Sick City (26 page)

He froze. He looked over to the sleeping mass on his bed. She turned, quieted down for a moment, and then started snoring again. Randal picked up his cell phone. He glanced at the screen and was surprised to see a missed call. He wasn't exactly Mr. Popularity these days.
YOU HAVE 1 TEXT MESSAGE,
the screen said. He pressed a button. The screen read,
from: jeffrey
.

Randal stared at the phone for a moment. He hadn't spoken to Jeffrey in a long time. They had halfheartedly kept up communication in the first few months following Randal's departure, but then as the drugs had taken over they had drifted out of contact. The last he had heard was that Jeffrey was planning to return to England. Seeing the Los Angeles area code, Randal guessed that Jeffrey's plans had changed. Scrolling down to see the message, Randal felt a shiver of recognition. It simply read,
STEVIE ROX DEAD. FUNERAL THURSDAY @ 3PM BLESSED SACRAMENT CHURCH, HOLLYWOOD. R U OK? X JEFFREY
.

Randal looked around the room. This run-down hole, with its threadbare carpets, by-the-hour rates, and regular visits by the LVPD had been his home for a long time. He thought of Stevie Rox, and Jeffrey, but most of all about Hollywood herself. No sooner had he resigned himself to one fate than she came calling again like some insane ex-girlfriend he couldn't drink or fuck out of his mind. Just thinking about stepping foot in Hollywood again, for any reason at all, filled him with a curious kind of thrill. Maybe Jeffrey was doing better than he was. Maybe he would have some money to loan his friend. But as soon as the thought surfaced, a wave of anxiety shuddered through him. The idea of returning to Hollywood penniless and hopelessly strung out again terrified him. Then he could no longer deny the fact that he had fucked up his last opportunity. That he really was what his brother had called him for so long: a world-class, grade-A, prime piece of fuckup.

Should he stay? Should he go? He looked up to the wet patch on the ceiling and said, “I need a sign. What the fuck should I do?”

“Wha?” said the woman on the bed.

Randal started putting the trousers on as quickly as possible. Goddamnit, where were his socks? He grabbed the wallet. Grabbed the car keys. She was sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes.

“Hi, lover,” she said, “where you going?”

“Beer,” Randal stuttered, “I'm going to get beer.”

She smiled at him sadly.

“Well, you sure had fun last night,” she said, “I guess you enjoyed it more than I did. Not that I'm complaining . . . but, you know . . . you were kinda
selfish
.”

Randal shivered. “That's me. Selfish. Listen, uh, I'll be back, okay?”

“Sure.”

She looked at him with a puzzled, sleepy expression on her face as he searched around for his socks. Then, deciding fuck it, he grabbed his shoes and shook them. A fat roach fell out of one and scuttled into a hole in the wall. He stuck his shoes on without socks. The chunks of glass still buried in his foot made him stifle a sob.

“I'm getting married this weekend,” she said, “and that's it. I'm gonna be faithful. Magnanimous. You don't think I'm a bad person, do you?” There was something tragic about the way she said it that made him almost reconsider leaving. Part of him wanted to go over to her and give her a hug. But only a small part.

“No. I don't think that. I'm sure you'll make him very happy. Good for you,” Randal said, and he opened the door.

Randal stopped in his tracks. He was frozen by what he saw. He had been half joking when he'd looked up and asked for a sign. He wasn't expecting one so blatant, so shocking. He stood there, mouth hanging open, rocking back and forth on his heels for a while.

“Hey, Mike!” the voice called from inside.

Randal continued to stare out of the doorway dumbfounded. Then he croaked, “Yeah?”

“Get me some Cisco, will ya?”

“Sure thing.”

“The red one!”

“Okay.”

“And make sure it's cold!”

At this Randal started to laugh. He closed the door behind him, now knowing that he would never step foot back in room 314 again.
It'll be cold all right,
he thought. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and looked at the absurd panorama before him. The streets of downtown Las Vegas were covered in a thick white blanket of snow. The cheesy neon genie lamp that advertised the motel to the prostitutes, johns, and down-on-their-luck addicts who frequented the place had a fat layer of white on top of it. The walkway and the parking lot were covered under a silent, heavy carpet of frost. The snow was still falling, thick, intricate flakes heading downward in arcane patterns. All of the filth, and the shit, and the human wreckage of downtown were hidden for a moment. For a moment, the streets almost looked beautiful.

Randal shivered, walking out into the white toward his car. The air was clear and sharp, and it made his lungs feel freshly scrubbed out. His feet crunching into the frost was the only sound. The room had two more days left on it. Anything of value had long since been stolen, lost, or pawned. All he had was his wallet, the clothes on his back, and a car that might not make it all the way to Los Angeles. He sat down in the driver's seat and fumbled with his wallet. Finding the last of the meth, he took out his keys and inhaled a generous blast in each nostril. Then he stuck the key in the ignition and turned the engine over. What was that great rallying cry of the American spirit? “Go west, young man!” Randal looked at his shriveled face in the rearview mirror. He turned the radio on and caught the end of a Missing Persons song, “Walking in LA.” Deciding that maybe old men can go west, too, Randal stuck the car in Drive and started on the road to home.

Somewhere in the church, over the lilting melody of the pipe organ, a noise, a barely human noise, was building in waves, growing louder, stifling out everything else. In the pews, supported by her tarot reader and her hairdresser, Baby was wailing, inconsolable, playing the grieving bride behind a black veil perfectly appointed to match her Armani suit. And front and center was Stevie Rox, as ugly in death as he was in life, bloated, stuffed, plugged, painted, and rigid as a board. The coffin was dark mahogany, with a white silk interior. Ray-Bans shielded his extinguished eyes. Chubby hands clutched a crucifix to his chest, all decked out in a three-piece Yves Saint Laurent suit and a garish, European-style silk shirt.

The mourners lined up around the coffin, passing by him in turn, and each remembered how Stevie had touched their lives. They were a particularly Hollywood mix of actors and celebrities, businessmen, drug dealers, adult movie stars, and other rootless, wasteful children of Los Angeles. An Oscar winner stood over Stevie: once famed for his intense, soul-searching performances in the first wave of great American independent cinema, and now relegated to playing lovable curmudgeons in romantic comedies pitched at aging baby boomers. His iconic features were now shriveled as a prune. He let his hands dance over the white silk as he whispered his good-byes, remembering the prostitutes that Stevie would send over to his house, unannounced. The next day Stevie would call him up, cackling. “How did ya like the flowers I sent over last night?” That's what he called them, “flowers.” “Oh, sure, they were beautiful, Stevie. The nicest arrangement yet.”

Next there was a young woman who looked down on Stevie's corpse with a cold smile. She thought of screen tests and hush-hush abortions. She whispered, “I hope you burn in hell, you rotten cocksucker . . . ,” before walking on. Stevie's coke connection was next. He slipped an eight ball of cocaine into Stevie's top pocket, a promise he'd made to Stevie a long time ago, and one that he had decided to keep. Stevie was ambivalent about the thought of an afterlife, but he had wanted to make sure that, just in case, he'd have some blow for the long eternity ahead. Stevie had paid for his dealer's house, his cars, and his daughter's college tuition. It was the least he could do. “Godspeed, Stevie. . . .” And then came a skeletal figure who had only met Stevie twice. His lank hair was combed back, tight against his skull. His skin was gray. The light in his eyes was all but burned out. It looked as if he were the one who should have been in the casket. Jeffrey shook his head slightly, amazed that he had outlived Stevie Rox. Stevie Rox, who had, in his own little way, helped to bankroll this last, final spiral into utter hopelessness.

· · ·

Looking down at Stevie, he remembered the last time he saw him, sitting on the edge of his indoor pool, in that monstrous villa in the Pacific Palisades, smoking a cigar and casually flicking the ash into the water. The way he had looked at the envelope of cash they had handed to him. That wide, bloody smile.

“Boys,” he had said, “I guess this is what they call a win-win situation.”

And now, just over a year later, Stevie was dead of liver failure. The morticians had done their best to play down just how yellow Stevie had looked in the last weeks. Jeffrey was standing there in a borrowed suit, wondering where exactly he would get the money to score when he finished with the last of his heroin. The thought brought about a twinge of psychosomatic withdrawal: a shudder in the gut, a loosening of the bowels, an internal chill that shook him with a wave of nausea. He tried to catch his breath. As he did, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you a friend of Bill W.'s?” a familiar voice asked.

Jeffrey turned. He blinked his eyes, as if to adjust his focus. He found himself staring into a face transformed. The features were almost the same, but the face seemed to have aged terribly in the preceding year. Maybe it was the missing teeth that did it. It made the cheeks seem even more sucked in, the mouth more puckered, like a little old man. Almost every last trace of that remaining youthful beauty was now gone. The bleached hair was thinner now, the skin blotchy.

“I know, I know,” Randal laughed, “I look like shit. If it's any consolation . . . so do you.”

· · ·

With that, they hugged. To the others in attendance they were just two old friends brought together by grief. People saw them standing there, hanging on to each other, and thought,
They must have really cared for Stevie.
They weren't to know that all of their grief was reserved for themselves.

——————

After a long church service, enlivened only by a eulogy from Tatum O'Neal and a graveside meltdown from Baby, who threw herself onto the coffin before fainting outright, Jeffrey and Randal sat in the half-deserted gloom of the Spotlight bar on Ivar. The place still smelled the same—a musty, long-ago smell, with an undertow of bleach. The place had the usual crowd of male prostitutes, worn-down transvestites, and other lost souls. They had the table by the jukebox.

“So his liver gave out, huh?” Randal said. “Goddamn.”

“Uh-huh. He refused to stop drinking, even when the doctors told him that the thing was failing. He couldn't get his head around the fact that he could fuck up an eighteen-year-old's liver in less than a year. Thought they were lying to him. Even when he turned yellow as a fucking block of Velveeta he refused to give up his vodka gimlets for breakfast.”

“How come you got to know Stevie so well?” Randal said. “You used to think he was a fucking asshole.”

“He was a fucking asshole. He was Damian's friend. They took quite a shine to each other toward the end. He did a portrait of him, not so long ago. . . .”

“Shit,” Randal said, looking over to the bar, where Damian was waiting to get the drinks, “I can't get over that motherfucker. Look at him! A fucking
artist
. How the fuck is that prick making a living as an artist?”

As he said that, Jeffrey let his eyes move toward the bar where Damian was standing. His six-foot-six frame was draped in a leather trench coat. His stick-thin legs were clad in black denim and tucked into a pair of ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He dropped the money on the bar and started walking back toward them, drinks in hand.

Randal looked Damian up and down, still shaking his head.

“No offense, man, but I'm still finding it hard to believe that you're paying your way with those fucking paintings.”

Damian smiled, with no real humor. He slipped a glass of Johnny Walker over to Randal.

“You might dislike my art,” he said, in that nasal whine, “but it just paid for your drinks.”

“Damian has a patron,” Jeffrey said, raising his own glass to his lips, “a very generous patron. He has been buying up every canvas that Damian can produce. You know him, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Rupert Du Wald. The collector. He says that Damian is possessed by genius.”

Randal looked at Damian, and then at Jeffrey. He noticed that Damian's yellow teeth had been replaced with fancy platinum and white diamond numbers that made him look even more ludicrous than before. Randal croaked, “Excuse me,” and stood, walking toward the bathroom.

When Jeffrey followed him in a moment later, he could hear Randal snorting meth in the cubicle. He knocked on the door softly and said, “You got room for a little one inside?”

“Sure, come in.”

“Thanks.”

Bunched together around the filthy toilet, Randal held the key with a mound of meth on the tip up to Jeffrey's nose. Jeffrey took a blast in each nostril, making his eyes tear up.

“You heard the latest about Dr. Mike?” Jeffrey asked.

“He's in prison, isn't he? Over those prescriptions?”

“Nah! He was out after three months. No, I mean the billboards are up all over the city.
DR MIKE: RECOVERY AND REDEMPTION
. The motherfucker has landed a new show on VH1. About how he found God in prison, and now he's gonna use the lessons he learned inside to help others, and blah, blah, blah. . . . He's on
Oprah
next week.”

Randal laughed, sadly.

“I guess you can't keep a good man down. . . .”

“I guess. So listen . . . Randal . . . Damian and I . . . we have something to discuss with you.”

“Damian and I? Why exactly ARE you hanging out with this dick again, man? Seriously, the guy's a fuckwad. A talentless, know-nothing asshole. Just because that wannabe freak Du Wald is buying into his shit doesn't make it any better, you know.”

“Randal, I'm broke. Totally, utterly fucking broke. I never made it back to England. I never even made it out of Hollywood. Every bit of that money went into my arms. Look at this.”

Jeffrey pulled up the sleeves of his jacket, exposing his long, pale arms. They were a tapestry of needle marks, running from an angry purple welt at the crook of the arm all the way down to the bruised, swollen wrists. Then, for the coup de grace he tilted his head back, exposing a trail of angry-looking needle marks dotting the length of his throat, barely hidden with thickly applied makeup.

“Jesus, Jeffrey,” Randal breathed, “what the fuck did you do to yourself?”

Jeffrey let his chin drop again.

“Speedballs. I got hooked on fucking speedballs. The coke took me down so fast, man. So fast.” Jeffrey clicked his fingers. “Like THAT. . . .”

“Are you still using?”

Jeffrey shrugged. “I'm on the methadone program. There's a clinic in Hollywood. I go there every morning to get my dose. I can barely afford that. That's why I've gone back to working for Damian. He pays well. He did a whole series of abstract pieces based around my tracks. But listen, there's something else.”

“What?”

“You remember some of the shit that Du Wald had in his place? The collection?”

“Sure.”

“Damian has been spending a lot of time with Du Wald. They're real friendly these days. He managed to get these. . . .”

Jeffrey reached around to his back pocket, pulled out a small notebook, and handed it to Randal. Randal flipped the pages. There was a sequence of numbers, scrawled in spidery handwriting. “So what? What the fuck is this?”

“There are pass codes to every door, safe alarm, and case in the fucking house. All of them.”

Randal looked at the book again, feeling his throat go dry.

“And that's not all,” Jeffrey was whispering. “He knows someone. Movie executive. Real interested in something that Du Wald had. The penis. You remember the penis that he said belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte? Well, this guy is offering six mil cash, no questions asked. All we'd have to do is get it.”

“But . . . but . . . what about Lurch?” Randal stammered. “Why doesn't he do it himself?”

“This weekend, Du Wald is taking him to meet some of his art collector buddies in Italy. They're going to be gone for seven days. If we're going to do it, we have to do it then. Damian needs to have an alibi. Du Wald has no fucking idea that you and I are still around. As far as he's concerned, we took the money and split a year ago.”

“But what's going to happen . . . I mean, shit! How the fuck could we get away with it?”

“We got the pass codes. Who knows how long it would be before he even realizes that it's gone? Damian has secured another vintage Cartier box, exactly like the one that Du Wald has the dick in. He's even come up with a fake dick that looks pretty close.”

“How did he make a fake Napoleon Bonaparte dick?”

“With a blowtorch and some beef jerky. It looks exactly the same to me.”

“Well,” Randal said dryly, “he IS an artist after all. You said six million?”

“Six million. A chance to start over. We take the dick, and when Damian gets back we sell it to his contact. Then all three of us go our separate ways. Just like that.”

· · ·

When they made it back to the table, Damian was looking intently at something small, squirming on a beer mat. As they took their seats Damian said, “Get a load of this.”

They looked down. It was a cockroach. It was on its back, six legs squirming madly in the air.

“Fucking thing tried to crawl into my rum and coke,” Damian said.

Jeffrey went to brush it away, but Damian grabbed his wrist and said, “Wait.”

Damian took a finger and flipped the roach right side up again. It froze for a moment, as if barely believing its luck, before making a break for the edge of the table. With a lightning reflex, Damian flicked it again, flipping it up into the air, landing it on its back once more. The legs resumed their wiggling.

“I love cockroaches,” Damian said, “I love their hardheadedness. Look at that fucking thing, squirming away, trying to right itself again. You know it would squirm and squirm for days if you let it? And then, if I flip it again, it will make a break for it. I used to do this for hours, when I had a dope habit, and my only friends were the roaches. Flip 'em. Watch 'em squirm. Flip 'em back. Watch 'em run. Flip 'em . . .”

“Yeah,” Randal said, “good times.”

Damian looked up. “Do you know that a cockroach can live for up to two weeks without its head? You cut its head off, and it's so determined to live it doesn't even realize that it's dead already.”

Randal shrugged. “I fucking hate roaches.”

“Everybody puts the cockroach down. But it is the most tenacious, hardheaded motherfucker out there. Its survival instinct is amazing. No other creature on earth comes close. The humble fucking cockroach. A lesson to us all. Off you go.”

With that, Damian flipped it over one more time, and they watched it crawl to the edge of the table and fall off of it, scuttling away to some shadowy corner. Randal smirked at Jeffrey and said, “Deep, isn't he?” They followed the roach's progress for a while before turning back to Damian. Damian smiled.