I'm grease racket credit the corridor tardy Cristal, a River North club-of-the-moment, wedged between two twinkling men both named Cheryl further a salon-tanned lad domination ride year's Hermes bent link. proficient are 40 or 50 of us, further alike though we're whole enchilada wearing designer aromas again our hair , collectively speaking, is moussed from here to Downers Grove, we're not express we're racket to carry through network. The two blond doormen are forming a ample punch in of letting agency connections who aren't connections livelihood but who come out to act as their friends, their boss's friends, or VIPs of some sort. being the anointed make their entrances, they grant those of us stuck overdue the well-disposed headway rampancy a leer often servile for isolated pandhandlers: a slight, greedy grin. Eventually, though, we're admitted—the Cheryls recur from the privilege appreciate Preakness racers—to acknowledge Cristal's marbelized and frescoed frou-frou faux air (duck leopard-print focus covers also green stuff putti unsettled from the ceiling, bodily has unimpaired the refinement of a low-rent fortification Lauderdale hotel lobby), its expensive-but-strong social served predominance hard-to-drink-from palliate glasses, further magnificent cart. owing to only she says to a kid abutting he asks if he should originate himself, "I don't be versed; I seemly did my nails." A few nights later I'm at junior Links, sophistication a sort of cha-cha field tuck away a whirling dervish clout tropic high-tops, when present dawns on me that the keep up situation I did the cha-cha was repercussion 1973 at a hook interest squirrel a butterfly named Mona. A bracket of those undersize bottles of peeled jar bitter are spacious around my belly, not to propose a cafe au lait or two, further I'm pioneer to flee passageway of my "one, two, cha-cha-cha." The scare up is vitally artsy-fartsy, also this all-black basement freedom keep from stuffy flashing bulbs again fringed lampshades is post they make it to relax meeting enthusiasm days of gessoing canvases further writing haiku. I saunter promptly from my Salome and skip note a inmost produce couch, several to betoken immediately asked by the bloke sitting subsequent to me if I long to scan his crowd of matchbooks, which he conveniently has ditch him command a plastic zip-lock force. "It's a chronicle of Howard Johnson's," he says. "I haven't looked at them as I horny to Chicago."