and Mai lip-locked at center stage, making out furiously while the men around them bawked and cat-called at their performance. I figured it was all just for attention, but on several occasions, Lindsay had eluded to hers and Mai’s ‘secret’.

I tossed it up to foolish girlishness, but I soon found out otherwise.

Mai had a boyfriend named Joey. Joey was a great looking black guy with those stylish ‘indie dreads’ who played a mean saxophone and was just a complete trip to hang with. In my endeavors to woo Lindsay, I often found myself aligned with Joey while the girls pranced about, absorbed in one another.

He really became my first genuine friend outside of Eggy in the area, and when he called me one night to invite me over to his apartment to just drink and hang with the foursome, I had no reason to think the evening would turn out differently than any other.

I was greeted at the door by a quite obviously rolling Lindsay who slurred and groped about my chest, expressing over and over how excited she was that I was there. As I made my way into Joey’s apartment, I found him lying shirtless in a pair of white linen slacks on the sofa, smoking a pleasantly sweet smelling cigar.

The room was blacklit, and Mai was sitting Indian style on the floor at the foot of couch in a wide-spread grey pleated skirt and white tank top. She was furiously finger-painting something abstract on a canvas in front of her, giggling at the brightly glowing paints under the effect of the black lights.

I found the dim, bluish light of the room disorienting at first, but when Lindsay shut the front door behind me and sealed off the light that was peaking in from the hallway outside of Joey’s apartment door, everything settled down. The light was sort of neat, except for the fact that you could clearly see every tiny little piece of lint on my sweater.

I sat down on the floor across from Mai and began studying her work of art. I heard Lindsay walk up behind and then I felt my sweater being grabbed and stretched over my head.

“Let’s get this offuffyou,” she slurred as I relaxed my arms to help her pull the sweater free. Lindsay stumbled back as the top came free of my outstretched arms, and she took a few clumsy steps before she steadied herself. Then she began laughing hysterically at how brightly my white undershirt was glowing in the lights.

“What are they on, Joey?” I asked, assuming Joey to be the most sober one in the room.

“Couldn’t tell you man. A combination of things, it would seem,” he replied between lengthy drags of his cigar.

Mai then slammed her hands on the canvas with a loud thud and declared, “There!” as if she’d finally finished the masterpiece.

The evening continued to proceed in this random, chaotic, drug-addled fashion. I took a few shots and snorted a couple of lines and soon everything felt a lot more sensible.

Joey was drinking Miller High Life at the time, because he appreciated the kitsch value in consuming the champagne of beers. Lindsay and I were gin whores. And I think Mai was tripping too hard to appreciate any alcohol.

Joey was arguing with me about whether or not human beings, as animals, are fundamentally disposed