Page 83 of Disco Witches of Fire Island

Joe smiled as broad as Frankie Fabulous, then made his way into one of the porta potties and locked the plastic hatch. One byone he pulled the brown glass vials from his fanny pack and checked their contents. Two were half full and one was completely full. There was also the little packet with the star-embossed blue pill. He remembered hearing a Promethean bartender calling X a bliss rocket. That was exactly what Joe needed. He tossed the X into his mouth, making spit to swallow it down. He waited five minutes but felt nothing.Fuck this!Joe poured a tiny white mountain of coke onto the meaty part of his hand behind his thumb, exhaled all his breath before snorting the powder as deeply as he could. Zing! A slight burn, a bitter taste, and his nose felt immediately clear. A second later, tiny explosions ignited inside his brain.

“Holy shit,” Joe said, carefully shoving the vial back into his fanny pack.

He burst out the door of the porta potty to an entirely different world. All his dark musings had been subdued.It’s really not such a bad party! In fact, it’s a really, really nice party!The music seemed better, the weather seemed perfect, and everyone appeared way more fascinating than only moments before. This shit really did work. He ran back to Frankie Fabulous and started dancing wildly underneath the man’s scaffolded neck brace.

“There ya go, Joe!” Frankie cried. “That’s the spirit!”

“You’re a really great guy, Frankie!” A lightning bolt of bliss surged through his veins. “That you can have that kind of accident and come back and dance! It’s incredible! You’re such an inspiration!”

“Thanks, Joe! I justloveto dance!”

Joe blew Frankie a kiss and bounced off deeper into the crowd until he found the perfect spot to dance alone. Fifteen minutes later something felt different—the coke zing grew quieter. Suddenly he was overcome with the most sublime feeling, as if little rays of light were shooting out of his pores. The bliss rocket. He stood on his tiptoes, closed his eyes, and stretched his arms up toward the sun. The warm breeze blew through each hair on his body. When he opened his eyes, the sky was bluer, the sun brighter, the dune grass greener. Everything was sparkling, including him. He grabbed his pecs and biceps. The feel of his own flesh turned him on.

“Yeah, that’s right!” he yelled. “I am Falafel Crotch! That is who I am!” He reached into his fanny pack and lovingly grasped thebrown vials and empty cellophane baggie in his hands. “Thank you so much!” he told them. “I understand now! I can get through life like this! I can be brave! I can do what I came to do!”

In one giant, loud, harmonious, electronic voice, the vials and baggie began to sing “This Is Acid” by Maurice Joshua. “Bah bah bah-bah bah-bah-bah-bah!” Joe shoved the singing drugs back into his fanny pack and began to dance with his two thousand dance partners, all stomping on the makeshift pool-top dance floor that bounced to the throbbing dance mix. So many hands groped Joe’s chest, his cock, his ass. He felt so loved, so happy on his final day. Everyone’s eyes sparkled. Why had he waited so long?

“How’s it, Joe?”

“You look great!”

“Didn’t know you could dance, Joe!”

“Wow, itisbig!”

Joe’s grin strained the edges of his face. He was in love with every single person on the dance floor. One middle-aged dude began rubbing his hand down the center of Joe’s sweaty back until it reached his buttocks. Joe’s skin leaped to meet the man’s touch. He wasn’t even attracted to him, though he ruminated on whether he might be the love of his life.If only the world could feel like this forever.

“Thank you!” Joe yelled into the man’s ear. “I have to go, but I love you very much! But today is the ending! The big finale! And I have to find someone first!”

And it wasn’t a lie. Joe intended to find someone … or rather someoneelse, someone with a big, muscled body and a handsome face. Someone who wanted to have sex with Joe but at the same time hated him. Someone who could never be wounded or hurt.

He had to find the Gladiator Man.

Joe slid around the dance floor as if it were a giant flesh jungle gym, kissing this one, dancing with that one, using all the beautiful bodies like slippery water slides to whatever beautiful man was next. When he finally paused to look up at the sky, the sun had fast-forwarded itself to the far west. How long had he been dancing? He glanced at someone’s watch—hours had vanished. He felt a sudden swoop, like an airplane losing ten thousand feet of altitude. He looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed, yet everythinghad. Eyes no longer sparkled. The music was no longer magical. The groping hands were attached to men he no longer found attractive. Dark, pickax-carrying thoughts floated across his brain.Is it right to be dancing when so many others are dying? Did Fergal already meet someone else? Will he die without ever finding love? Will Elena? How are you supposed to be brave enough now?

Joe hoovered his way through the rest of the coke vials, and for fifteen-minute bursts he got a little of his zing back, but then the swoop down would return, the dark thoughts. Finally, he stood stone still in the middle of the dance floor, shoulders slumped, his face a mask of despair. All the brown vials and the baggie in his fanny pack were empty. The Morning Party would be ending in a matter of hours. Howie’s blood moon would rise, and all the people would leave for dinner or go to the Promethean, partying until Monday morning, cuddling with someone they were capable of loving. By then Joe would be gone. But before then, Joe needed to find the Gladiator Man—and more drugs—to be brave enough to do what he intended to do, to be brave enough to escape.

He unscrewed each of the empty coke vials and tapped them on his tongue, hoping orphaned grains would fall out. None did. He licked the inside of the X baggie. Nothing. He pulled out the little burned merman’s head and looked at his tiny, manly, bearded face, still black with soot. The face that had once looked like Fergal’s.

“What am I going to do now, little merman? I’m drowning again, and you don’t even have a tail anymore to save me.”

The little merman’s black dot eyes stared back at Joe coldly.

“Fuck you.” Joe tossed the charred head high up into the air over the dancing crowd. Once he saw it drop into their midst, he returned his own head to his knees and prayed for the day to finallyend. It was the strange vibration of the floor that made him look up.

“What the fuck?” Joe stumbled up from the floor. “Did you feel that?” he asked a man, sweating with a rapturous look on his face.

“Feel what?” the man said, dreamily pulling Joe’s hand toward his crotch. “Wanna feel this?”

The floor rumbled louder. It felt as if Fire Island was being hit by an earthquake. He heard the sound of wood splitting. The floor beneath his feet dropped to a tilt. The crowd fell into one anotherand erupted into screams. Joe, realizing the pool-top platform was collapsing, ran toward the temporary fence that surrounded the party. Just as he landed on solid ground, he tripped and fell, scraping the heel of his hand. When he turned to look back, he saw the entire middle of the dance floor crack, split open, fold inward, and collapse. Bodies fell into one another and then into the pools.

Some people screamed for help, as if they were Shelley Winters in a seven-foot-deep version ofThe Poseidon Adventure. Some people laughed at the absurdity of it. Others whined loudly how the disaster had killed their high. A few simply floated dreamily on the sinking debris, cocktails still in hand. The DJ never stopped spinning.

“Quite a shit show if you ask me,” a voice from behind Joe said into his ear. “Wouldn’t have happened if I’d been in charge.”

Turning around, Joe saw that it was Scotty Black, the person he hated most in the world other than himself. He appeared unfazed by the dance-floor disaster, as if he had seen things like that happening every day.

“What do you want?” Joe said coldly. “Wasn’t burning the bar down enough?”

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