the car around, and drove north toward Myrtle Beach. Ten minutes later, he pulled into the driveway next to an unlit, deserted building off King’s Highway. In the headlights from his car, the fading sign nailed to the boarded-up window of the former T-shirt warehouse said, appropriately, “Fire Sale. Everything must go.” Ignoring the scorched front of the darkened building, which had suffered a small but smoky fire the year before, C.B. drove behind the building. There he parked among the fifty or so other cars whose owners had also just gotten directions to the rave. Its carefully guarded location changed weekly and was announced by beeper to the rave community only minutes before the action started. The system worked well. Myrtle Beach raves were seldom discovered by the police.
Outside the back door of the building, a 6’5”, 270-pound, heavily muscled bouncer with a massive chest, narrow waist, yellow/red/green Mohawk, seventeen pierced earrings, an eyebrow ring, a tongue stud, nine tattoos, and wraparound, yellow-lens sunglasses passed judgment on the mass of teenagers and twenty-somethings who flocked to the door. His name was Thud, and he never smiled. He worked out pumping iron four hours a day, seven days a week at a local weight-lifting club and steroid saloon. A nod from Thud and your money got you in. A grunt from Thud and you were on your way elsewhere. Everyone knew that if you were stupid enough to give him any grief or tried to argue your way through the door, his name was the sound you’d make when he decked you with one punch. Few people were that stoned or stupid.
C.B. nodded in respect, passed Thud a twenty and an eight-ball of crystal meth, and escorted April through the door. A wall of sound assaulted them as they entered. At the front of the building, every crack through which light could pass had been covered with cardboard and taped. To the left stood trash barrels full of ice-cooled beer. On the right, a DJ cranked out high-energy music fed into massive amplifiers, loudspeakers, and subwoofers powered by a gasoline-fueled electric generator. Red strobes and white laser lights illuminated the room, lending a disconnected, psychedelic, time-warped feeling to everything that happened there.
The sound level was mind-numbing – which was exactly the desired effect. Talking was far beyond impossible. Everything was communicated through sight, motion, touch, and the exchange of money and drugs. Two hundred bouncing, writhing, supercharged dancers filled every square inch of the place. A half-dozen carefully screened dealers openly dispensed marijuana, Ecstasy, crystal meth, PCP, LSD, heroin, and almost any other drug du jour for twenty to fifty dollars a hit.
Like most serious drug dealers, C.B. didn’t partake or deal directly. He paid for a beer and took in the sights, while his fellow Skinhead, Skank, dispensed the goods and collected the money. April, with the full rush of the meth and Ecstasy roaring through her, wanted only to dance. Her heart pounded. The sweat poured out of every cell of her body. Every light was surrounded by a bright, shimmering, multi-colored, crystalline halo. C.B. dumped a glass of ice water over her head to cool her off. April didn’t even notice.
The rave was already filling the warehouse with bouncing people waving lights and sucking lollipops. The Ecstasy stimulated their enhanced perception of light; the lollipops lessened the damage from the tooth grinding that the Ecstasy produced.
In the middle of the frenzied crowd of dancers, a girl staggered over to April and yelled something unintelligible into her ear. It was Wendy Hickson, her eighteen-year-old fellow Skinhead and friend since grade school.
“Where’s C.B.?” she asked in a dreamy, slurred voice.
“What?”
“Where’s C.B.? I gotta get some more stuff.”
“By the beer.”
“What?”
“Over there, by the beer, talking to Suzi,” April yelled into her ear.
“I love you,” Wendy mumbled as she staggered off through her psychedelic haze to find her lover/dealer.
“I love you, too,” April replied in a slurred voice, her head spinning from her own chemical cocktail. She immediately returned to her frantic dancing, oblivious to the fact that Wendy had draped herself over C.B. As he drank his beer and talked to his friends, Wendy patiently waited for him to finish talking to their fellow young roommate, Suzi Vetter.
“Suzi, I can’t do this forever, you know that,” he said to her. “Here’s three tabs. Sell two of them to your friends for me and the third one’s free for you, OK?”
“Sure, C.B., whatever you want,” Suzi said, her eyes aglow in anticipation of the Ecstasy rush soon to follow.
An hour after the first beeper message went out, the warehouse was packed with high-energy, writhing bodies. Thud – a true man of steel – was now turning away all comers, despite the endless and escalating amounts of sex, drugs, and money he was offered to get in.
After two hours of frantic dancing, the alarm on April’s watch went off. She groped her way through the bouncing, human maze of light-stick-waving dancers in search of C.B. “I gotta get home now,” she told him. “My mother is gonna be coming home soon. I gotta be in bed when she gets there.”
“I know, Baby,” C.B. said. “Just a few minutes and we’ll go. I’m waiting for two friends,” he said with a wink. April knew what he meant. C.B. hadn’t yet made collections from two of his distributors.
In about ten minutes, she stumbled back to C.B.’s car, her clothing soaked with sweat from the drugs and non-stop dancing. “Dolly’s gonna kill me, C.B. I was grounded tonight. You’ve gotta promise to take care of me if she finds out.”
“Don’t worry, Honey, I will. We’re family. No matter what, we’re family. You, me, Wendy, Skank, and Suzi are W.A.R. Skins. We take care of our own.”
Fifteen minutes later, April crawled back through the window of her bedroom and collapsed onto her bed. She stripped off her sweat-drenched clothes, threw them in a heap at the foot of the bed, and climbed in.
Less than two minutes later, she heard the front door open and her mother say, “G’night, Chrissie.” April pulled the covers up to her head and closed her eyes, her back to the door. In the mirror, she saw her bedroom door slowly open. Silhouetted against the light from the living room was the unmistakable outline of her mother’s body. In a few moments, the door closed. Her heart was still racing from the meth, and the sweat was still pouring out. April threw off the blankets and prayed that the air conditioner would kick in. It didn’t. As she lay wide-eyed on her back, her mind raced, and her sweat dripped into the sheets until the sun finally rose.
6. Captain Willie’s
SeaVue Apartments
Right off the bat, Dolly sensed that something was wrong. The sound of the washing machine running at 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning was unusual to the extreme. It was totally out of character for April, who was usually still in the sack at noon. Dolly opened the top of the machine and saw that April was laundering her sheets and clothes. Another mystery. Since she turned fourteen, April had to be constantly cajoled, prodded, and nagged to change the sheets. She’d gladly leave them on the bed forever if Dolly hadn’t insisted on changing them once a week. The load of clothes was also a mystery, since April wasn’t any more eager to launder clothes than sheets. Then there was the early hour....
Dolly knocked on April’s door, but there was no answer. She knocked again; still no answer. Gently, Dolly opened the door, expecting April to be up and alert, considering the work she’d already started. Instead, she lay diagonally across the width of the bare mattress, dressed only in panties and a soaked T-shirt. A body-length damp spot covered the center of the mattress. What on earth? Dolly thought. Did she have a heavy period and get everything bloody and clean it up with water? Is she ashamed and wanted to hide it? “Hey, Sweetie, you OK?” she called to April. “Honey? You OK?”
“Yeah, Mamma. Just tired. I want to sleep.”
Dolly sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand on April’s shoulder. It was cold and clammy. She gently tugged on her shoulder. “Honey, what’s the matter? You have a bad period or something?”