Dead Boys (25 page)

She finally screams, “Do something!” and I stick my arm out the window, but the plastic slithers from my touch and launches itself again into the air, where it shoots straight up into the sky, up and up and up, to join the satellites and space junk. Dee Dee and I laugh and fiddle with the radio and keep on driving, any righteous wonder the moment warrants swept away by the cheap high of shared relief.

D
EE DEE’S NEW
apartment is a block north of Hollywood Boulevard, in a scabby, has-been building that’s supposedly haunted by Sal Mineo. Luckily a few of her friends are waiting, because the elevator is out of order, and everything will have to be carried up to the fourth floor. After Dee Dee jump-starts the late arrivals with a line or two of her stash, they’re raring to go. “Beep beep,” they shout as they squeeze past me, competing among themselves to see who can haul the biggest loads. I take up a position in the back of the truck and spend the next hour sliding boxes and furniture down the ramp to Dee Dee’s buddies. They make a couple of remarks about me not doing my share, but fuck it, I’ve got nothing to prove to these boneheads.

More and more people straggle in, and it actually begins to resemble a party. The unloading goes quickly, and when it’s done, Dee Dee takes everyone up to the roof of the building to cool off. It’s just an expanse of gravel with a few potted palms scattered about and some rusty patio furniture, but the wind has lost its burn now that the sun is setting, and the Hollywood sign glows a pretty pink. Soon reggae is snaking out of a boom box, and a girl with a pierced eyebrow hands me another beer before I’ve finished the one I’m drinking. Someone discovers a barbecue grill, and a contingent is dispatched to buy hot dogs and veggie burgers.

I drag a lawn chair to the edge of the roof. The sky out this way is a map of hell — blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds. I stare at it until I think I have it memorized, then lower my eyes to an open window in the next building, through which I can see a fat man lying on his couch, watching television. There is an empty birdcage in the apartment, a treadmill. He scratches his belly and coughs. These lives, these lives.

The girl with the eyebrow ring approaches tentatively. She’s playing with a yo-yo. She stands with her back to me for a few seconds, taking in the sunset, but I can tell she has something prepared.

“You went out with my sister,” she says when she finally turns to face me.

“What was her name?”

“Christina. About five years ago.”

The aromatherapist, with all her little vials and potions. She thought she could help me, but my sense of smell was shot. Too many cigarettes. Christina’s sister walks the dog, then jerks the yo-yo out of its stall into a cat’s cradle. She’s hot, in a black nail polish kind of way.

“How is Christina?” I ask.

“Married. Pregnant.”

“Good for her.”

“Like you give a shit,” she says.

The yo-yo zips out and stops about an inch from my face before racing back up the string to her hand. She wraps it in her fist like she’s going to clock me with it.

“Are you mad at me?” I ask.

“Yeah, I am. I’m fucking pissed.”

I get up from my chair and walk back to where everybody’s hanging out. A couple of guys I know are there now, Charlie and Nick. We talk about their band for a while, drink a few more beers.

M
ERCEDES’ BLINDNESS BROUGHT
out the best in most people. Strangers were always grabbing her arm, trying to help her. We’d be eating breakfast at Denny’s and old women would come up to our table and say, “God bless you, dear,” and shove a few dollars into her hand. The neighborhood where the Braille Institute was located was a little rough — I heard gunshots almost every night — but Mercedes never had a problem. In fact, the only time she was robbed, the thief apologized. “I’m a drug addict,” he confessed before snatching her purse, which she later told her parents she’d left on the bus, because her getting mugged would have been just the excuse they needed to keep her locked up at home.

She planned to go to college someday. She wanted to work with children. She also wanted to visit France. “Why?” I asked. It was a legitimate question. I mean, she was blind. That was the only time I saw her cry. She had a cat named Lilly and a brother named José. Once when we were high in my apartment, she got confused and walked into the kitchen, thinking it was the bathroom. “It’s okay to laugh,” she said, so I did.

Saturdays we’d go places together — Griffith Park, the rose garden down by USC. She’d ask me to describe the flowers, the trees, the carousel, but this was beyond me. I couldn’t find the words. She said I was lazy, that if I cared about her I’d try. So I practiced.
The moon looks like a drop of milk,
I’d say to myself in the mirror,
like a pearl, like a peephole into heaven.
I never worked up the nerve to repeat any of it to her, though. She bought me a shirt for my birthday, the ugliest shirt I’d ever seen.

T
HE PARTY MOVES
back down to Dee Dee’s new apartment, and Grady pulls me into the bathroom and offers me one of the lines of speed he’s laid out on the plastic case of a Motörhead CD. I’ve been trying to stay away from that shit, but I’m drunk already, and I want to drink more. The speed sears the inside of my nose and drives tears into my eyes.

“Katy got busted,” Grady says.

I nod like I know who he’s talking about. The bathroom is painted light green, hospital-gown green, and there’s wall-to-wall shag carpeting on the floor. I don’t even want to think about that carpet.

Back in the living room they’re playing a Greatest Disco Hits record, and a few people are dancing to it in that exaggerated way that lets everyone know they’re only kidding. We’re all on something or other now. A forest of beer bottles has sprouted on the coffee table. Everywhere I look, I see a guy chewing the inside of his cheek or a girl bouncing her knee and laughing too loud. Great secrets are revealed to strangers who will forget them by morning, and the smoke of a thousand cigarettes rises like scum off boiling meat and tries to find a way out through the earthquake cracks in the ceiling.

A space opens up on the couch, and I take it, settling into the thick of things. The speed is tickling the back of my neck, where my skull joins my spine, and my earlier drunkenness fades into a taut chemical clarity. I open myself up as wide as I can, so wide that all of the goodness inside me sparkles like diamonds there for the taking, and sure enough, the guy to my left, the white boy with dreads, asks my name.

My tongue can hardly move fast enough to push out the words my brain drops onto it. I’ve got so much to say to my new acquaintance, a whole life to explain. Twenty minutes or so into it, he excuses himself to fetch another beer, but that’s okay, someone else takes his place. And so on, and so on, for what seems like hours. One by one people get their fill of me and slip away. I don’t even try to keep track of the changing faces, because I’ve got this idea that if I stop talking before I’m all talked out, I’ll seize up and die.

I reminisce about Christmas when I was a kid and reel off the names of every dog I’ve ever owned. I discuss the themes of
Moby Dick
and explain how to make perfect scrambled eggs. I tell them about Mercedes and what finally happened between us and toss out every other miserable and degrading memory that comes to mind. Dee Dee finally jumps on me, pinning me to the couch. She’s laughing so hard she’s crying as she puts her hand over my mouth and squeezes my lips together.

“Shut up,” she gasps. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

I
GET A
grip on the reins after another beer or two, jerk myself back into a trot. Everything’s sort of whirling around me, slightly distorted, like I’m watching from inside a fishbowl, which is fine: I enjoy the distance.

Some joker comes prancing down the hallway wearing one of Dee Dee’s dresses and sends the party into hysterics. I’m swept up by the unruly stampede to the bedroom, where all of the men are soon tearing through the boxes of clothes and pulling on Whatever fits. Mine’s a frilly blue thing that reminds me of the toilet-paper covers in my grandmother’s bathroom. A seam rips when I bend over to roll my jeans above my knees. Dee Dee’s makeup case is unearthed, and we go to work on each other with lipstick and eye shadow.

“This is pretty fucking gay,” I say as I draw a bright red whore’s smile on Grady’s face.

He takes a hit off a joint that’s going around the room, then passes it to me, and it looks like it’s been dipped in blood. I realize that I’m sweating, have been for hours. I stink.

There’s some kind of contest. One by one we’re to exit the bedroom and let the girls judge us. I stomp out and do a couple of pirouettes and some half-assed pop-locking. A flash goes off in my face and a Polaroid whirs. My performance draws a few claps and hoots, but nothing like what the next guy gets when he raises his skirt to reveal that he’s not wearing underwear and shakes his gear in time to the music. The winner, instantly, and his prize is that he can kiss whichever of the girls he wants. He chooses a guy, though, and everybody loses it when they tongue each other right there in the middle of the living room.

“Cheater,” I keep yelling, “no fair,” until someone tells me to grow up.

When nobody’s looking, I sneak over and steal my picture out of the stack of photos on the couch.

I
SHOULD HAVE
told Mercedes when I began to date Pam, the barfly nurse. Instead I kept my mouth shut and pulled double duty, waiting for an easy way out. One day Mercedes showed up with all her hair cut off. She started to talk about getting a tattoo, a small one on her butt. The institute called her parents and let them know she’d been missing classes, and her mother sent her to a priest, who made her swear on the Bible that she was still a virgin. Mercedes could smell Pam on my sheets. “That’s another girl, I know it is,” she said.

In the midst of all this, I got a little strung out. My dealer, a fat pig named Alberto, had seen me around the neighborhood with Mercedes and was fascinated by our relationship. When I wound up in over my head to him, he suggested I could clear my debt by letting him fuck her. I told him he was crazy. “Let me watch, then,” he said. “She’ll never know.” He stood in the kitchen, and I turned up the music and got it over with quickly. He was right — she never suspected a thing.

Eventually I stopped answering the buzzer when Mercedes showed up. The tapping of her cane as she walked away made me want to puke. I felt creepy and weak and my blood burned like poison. I’d see her sometimes, headed for the bus stop or doughnut shop, and pass within feet of her without saying a word. “You are such a fucker,” Pam would tell me — Pam, who lasted less than a month. I wound up getting loaded on Percodan and driving my car into a Taco Bell. That was as close as I came to asking for help.

I
BREAK THE
surface somewhere between dead and alive in the backseat of a car speeding through the desert. It’s still night, and Dee Dee’s driving, and I’ve got my hand down Christina’s sister’s pants. She shoves a stick of gum into my mouth and pulls my face to hers. My lips are raw and slimy. We’ve been kissing for hours. I touch the ring in her brow, think about yanking it out to see if she’ll explode like a grenade, but she slaps my hand away.

Grady’s Cadillac is behind us. His headlights flash, and Dee Dee pulls over. I leap from the Malibu and cross the dirt road to piss against a Joshua tree. I’m still wearing the dress. I have to pull it up around my hips to get at the buttons of my jeans. The massive sand dune swelling on the horizon glows like a pile of lost, old bones, and the wind howls in my ears. It’s a lonely and truthful place, and it scares me. Grady and Dee Dee and Christina’s sister are standing around the Caddy, washing down little white doughnuts with beer. I see that Grady is still wearing his dress, too, so it must be something we agreed upon.

He tosses me a Bud, and we walk to the Malibu. He has me hold a flashlight on him while he uses a screwdriver to pry the CD player from the dash.

Who are these people,
I wonder,
and what happened to my cigarettes?
I can’t stop looking at the stars swarming overhead, preparing to attack. Christina’s sister comes up behind me and wraps her arms around my waist. Her breath against my spine makes me want to scream.

When Grady’s done, he tosses the stereo into the Caddy, then hops in and backs the car farther away from the Malibu.

“Let me pour,” I say, just to say something, just to get away from Christina’s sister.

Grady hands me the gas can. Following his shouted instructions, I douse the interior of the Malibu, the tires, the engine. The fumes sting my eyes, my swollen lips. I want to be the one to put the spark to it, too, but Grady won’t allow that. He tells the girls to move across the road, to the Joshua tree. I stay where I am, beside him.

He strikes a road flare. It sputters and catches, giving off a rosy glow. With a smooth underhand toss, he sends it through the open window of the Malibu. There’s a loud roar, and the sun rises inside the car, finds itself trapped by the roof, and so forces itself out wherever it can. A fiery arm reaches for us. Grady runs, but I don’t see the point. The air begins to crackle around me, and hot fingers caress my cheeks, my nose, plunge into my eyes. My tongue crumbles into ash when I laugh, my teeth are nubbins of coal.

Grady yanks me backward by my collar. He rolls me in the sand to put out the fire. I sit next to the Joshua tree in the mud my piss made and stroke the remnants of the dress that still cling to me. The clothes I’m wearing beneath it are untouched. Across the road, the Malibu pops and whistles, a musical inferno. Birds chirp in the false dawn, jackrabbits awaken confused. Black smoke billows up to obscure the marauding stars.

“You okay?” Grady asks. The girls await my answer, hands over their mouths.

“I’m fine,” I say.

We use the rest of the beer to wash the soot off my face. And I
am
fine, except that when I close my eyes there are flames dancing on the backs of the lids.