High Life (9 page)
“Feel cleaner, my love? Did it scrape away some of that pus in there? Here comes number two.”
Same thing, with Ron jigging about and the woman making animal noises, except Rex was in her ass. After a while she started to fart with each of his thrusts.
We broke for booze and another shot of coke, then swapped holes and did it all over again.
At the end, Rex and I stood like drooping matadors over an exhausted bull. Ron lit another cigarette. He had his dick out and looked slightly ludicrous wanking and jetting smoke at the same time.
“Don’t keep me waiting, man.”
He held the cigarette out to me. I felt drained and jittery from the coke, stale from the booze. I wanted to be gone. I started to take it but Rex pushed me aside.
“I’ll do it, Ron.”
“Whatever. Just do it, for godsake.”
Ron stood by the woman’s head, up on his toes, putting all of himself behind his dick. Rex blew on the end of the cigarette, then, avoiding my eyes, spread her labia and pushed it against her clit. I heard a small hiss as the coal hit pussy juice.
She pissed herself and jerked around on the table like she’d been electrocuted. The sounds she made behind her mask were really quite frightening. Ron groaned and spurted white come over the black leather of her face.
Out in the night again.
“I’ll drive.”
“Sure.”
I wasn’t going to argue. My body ached and my head hummed with post-coke emptiness. I could do without the hassle of driving.
“Got any Valium?”
“Jacket pocket.”
Rex pulled out onto Mulholland and headed in the opposite direction to home.
“Wrong way.”
“Helps me unwind. Just for a while, okay?”
I tapped out two yellow pills from a brown plastic tube and swallowed them with some of the vodka Ron had let us take when we left. Two didn’t seem much, so I did two more. Rex took the same and finished the booze. I chucked the bottle out the window and watched it explode against the side of the road like something heavy thrown into a lake. There was a long hour till dawn and the sky was a sick gray lid. Around us the hillsides were developing like some scene in a retarded Polaroid photo. We drove in silence for a couple of miles, letting the pills take hold.
“What did you think?”
“Was she really into it?”
“Of course. Easy money, huh?”
“Are they all like that?”
“Some are, some are different. You did good.”
“What’s she look like under the mask?”
“I’ve never seen her.”
“They must have an interesting relationship.”
“I guess it’s one way to keep a marriage alive.”
“Sure, as long as you’ve got the money to feel safe doing it.”
“What safe? They’re not killing each other.”
“Yeah, but to be okay with it you’ve got to be able to step outside the usual morality. And that’s not something everyone can afford.”
“You’re saying money buys them out of right and wrong?”
“Out of other people’s ideas of it.”
“Man, you romanticize it too much. When it comes down to it, they’re just people, same as everyone else.”
“Bullshit. Can you see some guy, like some sanitation guy or something, coming home and his wife, who’s been scrubbing floors all day, letting him tie her up and burn her cunt with a cigarette? Fuck, there’d be all kinds of shit to pay. Police, domestic violence, sexual abuse … That one act would change everything for them. But rich people aren’t affected the same way. They can segment. They can indulge without fucking up the rest of their lives. Tomorrow Ron and his wife will wake up and she’ll be sore as hell, but I bet they’ll be having breakfast in some chichi nook off Melrose as though nothing ever happened.”
“Well, I won’t be out looking for them. Jesus, I’m wrecked.”
He U-turned and we tried for home. Pilled out, it didn’t matter to either of us that our speed was below twenty-five. Five minutes later Rex nodded off at the wheel and it became obvious we weren’t going to make the distance. I elbowed him awake.
“Pull over.”
He snapped his head up and did his best to focus. When he spoke his voice sounded like mine—slurred.
“Are you hungry, dude?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Me either.”
“We did too much Valium.”
“Nah, not after that coke.”
“Let’s pull over.”
“Yeah.”
We drove for another half mile while Rex summoned the motivation to change from a mobile situation to a stationary one. By the time he managed it we were back at the Hollywood Bowl overlook. We parked up close to the fence.
An angled vista of city dawn.
Engine off. Systems shut down.
“Holy fuck.”
“These seats recline.”
“Thank god.”
The sun was high when I woke and the air in the car was stale. Through the windshield downtown L.A. was a dark ghost behind a curtain of smog.
Rex was gone, but he’d left a business card and some money on the dash. I counted the money—three hundred dollars—and read what he’d written on the card: “Use the number. Getting a lift with tourists.” I flipped it over. Black on white, expensive letters. A phone number and the words
“Bel Air Escorts.”
The area code wasn’t Bel Air, though. I stuck it in my pocket with the money.
The overlook gates were open now. I got out of the car, walked through a group of sleek Japanese in the parking lot, and climbed the steps to the top of the sandstone outcrop. Cicadas buzzed in the scrub around me and down in its dirty brown bowl the city hustled ten million people through another day.
Despite the body mileage I’d clocked up last night I felt good. I ran scenes in my head and marveled at them—my cock, her cunt, my fingers holding the cigarette against her foot. I’d done it, I’d crossed the line between accepted behavior and behavior most of the population would consider a lynching offense, and that morning I felt as real as any of the men in the Escape commercials. It had been dirty and nasty but I wanted more.
I looked over my shoulder to check the car, another coach-load of tourists was squeezing its way through the gate and I was worried about my paintwork. Reflected sun made bright ovals on the windows and heliographed memories of Karen at me. She would be underground by now, flapping chest and skinny limbs bundled into a county grave that I would never visit. But she’d bought me a car with money earned by selling her kidney and I couldn’t forget her completely. Same as I couldn’t forget I’d forced her from the apartment that night—an action that almost certainly had its place in the chain of events that led to her murder.
I realized then why yesterday evening I’d put together what I knew of her death. Karen to live with had been a nightmare, but Karen dead could be used as an escape. Tracking down her killer wasn’t something I expected to succeed at, but the simple doing of it, the attempt alone, had the potential to give me again what I’d experienced at Ron’s—life outside the mainstream. If I ever found the person responsible I wouldn’t know what to do with them, but that didn’t matter. What I wanted from her death was a reason to move in a world where the usual social obediences didn’t apply. An excuse to go places, to ask questions, to do something other than lie in bed all day.
And to finance this withdrawal from all things good and clean and American? I had three hundred bucks in my pocket and the number for Bel Air Escorts. Rex had told me I’d be good at it. Man, I’d be a natural.
Down from the lookout. The first cluster of Japanese had been replaced by another. I walked through them, half a foot taller and full of alien thoughts about the pointlessness of community.
Inside the Prelude I felt protected.
The seats were warm, they wrapped around.
A phone booth in West L.A. I’d stopped because the confidence I felt at the overlook had become infected with thoughts of Ryan. Maybe it was just chemical residue paranoia, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I should tie up the loose ends of my old life before embarking on a journey out of it. By now Ryan would have confirmed my alibi, and that my spunk wasn’t the same as the stuff they found in Karen. I knew I’d check out okay, but I wanted to hear it from him. I needed to be reassured he wasn’t going to be following me any further down the line.
His ID badge had made him part of the Santa Monica Police Department. I dialed info and asked for the homicide section. And things got immediately weird. He didn’t work there. The guy I spoke to said the only Ryan at the station was a member of the minor vice team.
“Would they be dealing with that girl who got killed in Palisades Park a couple of weeks ago? The one that was cut open?”
“Not a chance. We catch all the murders. If you got information you better talk to Detective Sullivan, he’s the officer in charge of that case. What’s your name?”
It seemed so much simpler to hang up rather than answer. So I did. Then I rang the switchboard again and asked for Ryan in minor vice. The extension rang for a long time before it was picked up.
“Yeah?”
“Ryan?”
“Not in. Try tomorrow.”
“Ryan’s like this fat guy with black hair, right? Takes heart pills.”
“Yeah, that’s him. Who’s calling?”
“I’ve got some info on that case he’s working. The murder in Palisades Park.”
“Murder?” The man laughed. “You got the wrong guy.”
“I’m sure it was Ryan.”
“Not unless it happened in a porno store. Try homicide.”
I didn’t have to hang up this time, the guy beat me to it.
I stood in the booth for a while trying to decide whether I should be relieved or frightened. I hadn’t heard from anyone called Sullivan, and he’d had plenty of time to show up. So I figured the police department as a whole didn’t have a handle on me. That was cool, but what did it leave? A psycho like Ryan gone rogue with me as the focus of his obsession? Had I become his independent pet project?
I got back in the car and headed home. I needed a shower and some sleep.
On the ocean side of Lincoln Boulevard that morning Venice had a dusty feel, like a reluctantly reinhabited ghost town. Maybe when I first moved there it held some kind of mystery or romance for me. But that had changed. What had not been gradually eroded during my time with Karen had now, I found, been finished off in the incinerating flash of last night’s sex and this morning’s epiphany. Now it was hollow and untenanted, a place to pass through, to move away from.
I’d caught a radio rundown of the latest news on the way back from the hills. Mel Gibson was getting twenty-five million for
Ransom
, Macaulay Culkin was hanging out for his eighteenth birthday when he’d get his hands on sixty of the same, and Michael Jackson was estimated to be personally worth two hundred and fifty.
The sums of money jammed my head. When I was younger I used to play the game of deciding what I’d do with ten million dollars, certain that one day I’d have at least that much. I’d plan in infinitesimal detail the exact steps I’d take, the order of my purchases, the choices between the unlimited alternatives so much money would open up. But now, at a failed thirty, those kind of hyperrealistic imaginings brought with them a depression too exhausting to bear. Along with the news about Ryan, the reports of other people’s wealth fucked my mood completely.
I took two Seconals and climbed into bed. A shower would have to wait.
It was dark when I woke. I lay for a while watching the colored washes of light that the cars down in the street threw across my ceiling like opening Japanese fans. My head was clear. I ran my hands over my body. It felt ready for action.
Time to motivate.
Shit, shower, teeth, shave. A can of cold Pepsi and two cigarettes in the warm night air by the window, silent TV alight in the corner of the room. People moving outside. I imagined how they felt—suntanned skin smooth and dry after daylong beaching, frictionless under freshly washed denim and soft cotton, happily heading for bars and movies.
I ate some food in front of the open fridge and thought about Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise. How much more keenly they must be feeling this same night air that lay against my skin. Their senses would be more finely attuned to it than mine, undulled by the exhaustions that plague the poor—food, rent, taxes, tires for the car … And if anything like that did make it into their world, they had maids and personal assistants to deal with it.
I got kind of caught up with those thoughts for a while and it was pretty late by the time I left the apartment and started the game of looking for Karen’s killer.
I didn’t know any of Karen’s friends well enough to have their phone numbers, but from the early days, when she and I were still attempting the charade of a shared existence, I had an idea where I might connect with one or two of them. Karen had been part of a loosely knit group that hung out in the same places, listened to the same music, and shared similar interests—drugs, money, leather clothes … Unless what was hip had changed since we terminated our joint socializing, I figured a tour of certain bars ought to turn up someone who knew her. And if I found someone who knew her, then maybe I’d get a pointer to the kidney man.
The first couple of places didn’t work—an espresso bar on Harper Avenue, where I was a little reckless with caffeine, and a live music joint near Paramount where I did what I could to antidote myself with vodka. Third time lucky, though. At a place on Detroit Street, not far from the drag.
The club didn’t make much of a fuss about its entrance, just a door between two businesses, propped open with a chair, giving onto a flight of steps that led below street-level. It wasn’t mentioned in the entertainment listings, and it wasn’t at the cutting edge of any musical trend, but it nevertheless had its attractions for a certain kind of person. Because, along with an almost nonexistent policy against substance abuse, it had a gimmick that was just so terribly wild, man—it was cool to jerk off there. Or jerk someone else off. Or get jerked off. And you didn’t have to hide in a toilet stall either.
At the bottom of the steps I got frisked for weapons, paid the twenty dollar entrance fee, and pushed through a set of padded double doors. Simultaneous high-volume sound and low-power lighting—so low, in fact, it took a couple of seconds for my eyes to adjust. The music was pretty much industrial and it made a jagged atmosphere that I figured was designed to get people so tense they had to beat off for relief.
Small and dingy, everything black. The dance floor held about eight and the top of the bar looked like it had been cut from the side of a Russian freighter. The air stank of fish. I bought vodka and watched some girl in latex pump spunk out of a guy, into a glass that already looked a quarter full. Then I checked out the crowd. It was hard to make out faces, so I concentrated on haircuts. I found two I recognized sitting together in one of the booths that ran down a wall.
Jimmy and Steve were rock star wannabes who’d come over from England a few years back only to find that California already had about a million unemployed musicians of its own. They’d adapted pretty well, though, and moved swiftly on to an area in which they excelled—taking smack. Mid-twenties, leather head to toe, dyed-black hair.
Their faces went blank and guarded through a moment of image search when I walked up. But after I said Karen’s name they remembered who I was and let me sit down. The first thing they asked was if I had any gear. It wasn’t a particularly safe assumption, but I took it to mean they didn’t know about her yet. On the junk front I didn’t disappoint them. I’d scored a quarter gram at the beginning of the evening for just such an ice-breaking opportunity. Even in that place cooking up in public would have been a bit much, so we had to duck our heads below the table and snort it through a bill. After that we were friends, mates, buddies—longtime acquaintances chewing the fat about this and that.
Half an hour later, when a chick in the next booth had finished screwing herself with a bottle of Rolling Rock, I started in on the real business of the evening.
“How long since you guys seen Karen, then?”
The smack had taken hold and their responses were pretty relaxed. Steve looked as though he’d done a tad too much to continue active communication, but Jimmy was functioning reasonably effectively.
“Dunno. When’d we last see her, Steve?”
Steve managed a shrug.
“I dunno. A while.”
“Yeah, be a while now. How is she?”
“I haven’t seen her for a month.”
“A month? You split up or something?”
“Not that I know. I thought she was on a job.”
“Long job.”
“Yeah, I’m getting worried. You haven’t seen her?”
“Nah. Hey, Steve, you know where Karen’s at?”
“Huh?”
“Karen. D’you know where she is?”
“Haven’t got a clue.”
Jimmy lifted his hands and let them fall.
“Sorry, pal.”
“She was going on about this plan she had. I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with anything.”
“No offense, man, but she’s always fuckin’ on about one scam or another. They’re bullshit. Never happen.”
“This was, like, about kidneys or something.”
Jimmy laughed and slapped the table.
“Oh, fuck, not the kidney thing! Man, she was hot for that one. No offense, but she’s a mad cunt sometimes.”
Jimmy’s reaction jerked Steve out of his stupor. He opened his eyes and scratched his forearms.
“I know someone who did it.”
“What are you talking about, you dumb cunt? Go back to sleep.”
“Nah, you know him too. That geezer who used to score off us. What was his name? The fuckwit with all the earrings.”
“Joey.”
“Yeah, Joey. That’s how he said he got his bar.”
“Bullshit.”
“He showed me his scar.”
“And that makes it gospel.”
“I’m only telling you what he said.”
“He was shitting you, for fucksake.”
Jimmy shook his head and got up to go watch a circle of guys who were starting to group around a girl.
I asked Steve how much Joey was supposed to have been paid for his kidney. When he said thirty grand it seemed smart to ask for the guy’s address as well.
“I don’t know where he lives, but his bar’s on Pico. It’s got all this bullshit Egyptian stuff on the front. Look for a little guy with a goatee. And lotsa earrings.”
