Sick City (4 page)

“So tell me, Randal, what brings you here?”

Randal was sitting across from an impossibly young drug counselor. He looked to be, what, twelve? Thirteen? He was wearing a Circle Jerks T-shirt, and Randal noticed that he had a Misfits tattoo on his arm. I mean, did this kid really have any clue about who the Circle Jerks were? Or did he just think the T-shirt looked cool?

“Uh, what?” Hearing that the kid's voice had gone up expectantly at the end, Randal snapped out of his thoughts. “How do you mean? I came in a taxi.”

“No, I mean . . . why do you feel you need treatment?”

Randal was wearing a pair of ill-fitting tracksuit bottoms and a huge Denver Nuggets T-shirt. Both items of clothing had been taken from the lost and found box. Randal's filthy suit was in a trash bag, next to his feet. Upon arriving he had been immediately led to the showers. The warm water felt good against his aching muscles. The sensation was fleeting. Now Randal was agitated again, and there seemed to be endless rounds of paperwork to be completed before he would be dosed with medication and allowed to pass out.

And on top of it all . . . there was this wannabe punk rock kid, with his stupid fucking questions.

“Look,” Randal said, “I'm here because my brother is gonna take away my credit cards if I don't get clean.”

“And you do meth, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Until it runs out.”

“I mean, how long have you been doing meth?”

“Shit, I dunno. Years. Put down ‘years.' I can't think straight right now. I'm crashing. When do I get my medication?”

“When we complete your paperwork, and the nurse checks you out.”

Randal watched the kid as he filled out the form on his Mac notebook. Everything in the office looked new, expensive, and shiny. The building itself was vast and painfully white. It smelled of bleach and new carpets. Clean, happy, productive, neat, new. The staff walked around here with cultish smiles on their faces, attacking him at every turn with attempted hugs and cries of “Welcome!” All of the friendliness made Randal want to puke.

“So you work for, uh, Dr. Mike, the TV doctor, huh?”

The kid pursed his lips.

“Dr. Mike is very much a REAL doctor.”

“But I mean—I just mean, the one on TV?”

“Yes.”

“Will he be treating me?”

“Dr. Mike treats all of the patients. It's a common misunderstanding that he's some kind of a Dr. Phil character, a ‘TV doctor,' as you say. But Dr. Mike has always retained a regular practice here, and meets with every patient on a one-to-one basis.”

“Is he here now?”

“He's only here on Fridays. The rest of the time you'll have your day-to-day counselor. You'll be assigned one. Do you attend AA meetings, Randal?”

“No.”

“Have you ever attended AA meetings?”

“Only when I'm in rehab.”

“The meetings are mandatory here. Just so you know. We believe that the twelve-step program is an essential backbone to any attempt at recovery.”

“So my room won't have a minibar?”

“No,” the kid said without cracking a smile, “it won't have a minibar.”

——————

“Okay, spread 'em, buddy.”

Next Randal was looking into the face of a puffy Southern ex-drunk, with a bristly red mustache and ruptured blood vessels all over his face. The top row of teeth was missing. He was wearing a T-shirt with the Confederate flag on it, and chunky silver rings adorned eight of his fingers. He had a soft lilt to his voice, but there was steel underneath it.

“I beg your pardon?”

· · ·

Randal was in another closed, antiseptic room. “Big Jim” had directed him here after his meeting with the punk rock kid. By way of introduction Big Jim had looked into Randal's eyes and muttered, “Say ah.”

“Ah?”

“Longer. Like at the dentist. I'm checking your mouth for contraband. Say AH.”

“Aaaaahhhhhhh.”

“You got some fucked-up teeth in there. You a methhead?” Jim asked when he was done poking around in there.

“Yeah. You got some pretty fucked-up teeth yourself, Jim. You do meth, too?”

“Been clean for comin' up to thirteen years. But, nuh, I was a drunk. I just liked to kick the shit sometimes. And sometimes, I got the shit kicked outta me.”

Big Jim shot Randal a big, toothless grin. Then—maybe deciding that the time for small talk was over—Big Jim said:

“Okay, spread 'em, buddy.”

Sensing Randal's confusion, he clarified: “Drop the pants, turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks. I gotta check for contraband.”

“I don't have contraband.”

“Sure. Nobody has contraband. We still gotta check.”

Randal sighed. He had been through this routine before. He dropped the sweatpants, turned around, and halfheartedly pulled his ass cheeks apart. Big Jim pulled out his key chain. He had a little pocket flashlight attached on there. He flashed it into Randal's asshole.

“Nice job you got there,” Randal said, gritting his teeth. “Your mom must be real proud.”

“My momma's dead. She was a drunk, too, only she didn't see the light in time. Okay, buddy, you can get dressed.”

Randal straightened up. He turned and looked at Big Jim reproachfully. Big Jim just grinned at him.

“And anyway, it ain't a job.”

“Uh?”

“I said, this ain't a job for me. Nuh-uh. I've been doing this for thirteen years, and it ain't a job. It's a vocation. There's no better feeling than watchin' some sorry sack of shit like yourself walk into this place thinking they know it all, thinking that the program don't got nuthin' to show them, thinking that they can still do it their way . . . watching the moment come around that they finally GET IT. Finally let go, and let God. That's what gets me outta bed in the morning.”

“I guess it's nice to have a vocation,” Randal said.

Big Jim was on his cell phone. “Yeah, he's ready. You can take him up.”

A few moments later the punk rock kid reappeared and said, “It's time to get you medicated.”

“Halle-fuckin-lujah.”

Randal's feet squeaked against the tiles as he was led to the detox unit. The unit consisted of several rooms, each with three beds, a bathroom, and a single television bolted to the wall. There was a nurse's station and a small kitchen. He was left with the nurse, an older woman with frizzy red hair. She had a vague beaten-up look about her face that suggested she had once been a drunk or a doper. Randal silently had his blood pressure taken, his eyes, ears, and throat examined, his weight assessed. Finally the nurse went to the medicine closet and returned with a paper cup full of pills.

“Something to help you sleep,” she said, pushing a pill toward him.

“Some diazepam to help with your anxiety.

“Some clonodine to regulate your blood pressure.

“Some Tylenol to take away your aches and pains.”

Randal scooped up the pills, popped them into his mouth, and swallowed them with a practiced efficiency. He wondered if the diazepam would be enough to make him feel something. As the nurse explained his dosing regimen to him, he started making instantaneous calculations. He would receive a 10 mg diazepam three times a day. If he saved them up, he could maybe cop a buzz at bedtime. It would be better than nothing. Even in a place like this, Randal knew that it was always possible to work the angles.

“And this is chloral hydrate.”

The nurse passed Randal a small cup of toxic-looking green goo. Before she could say any more, he gulped the contents down.

“Say,” he said, “isn't that the shit that killed Marilyn Monroe?” The nurse just shrugged.

He smiled at her, already feeling better. Just the idea that his stomach was digesting these little miracles and that soon the chemicals would be in his blood and he would again feel like a real human being—however briefly—was a great comfort.

“Is there food?” Randal asked, smiling sweetly, momentarily filled with artificial goodwill.

“There's bread and fruit in the kitchen. Cereal, too.”

Randal stood. “I'm hungry.”

“Mr. Earnest—”

“Randal, please.”

“Randal—you may start to feel a little unsteady soon. Maybe you should wait a moment before you—”

Randal shook his head.

“I'm feeling great. Shit, I could drive a car on stronger shit than this.”

“The chloral hydrate will take effect pretty quickly. I'd suggest just lying down for a moment to see how it affects you. . . .”

Randal laughed a little and made for the kitchen anyway. The nurse shrugged and turned away to finish her paperwork. In the detoxification unit it was silent. The only other patient was an older woman whom Randal glimpsed as she shuffled from a bedroom to a bathroom, heavily medicated.

“If you need me,” the nurse said over her shoulder, “just whistle.”

“Yup.”

She found him in the kitchen, twenty minutes later, with the toast cold in the toaster, the plastic knife still in his hand, facedown in a pool of saliva at the kitchen table.

“Aw shit! We got another sleeper!” she yelled.

In the shitty part of Hollywood where all-night newsstands, peep shows, transient hotels, and check-cash stores bordered uneasily the desolate ass end of the tourist strip, Bee was getting hassles from his old lady. He hissed into his cell phone:

“I toldja. I'm coming back now. I'm gonna get a ride with Pat.”

“All of these shady fucking speed freaks sitting around the place lookin' to score. . . . The fucking apartment is getting like Union fucking Station! And then fuckin' Henry shows up with his girlfriend a couple of fucking granolas from San Francisco . . . I mean, he's just bringing random people who he bumped into at the club over now? This is my HOME. I don't want it to turn into some kind of fucking crash pad for Henry and his dopey friends. . . .”

“I heardja! Listen, babe, I'll talk to Henry about showing up unannounced like that, okay? That shit ain't cool. I swear. Look, Pat wasn't at the hotel, he was over in the Spotlight, I had to go find him. Then we had to wait for some guy to show up so he could do business. Now we had to walk to pick up his car. . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, just make sure you get over here before this dreadlocked bitch starts burning some fuckin' patchouli or talking to me about my aura, okay?”

“Okay, okay, babe.”

He snapped the phone shut. Pat stepped out of the bodega, ripping open a packet of Parliaments. His garish Hawaiian shirt billowed around his taut, muscular frame. He looked like some strange cross between an alcoholic country singer on the skids and an aging Hells Angel. But despite the face that had worn out like twenty miles of unpaved road after decades of pummeling himself with booze and methamphetamines, the eyes still burned with an astounding intensity. And like the eyes of a rabid dog, if you stared into them for too long you ran the risk of having your face ripped off.

The older man lit a cigarette and twisted his eyes up against the rays of the dying sun. Then Pat playfully clipped Bee around the back of his head and growled in his two-packs-a-day gurgle: “C'mon, shithead, the car's right here. S'yer old lady on your back again?”

Bee just shrugged as they walked toward a rust-bucket red 1984 Toyota Corolla. The tinted windows were filthy, the paint peeling. Pat wrenched the door open. It hadn't been locked. Nobody would want to steal this piece of shit anyway.

“What happened to the Trans Am?”

“Scrapped it. Fuckin' transmission gave out.”

· · ·

Bee's thick, greasy hair was combed back flat against his skull and his red eyes were hidden behind a pair of bootleg Ray-Ban Wayfarers. As they sailed down Hollywood Boulevard, Bee said: “Every time I see you, you got another piece a shit car. Why dontcha just buy a decent one?”

Pat shrugged. The reason was simple. In his line of work it helped to switch vehicles often. That's why he routinely bought junkers and drove them until they died, then dumped 'em and replaced 'em. He didn't need the heat noticing him because he was driving some fancy-ass car around making deliveries. In fact, the only car he'd ever kept was an ancient Volkswagen Bug that just kept going and going. But after four years he got sick of looking at it, so he traded it to a whore for two eight balls of cocaine. The fucking Krauts sure as hell knew how to build cars. But he didn't need to tell the kid any of that. Instead, he said: “Those beaner chicks can be ballbusters, huh?”

Bee was staring at his cell phone absently, waiting for it to buzz into life again with more of Carla's screams. “Huh?”

“Ballbusters. The Mexicans. Ah was married to one for a year ana half, back when I was a young buck. Almost broke her goddamned neck a few times.”

“Huh? What, Carla? She's Dominican.”

“It's that fuckin' Indian blood . . . ,” Pat went on, ignoring him. “Makes 'em crazy. Does she drink?”

“Uh, no, not really. She mostly just likes to get high.”

“You're lucky. They get crazy on that goddamned firewater. Get a few drinks into Maria and—whoo!—watch out, boy. The bitch would flip the fuck out. Came at me with a kitchen knife once, calling me a no good son of a bitch, sayin' I was screwing around on her. That's how I got this. . . .” Pat raised his chin, exposing a thin scar across the Adam's apple. “I had to knock her ass out! She comes around the next day and shakes me awake.
‘Pat! Pat! My tooth's missing! What happened to my tooth?'
I tole her that she fell in the bathroom and hit her face on the sink. Fuckin' dumb bitch believed it, too. She couldn't remember a goddamned thing. Turn that radio on.”

Bee turned it on, caught some lousy station playing country music.

“Were you? Screwing around on her?”

“Shit, of course. She knew goddamn well! Only really bothered her when she was drunk. Turn that hick shit off. Find something decent, man.”

Bee started turning the dial. “What happened to Maria?”

“She ain't around no more,” Pat replied.

Bee nervously switched the station. Pat glared at Bee for a moment like he was thinking of snapping his spine. Then he looked back to the road. A flat-toned woman was talking about the Dow Jones.

“Switch it.”

A hip-hop station.

“Yeah, right. Switch it.”

An alternative rock station.

“Fuck that. Switch.”

A '70s rock station. “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Bee almost pulled his hand back, sure that Pat would say “Stop.” Instead he barked, “No.”

Bee switched. Pulsing electronic beats.

“Fuck off.”

Phil Collins singing “Against All Odds.” Bee's hand hovered by the radio.

“Don't touch that motherfucking dial. Listen, man. Listen to this fucker's voice.”

Bee watched Pat out of the corner of his eye. It looked as though Pat was driving with his eyes closed. His head swayed in time with the lilting piano.

“You like music, right?” Pat snapped suddenly, fixing Bee in a cold stare.

“Yeah. I like drum and bass.”

“Drum and bass? What is that? Some kinda faggot music?”

Pat's eyes, as cold as long-dead stars, glared at Bee. Bee shut the fuck up. Pat's leathery face remained cool, but the voice dripped with barely concealed violence. The twinkling of Pat's pendant, as the sun turned the sky a dirty shade of gold. Then Pat started laughing, which was a disconcerting sound, like the wheeze of a deflating air bed.

“How can I just let you walk away . . . ?”

“Just let you leave without a trace?”

“Fucking beautiful song, man. You HEAR that mother-fucker? You hear that VOICE? THAT'S the blues. I tell you, that's BLUER than any nigger blues singer I ever heard. That's PAIN, baby. That's real pain. That's from the fuckin' soul, man.”

· · ·

“Yeah,” Bee croaked.

Pat gripped the steering wheel, momentarily lost in the swelling of the song. His skull rings twinkled as he drummed his fingers. His head was shaved. His high cheekbones cast deep shadows on his sucked-in cheeks. A graying handlebar mustache gave him the look of a starved vulture. An inked thunderbolt on the throat marked him as a killer, and a spiderweb on the left cheek as a habitual prisoner.

“Okay, listen, this is the bit I'm talking about. The chorus. Shhh.”

Bee was a twenty-one-year-old aspiring tattoo artist and speed freak. A character collector. The kind of guy who relished going into shitty bars in the bad part of town and talking to the locals, just so he could go back like some explorer returning from a desolate, forgotten continent, and repeat the stories verbatim to all and sundry. However, he was completely out of his depth with someone like Pat, and he knew it. Pat was a lifelong meth freak and career criminal. Pat's once amusing anecdotes had gotten progressively darker over time, until Bee started feeling more like an accomplice to Pat's criminality than just another member of Pat's constantly rotating audience. A part of Bee aspired toward the outlaw cool of a man like Pat. But only a small part. Mostly, Pat scared the shit out of Bee. If Pat didn't have the hookup for some of the finest methamphetamines in Los Angeles County, Bee would have surely limited his contact with the crazy old bastard already.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, drums kicked in at the top of the second verse.
Thud, thudthud, thud-thud-thud-thud!
Pat cranked the volume to its maximum level. The interior of the car vibrated, as the speakers rattled and protested, distorting and crackling ominously.

“This was a fucking golden era for music. This was the last era of the fuckin' troubadour. The last era of the great love song. . . .”

Pat had not slept in many days. In the two years that Bee had known Pat, he had never known him to sleep or eat. The music was painfully loud. Phil Collins's voice burrowed into Bee's skull.

“I mean, shit, I don't think that no one out there—NO ONE—has written a better song about the fucking horror and absurdity of relationships. Of what love does to a man. I mean—bitches fuck you up! That's what Phil is saying here, you know what I mean?”

The meth he had smoked earlier was making Bee's head throb and his chest hurt. Pat was still talking, he had never stopped, his voice was getting louder, and louder, more insistent and hectoring.

“Phil Collins! Man—you can't fake that shit! That's a man who obviously had his nuts handed to him by a broad, you dig?”

Bee noticed beads of sweat standing out on Pat's brow. Goddamn, Pat looked like his heart was about to explode.

“YOU KNOW SOMETHING? IF SOMEONE . . . IF SOME MOTHERFUCKER SAT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING RIGHT NOW AND TOLD ME THAT THIS SONG DIDN'T MAKE THEM FEEL SOMETHING, YOU KNOW WHAT? I'D HAVE TO BUST THEIR FUCKING ASS. I'D FUCK THEM UP. YOU KNOW WHY? YOU KNOW WHY, BEE?”

Unsure of how to answer, Bee just shrugged.

“BECAUSE THEY'D BE FUCKING WITH ME. YOU COULD ONLY SAY SOMETHING SO STUPID IF YOU WERE TRYING TO FUCK WITH ME. I MEAN, SHIT. IF THIS SONG DON'T MAKE YA FEEL SOMETHING YOU GOTTA BE DEAD OR A FAGGOT OR SOMETHING. GODDAMN. AM I RIGHT? HUH? AM I RIGHT, BEE, HUH?”

“You got it, man,” Bee answered quickly. “It's a classic. A total classic. None better.”

Pat smiled. He lowered the music slightly. He seemed calmer now. His eyes were wet, gleaming.

“He sure was an ugly son of a bitch, though,” Pat mumbled to himself as they sailed past Rampart. “Kind of amazing he managed to get laid in the first place, if ya think about it. . . .”

When they arrived at Bee's tiny apartment, Carla's pissy mood relented somewhat now that Pat was here with the speed. Pat knocked on the door and cooed, “Home honey, we're high,” and laughed a crackly laugh at his own joke. Carla opened the door and ushered them inside, dead-bolting it afterward. “Here comes the candy man.” Pat grinned, giving Carla a kiss on the cheek. “How are ya, baby?”

“Doin' better now.” Carla smiled, handing Pat some twenties.

“Ain't that the truth. . . .”

Henry, his girl Heather, and the girl from San Francisco with the dyed green dreadlocks immediately flocked toward Pat to buy. When everybody was fixed up, Pat lingered for a while to bang a little speed himself. They sat around the apartment, loading the pipe, cutting up the rocky gray powder with razor blades, absorbed in the process of preparing the drugs. Pat noticed the dreadlocked couple watching him hungrily as he prepared his shot. Pat instinctively recognized that they were junkies. New junkies for sure, baby junkies, but junkies just the same. It was the way that they stared at the needle as if it were a twenty-dollar steak. They looked young and clueless. The boy, whose name was Sunray, was wearing what looked to be a pair of girl's jeans slung low at the hips. The girl was pale and pretty despite her ridiculous dyed green dreadlocks.

“You guys from San Francisco?” Pat said to Sunray absently, as he tapped the air bubbles from his syringe.

“Yeah, how d'you know?”

“Just a hunch.”

Pat returned his attention to the needle. You never could tell who was or wasn't a faggot in San Francisco. He slid the spike into his scarred, leathery forearm, pulling back the plunger, sending a plume of thick blood blossoming into the syringe. Then he pushed the speed in, his lips pulled back, exposing yellow teeth, worn flat by decades of meth-induced grinding.

When Pat withdrew the needle from his arm and sucked away the black-red bloodspot that bubbled from the crook there, the girl with dreadlocks asked, “Uh, that's a cool pendant. Who is it?”

The meth made the blood pound in Pat's ears. His jaw was clamped in a grimace of pure euphoria. He said, “What's your name, baby?”

His eyes burrowed into her. She stammered, “Salvia.”

“Salvia . . .” He grinned, breaking her gaze and addressing the room while pointing to the pendant. It was on a gold chain and featured a portrait of a man with a neckerchief and mustache, rendered in semiprecious stones in a religious-iconic style. “This is Jesus Malverde. The patron saint of drug dealers. Old Jesus here was a Mexican bandit who was executed in 1909. He's a bit of a folk hero south of the border. The beaners believe that wearing an image of this guy will keep you alive when you're in . . . my line of business.”

“Wow . . . where did you get it?”

“I took it. I'm not one for patron saints and shit like that. But the spics, that's a different story. They're a superstitious bunch.”

Pat looked over to Carla, and then to Henry. Henry dropped his gaze.

“No offense,” he grinned, “I don't mean to talk bad of all y'all. I'm sure there's plenty of you who don't believe in all of that shit. Just in my experience it seems that most of ya do.”

Pat was thirty years the senior of anybody in the room. His weathered face exuded a quiet authority. The stench of cooking meth filled the room as the pipe went around. The others sat in rapt attention before him.