TWENTY-EIGHT

As he turned down Wilcox toward the Gilbert Hotel Randal felt a twinge of apprehension. It had been a long time since he had been face-to-face with his old friend, Jeffrey. He felt edgy and irritable and – although he refused to admit it to himself – Randal knew damn well that mild amphetamine withdrawal was partly to blame for his raw nerves. He had resolved to cut down on his Adderall intake, following his discovery that he had burned through almost sixty pills in the last couple of weeks. If he couldn’t control his intake of prescription stimulants then he realized that that whole AA philosophy of having to admit powerlessness over your addiction had more merit than he had previously allowed. This was a possibility that Randal truly could not tolerate. Better to suffer through his cold turkey, refusing all the while to admit what it was, than to submit to that most dangerous concept of all: powerlessness.

He took a gulp of his diet Dr Pepper as he drifted past the Mark Twain Hotel, a hangover gnawing at the base of his skull. He’d tried to compensate for the lack of pills by drinking a half-litre of cheap vodka last night, and now he felt shaky and ill. The flat soda rested uneasily in his gurgling stomach. Craning his neck for an empty meter, he silently reflected on just how far – or not – he and his old partner in crime had come in the past twelve months. For Jeffrey, the distance could be visualized as less than a city block. He had moved out from the dump with the deceptively literary name and straight into the no-more-palatial environment of the Gilbert. This virtually identical fleabag hotel was within crawling distance of the first. Although Randal had never set foot inside the Gilbert, from the outside at least it looked like a sister to the Mark Twain: a sun-bleached slab of ugly concrete with crumbling signage. A den for drug addicts on the skids, trick-turning whores, and lost souls near the bottom of society’s ladder.

To go along with his geographic stasis, it seemed that the rest of Jeffrey’s life was in a similar state of limbo. He was obviously still strung out. Judging from the condition of the spectre that Randal had spotted shuffling down Hollywood Boulevard a few months ago, he was in worse physical shape than ever.

Pulling up behind an idling pick-up truck, Randal reluctantly allowed himself to ponder his own journey these past twelve months. It was an uncomfortable thought. Another stint in rehab, pitiful finances, miserable months of boredom and sobriety, an expanding waistline and a receding hairline… night after night spent gorging on take-out Mexican in his shitty apartment, his only respite jerking off like a crazed baboon to internet porn. When he wasn’t eating or masturbating he was working a soul-destroying day gig, attending AA meetings and hating his own guts for what he had become. He was drinking out of necessity, depending on booze as a crutch to support him through the mind-numbing tedium of his day-to-day routine. It was perfectly obvious to Randal that he had morphed into One Of Them: a schmo. A regular Joe. A real asshole. Even his drugs of choice these days hammered home the extent of his downward spiral. He here was, Randal P. Earnest, a man who thought of himself as the outlaw black sheep of the Earnest clan, abusing prescription pills and alcohol like every other dull, lifeless, unimaginative Hollywood asshole out there.

In treatment he had always held a special kind of distain for those who found themselves strung out on doctors’ prescriptions. He felt it showed a lack of moxie. When he was in treatment he’d noticed that the people who’d found themselves taking dozens of Oxycontin a day usually looked down upon the heroin addicts and the speedfreaks as being junkie scum. It was a baffling and disgusting example of drug-snobbery. Randal disparagingly thought of the pill freaks as the kind of weak, coddled junkies who were just too soft to make it out on the street. He didn’t even want to dwell on how he’d once looked down on the drinkers, a group he could never relate to in all his years of ping-ponging in and out of rehab. Although Randal came from the kind of privilege that could have easily ensured he’d never once have to leave Beverly Hills, it gave him a special feeling of pride to know that he could make it among the whores, gang bangers and street-crazies that populated the city’s underbelly.

These days Dr Titov was his main drug connection. Randal shook his head in disgust.

After a few good blasts on the horn, Randal saw Jeffrey come out of the front entrance, looking like some bedraggled ghost of Christmas past. He looked to be rendered in black and white against the stark brightness of the early afternoon sun: tall and skinny, thick greasy hair sticking out from his skull at all angles, eyes hidden behind a pair of plastic sunglasses, skin so translucent that it looked almost blue. He was wearing a pair of bone-hugging black jeans and a filthy T Rex T-shirt, possibly the same T-shirt he remembered Jeffrey wearing back when they’d been roommates at the Clean and Serene treatment centre.

Jeffrey pulled open the door and slid into the air-conditioned cool of Randal’s car. He slammed the door closed and then coughed violently, letting loose a series of chest-rattling blasts. When he was done he stuck his head out the window and spat up what looked like a sizeable portion of his lung onto the street. The smell of unwashed clothes and stale cigarette smoke filled the car. Jeffrey’s dry, cracked lips formed a crooked smile and he said, “Randal… Long time no see. What’s going down?”

“Very little, man. It’s good to see you. You doing okay?”

A pained look came over Jeffrey’s face. “Don’t gimmie the fake concerned shit, man. You can see I’m doing lousy. But it’s okay. I’m still breathing, that’s all that matters.”

“I guess.”

Randal stuck the car into drive and they took off, heading towards Sunset.

“Six months clean,” Jeffrey was saying as they headed toward Chinatown, where Gibby had set up a noon meeting with Jacques. “That’s really great man. I’m happy for you. How does it feel?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah, honestly.”

Randal was silent for a long while. Finally he said, “Tell you the truth it feels shit. I don’t feel any different. In fact, in a lotta ways, I feel worse. When I was in rehab they told me that a lot of my hatred for the world was a kinda… you know, a self-fulfilling prophecy. They told me I was miserable because I was taking meth, and I used that self-inflicted misery to justify taking more meth. They said that a lot of my hatred and my unhappiness was generated by my addiction. That my addiction had… uh… twisted my worldview to make the drugs seem like a necessity, you know?”

“You gotta love that about AA.”

“What?”

“Your addiction.” Jeffrey snorted. “The way they talk about it you would think it was a fuckin’ sentient being that you gotta outsmart, or something. I guess I take a less complicated view. It’s just about getting high, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah, I hear ya. Still, I’ve been trying Jeffrey. I really decided this time that I was gonna surrender and I was gonna listen. Do it their way.”

“You let go and let God, huh? I’m sure Dr. Mike would be very proud.”

“Maybe. But it worked. I haven’t used meth since my last trip to rehab. The problem is, when I quit, nothin’ really changed. I still turn on CNN and I feel fucking murderous. I still drive down the street and when I look around at the cars filled with assholes it just gives me the creeps. I get out of bed in the morning, and I change my underwear every day, and I show up at my brother’s office, and I wear clean clothes, and buy the fucking LA Times every morning… I eat breakfast, give Christmas presents, take vitamins, go on dates for fucking coffee and conversation, I don’t fuck whores, I don’t get high, none of that all shit.”

Randal gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white. “Nothing seems any more bearable. I do everything that they do, I do everything they tell me to do, and the only difference between now and back then is that I don’t even have crank to make me forget how dull and dismal and shitty it all is. I tell my therapist this, and my therapist wants to give me Xanax, and Wellbutrin, and fucking Zoloft or whatever. So I take those and then it feels like I’m sleepwalking through my fucking life. I can’t get a hard-on and I can’t take a shit, and my mouth feels like it’s wadded fulla cotton the whole time. On the antidepressents it’s not that I don’t hate my life any more, it’s just that the pills have zonked me out so much that I don’t have the fuckin’ energy to feel that strong about anything. And when I take that shit all the guys in AA are cool with it, it’s fine and dandy because my fuckin’ doctor gave it to me so I must need it, right? But now I’m a fucking zombie with a limp dick who just wants to sleep all fucking day! So I come off of all that shit, I feel like I’m going insane for a few weeks, and I’m back to square one. I know that with one fucking phone call I can get some shit that will straighten me right out. One fucking hit on the pipe and suddenly life is gonna seem like it’s worth living again, and I’m gonna be able to fuck like a normal human being, I’m gonna feel like me again instead of some half-insane spastic-freak. But if I smoke some meth that would be bad, because I’m an addict and I can’t get high any more.” Randal wiped his sweaty brow. “I started drinking. You know, to ease the pressure a little. It only works when I’m drunk though. The rest of the time I still feel like shit.”

Jeffrey raised an eyebrow. “So what you saying?”

“I dunno, Jeffrey. All I know for sure is that this fucking stinks.”

“It sounds like you’re already made your decision. You wanna go back on.”

“Maybe I should. I don’t know if could be any worse than this.”

Jeffrey’s heavy eyelids drooped and he stretched contentedly. He looked like a cat that had been thoroughly sated by a bowl of warm milk, and was about to curl up and take a solid four-hour nap.

“Well,” Jeffrey said in a sleepy voice, “all I’m sayin’ is that things ain’t so much better where I’m sitting. And you got a hell of a lot more to lose than I do.”

“It can’t be all bad. You look liked you’re feeling pretty good right now.”

A wan smile crossed Jeffrey’s lips. “Give it few hours, man. Then I gotta figure out how the fuck I’m gonna get high again. I’m broke and unless something changes I’m gonna be dope-sick and homeless soon.”

“Yeah, well maybe this whole Jacques deal can help you out with that.”

“I hope so. Look Randal, all I’m saying is that it’s real easy for you to start over-romanticizing this shit now you’re not doing it. I remember the day you showed up for Stevie’s funeral. You didn’t look like you were having such a great time then, you know?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Look man, I’m not here to give you fucking life advice. I made my choice, you know, you gotta make yours. The way I see it is this. Life’s a bitch any way you slice it. For me, I’ll take the trade-off of knowing that I’m gonna feel incredible when I put a needle in my arm, over the uncertainty of having to wait and see if fate is gonna throw me a bone today. I know I’m never gonna be a CEO or whatever, but fuck man, I never had those kinda ambitions in the first place. Me? At this point, my view on life is this: I just wanna pay for my groceries and get out of the supermarket without incident, you know?”

Randal laughed and nodded. “That’s pretty profound, man.”

Jeffrey shrugged, rested his head against the glass, and a couple of red lights later he had drifted into a peaceful nod.