Plush (8 page)

“Hollywood. Always.”

Cesar Chavez to Sunset.

We drive up to the roof of the Arclight cinemas parking lot. It’s high enough that you can see the famous, white-painted Hollywood sign; hills; city lights; trees: you know, the world that matters. We park the car against the wall – against the world. Up on top.

I kiss Diego and his hand tries to find me to pull me close, but he is slow, so I just get on his lap, car wheel digging into my back, and we fish it out. Our mouths and tongues grasp for some new reality. I pull away and look at his face. It’s so perfect. Like an angel. Cherub. Big blue eyes. Perfect blonde curls. I touch his cheek. I can feel his boner pushing through his ridiculous looking pants.

Me: “I’ll fuck you in a second…” Diego’s mouth drops. I bite his lower lip:

“But first, let’s get high.”

While on his lap, I pour some speed into the light bulb and put a cut straw in my mouth, dropping it into the big opening where the silver thingy once was. My purple glitter lighter lights the speed on the bottom of the bulb, heating the glass, and I suck. My brain goes
KAPOW!
And I’m melting and running and dying and twitching and wow! This is fucking CRAZY!

I go up to Diego’s mouth and he tries to move away. But too late, I blow it in – just like Sketch did to me in Austin, but I don’t have fish lips. We are both coughing hard. “H-h-ck-ck-Hayley… I’ve never done hard drugs before! Uh… uh… I’m a caf-feineless vegan…” He winks even though it’s true. I smile.

Eyes, left right, twitch. Sky. Speed. Thrill. Night
.

I kiss his cheek; turn it on to the 80’s, metal and hard rock, speed guitar station; and take another deep hit.
DUNADUNADUNADUNAWEEEEE!
I open the car door. Diego follows me out. There’s no one up here; it’s so late on a Tuesday night. Just our car, the moon, an occasional ‘copter, and the hell-fire sounds of an L.A. night, losing its mind.
Twitch. Drip. Shake. Nod
. I drop the bulb over the side and watch it break on the sidewalk far below. Shatter. Clear bits fly into the road and onto the small patch of tree, mixed in with the crushed cans and stomped hearts of Hollywood gutter life. I toss the baggy over too.

“Kiss me hard,” I say to Diego; his blue eyes are sad, entranced, questioning, and freaking out. We make out, my ass on the hood of his old car. I’m fast, lighting speed. Nothing can stop me.
Twitch. Gack. Spigaked. Squawk. Sigh
. I unzip his pants and bend over the truck. “FUCK ME SUPER HARD, DIEGO!” … “ok.” Not enough fore-play. I’m not even that wet, and it makes me upset; I don’t know what to do. So I do what I saw a girl once do at a Lord Percy party: I put spit on my hand and put him in.
Fast. Speed. Wild. Metal. Digging into my stomach
.

He’s so polite, and yet he fucks so hard.

This is what I needed to forget the retardation of my childhood life:
freedom-tanking, wild nights where anything goes
. No more being told who to be or what to do.

“Spank me, Diego.”
Gun. Trucks medaling 130 down a freeway
. He’s fucking me faster and harder, and we’re screaming. But he spanked me too soft. Too polite. We’re chewing on our lips, eyes bulging out of our heads. Our minds are gone, gone, and even more gone. Sweating. Dizzy fast. Twitching. There is no romance here. “Harder!” I yell.

“FREEZE!” we hear.

Diego and I stop fucking, but he doesn’t pull out; he gets limp inside me.

A bright spotlight is shining on us, and two cops are holding out guns pointed at us. This is worse than it seems. I feel the need to run in circles or run up and down the stairs or just move!

“You’re under arrest!”
Blah. Blah. Blah
.

Fear, fear. Fast fear
. What the fuck have I done?
AHHHHHH!

Somewhere amidst their speech, I ask the bright light, “Um, can I pull down the back of my dress… uh… and can he pull up his pants?”

I don’t know whether I’m dying inside at the absurdity of the situation or if I’m dying from not knowing what’s going to happen next.

Cops: “Yeah, ok, but only with one hand. Don’t try anything funny.”

I still can’t make out the piggies’ faces – the lights on us are too bright – only silhouettes of one chubby piggy and one statuesque one.

Diego and I arrange our clothes.

Handcuffs on.

Back of car.

Apparently it’s illegal to have sex in public. “Where’s the drugs, lil’ girl?” they bark. They search our car: Nothing. I’m just glad they didn’t find the speed that I tossed and that Diego has no other drugs.

I can’t look at him. I know he is twisted in pain of this life letdown moment. I know I have broken his innocence. I was warned about L.A. apathy, and in these cuffs stuck in this car, I can feel it setting in. People say if you live in L.A. long enough all you care about is fame, drugs, and everything to do with how to not get old. I don’t care about the world right now. I care about getting out. “If you guys weren’t so high, I may have let you go…” I see the copper’s face in the car light as he closes the door. It’s sad and stern with German jaw-bones. He looks tired and mad and puffed up and righteous – tight mouth, sad eyes, all bravado. The other, shorter, chubbier one has a scar on his hand that looks like what I’d imagine a bullet wound would look like. I hate my life. Diego is crying. The seat is uncomfortable. My back hurts. The cop car winds down the parking lot. Hollywood has never seemed more like a hell than it is now.

There are a lot of culprits for the bag of tricks laying up in my brain, but most of all me. I’m to blame.

19

“Annie… um… It’s me, Hayley… I really fucked up this time.” I’ve been let out of my holding cell to make my one phone call. It smells weird in here, like sterilizer, urine, and loss.

“HAYLEY! You’re calling from the police station?!” Sigh. Gulp. Drown. A lady cop is staring at me hard, making sure I don’t do anything funny. What could I do?

“Yes; Can you come bail Diego and I out? He’s in the boys holding cell.”

“Coming right over. Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.” Her voice is tense, yet still placid lake calm.

“Hurry. If you’re not here soon they’ll put us in the jail! JAIL!”

Back to the cement holding cell with bars. Inside there’s an 18-year-old white girl with a messed-up, brunette beehive and runny mascara. She keeps screaming that she’s pregnant and not a prostitute and that the law requires them to let her out. Her mini skirt torn and eyes the size of an egg, she rattles herself against the bars, moaning against the moon and the world for all this misunderstanding. There’s also some old, scrawny, white-haired, tatted-up woman chewing on her lip like me. She’s a skeleton with missing teeth and giant pock marks in her face that she keeps picking at to get the worms out. She must be sixty.

I pace back and forth nonstop; I have all this fucking speed in my veins and nowhere to run. I want to clean, clean, and organize things, but not this place. It’s over-air-conditioned in here, and I’m freezing and shaking. Keep the speed up. Keep warm. SPIGAK’D!

“YOU!” the tatted-up, old lady says…

Fuck, what do I do? Ignore it? Talk back? Will I get raped? All you hear about L.A. prisons is that the people beat you and the girls rape you. I don’t want to be raped. I don’t want to die behind bars – maximum sentence is just under a year! Fucking cops! I’m too pretty for prison. AHHH!

“YOU!” She yells again as she points a wiry finger with a skull tattooed on the tip straight at me. Her leg kicks out, blocking my pacing path. I stop, turn, and look in her wild cannon eyes. Do I yell crazily, or do I melt into a mouse? Do I show I’m dominant so she won’t hurt me? “WHAT!” I yell, trying to shake my arms like I’m super kray-kray shark attack so she won’t want me.

Her face twists: “You’re gonna fuckin’ die, bitch… If you keep doing drugs ‘n shit. You’re gonna fucking die. And if you don’t, all your friends will die and then you’ll be like me: 33, in and out of jail, and nobody will love your pretty face anymore… I was a fucking runway model, bitch.
Milan, baby, Milan!
” Her eyes twitch. 33? Holy fuck. Maybe it’s time to get my shit together. Maybe I should slam the breaks stop.

A cops baton hits the bars behind me.

“Hayley… You made bail.”

Annie paid fines. The cops were just scaring us, I guess. Not even probation. We all agree not to tell anybody and forget this ever happened. I guess this is a sign that I don’t really need to stop. Just proceed with caution.

Sunrise over this crazy, sacred city. Stumble home, up the stairs.

What lays ahead? I never know what’s around the next bend.

20

It’s close to the end of the album; I just have to finish my very last vocal take. The record company is sure this is the biggest thing to happen since Nirvana or Radiohead or Arcade Fire or all the other big things.

La Egg decides to throw a party at the studio, which has a house in front; a swimming pool out back; and a tranny, thronged-up, Arabian dress wearing, crossdressing caretaker, named Simon(e).

Mountains of coke, fake boobs, disco balls, loud music, DJ’s, TV actors – It’s full on. I try to go the bathroom stall and see ringed hands curled over the wall. La Egg’s wicker, pointy shoes poke from beneath, and a line of girls giggle as the stall door shakes. Some weirdo moans. Nikolai Egg-y poo was so quiet in the studio, so charming, and so polite; who knew he had such gusto to fuck somebody in public in a bathroom stall like this?! He screams, “I AM THE KING OF HOLLYWOOD!”

I do a line of coke off a stripper’s tits per some B-actor’s request. Jack and Donnie have so many stripper friends; it’s beyond cliché and beyond L.A. Everybody has black or bleach blonde hair.

What does the stripper do with her asshole after work?

Drop him off at band practice.

I’m so tired; I don’t know who I am anymore
. Coke. Another line of coke. White divine drips down the throat. The drip: that’s the best part. That’s the only part. I’m losing weight. I tell the bloggers I’m on a strict diet of Camel lights, cocaine, vodka, and hot ass, tattooed, black-haired boys. Everything is for the taking, and we’re taking it all.

I don’t see Jack all the time, but we see each other enough… I understand for the first time what it means to feel indifferent. I’m indifferent to the bodies laying next to me, indifferent to the people I talk to at parties, indifferent to the two, almost L.A. legendary, blonde boys coming up to me that Jack had pointed out at another party – maybe at Lord Percy’s. They’re rock-n-roll royalty. Both of their daddies are in famous bands. And they’re soon-to-be, almost rock-stars themselves.

“Hey I’m RoRo…”

“I’m Bo.”

Yes, you’re both beautiful…
but my eyes blur in the wild train ride of never-ful-ly-here, never-fully-there, never-really-asleep, never-really-alive
. I rub my eyes; black mascara comes off into my fingers.

“You wanna come back to our place?” they ask in unison, pulling at my sweaty, shaky hands. My head is spinning, but somewhere, someone else is saying:

“Hayley?” I turn and pull my hands back to myself.

“Hayley?” A platinum-haired, wild witch of a woman calls from across the room in a flowey gown, spike collars, and platform boots. Is she a dream? Is she real? Have I slept in the last three weeks? In the mirror, purple bags and bones in powder white skin I see.

“Hayley?”

I am suddenly across the room, but I didn’t move my feet. Something moved me. The witchy, lanky, alien, flowey woman of flowers and pain floats me into the backroom. A bedroom. A royal-red velvet comforter and curtains. I am laying down, chewing my lips, and vanishing.

“Hayley?” She whispers in my ear. Her gown is off without anyone taking it off. I see gorgeous, round tits and a rib cage and tiny wrists of bangles and mist.

“Hayley?”

“Yes, magic lady?” I take my shirt off as she comes in, and her soft, soft lips roll over me like delicate, thunder-hungry clouds. Women’s lips are so different than men’s. Pillows, love, luscious, sweet, sensitive, sexy. I caress her ass – oh, a woman’s ass is divine. I want to worship her. Her hands are on my chest; her lips move to my nipples; I’m getting wet. I pull her underwear down. The ceiling is spinning. The wobbly bass booms through the walls. “Hayley?” she whispers. She’s on top, her hands moving so sweet, so tender, so like nothing else I’ve known. A tenderness. An understanding of the violence of men’s minds and the sensuality of ours. She’s vibrating my pussy with her middle finger. I don’t fight it; I fall in it, fall off a cliff of desire, flying over the ocean. Down my underwear goes, and her mouth is down there, sucking away my sorrow, my wetness, and my screams. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, OH FUCK!

My body is shaking. I can’t help myself; I’m cumming so fucking hard – men never make me come so fast. Men are greedy; she is giving me everything I want. I think someone is at the door, but it’s locked, and I moan louder and louder. And then light comes in from the door as I’m clenching the sheets.

Le Egg IS THERE. The Brit Aussie accent shouts in garbled, misharmonic, dissonant angst.