The Change Room

“WHAT?”

“I SAID, YOU WANT ME TO GO WITH YOU?? LOTTA SKEEVY DUDES HANG AROUND BACK THERE!”

“I’M GOOD! THANKS!”

“WHAT?”

Madison waved it away and began the gauntlet toward the indeed skeevy and cannabis-and-piss-scented hallway to the rear of The Mill, ignoring the roman hands, the fondling and brushing and inebriated oopsy-doodles, the redcoating and scibzing, the Friday preddos and thirsty eddies packed beyond fire capacity into the bar. There was like a thesaurus the size of the presumably defunct Chicago White Pages just for the pervs, and Madison had earned a doctorate in the jargon and its application.

Along with a crucial immunity to the practitioners of the dark and dirty arts. Eyes on the prize, some sister had told her in ’74 at the joint where on a Saturday night Motown and Hendrix and EWF nearly shook the brass off its moorings. They sold biodegradable candles and incense and mystical pebbles there now, which seemed a sort of temporally lateral move save that a far more upscale and legitimized crowd was rubbing elbows with the metaphysical and power smoking for the old BP.

Madison didn’t look back. Nature abhors a vacuum, and some drunk and horny soul’d likely already oozed into the space she’d vacated. Abby or Andi or whatever she’d hollered over the band and the brews and the bros was on her own, and Madison silently offered an agnostic prayer for her continued safety and dignity. Annie or Angie or Avi had no idea she’d seen her last of her temporary pool buddy.

She breezed between the two skeevy dudes blocking the path to the women’s, like Cerberus with two bodies, a single hungry canine gaze, and two brains short.

**

Madison emerged fresh and this time blonde. The Helldawgs had vanished, and the black corridor was now a bright and bold red, plastered with band flyers and lightly spiced with spilled beer and pop-up deodorizer. Though the remodeled toilet “still” had the ambience of a Walmart black-ops interrogation room, Madison blinked as she reentered the long bright barroom, precarious on Spice Girls platforms. The Clueless look would have appealed to the bare legalists in the crowd, but she’d done her Wiki, and so she’d grunged it up with some aftermarket-distressed Guess jeans and the snug Nirvana tee she’d eyed a dozen times and was kind of stoked to debut tonight.

This was Central Illinois –only space needle here was the downtown WMIL-FM tower where Verizon had been earlier or maybe later in the evening – and so the band was pumping “The King of Wishful Thinking” from the hooker rom-com her mom had watched ad nauseum while she was growing up and onward, and would probably be catching a third time this weekend at the late University Cinema.

Well, maybe.

The band was transitioning from Go West to Queen – nope, Vanilla Ice -- as Madison spotted him near the corner of the bar, talking up the crop-topped redhead behind the taps. He was pretty much as advertised – almost hot, red-flag charming, big dumb grin like the wolf in the old Disney Golden Book Grandma had recited to her over and over and, as dementia had set in, over once again and again. She’d inherited it from Mom, though the central hook about lupine pathology obviously had escaped her. Or maybe Grandma Theobald simply injected a little more stank into Madison’s version of the tale, experience being the teacher and all.

“Band’s really rad, huh?” she half-shouted, half-amusing herself as she took the next stool and the redhead gratefully retreated. He twitched slightly, then turned slowly, locking in about six inches below Madison’s clavicle and lingering a half-second before panning up with a lazy, studied grin. He wasn’t much of a study, but Madison beamed.

“Ice is a pussy, but except for a little Bon Jovi, so’s most of what these pussies have been doing tonight. Nirvana? Never heard of ‘em, him, her, whatever.”

Madison paused to scan his face. “’Smells Like Teen Spirit’?”

“Yeah, dude down the bar horked earlier, and it took ‘em forever to clean it up.”

“Ah.” She could tell he was three or four rounds into the evening, and maybe Kobain was just too pussy for Craig here. Madison pictured him as a hair metal guy, Poison, Whitesnake, Axel and the boys – the kind of stuff she’d haul off to Vinyl Destination after Mom’s hands turned cold and dead. The bored hipster behind the counter had given her $14 for the stack, but respected the vintage knowledge the Gen-Zer had accumulated over the past half-century. As it would turn out, Nevermind wasn’t or wouldn’t be released until ’91, but maybe Madison had simply gotten ahead of the Cobain train. Plus, another tidbit to share with Man-Bun at the record shop should she ever discover another treasure trove behind the basement water heater.

“Yeah, getting a little tired of this shit myself,” Madison sighed. “Wanna get out of here?”

Despite his impairment, Craig didn’t have to be asked twice. Spotting the tall brunette squinting and scanning the room just inside the entrance, Madison suggested they exit to the rear. Which seemed to doubly please Big Bad. One Saturday night at home wouldn’t hurt, though Mom would never realize it.

**

It had been quick – unlike Craig, Madison was a quick study. And tidy – no one had noticed her return to The Mill for a speedy and efficient washup, and The Old Mill’s lunch crowd had paid little heed to the auburn-haired drink of water in cardigan-and-capris who’d emerged from the back hall. The kitten heels were far more comfortable than the platforms, and she breezed confidently past the Pabst and Blatz signs flickering on the backbar mirror and the assortment of men in suits and coveralls and hardhats and uniforms who wanted a little more than an orangeade at the Woolworth’s on the courthouse square. On her opposite flank, a table of attorneys including the spitting Mad Men image and probably grandfather of the billboard guy who’d handle Mom’s estate were sharing ex parte war stories, while the secretaries in Peter Pan collars and full skirts next door were spilling the tea in what they thought were furtive tones.

The guy at the flat-top was smashing burgers 10 or 11 presidents ahead of the foodies while listening to the scratchy early innings of a Cubs game on an analog radio spotted with the grease of a postwar decade. Madison caught the eternal and unchanging gaze of the young bartender and paid him an admonishing grin, and ignored the ugly chortle of the Courthouse Roundtable as she passed.

He was on a stool in front of a shiny new OG pizza oven – Grandma had gone on about Tony deLuca coming back from the war with a notebook of recipes and a GI loan he used to bring Roman-style ‘za to the Millingtonians. DeLuca’s thin crust, square-cut “tavern pizza” was designed for the one-fisted drinker, and Frank was giving a demo for the noontime pack, shoving rectangles of cheese and sauce into his still-firm jaw with a three-fingered grip on a sweaty mug of the Schlitz that likely had cost the drill press operator a pinky and its next-door neighbor.

“Excuse me, Sir?” Madison inquired. Frank glanced up, eyebrows arched as he brushed a crumb from his mustache. “Do you mind much if I just sit here next to you while I wait for the boss’s order? I’m a little uncomfortable in bars, but he just had to have one of Mr. deLuca’s burgers. Those gentlemen over there were looking rather strangely at me, and I don’t like it at all. I’m sure this doesn’t look very proper…”

Frank craned around her, and gave the lawyers an exaggerated scowl. He patted the leatherette stool beside him as he licked his lower lip. “Don’t you worry, sweetie. I bring my niece in here every once in a while, and nobody says a word.”  

Madison’s grateful smile faltered – nobody had indeed, not for years. “Thank you, Mr….”

“You just call me Frank. Uncle Frank if you want.”

She nodded, settling in and biding time ‘til the barkeep brought him a new brew and they began handicapping Sam Jones’ prospects for the season to fish the vial out of her clutch…

**   

As five attorneys worked unsuccessfully to play doctor to the middle-aged lush now shutting down on the scarred plank floor, not even the skeevy bartender gave her so much as a glance her way. Her secret formula, karmically pilfered from Grandma’s old stash, didn’t fully kick in ‘til she was halfway back to the rear hall, and, in 1956, it was untraceable medically or forensically – if anybody even suspected Great-Uncle Frank might have perished by other than his own, greasy, Schlitz-stained eight-fingered hands.

At the worst, Madison’d spared the fucker a far lower rung in Hell, if indeed, Hell and quantum physics worked that way. At best? Well, she’d never much pondered the situational ethics of smothering Baby Hitler or burning down the Texas School Book Repository or dropping a little Plan B into Maye Musk’s morning-after tea, but as far as she knew, the now-theoretical old peddo had never squirreled away a cancer cure or slipped anything of lasting value to the youth of America.

It had been a pretty full day, if you counted chilling half the morning at the DMV and the University tracks both to and from the Ministry of Gloom and haggling with the Nerd Squad’s condescending chief incel for the return of her Dell, from which it turned out nearly a week of code had disappeared. Now, there might have been some emergency contraception put to good use, but Madison suspected Better Bytes actually cloned these guys somewhere in the back with the PSPs and air fryers. Besides, eyes on the prize, little sister.

The downtown and future flagship CoffeeDawg was still open across the street, and she needed some caffeine and contemplation, even if the oatmilk truck wouldn’t roll in for another couple of years. Madison beelined through the wobbly, handsy pre-COVID Thursday night Mill crowd and out onto Main, The Drag, where Dr. Goodleaf’s Dispensary was still a doomed cupcake shop and you could still get a good pad Thai before the boba mafiya eventually moved in.

With the campus Marriott still an open-air installation just east of the Quad, the only Starbuck’s was in the Student Union/Bunn Center, and the post-Mumford & Sons crowd would be getting out soon, including Deb and Sage and Rachel, whom their fourth had ditched over a passive-aggressive slight. Here presence would only raise questions. Madison had about 15 minutes before the Yellow NightRide would trundle up to the corner, the next-to-the-last of the evening. Timing had of late become her forte, and Madison was confident she could be back to the University and Main stop well ahead of the last Ride.

The soy latte fortified Madison as she rode in jostled silence with the usual collection of half-dead, campus-bound slow food slaves whose West Side fast food counterparts would accompany her on the return leg. That crew would be coming home just in time to kiss the kids goodnight or crash on the sprung couch until it was time to change for the morning shift, or seek out whatever intrigue there was to be had at the hour when, according to Grandma, nothing good was ever likely to transpire. Truer words, Madison reflected, keeping it eyes-forward as the dude across the aisle, who smelled only of faint BO and frothing pheromones, eye-fucked her.

Skeevy Steve fortunately disembarked at the minimart by the campus underpass, a stop behind. Fortunate for him, Madison thought, probably with false bravado. As it was, this was the diciest errand of the afternoon, even if she’d dressed for comfort and camouflage in her own timeless ensemb of black hoodie and jeans and now-vintage pink Nikes.

It was a stretch of faculty/arena lots and the detention basin that divided the Campus proper from frat row and the brick townhouses and dumpy one-bedrooms Where the Wild Things Were (another Grandma’s Subconscious Trauma Scholastic Book Club Selection). Periodically spaced blue beacons formed a trail for the innocent and the foolhardy. The emergency campus “rape” phones that purportedly served as the thin blue line between a cozy dorm bed and a harshly lit stall in the St. Mark’s ER getting swabbed and probed but, Madison suspected, functioned more as a GPS locator for the latest shattered life. As effective as a string of garlic at keeping these testosterone-fueled children of the night at bay.

Coming up diagonally from Main, Madison spotted her halfway across the grassy basin, equidistant between rape beacons. He was trailing at the edge of the Bunn Center lot, and she set off, fingers wrapped around the object in her deep hoodie pocket, jogging from floodlight to floodlight and into the semi-murk where the two figures moved at a nearly identical pace from one blue spot to another. Madison halted in the darkness as he began to close the distance maybe 40 feet from the girl.

“Hey,” she called calmly but with a sharp steel edge. He froze in the cobalt glow, and whipped toward his shadowed pursuer, slipping on the damp grass to one knee.

“Shit,” he grunted. “I almost fucking pissed myself.”

“What’s up, Dude?”

The boy pivoted slightly on his grass-stained knee to watch the girl cross into the darkness beyond Willow Avenue, pink cross-trainers slapping on the worn asphalt. He turned back toward the silhouetted woman. “It’s not what you think, really. Maddie’s a friend – she got upset at the concert and just took off. It’s kinda dangerous alone at this time of night, and one of the other girls texted me as I was getting off work.” He displayed his Jimmy John’s badge. “I just wanted to make sure she got home OK. She lives about a block away.”

“Yeah. 724 Davis, Apartment 6.”

“Wha--?”

Madison stepped out of the shadows, and he slipped again, this time onto his ass. “She’s safe. Thanks, but you oughtta go home now, Matt.”

“How do you know me?” Matt rasped, his illuminated features confused and wary. “Are you, what, her sister or something? She told me she was the only one. You can’t be her mom…?”

Madison laughed harshly; it ricocheted off the Gamma Tau house across the street. “Here’s the thing. Maddie’s going through a lot right now with her family and school, and she’s not ready for a relationship. You’re a nice guy, I know that. But you don’t know what Maddie’s capable of, and you don’t want to.”

“But I care about her, honest, really.” Madison spotted a glint of wetness in Matt’s eyes.

She knelt beside him and smiled. Matt scooched backward a foot. “You really do, don’t you?”

“I love her,” he whispered, breaking eye contact.

Madison’s fingers shifted from the taser to the other item she’d taken off some skeevy dude 29 years or 20 minutes or 65 seconds ago, depending on the incalculable math… She’d hoped a few jolts of God’s fear would do the job. Matt was a nice guy, had been. Until he wasn’t.

**

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d slipped out the back,” the cashier breathed. “You were gone for almost a half-hour. Mrs. Wrayne?”

A head of permed white hair with a very old woman under it popped out from behind a rack of sweaters, steely blue eyes aimed at Madison.

“Dressing room’s free now,” Shania smiled. Gathering up a once-white wedding gown, a tweed business suit, some sensible patent heels, and a huge, embroidered handbag, she brushed past, glaring at the younger women. The changing room door slammed shortly, and the bolt slid loudly into place. “Don’t know why she’s in such a hurry,” the impossibly red-headed millennial grinned. “Not like anybody’s going anywhere. So what do you think?”

Madison dumped her load on the glass counter where the pizza oven and the taps used to be, and shoved the clonky platforms aside. “I’ll take these, what’d you call ‘em, kitten heels?”

“The Gaymode Chartreuse Green Gold Silk Brocades,” Shania nodded enthusiastically. “They go great with the clam diggers.”

“The what?”

“The capris. You pair ‘em up with the cardigan? You have a great color sense. Uh oh.” Shania pulled a deep slate T-shirt from the rejected pile and looked into the dazed-and-confused yellow smiley face. Madison noticed the condensed sans serif on the back for the first time: FLOWER SNIFFIN KITTY PETTIN BABY KISSIN CORPORATE ROCK WHORES. “What happened here?”

Madison winced as she spotted the drying red stain beneath the proto-emoji’s lolling tongue. “Shit. Well, I guess I’ll take that, too. Sorry.”

“Me, too,” Shania smiled sympathetically. “This is a rare one – you can see the Stedman tag that shows it’s the real thing. I can’t do any better than $50. Don’t use bleach – it looks fresh enough you might be able to get it out with cold water and an enzymatic stain treatment. If it doesn’t come out, burn the thing. I don’t want anything coming back on you, or, worse, on me. Don’t imagine Cobain will care.”

“From what Mom told me, he never really did.”

“Guess not. So that’s $50 for the tee, I’ll take $5 off the heels, and you want the pants and sweater?”

“Nah.”

Shania smirked. “Too many bad memories?”

“Actually, a pretty good one. Just the shirt and shoes, please.”

“And we’ll just call it 20 minutes, okay? By the way, you bring anything back?”

Madison paused. “Had a burger. That like killing a Jurassic butterfly?”

Shania shrugged. “I could give you trade-in credit. Not for the burger. In that case, it comes to $167. Got any big weekend plans?”

Madison pulled out her VISA and phone and pulled up her texts as Shania snapped open a Through The Mill Style bag. “Time will tell.”