Page 6 of Losing Control

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The pink and green neon signs reflected off the haze on the mirrors lining the back wall of the bar. The fake leather bar stools perched along the gritty wood floor and Formica counter were sticky with grime. With the exception of the women who danced on stage, there was nothing inviting about Fantasm Strip Club. Yet, somehow, taken as a whole, the place worked. Fantasm was the epitome of a dive, right down to the dim, sporadic lighting, the thick, pungent atmosphere and the sketchy regular customers. Harvey, a massively fat, old guy, who needed two bar stools to support his weight, was already leaned over his usual corner of the bar, working on his second pitcher and hogging all the bowls of peanuts. Ruby, the bartender, had mentioned that Harvey occasionally fell asleep at the bar, and since no one could wake him or budge his giant whale-sized form, Rocky, the owner, would just let him stay like that all night.

I pushed aside the three empty whiskey shot glasses, poured myself another beer and slumped back against the hard sticky chair, my gaze only half focused on the woman wrapped around the stripper's pole. Fantasm was a place I slinked into when I wasn't in the mood to hang with snobby, self-centered people in richly decorated night clubs. No one knew me at Fantasm, and I liked it that way. It was my escape. And tonight I needed that escape more than ever.

The speakers perched on each corner of the stage were broadcasting more static than actual music. Or maybe it was the gritty noise in my head, reminding me that I was fucked. I was looking for every damn excuse in the world to make myself feel better, but as my dad had taught me, you never make excuses for failure. I'd been soft on myself, feeding my needs more than keeping my self-control. I'd spent two decades of my life under my dad's rigid iron fist. Now that I was free of it, on my own to do as I pleased, it was just too damn easy to let loose, party, fuck women and enjoy life. After I got to college, it had dawned on me that, for once in my life, I was free of Dad's harsh rules. I went fucking crazy. I was that badly shaken can of beer just waiting for someone to pull the tab so I could erupt. Temporarily forgetting that David Nash Senior was a psychotic control freak, I had naively thought I could get away with it. But I quickly discovered that he had promised the dean of students a nice lump sum for the university in exchange for the dean keeping a close watch on me. The dean called home with the news that my midterm grades were bad, and that I'd missed a lot of classes. For three weeks, I was slammed with cold silence from my dad. Then I arrived home for the winter holidays. I tromped upstairs to my room to find that all of my things were gone. Not that I had many possessions. Dad had a theory that the more stuff you owned, the stupider you got. My bed sat in the middle of an empty room, and the mattress was bare, no pillow or blanket. I spent the entire break wearing the clothes I'd flown home in. I had no computer, no books, except the textbooks in my bag. Not even a damn magazine. It gave me a lot of time to study, so, technically, the punishment worked. Except that it made me hate him even more. But after I made my first million, I realized my crazy, fucked-up old man had been right. He'd taught me that once you let life's distractions overwhelm you, the game was over. He was always hard on himself, and he was extra hard on me. But in the end, it had worked. Losing the Rad Video deal had been a wake-up call. I needed to get my focus back. I just wasn't completely sure how the hell to do that.

I was so deep in my beer soaked misery, I hadn't noticed that Jack walked up until the chair scraped the floor. He glanced at the parade of empty shot glasses and then stared at me, seemingly assessing my state of mind, as he sat down.

He grabbed the pitcher of beer and poured himself a glass. "So did Grant really can you?"

"I don't know what else you would call it when your boss tells you to get the fuck out of his building."

"Well, shit. Maybe he'll come around when he realizes how much revenue you bring to the business." He took a long gulp of beer. Jack Hunter was one of the few individuals I'd allowed into my personal circle of friends. I had thousands of acquaintances, mostly business, but very few friends. And I preferred it that way. Jack was one of those California pretty boys who the women went nuts for. Like me, he hadn't settled down with one partner. His motives for staying single had less to do with focus and a resolve to stay unattached and more to do with the fact that he loved women, all women, and as he liked to say, he didn't want to 'miss out by tying himself down'. I'd met Jack in college. We were both studying business administration. He was from a working class family of six, where his parents put more emphasis on love than on money. And I was from a family of two, my dad and me. The only focus was on money. Love was a four letter word in our household and not just literally. Not that Jack didn't love money. He was nearly as cutthroat as me when it came to business. That and an extreme fondness for women were probably the only things we had in common.

The usual set of horny, drooling loudmouths had already taken over three of the tables lining the front of the stage. The dancer who Jack and I called Dorothy of Oz because she started her show wearing a short blue dress and red sparkly shoes had already stripped down to her red sparkly thong. Her long leg snaked around the pole as she swung her mostly naked body around. I'd never done anything more than tuck twenty dollar bills in the dancers' g-strings. Jack had a harder time keeping his hands off of them. And they had a hard time resisting him and his thick wallet.

I smacked my glass down hard on the table, not out of anger but because the earlier whiskey shots were throwing off my coordination. "Fuck it. I've been wanting to start my own private equity firm. That's what I'm going to do. If I can ever get my head back in the game. I just let things get out of control. Dad always said ignore the pain, but I forgot to ignore the pleasure."

"You don't have to ignore the pleasure. You just have to dial it back some." Jack leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table, then immediately regretted it. He wiped each arm with a napkin and sat back. "This is Jeremy Travers all over again."

I lifted a questioning brow at him. "Who the hell is Jeremy Travers or do I even want to know?"

"I went to school with this weird kid named Jeremy Travers."

"Guess I'm going to find out, whether I want to or not."

Jack nodded confidently. "Just hear me out. Jeremy wasn't such a weirdo. He was just under complete control of one of those wacky moms who thought playing video games turned kids into killers and eating candy shaved years off your life." He shrugged. "She was probably right there but then who wants to live a long life when you can't even eat candy."

"I might not be drunk enough to hear this stupid, seemingly pointless story." I slammed back the rest of my beer and refilled the glass.

"There's a point, and a good one, because, in a way, Jeremy's mom was from the same warped school of parenting as your dad. When we were in fourth grade, Becky Jones was having a birthday party. Becky was one of those sugary sweet girls that everyone liked. She brought cupcakes for every class event and she lent you her cool colored markers during art without a second thought." Jack sensed he was losing me and sped up his story. "Anyhow, Becky invited everyone in class to her party because she didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I'm pretty sure it was the first time Jeremy was ever invited to a party or at least I never saw him at one before that. Becky's parents set up a carnival theme. They had placed bowls of candy all over the house, and you could fill up little paper bags with as much candy as you liked. Jeremy, who never got to eat candy, was out from under his mom's thumb for those two hours. He shoveled that candy as if he might die without it. His mouth and tongue were stained with every color in the rainbow." The music stopped along with the usual chorus of hoots and hollers as the stage cleared for the next dancer. No longer competing with the usual clamor, Jack lowered his voice. "Jeremy ate a lot of fucking candy. Then we were sitting around singing Happy Birthday to Becky, and all of a sudden, Jeremy's eyes rolled back in his head and he had this crazy seizure right in front of all the gifts. The ambulance came. Most of us thought the whole thing was pretty cool, but Becky was crying because her party was ruined. Jeremy came back to school on Monday looking as if he wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear. It turned out he had eaten so much candy, it had spiked his blood sugar to a dangerous level." Jack finally took a breath. He waved toward me with a flourish. "And there you have it. Jeremy Travers, all over again."

I stared at him across the table. "Sometimes I wonder why the hell I keep you around."

"Who the fuck else is going to read your eulogy when they're shoving you in the ground?"

"I told you, no eulogy, no send off. Just send my remains to the nearest medical school and let them chop me into parts. Tomorrow would be a good day to start."

"Ah come on, buddy. You'll get through this. You're a fighter."

I glanced around. Some of the dancers and servers were lingering around the bar floor. "You're sitting here alone? Normally ten minutes is enough time for you to have a woman on each arm."

"That's because I'm not here for my own pleasure tonight. I'm here to support a friend," he said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. "I was in here last week though." Jack flashed his big white grin and winked across the room at a petite red head leaning against the jukebox in the back corner. She stepped in as a substitute dancer whenever Rocky needed one, but tonight, she was wearing shorts and a t-shirt that showed off the rhinestone stud in her belly button. "That night, Jade, the sweetie who looks as if she's about to dry hump the jukebox gave me a hand job in the back room." He spoke without moving his jaw, and he kept that smug smile plastered across his suntanned face. He raised his beer glass to her and took a gulp, then rested his forearms on the table and returned his attention to me. "I gave her twenty, but she insisted she would have done it for free," he boasted. "She just wanted to see if my erection was as magnificent as the rest of me. Her words. Not mine."

"So I guess she was disappointed."

Jack laughed dryly. "Considering that while she jerked me off, she was making the kind of sounds you hear from women who are getting their pussy pounded, I think not. Which reminds me, Rocky hired a new dancer. Her name is Shay. I don't know what it is about her, but I was sporting a chubby plank of wood before she even stripped off her clothes."

I took three slow gulps of beer. The beer on tap was another good reason for ignoring the trashy ambience. I lowered the glass. "And the new dancer gave you a blow job after the successful hand job?"

"Nah, she never came out on the floor. Which was probably a good thing because she left the crowd pretty damn wild. I thought they were going to start throwing chairs when she slipped off stage to the dressing room."

Jack refilled my glass to the brim. "Drink more. You look like crap. I can't remember the last time you lost a deal."

"That's because I haven't."

Jack sat back and his bearded chin shifted back and forth. "That can't be right. Never? What about that—" He stopped. "No, that's right. You got that one too. Well damn, then I guess this really is a milestone in your career."

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