Wonderland

“Rainbows Playing Putt Putt” by Edward Michael Supranowicz

“You look awful young.”

The bald man is holding your license, rubbing his fat finger across the surface and squinting his eyes. His barrel of a chest is too big for his black T-shirt, so the grinning cat in the Wonderland logo is stretched almost beyond recognition.

A wave of impatient sighs rises from the line of men behind you. The walls of the narrow entranceway vibrate with sound and you can hear Madonna pleading with you to justify her love. Her love. Her love.

“Chrissakes.” Larry stands in front of you, just beyond the bouncer. “You say that to him every week,” Larry says.

It doesn’t matter what Larry looks like. You and Larry aren’t friends, not really.

Larry has a car.

“When were you born?” The bald man says. You think his name might be Barry, and that he might be straight, but you can’t remember who told you that. It makes sense though. The blond bouncer on Wednesday nights never cards you.

“1973,” you say.

“He’s eighteen,” Larry says. “Same as he was last week.”

The man who might be Barry draws an X across the back of your hand with a black marker. “No alcohol,” he says. You nod and follow Larry through the glass door.

Take away the colored lights, and the fog machine, and the neon-trimmed bar that runs all the way down one wall, and Wonderland is just a giant brick box. Right now, it is a giant brick box that is pulsing with bass so loud that it’s hard to distinguish it from your own heartbeat. Madonna is writhing in a bathrobe on a giant screen above the bar, still waiting for you to justify her love. Her love. Her love.

“I hate this song,” Larry says. “I’m going to get a drink.”

You don’t like Larry.

Usually there’s a group of you, all summer staff at an amusement park about an hour from the city. Usually, you all pile into a couple of cars and ride to Wonderland together. And then after, all sweaty and giddy and smelling like Eternity and beer, you all squeeze into an oversized booth at Denny’s for waffles and post-club gossip. Usually, you like that part of the night the best. You don’t talk much, but you like being part of the group.

Tonight is the first time there’s only two of you. The summer is almost over, and you feel like some of the guys are already starting to disconnect, starting to turn back into whoever they were in West Virginia or Michigan or wherever they left to come here. Plus, it was all over the news last week that some guy in Milwaukee was picking up men in gay bars and then cutting them up and fucking their heads, or something. Sure, that was five hundred miles away, and the guy was in jail now, but some of your friends were still freaked out. “How do you know any random guy in the bar isn’t another Dahmer?” one of them said. “Until he’s staring at your severed head with his dick in his hand?”

You laughed at that. Larry laughed too. And Larry has a car.

So tonight it’s just you and Larry. Except he’s already across the room getting ignored by the bartenders, so really, it’s just you. The dance floor takes up at least half of the club, loosely defined by strings of purple rope lights on the floor. You stand near the purple border and lean against the brick wall with one hand in your pocket and the other hanging at your side. You’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about what to do with that other hand. You think this is the best option. You think this looks like you’re relaxed, like you aren’t trying too hard, like you haven’t spent an entire summer thinking about it. 

The crowd is smaller tonight, but it’s still kind of early. A few dozen men are dancing. It’s hard to see them clearly, because fog is rising from unseen vents, a chest-high tide of white mist transforming their bodies into silhouettes, dark shapes undulating through artificial clouds. The fog never reaches the top of the giant wooden boxes that line the wall on the far side of the dance floor. It wouldn’t dare.

The box boys don’t like to be obscured.

There are four boxes. They are about four feet high, and each is painted a different color. Red. White. Yellow. Blue. You aren’t sure if they hide speakers or if they are there solely to provide elevation for the boys that dance on them. Some nights there are enough of them that they share the boxes. Tonight there are only four.

You’ve heard that the box boys aren’t employed by the club, that they aren’t an official group. In theory, anyone could climb onto one of those boxes and dance beneath the giant neon Chesire Cat grin suspended above them. One of your friends, after a round of Jager shots, tried to climb onto the blue box one night, but the rest of the group pulled him back down.

You stare at them, eyes scanning from box to box, never settling long enough to make eye contact. All four are wearing white T-shirts tonight, with the collars torn into a deep V. They each dance in their own style but remain inexplicably in sync. As one grinds their hips into the air, another moves his shoulders, and a third rolls his head, giving the impression that a wave of kinetic energy is moving from the top of one box to the next, connecting them all with the lost language of movement. You let your hips sway a little as you watch them, looking around to see if anyone notices.

Thing is, you know you’re pretty. But you’re late-blooming-boy-from-Michigan pretty. You’re dandelions and dirt roads and lightning bugs in a jar pretty. The box boys, with their liquid bodies and their severe eyebrows and their swimsuit catalog hair, they are a whole different kind of pretty.

You are thinking about switching things up, maybe crossing your arms over your chest, when you notice one of the box boys stop mid-dance to kneel down and plant a kiss on the cheek of a man standing on the dance floor below him. The fog is starting to clear out now, and you see the man is standing with his back against the box, facing your direction. He has dark hair and he is wearing a black biker jacket, and you can see his blue eyes from all the way across the room. And you’re pretty sure he’s looking at you.

Probably not.

You look around the club, see if you can spot Larry. It’s gotten busier now, and your view of the bar is blocked. You look back across the dancefloor. The blue-eyed man is definitely looking at you. Except, his eyes are more violet than blue. You know that because he’s closer now.

He is handsome. Not just gay bar handsome. He’s that kind of handsome that’s reserved for Hollywood vampires and soap opera doctors.

He is only a few feet away when you realize that your free hand has repositioned itself and is now sitting on your hip Mae West style. You panic and lift it up, but now it’s too late and he is standing right in front of you and you’re holding your hand out in the air like you’re swatting at something.

He’s close. He’s too close. You can smell the leather of his jacket.

“Hi,” he says.

At least, it looks like that is what he’s saying. The music is too loud to know for sure.

“Hi,” you say back, except when you say it, it sounds more like a question.

He smiles and says something that you can’t hear. He is old, maybe thirty. When he talks, you can see a tiny crinkle form in the corner of his eye. He puts a hand on the brick wall behind you and leans in so that his mouth is closer to your ear.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you here before,” he says. There is a dark rasp to his voice and his breath smells like clove cigarettes.

You worry that you might be getting a hard-on.

“I’m usually with a group of friends,” you say. There is no way to put your hand back down to your side now. You could lay it across your chest, but that would be weird. You could put it on his shoulder, but—

He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small silver flask. He unscrews the top and sets the flask in your hand. “You seem like you might need this,” he says.

You turn your hand to the side to show him the X-shaped ink mark.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” he says.

You take too large a sip from the flask and somehow keep yourself from coughing. You take a second sip before handing the flask back. You’re not sure if the whiskey is raising your internal body temperature, or if the man’s torso is actually radiating heat, but you are suddenly too warm. You shift your weight from one foot to the other and start to stumble forward. He catches you.

You are pretty sure you’re getting a hard-on.

He suggests that you move to one of the high-top tables near the front of the club. There, you stand next to him, leaning on the table. You talk for a while. He tells you he used to be a bartender at Wonderland. You tell him about the amusement park, and the friends that usually come to the club with you, and how it’s just you and Larry tonight, and how you don’t like Larry.

He lets you take another drink from the flask and asks why your friends all stayed home.

You do cough this time.

“They are all a little freaked out,” you say. “You know, Jeffrey Dahmer and all.”

You cough again, but this time it’s mostly to cover up what you just said.

“I get it,” he says. “You just never know who you might be talking to.” As he says this, he leans toward you and traces his index finger across your neck in a faux slicing motion.

You definitely have a hard-on.

Later, when you are sitting in the front seat of his car in the parking lot, he puts his hand on your thigh and it sort of feels the same way there that the whiskey felt on your throat. You can’t hear the club’s music now, but it must be locked into your physical memory because the inside of your body is still pulsing to Wonderland’s rhythm. You can feel the bass of your heartbeat, but instead of your chest, it now seems to emanate from the tips of his fingers on your leg.

He leans toward you, and you can see a glint of a nearby streetlight in his eye, and then his mouth is on yours. You think you’re supposed to close your eyes for this, but you don’t. His eyes are open too, staring into yours while your lips mash together. But then his tongue is in your mouth and you close your eyes. And somehow your tongue is in his mouth at the same time, and you wonder if he is still watching you. You wonder if he can see your raised eyebrows and your twitching eyelids and how you want his hand to burn through your jeans and leave a permanent brand on your thigh.

That’s when you remember that you never said anything to Larry when you left. Maybe he left too, or maybe he is searching the bar for you, swearing he’ll never drive you there again. 

The man’s hand stays on your thigh for the whole drive across the river to the duplex where he lives in the upstairs apartment. When you think back to this, you won’t remember the furniture in the living room, or the little kitchenette. You will remember the narrow, wood-paneled hallway, because while you are walking down it, you are also kissing him and your arms are around one another, and your bodies are bouncing against one wall and then the other. And at one point you don’t think you can feel the floor at all and you think he might be holding you up, your back sliding across the wall.

And then you’re on the bed, and your clothes are in a pile somewhere near the bedroom door. The lights are off, but there is a little bit of moonlight coming in the window. Just enough for you to see the outline of his body on top of you. The broad chest. The wide shoulders. The Cheshire smile. He leans down and kisses your neck, sucks at it in a way that makes your fingers stiffen and your jaw drop open. Then he presses his mouth against your ear and growls.

“Have you done this before?”

You don’t know how to answer. You aren’t exactly sure what this is, but you don’t think that the time you went down on your best friend in the middle of a corn field the summer after your junior year counts as this. You think that you shake your head, but he is sucking on your neck again, and it is making you lose track of the mechanics of your body. You close your eyes. When you open them, he is kneeling between your thighs, looking down at you, and pushing your legs apart with his knees.

There is more happening than this. You know that. There are things that happen in between. Things with mouths and fingers. There are gasps and whispers, the sound of a plastic tube belching out satiny liquid. You won’t remember those things. You’ll think maybe you remember the subtle scent of latex, but you won’t know for sure.

You will remember that he has his hands under your legs and he’s pushing them back to your chest. He’s staring down at you, and it occurs to you that since he first saw you across the dance floor, you don’t think he’s ever shut his eyes. And you don’t think that anyone has ever looked at you like that before.

When he’s inside you, it hurts in a way that surprises you. A way that you can’t make sense of. Like a hundred shots of whiskey on your throat. Like a hand burning into your thigh.

And then it changes. The pain becomes something else, something electric. A million lightning bugs roaring inside a glass jar. For a second you think you are back inside the club because your body is pulsing with bass again, a beat throbbing from your gut to your brain, louder than anything in Wonderland. So loud that it overtakes your body, vibrating your muscles in time to its relentless rhythm. You hope that it transforms you, that it changes you from the inside out. You hope that it drowns out the sounds of dirt roads and dandelions and turns you into a new kind of pretty. The kind of pretty that climbs up out of the fog and dances under a neon grin. 

You think, maybe, you’ll take the red box.   

About the Author

Craig Anderson is a writer, L&D consultant, and part-time Chiromancer. His work has appeared in the Eckerd Review, The Coffin Bell Two Anthology, Glitterwolf Magazine and other publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University. Craig lives with his husband in St. Petersburg, FL (but he'll always be a Detroiter at heart). You can find him on twitter @wildcraigdom.

about the artist

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door Is a Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet.