The Sunshine Club
Charlie started the car as the rest of the gang squeezed into his little Saab they affectionately called Betsy. As he pulled out of the driveway, Shotgun Rich slid in the latest Mazzy Star CD and turned the volume up.
The music washed over them immediately — haunting, dreamy, psychedelic.
The mood was set.
Saturday night. San Francisco. Mazzy Star live.
Alex lit a joint and passed it around, completing the synchronization of music, mind, and body. Steve divided the ’shrooms evenly, then stared out the window in silence, waiting for the patterns behind his eyes to wake up.
The music and drugs braided them together into something larger than themselves, reinforcing a friendship more than twenty years deep as they drove north on Highway 101 toward the city lights.
“Slim’s? This is Boz Scaggs’ place, right?” Alex asked as Charlie locked Betsy, who beeped twice in confirmation she’d survive the sketchy neighborhood.
“Don’t forget where we parked,” Charlie said, pretending he knew who Boz Scaggs was.
They paid at the door and stepped inside the club.
A sign near the entrance read: Maximum Occupancy: 300.
Perfect.
The place was small, dark, intimate. As Charlie scanned the room, everyone blurred together into a single species he could only describe as Mazzy Star fans.
“We’re heading up front,” Alex announced. “I want to look Hope in the eyes.”
The others followed him toward the stage.
Charlie stayed behind, studying the room carefully. From his wheelchair, he already knew the front would become a disaster once the crowd tightened. People never noticed him in packed venues. They saw only empty space and instinctively tried to occupy it, stumbling into his chair over and over all night.
Near the end of the bar, though, there was a narrow opening.
No one in front of him.
A decent angle toward the stage.
Enough room to breathe.
He settled there and watched the crowd while he waited for the show — and the hallucinogens — to begin.
Mazzy Star fans were different from ordinary rock crowds. The music demanded reverence. Slow, dreamy, emotionally charged songs hung over the room like smoke, and people respected the silence between notes.
For three hundred people packed into a dirty little dive, the room was strangely quiet.
“Hey. Buddy?”
Charlie turned.
The bartender leaned across the counter above him.
“Can I get a Coke?” Charlie asked automatically.
“Sure. But you won’t be able to see from there once the show starts. Crowd’s gonna flood this whole area.” The bartender nodded toward the bar top. “Want me to put you up there?”
Charlie blinked.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“That’d be great.”
The bartender looked more like a bouncer than someone who poured drinks. He lifted Charlie effortlessly and set him on the far corner of the bar. Then he wheeled Charlie’s chair behind the counter so nobody would trip over it.
Suddenly Charlie sat a head above the crowd.
He imagined this must be what being tall was like.
The perch was precarious. Nothing to hold onto. Long drop to the floor. But as long as nobody shoved him, he figured he’d survive.
Then the lights dimmed.
The opening band took the stage.
The Sunshine Club.
A local band, probably having the biggest night of their lives.
They played tight, loose in the right places, clearly thrilled to be there.
The singer caught Charlie’s attention immediately.
Tall. Dirty-blonde. Sharp-featured in a plain, effortless way he found impossible not to stare at. She wore a gold sleeveless dress that looked stolen from a seventies go-go dancer and knee-high brown boots with thick heels that made her move like she was stomping through the music instead of dancing to it.
Like a horse almost.
Like something half wild.
Charlie watched her constantly, drinking in every movement with the strange ache that beauty sometimes caused him.
The crowd liked them well enough, but everyone was waiting for Mazzy Star. After a short set, the band cleared the stage and the lights rose slightly while roadies prepared for the main act.
The bartender had been right.
As anticipation built, the crowd surged toward the stage and filled every open space around Charlie. Bodies pressed closer and closer beneath him.
Too close.
One accidental shove and he’d tumble straight off the bar.
The ’shrooms had begun blooming in his bloodstream now, sharpening every sensation. He forced himself not to look down. If fear got hold of him, the entire trip would collapse into anxiety, and anxiety on mushrooms became its own terrible universe.
So he stared outward instead, letting his eyes drift across the moving crowd like someone trying not to wake from a dream.
He didn’t notice her until she slammed into him hard enough to tilt him sideways.
Charlie grabbed her shoulder instinctively.
“Oh shit — sorry,” she laughed, steadying him while yelling toward the bartender for a Coke. “Nice seat.”
Charlie looked at her face and recognized her instantly.
The singer from the opening band.
She’d seemed tall onstage, but standing beside him now, he realized he’d underestimated her height. Even from atop the bar, she nearly met his eyes.
“The bartender put me up here so I could see over the crowd,” Charlie explained, gesturing toward the wheelchair behind the counter.
She glanced at the drop below him.
“Aren’t you terrified of falling?”
“A little.”
He released her shoulder.
“Sorry.”
She smiled.
Then the lights dimmed again.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll stand in front of you so nobody knocks you off.”
Charlie laughed nervously.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
She turned her back to him just as the crowd compressed tighter around them.
Then she reached behind herself and grabbed his ankles.
The room darkened completely.
Someone struck a guitar chord onstage. The audience fell silent.
Blue light slowly spread across the band as Hope Sandoval stepped to the microphone, head lowered, black hair veiling her face.
Then she sang.
Her voice slipped through Charlie like something holy.
The room disappeared.
The drugs magnified everything until the music no longer sounded external. It moved through him, dissolving thought, dissolving time, pulling him somewhere higher and stranger where loneliness itself briefly lost its shape.
Charlie didn’t believe in God, but he understood transcendence. He understood the feeling of something reaching inside you and opening a hidden door.
Suddenly he felt himself sliding forward.
Instinctively, he grabbed the singer’s shoulders.
She had lifted his legs around her waist.
Charlie froze.
Then she leaned back into him fully, anchoring him against her body.
He had two choices now:
drop his arms for balance,
or hold onto her.
The decision felt automatic.
He wrapped his arms around her.
Immediately, the fear vanished.
He was safe.
Her body was solid beneath his arms — muscular, grounded, impossibly steady. He imagined she could walk straight out of the club carrying him effortlessly on her back.
Half Amazon.
Half centaur.
The thought moved through him like a flash of hallucinated mythology and he smiled into her hair.
Mazzy Star wasn’t dance music. It drifted with a melancholy ease that evoked cloud-watching, slow kisses, sunsets, moonrises, and the sadness of beautiful things already disappearing while they were still happening.
So she swayed.
The crowd swayed too. From above, the entire room moved like one slow living wave.
And together, they moved with it.
Charlie felt her hair brush against his face. Perfume mixed with sweat — warm, salty-sweet, real. He held tighter without thinking. She leaned farther back into him.
At some point, the boundaries between them began to blur. The music dissolved whatever distance remained. They moved together instinctively now, sharing balance, rhythm, breath.
One motion.
One body.
One brief impossible thing.
He felt himself slipping into her somehow, emotionally, spiritually, the way songs sometimes become memories before they’re even over.
The music washed over them endlessly.
Time loosened.
The entire room seemed suspended in blue light and smoke and slow movement. Charlie became aware of nothing except:
her warmth,
her breathing,
Hope Sandoval’s voice,
and the strange overwhelming certainty that this moment would hurt later.
When the lights finally came up, neither of them moved.
Around them, the crowd slowly woke from its trance and began shuffling toward the exits. Voices returned to the room in fragments.
Eventually she loosened his legs from around her waist.
Charlie let go of her carefully.
She turned to face him.
Under the lights, he suddenly felt exposed.
She smiled at him — soft, almost sad.
For a long moment neither spoke.
Then she leaned forward and kissed him.
Charlie kissed her back and poured everything he had into it, trying desperately to preserve whatever impossible thing had existed between them before the ordinary world returned and separated them again.
Finally she pulled away.
Her eyes lingered on him as though memorizing his face.
Then she disappeared into the crowd.
Charlie remained on the bar long after the room had started emptying.
Eventually his friends found him there, all of them still dazed and half-absent themselves.
Alex rolled the chair over while Rich and Steve lifted Charlie down from the bar.
Before leaving, Charlie turned back to thank the bartender for the perfect seat.
Outside, the cold San Francisco air slapped everyone back into reality.
“Where did we park?” Charlie asked.
“I have no idea,” the others answered together.
They burst out laughing.
“Hey,” Rich said suddenly, pointing down the block. “Isn’t that the opening band?”
Charlie turned.
The singer stood beneath a streetlight watching him.
She raised one hand in a small wave and smiled — radiant enough to burn itself permanently into memory.
Charlie didn’t wave back.
He only stared.
“You do this a lot, you know,” Rich said as they stood there. “Girls walking away from you.”
Charlie stayed quiet.
“New Year’s. That girl who kissed you at midnight. Jessica at your cousin’s wedding. Same thing every time.” Rich shook his head. “You connect with somebody all night, then let them disappear.”
Charlie kept watching the singer down the street.
“You should probably go after her,” Rich continued. “But you never do. Maybe because technically you can’t. So you don’t have to.”
Rich smiled sadly.
“That’s gonna hurt when you’re old, my friend.”
Charlie knew he was right.
Still, he smiled.
“I think I like it better this way,” he admitted quietly. “For a moment, I belonged to her. Or it felt like I did. And this way…” He looked back toward the streetlight. “I never have to say goodbye.”
“Betsy’s over there,” Steve called out.
Charlie turned his chair toward the car and didn’t look back again.
As they crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, city lights shimmered across the windows while he imagined her body against his one last time.
Then he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, she was gone.
Only the memory remained.
And maybe that was better.
Some connections lasted longer as moments than they ever could in real life.
At least that’s what Charlie tried very hard to convince himself as they drove home through the city lights.
