Sick City (22 page)

“Gentlemen,” he breathed, “the film, if you will.”

Randal passed the bag to Jeffrey. Jeffrey placed it on the floor and removed the canister. He looked at it for a moment and took a deep breath.

“Are you sure you know what you're doing?” Jeffrey said. “This thing is old. Delicate.”

Du Wald smiled softly. “I will treat it as if it were my own child,” Du Wald said, in a way that made Jeffrey feel extremely bad for Du Wald's descendants. Reluctantly, he handed the canister over. He watched as the old man opened the lid in the dim light and looked upon the reel of film within, awestruck. He took a deep breath, as if he were trying to inhale the essence of what this reel contained. His eyes were gleaming with anticipation. He lifted the film from the canister and loaded it onto the front of the projector. With practiced movements, he clicked open the lens and turned it to one side. Then he took the film and gently unraveled around three feet of it, holding it up to his eye in the dim light, and nodding appreciatively. Randal and Jeffrey anxiously watched him feed the film through a series of cogs, locking the film in place with a small lever.

“Film is a tactile medium,” Du Wald was muttering to himself. “I find this to be part of the appeal. I mean . . .
video
. . . there's no romance to video. I feel sad for the people who will come after us, don't you? Those people for whom video or CD will be the medium that documents their history? I mean, can you imagine someone getting genuinely excited by finding an old dusty DVD that had been misplaced over the years? Everything is available to everybody at the click of a mouse button, these days. The art of collecting is dying.”

Creating a loop with the film, he lined it up behind the lens, fiddling with it, positioning it perfectly. Then he closed the lens over the film with a dull clunk. He repeated the process on the back end of the projector, looping the film through a series of cogs of various sizes with quick, nimble fingers. He threaded the film upward, until he was able to wind the film onto the empty reel, holding it gently in place while he started turning the reel slowly, wrapping the film around it. He tinkered with the machine for a few more moments, muttering about the framing of the movie, before he turned to his guests and said, “Gentlemen, we're ready. Why don't you have a seat?”

· · ·

Randal and Jeffrey sat in the front row. Both stared at the screen as Du Wald dimmed the lights further and took up his position behind the projector.

“How long did you say it has been since anyone saw this tape?”

“At least thirty years,” Jeffrey answered.

“Goodness. In that case, gentlemen, we are truly privileged. Ms. Tate . . . we are ready to be entertained.”

With a whirring sound, the projector started up, and a flickering image appeared. Indistinct figures danced on the screen, out of focus in a psychedelic splash of colors. The image sharpened, and a mouth appeared, filling the screen. A perfect smile, full red lips, laughing silently. As Du Wald continued to tinker with the projector, sound began to fade in, filling the small screening room with laughter, muted voices, and the musical chime of glass on glass. The soundtrack of a long-ago party filled the air, and Randal felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise. He looked over to Jeffrey, and even Jeffrey was enthralled now, eyes fixed on the screen, mouth half open in a mixture of awe and disbelief. A male voice, mute for decades, now saying, “Okay, okay, we're rolling. We're rolling . . . ,” as a woman laughed drunkenly in the background, and the camera pulled back suddenly, and everyone's eyes focused on a familiar face on-screen.

“My God,” Du Wald muttered to himself as the action unfolded. “She really was beautiful. I suppose it's easy to forget, amidst the ugliness of what happened to her. But she
was
beautiful. Utterly
devastating
.”

“Three million dollars,” Jeffrey was saying again in a voice dripping with wonder. “That's a lot of fucking money.”

Randal shrugged. “It is. One and a half million each. It's not bad. But then you gotta figure in Stevie's cut. Twenty-five grand finder's fee, and his ten percent. That's a pretty hefty chunk.”

They were back in the Mark Twain now, Jeffrey on the bed, shirtless, fixing dope and Randal smoking meth, blowing the rank cat-piss-stinking fumes out the window. Randal watched Jeffrey as he slid the 28-gauge ½ cc insulin needle into his flesh, digging around under there, the thin rivulets of blood running down his stick-thin arms. So long as he stuck to just smoking meth, Randal could feel a little bit of moral superiority over his companion. He started to get the impression that whatever cut Jeffrey was going to make from this deal might well prove fatal.

· · ·

There was something that struck Randal as almost comical about this moment. They could hear a pimp loudly beating one of his girls in the adjoining room. She was sobbing, begging for forgiveness, and occasionally she would let out a blood-curdling scream when one of his blows really connected with her. It sounded like he was using a belt buckle, because each blow had a heavy, metallic sound to it.

“Where's my MONEY?” the pimp kept screaming. “BITCH, where's my MONEY?”

Here they were, shirtless, bathed in sweat (the Mark Twain did not boast air conditioners), listening to all of this in one of the scummiest hotels in one of the scummiest corners of Hollywood, discussing their cut of a multimillion-dollar business deal. Below them some homeless drunks were fighting and cursing at each other in the parking lot.

Jeffrey got his hit, slid the needle out, and lay back on the bed. He raised his arm to his mouth and sucked away the excess blood with a contented grin.

“Still . . . ,” he said, “it's a lot of money.”

When Jeffrey said it this time, there was a hint of doubt in his voice. Something about Stevie Rox walking away with such a huge chunk of their money rubbed Jeffrey the wrong way. He hated people like Stevie. It seemed in America, whenever you made some money, there would be a queue of bastards like Stevie lining up to take their goddamned cut. Usually they only had two things in common: they were already as wealthy as shit and they had done nothing to earn their percentage. You put your money in a bank, and they start creaming shit off the top. You buy a house, and some asshole wants a percentage of the sale just because they unlocked the door for you and gave you some rehearsed spiel about what a great place it was. And here was Stevie Rox, no doubt right now snorting blow and banging Baby in his four-poster bed, in some obscene mansion up in the Hollywood Hills, about to take his cut because he happened to write Du Wald's number on a napkin for them.

With a sudden crash, the prostitute next door bounced off of the connecting wall. “Well, you gone and done it now!” the pimp screamed. “You made me go mess up yo face! Stupid ho!”

“Aw, fuck this!” Randal spat. He got up and started banging on the wall. He screamed, “Can't you beat her quietly? Keep it down, man!”

There was a moment of silence, and then the girl started screaming: “Mind your business, fuck face! My man has a gun! He'll shoot your ass!”

“I gotta gun too!” Randal screamed back. “And I'm halfway outta my mind on meth right now, so DON'T FUCK WITH ME!”

As this was happening, Jeffrey's cell phone rang. It was the third time tonight. Jeffrey was about to ignore it again, but Randal said, “Can you like turn that thing off? Or answer it? It's driving me crazy. What the fuck is that ringtone? It's from the Tom and Jerry cartoons, right?”

“It's called ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.' It's by Handel.”

“Handel? So he's the guy who did the music for those old cartoons?”

“Yeah, that's him.”

Jeffrey looked at the phone, wrinkled his face, and said, “Oh, shit. It's Spider.”

“Who's Spider?”

“Guy I know. Speed freak. Used to be in the porno industry. . . .”

“Oh, yeah? He knows porn people?”

“Sure, I guess. He used to work for the Russians, some guy called Dimitri Barakov. Big porn guy, financed a lot of shit.”

“I know that name. Barakov. Yeah . . . he's pretty big. You think Spider could help us? I mean, get rid of the movie?”

“What, sell it to the porn industry?”

“Why not? What I saw tonight was pretty pornographic. I mean, if fucking Paris Hilton giving a half-assed blow job is worth millions to the porno industry, what about this tape? You saw the way that McQueen was drilling Sharon Tate and Mama Cass at the same time? He coulda had a career in hard-core, easily.”

The song kept playing. “
Dada-dah—dada-dah—dada da-daaah . . .”

“But you said that porno wasn't the way to go.”

“But we have an offer on the table now. If we could get someone to match it, we could cut Stevie out altogether. It doesn't hurt to see what our options are. . . .”

“I guess . . .”

Jeffrey looked at the phone.

“Spider is kind of an asshole, though. . . .”

“Who isn't? You think I wanna go hang out with fucking Rupert Du Wald and play with his collection of mummified dicks?”

Somewhat reluctantly, Jeffrey picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Jeff! Baby! You okay?” Spider's crackly, faraway voice said.

“Yeah. I'm good. What's up, Spider?”

“Nuthin'. I just, uh, wanted to give you a call . . . see how you were doing. . . . You know, I hadn't heard from you since the whole Tyler thing went down, and, uh, you know I got a new connection now. Good guy, good stuff. I mean he can get it all, and I mean I don't wanna talk bad of the dead or anything, but he's a much more reasonable guy than Tyler ever was. Guess I wanted to call and see if you needed to find a steady source, you know?”

“Spider . . . ,” Jeffrey said, cradling the phone with his shoulder while he caressed the fresh tracks on his arms, “I just got out of rehab. You crazy or something?”

“Oh, shit! My bad. You still off the shit? It's been like two months already! I just assumed . . .”

“Well, don't. Actually, though . . . there is something I wanted to talk to you about. You around tonight?”

“Sure.”

“You wanna meet me in the Spotlight, on Ivar? I got a friend I'd like you to meet. We got some business you might be interested in. . . .”

“Sure, sure, baby. Now?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, I'll be there, man . . . Gimme like forty minutes, okay?”

“Sure.”

· · ·

With that Jeffrey hung up. Randal gave him the thumbs-up. Jeffrey still looked unsure.

“It'll be fine,” Randal said. “We're just gonna shake the tree a little. If he can't help us, we call Du Wald tomorrow morning and tell him we accept. Either way, we're outta here by tomorrow night. What do you say?”

Jeffrey nodded. The staccato thump of belt buckle on flesh resumed next door, as the pimp got back to work straightening out his girl.

It was early evening in the Spotlight. At this time of the night there was an uneasy truce between the transvestites, the male prostitutes, and the speed freaks. Depending on what time of day you set foot in the Spotlight, one of these three social groups would dominate the bar. But at eight p.m., with the final rays of sunlight still creeping around the sticky black PVC curtain that hung in front of the door, and before the evening crowd had yet gotten good and drunk, no one particular group had dominance. A couple of lonely-looking men with five o'clock shadows and makeup melting off their faces sat close to the jukebox, sadly miming along to Sammy Davis Jr. singing “I Gotta Be Me.” Their faces told silent tales of lives gone horribly wrong, of worlds that had long since imploded. By the bar, an alcoholic with a long-ago broken nose that had healed up in such a way it looked like a smushed piece of Play-Doh was trying to convince a female barfly that he had connections in the movie industry. It was the oldest hustle in the book, and they both knew it, but they carried on the dance anyway, the gestures and lines worn smooth over the years with repetition.

“You could totally be in the movies,” he was saying to her, edging ever closer. He had been up all night already and his earlier bar friends were long gone. All he had going for him was a dog called Fuckface that was sleeping in the trunk of his car and three months of unpaid rent on the roach-infested hole he called his apartment. The object of his attentions looked to be in her late forties, and brightly colored patches of makeup gave her the look of a battered wife.

“Well, I do got legs,” she was saying, stretching one of them out and looking at the calf admiringly. “My second husband was from the Dominican Republic. He used to go
crazy
for my legs. He was shot and killed three years ago.”

“They are great legs,” the man said. “Who shot your husband?”

“The guy who worked at the 7-Eleven he was robbing. I heard the guy was a Buddhist or a Hindu, or one of those fuckin' crazy things. The ones who worship cows and shit. Anyway, I thought those bastards were all pacifists. He sure as hell wasn't a pacifist when he blew poor Enrique away. Goddamn his soul.”

“That's a tough break. . . . You got your SAG card? I know a guy who can get you one if you need it. . . .”

In the back room, under the glow of the Coors sign, Randal looked at Spider. Spider had a vaguely familiar look about him. Maybe it was that he reminded Randal of vermin. He had a long, pointed nose that seemed to be missing whiskers, but no—it was something else. He looked like a dwarf in reverse. Like somebody had transplanted a child's face onto an adult's body. Sure, it was wrinkled and fucked up, but somehow the features still looked childlike. He may have been cute as a kid, but now there was something grotesque about him, unnatural.

Spider drained a shot of Wild Turkey and washed it back with a slug of beer. He looked over at Jeffrey. “So what's the deal?” he said. “You said that you had some business for me.”

“You still got those connections in the porn industry?”

At the mention of his porn connections, Spider suddenly got antsy. He looked at Randal and said, “What's Jeffrey been telling you?”

Randal shrugged. “Just that you know some people. That's all.”

“Be cool, Spider. Randal's good people. He's okay.”

“I just don't like to talk about that shit,” Spider said, glaring at his empty bourbon glass.

“Another?” Randal said, getting up before Spider had a chance to say yes. Before the meeting, Jeffrey had told Randal the whole story of Spider's career in porn. He heard that there had been some kind of a stink on an S and M video he'd done a few years ago that made him pretty much unemployable within the mainstream porn industry. Something to do with a strangulation scene that went wrong. The way that Jeffrey told it, nobody had even realized that the kid was dead until after Spider had ejaculated. The Russian mafia financed the films, and they had forced Spider to help dispose of the corpse. The dead kid was illegal, underage, and vanished as if he had never even existed.

· · ·

“I mean, you gotta imagine the effect this had on him,” Jeffrey had explained back in the hotel room. “Spider
supposedly
doesn't dig guys anyway. Now he has to fuck this Russian kid while tightening a leather belt around his throat. Afterward, Spider realizes the kid died and now not only is he a faggot for money, he's a necrophiliac, too. And it's all on tape. The guy shooting the video hands Spider a handsaw and tells him to get to work while he goes to buy a shovel and some lime. Let's just say that Spider didn't do movies for a while after that.”

When Randal returned with the drink, Spider's mood had changed again. Jeffrey and Spider were having a conversation that, judging from the smiles on their faces, could only be about drugs.

“You got some go fast?” Spider said, shooting a gap-toothed grin at Randal. “You mind if I, uh . . . ?”

“Sure.” Under the table, Randal passed the baggie to Spider.

“Be right back, boys!” he said, walking toward the bathroom.

Once he was out of sight, Jeffrey said, “I don't know why the fuck we're dealing with this guy. He's a total fuckup.”

“I can see he's a total fuckup. But that's beside the point. He knows Dimitri Barakov, who is big fucking time in the porn industry. I've heard of that motherfucker—he's a billionaire. You won't hear his name mentioned at those fucking Adult Movie conventions, but he bankrolls everything.”

· · ·

“Man, I just don't think that the fucking Russian mafia is the direction we should be taking this. This is movie history, man. We need to get it into the hands of a proper collector. . . .”

“I agree,” Randal hissed, “but we don't got time for that. If we sell to Du Wald we have to pay out Stevie. There's no time to find another freak like Rupert. If Spider's porn connections matched the offer, we'd take one hundred percent. I mean, Spider might want a cut, but believe me, I can read people. This guy? He's a first-class moron. We could probably pay him off with some fucking meth and he'd be happy. People are looking for us right now, you said it yourself. We need to cash this shit in and get the fuck out of LA. Right?”

“Right,” Jeffrey conceded.

As soon as Spider returned, Randal took the baggie from him and snorted more himself. He shivered under the bathroom's short-circuiting fluorescent light. The chemical stench of the speed made his lungs feel as though they had been scrubbed out with Ajax. He was snorting more and more of it, just to keep the fear away. He knew that he was right around the corner from another insane, self-destructive bout. As many times as he had put himself through this and sworn that he would never do it again, Randal seemed incapable of avoiding doing the same fucking thing over and over. Once he started up on meth, he knew that he needed it daily. He needed it to get out of bed in the morning. He needed it to think straight. He needed it to fuel this whole caper, so that he could escape and never look back. He could sense that he was days away from starting up with needles again, and when that happened. . . . Snorting a huge nostril full of the burning powder from the tip of his car key, Randal again made himself a promise.

Once we sell the tape and get out of LA, I will never do this shit again.

He didn't laugh as he thought this.

He flushed the toilet and walked back out to the bar. His brain was frantically spinning off in many different directions.

He slid back into his seat, his eyes burning holes through the ozone. As he sat down, it came to him in a moment of idiot genius. Why Spider's face was so familiar.

“ . . . toldja what that motherfucker did to me. You know they sold that fucking clip, anyway? Out there somewhere, some corpse fucker is using it for jerk-off material.”

“That's rough.”

“But you know . . . I could make the call. It would have to come through me. But you know, I have a relationship with those guys, so if I'm gonna put my good name out there . . . there'd better be something in it for me. So what is it? What's this big deal that you're trying to unload? It is porn, right?”

Jeffrey nodded his head. Spider dropped his voice down.

“Specialist stuff, huh? What is it? Kids? Animals? It's okay. I'm broad-minded. You won't offend me. . . .”

“Little Wonder!”
Randal finally blurted, when he could hold his tongue no longer. “You were in
Little Wonder
. You were Jimmy! The neighbor's kid!”

· · ·

At the mention of these words, Spider's face collapsed in upon itself. He scowled and then emptied his glass with a flourish.

“What the fuck's a little wonder?” Jeffrey asked no one in particular.

“Yeah, that was me. So fucking what?” Spider spat.

“
Little Wonder
was this great TV show. Back when I was a kid. Ahead of its time. Too fuckin' dark for network TV. Didn't the scientist . . . Mr. Fester . . . didn't he murder his son during the opening credits?”

“It wasn't murder. It was an accident. In the lab.”

“Right. He kills his son in some kind of terrible accident. Remember, this is a sitcom aimed at the same audience as
Punky Brewster
. He kills his kid and then attempts to hide the crime by building a replacement. A robot kid. Little Wonder!”

Jeffrey looked at Spider through slit eyes.

“You played a robot on a TV show?”

“No!” Spider sneered, as if the very idea were preposterous. Then he quietly added, “I played the kid who lived
next door
to a robot. The one that knew that the kid was a phony. I was always trying to catch out Mr. Fester.”

“Shit,” Randal said, shaking his head in wonder, “how long did you guys last? A season or two at most, right?”

“Seven episodes.”

“Jesus. Seven episodes. It was like a fucking Shakespearean drama, I'm telling you.” Randal slipped the baggie of meth to Jeffrey. “It was ahead of its time. People weren't ready for that shit. Today, on HBO, maybe. You can get away with weird, dark shit like that. But back then on the networks . . . ”

· · ·

“They killed us,” Spider said, matter-of-factly. “
Killed us
. I never worked again. Landon Bruce, the guy who played Mr. Fester . . . he did a few episodes of
The Love Boat
and then burnt his face up in an accident on the set of some Italian movie about cannibals. After that . . .” Spider shrugged.

“What about the kid? What about Little Wonder?”

“AIDS. Heard the chick he married was a junkie. You know how that goes.”

They sat and considered this for a moment. Over by the bar, the guy with the broken nose was rubbing the thigh of the barfly and whispering filth into her ear. She was giggling and for a moment she looked like a fourteen-year-old girl. Jeffrey said, “I'm gonna powder my nose,” and split for the bathroom.

When they were alone Randal said, “You should write a book, man. One of those fucking tell-alls.”

“Fuck off,” laughed Spider. “Get me a drink.”

“I'm serious! Think of all of the kids our age who were scarred for life by that show.”

“They don't wanna hear stories like mine!” Spider growled. “They want shit that'll make them feel warm and gooey inside. Shit that won't make 'em think too hard. They'd want me to say how I found God, or love, or golf, or fuckin' L. Ron Hubbard, or some shit. You know something, man? I'm already where I want to be. I got sixty dollars in my pocket, and I'm gonna pick up an eight ball of meth when we're done here. I wouldn't switch places with Leonardo DiCaprio right now. I got everything I need. Nah . . .”

He looked around the bar once more and grabbed Randal's shoulder with a pleading, shaking hand. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.

“They don't want that! They want the candy-coated, low-fat, mocha latte garbage that they're used to! They like their junkies nice and presentable. They like 'em sorry. They like 'em boo-hooing and asking for forgiveness. Well, fuck that. Fuck writing books. Now . . . are you gonna buy me a fucking drink?”

Jeffrey sailed across the dirty floor like he was ice skating. He knocked on the table and said, “Well, ladies, what did I miss?”