Black Wave

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Michelle wasn’t sure when everyone started hanging out at the Albion. She had managed to pass the corner dive for years without going inside, simply noting the dank, flat-beer stink wafting from its open doors, catching the glow of the neon sign hung above the bar — SERVICE FOR THE SICK — in hot, red loops. It seemed that all the other dives had been purchased and repurposed, renovated and sold to a different clientele. The purple-lit bar where middle-aged, working-class bulldaggers nursed beers at the counter was, overnight, converted into a heterosexual martini bar where men who smoked actual cigars drank chocolate martinis and harassed the women who passed by on Valencia. It was 1999.

Aside from the neon sign glowing its sinister pronouncement, the Albion’s other notable fixture was Fernando, a man who wore a mullet and a leather vest and carried a brown paper bag, the sort a mother will pack her child’s lunch in. It contained cocaine heavily cut with baby laxative. Michelle and her friends would pool their resources and walk into the women’s restroom with Fernando, who would tear a page from the stack of Cosmopolitan and Glamour in the corner, origami it into a little envelope, and dip it into his sack of drugs. The rumor on Fernando was that he used to work for the government, the FBI or the CIA, and was so hooked up with the most corrupt corners of the system that he was immune from being busted. Everyone felt very safe buying drugs from Fernando in the women’s restroom at the Albion.

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