Sunny Tsunami

After the show, Shelley said she wanted to get out of the smoke. The boy on her arm had been the lead guitarist of the headlining band. The band’s good looking member - their eye candy. He was also a bit of a wicked type. He knew about throwing knives and all the fucked up stuff El Greco and his buddies used to do between paintings. The bar would close in a half-hour anyway so he didn’t care if they stuck around or not. He knew of an after party he wanted to go to.

His name was Lucius.

He said to Shelley, “They’re going to have cock-fights in the basement of the ‘7 Dollar.'”

“Lucius, that’s fucking gross. I don’t want to go see cock fights,” she said. He didn’t argue. He just led her there by the elbow. She knew where he was taking her but as he told her about the band’s practicing over the last week and what he thought about the night’s set and how he was really psyched to get her friend Steph involved, because the band wanted to get that electronic sound going and she was the best Trance composer in their scene… well, she let him lead. So long as he didn’t point it out she would not mind.

They walked into the 7 Dollar and it was not the sort of place you would ever expect to support cock fighting. They kept it pretty swank there. The 7 Dollar was hipster central - these were some soy latte drinking motherfuckers. The 7 Dollar had another interesting feature to it: at bar-time, when the lights came on, the whole place instantly converted into an all-night diner. They quit serving drinks and started mixing up pancake batter. It did it’s best business about an hour before bartime as scenesters who were still trying to talk each other into the sack that night went there to have a last drink and order spinach-and-feta omelettes.

Lucius led Shelley to a table where some of his friends were sitting a little before last call. These were more his knife-throwing friends than his indie music friends. They weren’t rednecks or NRA members or anything. They were just these edgy scenesters who thought it was really cool to be able to hit a running rat with a switchblade you slipped out of a secret pocket in the back of your jacket. Lucius opened up his little box of clove cigarettes and offered one of them to Shelley. She took it. They started smoking.

Lucius kept gabbing with her, normal as ever, and she thought maybe he wanted to be at the 7 Dollar but didn’t have any interest in cock-fighting. What Shelley didn’t understand was that the cock-fight was invitation only - and everyone had received instructions about when they should go down into the basement. That way, there would not be this sudden rush down the back stairs that would draw the attention of the non-invites. Lucius’s table was scheduled to drop down at 2:20. He was watching the clock.

Shelley managed to have herself a shirley temple before Lucius got up and nodded to his friends. Then Shelley found herself being led down the stairs into this strange arena that she would have thought could not fit beneath the 7 Dollar. It looked like it had just been built yesteday, too. She asked Lucius if they had stolen the bleachers from some kids’ soccer field. Lucius laughed and said they probably had. The walls and ceilings had been lined with egg cartons. Sound absorbers, she thought. Someone probably thought that funny.

In the center of the bleachers stood a ring no larger than the back of station wagon. It was built out of unstained wood. You could see sawdust all over the floor around it. In the air hung cages with chickens in them - the cocks, she guessed. The cages hung from ropes that hung from pulleys. After they sat down in the bleachers, a young woman came by in a short skirt and a tight t-shirt and she asked if they wanted to bet. Lucius gave her a twenty and said “Splitter.” She nodded, wrote something on a pad she had, then tore half of it off and handed it to him. He smiled at her as if Shelley weren’t there.

Once the place had filled up the lights went off for one second and then they came back on with spotlights circling the room. Not fancy ones. Cheap, elementary school theater spotlights that a couple of college students were making flip around. A guy in shiny clothes stood in the ring now as two cages lowered down into the ring from the ceiling. The guy in the shiny clothes had a mic in his hand and he gestured at one of the lowering cages and shouted, “Ladies and Gentlemen! Can you tell me why Splitter here crossed the road?”

The crowd screamed “Why?” with delight.

To which he answered, shifting his gesture to the other cage, “To rip the gizzard out of Sunny Tsunami!” And the crowd roared, and Lucius was right there with them. Shelley decided that maybe this relationship was not ideal.