TWENTY

Ghosting the streets of Hollywood in a pair of skinny black jeans and scuffed leather Chelsea boots, Jeffrey cursed and sniffed, the dark wind of heroin withdrawal gusting steadily from some unseen future point, relentlessly rolling toward his present, invisible, unstoppable and grimly smothering everything in its way. It was shaping to up to be a shitty day.

Rachel was back at the Gilbert, dope-sick and pissed off. She was still refusing to turn tricks and Jeffrey had begun to suspect that the prophetic dream Rachel claimed to have had was nothing more than a passive-aggressive ploy to get back at him for the incident with Smooth. Over the past few days Rachel had withdrawn from him almost completely. She spent her days lying in bed chain-smoking anxiously, occasionally looking at him with eyes that radiated disgust. Jeffrey knew that unless he found a way to start bringing in some bread, he was going to come back to their room one day to find she had cleared out for good. There was no doubt in his mind that without money and without drugs it was inevitable that Rachel would split for greener pastures.

In some ways he knew that this would make his life easier. He would be able to come and go as he pleased. He’d never have to share his dope. But in most other senses it would be a disaster. It was always better to have a partner in the dope game, someone to rely on to help you get fixed when your luck and your dope ran out, as they inevitably did from time to time. More than that, Jeffrey remembered how it was to face up to the nights alone, with only his drugs and his self-loathing for company. The despair that had threatened to choke him so many times.

What they had wasn’t what most people would call love, but it was something deeper than mere co-dependence. It was junkie love, a kind of ménage a trois were both partners tolerate each other’s faults because of a shared romance with the needle. A trade off, where the one thing that causes all your problems also smooths them out completely. Jeffrey wondered how anybody could tolerate the messy complication of human relations without dope. He resolved to make one last-ditch effort to fix the situation. He hit the streets with fourteen bucks and change in his pocket hoping to somehow transform this – like Jesus with that old water into wine routine – into enough dope to warm over both their bones.

Jeffrey wandered Hollywood’s starved streets, his mind squirming, desperately trying to figure out another way to make some decent scratch. His fence, Doug, had recently dropped the bombshell that he was getting out of the book hustle altogether. “It’s a dying business,” he had whined. “The fucking publishers have been hammering the public with crap so long that people have stopped caring. I’m thinking of getting into pimping again. At least there’s always a market for pussy.” The book thing had been Jeffrey’s most reliable way of making money. Although he had no real stomach for overt acquisitive crime, he took to the streets anyway hoping that some kind of miracle opportunity would present itself. Jeffrey knew damn well that magical thinking was an essential part of making it in the dope game.

He hopped the Metro at Hollywood and Vine and rode the train downtown, trying not to make eye contact with the crazies and commuters onboard. He got off at Union Station, unsure of why he chose this stop, drawn to downtown by some kind of diviner’s instinct. Just knowing that dope was nearby made him at least feel that he was at least headed in the right direction.

He found himself in the main hall of Union Station, retracing the steps he had taken many times in the past as he’d cruised for young Latin trade to bring home to his late boyfriend, Bill. Bill had liked to watch Jeffrey screwing these young guys, staring with bulging eyes as the action went down on his king-sized bed, one hand holding a bottle of amyl nitrate to his nose, another frenziedly working his pecker. Those had been happier days, easier days, when money and drugs were both plentiful. Now Bill – and the security that his money had provided – was long gone. Today there was barely enough money for dope, and not even enough time for a luxury like cruising for sex. Jeffrey was certainly too long in the tooth to try and make a few dollars by turning tricks the way he had when he was a teenager. What with an abundance of younger, prettier guys cruising for fun, Jeffrey suspected that he probably couldn’t even give it away at the moment. He had lost his latest tooth – bringing the running tally up to seven – biting into the crust of a stale slice of pizza. He knew he wasn’t exactly a hot commodity these days.

He entered the station’s bathroom, experiencing a weird feeling of nostalgia. Inside, the familiar smell of bleach and the undertone of stale piss. Jeffrey noted that it was unusually quiet in there for the time of day. A bald man wearing a charcoal grey trench coat was off to one side, taking a suspiciously long time at one of the urinals. The place was quiet. Even though the bald man in the trench coat was standing with his dick in his hand, there was no accompanying sound of urine against porcelain. He just lingered there with an absent look on his face, with the resigned air of someone waiting for a bus. A faucet dripped, slowly and steadily. The row of stalls against the far wall was empty, except for one. The stall on the furthest right, the larger stall that allowed for wheelchair access, was definitely occupied. The door was closed and Jeffrey could see a pair of expensive-looking leather shoes underneath. There was a slow, steady sniffing noise emanating from inside the stall. Jeffrey looked at the positioning of the feet, indicating that the person was sitting on the toilet, twisted around to the left, and obviously snorting coke or some other drug from the top of the toilet roll dispenser. Next to the feet, propped against the door, was a black laptop case.

Interesting.

Jeffrey calculated in an instant the odds of getting away with the laptop. It seemed quite possible. If he got on his knees he could slip his hand under the wall of the stall – there was a good two-inch gap – turn the laptop on its side and slide it out easily. He figured he could make his escape before the guy inside had even got the rolled-up bill out of his nose. Hopefully. It would take a couple of seconds before the guy would be able to give chase, which would be just enough time for Jeffrey to get the fuck out of there.

But he had to act fast. The guy inside would finish up any moment. Jeffrey was suddenly convinced that Bill had a hand in this, that it had been some kind of supernatural nudge from his dead ex-boyfriend that had guided him down here to this bizarrely easy score. Jeffrey walked purposefully toward the stall. The bald man half turned, pecker still in his hand, and stared at Jeffrey with a smile playing on his wet, rubbery lips. Jeffrey shot back a look so poisonous that the bald man immediately turned away, and went back to looking intently at his dick in his hand, waiting silently for someone else to pass by. In one swift movement Jeffrey hunched down, grabbed the laptop and slid it out of the stall. He was already heading toward the exit when he heard the guy in the stall yell, “What the FUCK? HEY! COME BACK!”

Holding the laptop to his chest Jeffrey ran, easing up when he was well away from the bathrooms and safely surrounded by commuters. He was pretty sure that the guy in the stall wouldn’t be able to catch up with him. Besides, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by running through the station in such a conspicuous manner. There were so many people that Jeffrey felt he could make it back onto the metro without being spotted. He didn’t fully relax until he was back on the red line, heading toward Pershing Square. He finally allowed himself to breathe easy as the train trundled away from Union Station, allowing himself to open up the case and peek inside.

There was a white laptop inside. It looked like a brand new MacBook, definitely worth a few dollars to the right person. Goddamn! When they pulled into Pershing Square Jeffrey hopped out, smiling inanely at the people he made eye contact with. Everything was suddenly all right with the world again. He made his way up to the street, virtually skipping past a gaggle of homeless men loitering at the top of the escalators. By the Angel’s Flight train, in the neighbourhood that was once known as Bunker Hill, Jeffrey found a payphone and called a fence he knew who operated out of downtown. They arranged to meet at the Grand Central Market, at a taco joint called Tacos Tumbras a Tomas. He walked over there, found an empty table, and opened up the laptop while he waited. He turned it on and stared at the peaceful blue screen as it loaded up, wondering exactly how much he could get for his haul.

*

“Man,” Jeffrey said, “and you people say that us faggots are sick in the head? This is some twisted shit, Whitey.”

Jeffrey and his fence, a hulking six-foot-two African-American albino called Whitey – real name Winston Edward Delacroix – had been huddled over their table for half an hour now. Whitey’s carne asada taco was forgotten and long since gone cold. Mute, they flicked through the hundreds of images on the stolen MacBook of a portly, grey haired man in a variety of sexual positions with a gaggle of blank-eyed, emaciated Cambodian child-prostitutes.

“Shit, jus’ ’cos they females, don’t make this motherfucka straight. This homeboy iz sick in the head, Jeffrey. This cocksucker’s a fuckin’ pedophile, cuz. That’s a whole other kettle o’fish.”

“Okay man,” Jeffrey said with a wince, slamming the laptop screen closed, “that’s enough pre-teen poontang for one lifetime. Let’s talk green. Although, I gotta say having seen that shit I don’t feel so bad about ripping this bastard off.”

Whitey pulled the computer over to him and opened up the screen again. Looking over his shoulder to make sure that nobody else was looking at the disturbing images on the screen, he started frantically tapping at the keys with a look of intense concentration. Jeffrey sniffed and looked away. “Jesus Whitey, you ain’t seen enough already?”

“I’m looking for somethin’. Like I said when I saw the first fuckin’ pic, this bastard looks familiar.”

Whitey tapped away, his brow furrowed in concentration. Losing interest, Jeffrey watched a down-at-heel man in a dirty blue polyester suit buy a short dog of Wild Irish Rose over at the liquor counter. He meticulously counted out the balance in greasy change, much to the annoyance of the old hunched-over Latin man behind the counter.

“I fuckin knew it,” Whitey said.

“Knew what?”

“That I recognized this prick. It’s Kevin Macmillan. I just found the motherfucker’s tax returns on here.”

“Oh.” Jeffrey tore his eyes away from the man in the blue suit as he staggered out onto Broadway with the booze. “So who the fuck is Kevin Macmillan?”

Whitey raised an eyebrow. “You heard of Californians for Family Values, right?”

Jeffrey shrugged, non-committal.

“You remember all those ads that were running about Proposition 8? The ones that said if gay marriage was legalized then the homos iz gonna start adopting kids so they can diddle ’em? And about how gay teachers’ll be diddling their pupils and the school won’t be able to fire ’em? They were all over TV back when the vote was goin’ down.”

“I don’t watch TV.”

“Or the Prop 19 commercials?” Whitey carried on, ignoring him, “The ones that went Don’t Let California Go To Pot! All about how a yes on 19 would mean your kids could buy weed at the grocery store and pretty soon the entire state would be strung out on meth and heroin? And about how weed causes cancer and insanity? It was some real Reefer Madness shit… You never saw those?”

Jeffrey shook his head.

“You said he was gettin’ high when you snatched the laptop?”

“Uh-huh. Either that or he had the worst case of allergies I ever heard in my fuckin’ life.”

Whitey shook his head. “Figures. Most of these cats are motherfuckin’ hypocrites…”

“So how much, Whitey? I’m kinda hurtin’ here, man. If you’re gonna blackmail this guy I guess it’s gotta be worth some decent scratch…”

Whitey seemed to consider Jeffrey’s blackmail suggestion for a moment. “Well,” he said, “Could do that, fo sure, fo sure... Then again this motherfucka’s connected, cuz. I hear he’s bankrolling Tea Partiers, eatin’ lunch with mayors and police chiefs. Donating money to the Church of the Latter Day Saints… sonvabitch could be a damn Scientologist for all I know. I’m jus’ a buyin’ and sellin’ type of a guy. Small time motherfucka like me could have an unfortunate… accident tangling with the likes of this prick. Happens all the time. Besides…”

Whitey powered the laptop down, closed it up, and slipped it back in the case.

“Be-sides… it might give me more personal satisfaction jus’ to send these pictures to every major news source in the fuckin’ country. Jus’ bring down that playa-hating, baby-fuckin’, tea-baggin’ piece of shit for kicks, ya know?”

“So how much, Whitey?”

Whitey sucked air through his teeth and raised four fingers. “Howzat sound?”

“Shitty. Six.”

“Five. Final fuckin offer.”

“Five fifty?”

“You’d better get back on that fuckin’ Lucky Charms box, motherfucka and ask those damn kids if they wanna buy this thing for five-fifty. Cuz I’m offerin’ five-even.”

Jeffrey ran a hand through his greasy hair. Five hundred dollars was probably a fraction of what this thing was worth, but Whitey was offering straight up cash, immediate payment. Whitey pulled out his wallet, and flashed the bills. Jeffrey nodded weakly. Whitey counted out the notes, and Jeffrey pocketed them. The fence grabbed the case, nodded his thanks to the shivering Irish dope-fiend, and headed out to the street. He pulled his cheap plastic sunglasses down over his face on his way out. Jeffrey watched him go. He was already yammering into his cell phone, making plans, brow furrowed, gesturing with his free hand.

Moments later, Jeffrey’s cell phone – a pre-paid piece of junk he’d bought in a 7-11 for the sole purpose of communicating with his drug dealers – started ringing, pulling him out of his thoughts. For almost a year now the only calls he’d received on this thing were calls from irate dealers complaining that he still owed them money from the various small time buys that he’d showed up twenty dollars light to. He didn’t recognize the number, but answered anyway. His experience with Smooth still fresh in his memory, he picked up the phone with the intention of pacifying whoever was on the other end.

“Yeah?”

“Jeffrey, is that you?” said a crackly voice.

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“It’s Randal, man.”

There was a long silence. Jeffrey’s dry lips cracked a smile.

“Randal? That’s really you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jesus Christ Randal, how you doin’ man? It’s good to hear your voice! Shit, what’s goin’ on? You making it?”

“Barely. You?”

“Not at all. So what brings you outta the woodwork?”

“Don’t laugh,” Randal said, “But I got a business proposition for you. Some easy money, if you’re looking for a gig.”

“Man, you don’t know the half of it. Lemmie grab a pen…”

After he hung up, Jeffrey grabbed Whitey’s uneaten taco. He smiled to himself imagining the look on Rachel’s face when he showed up not only with money and dope, but Mexican food as well. If this deal Randal had proposed was for real, then maybe – just maybe – they’d be able to dig themselves out of the pit they were currently in. All of a sudden, life had thrown him a bone. Jeffrey headed out to the street. He shot an easy smile at the old drunk in the polyester suit. He was sitting on a dolphin-shaped kiddy ride outside of the market. Jeffrey rummaged around in his pockets and found a quarter. He popped it in the slot and the machine announced “Attention parents! Please do not leave your child unattended while riding the ride. Have fun kids!” before jerking into life, bleating out a creaky rendition of Old MacDonald Had A Farm. The drunk rode the dolphin unsteadily, raising his paper bag and toasting Jeffrey as he headed back toward
the Metro.