Roscoe had taken the thin walls between the rooms of the Chimney as an invitation to knock most of them down. We exited through a heavier door to the east end of the bar and emerged into the first guest room, denuded of its bed, shitty Zenith TV, and decaying end tables. Here the music was much louder and the smoke’s character took on a pungent, floral note. All of the rooms on opposing wings were chained together, either openly or through more heavy, swinging doors.

Stationed at various intervals were smaller bars. The deeper we traveled, the more dense the bodies. Between doored rooms, the soundtracks and lights matched the mood. What I began to realize were states of undress off the hollowed bathrooms simmering in ambient light. The rooms’ curtained plate-glass windows, which had looked so morose on our arrival, were coated in thick black-out paint.

Somewhere our sober little molecule disintegrated and we were atomically free to re-bond. Karl disappeared. Andie became absorbed in a conversation with a peacock’s pen of mohawked and skin-headed boys dissolving into a distressed leather couch. I trusted we were either in the midst of a very successful or remarkably terrible first date, but not necessarily with each other.

After two more beers, a bartender in a white cowboy hat offered me a small pink pill, which I took. A bit later I drifted into an all black room with a disco ball and obeyed an overwhelming urge to dance for a long time.

I leaned my hot forehead against the cold tile above a urinal trough. I felt the layers of paint pen with the pores in my skin. I could almost divine the indecipherable script by touch. A braille graffiti! A part of my brain, the part which troubled itself with nested loops and the intricacies of LoreSoft puzzles, recognized this as the thought of a very high person. I turned my head to the right and watched two boys do a line of coke off the top of the universe’s whitest toilet seat.

Karl passed by the bathroom’s doorframe, his hat flipped backwards on his head like a sandlot ballplayer. A slender kid in a tank top I recognized from somewhere—the university library?—followed. I rushed after, realizing only when I’d reached the dance floor that my fly was down. I stumbled while tugging it up, elbowing a drink out of someone’s hand. I’d almost lost sight of Karl. He was on the cusp of a narrow red door in the next room’s wall.

“Karl!” I shouted. The boy in tow paused at the door. Karl said something in the boy’s ear and walked back my way. The boy slipped behind the red door.

“Did you dance, Durak?” he shouted over the music.

“I did! You were right! I’m having a blast!” I lead the charge. “Next room! Next room!”

Karl caught my arm. “Ah, Dean. This is the last room. I don’t think you want to go in here.” He smiled as he said it, but his eyes didn’t.

“I don’t?”

“No, you don’t. You really don’t.”

I felt suggestible. “Maybe I don’t.”

Suddenly the music was punctured by a great metallic clanging. A suspiciously New England-accented cowboy voice whooped though the bell: “CHOW’S ON YOU FUCKAHS! COME AND GET IT!”

“Go on. Find Andie,” Karl said. “I’ll find you.”

I waded up through the rooms I’d drifted down during the night. With each threshold the pill worked its way out of my system while my appetite worked its way in. I followed others, others followed. A deep, savory odor intensified as we went, commingling with varied currents of armpit and smoke and beer.

“That smell!” I cried out to no one in particular.

“Curtis Brothers,” said a hoarse voice.

My diminishing drug distorted time. The dead residue of dancing leaded my legs. We picked up more on the way, the lot of us swimming upstream for the Chimney’s lobby bar. I felt we were all brothers on an arduous pilgrimage to a midnight mecca. It seemed we had always known each other. There was real brotherhood of hunger. Someone wrapped a strong arm around my shoulder. Were we almost there? A caramelized roasted animal odor wrung tears from my eyes.

Barbecue!

We flooded the lobby. Roscoe now wore a white chef’s hat and checkered apron. The line formed at his cash register. The Curtis Brothers, best kept secret in the Spring Hill district of St. John’s Landing, unloaded a buffet of thickly foiled BBQ trays onto the bar. Here was the great midnight picnic in the Chimney Corner, the famished and the drunk, the high and shirtless boys with laughing mouths, the hands and chins glistening with pork fat and brisket traces and the brick and ruddy sauces of feasting. Years of sprouts and butters and wheats and sunflower seeds belonged to my other brain.

I have had mystical meals in my life. Not a great many, but enough to know when I was in their midst. I didn’t find Andie, but Karl found me, deep in my second pile of pulled pork. He had a sleepy ease about him.

“Where’s Andie the Adjunct?” he asked.

I didn’t know. I gnawed at bone.

“Poor old Durak. She left you at the altar.”

I waved the next short rib in the air, the meat magician.

“Fuck the altar.”

The midnight picnic was itself like a door the night passed through, and though the east wing of the Chimney was still open, the west side was where most of the hang-on crowd dispersed. Itself in every way the opposite of the east end, the west was a downtempo yawn toward the end of the party. The rooms were packed with a calico fleet of couches and stained plush chairs, low coffee tables bordered by plains of shaggy rugs and hillocks of pillows. Here was the land of the great coming down.

Just before dawn Roscoe propped open a fire-door with a cinderblock and the last of us emptied into the weedy alley between the Chimney and Solomon’s Salvage Yard. Through the littered beer cans and cigarette butts ran well-worn paths, some from the dawn exodus to the parking lot, others through holes in the security fence into furtive dealings between canyons of wrecked cars.

Andie was long gone. I didn’t cruise the university library again and I didn’t hear from her.

Karl drove with all the windows down. The clean, green air cleansed everything. We were upon the fishing hour.

“Oh driver,” I said. “Take us to the lake.”

Karl concentrated on the road as if debugging it.

“It’s Saturday, Durak.”

“Exactly.” My planed hand swam up and down in the rushing currents outside the passenger window. “The element of surprise! The General will never see us coming.”

Karl laughed. “Dean Dean the Fishing Machine.”

I laughed. I knew we weren’t going to the lake. That was okay. Everything was okay.

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