52.

We end up at a bar in the city, and then another, drinking obliviously, paying too much for beer and, for the most part, reminiscing about school, friends, and family; or talking about important theological questions, like which Star Trek series are better (but agreeing that all the new stuff is shit); that Stranger Things is grossly overrated as style over substance; how modern Hollywood predominantly makes special effects extravaganzas rather than stories; and then we talk about death, because that’s where it’s lumped nowadays as a discussion – from pop culture to the ultimate end.

“If I had the guts to do it,” Stan says, “I’d go.”

We’re in some small bar now – the last place had a noisy band, and this place is just too dark, it smells of old wood, and walking you can feel the floorboards creak under carpet so thin that it’s only the dust that still holds it together. But it’s quiet enough to talk in the booth we’ve secured by the toilet (a strategic choice) and the darkness encourages disclosure.

And morbidity.

“What do you think’s on the other side?” I ask.

“Don’t care. I just don’t like this side.”

Stan had a difficult upbringing – abusive father, addictive personality, and an outlook that all that pain and suffering has tempered into making him feel he’s unworthy, which is a shame, because he’s brilliant and intelligent, and back in school he was as creative as me, but just not as single-minded in discipline. Then again, he went out and lived life – did some reckless things partying, married twice, and worked a series of jobs, while I stayed chained to storytelling, like I might shock the world with some triumph.

“Why don’tcha get back into writing?” I ask.

“I’m not good enough.”

“I’ve seen some of the people getting published. They’re not great.”

“I’ve tried – it’s not very good.”

“Let me read something.”

Stan shakes his head, and takes a drink from his Asahi. “Nope.”

“The offer’s out there.”

“Has it made you happy?”

“The writing?”

“Yeah.”

I laugh. “When I was young, I chased the dream. You think of all these glorious possibilities. And then you get here, and you learn it’s pedestrian for most of us.”

“But you did it.”

“So?”

“But you did it.”

“‘I could’ve been somebody’,” I quote Marlon Brando from On the Waterfront. “‘I could’ve been a contender’.”

“You are a contender, you dickhead.”

I stop halfway in the process of lifting my Corona to my mouth. “I wanted to be special,” I say. “The one.” I smirk around a swill of beer. “It might still happen, but you believe a little bit less at this age with my background. You start to think, well … you think, Maybe I’m just not that good.”

“You look at the wrong things.”

“We all do, don’t we?”

“You’ve done okay for yourself – you just don’t see it because you expect more.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because life’s a cunt. You make do. It’s like that saying, ‘When life gives you lemons—‘”

“‘Make lemonade’,” I finish. “Fuck that. I have sugar intolerance.”

“No,” Stan corrects me with strained patience, like he’s trying to communicate a lesson to a particularly obstinate kid, “fuck that. ‘When life gives you lemons, throw them at somebody’.”

“What’s that achieve?”

“Anger’s an underrated commodity. I’m as healthy as I am because I vent. Do you vent?”

“At work, no. With Lana, yes. With myself, definitely.”

“Then what’re you complaining about?”

I really don’t know what to say to that. We’ve taken a circle and here we are.

Stan finishes his Asahi. “I’ll be back.”

He ducks into the toilets first, then goes to the bar to order another round. This feels like old times – we’d catch a taxi to a bar, then barhop, spending way too much money on getting drunk, but never really doing anything else. It wasn’t like we hunted women, or wanted to meet people or find a place to dance. We’d secrete ourselves somewhere, then just drink.

“You thought about it?” Stan asks when he slides back into the booth, placing a fresh Corona with lime in front of me.

“Didn’t they have lemon?” I ask.

“I asked for lemon.”

I hold the Corona up and show him the lime. “Don’t worry about it,” I say, stuffing the lime into the bottle. “Happens all the time.” Life doesn’t even want to give me lemons now. Or a slice of lemon.

“So you thought about?” Stan asks. “About suicide?”

“Seriously or just randomly?” I ask. “Because randomly, I’ve always thought about it.”

“Why?”

“You know me. This isn’t where I want to be.”

“Who is where they want to be?”

“Tom Cruise?”

“Outside of Tom Cruise?”

“You know Brett?”

Stan knows Brett – one of our crowd when we were twenty-somethings. Everybody loves him, but everybody knows Brett’s lack of self-respect has led to disastrous relationships.

“Brett’s where he wants to be?” Stan asks. Scoffs. Stan scoffs, although he’s always been a scoffer of sorts.

“No,” I say. “Fuck no. But, you know, multiple marriage, kids, all his almighty fuck ups, and he lived. He got to experience things.”

“You’ve lived. You’ve experienced things. They’re just different things.”

“I don’t know how much living was involved.”

“Where’s this coming from?” Stan sits back, and swills from his beer. “When you were young, all you did was look forward. Now you’re old, all you’re doing is looking back.”

“Just, you know, you try to build something and it doesn’t quite work the way you thought it would.”

“Just about nothing ever does.”

“Well, I guess that’s what I’m struggling with.”

“You know what you need?”

Stan finishes his beer in one gulp, so the way he’s downed that beer tells me that what I need isn’t just some spontaneous idea, but something that’s been germinating around in his head for a little while.

“What?”

Strippers.

That’s what Stan thinks I need.

He takes me to this bar on the edge of the city – the bouncer out front looks like an Aryan, and wears a big grey overcoat. He’s talking to four guys who are probably only about eighteen or nineteen, asking to see their identification. One of them, this scraggly redhead, surreptitiously lifts a vape to his mouth.

“You are not to do that shit in there,” the bouncer tells him.

The scraggly redhead holds the vape up like he’s been caught carrying a gun. Then he brings it down – inadvertently waving it right in my face – so I catch a whiff of strawberry.

I don’t get the vapes; I smoked in my teens because movies made it look cool. James Bond smoked – at least originally. Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice smoked. He had a cool way of doing it, too, plucking the cigarette out of his pack, then tapping it on his pack, rolling it across his lips, and lighting it with a Zippo. That was cool. It might’ve been unhealthy, but cool nonetheless.

Sneaking a vape to your mouth for a quick puff, then an embarrassed exhale, seems about the uncoolest thing you could do, like you’ve decided to pluck a dildo from your pocket for a quick suck before sticking it back.

The bouncer urges the guys in, then greets Stan with familiarity. They have an easygoing rapport that tells me this isn’t just an acquaintance, and that Stan must come here regularly. Stan introduces me, the bouncer shakes my hand, and then he opens the door and gestures us in.

Stan leads me down a zigzagging stairwell to this twenty-something woman in lingerie sitting behind a counter. Stans pays her (I’m not sure how much), then she takes our ID and scans it – just in case we cause trouble, apparently, they have a record of who we are – before returning it to us.

Behind us there’s this big square door that looks like a cushion. When Stan opens it, I see it’s thick, so it must be soundproofed – and with good reason. The music that hits is loud and dense that it’s like having to push through a gust of wind just to move forward.

The inside is garish – a stage where a stripper dances, with a line of chairs around it. Then there are these little set-ups around it you might expect in a café – three plush little chairs around a small round table. Further out, there are tall tables with stools. In one corner there’s an ATM; in the opposite corner’s the bar; the two barmaids in lingerie.

Stan grabs two beers, while I find a stool furthest away from the stage, because that’s furthest from the loudspeakers blaring the horrible music the current stripper, a redhead, dances too.

“What are we doing here?” I ask when Stan returns from the bar.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Stan asks.

It’s hard to talk because the music is so loud, and every ten or so minutes, some stripper in lingerie comes by and tries to solicit us for a private dance in one of the back rooms. Stan goes several times, while I sit there, sinking into a melancholy wondering what I’m doing here.

A small blonde in a g-string, fishnets, and corset walks past me – well, she walks around me, like she senses the impending doom that surrounds me. She stops at a table, smiling as she chats to the three twenty-something guys sitting there. Although she’s tiny, she’s exquisitely proportioned, but when she lifts her leg suggestively, planting her foot on the armrest of a chair, her butt – which was so perfect a moment ago – seems distended.

Stan returns, clapping me on the shoulder. “What’cha looking at?”

I point.

“Not bad.”

“You ever notice with butts how good they look in certain poses – like to get the curve right, but then sometimes they just look wrong.”

The way Stan regards me tells me he hasn’t thought about that at all.

“Like when women are walking – in mid-stride, the buttock becomes like this elongated oversized sausage that loses its proportion in relation to the other buttock. You never see women photographed like that in magazines – well, when there were magazines. It’s always to get that exact curve. Even if they’re photographed walking, it’s at the end of the stride when everything’s shaped back into the perfect curves.”

“Butts are always the first thing to go, too, when you get older.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, like Stan has just disclosed the answer to some incredible conspiracy that’s circulated for decades, like who shot JFK?

“Weight goes to the hips,” Stan goes on, “then drops into the buttocks. They take weird shapes, too – like screens you should project films on. They’re not as fun to do anally either when they’re like that.”

And there Stan goes, dragging a curiosity into decadence.

“You ever done anal?” he asks.

“No.”

“Never received it?”

This is the way Stan likes to stir me up – we’ve been doing it for decades, so it doesn’t bother me.

“No,” I say.

“It’s good,” Stan says. “Like you’re applying a submission move in mixed martial arts. You have them at their mercy. Then, when they get in the rhythm, when they’re enjoying it, it’s like they’re a slave to you. Like riding a fast horse.”

“You should be a poet, you know?”

Stan bellows with laughter. “But there’s all that shit, though. It’s not like porn where they get enemas to flush them out and—”

“Okay, okay.”

“It’s just a reality of anal,” Stan says. “It’s all the shit.”

“Okay.”

“You shouldn’t be so sensitive.”

“I’m not sensitive,” I say, although I am, “but it’s just …”

“What?”

And I think I have too much of a romanticised view of everything, even something like this. Stan talks in the realities. I wonder if somewhere in my life, I lost that ability – or at least diminished it. Maybe I’m stuck in fiction where everything’s clean, even the sex and murder and travesties. I recall just before my first novel was published, the publicist flew out to see me with her assistant, and the assistant had a friend join us who said she never read about women having periods in books. I don’t know if that’s true – I haven’t encountered periods in books. Maybe my whole life has become overly sanitised.

“You okay?” Stan asks.

“Uh huh.”

There’s more of this repartee, but that’s about as interesting as it gets, and the banter grows repetitive, which doesn’t help me because the more we drink, the more the night moves ahead in blurs. I’m reminded of my first death: the train hitting me; bones mashing; nerves shrieking in horror; being catapulted through the air; organs shutting down one after another, hiccoughing in agony; my breathing stopping abruptly as my heart offers one final pathetic beat – I didn’t experience any of this, and until now I’ve never recalled it (and can only imagine I’m recalling it now because I’m drinking as much as I did that night, and I’m about as drunk as I was that night), but it makes me think, makes me realize, that all that is stored somewhere in being, and I’m carrying it over despite my resets.

“Hey!”

Stan, annoyed, because he has two strippers at the table with us: Suzy’s this gorgeous, sultry blonde, but she’s so manufactured with the peroxide hair, boxtox lips, and breasts (no doubt implants) threatening to burst from her bra – she’s the sort that epitomised why plastic surgery (I’m sure she’s had a nose job, it’s so thin and pointed, and her cheeks seem almost too high) could construct beauty, until it’s taken so far it caricaturizes; Rachel’s this coppery redhead, homely like you’d expect her to be your best friend and prioritise your needs in a way that women always did in those 1960s sitcoms. She’s small-breasted, lithe – athletic. I could marry this woman – at least in the idolisation of my fantasies, because in reality dreams don’t work the way they should.

“I was telling them you’re a writer,” Stan says.

Suzy doesn’t care – she thinks Stan wants to intellectualize me like that will impress them, because otherwise we have to concede that we’re two slobs late in our forties, but Rachel nods, taking that in, and she looks at me like she’s surveying me, like she’s measuring up whether Stan’s bullshitting or not.

“What do you write?” she asks.

“Stories about guys trying to find their place in the world,” I say. “Fucked-up relationships.”

“Is there any other kind?” Suzy asks.

Stan chuckles and lifts his beer to toast her. She has something – something clear in a short glass with a lime. I don’t know what it is. I don’t remember her getting it. Of course, I don’t remember them arriving.

“How’d you go with them?” Rachel says.

“I think I sold about twelve copies of each,” I say.

Stan laughs and claps me on the shoulder. “He’s being modest!” he says. “He sold at least thirteen or fourteen. But you should read them. They’re great.”

“I don’t read,” Suzy says.

“You dance, don’t you?” Stan says, finishing his beer.

“We’ve had two dances, you idiot,” Suzy says.

“I know – I was being clever.”

“How’s that working out?”

Stan slams his empty bottle down. “Let’s go find out.”

Suzy’s already moving, though – she grabs his hand and yanks him away.

Rachel sits on a stool next to me. She’s warm and beautiful and way closer to me than any woman’s ever been for the last twenty-five years – well, Lana aside.

And, to be honest full disclosure, I’ve been to strip clubs before. It’s a confronting evolution that the average male will face. When you’re sneaking in underage (which I’ve done, because I always looked older as a teen, and security wasn’t as stringent in the 1980s), you think you’re a chance with strippers, but it’s just this unrealistic male braggadocio speaking. In your twenties, you’re almost on equal footing, and I’m sure somewhere in the world men have picked up strippers, but not when you’re an insecure, inadequate geek. But that doesn’t stop you (when you are an insecure, inadequate geek) from idolising them and imagining some improbable relationship. In your thirties, you start to reconcile your separation not only from that idiot younger version of yourself, but also from any possibility of clicking with one of these women. And, in your forties, you not only realise you’re just some lecher coming in for cheap gratification, but that’s what you’ve been all along.

Anyway, back to the story – Rachel asks me if I want a dance.

“Maybe later?” I say.

She tilts her head and smiles this crooked smile – I idolize her then. She’s a stripper working through tertiary education. A nurse. That’s what she wants to be. Stripping’s the only way to pay for the tuition. Her parents are divorced. Her dad’s abusive. Her mum’s a goodish mum, but not financially supportive. So Rachel dropped out of high school to find her own way. And all this leads to the cliché of a stripper with a heart of gold, although I guess they might all … well, that’s unrealistic, but a lot of them might have hearts of gold.

“Why do you dance?” I ask.

“It pays bills,” she says, “and I’m not that good at school.”

“But you like reading? I mean, you asked me what I write, so you must have like a frame of reference—”

“I like learning about things I’m interested in. Then I’ll read everything I can about it. Do you want a dance?”

“Maybe later.”

“You said that before and now it’s later.”

“Sorry – I know you’re working.”

“It’s okay.” Rachel rises from her stool and pats my hand. “I’ll talk to you later maybe.”

She wanders off, then approaches two twenty-something guys who sit at a table, greeting them like she’s just bumped into old friends. The guys themselves are reasonably good looking – part of this generation who seem (I don’t know if they are, but they seem it) more comfortable with their masculinity. They grin at her, and one of them gestures to a vacant chair opposite them. She sits, and I expect she might cast me a reproachful glance, but she doesn’t, because who am I outside of somebody who’s kidded themselves that maybe I meant something in this chance meeting?

In my history of drinking, I’ve only truly blacked out once and that was a result of drinking the whole day while on meds. Then I remember very little, outside of friends bringing me home. That was scary – retrospectively. I could’ve done anything that day and night. Friends told me I tried to start a fight with somebody. But every other time, I maintain control. The night might flit about in disjointed patches, but I still know what I’m doing.

That’s what happens tonight, so I remember Suzy and Rachel reappearing later, and then being in a taxi with them and Stan, and then being at Suzy’s, this pretty house in Fitzroy, evidence of toys suggesting she has a kid or kids, and then we’re sitting on a lumpy couch in her living room. The room’s cluttered – not dirty, but just strewn with clothes, printouts (she tells us she’s trying to get into day trading) and (lots of) pictures of her kid, this annoyingly cherubic blond boy who’s probably only five or so.

Then we have drinks: not beers, because she says she can’t stand beer, but scotch, which she pours for each of us. I haven’t drank scotch in about fifteen years – it started to bloat my stomach until I’d have stomaches. So I nurse the glass, wondering what I’m doing here, and that I should be sleeping, because that’s about as exciting as I get.

Suzy tops up our glasses – I wave her away – then sits too close to Stan. I haven’t told you about Rachel; she’s sitting about a standard distance from me, but given how spacey I am, I’m not engaged with anybody in the room, or even with the room itself.

“What else you got?” Stan asks.

Suzy has cocaine – a little packet she draws from her jacket. Stan does the first line with the aplomb of somebody who’s done too many, and then Suzy does a line. She offers it to me. I wave it off.

“You sure?” she asks.

Stan claps me on the back. “Come on!”

Part of my decline is that I’m just too much of a goody to do it, and another part, a bigger part, is that I worry what’ll happen once gets in my system, and what it could do to my brain. I don’t need it speeding anything up in there given the way my thoughts flit around.

“I’m good,” I say.

“Rache?” Suzy asks.

Rachel also dismisses it, then puts a hand on my thigh – it’s not sexual, though. I think she does it to help ground me.

“You’re really gone, aren’t you?” she says.

“Can you tell?” I ask.

“A little bit, yeah.” Rachel takes the glass of scotch from my hand, sets it on the coffee table along with her own, then rises, grabs my hand, and leads me from the couch. “I think we need to check you out.”

“I reset, you know?”

Rachel frowns. “What?”

I wave it away.

Rachel tilts her head at Suzy, like she’s gesturing to something. I don’t have to puzzle it out too long, though; Rachel guides me from the couch and to what must be a spare room – about the only thing in it is a bed (with this really old tarnished wooden bedhead) and some shabby faded blue curtains.

Then I experience this sudden acceleration of nervousness, like she’s taken me in here for sex, when I can barely function, and even if I wasn’t drunk I still think I could barely function. She’s so worldly. I’ve decided that. She’s experienced the world, like Stan and Suzy, and these things come naturally to her because that’s a skillset that develops through relationships, but it doesn’t feel fluent to me.

“Lay down,” she tells me.

I’m even reluctant to do that because after drinking so much, I worry that laying down’s just going to make me sick, and there is a surge of nausea when my head hits the pillow, but fortunately I think I transcend that stage because it’s not long before I know no more.