Sick City (3 page)

In the dream Randal was looking out toward a perfectly clear horizon. The powder blue sky lay hard against the sapphire blue of the farthest point of the ocean. The water was crystalline, lapping at the shoreline with a gentle undulation. He was sitting on a beach chair. The one-eared girl was sitting in front of him, just as she had been before. Her single earring, a large hoop bearing the legend “Esmeralda” in script, twinkled in the sunlight. This hypnotic twinkling, in time with the bus's steady lurches, had lulled him to sleep originally. It kept up its steady rhythm here, as he ran his hands over her smooth, oiled back.

Then they stood up on the hot sand and walked toward the water hand in hand. The water was warm. As they walked, their feet at first smushed into the soft white sand. Farther on, they found themselves in a patch of dark green sea grass. Here they stopped. She sat, so only her head was poking above the water. As Randal sat beside her, he felt the warm slush of the sand and the slimy weeds collecting around his ass and his thighs. It was this sensation, warm, viscous, that began to bring him around. That and the driver with the bulldog neck, who applied the brakes and frantically looked back over his shoulder, barking, “YOU! SIR! Wake up! Get off my goddamned bus!!!”

He blinked. The mid-afternoon sunlight burned his face through the scarred glass. Someone had scrawled “FUCK THE LAPD” in Magic Marker here. There was a rank stench. Esmeralda was here, too, on her feet and looking down on him with unconcealed disgust. The smell of his own shit made him gag. He looked over toward the driver, who was standing now, about to walk toward Randal and physically drag him off the bus. An old Latin lady stood behind the driver guiltily, having informed him of what had happened. Half retching, Randal staggered to his feet and said, “I'm going!”

Delirious, he staggered off the bus and onto the sidewalk, leaving a trail of excrement in his wake. He sat under the Hollywood sun with crap leaking from the legs of his destroyed $1,500 Yves Saint Laurent suit. The bus tore away from him, and he was alone on the hard plastic bench.

Randal's receding hair was dyed platinum. His once handsome face was hollowed out beyond recognition. He still had the eyes, though. Soulful eyes. Eyes that earned more forgiveness than even he thought he deserved.

He was on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. He walked toward a pay phone, noting the dinosaur bursting from the roof of Ripley's Believe It or Not, with a clock clamped between its jaws. He called his brother collect. Across the city, white-knuckled behind the wheel of his Lexus, Harvey accepted the charges.

“You're a motherfucker,” Harvey said.

“Harvey. It's Randal!”

“I know who it is. Nobody else calls me collect on a regular basis. I guess you're calling to see how the funeral went? It was good. A lot of people showed up. Susan Sarandon was there, the Cruises, Bobby De Niro came. Can you believe that? It's been, like, what? Fifteen years since they'd worked together? He showed anyway.”

“Harvey, man, listen—”

“Shut the fuck up for a moment, okay? I'm telling you about Pop's funeral. Don't interrupt me. You're so fucking RUDE sometimes! Anyway, De Niro spoke, oh and shit, you'll never believe who was there. Sidney Poitier. Sidney fucking Poitier. Can you believe that shit?”

“Wild.”

“Yup. So you calling me with some brilliant excuse for why you didn't show up?”

“It's not an excuse. I just got out of the psych ward. They held me for seventy-two hours, dosed me with lithium, the whole fuckin' bit. I woke up strapped to a bed, in a ward with a bunch of nut jobs. There was this chick that kept trying to catch invisible butterflies and a guy with shaved eyebrows who screamed all night. I called the suicide hotline when I was fucked up. . . .”

“Again? My goodness, aren't you the reckless one. Well, I'll be sure to let Mom know. . . .”

· · ·

“You're such a callous prick sometimes, Harvey. I'm sick. I lost my wallet. I got shit in my pants. They gave me a fucking bus token and sent me off into Hollywood. I'm standing outside of Ripley's Believe It or Not.”

“You ought to be inside of it. Hold on. HEY, ASSHOLE. WHATCHA DOING? INDICATE, FUCK FACE! YEAH! THAT'S RIGHT! YOU DUMBSHIT.” Harvey sighed, “Hey, shitpants. You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Randal, listen. Here's the deal. Mom, Lori, and I had planned an intervention for you. We like flew this professional interventionist called Autumn down from fucking San Francisco, and we all wrote letters about how much we loved you but we don't wanna see you die, all of that shit. But, uh, I guess you were indisposed. So I'm gonna give you the Cliff Notes. You're goin' to rehab or you're cut off. No apartment, no credit cards, nothing.”

“Can you come pick me up?”

“Hold on, shitpants. Don't cut me off before I get to the best bit. Randal, are you willing to accept the gift of recovery that we're offering you?”

“Sure. Whatever. Can you send a limo? I need to change.”

“No changing. You're going straight to rehab.”

“I need clean pants. I shit in my pants!”

“Don't be a pussy. I'll bring you some fucking pants, okay? You're meant to be experiencing a, uh, rock bottom right now. So experience it. They're waiting for you to check in. It's a good place. The guy who runs it has that TV show,
Detoxing America
. You seen it?”

“Yeah, I've seen that asshole. I do have a TV, you know.”

“Well, anyway. He seems like a good guy. He deals with celebrities, so I'm sure he's used to spoiled fucking speed freak assholes like you. Just hold on, 'Kay? I'm calling a car service.”

Randal returned to the bench. He waited. Was this a rock bottom? He wasn't sure. When money is not an object, rock bottoms are hard to find. There are mostly trapdoors, which lead to ever more dark and deep caverns of degradation. He thought about scoring some more meth before the car service arrived. It was hopeless, though. Drug dealers never accept collect calls.

Every year or two Randal had to make the trip to rehab at his family's behest, or face the prospect of being cut out of his inheritance. Now that his father was dead, Harvey would no doubt be in charge of the estate. Dad had been senile and soft, prone to bouts of sentimentality and sudden forgiveness when he was drunk. Harvey, though, could be a hard-nosed bastard. The prolonged infantilism that Randal's meth habit brought about had changed their relationship as siblings, twisting Harvey into the tough-loving older brother. Only these days it was more toughness than love.

As Randal waited for his car, he supposed that there were worse things than rehab. He would have a bed, meals, and he'd met more than one girlfriend while undergoing treatment. After all, there's no icebreaker in the world like a shared love of hard narcotics.

Randal limped to a nearby Jack in the Box and headed straight for the bathroom. He tried to clean the drying shit off of himself as best he could. He used the abrasive brown paper towels and cold water to scrub some of the stench away. He shoved the shitty, wet paper towels in the toilet bowl. When he had done all he could, he flushed the toilet. It immediately backed up, and started to flood. He fled the bathroom and walked as nonchalantly as possible past the customers waiting for their Jumbo Jacks with Cheese. He staggered out to the sunlight again as filthy water began to seep out from under the door and into the restaurant.

When he made it back to the bus stop the car was waiting for him. Randal slid into the backseat and opened the window wide. The driver, an enormous, sweating black man with a shaved head and an ill-fitting polyester uniform, took off without saying a word.

“Hey, man. What's your name?”

“Christian,” the driver replied, with a heavy African accent.

“Hey, Christian. My name is Randal. I was just wondering if we could make a stop on the way. . . .”

“No stop. Mister Earnest specified no stops. No stops until the hospital.”

Christian turned the radio up to signal that the conversation was at an end.
Goddamn, Harvey!
Hopeless, Randal closed his eyes and enjoyed the breeze against his face. After a while he heard some off-key singing and opened one eye. Christian was singing along in a weird, fractured falsetto to Jennifer Rush's “The Power of Love.” He looked at one of the business cards that had been left in the backseat.
DIVINE LIMO
,
it read,
it's not just when you get there—it's how you get there!
Groaning, he closed his eyes again and waited for sleep.

After lunch at Spago Beverly Hills, cocktails at Bar 19, and a furtive blow job in the backseat of his Mercedes-Benz, Dr. Mike was adjusting his tie in the rearview mirror when Lai said, “So, I take it from the ring that you're married?”

Dr. Mike smiled without any emotion and said, “Yes. Happily married with two children. But I'm sure you already knew that. I assume you are familiar with Google?”

Chastised, Lai quieted down. This was Hollywood, after all. Everybody involved knew what the deal was.

Lai had no illusions that she would ever have the opportunity to talk to Dr. Mike once this encounter was over. But she had got half of what she came for: the addictive, instantaneous thrill of bedding a celebrity. As far as that went, Dr. Mike was okay. Not as exciting as getting head from Dave Navarro in a back room of the Sky Bar, but definitely better than last year's coke-fueled bathroom sex with stand-up comedian Randy Dick. She looked at the full condom, knotted in the ashtray. Catching her gaze on it, Dr. Mike said, “You know, if you'd like to, uh, freshen up . . . I have a travel-size Scope right there in the glove compartment.”

Lai shook her head. There was only one more thing she needed.

“We never had the chance to talk about my brother. . . .”

“Your who?”

“My brother.”

“Oh, yes. An alcoholic, yes?” Dr. Mike began to shake his head. “I've dealt with many alcoholics in my time. . . .”

“He's addicted to cocaine, Dr. Mike. Crack cocaine.”

“Oh, oh, yes. Yes. Where do you live?”

“Oh. Los Feliz.”

“We can talk while I drive you over there. . . .”

——————

They were heading down Sunset, toward Vermont. Lai was talking, and NPR was droning softly in the background. Dr. Mike's face was cocked at an angle, and he was dreamily listening to what Lai had to say. Her brother was indeed a habitual user of crack cocaine, but not only that, he was a transgender who made for a more than convincing woman. When Lai had pulled out the picture of her and her brother, Dr. Mike had scrunched his eyes, disbelieving. Never in his years of trawling the underbelly of Los Angeles had he seen a more beautiful and convincing transvestite.

· · ·

“You see . . . Joseph is . . . well, my parents are very old-fashioned. Very traditional. He's the only son and—they prefer to think of him as DEAD rather than deal with the fact that he's . . . like THAT. He doesn't even like me to call him Joseph anymore. He insists on being referred to as . . .
Champagne
.”

“Hm. This complicates matters somewhat. Dual-diagnosis patients are much more difficult to treat—”

“Dual diagnosis?”

“When there are obvious . . . psychological problems unrelated to the addiction itself. Dual diagnosis is a broad term. It can cover anything from manic depression to a case like your brother's where there are, uh, sexual issues. . . .”

“I mean—I love my brother. And I accept him. But the way he's living his life . . . I suspect he's supporting his drug habit . . . by . . . by
prostitution
. There are always these creepy old men around him, and I know that Joseph would never dream of hanging out with these guys unless they were supporting him.”

Dr. Mike looked at the picture again. Dr. Mike had thought that Lai was pretty, maybe not stunning, but definitely pretty. However, next to her brother, Lai looked hopelessly plain, nondescript even. Champagne was beautiful, truly stunning. He wondered if Lai was upset that he made a prettier female than she did.

“Has he sought any kind of treatment for his drug use?”

Lai shook her head. “He says that he's happy. But I know that he isn't. I know him. I can see the scared little boy underneath the makeup.”

When she said that, Dr. Mike felt his breath get wet and heavy in his throat. His hand trembling slightly, he passed the photograph back to Lai.

“Write your brother's number on the back,” he said. “I can't promise anything, but I can at least call him to offer my advice. If he wants to seek treatment . . .” Dr. Mike shrugged. “Well, I can see if I'm in a position to help him. But as I said, I can't promise anything.”

“Sure, sure. Thank you. . . .”

Lai scribbled the number on the back of the picture and handed it to the doctor. He slipped it into his suit pocket.

“You understand that we won't really be able to . . . continue to see each other after this. . . .”

“You don't have to give me the speech. I'm a big girl. I just want you to help my brother.”

“I can promise to try. That's it.”

“That's good enough.”

He pulled up. Lai looked at Dr. Mike. He smiled at her. She hugged him awkwardly. What to say now? “It was fun”? “Say hello to your wife”? “I hope you enjoyed the blow job”? I mean, what do you say in this situation?

“It was nice to . . . meet you,” Dr. Mike said.

“Yeah, you too. Do you have any smokes?”

Dr. Mike shook his head, and she got out of the car.

“You really shouldn't smoke those things, you know,” he called after her. “They'll kill you one day.”

And then with a roar, he was gone. She was back in the disappointing realm of reality once more. She went inside, turned on the TV, and another stupid day passed like a dream.