Little Boy Blue (43 page)

Half an hour later the battered car was
cruising through the fringes of Hollywood, with multihued neon bouncing from
the painted metal, giving it an undeserved sheen. Wedo drove, able to stay
alert except at a couple of traffic lights; then Alex had to nudge him awake.
The shotgun was under the seat; the pistol beneath a shirt on the seat between
them. Alex was conscious of the broken headlight, which might get them a
flashing red light from a prowl car. His belly was knotted and queasy as they
cruised—a crime looking for a place to happen.

Alex slept on the floor of Wedo’s hotel
room. It was a fortunate choice, for in the morning Wedo had several rows of
red marks, hard little knots several inches apart in straight lines.

“Bedbugs,” Alex announced, having
seen the bites before. No other insect nipped in a straight line.

“Fuck!” Wedo cursed, scratching
himself while standing in his shorts preparing his “getup” fix.
“This is the last I got.”

“I told you I had some dough.
A little.
We’ll see Itchy. Tonight we’ll have
plenty of dope and money. I know Itchy’ll buy some of what we get.”

“What a way to live,” Wedo said,
squirting a line of water through the needle into the air, cleaning it; then he
wrapped up all the paraphernalia. “How is it that we’re like this
and they’re like they are? I mean, I don’t feel like I’m so
different… not down inside. I don’t feel like I made a decision to
be what I am.” The powerful narcotic so obliterated all pain, physical
and emotional, that it was the greatest tranquilizer of all. Euphoria is
fertile earth for reflections on existence. “Aw fuck it,” he said.
“Let’s go find that Chicano with the stuff… and we can cruise
by that drugstore, que no? Check it out in the daytime—case the joint
like the bigtimers do.”

Itchy was missing from his pool-table office,
but according to a pair of waiting junkies, one of whom was already getting
sick, he was due momentarily. When he finally arrived an hour later, seven
junkies were waiting. Christ personally dispensing sacraments would not have
gotten more homage than did Itchy for his heroin.

When Alex and Wedo left, Wedo demanded to fix
again, although he didn’t need it. “I just wanna get high
once,” he said, “instead of fixing just to keep from being
sick.”

They had checked out of the hotel room, so
Wedo used a gas station restroom, Alex leaning on the lockless door to make
sure nobody came in.

Afterward, with Wedo nodding, Alex took over
the driving. With nothing to do until nightfall, he
cruised
the city, happy to simply see things. In midafternoon the junkheap car was on
the winding, expensively bucolic streets of Bel Air. The palaces of the
rich peeked out between trees and over manicured hedges. The only life they saw
was an occasional automobile or a gardener rolling up his hose. Alex tried to
imagine what living in one of these mansions was like, what it meant in terms
of a whole life—but such a world was too far removed from his
experiences. To him being rich meant a new car, sharp clothes and a slick
apartment. Such things were hard enough to get— he certainly didn’t
have them except as a dream—and yet he could see clearly (others from his
world couldn’t) that his desires were trivial, picayune in this world.
Bel Air was another universe.

Next he followed the winding curves of Sunset
Boulevard to U.S. Coast Highway No. 1, and then along the seacoast northward
for an hour. Wedo rose from his stupor but said little as he, too, became
involved in watching the serene landscape of ocean, sky and green hills. It was
far from the mean streets and the Sisyphian struggle of their tawdry lives.

At dusk they were back in the city, eating
cheeseburgers and
french
fries at a greasy-spoon cafe.
In fact, Wedo pocketed a cheap teaspoon and Alex asked for a paper cup of water
to take with them. They parked in a deserted, still undeveloped spot on the
road along the top of the Hollywood Hills. While Wedo used the dashboard glow
to prepare his fix, Alex stared out over the endless city, the lights of which
seemed like exquisitely bright jewels carpeting the world to infinity. It was
so beautiful that he ached. The stars were coming forth as the sky darkened,
but from here the city’s lights were much brighter and more entrancing.

Wedo pulled Alex from his reverie, asking him
to hold the flashlight’s beam on the inner elbow so Wedo could see
the blood register in the eyedropper. It flashed up, a streamer of red in the
liquid, and Wedo squeezed the rubber knob, half-humming and half-sighing as the
concoction flashed through his system.

“Well, let’s go do it,”
Wedo said, voice gravelly; he was scratching himself in a variety of places.
“Fuck! It’s either got a lot of codeine still in it, or they cut it
with procaine. They’re starting that lately, makes the flash
stronger… but they cut the dope. That’s why I’m scratching.
But it’ll go away in a few minutes.”

As they drove down from the hills and through
the streets, the knot of fear was in Alex’s gullet, but its fingers
didn’t probe through the rest of him to create a form of paralysis.
Tonight he could control fear, for his greatest dread was not of capture but of
showing a lack of courage and nerve.

The drugstore’s doorway threw a
rectangle of light across the sidewalk. Wedo went by and turned down the next
street. They would come out, turn left down the side of the building, turn left
again through an alley to the next street, and then to the right would be the
car. Nobody would follow them down the alley, certainly no unarmed citizen, so
nobody would see the car. And when Alex got out, sliding across the seat just
vacated by Wedo to do so, he went to the back, looked at the license plate, and
decided that when they came running a few minutes hence he would bend the
license plate down. Nobody could even see it that way. After the getaway he
would put it back the right way.

They began walking. Ahead was the lighted
boulevard with cars flashing past the
intersection.
The fear cried for attention, but tonight Alex was resolute. He clenched his
teeth and kept walking despite feeling a weakness in his legs. He refused to
let his imagination conjure pictures of bloody shootouts and screaming police
sirens. The single-barrel shotgun, sawed off to about twenty inches overall,
was tucked beneath his armpit and under his jacket; his fingers curled around
the pistol grip that remained of the stock.

As they reached the lighted doorway, a woman
holding a toddler’s hand came out, making them stop momentarily. Then
they pushed in. Just one customer was inside, a man already paying for
something and ready to leave. Alex turned to a magazine stand and acted as if
he was looking for something. He would cover Wedo’s back and capture
anyone who entered at the wrong moment. Wedo went toward the pharmacist but
waited until the customer had gone out the door. Then he opened his coat to
show the revolver tucked in his waistband.

The bespectacled druggist flinched and nearly
fainted as the word “holdup” wafted through the air. Wedo glanced
back, got a signal from Alex, and vaulted the counter, pushing the man out of
sight to the rear. Alex hadn’t planned it before, but now he closed the
door and locked it. The moment the robbery commenced the fear dissolved
completely.

The danger, however, did a weird thing to his
senses. He saw things with greater clarity, and shapes and colors leaped hard
into his eyes. He heard with special acuteness—the metal cabinet door of
the drug box being opened, the voices with occasional clear words. He could
hear traffic outside that he hadn’t heard moments before.

After what seemed an hour but was really
two minutes, Wedo appeared with a heavily laden shopping bag. At his
appearance, Alex ducked outside and went down the building to the alley,
stopping just inside the darkness until Wedo’s footsteps crunched nearby.
They both ran for the car, Alex arriving first and crawling awkwardly past the
steering wheel to the passenger side. He was laughing as Wedo flew in and
started the car.

Two hours later they were in the bedroom of
Itchy’s Hollywood apartment. Dozens of bottles, in various sizes and
colors, were in three piles on the bed—and a wastebasket held the
discards, medicines of no illegal value. The three piles were opiates,
amphetamines, and barbiturates.

“Three hundred for the uppers and
downers,” Itchy offered.

“Man, they’re worth three or four
times that,” protested Wedo.

“Right, ese, if you wanna get out on
the corner and sell ‘em one at a time. I’m not doing that. I know
somebody’ll give me four bills, maybe four fifty… and they’ll
sell ’em to the pillheads.”

“What about the morphine, dilaudid, and
etcetera?” Alex asked.

“We just wanna sell a little,”
Wedo said.

“Whatever you guys wanna sell,
I’ll cough up two bucks for each sixth grain, three bucks for each
quarter grain—”

“Don’t even mention the
dilaudid,” Wedo said. “It’s too good to sell any of
that.”

“Yeah,” Alex inserted,
consciously and deliberately showing off. “That Persian tentmaker Omar
Khayyam said he didn’t know what wine merchants bought that was half
so
precious as what they sold.” He watched his
friends’ faces; they were blank. “No dilaudid,” he added.

“Then get it off the bed,” Itchy
said.

When it was over, Alex was nearly four
hundred dollars richer; it was by far the most money he’d ever had at one
time. Wedo had a little less in cash, but he had enough narcotics for a week,
and therefore got a much bigger cut than Alex. It was also Wedo’s best
score, temporarily removing from his shoulders the awesome burden of pulling a
robbery every other day.

As the elevator took them down to street
level, Alex draped an arm around Wedo. “Let’s go celebrate.”

“And do what?”

“Fuck, I dunno. I’ve been busted
since I was eleven… What about the amusement pier in Venice?”

“Yeah, that’s cool. But remember
I gotta get back in three or four hours to fix.”

“How could I forget that? Say, Wedo,
doesn’t it fuck with you… I mean your thoughts… knowing you
gotta fix three, four, five times a day… day after fuckin’ day.
It’s like bein’ a Moslem in a way; they gotta pray to the east four
or five times a day.”

“Sure it fucks with me… but when
I pull that needle out I feel so fuckin’
good
I
can’t tell you… so good there ain’t no words. And if it takes
all my time… fuck it! I’m a dope fiend. That’s me from here
on out, I guess.”

Alex was silenced, stunned by the apparent
nihilism. He remembered the other junkies he knew, mainly Red Barzo and
First Choice Floyd. They knew what it was to “kick cold turkey” in
a dirty city jail, stretched on concrete floors, vomiting for days after
everything was up and there was only a sour, green bile. They experienced
diarrhea beyond control, dirtying themselves and their underwear without access
to a shower more than once a week. Mucus drained constantly from their noses,
hot flashes alternated with cold sweats. Everything that touched their skin
made their nerves cry and whimper in pain. Nor could they rest; they thrashed
about, kicking their legs because some agony in the joints commanded it. Worst
of all, these symptoms continued night after long night without respite,
for sleep would not come for days—until they sometimes actually hallucinated—or
until the body shut off the circuits and they had a few minutes of half-sleep
several times a night, snapping from the sleep- stupor wringing wet, perhaps
with a spontaneous orgasm. While they were hooked, the craving for sex was
diminished, and sometimes eradicated. The torments had been described to
Alex more than once, and he couldn’t understand why they would immediately
start “fixing” again at the first chance—even when they had
been clean for months or years. “Nothing could be that good,” he
said. “Nothing is worth
what’s
inevitably
gonna happen. You know it’s inevitable when you start. Nothin’—”

“Nothin’ but heroin,” Waldo
interrupted. “That’s God’s medicine.”

“Tonight, when we get back, I’m
gonna try a fix. I really gotta know what’s so good about it. I
can’t believe it’s worth all the pain.”

“You’ll like it. I just hope you
don’t dig it too much.”

“I gotta see why so many people make it
their God. You guys give your lives to it.”

“Oh man,” Wedo said, laughing,
“it ain’t that bad.”

“No? What is it, then?”

“You’ll
see, motherfucker, you’ll see,” he said fondly.