Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 06 - Lucky Man by Tony Dunbar Page B

on a stool and collecting ten-dollar bills.
    “Don’t I know you?” Raisin asked, trying to make out the face behind the red sunglasses and tangled yellow beard.
    “Da Nang, 1969,” the toad said through a hole in the hair.
    “I don’t think so,” Raisin said thoughtfully, but he couldn’t finish the reminiscence before he was herded into the dark hall by the crowd behind him.
    “I’m in a generation gap,” Raisin moaned.
    “Hold my hand,” Sapphire cried over the music. “The girl we’re looking for has a tattoo of a tongue on her forehead.”
    A band called Galactic Fellatio was banging away at one end of the warehouse. A rotating strobe light on the ceiling, that the producers might have rescued from a wedding-reception ballroom, and a thousand handheld glow sticks provided most of the light. Raisin noticed bundles of electrical cables snaking across the floor. The place looked like maybe yesterday longshoremen with forklifts had cleared out all the cotton. Tonight, juiced-up kids were dancing and falling over each other.
    “Where’s the bar?” Raisin yelled.
    She pointed to the far wall where there was some encouraging neon.
    “I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.” he roared. “Want anything?”
    She shook her head. Sapphire was busy scanning the room, jumping from toe to toe, trying to spy her friend— the one who knew where the man from the newspaper lived.
    Raisin pushed his way across the floor. The people whose feet he was stepping on were about evenly divided between short-haired types with baseball caps worn backwards and a more diverting breed with spiked hair, acrylic makeup, and ring collections on their noses and lips. Lots of them had plastic bottles hanging from their necks on nylon cords. The girls wore slips longer than their dresses. Quite a few had baby pacifiers stuck in their mouths, wore pants like potato sacks, and were gyrating like Sufis. He saw tattoos galore. There were flowers and birds and gargoyles, penises and ice cream cones, sunsets and ankhs and thunderbolts, but he didn’t see any tongues.
    He reached the tangle where drinks were being served from ice chests tended by a pair of guys with lots of muscles and gold chains.
    “Beer!” he bellowed, when one finally looked his way.
    “Coke or spring water,” the kid yelled back.
    “Ah, shit,” Raisin cursed, and barged away.
    “Want to buy some vodka?” a pretty girl with a lip bracelet whispered in his ear. Instead of a blouse she wore lace from Yvonne LaFleur’s. He nodded and she pulled a clear plastic flask out of her floor-length sarong and showed him five fingers twice.
    Why not? He dug a bill out of his wallet, and she traded for the bottle. He took the precaution of unscrewing the cap and sniffing before he let the money go. Sure enough, it had that memorable distilled smell. Lots of other people’s money was changing hands around him, he saw. Life savers, breath mints, and match boxes all were being passed around for unusually large sums. Being a streetwise kind of a guy, he suspected these kids were trafficking in the
d
-word. The fact that there were also funny cigarettes burning everywhere tipped him off too.
    A pimply-faced girl naked from the waist up gave him a quick hug and moved on, followed by her fans. He could not see Sapphire anywhere.
    Hi-ho, he told himself and tilted his bottle back. Should have got a Coke for a chaser, he thought.
    Hi-ho, he said again, as the room morphed into a purple onion. “Should have closed a cockatiel for dinner,” he said out loud.
    A stampede of bison pounded past, and he wondered why his eyeballs wouldn’t stay in his head where they were supposed to be. They were bouncing around all the bare-assed Egyptians eating golden apples in the icebox.
    Sapphire pressed her nose to his leer, and before their mind-meld became complete she was replaced by a woman with two mouths and a nipple on her lip. She expressed some concern about his condition. He sensed