Pain Killers (31 page)

Until traffic thinned, opening the door would be suicide. Between four and six in the Valley nobody cared what they hit. Finally I saw a lull. But just as I opened the door, a VW Beetle changed lanes. The driver braked hard. I saw the Rottweiler in back stick its head out the window a second before it hit me in the face. The next I thing remember is a terrified yelp and the sloshy
thwop
of dog tongue. The impact stunned me, until Cathy, who had no idea I’d just been Rottweilered, stopped screaming rape and started grinding her skeletal buttocks at me. Her horrible Marilyn morphed into horrible black Marilyn. “Want me to wiggle, Mister Man? You know you wanna tap that ay-uss!”

After that I didn’t even look. I just grabbed her, ripped open the passenger door, pushed her in and slammed it. Brakes squealed behind me. I managed to jump behind the wheel and get the key in the ignition before anything else hit me. But I was too mad to drive.

“How did that happen?” I yelled at Tina, gripped by retroactive panic.

She barely shrugged. “How does anything happen? Her parents fucked at a truck stop; twenty years later their baby girl is flashing her rack for strangers.”

Tina’s tone was as lackadaisical as mine was agitated. “Tina, that’s not all that happened! I was nearly decapitated by an Escalade door handle…. I almost bit off a dog’s tongue…. Little Miss Jesus was out there screaming rape.”

“Uh-huh. Poor thing’s going to crash hard.” Tina stroked Cathy’s head in her lap, gently brushing hair out of her eyes. “You find anything inside?”

It was always like this. The kind of calamity and chaos she’d survived left her inoculated; I could never get Tina to share my panic. The preceding near-death-in-rush-hour-Reseda experience might as well have never happened. I gave up and got back to business.

“Yeah. I found something,” I said. “But I want to talk to her first, I want to know what he asked her to do.”

“I’ll ask. She doesn’t like you.” Tina ran a gentle finger over Cathy’s fluttering eyelids. “Honey, tell me again, what did your old German do?”

Traffic had picked up. A Benz whizzed by, leaving a trail of NPR. I had an odd awareness of strangers listening to news of atrocities that didn’t happen to them.

Cathy talked like her voice belonged to somebody else. “Like, first he had me strip and walk whichever way he pointed. Then he, like, wanted to examine my hymen? I told him how Reverend D says after Jesus prayed, he didn’t say ‘amen,’ he said ‘hymen.’ But he had, like…
instruments.
He told me in his country they had baby factories, where perfect women went to be pregnant after they were impregnated by perfect men. He really wanted to talk. A lot of guys do. But they don’t talk about this stuff. He said he had a very important job. Half of it was keeping the impure races from multiplying, half was trying to help the pure races multiply
more.
It’s like he wanted to save the world or something. I told him, ‘Hey, Daddy, don’t worry. Jesus is coming!’” Her gaze was solemn as a nine-year-old’s. “That’s what global warming is. It’s Jesus, getting closer. Giving off His holy heat.”

She trembled and scratched a scab on her neck.

“Reverend D said after the Rapture the world’s going to have to fill up again. Girls are going to have to breed. And who is Jesus going to want?”

“Let me guess,” I said, “virgins?”

“Yes! The Bible is so
hot
! When the old man saw my coochie, he said it looked like a hairless chihuahua. I shave it, but that was kind of gross. When I told him my vagina belongs to the Man Upstairs, he got really confused. ‘The man upstairs? Mr. Wong?’” She erupted in a giggle, then stopped just as suddenly. “He told me if I ever lost my hymen not to worry, he could get me another one. ‘Not even the Lord would know the difference.’ Like, is that
creepy
!”

Cathy’s words came faster and faster. Her scratching got more feverish. She raked her nails over her scab-dotted wrists.

“So I said to him, kind of teasing like, ‘What do you have, a box of hymens under your bed?’ And then, the old German guy, he was really
old,
he says—
HICK!
”

She stopped, covered her mouth with a scabby hand and hiccupped again.
“HICK HICK!”
The hiccup turned to a spasm and the spasm brought a shock of clear vomit, which she wiped away as she sputtered. “He says, ‘Not anymore. I had to get rid of them.’”

That was enough. She was on her stomach, flopping in the backseat. I twisted out of my jacket, still driving, and threw it over her. “God, look at her….”

“You had to start!” Tina said. She pulled my jacket up to Cathy’s chin. Blue TV light shined out of condo windows.

Tina put her thumb in her mouth and bit into it. “So what did you find out?”

“Somebody’s already moved into his place. But I found out where he worked.”

I tossed the banded envelopes in her lap and hit the blinker.

“L.A. Small Animal Rescue Shelter?”

“The pound,” I said, pulling out. “He’s still gassing undesirables.”

Tina dropped me off at my house so I could grab my old Lincoln. I found it parked in the street, under a layer of dirt, bird shit, swap meet flyers and eleven parking tickets, ten of which turned out to belong to somebody else. Somebody who owned a Kia. What kind of scam was that? Did they think I’d pay? The whole notion made me unaccountably happy. It was refreshing to think about old-fashioned, everyday malfeasance, as opposed to sick, mind-cracking, destroy-your-faith-in-mankind-on-the-off-chance-you-had-any derangement.

After allowing myself that little pleasure, I returned to the real world.
My
real world. The one in which I could not stop thinking about how much I wanted my wife back. Or what I’d do for the rest of my life if she wasn’t in it. Did the possibility of being alone hurt as much as the Holocaust? That in itself was painful to think about. But pain only hurt if you could feel it. Maybe the problems of two people did amount to a hill of beans. Inside of a much bigger hill.

What I had meant to do was MapQuest the address of the pound. I let myself in, MapQuested, found the right freeway and, instead of taking a piss, which I was dying to do, stayed at the computer and Googled Mengele. It turned out that was one of his experiments, too: denying urination. Testing how long Jehovah’s Witnesses could hold it, as opposed to Gypsies, as opposed to Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews.

But fuck that. I knew enough about what he did. I wanted to know what he
was.
…I needed a portal to get inside the man.

EDUCATION.
Don’t care.

MILITARY SERVICE.
No.

SOUTH AMERICAN EXILE.
Not that either.

I figured I’d know it when I saw it. But by the time I did I was sweating and tapping my leg and taking short, choked breaths. I had made not-urinating a holy test, as if God commanded it.

To squirt one drop meant that thousands might die.

I began to vibrate. The pain came in sheets. Waves of sudden perspiration. Don’t let a man urinate. It was that easy. You’d think we were designed for torture. Maybe mankind, in the end—and in the beginning—is just a prolonged experiment on man. It made sense that God was more like Mengele than Gandhi. If God were like Gandhi, we wouldn’t need Gandhi.

The pain was making my brain sweat.

I kept Googling.

RELIGION.
No.

My eyes watered. I chewed through my bottom lip.

I needed to relieve myself so badly my feet were swelling. I thought I could hear them squish when I crossed my legs. Then it felt like I
was
peeing. But I was dry.

I linked to a Mengele quotation on the same page as quotations from Charles Mingus and Mother Teresa.
The Wit and Wisdom of
…Josef Mengele:
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”
Charles Mingus:
“White man? No such thing as a white man. He pink.”
Mother Teresa:
“God’s love touches the lowest first.”

I belched and swallowed back what I hoped was bile. Could I have somehow pissed my mouth? Can that happen? Without thinking, my fingers typed in “Mengele + Mother.” Then I saw her: Walburga. Mengele’s mom, in black and white. A hard-faced, obese woman with eyes that could hate through steel. Squeaks escaped my throat. I saw another name: Wilma. Mengele’s Jewish mistress…Every racist liked a little verboten on the side. Look at Strom Thurmond. Wilma was too obvious. But Moms Mengele really grabbed me.

I stood up, still reading. I was going to squirt. I read, “Mrs. Mengele brought his father’s lunch to the family tractor factory every day, and often chided the men who worked for her husband for their slovenly manners at table.”

You looked at her and you knew: every day Daddy got the big shame strudel. His employees must have thought he was married to a tank. Maybe some were jealous. But Mommy doted on Joe. “Walburga’s pet name for her little Josef was Beppo.”

Beppo.

I knocked the chair over scrambling to the bathroom. When I got there, I couldn’t go. I put the seat down and sat. Turned on the tap and stuck my hand under the hot water. Finally—
Thank you, Jesus!—
a trickle, the relief almost worse than the pain. Sitting there, peeing, I had to lean forward and hold on to the hamper. I rested my head on the wicker lid and remembered the pills I’d stashed. I was always stashing shit so I could surprise myself someday when I was in bad shape. Although since Tina left, the surprise would have been a day when I wasn’t.

I reached down and dug through a week or three’s worth of laundry. Felt something hard. Dug up a bar towel I didn’t recognize—who’d name their joint the Tsetse Fly?—and unwrapped a prescription bottle. Percocet. I counted twenty-two. Surprising myself, I stood up and dumped the pills in the toilet. Flushed. Then I dropped to the floor so fast my kneecaps cracked and stuck my arm in the bowl. My hand scrabbled over the porcelain bottom like a crab, trying to rescue some pills before they dissolved.
What the fuck?

I stood back up, pants at my ankles, and stared at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands.
Look at you, champ!
I knew people who did affirmations. But that’s what came out.

Minutes later I realized I was still washing my hands. And stopped. Still staring at myself, lips moving.

Mengelosis…Mengeloid.

I felt some kind of curdled twitch in my mouth and my own smile scared me.

I grabbed my jacket and keys and ran out the door, forgetting all about MapQuest. But I knew I’d get there.

Mengelomaniac.

Karala was no more than an alley running alongside the Metro Rail tracks between Avenue Fifty-one and Avenue Fifty, a half a block up from Figueroa in Highland Park. Turning off Fig onto Fifty, I made a quick left into the lot behind Chico’s, a yellow concrete box of a restaurant with a mural of a red chili in a poncho riding a burro out front. Multilayered graffiti graced the back wall, some fresh, some freshly crossed out. RESPECT YOUR HOOD was black-lettered over the door.

I hadn’t eaten in so long I’d forgotten you were supposed to. The overpriced airport grub was long gone.

A waitress watching a
telenovela
popped out of a booth when I entered.

“Hola.”

“Hola.”

My Spanish consisted of twenty words, and
hola
was five of them.

The waitress had straight black hair and a flat face that might have gazed off a frieze on a temple to Quetzalcoatl. She didn’t bother to ask if anybody would be joining me, and I could tell she didn’t think I was half as beautiful as I thought she was. But she was kind enough to recommend the enchiladas
verdes.

A blue and red plastic parrot hung in a cage over a mural of a man fishing and a woman pounding maize beside an ocean that continued over two walls. The only other customers were a toothless
viejo
who mad-dogged me over his soup and a table of laughing women in green scrubs and hospital tags enjoying beer with their guacamole.

It was twenty to eight. I wondered if the beer was to help the hospital ladies get over their shifts or get through them. Of course, people who don’t have substance issues don’t obsess about what other people do with their substances. Some people preferred to bird-watch. I figured I’d give that a try and focused on the plastic parrot. Maybe it would suggest a plan, since I didn’t have one. What I did have was a burglar’s all-access pass, a pair of bolt cutters, under the spare tire in my trunk. And a loaded .38 in an oily rag underneath that. This was not a neighborhood where anybody wanted to be caught breaking and entering. I was a white man snapping the locks off an animal shelter. If I got caught, I’d just say I was on the trail of a war criminal.
Hola!

The parrot held his mud. But the enchiladas
verdes
were good enough to renew my faith in humanity. I got two more to go, just in case, and asked if they had anything for my dog. The waitress came back with a paper bag inside a plastic bag, brimming with bones. She pointed. “
Pollo
…
Puerco
…Goat…Beef. Is okay?”

I said,
“Muchas gracias,”
and gave her two twenties for the enchiladas and dog treats. Told her to buy a couple more rounds of Corona for the Kaiser Permanente health care professionals. What the hell, I used to have health insurance. I hoped they were brain surgeons.

Thanks to perpetually failing tire pressure and blown-out shocks, the black Lincoln rode low, which in this neighborhood was a plus.

In my trunk, along with those bolt cutters, I carried a crowbar, cuffs, Ex-lax, Sominex, a switchblade and two-hundred-watt police “blind ’em” lights. It wasn’t that I was prepared, I just never took anything out of my trunk once I put it in. I also had a suitcase with a change of clothes, empty water bottles, a blanket, towels and an air mattress. In the tire well I hid a high-powered telescope and paper bags full of crumpled-up sweats, work boots, tennis shoes and Tiger’s Milk bars.