Sick City (5 page)

“Now, the other day I had a bit of business around Westlake. I went there to meet a friend. I found out that my friend was having some . . . problems. There was some other motherfucker filling in for him. The prick was a real smart-mouthed little beaner. Mouth fulla gold, thought he was real fuckin' smooth.”

Listening, Henry felt his jaw tighten. He glanced at the girl he was here with. She was staring at Pat, rapt, oblivious to Henry's discomfort. He began to feel anger rise in his chest but knew better than to talk back to the man with the drugs.

“So I tell this guy that I want five balloons. He tells me, no, eighty bucks only buys four balloons. I tell him I've been buying dope around here for a long time, and I want five. Eventually the little bastard relents and gives me the other balloon. I make a mental note to check the merchandise later. Sure enough, when I pull over the car and open it up, it's bunk. The last balloon is a piece of gum, wrapped in wax paper. Not fucking cool. So I turn the car around, and go back to express my
displeasure
.”

The pipe and lighter made their way to Pat. He paused long enough to heat the glass bulb with the butane flame and suck in the pungent chemical fumes. He passed the pipe on and exhaled a cloud of gray smoke.

“So that's where I picked up Mr. Malverde, and also this. . . .” Pat had been digging around in his pocket as he spoke, and on the word “this” he produced something small and shiny. The others strained to look. It was a gold tooth, bent out of shape a little, but still recognizable, twinkling in the dim light.

“That's the last time that goddamn spic'll try an' stiff me on a deal, I tellya. I dragged that motherfucker four city blocks by his goddamned head, before I let him go.”

“Hey, man!”

All eyes turned to Henry. He glared at Pat.

· · ·

“Problem, kid?”

“Why don't you quit it with all of that spic shit, man? It ain't cool. My mom is Colombian. Carla's
dominicano
. You got two spics sitting right here.”

Pat stared at Henry with blank, insect eyes. Henry was a slight kid, pretty and young. Pat smirked. He took in the diamond earrings and the neatly trimmed goatee. He was pretty sure the kid was more naïve than ballsy. Bee tried to catch Henry's gaze so he could motion for him to shut the fuck up. Pat leaned toward Henry, who remained oblivious to Bee's warnings.

“You ever been to prison, kid? I don't mean county jail. I mean prison.”

Henry shook his head, slowly.

“Well, I have. That's where you really get to see people as they truly are. I watched the fucking spics hold down a white boy no older than you are now and fuck the shit outta him. Just because he wasn't affiliated. Because he didn't believe in choosing his friends carefully. So they took him for their lapdog. Seven or eight of them broke him in like that, knocked him around until he was about ready to do anything they asked. He was real screwy after that. They knocked something outta his head, and he never got it back. Inside, boy . . . that's where you get to smell the STINK of humanity up close. A spell inside the pen will knock that we're-all-in-this-together peace, love, an' harmony shit outta ya straightaway. You get me?”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Henry relented, smiled a weak smile, and stared at his shoes. He could not meet Pat's gaze again for a long while. Salvia and her boyfriend, Sunray, gave each other a look.

“Ask him,” Sunray hissed.

“I will, shut up!”

“What's up, honey?” Pat grinned, turning his attention to her.

“Do you have any dope? We just came down from San Francisco, and uh, we're both getting a bit . . . anxious.”

“Heroin?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. If you'da asked me an hour ago, I'd have said yeah. I don't touch that stuff myself. That stuff is bad news. But I got some buddies who are into it, and . . . I buy and sell it once in a while . . . shit, I could maybe, uh . . . you kids need it tonight?”

Sunray nodded, “Yeah.”

“You wanna go for a ride? I think I know one guy who'll be around this time of the evening. . . .”

Sunray looked doubtful, but Salvia said, “Sure. I mean, if you think you can get hold of someone. . . .”

“Yeah, Uncle Pat'll take care of ya.”

He stood. Looked around the room, hooked his thumbs in his belt. “You take care, man,” he said to Bee. “I'll be seein' ya.”

Salvia and Sunray stood: “Nice to meet you, Carla. . . .”

Carla nodded and returned her attention to the pipe.

“Nice to meet you, too, Henry . . . ,” Salvia said.

Henry stood, hugged them awkwardly. “Yeah. Take care.” He watched them go with Pat, uneasily. Well, fuck it. At least he was out of here now.

· · ·

The three of them walked out into the balmy night and walked toward the car. Sunray went to get into the passenger side, and Pat stopped him.

“Backseat, hombre. The lady gets to ride shotgun.”

As Sunray slinked into the backseat, Pat opened the passenger door for Salvia and winked at her.

“Go ahead, hon. Maybe some of my manners'll rub off on the kid before the night's out. . . .”

He slammed the door behind her, and whistled that Phil Collins tune again, as he walked around to get into the driver's side, jangling his keys as he went.

Jeffrey woke up and screamed, “Jesus!” He was on Tyler's couch. Tyler was crouched down at the other end of it. He had the toes of Jeffrey's left foot in his mouth. When Jeffrey screamed “Jesus!” Tyler froze, and looked up to Jeffrey's uncomprehending face. He took the toes out of his mouth.

“Okay, I know this looks bad,” he said, “but . . . I was . . . oh, Jesus, man, I don't have an excuse. I was fucking loaded, and horny, and your feet just looked . . . well, they looked
spectacular
.”

Jeffrey pulled his feet away from Tyler and sat up.

“Oh, God,” he said. “What time is it?”

“It's like three a.m.”

“Why are you awake?”

“I've been up all night. That coke you gave me was amazing. Is there any more?”

“Yeah. There's more. Jesus, I gotta check into treatment today. Why couldn't you have let me sleep?”

“I tried not to wake you up, dude. I saw your toes and I couldn't help myself. Sorry.”

Jeffrey reached for his lighter and lit a cigarette. He looked around and said, “Where's my stuff?”

“Safe. I put all of the valuables in a tote bag and stuck it up in the crawlspace. I figured you'd need the suitcase for rehab. No point you dragging all of that other fucking junk around with you.”

“It isn't junk. . . .”

“Well, whatever it is, it's safe as fucking houses, man. The bag's a collector's item, bro. From the last movie I worked on—
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
. Did you ever see that one?”

“Nah. Don't think I did.”

Before he had started dealing drugs full-time, Tyler had been moonlighting as a set dresser's assistant. This basically meant that he did all of the grunt labor on the set, for cheap. When it came to the movies, though, Tyler had a kind of reverse Midas touch. No matter how big the budget, no matter how hot the star, whatever movie Tyler worked on seemed to sink without a trace. Luckily for the movie industry, Tyler soon lost interest in that career and decided to get into drug dealing instead.

“It's a great fucking movie, bro. Eddie Murphy plays a nightclub owner on Mars. It's like one of his best roles, so fucking underappreciated. Anyway, dude, you can hang on to the bag. It's yours. You're gonna make a fortune on eBay with that fucker one day.”

“As long as my shit's safe, man. My whole fucking life is in that bag. It's all I got.”

“Don't stress! I'll guard it with my fucking life, okay? Anyway—dude, we're amigos, yeah? I got your back. You can count on Tyler.”

Jeffrey coughed and rubbed his eyes. “I need it. The rest of the dope is in there.” He checked his watch. “This is my last day of freedom. Better make the most of it.”

“I'll get it!” Tyler sang, jumping to his feet. “I'll get some more of that coke, too.”

Later that day, Jeffrey found himself surrounded by the kind of jeans that cost two hundred dollars and looked like they'd gone through a shredder. The plasma screens at J. Ransom on La Brea were playing some shitty song by Coldplay, but Jeffrey had drowned out the noise with his own headphones. David Bowie was singing about drawing something awful on his carpet. He leafed through the designer labels, and his mind turned once again to Bill. It was Bill who had first brought him to this place. His first suit—at least his first suit not bought specifically for a court appearance—was a black Dior number that Bill had picked up for his birthday. He knew that he was wasting valuable cash by buying the clothes he'd need for a stint in treatment at a place where socks started at the sixty-dollar mark, but he could not resist one last stroll around the place. The staff had all known Bill's face and would trip over themselves to fawn over him. Alone, Jeffrey was just another civilian, now totally ignored by the snooty little bastards.

Sex and commerce. It had always been this way. The main thing that growing up sharing a double bed with three brothers in a Belfast council flat had taught Jeffrey was that he didn't want to struggle for the rest of his life. His mother seemed to take some pride in how desperately they all lived, as if by enduring hell on earth she would somehow be guaranteed paradise on the other end. Apart from this sense of martyrdom Jeffrey didn't remember too much else about his mother. When he left Belfast at fifteen and never returned, his abiding impressions of her were about her fetish for crucifixes and the empty bottles of diazepam she'd leave lying around the place. Nobody in the family mourned Jeffrey's departure. There was no room at home for a smart-mouthed, snobby kid who thought he was too good to live this way. Especially one kicked out of the Christian Brothers school for forming “inappropriate relationships” with the older boys.

His late teens and twenties had been a time of borderline alcoholism and risky sex. London's Piccadilly was his entire universe, and the all-night cafés, where he ate pills and waited for anxious men in suits to buy his time, were the closest thing to a real home he knew up until then. In the other hustlers, strays, and addicts of Piccadilly Jeffrey found something approximating a real family. When his friends would be beaten senseless by a client, get robbed, or locked up, it caused him deep, genuine pain. That's why he got his first tattoo, the necklace of barbed wire. Back then a tattoo like that had the power to unnerve potential clients, pacify them even. Not like today. Jeffrey looked over at one kid folding a Ralph Lauren sweater, with diamond earrings and a skull tattoo on his forearm. He had a platinum streak in his hair and wore two-hundred-dollar designer frames. Now tattoos implied as much threat as a fucking low-fat mocha latte.

· · ·

When Bill had come along, it had been the right place and the right time. Without Bill, Jeffrey was just another rent boy who was getting too long in the tooth. Most of his contemporaries sank into chronic alcoholism and drug abuse once their looks started to go. But in Bill, Jeffrey had found the holy fucking grail, the thing that prostitutes the world over dream of: the ideal sugar daddy. Bill had been caring, considerate, generous, and—once Jeffrey got over the fact that he was almost forty years older than him—attractive. Maybe Jeffrey only had a hard-on for Bill's status, but a hard-on was a hard-on just the same. Jeffrey wondered, not for the first time that morning, why the fuck Bill had to go and die on him.

He looked up again at the video screens. It was that stupid fucking “Rehab” song, sung by the girl who looked like Ronnie Spector after going through a car wash. Jeffrey looked at his watch. Minus two hours and counting. He was already wondering if he was doing the right thing by checking into rehab again. In his back pocket was a carefully folded square of aluminum foil, with cocaine and heroin melted onto it. In his breast pocket, a pack of Marlboro Lights with an aluminum pipe carefully squirreled away in there. Suddenly he needed more, and he needed it right now. Trembling, he placed the ninety-dollar boxer shorts back where he'd found them and stumbled out onto the street, gulping the air down.

Later, Jeffrey was in the back of a gypsy cab, on the way to Clean and Serene. They had made a stop at a Del Taco drive-thru line. He had paid the driver an extra forty to let him smoke in the back. The driver was listening to talk radio. On it, some ranting right-wing commentator was suggesting that America nuke Venezuela. The driver was Indian and agreed loudly with most of what the commentator said. An air freshener shaped like Old Glory hung from the rearview mirror.

They were waiting to pick up a Macho Burrito and a strawberry milk shake, and Jeffrey was smoking a speedball off of the square of aluminum foil. He blew the smoke out the window as the cab lurched forward. The server said, “Four twenty-seven,” and Jeffrey passed the money over. He took the food and the driver pulled out of the drive-thru lane.

When he was sufficiently high, Jeffrey could once again recognize that his only option was rehab. If he wasn't together enough to sell off the merchandise then he would be truly screwed. All of the years he had put in with Bill would have been for nothing. There was no place else to go. He hadn't spoken to his family in years and had no experience as anything but a kept man. He had one shot to get his life in order, and this was it. Getting clean was the only possible first step. This was always the way: Jeffrey could only seriously consider getting clean when he was high. Then the terror loosened somewhat.

As they headed to rehab, Jeffrey forced the burrito down. The cocaine had sapped his appetite, but he was determined to eat something good this morning before he was forced to survive on a diet of shitty institutional food. He drank the milk shake and chased it all with a few more hits off of the foil. He made the driver pull over so he could get out and vomit the whole lot back up again in front of several horrified people waiting at a bus stop. Once he did that, he felt good. He was ready.

Jeffrey looked out to the streets. Los Angeles was such a garish, ugly place. He'd noticed that the first day he arrived from England. Nothing matched. The faux 1950s motel signs, the raggedy palm trees, the screaming billboards, the tacky neon . . . all of it a collision of styles, colors, and mismatched eras that made no sense together. Yet, somehow, there was something almost hypnotic about it. It had drawn him in all of those years ago when Bill had first brought him here after meeting in an Internet chat room.

“This place gets under your skin,” Bill had told him then, “and it never really leaves. Kind of like having a drug habit, you know? You can leave this city, but a part of it will always be lodged in your brain, calling you back. It becomes a part of you.”

He wondered if he would really be strong enough to leave LA once and for all. Or was he doomed to return, like a helpless junkie to the needle? The radio spewed, and the sirens wailed. Jeffrey picked up the foil and continued toward the bright, clean corridors of Clean and Serene. In an hour there would be interviews, paperwork, payment up front, and the first dose of medication. There would be several days of sweating and twisting on thin cotton sheets, drifting in and out of consciousness while the opiates worked their way out of his system. But for now, that was all still an abstract concern. With the coke and heroin inside of him, Jeffrey feared nothing at all.