Take It Off by J. Minter Read Free Book Online Page A

bottle of Boucheron Homme.
    â€œWhatever.”
    Mickey twisted the trash bag shut and kicked it under the bed. The cans made a gigantic rattling noise, and that shut Arno up. Mickey crossed his arms across his chest and said, “Challenge.”
    â€œGuys,” Jonathan said, “can’t you remember one simple rule?”
    Arno shrugged and looked back at Mickey. “Fuck the old rules. May the best man win.”
    â€œI’m all for that,” Mickey said. He threw his head back and let out a loud war whoop.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond …
    â€œTwo Jäger shots!” Rob yelled over the whooping and howling of the Bulgarian Bar’s Saturday night crowd. The bartender, a petite brunette with a vague whiff of the international about her, nodded impassively and put two shot glasses in front of him. He leaned in against the bar and ran his fingers through his hair. “Make it three. One for me, one for
mi amigo Daveed, y uno también para ti, mi amor
.”
    Earlier that evening, as they consumed a dinner of french fries with mayo and grappa at Le Père Pinard, Rob had described the Bulgarian Bar to David. “It is super-cool, it is like pure chaos. One of the few places you can experience pure Bacchic chaos in our technocratic society of today,” he explained, gesticulating and lighting a new cigarette with his old one. His English vocabulary increased suddenly, as though he were quoting something. David nodded, although this sounded suspiciously like the form of extreme therapy that his father, Sam Grobart, had helped pioneer in the seventies.
    It was a cold night, and they had to walk through a slushy pile of snow left over from the storm to get to the entrance. The place was on the second floor of a building on East Canal Street, and the klezmer/punk/dance music was already deafening as they came up the stairs. David was secretly relieved to see how dense and manic the crowd was. He’d been feeling self-conscious about his usual Nikes/jeans/white T-shirt uniform all night. But the atmosphere inside the Bulgarian was riotous enough that David could be pretty sure nobody cared what he was wearing.
    David stood fidgeting behind Rob, who was laying it on thick with the bartender.
    â€œSalud!”
Rob yelled, elbowing David to pick up his shot. They threw them back. David shook himself back into focus and saw that the bartender was smiling at him mischievously. Before he could think what to do, she leaned across the bar and kissed him full on the mouth. He thought guiltily about Amanda Harrison Deutschmann, his still-sort-of-girlfriend. But then all he could think about was how good kissing somebody new felt. The bartender pulled away and winked at him, and before he knew what he was doing, David leaned over the bar and was kissing her heavily.
    When he stepped back, the crowd around him erupted in cheers at the public make-out session. Robpatted him on the back appreciatively. “Next girl’s mine, okay?” he whispered to David, sounding like he was half kidding. Then he turned back to the bartender. “Another round,
bella
,” he said, waving a twenty in the air. “And two Heinekens.”
    â€œThose are on me, boys,” she said in a hard-to-place European accent.
    They took their drinks, the bartender still smiling coyly at David, and headed to one of the booths in the shadows.
    The center of the room was like a high-fashion mosh pit. Skinny Polish girls were being swung around by the jumping, yelling dudes. The music was just about the loudest David had ever heard. They watched for a minute, and then Rob yelled, “C’mon!” and tried to pull him up and onto the dance floor. Before David could say “I don’t dance,” he was swept up into a very fast, very drunk crowd of people.
    Girls started to come up to them from the dance floor. David looked over and saw that Rob was dancing pretty suggestively with some