Sex and Violence in Hollywood (14 page)

As they followed him to the DVD section, Carter said, “No shit? 2,000 Maniacs?”

“All of ’em. Blood Feast, Wizard of Gore, they’re all here.”

Adam and Carter wore broad grins as they snatched DVDs from the shelves.

“Over here,” Wally went on, wheeling the chair with thickly muscled, tattooed arms, “I got a digitally remastered Conqueror Worm under the original title, The Witchfinder General. The British version that was never released in America. And right here—” He took a DVD from the shelf, “—Oliver Stone’s The Hand, with audio commentary by Stone and Michael Caine, Good commentary, too.”

They were ecstatic, euphoric.

“There’s a new T.M. Wright novel,” Wally said. “Just arrived yesterday, in fact. And the new Stephen King, of course.”

Adam checked his watch, which he was not wearing, as he asked, “A new King already? What time is it?”

They spent a few hundred dollars of their dads’ money, and left the store with four plastic bags heavy with DVDs, novels, magazines, comic books, and toys.

Back in the car, Carter started the engine and pulled out of the lot. He asked, “You think, uh...well, I mean, if she’s really like you say she is, you think she might, um, hit on me? Try to blackmail both of us?”

“Carter, I’m honestly surprised she hasn’t nailed you already. She might do you in the backseat of the car while I drive.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“I don’t know, Carter, that’s what I mean! She’s completely unpredictable. Like a pit bull. One second it’s licking the baby’s face, next second it’s eating the baby’s face. I want you to see that, to see what she’s like.”

“I, uh...don’t know if I want to.”

Adam sighed and shook his head. “Don’t bullshit me, Carter, I know you better than that. You’ve got such a hard-on to meet her, you couldn’t stand up right now without popping your zipper.”

Carter laughed. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Adam grinned and said, “Then come with me, dammit!”

Carter thought about it awhile. Turned on the radio and found some music. “Okay, but only on one condition.”

“What? Anything.”

“If weird shit starts to happen, or if my woman’s intuition kicks in and I start feeling like weird shit is about to happen, I’m gone. You drop me off and I call for a car.”

“Deal,” Adam said. “No problemo, Kimosoggy.”

“Then I’ll go.”

TWELVE

Adam’s 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood convertible
was the glossy color of a freshly-made candied apple, with a hungry-sounding V-8 engine ready to chew pavement, and fins on the back like the ones on the Batmobile in the old TV series starring Adam West. The black leather upholstery was pristine, and the original black top could not have been in better condition the day it was manufactured.

Although he did not like prolonged exposure to the sun, Adam was not immune to the siren’s call of the convertible. It was heard loudest in Los Angeles, where everyone drove everywhere, freeways coiled and tangled above and beneath one another in the desert heat. In Los Angeles, where a drive to the grocery store is potentially an all-day event, a car is an integral part of life, a necessity rather than luxury. Adam discovered there was something at once exhilarating and deeply calming about driving a convertible. Especially around dusk, when the setting sun turned the dangerously high levels of deadly toxins in the air such lovely shades of red and purple.

The convertible was his father’s way of assuaging his own guilt, of saying, Look, Adam, I’m not sorry for anything I’ve said or done, but...here’s a really cool expensive car for your birthday, okay? Adam could live with that. But the convertible was a surprise. Something his mom would have been more likely to buy him, not his dad. He wondered if Gwen had been involved in the choice.

“This is not a car you take just anywhere,” his dad had told him. “You don’t know exactly where you’re going? You take the Lexus. It’s three years old and outta shape. Unless you’re going someplace with a protected garage, or at least valet parking, leave the convertible at home. That car didn’t come cheap. Anything happens to it, I’ll drown you in the fucking pool like a sack of cats.”

Adam had no intention of letting anything happen to the convertible. That was why he usually drove the Lexus. Going out with Rain would be no different than any other time.

“What?” Carter said as they walked through the main garage. “You’re not taking the convertible? You mean I’ve gotta sit in that shitbucket Lexus again?”

“Yeah, I wanna go in the fuckin’ convertible, Big Brother!” Rain said.

Carter and Rain walked several paces ahead of Adam, arm in arm. Adam had not turned on all the lights in the garage, and in the shadows, they looked like Laurel and Hardy without their bowlers.

The right side of Rain’s face looked puffy, but any bruises she might have sustained from her time with Adam that day were invisible. He assumed she had covered them with makeup.

She had been flirting with Carter ever since Adam introduced them, and Carter flirted back, seemed to enjoy her company. Adam hoped his friend was keeping a clear head about everything. He had been warned.

Adam got into the car and opened the garage door with the remote clipped to the visor. On the other side, Carter and Rain decided who would sit where.

“You sit in the front, Carter,” Rain said. “I love backseats.”

“No, you’re in front, Rain,” Adam said.

She opened the passenger door, leaned in to give him a wicked smile. “You want me to sit up front with you, Big Brother?” she said with a wink.

“Actually, I don’t want you behind me, okay?”

“Hey, that’s no problem,” Carter said, getting into the backseat.

Before they reached the gate, Rain found a radio station playing hardcore rap and turned it up loud. Adam stopped at the gate, killed the radio, turned to her.

“It’s very important that you listen to what I’m about to say, Rain,” he said. His index finger pointed rigidly upward between them. “If you are in a car that I’m driving, under no circumstances are you to tamper with the radio or the CD player. Don’t even reach for it as if to tamper with it.”

“Jeez, what’s up your ass?” Rain said.

“Nothing,” Carter said from the backseat. “He’s always that way about the radio. He has an allergic reaction to rap.”

As Adam drove on, Rain leaned toward him and puckered her mouth. She spoke through it in babytalk as she reached over and casually squeezed his genitals: “Poor widdoo bay-beee.” Adam quickly slapped her hand away.

Rain leaned back in her seat and lowered her window. She wore a pair of red-framed wraparound sunglasses that matched the red of her lips. Short black skirt, tight purple sleeveless top. A small black bag hung from her shoulder by the loop of its long silver chain.

“It’s after ten o’clock at night,” Adam said. “Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

She smiled at him. “I like it dark.”

“I think it’s cool,” Carter said. “It shows individuality. A refusal to conform. Those are admirable traits, Rain.”

She turned around in her seat, got on her knees. “You think so, Carter?”

“Sure. You’re a rebel. You don’t accept the status quo. You’re—”

“Rain, would you please sit down,” Adam said. “And put on your seatbelt.”

Rain turned to Adam slowly and glared. “I’m talking to Carter,” she said, teeth clenched.

“Then I’m pulling over, because I’m not driving while you’re sitting like that.”

“Unfuckingbelievable,” Rain said as she sat in the seat and put on her seatbelt. “I bet you go to church every Sunday and visit old people in rest homes, don’tcha, Mr. Douglas.”

“Mr. Douglas?” Carter said. “What’s up with that?”

Rain explained why she called Adam “Mr. Douglas,” and Carter laughed. The more he thought about it, the harder he laughed. Pointed at Adam and said, “Fruh-Fred MacMurray!”

Adam ignored him, turned to Rain again. “Look, I don’t even know where we’re going, okay? So you’ve gotta tell me.”

“Where are we going, anyway?” Carter said as his laughter subsided.

“To a party,” Rain said.

“Par-tay!” Carter shouted.

“It’s at my friend Monty’s house in Compton.”

“What?” Adam said as Carter simultaneously said, “Oh, shit.”

“What’s the big fuckin deal?”

“The big fuckin’ deal,” Adam said, “is that we can’t go to Compton because we’re not armed!”

“Jesus, what a coupla fuckin’ pussies!” Rain said. Leaned her head back, rolled her eyes. “It’s not that bad. He doesn’t really live there, that’s just where he’s staying until he gets back on his feet. It’s a nice little house and tonight he’s having some friends over to welcome me back.”

“Okay, but we’re not staying long,” Adam said. “We’ll go in, you can say hi to your friends, then we leave.”

“Who died and left you my fuckin’ nanny?” Rain shouted so loudly that Adam winced.

“You were the one who wanted to go out,” Adam replied, almost as loudly. “So we’re out. But we’re in my car and I’m driving, so we do things my way. Now, if you want to go to Compton and hang out till you get shot in a drive-by or raped by a drug dealer or employed by a pimp, you’ll have to do it in some other car with some other guy at the wheel.”

Rain smiled with satisfaction and said, “Well, Big Brother...we’ve only known each other a couple days and you’re already coming outta your shell.”

“Quit analyzing me and tell me where to go,” Adam said.

“How about to an analyst?”

In the backseat, Carter tried to stifle his laughter, but it got out anyway.

Adam glanced over his shoulder at Carter and said, “How would you like me to kick your traitorous ass out of the car in Compton and leave you there?”

Carter’s eyes widened. “Traitorous? I just thought it was funny, that’s all.”

Rain was looking at Adam with an annoyed frown. “You talk like a fuckin’ librarian, Adam, what’s wrong with you?”

“If proper English offends you, I’m sorry. You’ll just have to deal with it.”

“Proper English doesn’t offend me,” Rain said. “But people who use it so fucking condescendingly do.”

A snicker from the backseat.

Adam was surprised to hear her use such a word. And correctly.

They were silent for a while and Adam turned on the radio, found some music. The four of them did not speak again until they arrived at their destination.

A small community, Compton had a primarily black population. At first glance, it looked like a pleasant neighborhood beneath the California fan palms. With a closer look, its problems became clear. Houses and shops and even fast food restaurants had black iron bars on their doors and windows. Heavy sheets of metal slid down over the doorways of shops at closing time. Storefronts, apartment buildings, even houses were marred by graffiti, speckled with bullet holes.

Monty’s house—or the house in which he was staying—was more like a cottage. On the corner of two narrow intersecting streets, it was small, once cute, now crippled and battered by its own environment. Graffiti on the door and walls, bullet holes beneath the two windows that flanked the front door. Paint curled up in narrow strips, like dead cracked skin on the heel of a foot. The street was lined with houses exactly like it.

Cars were parked all around it, some blocked in by others. There were no sidewalks on either side of the street. The road simply ended on each side, replaced by rocky dirt. The rough ground made up a tiny yard, much of which was taken up by a battered old Mustang on blocks. No lawn, no fence. The concrete walkway leading up to the porch steps was broken into chunks of gray rubble. Music with a heavy beat rattled the foundation of the little house from inside.

“This isn’t a yard,” Adam said as they walked around the car over the oily dirt. “It’s an obstacle course.”

“You’re such a fuckin’ pussy,” Rain said.

“Boyz N the Hood was shot around here,” Carter said to no one in particular as he looked around with interest.

A bare, yellow, anti-bug bulb in a fixture over the door bathed the small porch in the color of unhealthy urine. The concrete steps were narrow, cracked, with broken corners. An old wooden graffitied door stood behind a sturdy iron security door with a shiny brass deadbolt lock.

Rain went up the steps first and kicked the screen door hard four times.

Carter leaned close to Adam and whispered, “I think we should keep the smartass remarks to a minimum. Somebody’s libel to bust a cap in our asses, know what I mean, Big Brother?”

“Knock that shit off!” Adam said. His nervousness made his voice tremble.

After more kicks, the door finally opened. Adam almost exclaimed, Opie Taylor! but clenched his teeth and swallowed instead.

The young man at the door was in his mid-twenties, but had the innocent, freckled face of a small-town country boy, with red crew-cut hair. He came out and picked Rain up in his enormous, muscular arms. His entire body rippled with muscles. Shorter than Adam by a few inches, his lack of height somehow made the muscles seem more threatening. Like snakes coiled to strike beneath his tight gray Tasmanian Devil T-shirt.