High Life (12 page)

It finished and I guess we were both satisfied. He was quiet while he fastened his pants and I was glad not to have to put up with chatter, not to have to engage any further. I had my own thoughts.

What had it meant to me? Not much. I could already regard it dispassionately. It was only a question of mechanics after all—rub something until you get a reaction. I didn’t suddenly find I liked men, but neither did I feel like I’d done something terrible. It was a kick, a spike of adrenaline. And I’d been paid for it. It didn’t need to be anything more.

He wouldn’t take me back to the drag. All he wanted was to be gone. Cool by me. I cabbed it back to the Prelude, but I didn’t feel like going home right away, so I cruised the streets for a while. The drag was still happening—plenty of action, plenty of money changing hands. A lot of different cars trawled the sidewalk. But no black Jaguar driven by a silver-haired man. Eventually I went back to Emmet Terrace and hit the sack. A few hours before dawn I woke up and jerked off over the picture of Crowbar Girl. Then I slept again.

Chapter Thirteen

A couple of days later I connected with Rex. Late afternoon. He was in a bar on Melrose, sitting alone at a table by the window, waiting for a gig. His Californian gloss was a little dull and he didn’t seem interested in talking. We ordered some food and watched expensive cars move along the street.

“Hard night?”

He looked at me blankly, then grunted.

“Prothiaden.”

“Huh?”

“I’m in a trough.”

“I thought you were on Zoloft.”

“Doctor said I needed a change.”

“Is it working?”

“Too early to say. He’s hopeful.”

“And you?”

“I gave up hope for Lent.”

“You sure they got the dose right?”

“It’s all a fucking joke to you, isn’t it?”

“Hey, man, I was just—”

“Joking. Yeah. That’s what I mean. Shit goes right past you and doesn’t stop.”

“Hey, I’ve got problems. I mean, I’ve got fucking giant problems.”

“But nothing gets past the surface.”

“Bullshit.”

“Jack, your biggest ambition is to get on the cover of a gossip magazine.”

“So?”

Rex must have realized how he was sounding because he dropped his head and stared at his plate for a moment. When he spoke again I knew he was trying to repair the damage, but it looked like an effort for him.

“Getting much from the service? He said he took you on.”

“One a few days ago, another tonight.”

“Mmm. Money.” Rex nodded, but his gaze was wandering.

“Not enough. I’m doing the drag as well.”

“Don’t let him find out.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“It’s a dumb move.”

“So it’s dumb, what the fuck? I moved out of Venice.”

“About time. That place is a slum.”

“Venice is hardly a slum.”

“It’s shabby.”

“I’m in Hollywood now.”

“Actual Hollywood?”

“You bet.”

Rex screwed up his face. “And that’s not like a giant leap into shabby? All those beggars …”

“Well, yeah, I know—”

“It’s so depressing.”

“Please, I can only stand so much encouragement.”

“Encouragement? Sorry, we’re all out.”

“Okay. Let’s move on. I wanted to ask you about the drag.”

“What about it?”

“Well, like, should I know anything about working there?”

Rex snorted. “You mean apart from it being super-dumb? Nope. Can’t help you. What you want to know you can only learn by doing. Figuring who the whackos are, who might be dangerous, who wants something you don’t want to give. How to get out of situations without getting stomped … You have to kind of absorb it, and if you’re not quick enough you’ll get fucked over for sure. The only thing I can tell you is don’t carry ID.”

“How come?”

“If you get picked up it means more work for the cops. Some nights they can’t be bothered and you walk.”

His mobile rang then—the Latin with his gig. Before he left I gave him my new number and address. He put it in his wallet without looking at it.

Later that night I made three hundred dollars for fucking a woman while her husband and twelve-year-old daughter watched.

In Hollywood the weeks rolled by. Days blurred into each other. I woke late, watched late-night Hollywood news and gossip on a VCR I’d bought, then soaps and movies—anything that showed a different world. I’d go out to eat, and spend most of the night on the drag. I had no plans to do anything with myself, no formula for self-improvement. I saw what I wanted on TV and I knew I couldn’t have it. Everything else was futile.

Work from the Latin was sporadic, maybe once every ten days. I was the new boy and the last in line when the gigs came in. On the drag I got to know a few of the hookers, they spoke to me when I walked by and I drank coffee with them sometimes. The rent boys were colder. They thought my age put the clients off. Toleration was about as far as it went. I didn’t give two fucks, I wasn’t there to make friends. The only things I was interested in were money and that intensity of feeling you got when you slid into a car with a guy you’d never seen before and you didn’t know what was going to happen next. You knew it would involve sex, but you were never quite sure how things were going to pan out.

My schoolboy fantasy of tracking Karen’s killer, a motivation which had ridden alongside the need for cash and kicks in bringing me to the drag, faded further into the background with each of these passenger-seat escapes from boredom. I kept an eye out for the man in the Jag, occasionally I asked about him, but I would have been down there selling my ass even if he’d never existed.

Not long into this time, Ryan looped back in, bristling and gnashing his teeth through an angry trajectory from Santa Monica to Hollywood.

Early evening. The drag hadn’t started to swing. The hookers were out, but most of them weren’t bothering much. They just stood around and smoked and talked, staking out their piece of sidewalk for later that night.

I’d been down an hour or so, most of it in a porn theater. The movies were about as heavy as you could find outside the private video circuit—douching, shitting, fisting—but they didn’t turn me on. Everything moved around too much and took too long. I watched them because they made me feel less alone—they were pictures of other people escaping the world.

Out on the street, heading for a burger at a place that had stools bolted to the sidewalk outside a slit in its front. No gig from the Latin, so fagsville looked like the evening’s entertainment.

Wrong.

A white hand on my shoulder, long tapered fingers that were pudgy but shouldn’t have been, carefully filed nails. It was that man again. The world moved in jump cuts as I turned to face him, kind of a life-before-your-eyes thing.

“Not smart, checking out of Venice like that, Jackie. You think I wouldn’t find you?”

I bit down on the impulse to run.

“Gee, was I supposed to call the station first?”

“I’m still pissed about the car chase. Don’t make things worse.”

“Oh, shit, was that you? I thought it was someone trying to rip me off.”

“Don’t push it, Jackie. Where are you living?”

“Over on Emmett.”

“Gosh, I’d like to check out the fittings.”

We sat at the table like cowboys in a poker game. A bottle of Southern Comfort between us, a six-pack of Bud, ice in a bowl—the guts of my refrigerator. Ryan had his jacket off, his shirt was wet down the back and under the arms.

He swallowed a shot of Southern, popped one of his nitro pills, and opened a beer. He looked set to be around for a while.

“So, Jackie, how’s it going?”

“Okay.”

“Okay? That’s good. How you paying for this place? I checked with the doughnut guy, he said you never went back.”

“This and that.”

Ryan looked like he was trying to kill a smile.

“What are you telling me? You working the drag? Shit, I thought you were just hanging out. You get stranger by the minute.”

“What strange?”

“Your wife gets dead. A few weeks later you’re living in scum city, taking it up the ass to pay bills? What is it, some kinda head trauma thing? You feel so guilty you’re trying to be Karen?”

“What do you want, Ryan? You found out where I live. You obviously don’t have anything else on the killing or you would have busted me on the street. This chewing the fat thing is bullshit.”

“Wow, Jackie, talk about hurt my feelings.”

He dug a bottle of Dexedrine out of his pocket and shook a few into the palm of his hand—flat yellow tablets that look like 5mg Valium. Opposite effect, of course.

“Here.”

“I want to sleep sometime tonight.”

“You can sleep when you’re dead.” He did two. “Might as well, Jackie. I got something to do tonight and it’d be just dandy if you came along.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll find it interesting, I guarantee.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Oh, Jackie, don’t say that.” He shook the pills at me. “Come on, I don’t want you going all droopy on me.”

I sighed and took three. Ryan wasn’t a guy who took no for an answer and the faster whatever he had planned was over, the better I’d like it. I could always dose myself later with any number of downers.

“Thatta boy, Jackie. You and me together, drinking booze, taking pills, kinda pally, don’t you think?”

“Whatever you say.”

One
A.M.
Breeze through the windows, warm and dry and powdered with carbon. Both of us liquored and zipped on speed. Ryan drove one-handed. Two types of cars on the streets—heaps driven by the young and the poor, out looking for some kind of kick; expensive coupes and limos carrying rich people looking for the same thing. The expensive cars looked exciting, like you wanted to follow them and see where they ended up, meet the people they were going to meet. The dented, primer-painted sedans just made the road look ugly.

I looked for palm trees. They were there, everywhere, quint-essential against the mauve sky. We headed east, cut the Hollywood Freeway on Santa Monica Boulevard, and plunged into zero land. East of the freeway and south of Griffith park L.A. turns into a million square miles of shit. Unless you’re a Dodgers fan heading for Chavez Ravine. I never liked sports.

Around Silverlake Ryan banged through a maze of side streets until he found some kind of industrial estate—a compound of single-story, breeze-block warehouses with corrugated iron roofs, ringed with a wire mesh fence that was rusted through in places. The estate was unlit and the driveways of cracked concrete that separated the warehouses turned into black tunnels a few yards from the light of the street.

Ryan drove like he knew where he was going, along one edge of the compound to a gate that was pretty much like the rest of the fence. A high-beam flash brought a heavy-looking guy out of the dark. He looked closely at Ryan, grunted unpleasantly, and opened the gate.

We rolled quietly through shadow, past oil-stained loading docks and sinister dead-body piles of broken packing crates.

The Plymouth slid into a space beside a row of other cars. Scratches of light cut a closed side-door into a building. In we went, Ryan and me, into sudden light and people. Secondhand furniture storage an obvious function—sofas, couches, upholstered armchairs ranked and racked, back to the walls and up to the ceiling. Cheap velvets, fake leather, stained material—used-up things to sit on that other people’s asses could no longer afford.

A square space had been cleared in the center of all this, twenty by twenty perhaps. Around it, most of them standing, about fifty men waited for something. Low talk shivered between them. They smoked and drank beer out of cans.

A man watched by another man with a pump shotgun was taking money and checking faces at the door. When he saw Ryan his eyes hardened but he didn’t say anything, just nodded and handed over a wad of folded bills he’d had ready in the pocket of his sport coat. Ryan winked at him, slipped the money into his jacket like he’d done this more than once, and led me along a short aisle of sofas to where everyone was gathered.

At one corner of the open space there was a stack of twelve-packs that looked to be complimentary refreshment. Ryan grabbed a couple of cans and handed one to me. It wasn’t cold, but at least it was Bud. I chugged it down. The scene around me was combining with the usual Dex anxiety to make me feel somewhat edgy. I couldn’t figure the atmosphere. There was a lot of macho ball-swinging going on, but underlying this there was a current of tension that seemed out of place at a gathering of beer-drinking buddies.

A jackhammer lay against a couch. Its black air hose snaked out of sight, and somewhere back in the furniture jungle a compressor thudded.

“What’s this? A bare-knuckle fight?”

“Relax, Jackie, all you gotta do is watch.”

I looked at the men around me, trying to guess what they were here for. What I saw didn’t make me feel much better. Their faces were slabbed and scoured by whatever winds blew when pity was relinquished. Frozen mouths and flat eyes that wouldn’t change expression whether they watched young children playing or someone in an alley getting the shit kicked out of them. Motherfuckers who took pride in being motherfuckers. And keeping an eye on these motherfuckers, no doubt thoughtfully provided by the event’s organizers, were a handful of armed men standing around in conspicuous positions.

“I don’t like this. I want to go.”

“You know what it costs to get into this place? A grand, minimum. I’m doing you a favor, boy, don’t turn pussy.”

Two minutes later one of the gun guys walked across the square and disappeared into the furniture. Everyone got quiet. Seconds ticked and some of the hard men did little nervous things like running fingers through hair or pulling shirts away from chests.

Then the guy came back, his hand clamped firmly around the wrist of an anxiously giggling girl. She was about twenty-three and she wore a short skirt and a blue Coca-Cola T-shirt. A large bare-chested man whose face was hidden under an executioner’s hood followed them.