The place was called the Mango Room. It was down on Keefer in Chinatown and it was only accessible after midnight and if they didn’t know you then you weren’t getting in. Alice called it the Garden of Arcane Delights and she wasn’t far wrong. It had everything that we needed in an after hours. It was exclusive by which I mean that if a person didn’t have a certain inclination toward minding their own business and ambiguous feelings about quiet exchanges of cash for goods of questionable legality then you needed to try your luck somewhere else. It was a safe space. It had a pool table, it had a weird and slightly decrepit bathroom, it had a well stocked bar, and on most nights it had Miss Vestige mixing cocktails and running the room. She had brown hair that she often wore up in a series of braids and tresses that seemed so elegant to me back then, a sort of counterpoint to the dark, desultory cast of characters that moved around her. She had style, a refined awareness of her beauty in how she carried herself in that milieux. She knew what desire lurked behind the bleary stare of the customer wavering at the bar, slipping another fiver into the tip jar like it’ll buy him a smile or a quick slice of conversation. Miss Vestige possessed the most devastating eyes. Ethereal blue that held within them a wicked sharp intelligence and a sort of dangerous wisdom that often struck me like a dagger of ice right in my chest. The sort of dagger that takes days to thaw and disappear. She drove me crazy but I projected like I was too cool for that shit. I didn’t dare let on that I was interested in her, that I wasn’t already taken by some shit hot scenester who was too busy for prowling after dark. I bought my drinks from her at the bar, I smiled, I played nice and looked her in the eye when we spoke. I tipped well, and discretely - all bills, never any change, I saved that for laundry and pinball - and I never left the empties on the table, never ashed my smoke on the floor. I played real nice for Miss Vestige. She had me in her pocket and I never even knew.