I meet him inside. Nemesis is one of those crazy bars you usually see only in the movies. Hellespont is a pretty smallish city, and the thing about smallish cities is that on first glance you think that there are quite a few bars to choose from, but upon closer examination you see there’s not enough to cover all the different types more than once, so if you find one you like you’re pretty well stuck. There’s Dilly’s Jazz Lounge, which with its black and blue walls and gold-coloured lights is so pretentious it’s almost comical. There’s Nick’s Public House, the one true sit-down place in the city, complete with electronic network trivia games and the fat-assed regulars who play them all the time. Then there’s Noo Yen’s, the closest thing to a tweener bar you can get—not quite a pub, not quite a live band venue, and with these goddamned lava lamps all over the place. There’s one strip club, one bar up at the university, and then there’s Nemesis.

While you won’t get much dance music anywhere else in the city, it’s the only thing Nemesis plays. There’s plenty of television screens everywhere, too, usually showing those computer-generated landscapes that the camera eye speeds over. The walls are covered with mirrors, so the moment you go down the stairs and past the bouncers you suddenly feel like you’re in an infinite underground, complete with flashing lights and a smoke machine. Different areas of the club alternate shadow and coloured light, and the owner changes the arrangement of the tables every couple of months so that while you feel just as comfortable as always, it’s never exactly the same place—just like that place in your dreams that you’ve never been in before and yet you know exactly where everything is. It’s also the prime spot to meet women in this city, if you go for the interesting type—the sort that might give you fuck-off attitude one minute and then seduce you in the back alley the next, or maybe the sort that’ll dance up close to you, give you the eye, brush her cheek next to yours, and then go up and start making out with some girl on the other end of the dance floor before the next song is fully mixed in. There’s one mirrored table that never changes spots because it’s built into the walls in the corner, and that’s where the only real regulars sit, and once I swear I saw the club’s owner snorting lines of coke with them, without a care as to who may be watching. Every night in this club there’s a different set of drink specials, and they’re always the sort of drinks you’ve never heard of before, like a Sloe Comfortable Screw Up Against the Wall on the Dark Side of Mexico City, or some crazy concoction like that.

Steve’s watching the girls on the dance floor, from a spot he’d chosen in the middle of the mess of tables. Always being the Good Man, Steve is. In all the time I’ve known him, he wouldn’t go up to a girl unless I goaded the hell out of him. He’s the sort of guy who can never bring himself to drop the Wall on anybody, not even his worst enemy.

I guess I should explain what I mean by that, dropping the Wall.

It’s not a tough phenomenon to see, once you start looking for it. Basically, if you’re sitting at a table with some friends and a girl you’ve never met before, and you ask her something, and she responds quickly and coldly and pretty well kills any notion you might have of asking any more questions, then she’s just dropped the Wall on you. Or, if you’ve ever watched a bunch of guys sitting around at a table, and this really good-looking girl is talking to this one guy, but the guy’s not drooling or falling all over himself to impress this girl like the others are, but is instead answering her questions cordially and in fact gets her to reveal more about herself than he does himself, then he’s dropping the Politeness Wall on her. In short, the Wall is a clear and distinct barrier that you’re showing to the person you’re communicating with, letting them know that this is as far as they’re ever going to get, and no further.

It works friggin’ wonders, let me tell you. The thing about dropping the Wall is that it excites the other person’s imagination, gets them wondering what lies behind it. Then they start seeing things that they want to see—it helps at this point if you tease the person by dropping different Walls on different people at the same time in front of her—and their curiosity gets so damned built up, that suddenly they stop wondering as much about what lies beyond and instead start to wonder what it’ll take to get there. Here’s where the flirting begins with many people, and if you’re smart, the more they flirt, the more you force the Wall on them, until at one point, well, something happens.

I understand if you find the whole thing a little disturbing, but I didn’t make the rules. If whoever was in charge of designing the whole mating game had asked me what I thought would have been the best thing to do, I would’ve said that people should all be clairvoyant. I know this sounds weird, but it’s how I really feel. That way, if people were all clairvoyant and telepathic and shit, there wouldn’t be any wasted time on guessing games which never tell you what you need to know anyway. You’d just see someone, and you’d know, I mean, really know. But instead, we’re not allowed to have that sort of instant certainty that can come from truthful communication, so we have to make up these goddamned charades about who we are, showing off some things and hiding other things, and it’s unfortunate, too, because if you watch the Good Man in action, you’ll see him there with some girl, trying to be completely honest all the time, and most of the time the girl won’t bite on it, because people get turned off by honesty. Nobody trusts you when you tell them who you really are.

Now, with the telepathic thing I suggested, you’d probably get a whole bunch of garbled emotions, perceptions, and ideas, and you’d probably have to teach yourself for some time about how to sort it all out, to get right into what the person is really about. But, if you ask me, it’d be a hell of a lot better than the uncertainty that you get in real life. I don’t like this shit about dropping the Wall on people all that much—except for the fun that comes with pretending to be someone you’re not—but hey, nobody’s telepathic, and I’m sick of the Good Man alternative.

So I go through the darkness in Nemesis up to where Steve’s sitting, and I tap him on the shoulder. “I will purchase the primary round,” I say, smiling, before dropping my coat onto the back of the chair next to him.

“And I will provide us with cigarettes,” he replies, getting up to go to the machine near the bathrooms, where two guys had their arms around each other in something more than a just a Platonic manner. I go join the back of the line, which doesn’t look like it’s moving too quickly. So, as it’s going to be a while before I’ll be able to buy us our first pitcher of draft (we don’t go for that weird shit), I look around at the talent we have available tonight.

The dance floor isn’t too badly crowded, just enough room to move but also just enough people to keep the dynamic interesting. The women outnumber the men, as per usual, and they’re fully decked out in the look-at-me clothing, from the revealing necklines and short sleeves right down to the brightly-coloured boots. Around the dance floor there are quite a few people watching—more women than men there, too. In fact, I notice upon having a complete look around that there is a very favourable ratio throughout the entire club. The timing with Desiree, apparently, couldn’t be finer. No lineup girls, as of yet, but there certainly are some pretty things here to be paid attention to.

After I get our pitcher from the bartender, I turn back to our table, and see that Steve has returned with our cigarettes, but he isn’t alone. As I grab two glasses off the end of the bar’s counter, I try to get a decent look at what’s going on between him and the girl. From the look of it, she’s in the process of bumming a cigarette off him. Steve, always the Good Man, has one pulled out for her and is even rummaging through his pocket for a light. He doesn’t seem to be having much luck finding one, so with two of my free fingers I nab a matchbook out of a box near the cash register, and return quickly before she has a chance to leave, all the while trying to look like I’m going as slow as I want.

“Allow me to present our opening drinks for this evening,” I say as I approach the table—Steve and I like to talk theatrically. Of course, with this girl around, it won’t be quite that easy.

“Yeah, thanks, Rod,” he says, taking a glass for himself. “Do you, uh, have a light?”

“But of course,” I say, producing my matchbook. I don’t know how I’m going to make him realize what I’m trying to do by talking this way, even with her around. “Fire for you, sir?”

“No thanks,” he says, tilting his head towards the girl.

I sigh. And I thought I had a lot to learn.

Turning towards the girl, I realize that maybe Steve’s anxiety isn’t all his fault. Our companion, whoever she is, certainly has the look of the lineup girl to her. A definite number-one draft pick, as Yula, a friend of mine, would say. She’s tall, at least five-ten, and she has dirty-blonde hair that’s curly, curlier than Lily’s even, framing her face—this girl isn’t the sort who’d waste her hair’s appeal by sealing it away with a pony-tail. It falls along both sides of her pretty, heart-shaped face before coming to rest around the front of her mauve sweater. When she smiles at me and my matchbook, I can see her teeth are perfect and orderly, and she has a smile that’ll make her look in her late twenties for the rest of her life. I can’t get a decent look at the rest of her body, which is fine, because I don’t exactly want to gawk at her.

I guess maybe I should explain what a lineup girl is.

The idea of a lineup girl came to me in the middle of a movie once, when two guys were talking about this gorgeous woman—I think it was Uma Thurman—and one guy says, “I wonder if she has a boyfriend,” and the other guy answers smartly, “Man, chicks like that are born with boyfriends.” Or something like that. Anyways, it got me to wondering what would happen if maybe a girl like that was in a relationship that was going sour. How would she handle it? Even Uma Thurman has had more than one guy in her life, from what I’ve heard.

I got to seeing that if a girl like that is in a relationship that’s on the rocks, there’s basically a whole slew of guys—a lineup, in fact—waiting for their chance to be next. And, the way I see it, they could be waiting a long time—it’s basically the sort of thing you’d have to be prepared to wait your whole life for. This sort of girl isn’t the type to go through a whole bunch of men real quick. She’s picky, and patient. But, if a lineup girl does come calling, even the most devout husband must divorce his wife and leave his kids to be with her, or else hate himself until he dies. And don’t give me any of that some-guys-are-perfectly-faithful crap—if a guy won’t leave his wife for another woman, it’s because the right woman hasn’t come along yet.

And the lineup girl is always the right woman. She’s smart, and goes for intelligent guys. She’s funny, but also has seriously refined taste, and won’t settle for less from the man. She might smoke, but she’ll never get sick from it down the road. She’s beautiful, which goes without saying, but she’s the sort of beautiful that all men will agree on—none of this “Well, there’s just something about her that doesn’t turn me on” bullshit. Finally, and this is the killer, there will sometimes be this one little flaw about her, one tiny humanizing thing of imperfection, that actually brings about in every man who sees her into an even bigger fit of desire, because many of them will actually delude themselves into thinking they might have a shot, that maybe they might even appear attractive to her, because of that one flaw.

Many a Good Man has had his heart broken beyond fixing by a lineup girl. It’s just the way it works.

The funny thing about the lineup girl is that, very often, other girls will think she’s sort of snobby, or full of herself. The way I see it, the only person who thinks that way is someone who isn’t a lineup girl. They just don’t get it—one big thing about a lineup girl is that’s she’s not naive. She just knows that she’s in demand, and adjusts her world view accordingly.

Anyway, I hand the matches over and drop the I’m-Not-Impressed Wall on her, and turn back to Steve. He’s looking at me a little strangely, as if trying to figure out why I’m not impressed by her. I grin in response.

“I have some news for you, comrade,” I say.

“Huh?” he asks.

“I have made a monumental discovery,” I say as I get comfortable in my seat. “The Good Man is dead.”

Steve squints his eyebrows inquisitively, before answering, “And just what is it exactly that has caused this thing to happen?”

I breathe a sigh of relief when he begins talking the way he normally would. I look over at our guest, and smile as she lights her cigarette, but I don’t explain the way we’re talking. “Nothing in particular caused his death. He was just destined for it.”

“I see,” says Steve, pouring himself a beer. He’s about to turn to the girl and, like the Good Man that he is, ask her if she wants a glass of beer, in effect ruining everything I’m trying to do. So, before he can say anything, I look at her and ask, “Don’t you agree?”

She raises an eyebrow. “I suppose so,” she says, and I push my glass towards her.

“I suppose it is somewhat of a shame,” Steve says, reaching for the pack of cigarettes and pulling out one for himself. “I rather liked the Good Man.”

“Ah,” I say, “but everyone liked the Good Man, to a certain degree.” As I lean into the table, I watch as the lineup girl does the same. “The trouble is, the Good Man is never going to be loved, and that is what the Good Man most desperately wants. And so, he must die, from the lack of it.”

“Well, I don’t know about you,” the lineup girl says, “but I personally have a preference for the Good Man.”

“You do?” Steve asks quickly.

“Sure,” she says, taking a long drag of her cigarette and crossing her legs.

“No you don’t,” I say, looking around behind me. A guy has just brought a pitcher and four glasses back to his empty table, and I wait until he’s looking towards the dance floor for his friends. When he does, I reach over and grab one of the glasses for myself, too quickly for anyone but our guest and Steve to see. Steve raises his eyebrows, but the lineup girl laughs. She has a deep-throated chuckle, which is too bad, because I know that Steve has a thing for girls with deep voices.

“And how do you know what I like?” the lineup girl says. “You don’t even know my name.”

“What your name might be means nothing,” I say, pouring myself a drink. “Nobody can love the Good Man. The Good Man is always beneath you, because he is always placing himself beneath you. The Good Man is always the easiest one to say no to, half the time because the Good Man is already saying no to himself.”

She takes a sip and squints at me, waiting for more.

“It’s not your fault,” I say, shrugging. “It’s exactly the same the other way around. The Kind Woman is dead too.”

“I don’t think she’s dead,” Steve mutters into his beer, which, surprisingly, is the best thing he can say at that moment. What Steve doesn’t realize that he’s doing is playing the foil. There isn’t much that’s more interesting than a pair of guys who are complete foils to each other. It’s easiest to find yourself in the middle of opposites, and it’s fun to watch, too. And, from the look of it, the lineup girl is eating it up.

“That’s sweet,” she says to him, patting him on the hand. “I don’t think she’s dead, either. Frankly, I don’t know what your friend’s problem is.”

“I’m Steve,” he says.

“I’m Amy,” she says, smiling back, before looking at me.

I just grin back.

“Alright, then,” she smiles, coyly, “you who are too good to have a name, why do you think the Kind Woman is dead?”

I look around the bar with a distracted look on my face, and shrug, smiling—in effect, dropping another Wall on her. I won’t tell you what Wall it is. If you haven’t figured it out by now, well, you’ll never understand.

I won’t bore you with the details of the ensuing conversation. Amy drops a little bit of a Wall on us too, being kind of vague about the store where she works and about her plans in life, whereas you could have written a book with what Steve is giving away about himself. Mostly, it’s talking about different topics of interest, mostly his interest, inspired by the various things going on around the club—music, clothing, homosexuality, the club scene, the drug scene. I don’t want you to think we’re really going into anything all that deeply, though. What’s more important is the body language we give each other, with her moving around in her seat, giving us various looks at her body, stealing obvious glimpses of ours, and even the odd random contact of knees under the table. Talk about the human animal at work.

So, after a good hour of intensely intricate discourse, Steve has to make a trip to the bathroom, and I go with him, not because I have anything in particular to say to him, but because I know, with the building energy that was present at the table as each successive topic unfolded, what’s coming. As we make our way through the smoke, the brightly flashing lights, and the sometimes-heterosexual couples in the midst of differing intimate complexities that we meet along the way, I can tell that Steve has a few things he wants to talk about.

“My Lord, Rod,” he says as he unzips before his urinal. “She’s amazing. I think she’s even flirting with us a little.”

“She’s not bad,” I say, undoing my pants.

“She’s not bad my ass,” Steve says, looking up at the posters on the wall in front of us. “Say, what’s the idea with you treating her that way? You want her to think you’re some kind of asshole?”

I shrug. “It’s all in good fun, Steve. Amy knows I’m just kidding around.”

“You better fucking hope so,” he says as he finishes his business and walks to the counter to wash his hands. “If she’s not at the table when we go back, I’m going to kick your ass.”

I laugh. As I do up my pants, the door opens. I see Amy’s deliberate walk from the corner of my eye as she enters the men’s room. I wish I could see how Steve’s face must be, as she struts in and touches him on the shoulder, saying, “Hi, Good Man,” before walking past him to the large men’s stall.

I go over to wash my hands, look at Steve, and say, “Well?”

As he walks into the stall—the one for handicapped people with that bar they use to help them onto the seat—I follow slowly behind, because I had long figured out that look that she had been passing back and forth between us at the table. The lineup girl doesn’t deny herself any experience she may find intriguing, and I could tell back at the table that she found the two of us pretty intriguing. Not separately, of course. Hell, I’m no idiot. In any other situation I wouldn’t ever have a chance with a girl like that, and I doubt Steve would either, not unless he manages to find some way to control his drooling. What I knew Amy wanted was something in between the two of us. Namely, herself.

When we walk in, Amy takes Steve’s hand and leads him to the toilet. For a moment, he stands there, dumfounded, as her fingers go down to his belt and undo it. He steadies himself against the toilet tank with his left hand, while with his right he seems somewhat unsure of what to do with it. She looks at his hand, and says, “It’s all right, you can touch me,” and then she squats before him.

He runs his hand through the curls in her hair as she brings his penis out and strokes it. He looks down at her with a bewildered expression on his face, and she looks up at him. Even though from my side of the stall I can’t tell for sure how she’s looking at him, deep down, I know she’s giving him the bright eyes and the kind smile, the sort that says, “Everything is going to be fine, Steven. It’s all going to be just fine.” Finally, he closes his eyes and lifts his face up to the ceiling, and he lets out a small whistle as she takes him into her mouth. Her dress is tight against her ass, and it is one beautiful ass, let me tell you. Her legs are spread apart, her knees on either side of his calves, and she’s supporting her awkward stance by cupping her hands around the back of his thighs. His free hand goes all around whatever of her he can touch, through the curled hair and around both her shoulders. At one point, he grabs her by the back of her head and cups it, and I wince, knowing how most of the girls I’ve talked to feel about that. Sure enough, she brings one of her hands up and pulls his away from her, but not wanting to spoil the mood too much, she keeps holding onto it, squeezing his fingers hard before returning his hand to the side of her face. Then she begins to change her technique, and she brings her mouth to the side of his shaft and licks it up and down, and with her free hand she plays his testicles around her fingertips. It’s at this time that she finally looks back at me.

Her eyes are saying, “What the hell are you waiting for?”

I come up slowly behind her, and she lifts her ass up, so that she’s no longer squatting but bent over, and she has to take hold of that handicapped bar so she won’t fall over or strain her back. I roll her skirt up and caress each of her buttocks, and as she continues to fellatiate Steve she lets out a slight moan. Finally, my hand goes up and pulls down her pantyhose and her underwear, and I can see that she’s the sort who enjoys keeping her pubic hair trimmed. I turn my palm upwards and slip my fingers underneath, rubbing the full of her crotch and stroking her clitoris. As she begins to moisten, I undo my pants and slide myself out. She lifts her butt even higher so I can bring my penis in between her legs, and when I do she lets out another moan. I put off inserting myself into her as long as I could, wanting to make sure she’s wet enough for it.

Finally, I enter her, and while she didn’t let out a moan this time, the entirety of her body tenses up. I take hold of her just underneath her stomach and bend my knees a little to alleviate some of her weight, and she brings her left hand to her chest and I assume—I can’t really see much from my vantage point—begins to rub one of her breasts.

Now, as far as I see it, there are a few ways of having sex with someone. Even looking at Steve right now, at the slight smile taking over his mouth as she continues, I know he’s the sort of guy who, when he is with someone he likes, is always making love. Never fucking, never having sex, but making love. Looking down at Amy, I can picture her being not quite so one-dimensional, enjoying fucking sometimes, enjoying just plain sex other times, and...

...and then I can picture her, the lineup girl, actually making love to somebody. It would be the lucky guy who happened to be available at the front of her lineup at just the right time, but the making love wouldn’t have happened right away, because lineup girls are just like most other ordinary people when it comes to needing time to trust people. It would’ve been having sex mostly at first, interspersed with the occasional fuck, until at one point, she’s actually realizing that he isn’t just the guy who happened to be at the front of her line, but also the sort of guy she might actually get in line for, and then suddenly, the possibility of really trusting him is occurring to her, and then, after a little bit longer, she realizes that she really does trust him, and she can tell he really trusts her, and then they, at some point during the sex, probably without even realizing it until it is actually happening, stop having sex and suddenly start making love, and oh my God what a lucky son of a bitch that guy is, not just because he’s good enough to be at the front of the line, but because he is with a girl that he is in the process of physically loving, and who is in the process of physically loving him...

This thought sort of develops in my mind as the three of us continue this little thing in the men’s room, and I realize that this is as close as I am going to get to a girl like this, not making love, not even having sex, really, but just fucking, and that’s it. Then, I decide if I’m just fucking this girl, I might as well really fuck her, and not anything less. So I grab her by her hips and stand fully up, and I start going into her harder, and when I can hear her making noises around Steve’s cock in her mouth I began to speed up even faster, and I keep going harder, hoping I’m making this hurt her back a little, and then hoping I’m making this hurt her back a whole lot, and she has to scramble with her other hand to support it against the wall behind Steve, who throughout all this still has his face pointed at the ceiling, his eyes closed and his mouth open and the corners of his lips curved slightly upwards. Amy, however, feeling what I was doing, twists her body a little so that she can continue what she’s doing to Steve but, at the same time, look back me from the corner of her eye.

I stare at her as I fuck her harder, and she takes it, and even though what I’m doing is probably way out of line according to the usual spontaneous-sex-in-a-bathroom-with-a-stranger etiquette, I can tell she’s not expecting me to stop. Instead, she has this look in her eyes, saying, “That’s it, you asshole, that’s right. We’ll play it your way. But this is all you’re ever going to know from me. From anyone. Just fucking. Keep going, you son of a bitch. Be an asshole. You’re good at it.”

So I do, and when I’m about to come, I bring myself out, and I spurt like a rifle onto Steve’s shirt, Amy’s hair, and in lines along down the back of her outfit.

All things considered, Amy’s a really good sport about me getting her clothes all messed. When we get out of the stall, a few surprised faces watch as we clean ourselves up. We go back outside to sit at our original table, and we have another round of beer, before Amy says that she has to go meet someone, and she gets up to leave. Steve is noticeably disappointed by this, and he asks for her phone number. Amy squints her eyes at him with a perplexed look on her face, before saying that her name is listed in the phone book. Steve smiles, and waves as she walks off. Five minutes afterwards, his face suddenly drops, and he asks me, “Do you remember if she told us her last name?” I decide not to bother explaining it to him. He, like Lily, has a lot to learn.

“So, what do you feel like doing now?” Steve finally asks, after we’ve been sitting around for another half-hour in a very anti-climatic state, watching the dance floor get more and more crowded as we get closer to midnight.

I don’t want to say so out loud, but I really feel like ditching Steve at this point. As far as I’m concerned, if I stay with him for the rest of the evening, we’ll probably end up having no fun. And, despite the excitement from earlier in the bathroom, I’m not nearly ready to call it a night just yet.

“I think I should be heading home,” I say bluntly, hoping I won’t have to make up a false explanation.

Steve doesn’t seem phased. “Yeah, I think I’m done for tonight too,” he says, and we grab our coats and head for the exit. The line into Nemesis has gotten massive, and none of those people waiting to get in spark my interest very much—either guys who’re dressed to pick up or girls who’re dressed to get picked up. Not my type of crowd, not right now.

So Steve and I walk to the top of our street before hitting the boulevard, where he’ll be turning right and I would keep going straight. As we walk by the working girls, Steve turns to me with a smile and says, “Have any of that Boulevard Heartache?”

I shake my head. “Even if an overblown libido was symptomatic one of the five stages of grief, my friend, I think the last remnants of that are back in the washroom.”

He laughs, turns right, and says, “Fare thee well, oh jolly asshole.”

“And a good night to you sir, the Good Man,” I say, and watch him walk off.

When he’s safely out of view, I turn around, and begin to walk back towards the harbour.