Chump Change (7 page)

L.A.’
S WEATHER IN
D
ECEMBER IS PARTICULARLY NUTS.
T
HE
night had brought in more dry Santa Ana winds from the desert. The last few years, at Christmas time, people drive to the canyons to start fires hoping to burn the city down and see the disaster they’ve caused reported on the TV news that night.

As I left the hospital parking lot, great waves of black dust splashed tree branches and brittle shards of paper bags against the windshield of the Ford. I found Santa Monica Boulevard and headed west in search of an open liquor store, while Rocco dozed on the seat next to me. I wanted only to be numb and buying two bottles of Mogen David Mad Dog 20-20, would make sure I got there.

For hours after the liquor store, I glided along the near empty side streets and dark avenues with my head sorting and clicking through impulses and conclusions. The more gulps of
Mad Dog I consumed, the more reasonable my thoughts became. I wanted only the aloneness and the humming of the tires.

By the end of the first bottle I was okay. I’d made it to sundown.

I got to Ocean Avenue and the beach and turned left to Venice Boulevard, then left again heading back toward downtown, continuing to let the world blow by in silence. From time to time, great gusts of hot air like giant cotton balls thumped the car in the darkness.

At Sepulveda, I went north again toward the mountains, until I crossed Pico and felt the tires hit what still remained of the shiny tracks from where the old trains had run. The rails popped up in places through the worn asphalt. The moonlight would hit the exposed metal for a few yards at a time, then the tracks would disappear back under the pavement, like the backs of eels gliding beneath the surface.

I drove more. Another ten miles. Fifteen. This time taking Olympic Boulevard downtown and back, passing “Nickel Street,” City Hall and Chinatown.

Near Venice Boulevard and La Cienega was a mini-mart liquor store. Rocco was awake and antsy so I pulled into the parking lot assuming that he was hungry.

A young Mexican clerk behind the register watched me coming in. I speculated that he pegged me in the category of jerkoff or wino bum because his attitude was cocky and nasty when I asked where the dog food was. He spoke bad American, snarled something, and pointed to an aisle. As I walked away, at the end of his side of the long counter, I saw a woman sitting on a stool and almost hidden. His lady.

She was Asian and older than the kid. Vietnamese or Cambodian. And very sexy. Red-red lipstick and long black hair and a black doily see-through blouse. I saw her face fully as she glanced up from her magazine. Our eyes locked for a second. Hers were hard and beautiful. Freeway eyes. I knew that mine were empty. Then, when I looked too long, she turned away. I always looked too long.

In the canned goods aisle, I picked up a few tins of inexpensive dog food and was about to return to the counter, when I remembered that I had my wife’s credit card tucked in my pants’ pocket. I had the revelation that I could afford anything I wanted. I wasn’t just another shit-sucking loser off the boulevard.

I put the cheap dog food cans down and walked back to the register and picked up a plastic shopping basket while the clerk’s eyes followed me. He could tell that something was different as I started randomly choosing packages of potato chips and cheese puffs and throwing them into the basket.

I grabbed many cans of good dog food, and several bags of Fritos, and a new can opener—not the cheap-shit metal kind that hurts your fingers, but the $9.98 kind with the wide plastic handles. From there I moved on: a Genoa salami and ten kinds of frozen dinners and crackers and mayonnaise and salad dressing and a dozen brands of plastic-wrapped cold cuts were next.

Now I was having a shopping spree. Carried away by my good fortune and the Mad Dog 20-20, I returned to the counter to drop off my full plastic basket and pick up two more empties, piling my purchases next to the register.

The mean-spirited young storekeeper’s full concentration was on me, but I didn’t look up or stop to make eye contact.

As I proceeded to the hardware area, I felt his glare, while I loaded up a few packages of light bulbs, telephone cords, and plastic-wrapped flash lights. When I changed aisles, he moved too, along the back of the counter to where he could watch me. He was making it hard to concentrate. To retaliate, I decided to buy everything in the lane I was in. The cookie lane.

Oreos and Malomars went in and chocolate chips by the dozen. Bags and bags. Peanut butter and oatmeal and even twenty packages of coconut macaroons that I knew I’d never eat. I had a mission.

The Asian girl was watching now, looking from me to her boyfriend, to the growing mountain on the counter, fully involved in the exhibition. When he saw me smile at her, it was the last straw. He snapped, “Okay majn. Bum. Jou ga monee to pay?”

I had him and I knew it. I was in no hurry. An American citizen in possession of a gold Visa card with a $5,000 limit doesn’t have to rush. Purposely, I again glanced down the counter at the Asian girl to be sure I continued to hold her interest, then I smiled back at him. “Right in my pocket, amigo!” I shot back.

“Shjo me,” he sneered.

“When I’m done, senor, you’ll be the first to know. You need have no fear regarding full payment. American pesos for American products. Esta bien, amigo?”

I didn’t wait for a reply. I wheeled around and made a beeline back to the cookie section, a little out of control from the effects of fortified wine and giddy at my own dialogue.

I swept two more shelves full of Ring Dings, Twinkies and cup-cakes into my baskets. Each one weighed thirty to forty pounds, minimum. I had to drag them the last ten feet to the counter.

When I began to dump the stuff on the counter he grabbed my arm. “Hole it, majn,” he said. “No more.” He leered at me.

I shook him off, leering back. I was bigger. A coward, but bigger.

“Jou put heem all bak, majn,” he said. “Jou krazee. Jou done want disa chit! Jou too drunk to pay. Done make too much trubl in diza store or I goin’ to fuk you up!”

My wife’s Visa card slid easily from my pocket and skidded across the counter to him, the way a crap shooter throws a come-out seven. Leaning over, an inch from his face, I yelled, “Ring it up, Ace. Ring it all up! And keep your fucking hands off me. As far as you’re concerned I’m Donny-fuckin’-Trump.”

The kid couldn’t decide whether to fight or take the plastic. Finally, reluctantly, he picked up the card and made a kind of spitting, throat-clearing noise, then phoned the Visa number to see if my card was stolen. He even repeated the process a second time to make sure. Then he wanted to double check my driver’s license ID before adding up my purchases. I passed the license over with a smile. I had nothing to hide.

Totalling everything up took him twenty minutes. I watched the register tape get longer and longer until it touched the floor. While he did it, his sexy girlfriend went back to reading her magazine.

Then I remember making a cocky, stupid decision, one that always made me end up the same way. After the kid had added everything up, I told him to throw in two bottles of Mad Dog 20-20. Hitting the wine too hard is when I start having problems.

The bill came to $619.00 for everything. There were seven full cardboard boxes to be carried out to the car. I signed the credit card receipt with a flourish, big circles and loops, “E.E. Cummings.” The kid didn’t notice.

As I was starting the motor, I took a last, long look back through the window at the girl. She was still on her stool at the end of the counter. Still reading her magazine. I knew she knew I was watching her, but she wouldn’t look up. The complete ice queen.

Unscrewing the cap on the Mogen David, I toasted her holding my bottle up and taking a long, deep wallop. Her haughty attitude didn’t matter. Mad Dog takes all the bumps out of the road.

I’d forgotten that the “Dog” ride I was beginning was my first since getting out of the hospital. For me, a run on Mogen David was like starting to fuck a five hundred pound female gorilla. All choice is gone. The gorilla lets you know when it’s time to quit. Sweet wine is like that.

Rocco was licking the cap, so I emptied the contents of the Milkbone box on to the blacktop in the parking lot and tore down the container and used it for a bowl. I poured a finger’s width on the bottom and he licked it up.

I kept heading east on Venice Boulevard in the hot night wind, sipping wine and watching pieces of L.A. blow across the
windshield. When I got to Western Avenue, I turned north and continued until I passed the Wiltern Theatre at Wilshire. I’d thought I was simply driving, cruising aimlessly as before; but when I saw the Wiltern, I knew I was only a few blocks from the Dante family’s first house in L.A., outside Hancock Park on Van Ness. It was the first home the old man had purchased on income from Hollywood. Movie money. Blood money. I found the house and stopped in front.

Seeing the place again in the darkness swarmed my mind with thoughts of another life. It had been thirty years or more since I’d lived in the place.

The old man had bought it because his agent, Harry Goldstone, had felt it would be a good address for a successful Hollywood screen-writer and because it was close to Paramount. Harry negotiated a great deal on the place.

The house was paid for entirely by Dante’s movie salary earnings. The old man had finally stopped turning down lucrative film assignments and had completely given up being a novelist. After years of writing straight fiction and nearly starving, it was an easy decision.

We moved to Malibu when I was still young, but I could vividly remember this house and his rages here. It was here that, day in and day out, he rewrote stacks of scripts and reworked scenes on shooting deadlines. Here he had begun to earn the big money. Success and rage stuck to every wall of the place like black jam.

In this house, I was to experience what happens when a passionate artist gives up what he loves and comes to detest himself. Here, I had witnessed my father’s drunkenness and seen him treat those closest to him with contempt and
bitterness, while he’d watched his pay checks get bigger and bigger.

And now, sitting in the station wagon, it was Christmas time thirty years later. Looking at the house, I realized how Jonathan Dante might have spent summer nights pacing the master bedroom balcony, a glass of scotch on the rail, raising his rough laborer’s fists to the sky, and cursing himself and God for letting him piss away his talent for a Hollywood paycheck.

I
DECIDED TO DRIVE SOME MORE.
T
OUR AROUND
L.A. I’
D BEEN
hitting the Mad Dog pretty good, taking long pulls as I stopped at each traffic light. I rode through Hancock Park, Mid-Wilshire, then headed back toward West Hollywood. When I got to La Brea, I swung north again. My plan was no plan. Float. Drink.

At the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard, I stopped for the red. It was then that I saw them. Hustlers. Boys. In the deadness of my haze, I wanted to fuck them all, suck every dick in a frenzy.

A blond kid, about eighteen, in a red halter top and cutoff jeans waved at me from a stand-up pay phone. Seeing that I was watching, he grabbed his crotch and smiled.

I tried to pull the car to the side to talk to him, but my leg wasn’t listening clearly to my head’s motor instructions. Slow motion had inhabited my brain. I knew that my foot would eventually go from the brake to the gas pedal, but it was taking great concentration. When the light changed, I heard a horn honking angrily behind me.

While I was re-thinking the directions to make the gas pedal work, I realized that there was a young black guy at the passenger door holding up two fingers. “Two blocks man,” he leered. “Just ride me two blocks to Fountain. Okay?”

I nodded and spoke. “Okay, sure, get in.” My foot went back on the gas and started working okay again. The black kid
got in, but the asshole motorist behind me kept honking and Rocco, who seemed passed out and unable to move across the seat, refused to budge. I had to drag him by his legs to make room for the passenger.

Once he was in the wagon and I had pulled away from the light, the black kid’s pitch changed. “So, what are you into?” he asked. “What’s your thing?”

“Tonight it’s sucking and fucking…and not thinking.”

“Your dog…is he dead?”

“He’s a sleeper.” I pointed to the bottle between my legs.

Looking around, he noticed the cardboard boxes in the back seat filled with cans and bottles and dozens of bags of junk food and cookies. “You’re into candy and potato chips big time, right?”

“Right.”

“I lied,” he said half-smiling, half-leering, “about the ride—I ain’t lookin’ for no ride.” He was tense. He acted as if he were high on “rock” or some kind of speed. The smile was a cheat on his face.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked, concentrating on the road to make sure that I was still steering the car okay.

When I looked back, he had unzipped his fly and was working his hand up and down a long, limp black dick.

“Want to suck me off?—Fifty bucks.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I suck you—that’s fifty, too—want to fuck me, that’s a hundred—half-and-half is one-fifty—that’s the menu, baby.”

“Okay, good…” I said, lying, turned off, suspecting that what he was after was money for more “rock,” not sex. Suddenly, I wanted to get him out of the car so that I could go
back to the boy in the red halter top or pull over to the side and sleep…

He saw me losing interest. “You like pussy, too?”

“A personal favorite.”

“Listen to what I’m tellin’ you, I got me some sweet young white hole stayin’ at my place—pretty, too—tight little pussy—she from New York…she love drinkin’ too…she fifteen, no shit, I saw her ID—suck your dick till it fall off—do anything I tell her—just give her some of that mean red piss you been drinkin’ and let her pet your dog—she love to watch herself in the mirror take it up the ass and suck dick—nasty bitch—you can have her for all night…wanna go…?”

I hated his hustle. “How much,” I asked, bored.

“All night, two-hundred,” he said, his brain speeding and out of control.

“Let’s forget it.”

He was desperate and had no patience. “Fuck, man—a hundred, then—FUCK—I need the money—you lookin’ at me—you know I need the money.”

“Twenty-five,” I said, sure it would get rid of him.

“Okay—deal—FUCK…you too drunk, baby—fucked up—how I know you got any money at all?”

We were at Sunset Boulevard and La Brea, half a mile from where I picked him up. I didn’t want to drive any more. I needed to pull over and sleep. “OK,” I said, removing a fistful of fives and tens from my pants’ pocket. It was part of the cash from my last four unemployment checks. “I’m rich, see?”

“Let’s go to my place—it’s just five minutes—you can fuck her all night—it’s on Santa Monica, past Western—not so
far—she take good care of your dick. First, you pay me the twenty-five.”

I bumped the big Ford against the curb when I stopped. “Bring her back here,” I said. “I’ll wait for you. Twenty minutes.”

“She won’t come out the house—you gotta go with me—she don’t trust nobody.”

I took a ten dollar bill from my pocket and handed it to him, then reached back and pulled three bags of Malomars and a couple of packages of the coconut chocolate chip cookies from the boxes and gave those to him too. “Give her this stuff and the money,” I said. “She’ll come. And tell her that Bruno said Merry Christmas.”

“Bruno?—bitch want money, Bruno—not no cookies.”

“Bring her back here. I’ll give you fifty more if you bring her here to me.”

“You fucked up, Bruno—you crazy—you look crazy—been suckin’ on that mean wine too long—don’t be sendin’ me to run down no pussy and not be here when I come back.” I handed him another five. “I’ll be here. What’s her name?”

“Amy.”

“Okay. What’s your name?”

“Call me McBeth, like the play.”

“Right,” I said.

A long time later, I woke up with Rocco barking and someone at my driver’s window. A girl. Young, fifteen or sixteen. She wasn’t pretty and she was very skinny, but she was smiling. I smiled back.

As my mind cleared, I saw McBeth at the other door, motioning me to let him in, so I popped the button. Rocco was
snarling at him and he was afraid to get in. I held the dog by the collar.

“Sorry, Bruno, it take too long finding da ho—two hours.” By my expression, he could see that I wasn’t impressed with her. “Yeah, I know, she skinny as shit and she got a horse face, but she fuck you till you beg to get yo dick back and she smart too—whacchaamatta you dog, man—he like me before.”

“He was asleep before.” I hefted Rocco onto the floor of the back seat. He didn’t resist and curled up. They got in.

When Amy talked, it was with an acute stutter. “Is th-th-that animal va-va-vicious,” she asked.

“Is McBeth?”

“A pa-pa-putz, a ba-bad business man but na-na-not va-vicious.”

“You’ll have to take your chances,” I said.

She smiled again. “I la-la like Ma-ma-malomar ca-ca-cookies.”

At McBeth’s suggestion, I headed the Ford West on Sunset to Laurel Canyon, then north up into the hills. Looking over at Amy, I could see that she weighed under ninety pounds. A body of a child’s. Her Hollywood-hooker costume of black high-heeled boots and thigh-high tights and a halter top made her look like a pre-teen playing dress up. Her tits were two knuckle-sized protrusions in the elastic top. A mile up the canyon, McBeth directed me to pull in behind the parking lot of the Country Store Market, so we’d be in darkness and out of view of the street. I did what he requested, and parked the car.

“Give the girl some wine—she love to get stupid—she love the shit,” he suggested. I took a long pull at the jug and
passed it to Amy. He was right. She hammered at it for half a minute with long, savage swigs.

“Fuck,” I said, “you are a drinker.”

“I ca-ca-ca-can pa-party,” she said back. Then she opened a purse that was crammed full of unwrapped Malomars, removed one and took a big bite.

I began to laugh from somewhere deep in my guts. Being with her and McBeth and my father’s old bull terrier in a deserted parking lot in the Hollywood Hills in the Santa Ana wind, eating cookies and drinking Mad Dog struck me funny. It was like listening from outside my head. I passed McBeth the bottle and asked him if he wanted a hit.

He pushed it back. “I want my money, man. Fifty bucks. We doin’ binnes. You gonna fuck this ho? Yes or no?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, still laughing, heavily under the numbness of Mad Dog wine, indifferent to whether I got fucked or not. To make McBeth happy, I started pulling clumps of wadded-up bills from my pants’ pocket and setting them on the seat for sorting. Amy took this as a cue, and bounced over Rocco into the cargo area in the back of the wagon, a Malomar in each hand. Half a minute later, she had managed to get her clothes off without having to set either of the cookies down. She was bony and pale and without embarrassment. Like a ten-year old boy.

I was having trouble separating the money and watching her antics. To me, everything she did was funny. She reached back over the seat and began petting and feeding Rocco part of her Malomar, her narrow ass jutting into the air. That was funny too.

McBeth was quick. With one hand on the door knob, he scooped up and grabbed all the bills that he could, then
jumped from the car and ran. When I looked over, he was gone. All I could hear were his footsteps. That was funny too. I yelled, “McBeth, you thieving nigger fuck, take her too…Don’t leave her here.”

Outside in the blackness, the footsteps came back to the rear of the car by the cargo door. “Okay homie,” I heard him yell. “You right. Fair is fair.” Then the tailgate door of the wagon popped open and he was inside next to Amy.

They grappled, but though she attempted to stop him, he was too strong and too fast, and he snatched up all her clothes and her purse, jumped out, slamming the tailgate door closed again. “Now she all yours, white boy—crazy motherfucker,” he yelled. “You so smart Bruno, you figure this out. I’m done with both you now. Fuck you!”

I struggled out of the car, but he was gone into the hot night wind with my money and her stuff. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The wine had done its job.

In the dome light from the car’s interior, she looked bewildered, her thin arms and legs crossed across her pale torso. Like the boat people. Naked and luckless. Removing my jacket, I handed it back to her. Then I needed a few deep pulls at the jug—not to consider the situation, but because there wasn’t anything else left to do.

We were a long time like that. Her in the back and me behind the wheel. I lit a cigarette. Then another. I could see her eyes studying me, expressionlessly, in the rearview mirror.

Finally, self-consciously, I smiled at her. It took a few seconds, but then she smiled too. I reached back and passed her the jug of Mad Dog and a fresh bag of Malomars. I figured, fuck it!

When I woke up, I was sweating. The pains above each eye were not synchronized. One stabbed, the other jabbed. I was being punched by different-sized staplers at half-second intervals. Someone was near me—above my head, breathing hard. Panting. I remembered Rocco.

I had been sleeping on something hard and gravelly. When I squinted my eyes, it was against airless intense sunlight and suffocating heat. I realized then where I was—the rear storage area of my brother Fabrezio’s Ford Country Squire Station Wagon.

I had no idea where it was parked, but I knew that this wasn’t jail. Looking further, I could see mounds of groceries all around me on the floor of the car. Food everywhere. Opened luncheon meat packages and piles of spilled corn flakes. Slices of bread and ruptured cookie boxes stewing in scattered soap powder. My pillow was an open bag of Fritos’ chips. Crumbs of the stuff clung to my hair. I peeled something sticky off my sweating chest. It was a section of crushed Malomar cookie, chocolate and marshmallow stuck to my skin.

Next to me was the skinny body of a boy without a dick—segments of the memory of the night before were coming back in grey flashes—Angie?—Edith?—Amy!

The immediate problem was the brutal heat and sunlight. With effort, I raised my head and looked backward above the window line and out the glowing, flat rear glass of the wagon. We appeared to be parked in a parking structure. The back of the car was engulfed by the angle of the brutal sun. The front was not. It looked much cooler up front.

Fab’s wagon had power windows but the journey and effort to travel to the ignition switch next to the steering
column was out of the question. It might be possible to make it to a shaded area in the rear seat but I was still incapable of attempting anything. My body wouldn’t obey. I settled for wetting my raw throat with several swigs from the bottom of the Mad Dog bottle. It helped.