NIGHT FLIGHT MIKE
Chester Burton Brown
Smashwords Edition copyright 2012 Matthew Hemming; all rights reserved.
Read more from this author at CheeseburgerBrown.com
License Notes: Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
Two weeks before his first wet dream, Mike Zhang Cuthbertson escaped from the custody of his adoptive parents and became a briefly burning nightclub hero.
The idea had come to him through the television: a pretzel-plot sit-com chosen by his white sister India when her turn came up. On the periphery his black sister Bianca glowered and fretted, anxious to resume televisual control in order to pursue documentaries about things that explode.
On the screen a straitlaced teenager took the opportunity of a family vacation to sneak into the hotel discotheque, ending up drunk and gyrating on tabletop for a rowdy audience when her parents showed up for the third act’s retrieval and retribution routine. “That is so not believable,” snorted Bianca.
“Why?” asked India listlessly, lolling on the couch.
“Because nerds can’t dance.”
India considered this, the light of commercials flashing in her eyes. “Even when they’re drunk?”
“Especially then,” confirmed Bianca. “Now give me the remote.”
“There’s still more show.”
“Just the credits.”
“I want to hear the ending music. I like it.”
Mike looked up from his homework and adjusted his glasses seriously. He was wondering whether or not he was a nerd, and therefore whether or not he possessed the ability—or even the desire—to gyrate on a tabletop. He absently pulled his feet out of the way as his sisters rolled across the rec room carpet, pulling each others’ hair and screeching.
A seed had been planted in young Mike’s sharp mind, and in those meanders it would find firm root.
2.
Three months after Christmas Mike’s white sister India won the district spelling bee championship and Mike’s black sister Bianca was warned that she was in danger of failing English. It was decided that both sisters would attend the Grand Bee in the big city, the former to make an attempt for the cup and the latter to be kept close by and out of trouble. As a corollary it was hoped that Bianca’s spelling might improve after sitting through two days of master beeing.
Mike’s parents made a generous offer: “We’ve decided that you’re responsible enough to stay home alone. Mom will freeze you a set of dinners.”
“If it’s all the same,” replied Mike, “I’d like to come along.”
His parents looked at one another. “But you’ll miss the science fair, honey,” said Mother.
Mike shrugged. “Somebody else can win this year.”
She took his temperature. Father was also concerned. “This is your chance to get away from the girls for a few days, champ. Don’t you want to give independence a whirl?”
Mike considered this, rolling the glass thermometer from one side of his mouth to the other. “I wanch ’o shee uh shitty.”
“Stay still,” said Mother.
“You want what?” asked Father, furrowing his brow.
Mike’s mother withdrew the thermometer and examined the grade seriously. “Normal,” she declared.
“I want to see the city, Pop.”
Father sighed. “I suppose he can sleep on the floor of our room, can’t he?” He was thinking about his credit card.
Mother seemed nervous. “I’ve already frozen a quiche.”
Father shrugged in unconscious imitation of Mike’s conscious imitation of him. “It’ll keep.”
3.
Four blocks from the bus station to the hotel didn’t sound far, but heaving baggage along and negotiating the girls’ bickering made it a marathon. Though April was unfolding the warmth had not yet been sufficient to melt the snowbanks away, but had instead revealed their black, cigarette-butt stuffed cores, ledges of treacherous silty ice that snaked along the sidewalk borders like petrified boa constrictors coming off dumpster-diving benders. India tripped on one and blamed Bianca, whom she subsequently characterized as a bumbling bum-goblin.
“No swearing,” muttered Father wearily.
“She hip-checked me,” whined India.
“Didn’t,” said Bianca.
They walked through Chinatown. There were squashed vegetables mashed into the ice crusts, and the air smelled like a fast-food grease-trap. The family wormed their way through dense, jostling crowds of shoppers pressed around make-shift market stalls filled with octopus tentacles and knock-off MP3 players. They were awash in a constant babble of Mandarin, and Mike experienced some regret that he understood none of it despite his heritage.
“I want to learn Chinese,” he told his mother.
“Not now, honey” she said.
The Fairbrook Hotel rose from the corner of Dundas Street and a dingy side alley populated by oily-haired aboriginals arguing over a patch of grating through which bloomed warm farts of subway air. India drew up against Mike at the sound of their sharp, gravelly profanity. Bianca laughed at her.
The bellhops at the Fairbrook were dressed like movie-ushers. They wore little crooked cranberry caps and had stripes running down each pantleg like Han Solo. They bowed to people who looked like big tippers and ignored everyone else, including Mike and his family.
When one of the bellhops was dispatched by the desk clerk he reluctantly loaded the baggage onto a cart with a squeaky wheel and studied the wall with severe indifference while they all waited for the elevator. He swiped the card to admit them into the room and then piled the bags unceremoniously next to the closest bed.
On his way out the bellhop loitered at the jamb and held open his hand expectantly. Father slapped his palm and said, “Thanks, man.”
Once they were settled Mother reviewed the itinerary, stepping through two days of round robin spelling and themed lunches culminating in a grand awards dinner of roast beef for finalists and parents only. Tentatively, half-jokingly, musingly, Mike set that final evening as the stage for his mission.
“Will you two be okay on your own?” asked Mother.
“Yes,” said Mike.
“No,” said Bianca.
“I don’t like roast beef,” said India.
4.
Twenty minutes later Mike was on reconnaissance. He told his parents he would request from the front desk an additional reading lamp to do his schoolwork by, which he did upon reaching the lobby. Afterward, however, he parked himself in front of a wall-sized map of the hotel’s innards and set to studying the layout.
A white woman in a fancy suit with a hotel crest on the lapel wandered over and asked Mike if was lost. “No,” he said. She went away.
The Fairbrook Hotel housed many facilities including a sauna, a swimming pool, a sports bar, a karaoke bar, a business centre, a fitness centre, a luncheon cafeteria with both kosher and halal dishes, a teleconferencing room and a gift shop. Try as he might, Mike could find no listing for anything resembling a nightclub.
He looked around to find the lady with the crest on her lapel but she’d vanished. Instead he caught the eye of tired-looking black woman flopped out on one of the lobby’s leather couches with her long, scabby legs sprawled out carelessly before her. “Hi,” she said.
“Can you help me?”
She shrugged, chewing a lump of gum rhythmically. “You looking for a good time, honeypie?”
“Yes,” said Mike, stepping closer. She smelled like rubbing alcohol, and when she crossed her legs he caught a bewildering whiff of tunafish. Mike pointed at the map. “I’m trying to find the nightclub.”
“What nightclub?”
“Any nightclub. I thought there would be one in the hotel.”
The woman stretched her bruised arms and cracked her thick knuckles. Her face was heavily painted, smeared around the lips. “You want to go dancing or something, baby?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name, sugar?”
“Mike,” said Mike.
“I’m Sapphire.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Coriander’s is down the block,” she said, gesturing vaguely. “They got pretty girls in there, maybe you’ll find yourself a girlfriend, Mike.”
Mike blushed, and then two security guards with muttering walkie-talkies came and escorted Sapphire out of the lobby. Mike guessed that she must be an important person in order to warrant a security entourage. He waved and she waved back.
5.
Three incidents marred Mike’s enjoyment of the first day of the Grand Bee. The first incident occurred when Mike was caught unconsciously mouthing the spelling of the words each contestant on stage was challenged with, leading to a harshly whispered reprimand from a fat judge with creased jowls who had shuffled over from the wings to accuse Mike of trying to help somebody cheat. “If you’re such a whiz-bang speller you should be up there yourself,” said the fat judge. His shirt bore a trail of white debris from the powdered doughnut he wagged at Mike in warning.
The second incident occurred when Mike went to the washroom and two obnoxious boys in private school suits accused him of being a “shy pisser” because he took too long standing in the stall. Mike immediately lost the ability to urinate and spent the remainder of the morning session with crossed legs.
The third incident took place during lunch when one of the other parents chatting up Father asked him to point out his children, which Father dutifully did. The blonde, pink-faced man furrowed his brow and then smiled. “Oh I see, they’re not your real children,” he said.
“I’m sorry?” asked Father, ceasing to chew his pasta.
“That explains the complexions,” added the blonde man.
The man hadn’t meant to offend Father but Father was offended. He had been offended in this way before. There was, in fact, an invisible valise of stored up offense sitting unseen on Father’s shoulder. Mother touched his arm and said his name quietly, but he shook her off. “What, pray tell, do you mean by that exactly?” Father wanted to know, stepping closer to the blonde man.
Mike didn’t hear what the man stammered in his defense, but Father put him in a headlock. Father had been a wrestler in college. The fat judge jogged up in a tizzy but, evidently lacking experience with wrestling, attempted to prise Father’s arm loose in entirely the wrong way, succeeding only in knocking himself to the floor when Father turned around to see who was pulling on him.
Violence upset Mike, so he ran away.
When Mother found him in the lobby hiding behind a magazine about Filipino pirates she stroked his dark hair and gave him the speech about Father being under a lot of stress lately due to difficulties in the adoption process of Baby Ruby and the threat of downsizing at the office. “When it’s all too much for him he falls back on wrestling,” she concluded lamely.
“I know,” said Mike.
“He wishes you would get into wrestling. He could be your coach.”
“I don’t like wrestling.”
“I know.”
They sat in silence a while, mother and son, watching people pass by on the sidewalk outside through the tinted glass of the hotel’s face. They saw a bellhop badly mistake the balance of his cargo and go sprawling to the floor, suitcases skidding away in a hissing ring of ejecta. Mike and Mother cracked up, and laughed more than may have been appropriate.
“Sometimes it’s hard...” Mother began wistfully.
Mike was patient and he waited, but the sentence remained dangling. “Sometimes what’s hard?”
Mother blinked the faraway look out of her eyes. “Sometimes it’s just hard, is all.” She hugged him. “Try to remember the burden your father carries. It isn’t always easy.”
“Okay,” agreed Mike.
6.
For a long moment after Mother, Father and India had set off to the awards banquet Bianca stood by the just closed door poised like a cat, eyes closed, listening. After half a minute Mike said her name and she gave him the finger. “Shut the f up,” she mouthed silently.
Footfalls sounded in the corridor. Somebody was coming. Bass mumbling was interrupted by Mother’s voice: “...Oh nevermind, it’s right here in my purse.”
Bianca looked at Mike and raised one eyebrow. Mike nodded mutely.
They froze again, listening to their family walk away from the suite a second time. At the edge of strained hearing Mike imagined he could detect the chime of the arriving elevator and the rumble of its doors. Bianca’s eyes were closed again, fingers splayed out in space as if they were psychic antennae. Her brow creased briefly when a lone person passed through the corridor outside their room, but Mike knew the stride didn’t belong to anyone he knew.
Bianca’s eyes snapped open. She crossed the room briskly and tried to open the hermetically sealed window. “F it,” she said, and then rummaged through her knapsack and extracted a neat faggot of cigarettes rolled inside the cardboard cover of a school notebook. She lit one with a hotel match and glared at Mike expectantly.
“What?” asked Mike, sitting on the bed, his homework on his lap.
“I’m just waiting for you to start up with what you’re going to say about this, so you can get it out of your system or whatever.” Bianca blew smoke out of her mouth and inhaled it into her nose in twin silvery streams. She kicked out her hip in that challenging way she used when lying about her chores.
“I’m not going to say anything,” said Mike.
“Sure,” scoffed Bianca.
“I’ll even leave you alone.”
“You’re going to do your homework in the bathroom?”
“No, I’ll leave the room. I’ll just go.”
“Why would I want you to go? I’m supposed to be in charge of you.”
“Shut up.”
“Excuse me?”
“We both know you want me to go. But you have to do something for me in return.”
“Here it comes.”
“If Mom and Dad call up to the room and ask you where I am, you just say ‘he’s right here,’ okay?”
“He’s right here?”
“He’s right here. That’s all you have to say. Can you promise? If you promise, I’ll leave you alone all night. I just don’t want to get in trouble for it. Okay?”
Bianca narrowed her eyes slyly and dragged on her cigarette. “What’s in it for me?”
“You get what you want.”
“So what’s in it for you?”
Mike flushed. “Nothing.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I’m sneaking into the business centre to use the computers.”
“Shut up, Mike.”
“I’m sneaking into the karaoke bar.”
They stared at one another’s brown eyes for a moment, pupil to pupil. Mike knew how to see the love between the flecks of resentment in Bianca’s gaze, and it comforted him. Finally Bianca blinked and began to nod. “It’s a deal. Now get the f out of here.”
Mike snapped closed his textbook. “I’m already gone.”
7.
Once he hit the lobby Mike’s pace slackened with doubt. The bloom of having bested his first obstacle, Bianca, paled as he recognized in his guts the challenge of the obstacles to come. Would they even let him, a minor, wander out of the hotel at night? Even if he did, would the nightclub have bouncers who would refuse all kids? Even if it didn’t, would everyone inside laugh at him?
Mike felt the urge to pee but knew he couldn’t. He had to stay on-mission.
He looked at his shoes as he passed the bellhops and swept out the wide doors, the bite of the evening air at first startling and then invigorating. It also exacerbated his need to pee. The street was colourful and loud, a jostling, veering, blinking blur that Mike found easier to ignore than to parse. He marched down the outer edge of the curb in the direction Sapphire had indicated, eyes locked along the sign-fronts hunting for any combination of spelling or logotype signifying Coriander.
“Coriander, Coriander...” whispered Mike. “Come on Coriander.”
He crashed into something meaty and leapt back, gasping. “Heavens to Betsy Ross!” cried Sapphire, stumbling against a mailbox. “You almost ate my lunch there, kid.”
They couldn’t say anything to one another for a moment while a streetcar rumbled by. “Am I almost at Coriander’s?” shouted Mike while Sapphire shouted, “What’s your name again, sweetie?”
The streetcar screeched as it slowed and chuffed as its doors unfolded.
“Coriander’s?” Mike repeated.
“Like the bar?” said Sapphire, frowning. “You’re named after a bar?”
“My name is Mike.”
“Damn, that’s right,” she agreed.
Mike was about to ask her to point him on to Coriander’s when she held up a hand with long fingernails and then stepped into the road to chat with someone in a car. Mike wandered on, having caught sight of an illuminated letter C on a sign occulted by a Vietnamese delivery van in the reflection of a shop window across the street.
He tilted his head to reveal the reflected letters S R E D N A I R O C, and his purpose was renewed. The sign was wrought in neon which was just the way he’d imagined it. The R stammered an irregular buzzing tattoo.
Mike turned to see the nightclub and his triumph chilled: the mouth of the place was entwined in a snaking line of people in various combinations of black clothing advancing by impatient twos to have their wallets inspected by someone or something in the shadowy maw before passing on within. The snake of people cackled and murmured, tall and sophisticated and ribald and adult.
Frightened that they would catch him staring Mike put his hands behind his back and pretended to be studying something on the other side of the street. In the shop glass reflection he glimpsed hope: an alley running beside Coriander’s. Could there be another way in?
Sapphire could not help him. She had climbed into her friend’s car to go for a ride, waving to Mike as they passed by.
Mike steeled himself and turned to march into the alley, on-mission once again.
8.
Three Inuit roadies worked in casual concert to ferry metal-edged boxes of sound equipment through the back door, joined on their final trip by Mike whose Asian features and humble height satisfied the bored Filipino bouncer as just Inuit enough to ignore. Nobody said anything until Mike and the Inuit on the other side of the box they were carrying between them looked at one another as they let go of the metal handles and straightened. “Hey, thanks,” said the Inuit.
“No problem,” said Mike.
The Inuit looked awkward. “Are you with Lorenzo?”
Mike interrupted him to ask where the washroom was. The chubbiest roadie explained something in a throaty, clicking mumble to the tallest roadie, who said in turn, “My brother says the way lies down, and then around a corner.”
The chubby roadie pointed to a flight of concrete steps.
At the bottom of the steps Mike found an ill-lit corridor with walls stained in floral blobs and streaks of mould. He followed the corridor around a ninety-degree bend and came to three unmarked doors. Investigation revealed a broom closet and a boiler room with old condoms on the floor before Mike came upon a decrepit water closet with a yellow toilet filled with something that looked like corn flakes.
Seeing no alternative, Mike peed on the corn flakes.
In the wake of relief came a new sensitivity to his perceptions: as Mike repackaged his willy he became aware of the steady throb of music coming from upstairs. He had at first mistaken it for the hammering of his heart. He next became aware of the smell of the tiny, grimy washroom and realized that it was putrid.
He was trying to formulate the best way to advance his plan when he heard the sound of approaching Inuit voices. There was a closet in the washroom so Mike opened it, revealing cartons of toilet tissue and a metal ladder leading up through a darkened aperture. As the voices drew near he grabbed the rungs and hauled himself up into the shadows.
He found himself in a second closet, surrounded by bottles of soap interspersed with mousetraps. Through the aperture below he heard the Inuit roadies joking with one another while they took a turn peeing on the corn flakes. Mike carefully shuffled away from the ladder and approached the closed door of the vestibule, pressing his ear against the cool wood. Silence. Tentatively he pushed at the door and it swung open freely.
Mike emerged into a second washroom, more spacious than the first, illuminated principally by strips of buzzing purple neon under the counters. It smelled like cigarettes and skunk, which was a welcome change. The steady pulse of the music was louder here, more insistent. Mike quailed. The beat felt angry to him—unwelcoming, challenging, bigger than Mike.
His nerve failed him again so he went into one of the stalls and sat on the closed toilet, wondering what to do. How deeply into the nightclub did he need to penetrate in order to feel that his mission had been fulfilled? Already he felt a certain triumph at his act of subterfuge in slipping in with the Inuit roadies, and already he felt a real apprehension to push his luck further. What if he were caught? Was what he was doing illegal? He had been thinking of the consequences in terms of being grounded, but now wondered whether the stakes were higher.