The Donzerly Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

dancers doing a pretty mean grind hardly a spit away. Sipping the last of his drink, Jay motioned for the waitress. “It was a little strange, but he wasn’t wacko or anything.”
    “My God,” Jude reacted, his head shaking. “You brought more than the dairy queen with you from old Madison, Wisconsin; you also forgot to scrape some of that Midwestern naïveté off your shoes when you entered the city.”
    “Her name is Carrie,” Jay reminded his friend.
    “Right,” Jude acknowledged, though he knew it wouldn’t have mattered what he called Miss Carrie Stiles. She didn’t like him, and he didn’t much care for her either. “My mistake.”
    “And I’m not from Madison.”
    “Oh, that’s right,” Jude said, mocking serious reconsideration of his statement. “You hail from a more cosmopolitan place on the outskirts of Madison. West Podunk, isn’t it?”
    “West Porter,” Jay corrected, trying not to smile at his friend’s ribbing. The best he could do was twist his coming grin into a tight pucker.
    “Right. Pardon me, Mr. West Porter, Wisconsin. Your home town may be a big fucking place, but it ain’t this big fucking place. I figured you knew that by now. You’ve been here three months—not three hours. There are rules of survival in this urban wasteland.” Without missing a beat, Jude snapped his fingers toward the least interested of their group. “Steverino, rule number one.
    His eyes fixed on madams A cup and B cup as their g-stringed crotches thrust at each other, Steve puffed smoke and answered without hesitation. “Don’t talk to scum.”
    “Right,” Jude agreed. He leaned a bit onto the circular table they were gathered ‘round near the stage and looked very seriously at Jay, as he might have at a wayward younger brother if being an only child hadn’t made that quite impossible. “Grady, those people are scum. For Christ’s sake, they piss on themselves to get warm for a minute. Don’t you understand? They are weirded out in the most revolting ways.”
    Bunker was nodding emphatically. “He’s not shitting you, Jay. One day, this raggedy old motherfucker threw a handful of his own shit at my sister in Soho. Dropped his pants, did a squirt in his palm, and heaved it at her. Just because she wouldn’t give him a buck.”
    Jay listened, swirling a red and white swizzle stick in his empty glass, glad now that he hadn’t mentioned anything about giving the bum some money. And especially not about the weird moment when Sign Guy had actually touched him. Man, wouldn’t Jude have a field day with that!
    “There’s a lesson here, farmboy,” Jude said. “Go on, Bunk.”
    “What Jude wants you to get out of this is profound,” Bunker explained.
    “Profound?” Jay asked, his eyes batting rapidly at his friend and the fingers of his right hand scratching absently against the palm.
    “Profound,” Bunker confirmed, with excess intensity. His words weren’t slurring, but Jay knew that his friend was a few pisses past drunk. Bunker Wallace, the man whose twenty-fifth birthday they had come to Buffalo Kabuki’s to celebrate after one more late night at the office (though it was more the truth to say that his birthday had conveniently fallen on a night when they were all at BK’s, which was every Friday night in fact), showed his liquor in his eyes. In the narrowing seriousness of his stare. Jude, on the other hand, showed it in his words. He talked louder, as if someone was cranking his volume up a notch with each drink. For Steve it was a slow slide to Mellowtown, and not long after that, while his cig bobbed up and down as he talked (Steve wasn’t a take-it-out-and-put-it-back-in kind of smoker—once lit, his cig stayed between his lips, slightly off center to the left, until it had burned down to the filter), he was likely to tell you for the fiftieth time about the sweetest piece of ass he’d ever had, Miss Glynis McChord, whom, to use his terminology, he’d devirginized after