High Life (13 page)
I figured some sort of spectator sex gig and relaxed.
The guy in the mask was built like a bull, very little definition but plenty of muscle bulk. He stood in the middle of the square like a rock, the girl looked at the floor and swayed from one foot to the other. She was obviously stoned, but not smack—she was too up for that. After the gun guy left the ring, Bullman grunted and the girl got to work—dragged off the track pants he was wearing and sucked his dick until it was hard. Huge, of course, thick as a woman’s wrist.
The routine went on from there—fingering, fucking, sucking in a sequence of positions. At the end of it, Bullman pulled his pipe out of her and pointed at the floor. I guess it was a signal, but she just looked unhappy and didn’t move. Bullman hit her on the side of the head. She started to say something and he hit her again. A few men in the crowd made turned-on noises. The girl whimpered then bent her legs like she was getting ready to sit on a chair. A second or two later, piss drew a yellow line from her cunt to the floor, spattering off the concrete and wetting her ankles. A dark pool spread underneath her. When she’d finished she squatted lower and I saw her face turn red. A couple of small farts, then a shiny bone of shit squeezed its way out of her hole and fell heavy and dead into the piss. I could smell it from where I was standing.
“Totally interesting. Can we go now?”
Ryan seemed fixated. He didn’t look at me when he spoke.
“She’s somebody’s daughter, can you believe it?”
“Huh?”
“Just watch the fucking show.”
Out on the square they’d handcuffed the girl to a ring-bolt set into the floor. She was on her back with her arms stretched behind her head, yelling stuff about this not being part of the deal. Two men held her legs—one each, straight up and pulled back. Bullman had a can of lighter fluid and a lighter. It wasn’t a joke. He went all the way with it, squirted it over her cunt and set it on fire. The noises she made didn’t sound human. The men around me yelled like they were at a football game. Bullman didn’t let it go on too long, though. When all her hair was gone he put the fire out with his foot.
The air in the warehouse was bad—piss, shit, burnt cunt hair, burnt cunt flesh. One of the men holding her legs had a bloody nose from where he’d lost his grip for a second when she started to writhe.
“This is sick.”
“That may be, Jackie, but this kinda thing happens every day in every country on the planet. It can happen to anyone you know. A few wrong turns is all it takes. Think of it as an eye-opener.”
I was going to hassle more about leaving, but Bullman was lugging the jackhammer across the floor and I had a feeling there wouldn’t be much chance of getting out of there for a little while yet.
The girl sobbed and begged, but it didn’t make any difference to Bullman. He rested the jackhammer’s chisel on the floor between her legs and gave it a short blast. The clatter was deafening, small chunks of concrete leapt into the air and the girl’s ass discharged a yellow-brown liquid.
When Bullman released the trigger, silence fell heavily. This was what the men had paid for, and they were waiting to collect—mouth-breathing, blink rate way down, a whole separate reality.
The girl babbled, promising everyone anything, but it wasn’t going to help her. Everyone there knew it. And so did she.
Bullman stood with his dick sticking straight out and waited for her to quiet. When she was down to a weak sniffling he hefted the jackhammer, motioned to the two men to pull her legs further apart, and slid it a long way into her cunt.
And pulled the trigger.
The tool tore into her, blood misted about its pistoning steel. Bullman guided it so the point forced its way through her back—I heard a metallic rasp as it hit concrete. Then he pulled free and sent it in at a different angle, this time it came out the side of her hip. Blood sprayed through the holes. It dripped off the barrel of the jackhammer and off Bullman’s forearms. The girl puked over her chin and her eyes rolled back.
Bullman went for her mouth next. Teeth snapped as he put it in.
When the roar started again her head came apart.
Rolling west through the sodium wash. Quiet time. A space between the esurience of night and the yawning kick-start of another morning. Few cars, dry roads. Mild air whispering of optimism and possibility. I’d watched a girl torn to pieces, but the city hadn’t changed. The money-bathed totem remained in tact despite the furniture warehouse.
And how did I feel? Pretty much like the city. Things happened, other things went on regardless. The girl was dead, but she would have died whether I was there or not. One more pawn out of the game. Shitty for her, but what real difference did it make to me?
I drove. Ryan sat in the passenger seat drinking heavily from a bottle of bourbon he’d picked up at a liquor store a few streets from the warehouse. By the time we turned off the Hollywood Freeway he was pretty far gone.
“So, you like that, Jackie?”
“Why did you take me there?”
“Wanted to show you that what happens to people is real. You think it’s a joke, but it’s not. It matters … It matters to someone.”
Ryan shook his head slowly and stared at his knees. I had the horrifying feeling he was close to tears.
“Stupid dumb bitch. Why did she do it?”
“Didn’t look like she had much of a choice.”
“Just grow up and piss it away … Life ain’t perfect, but she didn’t have to do that.”
A little while later he slumped forward against his seat belt and muttered things I couldn’t hear. Then he started to heave. I swerved to the curb but it was too late. He vomited into his lap and passed out.
If he’d been lying down maybe I could have dumped the car somewhere and hoped he’d choke to death on his own puke. But he was upright and breathing, and like that there was no way the fucker was going to sign off and make my life any easier. So I checked him into a motel on the strip, paid for it with money out of his wallet, and took a cab back to Emmet Terrace.
The Latin called midmorning. He had a gay escort job set for that night. Unusual, as most of the agency gigs were hetero, but what the fuck? It was money, and if it was coming through the Latin it had to be reasonably high-class. And high-class in L.A. meant movie people—real people.
I went out and rented a tux. From then until show time I sucked up news—taped late-night gossip and midday broadcast info on current productions. Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Douglas, Roberts, Stone, Willis, Moore … And on down the ranks. Bit players, rising stars, falling stars, flavor of the month, TV and big screen, the grossers, the flops, bankable, sexy, crumbling, fighting … But all of them in there, in that glass-sided swimming pool that magnified even the least famous of them into envy objects for the rest of the world. The quality of their movies wasn’t important, all that mattered was being on the screen.
I read glossy housewife magazines. I did the quizzes—multiple-choice star facts, current and past film titles made into crosswords, guess the star, which movie? Has Liz Taylor had a hysterectomy? Who’s dating who? I knew ’em all—scored one hundred percent while I preempted small-screen airhead reporters who thought they knew it all. I was better than them, I knew more, and I looked good. But they were the ones with lives.
I did a little coke and had a shower. Out of it, dried off but still naked, I walked around the apartment. Smooth night air sliding across my skin, colors in the sky outside. A hole in time, one of those pauses where the day stops and you float, free of the usual trivial bullshit. Ticktock. Pottering about, touching walls and chairs, straightening my few possessions. No thought, just movement. Just peace.
I dressed in the rental and did my hair. Most of the time it didn’t matter as long as you were clean, but with an escort gig you had to take a little more care. Besides, who knew what could happen mixing with the rich?
That thought, though, made me nervous. I hoovered more lines and followed them with Valium. A fine combination. A pick-me-up and a take-me-down colliding in a supernova of insular confidence. Yum.
The guy blew his horn about ten o’clock and I walked out of my building to taste another world.
Merc 500 SL with the top down. Latest model, of course. Shiny and red and showroom neat. He said his name was Dean. Gym-hours across his chest and shoulders, good skin, good hair. He spent a lot of time on himself and a lot of money on his clothes. But none of it looked like it ran too deep, you could almost smell that he’d put everything into front, into his car and the way he came across.
He leaned back and looked at me as I got in.
“Oh, you’ll do just fine.”
We breezed away from the curb and took boulevards into Beverly Hills. The night looked polished—chrome, taillights, buffed metallic paint jobs, pastel neon. Silhouettes of palms razor-cut into a warm velvet sky.
“I’ve seen you somewhere, right?”
Dean smiled. He was pleased. He had good teeth.
“Come on, now. I’m paying, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to impress.”
“Er, yeah … But I have seen you, haven’t I?”
“Not often enough, baby.”
“You’re doing okay.”
I ran my hand along the top of the door.
“This old thing? Six weeks work last fall. Remember Farrah Fawcett?”
“Wow.”
“What do you drive?”
“Prelude.”
“What’s that?”
“Japanese.”
“Like a Lexus?”
“Not really. It’s a Honda.”
“Oh.”
“It must be great being an actor.”
“It’s the best thing in the world. I mean, I haven’t totally made it yet, but it’s a very nice thing to have people recognize you.”
“And the money.”
“Money just buys things, Jack. It’s only a way of measuring what you’ve got. It’s how your life is that’s important. Love’s important.”
“Love?”
“Being loved. That’s what we are, all of us in Hollywood, working like whores. We’re the love generation. Love, love, love. Gotta have it! It’s what we feed on.”
“I can dig it.”
“I imagine you can.”
Dean let out a whoop and gunned the car. Reflected light slid like oil on water across the smooth paintwork of the hood.
“I want you to love me tonight, Jack. Really love me, like I was everything to you. Every single thing in the universe. Can you do that?”
“I guess. I’ve done a telehosting course. That’s kinda like acting. Isn’t it?”
He slapped my thigh gently a couple of times.
“Good for you. Good for you.”
We turned into Beverly Drive and started to climb into cooler air and greater wealth.
The higher you go in the hills, the smaller the streets become, like you’re moving away from the thudding central core of some beast toward its skin. Artery, vein, capillary, tighter and more twisted. Until you get high enough and super-money takes over from the double-digit millionaires below. The houses move back from the road, too far to see, and the crowding ostentation of the flats is filtered through acres of lawn and woodland and becomes, to a poor ass-selling boy, something beyond dreams.
The drugs I’d taken at the apartment seemed suddenly insufficient. I would shortly be in a world where everything was better than me, from the people themselves down to the fittings in their bathrooms.
We turned off the road and drove up a stretch of private asphalt to a set of white iron gates. A man in a three-piece suit nodded pleasantly at us and checked Dean’s invite against a list he had on a clipboard. As he did so, he and Dean exchanged brief but pertinent comments on current affairs. Then the suit spoke into a wrist mic and the gates opened.
And we rolled on into paradise.
From the drive the grounds sloped down to the edge of a canyon in a series of terraces. In between green open spaces there were two pools, an ornamental garden, an orchard, a set of tennis courts, scattered service buildings, and a number of follies—everything glowing soft gold. Overlooking this, a white Spanish mansion, built in a horseshoe, went up three stories in steps, like the land. Flowers had been braided into ironwork balconies and laced around the outside of every window.
The inside of the horseshoe was filled with coral-pink gravel around a fountain of some ethnic ceramic glazed sea-blue. When we got out of the car it was driven away by a guy in crimson livery.
I can’t say I’d never seen a place like it before, because they were on TV all the time, often in made-for-TV movies and nearly always in miniseries. But it was wild really being there. Dean and I entered hand in hand.
Space. Endless stone floors. A central reception that rose the full height of the building and held another fountain. Arches in ranks, one after another, off to other parts of the house. The ceilings were vaulted, like some European monastery.
I stopped and looked around, drinking it in while Dean rubbed the back of my neck. I imagined how it would feel if I lived there—in the morning, getting up and strolling through quiet Spanish expanses, warm air and silk against my skin—in the evening, freshly showered, dressing in perfect clothes, smoking a single cigarette on the balcony of my suite, the sound of a beautiful woman swimming in the pool below me rising into the night, mixing with the scent of honeysuckle.
“Things, Jack, only things.”
“Yeah, but it must make being loved a lot easier, owning a place like this.”
“That’s true. Indubitably. How much do you love me, Jack?”
“Lots?”
“No, Jack, properly.”
I stepped close to him, put my hands on his waist and kissed him.
“I love you like anything.”
“Will you love me forever?”
“Forever and ever.”
“You, my handsome stud, are on your way to a bonus.”
We followed a wide corridor down one arm of the horse-shoe to a series of interconnecting rooms that looked to be party central. A long way ahead of us the end wall was folded back in a concertina of French windows and the house gave out onto a broad spread of sandstone flagging and a pool the size of a battle ship, burning turquoise with underwater lights. Somewhere a quintet played West Coast jazz.
There were a lot of people there, but the place didn’t have the usual frenetic party wildness. It didn’t seethe. Instead there was a smoothness to the motion in the rooms, people glided from one flesh cluster to another, their limbs lagging and subtly slowed. I thought at first it was an affected grace, some learned mannerism of the upper class. What I realized later was that wealth and success actually gave these people greater control over themselves, it just happened to show in the way they moved.
Waiters were circulating, but there were a couple of bars too. The one we used was made out of white marble. It looked like it had been imported whole from some turn-of-the-century Italian salon. Spring water for Dean, a vodka, Southern Comfort, and champagne cocktail for me. In a tumbler. I really wanted to find a little seclusion and armor myself with a chunk of the gram I was carrying, but if I couldn’t have one drug, I’d have another.
I leaned against the cool stone and scanned the crowd. There were celebrities there, standing in scrums of hangers-on, but a lot of the people I didn’t recognize. I figured the bash was mostly a production-side affair—money men, producers, studio people, the lower profile directors, and so on. Still, I felt like I’d walked into the pages of a particularly glossy magazine and, god, I wanted to belong. I didn’t want to be just watching these people, to be on the outside looking at them. I wanted to be them. I wanted their limos and their palaces and their lack of worry about money to be part of me. I wanted to wear clothes that could buy a car, that I could throw away after a season. I wanted to walk into a restaurant and have people know who I was. For a moment the desire for it all possessed me so intensely I thought I was going to faint.
Snap back. Slug my drink. Order another.
“Whose place is it?”
“A guy.”
“It’s a secret?”
“Do you know much about the movies?”
“I know everything.”
“Really?”
“Well, everything about some things.”
“You know Peter Laratin?”
“No.”
“Big producer, TV movies. Lots of work.”
“Oh.”
“He needs a gay guy to play a straight guy playing a gay guy. It’s a sitcom. He thinks it’ll be more realistic.”
“So you’re working tonight.”
“Not me. I’m playing.”
“Listen, Dean, I gotta take a piss. I won’t be long.”
“Back that way, up on the second floor.”
I swallowed the rest of my drink and went exploring. Out to the central reception, through discreet clouds of thousand-dollar perfume. Women everywhere, all of them beautiful. I ran fantasy scenes. Would I fuck this one, or that one, or her, or her? Indubitably. If they weren’t rich themselves they’d be connected to someone who was. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, all trimmed down and monied up. Any one of them could take my life up a considerable number of notches.
The washroom off the second floor gallery had urinals, black tiles, and tinted mirrors. I did my coke in one of the three stalls and sat there a while licking my gums and letting it take hold. On the other side of the door men came and went. Their conversation over the splashing of piss was about imported cars, high-yield investments, films, and women. They told jokes I didn’t understand.
On the way back to work I passed a woman standing at the balustrade of the gallery. She was alone, looking down at the people grouped around the indoor fountain. She turned as I moved by and it was there that it all started. In the
Godfather
they called it the thunderbolt. Tick tick tick. A series of freeze-frames, our eyes tracking each other, locking. Connections completing, switches being thrown. It was all the lead-up, all the courting, all the emotional feeling-out we were ever going to need or have. She had gray eyes and black hair and white skin and she wore a fitted gun-metal two-piece. She was older than me and she wasn’t immediately beautiful, but her body was excellent and she was obviously major money. I went down the stairs and she didn’t take her eyes off me. I looked over my shoulder and her lips parted, but then someone got in the way and I was out of the foyer.
Back at the bar Dean was talking to a middle-aged bald guy with rimless specs. He was dressed casually in fawn slacks and a soft wool shirt and he was super self-possessed.
“Jack, I’d like you to meet Peter.”
“Peter Laratin?”
The man shook my hand and smiled. “The one and only.”
“Wow.”
Peter moved closer to me.
“We have been talking, Dean and I. Can you guess what about?”
“Er …”
“We’ve been talking about love. About how much in it you are with him.”
I glanced at Dean. He was looking at me lovingly.
“Oh, I love him like anything.”
“And he feels the same. Can you tell me what love means to you? How you … view it?”