Inside the smoke

You hate the city for the very reason that it’s like a giant cinderblock and every hole is filled with someone you know or someone your friends know. You can’t make it from the University to the centre of town without having to stop by somewhere to say hello to someone. Stop by in some basement where some noisecore band is playing, to see some girls that are there because they love the bass player. You just want to get back to the hotel and get some fucking sleep. Instead you’re feeling your way down some slimy set of steps into a cesspool of sweaty, muscular bodies. The band is making music that sounds like

Fight.Fight.Fight.FightFight.Fight.Fight.FightFight.Fight.

and the crowd are undulating like a cyst, tearing at the walls, tearing at each other’s hair and piercings. You find a corner to hide in, while your friends try and talk to their friends over the racket. You scan the crowd, terrified to see someone from the past, from when you were in places like this every weekend. Your eyes come to rest on a guy in the centre of the pit. And you hope it isn’t him. But he’s got the same grizzly beard. The same neck tattoo rising up from underneath his shirt. The same disc sized bits of metal in his ears. Your insides start to unravel inside of you, but before you can look away he catches your eye, and three years shrinks into a speck of dust suspended inside the shafts of stage light. And you’re back where he left you. So you run away, scale the rusted spiral staircase up to the mezzanine, fight for a wedge of space in between the kids dry fucking and snorting powder. You pull a cigarette from your pocket with your shaking hands, somehow manage to light it and exhale the plume of smoke. You watch the silken vapours floating in the air, forming the shape of a water dragon that you call Goaty Pete. His limbs are the colour of gossamer, but are as thick as woodcut lines. You exhale another breath of smoke and his paranormal wings unfold.
‘What’s wrong chief?’ he asks me.
‘NC’s here,’ you tell him.
His ghostly hands stroke his pointy beard.
‘So what?’ he says.
‘I haven’t seen him for the longest time,’ you reply, ‘not since…’
‘Exactly. It’s been a long time chief,’ he says, ‘things are different now’.
‘No,’ you say.
‘Why not?’ he asks.
‘Because he made me,’ you say, 'he believed in me when no one else did, let me join his band, trusted me to write the songs. He made me an artist.'
‘He didn’t know you at Uni,’ Pete says, his claws sweeping at you like a glass fan, ‘he doesn’t know what the teachers are telling you now, about how far you can go.’
‘I want to believe in the future,’ you say, ‘but when I saw him all I wanted…all I wanted was for him to shake my hand like he did when we were brothers.’
Goaty Pete swims around in front of your eyes, stroking his beard, scratching his donkey ears. Then he says: ‘Maybe just be happy that you’ve got friends now who love you for you, not just because they think you can make them famous.’
The cigarette is burning down to the quick.
‘I’ve gotta go, Goaty Pete,' I say, 'thanks for the words.’
He salutes me.
‘Glad I could help chief.’
You grind the cigarette into the ground, and are getting up off the slimy floor when your friend grabs your arm.
‘Let’s go,’ she says, brushing ash off your shoulder, ‘this band fucking sucks.’