"NO, NOAH. ALIENS DID NOT EAT YOUR GREMLIN."
It was two o'clock in the morning and we couldn't find my beloved car, Ginny the Gremlin, pale blue on the outside with a burgundy and brown herringbone interior. Getting behind the wheel was like biting into something that looked chalky and boring, like Maalox, and discovering it gushed sweetness, like chocolate and cherries.
It was just Ev, Crock, and me. We'd been kicked out of the Satyricon a whole hour before and had spent our time threading the downtown streets trying to find my car. Finally I threw up my hands and said that maybe aliens had eaten her. Because that was the only explanation. It was 1984 and everyone knew an alien invasion would happen at any time, and that when they overran us, they would be wearing silver jumpsuits, permed hair, and jungle-cat eye shadow.
Crock and Ev and I joked about it all the time, but right now Ev didn't think it was so funny. And who could blame him? We were stranded and out of ideas, and by the looks of it he had another migraine coming on.
He was leaning against a beige brick wall of the PfefferBrau Haus, his rainbow dreads falling around his shoulders. His face was scrunched tight and he was pinching his nose. He used to say he could feel those headaches before they hit, they were like a halo of pain. That was when he was supposed to catch it, when it was just a halo. Not later, when his head felt like someone had pinched it in a vise and screwed it up tight.
I had to get him out of there soon.
We really needed my car.
The only thing we could agree on was that we'd parked it next to a dumpster by the PfefferBrau Haus, but here was the problem: The PfefferBrau Haus took up multiple city blocks, and the brewery wasn't exactly square. It had alleys. It had grain chutes. It had skybridges. It had railroad tracks (railroad tracks!) with no trains. It had multiple corners with multiple dumpsters, and that nasty smell like someone was cooking cereal in tomato soup.
"Let's circle around one more time. Maybe we left it on the other side of the brewery."
"Please don't say 'brew,'" Crock contributed from the curb, where he was unhelpfully sitting, head between his knees, waiting for Ev and me to solve the problem of how we were going to get twelve miles home to Gresham.
I hated Crock so much at that moment. Bad enough that, thanks to a passable fake ID, he'd been in the bar shotgunning microbrews, leaving Ev and me stranded in the mosh pit, and that he borrowed my "I Have Seen the Abyss and Went to Denny's" button without asking and was wearing it now, flecked with spew.
But honestly: Couldn't he have made an effort? As it was, that drunk homeless guy in the tinfoil hat was more helpful. At least he had raised his head when we asked him about my Gremlin, and muttered something about monstrous evil lurking in the bowels of the city, blah blah blah. You know, the whole end-is-nigh crap.
"Maybe we're remembering the sign wrong. Maybe we left it in front of the plasma center?" Ev asked. His voice came out all wrong, like a grunt. We all donated plasma. It was like donating blood, only for cash. Not much cash, though. Just enough for the latest Ramones album.
I shook my head. There was no mistaking the Pfeffer-Brau Haus. And then there was its history. I'm not a superstitious guy, but the only reason I'd parked here was that no one else wanted to. It was as though what happened to Sherell Wexler was contagious, even though that's stupid. After all, you can't catch a case of having your throat slit and being shoved into a vat of porter, can you?
This place creeped all of us out. All the more reason to forget about the piece of paper in my pocket.
I slipped my hand in to make sure it was still there. And it was. I knew without looking it was the color of beer froth and blood. I had the writing on it memorized, having folded it and unfolded it a million times in the club bathroom, to the beat of synthesizers and drum machines cranking out a rhythm that, whatever it was, wasn't music.
Ev bent over. He had a bad case of grow-out. Under the dreadlocks was a layer of baby-fine blond hair. They were impressive dreads, long and dyed all the colors of the rainbow. Our senior class at Gresham High had voted him Most Unique-a title I clearly deserved-just because he had better hair than any white guy living or dead.
He said, "Listen, I know how much you love your car, man-"
"Ginny. Her name is Ginny."
"-but I think we should call your sister. Just for tonight. We'll look for your car in the morning."
He was right. It was the middle of the night and we were stranded in the warehouse district of northwest Portland. The buses had stopped running hours ago. We didn't have enough cash for a cab to Gresham.
We were screwed.
That was when Ev's eyes squeezed shut in pain. He slammed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and doubled over. You would think I would be used to that by now, since Ev's suffered from migraines since puberty, but I'd never seen him like this. He was writhing on the sidewalk, rolling right on the black spots of old gum and cigarette butts.
I rushed over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "You okay, Ev? You pack your meds?"
"DOES IT LOOK LIKE I BROUGHT A PURSE?" he barked. "Shit!"
I remember thinking, Oh god. This isn't a migraine. Something else is going on-when he appeared, the guy who was about to change all our lives.
He came out of the brewery shadows, walking loose-limbed and easy.
The hair was what I noticed first. It was egg-yolk yellow and poufy and high. He looked in our direction without seeming to really see us. He was wearing a loose blue shirt under a yellow thousand-dollar jacket, and he exuded cool.
Could it be… ? He looked a lot like David Bowie. And we would know, because Ev won a look-alike contest that netted him a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Jojo's Records. This was years ago, in his pre-dread days, when all his hair was still blond and baby fine.
Behind me, Evan groaned. I propped him up against a wall, but he slid down it, his eyes practically rolling back into his brain.
And Crock? Crock still had his head between his knees. So I was the only one who saw the guy. And real thing or wannabe, he was here, he wasn't vomiting into a storm drain, and his eyes weren't yellow and unfocused, like the drunk in the tinfoil hat. We needed help and we needed it now.
I went right up to the guy in the thousand-dollar suit. Even his eyes were freaky and mismatched, like the real Bowie's. One of them was all pupil.
"Hey, mister," I said. "Can you help us out? My friend here is sick and we can't find my car. Have you seen it? It's a '78 Gremlin. Maalox colored."
Bowie casually lit a cigarette, crooked a finger that meant Follow me, and disappeared back into the shadows.
I still don't know why I followed him. What kind of idiot was I, following a strange man into a brewery where they brewed teenage girls? I could've been jumped. I could've gotten my throat cut, my punk ass cooked. Following that guy was dangerously stupid.
I knew all this, but Evan needed help. Without my car, I couldn't get him home.
I took my first step into the darkness. Then another. And another, sure I was about to bonk into a brick wall. But I didn't, because there was no wall where Bowie had disappeared. There was open air, a space wider than my arm span. It had been camouflaged in the shadows.
Two steps later, my whole body slammed into something huge and metallic that smelled like garbage and had a hollow ring to it.
Another dumpster.
I felt along its sides, and when it ended, my knees rammed into something just as metallic, only pointier. The grille of my car.
I pulled the keys out of my back pocket and felt my way to Ginny's driver's side, unlocking the door. The interior light came on, and there was the chocolate/cherry upholstery. I sank into it, running my hands along the dash. I may have kissed the steering wheel.
I was about to start the engine when there was a rap on my window. I jumped into the stratosphere.
Two great mismatched eyes were staring at me from under a cap of poufy yellow hair.
I cranked the window down.
"You need to get your mate some aspirin. The All-Nite Pantry on Burnside's still open."
I closed my eyes and listened to his voice. It was lyrical-even the English accent had overtones.
I wasn't a shaking-hands kind of guy, but I held out my hand anyway. "Thanks, mister… ?"
"You can call me Ziggy," he said, thrusting his own hands in his pockets. Apparently he wasn't the shaking-hands type either.
"Thanks, Ziggy. We were in a bad way." I started the engine.
See? I thought to myself. Nothing freaky about him. No hunting knife. Just a well-dressed look-alike who'd happened to save our asses.
And just as I convinced myself that everything was normal, Ziggy said something that blew me into the stratosphere again.
"Oh, and Noah, you need to show them the flyer in your pocket. There's a darkness coming. I know you can feel it. Someone needs to make a stand, son. It has to be here. It has to be you."
With that, he stood back, hitched up his collar, rapped twice on the roof of my car, strolled back into the shadows, and was gone.