It was the first time I saw a self-driving limousine. Isn’t that funny? After everything, that’s what I remember most.
I messaged Jamie as soon as the wheels touched down. That’s the key to the perfect airport pickup. To see your ride pull up to the curb just as your feet cross the threshold. Of course, it never happens that way. And I stood in the warm wind tunnel of arrivals for half of some Radiohead album my dad sent me, peering into passing cars like some out-of-town creep.
When the limo spotted me, the tires twisted out and rolled laterally. My stupid face got bigger and bigger in the window’s reflection until I couldn’t look anymore. Jamie kicked the door open. His arms open, wingspan wider than I remembered. He said, “I know, I know. We’re late. LAX is still a bitch.”
My friend Jamie. You know the one. The first friend you ever had. The one who made you realize your mother lied and you weren’t actually the smartest or handsomest kid to ever live. He was always there. Drawing up plans for a treehouse. Deciding whether today would be soccer or skateboards, Smirnoff or a twelve-pack. He showed you what a natural-born leader looked like, so you knew you’d never be one yourself. And sometimes, you think your whole life might be different if you hadn’t met this friend.
Jamie’s teeth glowed against the wash of headlights. The way they did before he blew out birthday candles, or when we found his dad’s shoebox of porn. He wore a black leather jacket with silk paisley lining under slicked-back hair. Standing there face-to-face, after not seeing him for five years, I almost forgot I didn’t want to see him at all.
He stuffed my bag in the truck and pointed into the limousine. “My buddy Ethan is in there. He’s joining us on our voyage tonight.”
I looked in the limo and my eyes traced the wraparound couch, padded in thick, white leather. Panels and side tables made of maple, so polished they looked like glass. I counted a dozen cup holders, a bar sink, and an espresso machine plated in gold. Jamie climbed in behind me and looked at Ethan. “Ethan, this is Tim. My friend from home.”
Ethan slouched in the corner. Blonde hair teasing out the sides of a backward hat. He wore a tattered white tee that said Miami in cursive and what looked like really expensive sweatpants. He was the right amount of handsome and unkept to be ultra-rich. Ethan dragged a thick hand through an ice chest at his feet and then threw me a beer.
Jamie typed coordinates into a screen on the glass partition and the limo jolted forward. He sat down and started to inspect me. “Well I’ll be goddamned, Tim. Look at you.” He smirked and crossed his legs. “I almost didn’t believe it when I heard you were still living back home. What the hell you been doing out there?”
Jamie and I grew up in a small town. The one with horse ranches and wineries. Where wealthy sons wrap sports cars around oak trees and middle-class daughters take sleeping pills and wake up dead. Even in high school, Jamie talked about the town as if we’d already moved away. Always a place we came from, never where we were. His confidence about the future made me anxious, and I wanted to follow him anywhere before I knew how to want anything else.
Until one day, after graduation, his grandpa up and croaked and left him some giant fortune. Not enough to be a kidnapping target, but enough to never work or worry again. And since work and worry were all I’d ever known how to do, we drifted pretty quick once he moved to LA. It turns out you can spend your whole life just going along and still get left behind.
I still live in that small town. Still polish silverware and put in requests for vacation days. Still wait for designated breaks to take a crap or cry in my car. But then, last week, Jamie texts and asks, practically begs, me to come visit. Said he’d buy the ticket and pay for everything. Funny how fast a grudge slips away when a free trip is involved.
“We’ve got a big surprise planned for you tonight.” Jamie took out a vape pen.
Ethan let out a long, wet burp. “We’re going to a strip club in Mexico.”
Jamie kicked Ethan. “What, do you got your fingers in your ears? It’s supposed to be a surprise.” Jamie twisted toward me and gave me that look. The one he used to convince me to skip school or steal my mother’s car. “It’s not just any strip club,” he said. “We’re going to one of the most legendary gentleman’s clubs in the world. It just happens to be in Tijuana.”
“Don’t they have strip clubs here?” I already knew the answer.
Ethan yanked at the front of his expensive sweatpants. “Not like this one. Girls down there will do anything. Give you a boner that makes your stomach hurt.” He snapped his fingers and turned to Jamie, “Hey, you think they’ll do a surra bunda?”
“What’s a surra bunda?” I asked.
Jamie shook his head. “No, man. It’s a nice place. They don’t do that kind of stuff.”
Ethan looked offended.
Jamie moved over and wrapped his arm around me with an annoyed sense of responsibility. He told me to stop worrying. That it’s totally safe. And that the strip club is only “half the surprise.” Even then, I noticed a dull urgency in his tone. Like when he’d lie to his mother about where we were on Friday nights, or when he told me he fingered Mitzy Smalls in health class.
I muttered something about just taking a long flight, knowing it wouldn’t matter. “Don’t worry,” Jamie said. “We’re taking the Loop. Gets you from LA to TJ in twenty.”
“Airport to ass in record time baby,” Ethan laughed.
The HyperLoop. The series of sealed containers operating through underground, low-pressure tunnels, accelerating via electric propulsion at speeds of 760 miles per hour. I’d seen it on the news but let Jamie explain it anyway.
“Goes from Venice to Downtown in seven minutes,” Jamie said. “Silverlake to Santa Monica in ten.” He pumped his thumb at Ethan. “Last week we took it from Malibu to Dodger Stadium in eleven minutes flat.”
Ethan clawed the ice for another beer. “Yeah, except for the 90 minutes we had to wait in line to board.”
“Well, some things never change,” Jamie said.
“So, we’re taking an underground tunnel to Mexico?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” Ethan yawned. “The irony isn’t lost on us either.”
Jamie sat up straighter, the way he always did before explaining something. “The city annexed all the old underground tunnels used for drug trafficking and border crossing and converted them into the new transportation system. And now Los Angeles is home to the world’s first International HyperLoop station.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Now instead of fentanyl and families in search of a better life, the tunnels traffic pods of white people at 700 miles an hour.”
Jamie squirmed and shot me an uncomfortable look. The same one he had when he heard my dad use that word for homosexuals at a BBQ.
Hundreds of tiny white and blue lights swirled around the limo, mimicking the Milky Way galaxy or an underground rave. Each time the lights hit Jamie’s face, I saw something different in him. He somehow looked both bigger and smaller. The way someone does in a funhouse mirror or when they shift between different cliques in high school. And seeing him so anxious, I started to feel pretty good.
Ethan hung his head halfway out the window, washing his face with outside air like a dog. Jamie peered through the small back window, tracking the cars behind us, biting his nails. Ethan noticed this and said, “Stop worrying, man. No one is following us. Everything is going to blow over by Monday.”
I wanted to ask, but I knew Jamie wouldn’t tell me anything. I closed my eyes and ran my fingers across the couch’s leather stitching, pretending for a moment it was mine. “This limo might be the nicest place I’ve ever been,” I said.
Jamie looked at me. “Yeah, well, tonight’s a special night.”
“It’s good to see Grandpa’s money is being put to use,” I said, covering my grin with a beer can.
Jamie looked down at his hands. “The money was a nice surprise, Tim.”
“Oh, I bet it was a real shocker.” I tapped my foot, ready for more.
Ethan pulled his head back into the limo and ran his fingers through his hair. “What was a surprise? What money?”
Jamie looked at him, agitated. “I already told you. My grandpa. The pilot. He started an airline a long time ago and left me some money when he died.”
“Some money,” I muttered into my beer can.
Jamie slouched into the leather couch. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
Ethan reached into the ice chest again. “So you got a rich grandpa. Big deal. Who doesn’t?”
“Dead grandpa.” Jamie’s face turned red under the blue and white lights.
“Reminds me of a joke.” Ethan opened what must have been his fifth beer. “You say he was a pilot?” He swung his body forward. “Ok, get this…What do you call a black man who flies a plane?”
“Ethan!” Jamie looked to the front of the limo, as if someone up there might be listening. “Please, please, please do not finish that joke.”
“Oh calm your tits, Jamie.” Ethan waved him off and then faced me directly. “Tim…What do you call a black man who flies a plane?”
“I don’t know, what?” I braced myself.
“A pilot! What else would you call him, ya fucking racist?” Ethan howled, slapping his knee. After scanning our blank faces, he frowned. “You know,” he said, “I used to watch my dad tell that joke and get laughs. But now, whenever I start it, people just beg me to stop.”
No one said anything for about the length of time it took Ethan to down another beer. And I don’t know why I did. Maybe to fall into an old groove with an old friend. Or maybe because it’s easier to go through the motions of things. I lifted my beer. “Here’s to a great night. I just got here and already feel like I’m living in the future.”
“Forget the future,” Jamie tapped his beer to mine. “Tonight we’re going to another dimension.”
II
On the HyperLoop, I pulled the harness over my chest and closed my eyes, imagining the city I’d never seen flying over us. The destinations on my wishlist lined up like hotels on the Vegas Strip. The Griffith Observatory, Hollywood Walk of Fame, The Santa Monica Pier. My back glued to the seat. My eyes shut so tight. I could see it all. Long legs in rollerblades on the boardwalk. Young and free, naked and lost. Smelling like Coppertone. Spreading like blankets on the sand.
We sped like demons beneath the City of Angels. The land of dreamers, land of lost souls. My eyes so shut, I saw miles of tents spill over and stake claim on the lawns of mansions. The Pacific Coast Highway. The 405. Gridlocked and barb-wired. Gang signs over airbrushed faces. I saw the sports cars inching along. Fighting rush hour, seeking happy hour, drowning in an endless summer of billable hours. The adopted highways, abandoned intersections. Potholes etched into the pavement like cigarette burns. Gifts from a dying sun. Notes from an abusive father. A blanket of smog, the overprotective mother.
Seven hundred miles per hour, we penetrated the center of the earth. My eyes shut so tight, I saw a wall of pavement become a golden coastline. White picket fences blurred into shit red adobe homes. The last mile of California. Cars on the road aged ten years a second. Faster than the flesh under my chin, the fault lines on my face. Too fast to do a double-take. Too fast to turn around and see if any of it happened at all.
III
I followed Jamie and Ethan off the Loop and up the stairs to the city. Tijuana glowed with neon billboards and walking holograms. I smelled street corn and felt the warm air on my face. Rusted Cadillacs lined the main road, covered in succulents and turquoise jewels. We walked at an American pace beneath a canopy of orange and white bougainvillea. We reached an old cathedral, and on the side wall was a mural of a young Mexican girl sticking her head into the mouth of a lion.
At the cathedral’s entrance, a security guard waved a wand over our groins and stamped our wrists. Two floating bikinis guided us down a black hallway. Pink light bulbs sprouted from the carpet. A red neon sign hung above the door at the end of the hall, glowing. It read: Alternate Endings.
Inside, the club felt like a casino. The walls were covered in red carpet and chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The air tasted like cheap perfume and stale beer. We walked by two dancers dressed as nuns who sang karaoke while dad-shaped men in Hawaiian shirts smoked cigars and played roulette. Everything in the club revolved around a long, rectangular main stage at the center of the room. We took three empty chairs and a private table at the very front.
On the stage, strippers performed acro yoga. Tossing each other into the air in a synchronized, choreographed routine. They wore thin black belts around their waists bound together by a small LCD screen flashing different colors.
“What are those belts?” I asked.
“Don’t point.” Jamie slapped my hand. “Those are digital wallets. It’s how you send them tips.” He held up a remote control holstered to the side of his chair. “This is the sender. When you see something you like, just point and shoot. I pre-loaded yours with plenty of crypto.”
“How do they know they’re getting real money?” I asked.
Jamie rolled his eyes. “When you say things like ‘real money,’ what you need to understand is that all money is just a story.” My friend Jamie. The older brother who’s the same age.
“Isn’t one of the best parts of going to a strip club being able to slip bills into bras and g-strings?” I asked.
Jamie’s face turned disgusted. “Woah. Not ok, bro. You think these girls want some dirty fiat cash rubbing up against their skin?”
I picked up the crypto gun and stared back at him. “Dude. This thing looks like a taser and those belts scream house arrest.”
Then a dancer with thick legs and zebra boots appeared. She was tall as a bar stool and swung a bucket of beer back and forth until it gained enough momentum to land on our table. Ethan leaned in and asked if she or any of her colleagues happen to surra bunda.
Jamie kept looking over his shoulder. Pulling out his phone and putting it away. He looked over at Ethan. “You see that guy over there?” He pointed at a short fat man with a sweaty forehead. He wore a red flannel and black fingerless gloves. “Ethan?” Jamie asked again.
Ethan poured oil into a vape pen and it smelled like warm churros. He shook his head, ignoring Jamie. He looked at me and asked, “Has he always been this uptight?”
I looked over and the red flannel man was gone.
On stage, two topless dancers rode unicycles and wore knight’s helmets. They jousted toward each other at full speed with styrofoam pool noodles.
Ethan took a long drag of the vape pen and then emptied his lungs into Jamie’s face. “Bust out the stuff already. Let’s get this night started.” He sounded bored and dangerous.
Jamie reached in his pocket and then opened his palm, revealing three white capsules. He turned toward me, speaking softly. “You’re in for a real treat. These are a specialized blend. Designed to be transcendent. Think if Molly and mushrooms had a baby. Like a candy flip, only sweeter. And once you peak, it blasts off into DMT bon voyage.” He smiled at me desperately, like a used car salesman or a Jovaha’s witness. “There’s a little ketamine in there too for the comedown and some CBD to settle the stomach.” His eager eyes and open palm pressed into me. “It’s called Heaven’s Gate.”
“Heaven’s Gate? Wasn’t that the name of some dystopian death cult?” I looked over my shoulder now, scanning the room.
“What? No! It’s called that because when you take it, you have a chance to meet God.”
I wanted to try it. And I knew by the end of the night I would. But seeing Jamie sit there with his open palm trembling, so thirsty for me to go along, looking like he might fall over if I said no, I felt a surge of energy. “I’ll stick to beer and lap dances tonight,” I told him. And then, somehow with a straight face, I said, “I don’t need drugs to have a good time.”
Ethan leaned his head over, inspecting the pills. “I don’t need drugs either.” He snatched one out of Jamie’s hand like a lizard takes a fly. “I just need more.”
Jamie pulled his chair closer and put his arm around me. “Here’s what you have to understand, Tim. It’s not about having fun. It’s about finding out who you really are. Don’t you want to know?”
“Don’t be a dick.” I shoved him off.
“I’m just saying,” he said, “that if you can detach from your current definition of self, you just might find another part of who you are. What if you already are the person you want to be?”
I pushed his hand away. “I don’t need an external substance influencing my internal experience.”
Jamie kept pressing his hand and the pills toward me. “It may be external, but it uncovers something internal. Try and stay with me here, Tim. What you need to understand is that there is an omnipresent, continually expanding realm hidden inside our minds. A realm we can’t access because of a particular biochemical formulation of consciousness that exists in our current phase of evolution. But this pill…” his breath was on my neck now. “This pill opens that door.”
On stage, a dozen dancers sat in chairs while another one in a pink dress acted out the final courtroom scene from Legally Blonde.
A group of men at a blackjack table across the room told stories in loud voices. It reminded me how you could be where everything was happening and still feel left out.
“Listen, Jamie,” I said. “I know the universe and consciousness is vaster than my tiny brain could ever hope to comprehend. But I’m not interested in escaping this current version of reality.” I pointed at the sticky, beer-soaked floor. “Because I believe that it’s here, in our natural state of being, that true happiness resides.” I was surprised at how reasonable I sounded.
Jamie scoffed and glanced at Ethan for help. “Oh please… You think this is reality?”
I pushed his hand away again. “Dude, Jamie. I’m not taking some random-ass drug in some shady Mexican titty bar. This is Tijuana. You think I don’t know what happens here? You think I want to end up with a burrito up my ass in a jail cell?”
Jamie swung his head around and hissed, “Dude, you really can’t talk that way in here.” He dropped the two capsules down on the table, where they could sit between us in the open. “Whatever, man. You know, I brought these pills here for you. I wanted to help you overcome some of that negative energy blocking you.”
When Ethan heard this, he gave me a pathetic look. I put my beer down on the table and raised my voice enough to drown out the men across the room and the dancers on stage. “Jamie,” I said, jamming my finger into his leather jacket. “You might think you’re more enlightened than me because I still use ‘cash’ and actually drive myself places, but the only thing you’ve ever done right in your entire life was be born into a rich family.” I snuck a deep breath through my nose to make sure my voice didn’t crack. “And don’t give me that bullshit about never knowing you were an heir to an airline fortune. It’s all obvious now. Everything you used to say. You acted like a pirate ready to go down with the ship, but always you had a golden life raft waiting.” I realized I’d rehearsed some of this in my mind on the plane. And even though the words felt different coming out now, they still tasted good. I gave him a final shove with my finger before picking up my beer. “I don’t want to hear your thoughts on ‘negative energy’ or what you deem as ‘reality’ or ‘consciousness.’ You were a trust fund child who used to play tourist in my poor-kid neighborhood. And you’re doing the same thing right now. You have no idea how the rest of us really live.”
Jamie’s handsome, yearbook smile melted into shock and regret. The same way it changed when we were ten years old, shooting at blue jays with a BB gun until one actually fell down dead.
Ethan looked at us both and yawned. “Jesus. I can’t believe that after all these years, you two still have your periods synced.” He unholstered his crypto gun and aimed it at a dancer across the room. “Look at that ass. Right over there. Shaking like late-stage Parkinsons.” Ethan’s aim connected, and the dancer’s LCD belt flashed green. She gave Ethan a come hither grin, and he floated toward her like a mummy on rollerskates. Jamie and I watched with our mouths open as she led him through a door marked Private.
On stage, six dancers wore aprons and sharpened knives. Another dancer paced around them in a Gordon Ramsay wig, shouting and throwing food into the audience.
Jamie held his beer bottle up to the light and then drained the last sip. We sat silent for about the length of a lapdance. I turned toward him and looked at his face under the house lights. I didn’t notice in the limo, but there was more sag around his eyes. His skin had a sickly yellow and gray tint, like the color of masking tape. Finally, he said, “I wish we could go back to when everything was still going to happen. I didn’t know looking forward to something could be so much better than actually getting it.” He grabbed two beers out of the bucket and put one in front of me. “You spend your whole life waiting for something to change.”
“And the rest of it wishing it would go back to the way it was,” I cut in. And maybe because at that moment I thought I could rescue him, or maybe because I knew I would all along, I picked up a capsule from the table and swallowed it down.
Jamie stared at me, color rushing back to his face. “You know,” he said. “You shouldn’t have taken that if you really didn’t want to. That’s how you end up having a bad trip.” He grinned and put the last capsule in his mouth.
I unholstered my crypto gun. “Show me how this thing works again.”
That’s about when Jamie started to really open up. He told me life in LA the last five years had not been kind. He had fake friends who just ran up bar tabs and called only when they needed to borrow money. He told me he and Ethan made some bad business deals with even worse people. People who may or may not be looking for them right now. As he said these things, I felt the capsule open and the feeling of sunlight being poured over my heart. He looked at me and said that the only reason we’re even in Mexico right now is because very bad people were looking for him and Ethan in LA, and that he can’t say for sure if they followed us here or not. I sat there listening as my pupils spread open, feeling like I just drank poison.
Ethan wobbled back to the table, his skin glistening. “Man,” he said, “I haven’t seen that much squirting and wiping since I visited my grandma during Covid.”
Just as he sat down, two dancers walked up behind him. They wore blue, silk pajamas and stood arm in arm. One sat on my lap, she smelled like sweet jasmine at midnight. The other sat up on our table, legs dangling and arms crossed. She looked ready to interrogate us. “Ok, ok…Which one you white boys keep askin’ bout tha surra bunda?”
Ethan’s eyes were white saucers, vibrating in their sockets. He pumped his thumb to his chest proudly. “That’d be me, beautiful.”
I shifted the dancer’s weight off my femur and asked, “Will someone please, for the love of God, please tell me what a surra bunda is?”
The one on my lap put her lips to my ear. “The surra bunda is a dance move popularized by the Brazilian music group, Tequileiras do Funk. It involves one person, the receiver, sitting in a chair while a dancer, traditionally female, places her hands on the receiver’s knees and rests her feet on their shoulders.”
“Then,” the dancer on the table cut in, “the dancer grips the back of the receiver’s head with her heels and pounds her ass into the receiver’s face, over and over again, with as much force as possible, traditionally.”
“Sounds painful,” I said.
The dancer on my lap whispered, “Surra bunda means ‘punishment by ass’ in Brazilian Portuguese.” She ran her fingers through my hair and it felt like thunder.
“Your English is fantastic,” I smiled.
“Why wouldn’t it be fantastic,” she snapped.
“Don’t mind him.” Jamie leaned over. “He’s just visiting.”
Ethan’s tongue flicked over his teeth, back and forth like windshield wipers. “Ok, ok… You two think you’re pretty smart. You know a thing or two about dance moves. But let me ask you this…” He waved his hands around like a cage fighter and sprung to his feet. “What do you call a black man who flies a plane?”
“Ethan!” Jamie and I yelled in unison.
The dancer on the table said, “A pilot. What else would chew call ‘im?”
Ethan’s knees buckled and his cheeks turned red. “How would you like to come back to America with me?”
Both dancers rolled their eyes. “Come on guapo, you’re coming with us.” They picked Ethan up by his armpits and dragged him away.
Jamie watched him disappear across the room and shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like if I hadn’t met him, my whole life might be different.”
And that’s about when the house lights went way down and my own eyeballs began to shake. On stage, a white spotlight burned into an empty chair. The band played what sounded like an execution. The theme song to something gone wrong. My body felt like a gong pounded by a hammer. “How long till it goes away?” I asked out loud.
A fog machine dusted the air above us. Dancers suspended by golden ribbons glided from one end of the ceiling to the other, flying in and out of white light and fake fog like angels in a storm. One dancer descended over the empty chair onstage. The two dancers in silk pajamas brought Ethan out in a blindfold and sat him down.
I felt the sun shining on my face, even though I knew that was impossible. My feet stuck to the beer-stained floor, holding me in a state of comfort and ease I cannot explain. Perfume from the dancer who sat on my lap lingered on my neck and transported me to a garden I’d never been before.
Over Ethan’s head, the dancer suspended herself lower and lower. Her feet landed on the top of his shoulders. Her hands rested on his knees. The dancers removed his blindfold and he gazed forward. He looked like he was about to meet God.
Jamie’s face aged ten years before my eyes. His laugh lines cracked and turned to dust, flying through the room and back again like an endless waterfall of youth and age, forking off and returning to some infinite place.
On stage, the dancer gripped the back of Ethan’s neck with her heels and thrusted herself into him, over and over with all her might. His mouth opened. His eyes welled up, and tears rolled down his cheeks, changing color in the lights and fog.
My friend Jamie. The first friend I ever had. Him and that stupid look on his face. The one no one else ever saw but me. Like whenever he got caught in a lie. Or when his dad found us sharing a sleeping bag on the trampoline one morning. I felt a damp breeze on my shoulders and looked at him.
He was trying to run, but it was too late. I can still see them. Even now, with my eyes shut so tight, I can see it all. Two men throwing the burlap sack over his head and ripping him out of his chair. It was the last thing I saw before my own vision went dark.
I was lifted up, feet peeled off the floor. And I remember thinking then how easy it was to just go along. How there’s really only so far you can run, how long you can hide outside of oblivion’s lens, before you’re returned to where you’re bound to end up. I can still hear the dancers’ screams. But even then I knew it would be alright. I knew I could go along and everything would be just fine.
Did you make it to the end? Have any thoughts or comments? Want to call the police? Reply and let me know.
Best short I've read since Asimov. Great read and I want more!!