldn’t do such a reckless thing under any circumstances. It would have been monumentally stupid, and I was just wondering how to respond to the indecent offer when I heard a loud burp by my side. It made me realize I had lost track of what was happening at our table.

I promptly turned my head to look at Lara and discovered that what was happening at our table was the most probable thing in a situation like this—my “lady” had gotten drunk again! This woman was such a nightmare, and the present moment was no exception. Her drooping eyelids, dry lips, and sulky face showed me how badly she was wasted. She had her breasts resting on the tabletop now, and one of her boobs had tipped the plate of peanuts we had ordered for our drinks and spilled its contents. At the same time, her shirt was twisted around her body so severely that her right nipple almost popped outside. I didn’t even bother bringing it to her attention because I knew she wouldn’t care, and I only thought that if I sucked at that nipple, my mouth would probably fill with pure whiskey.

I kept watching my assistant, who was becoming increasingly unhappy about something, and after a minute, I realized very disagreeable things would happen to me at any moment. My humble plan of sitting peacefully here and spying on the people around us was ruined now, and soon we would be the stars again. To prove me right, the booze bag by my side didn’t even wait for a minute more, and she agitatedly raised her head and cast an unfocused look at me as if seeing me for the first time in her life. Then she sharply jumped onto her feet—of course, she made a total mess of the table while doing so—and croaked hoarsely and inarticulately in my face, “Will you dance with me?”

I looked at her, utterly surprised and unable to answer. Out of neglect or something else, she had actually omitted “will” from the start of her phrase, which pretty much straightened out the question mark at the end of it and turned it into an exclamation. In my mind, I hurriedly curved it back into shape and prepared to explain I would embrace a starving grizzly bear rather than dance with her, but unfortunately, I prepared for too long, as it turned out. And I just didn’t have the time.

Right in the next second, my assistant sharply grabbed my arm and pulled me harshly toward her, and before I knew it, I was already rolling around the hall amid a passionate tango or whatever passionate thing she thought she was doing. Basically, she lashed me disorderly to the left and right; she twirled me chaotically without giving me enough time to know what her next move would be, and practically, she took the male part without warning me about it. She never noticed, even for a brief moment, that there was absolutely no hint of music in the club!

We waddled like this for about five minutes, losing even an imaginary sense of rhythm with Lara leaning on me heavier and heavier until we eventually looked like old bears engaged in a clumsy fight. We soon started receiving the inevitable waggish remarks and impish whistles from the audience—the latter coming from the bodybuilders in the game room, who also sent a few air kisses to my lady. Unfortunately, this sudden attention to her “skills” sucked any remaining concentration out of my dancing party.

I say “unfortunately” because no matter how unenviable the situation had been for me until then, it became freakishly comical from that moment on. When Lara noticed the kisses, she bloomed like an English rose, which sensed a few of the fattest bees in the neighborhood buzzing around her and sharply let go of me. Instead, she turned around to blow a few kisses back to the jerks in tank tops, totally ignoring my very delicate position as a hot chick bending backward into her unreliable arms with my “sexy” leg sticking right up in the air. By and large, I had barely managed to keep my balance even before that, and with this, I instantly lost any control over myself.

What followed next was actually expected, and there was absolutely nothing unnatural about the way I hit the floor with my backbone and nearly brought the entire building down upon me. It was a good thing I had taken a few classes in martial arts when I was young, and I had lasted long enough, at least, to learn how to fall safely on the ground and not make a suicidal show for everybody else around me.

Without even turning back to take a look at what she had done, Lara quickly ran toward her new buddies—probably to demand an explanation for their behavior—and I, on my part, had nothing left to do but focus on the task of lying down as casually as I could and pretending that I hadn’t experienced the most humiliating thing one could ever experience in a hall full of people after he had recklessly put himself in the center of their attention before that.

I rolled around on the floor for a minute or two like a spoiled child, but I was aware I had to get up eventually. Since I didn’t know how to do it without destroying the last remaining pieces of my dignity, I raised myself to sit up, digging into my pockets for a forgotten cigarette and a lighter to help me get out of the embarrassing situation. I hadn’t smoked for almost a year, and it was only natural that, eventually, I found nothing. That’s why I remained there for a while longer, making my peace by only imagining I was smoking. I really hoped my audience had a fantasy at least half as devoted as mine.

Of course, as it usually happens in such awkward moments, one rarely has the chance to get away with it and avoid total disgrace. While I was still sitting on the floor in the middle of my “smoking” act, the DJ, probably inspired by me, suddenly decided the time for dancing had finally come, and his music boomed loudly in the hall. Only a few seconds later, a wild crowd of people flocked onto the stage, shaking to the rhythm of rock ’n’ roll, and literally booted me out of the area with my imaginary and still unfinished cigarette.

Profoundly humiliated and depressed, I stood up and took a few steps away to recover my shattered self-respect. I did it just in time to notice the unpleasant Asian guy staring at me fixedly. It really gave me the creeps. He didn’t look like a man who had seen another man’s dignity publicly destroyed, but rather like someone who had seen the ghost of Count Dracula riding the horse of the Headless Horseman throughout the Devonshire countryside in a quest for the Hound of the Baskervilles!

Highly annoyed at his staring but also annoyed by the fact that obviously, everybody in this city knew my life in very intimate details, I stared back at him, trying to look as mean as possible, which probably didn’t mean shit because the light in the hall was quite dim. Anyway, the Asian wasn’t impressed at all, and he just raised his right hand to snap his fingers at someone. At first, I thought he wanted to send his dandruff “beauty” to come and congratulate me for my cold-blooded handling of the embarrassing situation, but I was wrong. The gesture was intended for some other thug, and its meaning was probably to strangle me for bringing disgrace to his stage.

I glanced at the guy coming my way, and the sight of him made my flesh creep. With my terrible luck, it was only natural that this specimen was taller than Kilimanjaro, and compared to him, the dandruff-haired nymph looked like the adorable fairy of peace and harmony. While the thug elbowed his way through the crowd toward me, I briefly tried to consider my options, and it wasn’t even surprising that I found none. Obviously, the only thing I could do here was to hang on to all the glorious moments in my life so far and to brace myself for its tragic and untimely end.

Luckily, the situation didn’t evolve as I thought it would. For once, my luck worked just fine, and long before the thug came within reach, the music unexpectedly stopped—disappointing all the dancers—and the lights started pulsating intensely, messing with the guy’s intentions. In the next second, loud drumming and cymbal ringing reverberated throughout the hall, indicating it was time for the show to kick off. The thug shook his head, disappointed, and gave up the task, turning around to go back to his boss. When I saw him leave, I sighed with relief and looked around for Lara.

She was still in the game room and clearly didn’t even remember she had come here with me. I saw her swimming in a sea of muscles while trying to get nearer to the place where the knife-throwing action was happening, but fortunately, she didn’t have much success. The men around her were so huge that she probably had a better chance of breaking through the Grand Canyon rocks than squeezing through them. Moreover, she was soaked all the way to the tips of her big breasts and barely kept her balance. I wanted to go and grab her and get us out of there, but I knew I had no chance. Once she slid down the liquor slide, there was simply nothing in the world to make her stop.

Dejected and desperate, I turned around and headed to our table instead, and on my way, I picked up an abandoned pack of cigarettes and a lighter from one of the other tables. I just didn’t want to become a laughing stock again at a moment when I needed to appear cool. When I sat in my chair, I looked through the pile of empty glasses for something Lara had missed wiping clean, and when I found half an ounce of liquor in one of them, I took it to my lips. The way the club owner stared at me was very upsetting and boded nothing well. It only solidified my suspicion that I was neck-deep in shit without even realizing the full scope.

Right then, the show finally started. A couple of guys dragged a giant cake onto the stage, breaking my dismal train of thought and making me wonder what they were doing. After that, the drumming stopped, the music resumed, and a bunch of topless girls in bikinis marched around the cake twice and then lined up on both sides with party plates in their hands. It puzzled me even more and made me crane my neck in an attempt to see what was going on. Unfortunately, none of the girls was Sonya, which meant I would have to stay at this place for at least a few hours more. It made me shiver unpleasantly.

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