KATHARSIS (Chapter Twenty)

         The empty room didn’t stay that way for long. In the middle of July a friend of Marv’s came to visit, a nineteen-year-old kid named Alex Young who’d grown up with Marv a few hours away in Anderson, South Carolina. The night he arrived Marv was working the late shift at the hotel where he bell-hopped, Joe was working a closing shift as a delivery driver for Kickin' Chicken, and Bobby was back home in Rhode Island for his older brother’s wedding. The only one without a prior engagement was me, so I was of course left with the sole responsibility of entertaining this peculiar guest, whose appearance was like a bizarro version of my own. His face was remarkably similar to mine, but he had blonder hair, he was at least six inches shorter, he had sloppy tattoos dotting random parts of his body while I had none, and, while my style consisted of wearing old t-shirts and gym shorts, his was a bizarre amalgamation of things evidently deemed fashionable: an Indiana Jones hat, a brown waistcoat and jacket, a gold Rolex, black pants, Limited Edition Air Jordan’s. The collective result was a time-traveling hype beast from the late 1800’s.
         I met him in the living room and we broke the ice by playing a few rounds of bumper pool. He had brought a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon, and I had a twelve pack of Coca Cola in the fridge, so we made whiskey and cokes and started pounding them back as we played. He took any excuse to reference his wealth— “Yeah, I was think about buying this motorcycle called the Ghost Turbo, but maybe I’ll buy that new Audi Coupe instead”— and when I pressed him to explain how he’d made all his money he wasn’t evasive, just blatantly dishonest. Within an hour of introducing himself he had already given me three distinctly implausible explanations for how, at age nineteen, he’d already accumulated over two million dollars.
         In the first explanation, he made a $750 investment into what he referred to as “Walmart’s photographic services,” and when that took off the 750 turned into 100,000, and he took that 100k and invested it into solar energy companies and the car company Tesla before it got big. Several shots of bourbon later, he launched into the first of many alternative explanations. In this one, he had taken $3,000 to the Bellagio Casino in Vegas, needing to make $25,000 to pay back a drug dealer, and after a string of lucky calls on the roulette table he’d made the twenty-five but couldn’t stop, so he kept going, and going, and next thing he knew he was walking out of the casino with two bodyguards and a briefcase with almost two million dollars in it. A few shots after that explanation I got another one: he’d been plodding around Charleston with his camera, looking for inspiration, and he happened to be passing in front of the A.M.E. church when he heard a string of gunshots. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the front doors of the church, and after several moments of silence one of the doors swung open, and out walked a white boy with a white t-shirt, a bowl cut, and Timberland boots— Dylann Roof. There was an empty, hollow look in the killer’s eyes when they connected with his own, and they stood there staring at each other for a moment, a mutual understanding, or at least an acknowledgement passing between them, and that connection was only broken when Alex raised his camera, pointed it, and— click— took the most important photo of his life. He sold the photo to the New York Times for $100,000, then he took that 100k and invested it into solar energy companies and the car company Tesla before it got big.
         Needless to say, I had already formed a distinctly odd impression of Alex Young by the time we set out for the bars on King Street. On a normal night I probably would have gone to AC’s, Faculty Lounge, or Rec Room— all wildly different vibes, but all places with cheap alcohol where I could reasonably expect to see somebody I knew. Alex wanted to go someplace fancy, though, and since he’d seen The Republic on an episode of Southern Charm he said we’d have to go there. Technically, Alex shouldn’t have been able to go anywhere because he was nineteen and you needed to be twenty-one to get in, but I had both my older brother’s ID and my own ID, and somehow my brother’s photo looked more like me than my own photo did, so we decided Alex would be me and I’d be my brother. When we got there the bouncer hardly glanced at the ID’s but he said the cover charge was ten dollars and I couldn’t come in wearing tennis shoes like the ones I had on— old, dirty, and torn up. This was an elegant place. Alex handed the guy fifty dollars and told him not to worry about it. The guy shrugged, pocketed the fifty, and let us in.
         The Republic is one of the trashiest places on Earth, and I knew before going in I was going to hate every person I saw. The inside of the bar was nearly pitch black, like a nightclub except with a bunch of TV’s playing the Nicolas Cage movie Con Air, no dance floor, and the DJ was a just a bartender using the worst Spotify playlist ever assembled. Alex’s offensive cologne fit in well with the acrid cloud of perfumed douche bags that hit my nostrils as soon as we walked in. There were a few fist pumping guidos near the entrance, a bunch of old men and stripperish young women in the VIP section, and probably a hundred over-dressed white guys stalking the area between the bar and the VIP section, all trying to get ahold of the loud and scantily clad girls that were running around all over the place, taking selfies, screaming, and dancing with each other.
         Alex and I went straight to the bar. Ten minutes later, we’d succeeded in getting the bartender’s attention. Ten minutes after that, we’d succeeded in placing a drink order. Two Jack and Cokes. He made the drinks in a matter of seconds and said that’ll be twenty dollars. I said Twenty dollars? Are you fucking kidding me? But before I could really get going Alex handed the guy a twenty. We took the drinks and walked out to the patio to avoid the crowd around the main bar, and, while I found the people in the patio equally appalling to those inside, we were able to find an open couch with a coffee table where we could down our drinks and smoke cigarettes.
         At some point a young Korean guy with pierced ears and a soccer jersey came and sat at the couch across from us. We had seen him earlier, walking past the bar with a gorgeous Korean girl on either arm. As soon as he sat down he greeted us excitedly, “You boys like to party huh? Ha haaa!” and Alex was like, “Hell yeah!” They immediately clinked their drinks together in a toast and I was obliged to participate. After some brief introductions— the guy’s name was Lin and he was here for one month on a Summer study program— Alex asked him about the girls he’d been with, and Lin said they were classmates of his.
        “Yes, yes. They are very beautiful, no? You like?”
         If Lin hadn’t already referred to the girls as his classmates, I would have assumed he was their pimp, and I think Alex might have assumed that anyway, because he started asking Lin to set something up for him, bring the girls over here, lets all go back to my place and play some poker. Of course he meant my place, but I didn’t care. I was drunk, the girls were hot and slutty looking, and I hadn’t been laid in almost a month, since my second week back in Charleston.
         Oddly enough, Lin excepted Alex’s offer and ran off to find the girls, and next thing we knew we were all five of us in a cab on the way back to Rutledge. The girls were shrieking and laughing at everything Alex was saying even though none of it was meant to be funny, but then he’d laugh too as if he’d meant it as a joke all along, and soon they were all howling in the last seat, bent over themselves in hilarity that had no real source or meaning. Halfway to the house one of the girls bailed out on the corner of what was evidently her own place, waved to us all, then walked into a house. It was disappointing, because now there was just one hot Korean girl and three guys, and I wasn’t interested in sharing, nor was I the Alpha-male type who’d try to out-play the other two guys if they were trying to bed the broad too. I was resigned to accepting that the remainder of my evening would be spent drinking and playing poker, which didn’t sound all that bad.

TO BE CONTINUED