THE PLATINUM RAVEN

10 Santa Monica Boulevard

10   Santa Monica Boulevard

Scorpio, exultant, checks his make-up in the dressing-room, whirls around in spirals and runs his dainty hands across his body till it tingles. He darts across the dance-floor to the DJ booth and flings his arms around Amber, kisses him, then skips away and out through the exit, to the red-walled passageway leading to the stairwell.

He knows no more of mirror mist than anyone else here does. Its effect has been described to him, as seeing and imagining and feeling like yourself, but to the power of two, or three, or four—a zinging, self-affirming and ultimate edition of yourself, as it were.

"Yes, but what's it really like?" he asked the Platinum Raven and Amber yesterday evening, while they were all lounging around the kitchen table. "And how long does it—?" and he hiccupped: they were all a little tipsy on red wine by then, having laboured hard all day to prepare for this evening.

Amber and the Platinum Raven looked at each other, and Amber grins at her. "Well..." he begins, and tails off.

"Well..." she echoes, and tails off too.

Realising he is being toyed with, Scorpio smoulders at them with a sudden irony, but hiccups again in mid-smoulder, so the impact is somewhat lessened.

"OK, it's sort of like this," the Platinum Raven says, gets up from her kitchen chair and kneels down beside his chair. "I'm going to demonstrate the effect it has on the skin—it's a kind of tingle," and she lifts his black T-shirt up to just below his little breasts.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

"Relax," she says, "this is the best impression I can give. Trust me and I'll show you. Close your eyes..."

Reluctantly he does so.

"No peeking, now." She approaches his stomach with her mouth, then blows a quick and powerful raspberry against his skin. He shrieks and is soon chasing her round the kitchen table, a scandalised look of murder and mirth on his face. At last she is caught and punishment is meted out, which involves much slapping and throttling and hilarity; nor is Amber spared Scorpio's tipsy vengeance, until they all three constitute a puddle of giggling exhaustion sprawled across the chairs, table and floor.

So that was informative, he drily reflects. He halts on the stairwell and peers down off it to the tower's main lobby, where the doors to the outside world are being opened. But whatever this mirror mist turns out to be like, it will surely be a cut above the drugs he knew before. For Scorpio, like many of this club's clientele, came here from elsewhere. In his case, it was from pretty much as far around the globe as you could get from here—Los Angeles. It was only two years ago that he'd first arrived in L.A., on the run from his home town of Asbury Park (and that was a whole different story in itself), aiming for anonymity and a brand-new start. He achieved both aims, but at the cost of an addiction that saw him scoring heroin at seedy bars and clubs in Hollywood: at the Study perhaps, or at Tempo or Plaza with the drag queens, or at Blacklight with the derelicts. Or if he could get a lift, at other likely sources further away, like Scores or the divey Jalisco Inn in Downtown (he shakes his head involuntarily, to recall these old names that he's not recalled for months, but here they are, still tucked away in his memory-banks and popping out now). Chico in Montebello, Suave in Carson, the Annex down in Inglewood—or Jewel's Catch One, for a bit of scale and glamour. Oh, fuck... They were mean times, cut with flashes and jagged stabs of fun, but always followed by more mean times.

He worked Santa Monica Boulevard with the other girls, in twos or threes if possible but often alone. Scorpio was just a working name at first, chosen on a whim to undertake this paying work, in place of the boy name Angel that he'd grown up with in Asbury Park; but since this paying work was the only kind of work he found himself doing, and these girls his only colleagues and friends, he quickly morphed into Scorpio for all purposes. How well he got to know that long, grungy strip of Santa Monica throughout those months, from Western to LaBrea after midnight: so much verbiage and congregation, business and action there at Highland, near the donut stand, perched on the grimy wall, just beside the bus-stop; or standing at Gower by the disused gas station, sitting by the strip-malls at Van Ness or Wilton, on the bench at Budget rental cars at Orange, or beside that sports field down at Cahuenga, a block away from that hustler who disliked all proximity... Then if the girls' ships had come in that night, walking west, rich and hungry and closer temporarily, across the city limits into West Hollywood , where a plate of food awaited at the Yukon Diner. Or if no ship had come, then sprawling at the furthest ever-unwiped tables in the 24/7 drive-through burger joint beside LaBrea—covering perhaps for one another, as they shot up in the men's or women's room right there, in a grimy rush of over-yellow mustard and onion-rings.