THIRTY-THREE

i

Randal was stepping out of another identikit AA meeting, this one at a café on Fountain and Vine, when his phone rang. It looked at it: Gibby.

“Gibby. What’s happening?”

Gibby sounded even more harassed than usual.

“What’s happening is that that shit has hit the fan, big time. Have you heard from Jacques?”

“Me? Nah, why would I? Last time I saw him he was passed out in the crapper at Phillipe’s. He’s with Jeffrey, isn’t he?”

“I wouln’t know. I haven’t heard from him in days. His phone’s switched off.”

“He’s probably passed out in a gutter somewhere.”

“Yeah, I guess, maybe.” Gibby sounded unconvinced. “If that’s all it is, then his timing is fucked. I need to speak to him right now or we’re all up shit creek. Kenny got hip to my little trick with the Black Neon script. He knows it’s a fake and he’s threatening to pull the plug.”

Randal stifled a laugh. “Oh shit! How did he find out?”

“Christ knows. My money is on that bitch Sharon Lindenbaum. She hated Jacques from day one, and I’m guessing she demanded to see what Jacques had come up with. She’s a hell of a lot smarter than Kenny is. She’d have spotted that it was a phony straight away. Fuck! I had Kenny on the phone screaming at me for an hour and a half. He says if Jacques doesn’t sit down with him for an emergency meeting today he’s gonna have Dreamscape’s lawyers bury Black Neon, and they’re gonna throw me in the pit before they start filling it in. Oh God,” Gibby sounded like he was on the verge of tears, “If I don’t get hold of Jacques today, I’m fucking ruined.”

“Shh, it’ll be cool Gibby.” Randal did his best to placate the hysterical agent. “It’s probably nothing. His phone’s just off. Maybe he’s sleeping off a heavy night or something. He’ll be back sooner or later. Once you get Jacques in a room with Kenny it’ll all be fine again. Seems like Jacques knows how to butter Kenny up. He’ll just sprinkle a bit of that Jacques Selzter magic on the situation and Kenny’ll cool out. You know how dramatic the little fuck can be…”

“It’s not just Kenny!” Gibby whined, “I’m really worried about Jacques! Up until a few days ago he’d been uploading pictures and video to a server, you know, gathering material for the movie. Hundreds and hundreds of images, hours of film footage too…”

“You’re kidding me. I’m impressed, to tell you the truth… I’m pretty shocked old Jacques has been doing anything, besides get high…”

“That’s just it, Randal. The amount of shit he’s been uploading…. With Kenny crawling up my ass over the script, it’d just been too overwhelming to deal with. Last night I finally got a chance to start going through the material…. And to tell them truth, I’m pretty fucking disturbed by it.”

Randal found his car, pulled an orange parking ticket off the windshield and dropped it in the gutter. He slid into the driver’s seat. “Disturbed? Howdya mean?”

“It’s just…. well look, you know the kinds of images that are Jacques’ stock in trade. Extreme shit. But this stuff… it’s different. These images are…. Repellent. Twisted.”

“Gibby, you told me Jacques exhibited pictures of a guy getting meth injected into his pecker before now. What makes these pictures so awful?”

“I guess the main thing is that Jacques is in most of them. The whole line between observer and the observed…. It’s just gone. I got tons of footage on my hard-drive of these emaciated, dead-eyed crackhead whores fixing dope and turning tricks on filthy looking mattresses… and if you look closely, there’s fucking Jacques like some junkie Alfred Hitchcock making a cameo in his own film! I don’t even know who shot half of this stuff. It sure as hell wasn’t Jacques. I mean, there he is, all flushed and tweaked out, sucking on the tit of some bugged-out, toothless transsexual meth freak, or fixing a shot while some underage hooker turns a trick in the bed next to him… it’s really sick shit, man!

“And that’s not all of it. I’ve got hours of Jacques interviewing junkies, street freaks, prostitutes. He’s getting high with them on camera, screwing them, all of this interposed with footage of him checking motel rooms for bugs and ranting about how David Lynch is using his connections with the FBI to steal Jacques’ ideas. Jacques seems crazy. Like he went over the edge, totally.”

“Gibby, I kinda got the impression he’d gone over the edge a long time ago…”

“Shit! You don’t know him like I do, Randal. Sure, Jacques is an animal. Sure he loves this stuff, the sleaze, the grittiness, the underbelly…. But there was always a line. He’d go right up to it so he could record everything he saw, but up until now…” Gibby trailed off, a despondent sound in his voice.

“Look, I’m serious Randal. I’m worried about him. I never saw Jacques this fucked up before. This is a whole new depth he’s sunk to. He looks like a bum in these pictures. Some of these final shots I received… the people he’s with… there’s something really unsettling abut them, it’s beyond deviant. Jacques isn’t observing the scene anymore, Randal, he’s up to his fucking neck in it. I’m worried Jacques has gone native on me, man. This is some real Colonel Kurtz type shit…”

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

“Right after he disappeared off with Jeffrey. There’s been no new photos, no calls, zero. I’m warning you Randal, if that fucking asshole you hooked him up with has let anything happen to Jacques I’ll kill that junkie bastard myself.”

“Jacques is a big boy. I’m sure he’s fine. Maybe you just need to get him out of LA for while, cool him out.”

“My thoughts exactly. But unless I get Jacques in a room with Kenny today it’s all gonna be a moot fucking point, because the film is dead. That’s why I need you to speak to Jeffrey and find out what the fuck is going on.”

Randal winced at the suggestion. “Look Gibby, part of the reason I even put you in touch with Jeffrey is that I needed to get away from this whole mess. I’m already too involved for my liking.”

“Randal, please. Jeffrey’s your friend. Just call him, find out where Jacques is. Pass on the message that I really, really need to speak to him. This is life or death we’re talking about here!”

“Shit. Okay, Gibby. Okay.”

“Good. Good, thanks Randal. Call me back, I’ll be waiting.”

Randal clicked the phone shut. He was suddenly ravenously hungry. He decided he would drive over to El Siete Mares and pick up some fish tacos. His stomach growled psychosomatically.

ii

“Jeffrey!”

“Randal… hey buddy.”

“What you doing?”

Jeffrey looked around his heroin dealer Peewee’s chaotic apartment. Peewee was cross-legged on the floor watching a Mexican wrestling flick, Santo vs The Mummies Of Guanajuato, on cable. His sister, Patricia, was smoking a primo and staring vacantly at a series of cigarette burns that ran the length of her arm. In front of Jeffrey were his spoon, needle, cotton and lighter laid out before him like the components of a Japanese tea ceremony.

“Uh, nothing…” he said.

“You know, I just got a call from Gibby. He’s freaking out big time. Worried about Jacques.”

“That piece of shit? “ Jeffrey scowled, “What’s he worried about him for?”

“Because he hasn’t heard from him in days. Is he still with you?”

“Nah. I haven’t seen that bastard in a while. We had a bit of trouble… a disagreement I guess you’d call it.”

“What kinda disagreement?”

“I, uh… it was the kind of disagreement where I kicked him in the balls and he stormed off. Ain’t seen him since.”

“Shit. Maybe he’s just hiding out in his room?”

“I dunno. I had to take Rachel to the ER, she fuckin’ OD’d on coke. Instead of helping, that fat shithead started filming her while she was having a fucking seizure, and then tried to talk me out of calling an ambulance. Can you believe that shit? Then to top it all off, when I was waiting around in the hospital to see how she was, the fucking pigs showed up looking for us. Fucking paramedics told them about the drugs in our room. I had to slip out before they clocked me. I just left her there, bro. I went back to the hotel, grabbed some shit, and split. I’ve been hanging out with a buddy of mine, waiting for this whole mess to blow over. Last fuckin’ thing I need is the heat showing up at my room asking all kinds of questions. I ain’t heard shit from Rachel either, so I’m figuring they probably busted her. When you called I was kinda hoping it might have been her calling me from downtown…”

“Look – where are you? I’m gonna come by, pick you up. We gotta go check on Jacques, make sure he’s alright.”

“Fuck that guy!” Jeffrey said, then looking at his works laid out in front of him, “And anyway, I’m busy. That guy’s a real asshole. If you ask me, he probably got himself killed already. As soon as that prick moved into the Gilbert he had every fucking junkie creep in Hollywood passing in and out, getting high on his dollar. Motherfucker was acting like Daddy fuckin’ Warbucks. I’m talking ounces of shit just laying around. I told him, you keep waving that stack around like that and someone is gonna take it from you. In this scene a man could get his throat cut for a ten-dollar bill, you know? Silly cunt wouldn’t listen to me. If you ask me, it’s a miracle he made it this long. Motherfucker had no street smarts. None whatsoever.”

“I hear you, Jeffrey, but unless I can get hold of Jacques today Gibby is gonna shit a brick. Let’s just take a quick look for him, just to see if he’s at the Gilbert or hanging out at any of his usual spots. At least that way I can get Gibby off my damn back, you know? Where are you exactly? I’m over in Silverlake right now, grabbing some food.”

“I’m close to you then. Grab a pen, there’s a Jack in the Box near here, I’ll meet you over there…”

iii

“I don’t believe one motherfucking thing that fat doofus says, Genesis hun. He stinks of puke, that ratty suit he’s wearin’ looks like it was stolen off a sleeping bum. If you ask me even that fuckin’ eye-patch of his is a put on.”

Lupita took a long sip of her Wild Turkey and ginger. Genesis looked confused.

“He told me he’s an artist,” he said slowly, “From Paris. That’s in France, isn’t it?”

“Paris my ass. And if that motherfucker is an artist, then I’m Mother-fucking-Theresa.”

“Motherfucking Theresa,” Genesis mused, “Good name for a band.”

Lupita laughed. “True that.”

They were in a Mexican bar in Echo Park. The jukebox was blasting a particularly ferocious slice of merengue called “Qué será lo que quiere el negro” by Miriam Cruz. The barmaids wore tight, white shirts that left folds of their soft, brown flesh hanging out at the tits and the belly, along with short, pleated black skirts and knee socks. When they served drinks to the smattering of washed-out old Mexican men frequenting the place, they leaned across the bar in such a way that the drink orders had to be delivered directly into the shadowy folds of their cleavage.

Jacques was here to meet his connection. He brought them inside and ordered drinks while ostentatiously flashing the wads of cash he had in his wallet. After a few minutes his cell rang to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar”. Jacques excused himself and had a whispered conversation by the soft glow of an ancient cigarette machine.

“He is very close,” Jacques told them after he returned, “If you will excuse me for a moment, ladies, I shall return… in ten.”

Lupita had shrugged, cool and non-committal. Genesis – who even didn’t want to be in here in the first place – barely grunted. Jacques bowed. “Excusez moi…”

“He seems harmless, I suppose,” Genesis offered as they waited for him to return. “I just don’t know why we’re doing this. If you ain’t feeling it either, then let’s just drink up and get the hell out of here. We made some decent bread already.”

“Hell no!” Lupita snapped. “You saw the stack that motherfucker was flashing? Besides, he’s out picking up drugs right now. Why quit before the main event? I ain’t leaving without the drugs or the money hun.”

Genesis sniffed. “So long as that’s all you’re after.”

“Huh?”

“You heard.”

Lupita scowled. “Don’t be getting all cryptic an’ shit on me, Genesis hun. If you got something to say to me girl, then spit it out.”

Genesis shrugged, half turned away from Lupita and sipped her drink.

“Out with it,” Lupita hissed.

“I’m just sayin’. I’m hoping you ain’t planning on breaking your promise to me, is all.” Genesis turned and put her mouth close to Lupita’s ear. “I hope you ain’t planning on trying to pull some of that crazy voodoo shit with this bastard once we’re alone with him.”

“It ain’t voodoo. It’s Santeria.”

“Whatever the fuck it is. That ain’t the issue. I’m more concerned with whether or not you’re planning on killing this idiot.”

Lupita glowered at Genesis. Genesis held her gaze.

“Well?”

Lupita sniffed and turned back to her drink. “You worry too much, that’s your problem.”

“My problem?” An anguished look came over Genesis’s face. “My problem is that the woman I love, who says she loves me, can’t even be straight with me. You’re the one who insisted on picking up this guy. I sure as hell ain’t planning on fucking him, and to be honest I’m not even all that keen on the idea of getting high with him. All I wanted to do was stick to the plan, and head up to San Francisco like we’d agreed. You’re the one who insisted on another fuckin’ detour! The very least you can do is tell me if you’re just planning on robbing this fucking asshole, or if you’re planning on killing him. Why can’t you be straight with me, Lupe? What’s your damage?”

Lupita took a sip of her drink and looked at Genesis. “I ain’t decided yet,” she said finally, “Okay?”

“Not good enough. You promised me, Lupe. No more…” she dropped her voice again, “no more killing. You swore.”

Lupita slammed her fist down on the bar. All around the bar, eyes darted in their direction. Lupita looked round the room with a murderous glint in her eye, and one by one the population of this dark, lonely place looked away again.

“This is about my religious freedoms!” Lupita whispered. “How dare you try and interfere with my cultural practices!”

“This ain’t about your culture, Lupe, don’t gimmie that. It’s about whether or not you plan on killing someone else. You’re hiding behind this whole black magic thing as a fucking excuse. Ah, what’s the point?”

Genesis turned away, raising her shaking hands to her face.

“All right, fuck it!” Lupita hissed, grabbing Genesis by the shoulder. “You wanna break my fucking balls over this, fine! We can leave right now if you want. Take our fucking chances. But I’m telling you, Genesis hun, I dunno if we’ll even make it as far as San Francisco with this bad mojo hanging over us. I don’t wanna hear it from you when that fuckin’ tsunami of bad luck comes crashing down on us all sudden-like, because I warned you girl. I told you what we gotta do, but if you don’t trust me, then what the hell…”

“It’s not about trust,” Genesis said. “That’s not fair.”

“Of course it’s about trust. Well fuck it, anyway. Finish up your drink. You wanna get out of here, let’s do it before fatso gets back. Here I am with the woman I love, and she don’t even trust me.”

Genesis’s eyes were brimming over. “Forget it,” she croaked.

“Forget what?”

“Forget leaving. If you wanna see what we can get out of this guy, then fine. I trust you, Lupe. Okay?”

Sensing she had an advantage, Lupita pressed on. “No, no…. it’s fine Genesis. Drink up. Let’s go.”

“I don’t wanna,” Genesis offered weakly.

They both lapsed into silence for a moment.

“Okay, then let’s do it this way. If he ain’t back by the time we finish these drinks, then we split. Otherwise we go with him. Let fate decide.”

Genesis nodded, ever so slightly. She looked at Lupita’s drink, which was almost finished. She looked at her own, which was three-quarters full. She picked it up and started to gulp it down, greedily. By the time Genesis had finished, Lupita’s glass was drained also. Genesis looked at her expectantly.

“Okay, you win,” Lupita said with an exasperated sigh, “Let’s go.”

As they walked toward the door, it opened. Jacques Seltzer stumbled inside, glistening with sweat.

“Ladies!” He laughed, “Leaving so soon?”

Lupita shook her head. “No way, Jack. We was just looking to see where you were. Ain’t that right, Genesis hun?”

“Yeah,” Genesis said weakly.

“Good! Let us get out of here, I have the stuff, I have a room. The night is young…”

Jacques turned and headed out into the evening sunlight. It was the golden hour, and everything outside this cave-like bar glowed with the vague tint of unreality. Lupita looked at Genesis, who seemed lost in her own thoughts. She nudged her and said, “Come on, Genesis hun. Shake a tail feather. You can’t argue with fate, and besides… this fucking mooch ain’t gonna rip himself off…”

iv

Randal was outside of The Gilbert fiddling with the radio, finally settling on a classic rock station. He tapped the wheel with his fingers and whistled tunelessly along with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s version of Blinded By The Light. A cop car crawled past him and Randal reflexively checked his reflection in the rear view mirror. He patted his glistening forehead with a Jack in The Box napkin, and took a sip of his melted ice water. He jumped when Jeffrey opened the door unexpectedly and slid into the passenger seat.

“Calm down,” Jeffrey laughed, “It’s just me. Why so tense?”

“I’m fine. So no luck, huh?”

“Nope. They told me he cleared out. Packed up his shit, dropped off his key and split. They ain’t seen him since.”
“Shit. Any other ideas?”

Jeffrey shrugged. “He could be anywhere. He’s got a fucking gorilla on his back and unlimited resources to feed it. I mean, I guess we could take a look around… But unless he wants to be found I dunno what good it’s gonna do.”

Randal ran his hand through his hair. “Makes sense. Fuck it. Let’s find a parking space. I could murder a fucking drink. Let’s get some booze and we can figure out our next move from there…”

“Sounds good…I think I got the perfect place for us. Pal of mine from the methadone clinic was hanging out with Jacques the night before he split. They were getting real buddy-buddy, I think he ended up going over to his place. Guy claims he’s old Hollywood. He was telling stories about his famous uncle, and old Jacques was just eating that shit up. He’s a drunk, has a place near here. Maybe he has an idea of where Jacques is. At the very least, he should have a bottle or some pills on him.”

*

Pop Gun Eddie was halfway down on a bottle of Brass Monkey when they showed up to his place. Brass Monkey was a favourite pre-lunch cocktail of Eddie’s – a bottle of Olde English drunk down to the label, and then topped off with orange juice. Eddie held a firm belief that his regular intake of vitamin C in this concoction was the secret to his health and longevity.

Eddie’s place was a tiny, dark apartment in a rundown complex near Selma. The door that led to the street had been busted for more than a year, and the landlord – a senile old red-head who claimed to have starred in several ‘Our Gang’ shorts – didn’t fix shit anymore as the building was in foreclosure anyway. As a result the hallway had become a favourite place for drug dealers to make sales and the homeless to congregate after dark. Eddie didn’t mind this at all: it meant he often he didn’t even have to leave his own building to cop dope.

After he and Randal had picked their way around two eye-watering bums passed out near the mailboxes, Jeffrey rapped on the door.

“Hey Eddie – you there?”

Eddie let them in. He was wearing a pair of dingy, once-white boxer shorts and a stained wife-beater. In the dim light of Eddie’s apartment it looked like the old guy suffered from elephantiasis of the balls: the ratty looking underwear hung heavy down to just above the knees. Jeffrey had never seen the old man not wearing his pinstripe suit, and was taken aback by how pale and skinny his legs were. They peeked out of the saggy underpants, brittle and bony, the fluorescent white flesh dotted with oddly placed patches of dark hair. There was a pumpkin-shaped belly that – like the balls – seemed weirdly at odds with how skinny the rest of his frame was.

“Pull up a pew, boys…” Eddie gurgled, motioning to the couch. The couch was covered in a dusty collection of junk – ancient magazines with stickers on them bearing the address of various doctors’ surgeries, shoplifted DVDs still in the shiny packaging, a few ratty looking paperback novels, and some funky-smelling socks and undershirts. “Just shove that stuff outta your way,” Eddie said, “it’s the cleaning lady’s day off.”

They sat. On the way over to Pop Gun’s place, Randal had bought a bottle of Rebel Yell and a six-pack of coke. Brushing away a copy of Time magazine with Stephen King on the cover and a DVD of Mighty Joe Young, Jeffrey said, “You wanna drink, Pop Gun?”

“Why not? I’m just about done with breakfast. There’s some clean glasses in the sink.”

Randal picked his way through the piles of junk – old fax machines, 1980s IBMs, boxes of dusty dining sets, and bundles of yellowing newspapers – that piled up around Eddie’s filthy apartment, to get to the kitchen. As well as dark – the dusty shades were still drawn – the apartment was hot. The heat, coupled with the stink of unwashed bodies and stale cigarette smoke, gave the apartment an almost unbearably oppressive atmosphere. Watching Randal go, Eddie said, “So what brings you boys around these parts?”

“Looking for someone. You remember that French guy who was hanging out with us the other night?”

Pop Gun Eddie laughed a long, wheezy laugh. “Do I? Motherfucker paid me three hundred dollars to come over and take some pictures of me…” Catching himself mid-sentence, he frowned at Jeffrey. “And no, not those kinda pictures thank you very much. The pecker stayed in the pants, you filthy-minded bastard. He just wanted pictures of me, y’know, hanging out here. Doing my usual shit. He shot some video of us fixing dope together and he asked me a bunch of bullshit questions. Then he nodded out and pissed in his pants, right where you’re sitting. He’s kind of a crank, right? Told me he was a filmmaker or some kinda shit.”

“That’s right,” Jeffrey said, sliding over to the other side of the couch. “My friend here…” Jeffrey nodded at Randal as he returned with the cocktails, “He needs to get hold of him. Except nobody knows where he is. You seen him since then?”

Before he took his glass, Eddie polished off the Brass Monkey with a long pull. He burped, tossed the empty bottle aside and started in on the whisky. “Can’t say I have. He did tell me that he was, uh, goin’ somewhere. Wanted to pick up some whores, he said. Even asked me if I wanted to come along, which was nice of the fellar. I told that motherfucker that I ain’t got any use outta my pecker since I had my accident, ya know. Fucked up the ol’ equipment when I got a bad hit shooting a speedball in my groin, back in ninety-three.”

Randal and Jeffrey winced in unison.

“What happened?”

“Fuckin’ gangrene.” Eddie placed a protective hand over his filthy underpants. “These puppies swelled up like a pair of fuckin’ cantaloupes. Never really gone back to their proper dimensions. Doctors had to stick a big syringe in there – like something you’d see a vet use on a fuckin’ horse – right in the old fun sack, ya know? And they musta drained two pints of the evilest smelling yellow goo I ever saw right outta them. Since then, nuthin’s been right down there. The fuckers are three times the size they useta be, but I couldn’t get hard if Farrah Fawcett herself stood right here in front of me, bent over and shoved a crucifix up her asshole. It even hurts to piss mosta the time. Still…” Eddie looked reflective for a moment, “S’pose it saved me a lot of trouble in the long run. The bitches were an even harder habit to keep up than the dope, truth be told. And a hell of a lot more expensive, too.”

v

Jacques was driving like a madman, weaving in and out of traffic, one hand on the wheel and his face intermittently buried between Genesis’s breasts. Genesis was pouring out the contents of a coke baggie between her tits and Jacques was snorting and sniffing wildly. He made a disgusting noise as he hoovered up the cocaine, somewhere between an asthmatic warthog and a broken vacuum cleaner. Once she had seen the size of Jacques’ coke stash Genesis had loosened up a little about the whole deal. As he buried his face in her cleavage, Genesis was squealing, “Oh shit! You are fucking crazy, Jack!”

On the car stereo Jacques had the Rolling Stones’ Miss You blasting at an almost unbearable volume. In the backseat, Lupita watched all of this go down with an unreadable expression on her face. Her bag was next to her with their clothes, the guns, and the shit Mama Z had given her all tucked away for later. Every so often she would glance up to make sure that they weren’t weaving into ongoing traffic, or to look around for cops. So far it seemed that Jacques’ luck was holding. When he finally dislodged his head from Genesis’s tits his face was red and sweaty, cocaine smeared around his mouth and nose. He looked like a fat kid who had just sneezed into a bag of powdered sugar.

“Watch the road, Jack,” Lupita intoned.

“Real cocaine and fake tits!” Jacques screamed, “My favourite combination!”

“Honey, who said these titties were fake?” Genesis pouted, adjusting her top.

She flirted with the practiced efficiency of the seasoned whore. Jacques wiped his face with a sweaty hand and then licked the coke residue off his palm with a fat, pink tongue. “They are real?” he asked incredulously.

“Sure honey… I’m just working with what my momma gave me.”

Jacques bellowed with laughter and stepped on the accelerator. Lupita fought to keep her face neutral, but the sight of this disgusting, red-faced pig slobbering all over her lover was almost more than she could bear. She could feel the rage rising in her chest, threatening to force her hand into the bag and onto the gun. She imagined drawing the gun, pressing it against the back of Jacques’ head, and blowing a hole clean through his skull as they careened down the street. No doubt they would be all killed or at least maimed in the ensuing crash, but the more that Jacques pawed Genesis the less Lupita cared about the consequences. Jacques looked into the rear view mirror and caught Lupita’s steely gaze on him.

“I think she is having fun with me, yes?”

“What – about the tits? Could be…” Lupita glanced coldly at her lover. “Genesis here’s a real laugh riot. Ain’t that right, hun?”

Genesis looked at Lupita uneasily. With a stiff smile Lupita quickly changed the subject. “Anyway, can I get some of that stuff or you just planning on pouring it all between my girlfriend’s tits?”

“Oh, oui! There is enough for everybody my dear. Look under the passenger seat…”

Lupita reached down and pulled a leather briefcase with a combination lock from under the seat. The first thing she noticed about it was the weight. It felt as though it might have several encyclopedias tucked away inside. It clicked open when Lupita pressed the release. When she saw what was inside her eyes widened in astonishment.

“What the fuck is this?” she asked in a faltering voice, “I mean… this shit isn’t what I think it is, is it?”

Inside the case were several large brick-shaped objects, wrapped tightly in wax paper, bound together with thick colour-coded rubber bands. Jacques grinned, his eyes darting between Lupita’s astonished face and the road ahead. “Well my dear, that would depend on what you think it is. It is the drugs, oui? Four bricks – cocaine, freebase, heroin and methamphetamine. Two point two pounds apiece, and the finest quality around.”

“No – fuckin’ – way!” screamed Genesis, scrambling halfway into the backseat to gawp at the briefcase on Lupita’s lap, “Lemmie see.”

Jacques looked over to his right, and found himself face-to-face with Genesis’s ass as she wiggled excitedly to get a better look at the drugs. He leaned into it and bit her lightly on the buttock. Genesis squealed.

A dark look crossed her face as Lupita snapped the case shut. “And you’re just driving around with this kinda weight in your car? You could get us put away for years pulling a stunt like that. Not to mention killed.”

Jacques sniffed loudly again, sending a gooey mixture of snot and cocaine gushing into his esophagus. “I am an artiste my dear. I do not fear death any more than I fear the police. In fact, I court death – it seems to be the least awful thing that could happen to someone, oui? You say this beautiful girl… is you girlfriend?”

“That’s right.”

Jacques turned his attention back to Genesis, who was sitting in the passenger seat again. “Does she fuck you well, my love?”

Genesis leaned in and licked the white tip of Jacques’ nose. “She’s the best I ever had,” she said.

“Magnifique,” Jacques breathed. “Young love… it is so … beautiful. I was in love once. A long time ago.” Jacques shook his head, and stared at Genesis again. “I want to watch the two of you… make love.”

“Make love, fuck, whatever you say, Jack baby. It’s your dollar. Now lemmie have some more of that coke, baby.” Genesis pouted as she said it, shooting Jacques a little-girl-lost look that made his pants tighten.

“Of course!”

Without taking his foot off the accelerator, Jacques reached down to his ankle and pulled a hunting knife from his snakeskin Chelsea boot. He tossed it, still folded up, to Lupita. She caught it with a fluid movement. “Dig in,” he laughed, “There is more than enough to go around…”

Lupita was beginning to realize just what a prize catch Jacques really was. He was clueless, almost idiotically trusting. Probably the asshole figured that there was no way he could ever be in danger dealing with a couple of chicks. He seemed to be the type – not a woman hater exactly, but at the very least a casual misogynist. No, Jacques would pose no problem at all.

She glared at Genesis as she ran her hands through Jacques’ greasy hair. Goddamn, she knew they were meant to be lulling him into a false sense of security, but did the bitch have to flirt with him quite so brazenly? She knew the girl liked dick, but still the sight of her allowing this fat, sweaty monster paw her body made Lupita’s flesh crawl. Shivering, she plunged the knife into one of the packages and ripped a hole in it, sending a small white cloud puffing up into the air. She had struck coke. She dug the blade around and slowly slid it out again with a heavy pile of white powder clumped on the tip. She held it to her nose and inhaled. She knew immediately that the stuff was high grade. It sent a frosty blast of pleasure tearing through her skull, numbing her palate as quickly as a shot of lidocaine. Jacques watched her as she did it, his eyes darting between her face, her lithe body, and the arm that ended at the elbow.

“My dear,” he declared, “Your body is incredible. You are possessed of a rare beauty. If you don’t mind me saying, I find your missing arm incredibly… erotic.”

“Nah,” Lupita said with a dry smile on her lips, “you ain’t the first to tell me that.”

“I am sure. I assure you that my photographs of you will soon be hanging on the walls of the most prestigious galleries in Europe!”

“Uh-huh. Seems more likely they’re gonna end up on some fucking amputee porn website. Is that were you get make your money, pal? You, like, one of those Internet perverts or something?”

“Pornography?” Jacques spat the word out. “Is that what you think of me? Some kind of low-rent exploiter of women?”

Lupita fixed herself a blast for the other nostril, before handing the shit over to Genesis in the front seat.

“Sure, why not? I mean, it’s either that or drugs, right? A guy like you, driving around in a fancy-ass car with enough coke to destabilize the economy of a small Central American country? That’s what I figured. I mean… let’s be honest. You don’t seem to be the drug dealer type, ya know? Fellow like you looks like he wouldn’t last two minutes in that game… No offence.”

Taking a blast of the coke, Genesis cooed in her best Betty Boop voice, “Of course we don’t think that, honey… Lupe’s just teasing. You said you’re an artist, right?”

Jacques laughed. “My dear, I not think that your beautiful girlfriend here shares your confidence in my honesty. For my sins I am an artiste. A low rent exploiter of my own talents, if you will. But enough bullshit. My dear, can you pour a little more of this nose candy between those beautiful breasts for me?”

“Sure thing, baby.”

Genesis poured a monstrous amount of blow between her tits, which were still moist with Jacques slobber. Jacques looked into the rear view mirror and fixed Lupita in a maniacal gaze.

“I am an artist, my dear. An artiste and an explorer. I am here to find America’s soul!”

With that he stuck his face between Genesis’s tits again, snorting wildly. The car swerved, and around them drivers honked and screeched on their brakes.

“Well good luck with that my friend,” Lupita said, a dangerous look on her face, “’Cos I really doubt you’re gonna find what you’re looking for down there, you know what I’m sayin’?”

vi

In Pop Gun Eddie’s apartment, halfway down on the bottle of Rebel Yell, Randal felt a familiar despair gripping his insides. Still feeling hollow and jittery because of drug-lack, he knew that the booze could at least be counted on to coat his screaming nerves and help him forget his misery. It was a transient solution though. Unlike meth, booze burned its way through Randal’s system quickly, requiring more and more to maintain the illusion of comfort. Instead of the clarity and focus that meth granted him, the more booze he poured into the gaping hole in his psyche, the slower and sloppier Randal felt himself becoming. He could feel the whisky doing its job as he drained his glass. Next to him, Jeffrey and Pop Gun Eddie crushed their methadone tablets for injection. Artificial goodwill bubbled up inside Randal, the notion that people were subtly becoming friendlier, stories more interesting, even the smells that permeated Pop Gun’s squalid apartment seemed less gag-inducing the more he drank.

The rising despair stemmed from the fact that Randal remained stubbornly aware that this was an illusion, that after the next drink his current state would inevitably give way to something else. Randal would morph into a loud, sloppy cartoon of his normal self. The benevolent goodwill that Randal felt toward all men right now would become an embarrassing over-friendliness, followed by the urge to confess all of the darkness that was inside of him, to confide in strangers, to laugh loudly at banal bullshit. Then there would be a sustained period of self-loathing. This ugly phase would end only when he slept. Tomorrow he knew he would wake with a burning head and a sour belly and begin the frantic recriminations: reliving every stupid word, every phony smile until he could take it no more. He would be forced to either drink again, get high, or punch himself repeatedly in the face.

For now he just drank and tried to drown out the nagging part of his brain that knew what was around the corner, losing himself in Jeffrey and Pop Gun’s brow-furrowed murmurs as they probed their bloody arms with needles and absently talked shop like a pair of old businessmen swapping trade secrets.

“Well, you know, Rachel always tells me to soak ’em first…. Says it gets the blood up…”

“Nah, that’s an old wive’s tale. You gotta drink water. That’s the key. If you’re even a little bit dehydrated, the shit won’t flow. You know, my Uncle John… he did a movie with Lucille Ball. The Magic Carpet. Now John, he never fucked with no dope, he was strictly a juicer. But he swore to me that Lucille was heavily strung out on this shit called bufotenine, which is a heavy hallucinogenic extracted from the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Claims she used to inject the stuff into her ass on regular basis.”

“No shit? What about Desi?”

“I dunno about Desi. But I did hear that Albert Most – fellar who founded the Church of the Toad of Light in Colorado – was a fanatical fan of I Love Lucy, and that’s what hipped him to the whole toad-juice thing. Those guys collect the slime and smoke it. It’s, like, a sacrament, ya know?”

Randal looked at his glass. Maybe this time, he thought, he would finish this drink and leave it alone. After all, it was the middle of the afternoon and they were supposed to be out finding Jacques. Pop Gun Eddie had given them a lead, albeit a slender one. He felt good now, good enough at least, and maybe if stopped while he was feeling good he could sidestep tomorrow’s recriminations and regret. He drained his glass feeling determined, and cautiously upbeat.

After feeding his hit in slow and easy, pushing the chalky mixture into his calcifying veins, Jeffrey sat back and sighed. “Man, that shit is a hell of a lot more bearable if you shoot it.”

“Yeah, the juice ain’t worth a shit. These pills came from a place south of the border. Got a buddy who makes the trip to Juarez regular, got a family who run a little farmacia who know him pretty well down there. He always sells me a little excess to cover his travel expenses.”

Jeffrey noted Randal’s empty glass and said, “I’m gonna need a minute, man. Don’t think I could walk right now. You wanna get another drink?”

Randal looked at Jeffrey, and then back at his empty glass. Sensing that he had no choice in the matter he said, “Sure. Why the hell not?”

After he’d poured the drink, Pop Gun looked Randal up and down. Next to him Jeffrey sank into a heavy nod.

“You’re real worried about this French guy, huh?”

Randal looked up from his glass with a puzzled expression. “Me?”

“Yeah you. He a pal of yours?”

“A friend? Not exactly. I can’t stand the fucking prick.”

“Well if it ain’t this French fellar, what is it? Something’s bothering you. You’ve been starin’ at your glass the last twenty minutes like a man with the weight of the fuckin’ world on his shoulders.”

Next to him, Jeffrey yawned and stretched. He contentedly picked at the bleeding spots on his hollowed out face. “Eddie’s right, man. You’ve been a real downer today. You sure you don’t want one of these pills? It’d take the edge right off…”

Randal shook his head. “I told you, man. I’m trying to stay off all of that shit. And it ain’t Jacques, okay? I’m only looking for him because I feel bad for Gibby. Plus… I’m being nosey. If Jacques really does fuck up this movie thing then an asshole I know called Kenny Azura is gonna get some major egg all over his smug fucking face, and I can’t wait to see that happen…”

“So what is it?” Eddie asked, with all the sweet con of a therapist dripping from his voice, “What’s bugging you?”

“It’s me, I guess.”

“Howdja mean?”

Randal took a deep breath, considering whether or not to answer. He looked at his old friend Jeffrey, with rivulets of blood drying on his skinny arms and his dope-numbed eyes half hidden behind sleepy lids. Then over to Pop Gun Eddie with his monstrous swollen balls and useless pecker.

Shit, it wasn’t as if they were gonna judge him.

“I’m going through a… well, I guess you’d call it a crisis of faith.”

Jeffrey laughed. “Jesus Christ Randal, don’t tell me you fucking converted or some shit when you got clean! If that was the case, I’d know the fuckin’ world was comin’ to an end…”

Randal shook his head. “Not that kinda faith. It’s just that… fuck, man. I was so sure of everything before I went clean this time; you know I mean I was so sure about how it all worked. But now…” Randal drifted off, his eyes searching futilely around the crummy room for the right words.

“Gimmie an example,” Jeffrey said.

“Well, the whole drinking thing, for a start.”

“Drinking thing?”

“Before I checked into treatment, I never really liked booze, yeah? Wasn’t my thing. I mean I liked a drink, who doesn’t? But not the same way I liked to get high. Ever since the first time I went into treatment all of those asshole therapists would tell me that I couldn’t drink no more, tell me I was an alcoholic. I’d just laugh at them. You remember the guys in Clean and Serene, right? All those fucking arguments we’d have with the counsellors?”

“Well, yeah.” Jeffrey sneered, “It’s a lotta horse shit.”

“Right! Except… except this time when I came out of the treatment centre, I cut out everything for like six months. Booze too. My fuckin’ brother had me on a real short leash and was giving me piss tests and all that kind of shit.” Randal looked over to Eddie. “My brother’s into the whole twelve-step thing in a big way. He got clean in the fuckin’ Eighties. He’s been hooked on those meetings almost as long as he’d been a cokehead, you know? But he follows that shit to the letter, never misses a meeting, sponsors like six guys, the whole bit. A real pillar of the fuckin’ community.”

Eddie nodded sagely.

“So I’d never been this clean for this long before. Harvey has control of our pop’s estate, and he’s been threatening to cut me out of my inheritance if I don’t get my shit together. I had no choice. For six months, I was living like a fuckin’ monk. After a while, Harvey gives me a bit of space, thank Christ. But I’m determined, you know, not to fuck up this time. I stay totally away from the speed, you know, that was really my thing. But I started drinking again. I needed something to ease the pressure, you know? This time though, it was kinda… different.”

Pop Gun leaned forward, his brow furrowing. “Different how?”

“Well, just knowing that the booze was all I could do… it made me treat it different. I’d never drank every day before. Never felt the urge. But all of a sudden, that’s what I’m doing. Four o’clock every day I’d have a cocktail. Just the one. And that first fucking sip… it was like… ‘Ahhhh!’ Relief, you know? Then pretty soon it’s not just the one cocktail, it’s a bunch. And it ain’t happening at four o’clock, it’s three. And then two. The drinking was different, I guess ’cos I was drinking to try and fill the hole that was left by the meth, you know? And it wasn’t just how much I was drinking – how the booze worked on me was different too.”

“You mean you started getting hangovers and shit?”

“No, not that. But the next day I would feel… depressed, I guess is the word. Really down. I found myself watching the clock, just waiting for four o’clock to roll around. That’s why I started drinking earlier and earlier. Because I’d get too fucking impatient. I just felt like…”

Randal drifted off, mortified by the words that were about to come out of his mouth. He fidgeted uncomfortably. Before he could force the words out, Pop Gun Eddie beat him to the punch.

“You felt like an alcoholic?”

Randal almost physically recoiled at this suggestion. “No,” he said quickly, before quietly adding, “I guess. Not really, but… yeah.”

All three of them sat there for a while saying nothing. Randal rubbed his hand over his face. He was suddenly bathed in sweat. Jeffrey looked like he may well have been sleeping, eyes closed to serene half slits. Pop Gun Eddie straightened up and cleared his throat.

“You know what I think?” he said.

“What?”

“I think that there’s no way in hell you’re an alcoholic.”

“I agree,” Jeffrey chipped in. “I’ve known you too long, Randal. And I’ve known plenty of alcoholics. You’re a natural born speed freak. You ain’t a juicer.”

Even though it was a pair of bedraggled dope-fiends telling him this, Randal was ready to seize upon any suggestion that this deep, dark fear he harboured was unfounded. “You don’t think?”

“Your problem,” Pop Gun continued with an air of ragged authority, “is that you think too much. You still going to them meetings?”

“Yeah. Now and then.”

“You see, that’s the problem.” Pop Gun waggled his finger at Randal in a gently chastising manner. “Those meetings got you pathologizing yourself. Analyzing yourself, defining yourself in those terms. That’s why your drinking changed. Now you’re ashamed to drink! You weren’t before. Now you judge yourself, and you view everything through this prism of addiction. Every time you drink you get down on yourself. You’re hiding it from those guys at the meetings, I’ll bet. Your brother know you’re juicing?”

“Of course not. He’d freak.”

“Sure he would! Even though what you’re doing is perfectly legal and socially accepted, you gotta hide it because those cats look down on that kinda behavior. They’ve got you thinking like an alcoholic, Randal. That’s why you’re drinking like an alcoholic.”

Jeffrey laughed. “I like that Pop Gun. You could start a support group with a slogan like that.”

Randal smiled at this, and Pop Gun sat back with a big stoned grin on his face.

“I guess you have a point.” Randal conceded.

“A point?” Jeffrey said, “The man’s speaking gospel, Randal. Look at me, man. I know I’m physically dependent on this shit, yeah? Of course I do. But I don’t care. I’m a dope-fiend because that’s what I want to be. It’s all I can be, truth be told. The difference between what I do or what Eddie does and what you do is fucking simple. I ain’t ashamed of how I live my life. That’s why I stay away from those damn meetings. The way those fuckers operate… it’s just like the church, and I had a gut-full of that shit when I was younger. Those fucking meetings, they thrive on shame, man.”

Jeffrey bent over, picked up his glass, and finished his drink. Between the methadone and the booze he felt pretty fucking good right now. He sat back, crossed his legs, and stared at Randal like a skinny, stoned Buddha.

“It isn’t the drugs that fuck you up, Randal,” Jeffrey said. “It’s the shame.”

Randal looked at his feet for a moment, taking in the filthy, cigarette-scarred carpet. Then he looked up at Jeffrey. “But what about you? You’re saying that this is it? You made your choice? When I roomed with you at Clean and Serene you were pretty determined to stay off dope, remember that? I mean, I know none of the shit we’d planned turned out like it was supposed to… but what the fuck has changed in a year that makes you feel so sure that what you’re doing is right, now?”

“What changed is simple. It was nuthin’ to do with what happened with the sex tape, or even with that cocksucker Damian ripping us off. It was just that after I got clean… it just made me remember why I used in the first place. You get complacent about it when you’ve been using a long time. The grass is always greener, yeah? Shit starts to bug you about your habit. All of the hassles and the bullshit… you get tired. Like those guys who marry these beautiful chicks, and eventually they end up cheating on them with some fucking pig. It ain’t that their wives ain’t beautiful any more, or that they even wanna fuck that pig. They just get too comfortable in their surroundings, and forget how good they got it.

“You get tired of the hassles, so you get clean, sort your life out, all of that shit, you know? But you end up switching your one big problem for a ton of other problems. They might be different problems, but they’re problems all the same. Being clean is a hassle, man. It’s the same shit that you’re going through right now. You gotta fill your time with some other shit, otherwise you’re gonna go batshit crazy. The big joke is that the stuff that’s legal and available, like booze or god or whatever…. Most of it is a hell of a lot worse for you than smack.

“It took me a long time to make peace with it, but the truth is that I prefer just having one problem to deal with than a few dozen. My life might be in the fucking toilet right now…” Jeffrey stretched his arms, as if presenting the bloody, track-marked things to Randal to emphasize his point, “but I wouldn’t swap places with you for a million bucks. No offence.”

“None taken.”

“You’ll probably live longer than me. You got an apartment, and a car, and clean clothes, and all of that shit. I got a whole lot of problems, but it’s nothing that more dope can’t fix. At least I don’t have to beat myself up about who I am. At least I don’t have to do a bunch of shit I hate to compensate for the fact I can’t do what I wanna do. That’s a trade-off I’m prepared to make…”

“I guess you got it all figured out,” Randal muttered sourly.

“Look man, I ain’t trying to do a sales pitch here. If you stay clean, then good luck to you Randal. It’d make me happy to see you live to be ninety, so long as you were happy. For me, a preacher in favour of dope is just as hokey as a preacher against it. I’m just telling you where I’m at in my life. Barring some kinda message from God himself… and believe me, I ain’t holding my breath on that count… this is the way I’m gonna live, and it’s probably the way I’m gonna die.”

Randal picked up his empty glass, and stared at it. “Doesn’t that sound kinda fatalistic to you?”

“Fatalistic?” Jeffrey snorted, “I hate to break it to you Randal, but you’re gonna die too. Whether you get high or not it doesn’t make a shit load of difference as far as I can see. All you gotta decide is this: how do you wanna kill time in between?”

Jeffrey sat back and stretched on the couch with a beatific grin on his face. He looked over to Pop Gun Eddie who was as stoic and still as a religious statue.

“Guess it makes sense,” Randal said.

“Hell, I got nuthin’ but time these days to sit around and think about it. That’s the thing. People put down dope-fiends as being these thoughtless, selfish, unthinking pleasure seekers when it ain’t nothing like that. As far as I’m concerned, this is a philosophical decision, and I made it after a lot of careful fucking consideration.”

“C’mon,” Randal said, standing. “We’d better keep moving. Thanks for the hospitality Eddie.”

“Anytime, baby. Hope you get this shit worked out to your satisfaction.”

“Thanks. When Jacques told you he was gonna look for whores, he give you any specifics?”

Pop Gun nodded. “Said he wanted some young pussy, and I told him Koreatown has a lot of that kinda action. I couldn’t give him any specifics though: as I said, the last time I got this pecker wet, Clinton was in office, ya know?”

vii

In the bathroom of room 23 of the Budget Inn on Sunset Boulevard – a faceless sleaze-pit sandwiched between an outpatient drug rehab and an auto shop – Genesis and Lupita were arguing in hushed voices about whether or not to kill Jacques Seltzer.

They were both naked and severely tweaked. For the past hour they had been smoking monstrous amounts of crack with Jacques, with the occasional bump of heroin to smooth off the edges. Genesis had never seen so much crack in her entire life. The brick, a solid two-pound lump of pure freebase, gave off a pungent stench of acetone so powerful that her guts had started churning and bubbling as soon as they had unwrapped it. The first hit from the pipe had made the blood rush in Genesis’s ears so intensely that she nearly blacked out. A tidal wave of pure pleasure, something in between an orgasm and a heart attack washed over her. They smoked furiously while Jacques snapped pictures of them getting high and blowing the smoke into each other’s mouths’. After a while their benefactor managed to turn his attention away from the drugs long enough to instruct the girls to strip. They did as they were asked, slowly peeling their clothes away and standing naked in front of him. Before he could lay a finger on either of them Lupita grabbed Jacques by the chin and – with a sardonic smile on her lips – raised his sweaty face to hers.

“You wanna see me fuck her, right?” she breathed.

“Yes!”

“You wanna take pictures, yeah? Nasty pictures..?”

“Oui!”

“Okay baby, that’s cool. But first… first we gotta renegotiate.”

Lupita let the words hang for a moment to gauge Jacques’ reaction. She removed her hand from his face. He didn’t flinch. In fact he was nodding so furiously he resembled one of those goofy toy dogs you see in the backs of some folks’ cars. Spurred on by this Lupita continued, “We want two grand to stay the night. We know you can afford it, pal. If you need to hit the old ATM or something before we get down to business, then do it now. This rock is making me as horny as hell, and once I get to work on the little lady here…” Lupita shot a theatrically seductive look in Genesis’s direction, “I ain’t gonna want to stop what I’m doing to run errands, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“No need,” Jacques gurgled, almost breathless with desire, “I have all the money we need… right here.”

Following Lupita’s cue Genesis stepped forward pushing her chest out. She shoved her breasts toward Jacques. She caressed them, squeezing them together, enjoying the power they exuded over the hypnotized Frenchman. “We wanna see the green first, baby. I mean, we’re having a lot of fun spending time with you an’ all, but we just gotta be sure that everybody is on the level. We got bills to pay, ya know?”

Jacques jumped to his feet, his pants bulging out obscenely at the crotch. He rummaged through the pockets of his crumpled suit and pulled out a Wells Fargo envelope. He started counting out one hundred dollar bills on the bed. Lupita and Genesis looked at each other as the money started to pile up. When he made it to a thousand he stopped. He placed the envelope back in his jacket and turned to them. “We have a deal, yes? Half now, half later?”

Genesis and Lupita nodded at each other. Lupita snatched up the bills and fanned through them. “Looks like we’re in business. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable? Me and Genesis here are gonna go get ourselves ready.”

Noting the look of confusion on Jacques’ face she clarified, “Honey, I never travel anywhere without my strap-on. And you ain’t lived until you seen old Mandingo in action, ain’t that right, Genesis hun?”

“Oh shit,” Genesis said, “You in for a fucking treat, honey.”

Lupita leaned in and placed her face inches from Jacques face. “I hope your heart can take it, Jack… ’cos we’re about to blow your fucking mind.”

Jacques just nodded dumbly licking his dry, cracked lips as he watched as the two girls walk away. Lupita casually stooped to pick up her bag on the way, and they both went into the bathroom to ‘freshen up’.

“Lupe, baby,” Genesis was begging now that they were locked away in the bathroom, “Don’t do it!”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” Lupita whispered as she checked the clip and attached the silencer. “I don’t want that fat fuck storming in here before I’m ready. Could get messy.”

“You promised me, Lupe. This guy’s no threat. And he’s a fucking goldmine. There’s no need to hurt him! You swore to me that you weren’t gonna kill nobody.”

“Aw Jesus, this again? Okay you listen to me Genesis hun, and you listen good. I did not promise shit to you, okay? I got one fucking thing on my mind right now and that’s lifting this fucking hex that has been dogging our asses all the way from Reno. For the first time in I can’t remember how long we’re finally running a little hot as far as our luck goes…. This goofy fucking bastard appears outta nowhere with an envelope stuffed full of cash and more fucking drugs than we can get through in a month, and you honestly think that the agreement we had is somehow still valid? Get real! Shit’s changed!”

A triumphant look crossed Genesis’s face. “So you admit we had an agreement.”

“It was barely that! I just said what you wanted to hear because you were getting upset. I was trying to calm your ass down!”

“So you lied to me, Lupe!”

Her nostrils flaring, Lupita turned her back to Genesis. In a low, dangerous growl she said, “What is it Genesis? Huh? You seem real fond of this bastard. You wanna fuck this guy, or something?”

“What?”

“You fucking heard me. Do you want to fuck this guy?”

“No! Jesus Lupe, come on…”

“Only you could have fooled me.”

Lupita spun around.

The gun was pointing at Genesis.

“I saw the way you was pawing at him back in the car. Yukking it up while he was sticking his face in your tits. I know you dug guys before I came along… I figure maybe now you see this fool with a stack of cash and a briefcase fulla drugs, and maybe you’re starting to get a bit nostalgic for the old dick, huh? Is that it?”

“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” Genesis murmured, “And for Chrissakes… Lupe…. Please… don’t point that thing at me.”

Lupita snarled, flecks of foamy white spit forming in the corners of her mouth. Her hand trembled.

“Maybe you figured you could convince me to put the fuckin’ gun down long enough so that you could finish me yourself? Maybe you’re planning on taking off with this fucking asshole! Maybe you’re hoping he’ll take you back to fucking Paris? Planning on running off so you can go be a kept woman, or some shit?”

The colour drained from Genesis’s face.

“Lupe… Jesus Christ Lupe what are you saying? I fucking LOVE you.” Big fat tears started forming in Genesis’s eyes. She choked her sobs back as she spoke. “For the first…. time in my fucking rotten life… I love someone who… who loves me b-b-back! Who treats me nice… who talks SWEET to m-m-me….” She wiped her snotty nose with a trembling hand. “Who doesn’t t-t-treat me like I’m some dumb bitch, some fucking hole they c-c-can use and toss aside…. Someone who’s guh-guh-good to me… And you honestly think I’d luh-luh-leave you for that piece of shit out there? That I’d fucking KILL you? Oh… my… guh-guh-God, Lupe… you’re breaking my heart…”

Genesis placed both her hands on her face and began to quietly cry. Collapsing back against the wall she slowly sank to the floor, crouching in the fetal position, her entire body wracked by brutal, silent sobs. Lupita watched her, her face stony at first. She was somehow shocked to realize that Genesis was actually heartbroken by the suggestion that she would double-cross her lover. Genesis was becoming a child in front of her. A challenge to her long-held belief that all human interactions were nothing more than an elaborate confidence trick, another obstacle to be scrambled over on the way to some larger goal. There was no leverage to be gained here, just a pitiful display of genuine despair and hurt. The kind of bewildered pain that can only be born out of love.

Lupita’s anger drained from her. She placed the gun gently at her feet. An almost unbearable feeling of sorrow and regret enveloped her. She crouched down next to Genesis. She leaned in to her lover, placing her arm around her. She pulled her close and her own fat, hot tears smeared against Genesis’s neck. When the words came they were halting and almost inaudible. Genesis could feel the hot breath brushing against her neck.

“Oh god… I’m so sorry Genesis hun… I’m so sorry…. I didn’t mean that shit… I love you baby… I’ve just… I’ve just never KNOWN, you know… not since Adolfo died… nobody had ever really…. Loved me, you know? I’ve had to fight… I’ve had to kill…steal… do all of that shit… just to get by in this fucked up… lousy… world, you know? It’s not that I didn’t believe you…. It’s just that it’s so hard for me to believe… even for a second… that something so … so beautiful could be happening to me…. Because deep down some part of myself... some fucked up… self-hating part of myself… doesn’t believe that I deserve it! That I deserve… YOU!”

For a moment they just held each other like that, trembling and sighing. Genesis looked into Lupita’s eyes. Both of their faces were slick with tears. Genesis realized that she had never seen Lupita cry before. In that frozen moment, in the bathroom of the Budget Inn on Sunset Boulevard, Lupita looked more beautiful to Genesis than ever before. When they kissed it happened in a perfect, unspoken synchronization. Their hot, mushy lips pressed together and they could taste each other’s tears intermingling in their cocaine-numbed mouths. It was a kiss that each of them felt resonate deep down within themselves. When it was over they broke apart, breathless and trembling. Some subtle tremor had happened in the universe, sending shockwaves spreading outward like the splash of a rock on the surface of a still lake. It was unstoppable now, reaching ever outwards and subtly altering everything in its wake. Lupita fixed Genesis in a very serious stare.

“You’re right, Genesis hun. About everything. I won’t kill him. This has to stop now. If you want, we can just walk right out. Leave him to it. I’m sure old Jack’ll manage just fine without us. Hell, if we just sneak out… he’s so fucked up he probably wouldn’t even notice we were gone.”

Genesis seemed to consider this for a moment. Then she shook her head. “I love you Lupita, but I ain’t asking you to be no saint. I don’t want you changing a goddamn thing about how you are. So long as you promise not to shoot the bastard, then I say we go out there, beat the living shit out of him, and take everything he’s got. In fact I think we’d be insane not to rob him, you know?”

Lupita ruffled Genesis’s hair, playfully. “That’s exactly what I love about you,” she said wiping the tears from her face. “You’re not just beautiful, Genesis. You got your head screwed on, girl.”

There was a sudden, loud crash from the next room. They froze.

“What the fuck was that?” Genesis hissed.

“No fucking clue.”

“Sounded like the door just got kicked in. You don’t think it’s the cops?”

“Oh Jesus! No. Just calm down… wait here, okay?”

Lupita picked up the gun. She crept toward the bathroom door and unlocked it. She opened it a crack and peered through. Looking back at Genesis she gave a shrug. Cocked the gun, opened the door slowly, and crept out.

Genesis picked her way to her feet, and wiped the tears from her face. Hearing nothing she cautiously followed Lupita into the next room. What she saw made no sense. Jacques was naked, sprawled out on the floor. The crack pipe was still in his hand. His face was frozen in a rictus of disbelief. His other hand was curled into a fist. It looked as though he was clawing at his hairy chest.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Lupita was kneeling next to him. She looked up. “Well, you ain’t gonna believe this,” Lupita said carefully, “But ol’ Jack here is dead as a fucking dodo. Looks like a heart attack.” She put her ear to Jacques’ chest again and stayed like that for a few moments. “Nuthin’,” she said finally. “Nuthin’ at all.”

Genesis covered her mouth with her hands and stared and the corpse. His corpulent flesh had a bluish-grey tint. She could not help but look at his pecker. Her eyes traveled down to the hairy folds where his belly hung over his crotch. She saw something small and red poking out of there. It reminded her of how her Aunt’s dog – a horny Pomeranian called Funky – used to get a weird little hard-on every time Genesis rubbed its fur. Every time Genesis had seen death up close, it never failed to amaze her with its banality. She looked away.

“What the fuck do we do now?”

Lupita looked around the tiny motel room. “We don’t have much time,” she said. “Hun, why don’t you pack up the suitcase and check his pockets for valuables? I’m gonna go get the candle and the prayer sheet. We got a fucking ritual perform, and then I think we’d be better get the fuck outta here. Don’t you?”

vii

After driving around Koreatown fruitlessly for a while, pulling over here and there so Jeffrey could hop out of the car and talk to the occasional pissed off looking whore, Randal was ready to call it a day. After Pop Gun Eddie’s place the trail had gone dead. Randal felt tired and irritable, the buzz from the alcohol long gone and replaced with the sick, throbbing precursor to a same-day-hangover. As he watched Jeffrey gesturing wildly to a disinterested-looking Korean hooker lingering outside a run-down deli, Randal decided that enough was enough. He gave a couple of loud blasts on the horn and waved for Jeffrey to come back. Jeffrey hopped back into the car.

“No luck, huh?”

“Nah. But she did offer to blow me for fifteen dollars. When I told her no, she got real pissy with me. So I told her, I’m gay, baby. It’s nuthin’ personal. You know what she says to me? She tells me that she don’t mind, and that she’ll play with my ass, no extra charge.”

“Nice.”

Randal was about to pull away.

“Where we heading now?” Jeffrey demanded.

“Back to Hollywood, I guess. There’s no sense in carrying this on. I clocked up six missed calls from Gibby already, so I guess I’m just gonna get back and give him the bad news.”

“You got a twenty I could borrow?”

“Sure, Jeffrey. Come on, I’ll drop you off wherever you need to go.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “It’s fine, man. I’ll get out here. I feel like walking.”

Randal looked at his old friend. It was the early evening, and as the shadows lengthened so Jeffrey seemed to age dramatically. His bluish-white skin seemed even unhealthier now – the only patches of colour were the bloody scabs where he had scratched and picked at his own face, giving him the effect of an acne-scarred concentration camp survivor. There was no spare flesh on him any more. The eyes seemed too big for the face, a face that was all cheekbones and sores. The mouth was that of a little old man, his full lips absurdly big on a maw that was sucked in and almost toothless. His black hair was lank and greasy. An unpleasant thought occurred to Randal. He knew that there was a very good chance that this would be the last time he’d see his friend alive.

He thought back to the day they’d both attended Stevie Rox’s funeral. He had been convinced that Jeffrey was dying back then. However after another solid year’s chronic drug use it was clear that Jeffrey had actually been comparatively healthy that day. There was still so much flesh on Jeffrey’s body yet to be hewn down to the bone. Today there was no place where Jeffrey’s skeleton could not be clearly seen poking through rubbery skin. He had been handsome in a fucked-up kind of way when Randal had first encountered him back in Clean and Serene, but now his look had moved beyond heroin-chic. He had drifted into the murky realm of death porn.

“Did you say you wanna walk?” Randal asked incredulously, reaching into his wallet and pulling out his last bill.

“Yeah. Seems like a nice night for it.”

“Walk where?”

Jeffrey pocketed the money and looked at Randal with eyes that projected a lifetime of pain and disappointment. He gave an almost imperceptible shrug and muttered, “Anywhere, man. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

They sat like that for a moment, just staring out of the car together, dreamily watching the action on the street. Suddenly tired beyond belief, Randal reached a hand across and rested it lightly on Jeffrey’s knee. It felt like touching a jagged rock, wrapped in a thin layer of old denim.

“Well you take care of yourself Jeffrey,” he said. “Be careful, you know?”

Jeffrey sniffed and shot Randal a wry grin. “Okay, Randal. And you man… Don’t let the fuckers grind you down, okay?”

“Yeah.”

Jeffrey opened the door, and slowly – his brittle body full of stiffness and pre-withdrawal aches – made his way out of the car. He slammed the door and then poked his head in through the open window.

“As one judge said to the other, be just. And if you can’t be just… be arbitrary.”

With that, Jeffrey was gone. Randal watched him for a while ambling up the road, another broken ghost on a sidewalk full of such spectres. He seemed at one with his dilapidated surroundings, fading in to a panorama of check cash joints, broken neon signs, shady doorways advertising palm readers and fortunetellers, idling bums, street drinkers, whores and other assorted lunatics. Jeffrey was not alone anymore. Like a salmon tossed back into the stream, he had returned to his own kind and it was only a matter of seconds before he was swallowed up altogether. Before he left, Randal caught something out of the corner of his eye, lying in the seat where Jeffrey had been only moments earlier. Something small, round, and black. Reaching over, Randal found himself holding a small package about the size of a ball bearing. Picking it up and looking closer, he knew immediately what it was. It was a balloon of heroin. It had no doubt fallen out of Jeffrey’s pocket when he had been stuffing the twenty-dollar bill into his jeans. It seemed inconceivable to him that Jeffrey would ever be careless enough with his dope to just drop it in Randal’s car, but here it was.

He considered getting out of the car to chase Jeffrey down. After all – assuming it was an accident – then Jeffrey would certainly be devastated by the loss of the drugs. But he hesitated. He turned the radio back on and found himself listening to America’s Horse With No Name. He laughed a little to himself, remembering a crackhead pilot he had once spent time with in Cirque Lodge out in Utah who had been obsessed with the song and would delight in explaining the many convoluted drug references he believed to be hidden in the lyrics. That had been years ago, and who knew if the pilot was clean or not today, or even alive? The thought gave him pause. He had been in and out of drug rehabs, hospitals, treatment centres and the rest for most of his adult life. When he was younger he’d always assumed that he would somehow just grow out of this self-destructive need to construct his own version of reality with drugs and sex. But life as a straight, as a citizen, still seemed as alien and far away to him today as it had when he was eighteen years old. What a joke. What a horrible, unfunny, awful joke.

Randal pulled away and headed toward home.

viii

When the phone started ringing, Gibby ran frantically around his apartment trying to locate it. On the third ring he found it, almost buried by a partially collapsed pile of unpaid bills next to his laptop. When he saw who it was, relief flooded his every fibre. He took a long, deep breath to compose himself and then assuming his most professional veneer, answered.

“Jacques! What’s happening baby?”

“This ain’t Jacques,” said an unfamiliar voice. “Your name Gibby?”

“Yes.” A note of alarm crept into Gibby’s voice. “Who is this, please?”

“It don’t matter who this is. Let’s just say I’m an acquaintance of Jacques’, okay? You a pal of his? I found your card in his wallet. Fat dude, takes dirty pictures for living?”

“Yes, yes…I – I’m his agent.” Gibby was gripping the cell phone so hard his knuckles were turning white. “Where is he? Is everything okay?”

“I think,” the unfamiliar voice said, “You’d better sit down.”

*

In room 23 of the Budget Inn, next to the corpse of Jacques Seltzer, a red votive candle was still burning. Jacques’ naked body was shiny and slick, having been vigorously rubbed down with Florida Water. The whole room stank of a mixture of sweat, death, citrus and cloves. As she talked on Jacques’ phone, Lupita was packing away any evidence that they had been here at all.

“Here’s the deal, Gibby. Jacques is dead. Dude was getting mad high with me, and he just conked out. Fuckin’ heart gave out, or some shit. One minute he was fine and the next he was on the floor, not breathing…. Ambulance? Nah, this poor bastard needs a hearse, not a fucking ambulance. Now, you got a pen? I’m gonna tell you where he is. My advice to you is that you come over here first and do a bit of housecleaning… ’cos let’s just say if this guy was as much of a big shot as he thought he was, then the pigs are gonna have a field day dragging his name through the mud with all of the paraphernalia they’re gonna find in here.”

“Are… are you sure? I mean – are you sure he’s dead?” Gibby asked in a small, strangulated voice.

“They don’t come any deader than this. Now listen. He’s in room twenty-three of the Budget Inn. That’s on Sunset between Highland and Mansfield. You got that?”

“Yeah, I got it. Okay, fuck… listen, what’s your name?”

There was a cold laugh on the other end of the line. “You don’t need my fuckin’ name ’cos you ain’t ever gonna hear from me again. Take it easy, and you know, uh… sorry about your friend and all.”

With that, Lupita clicked the phone shut. She turned it off again and tossed it on the bed. Genesis was standing by the door with the briefcase full of drugs in her hand. “Ready to split?”

“Sure. One second.”

Lupita picked up the digital camera that Jacques had been snapping them with. She flicked through the images on there – there were hundreds – and deleted any that featured her and Genesis. Then as a final thought she pointed the camera at Jacques’ nude corpse.

“Say cheese.” She snapped a picture, turned the camera off, and tossed it on the bed next to the phone.

“You don’t wanna take the camera?”

“Nah. What the fuck do I need a camera for? And anyway... now we done the ritual our luck should be back to normal. I don’t need any fuckin talismen from this motherfucker bringing weird vibes into our life, ya know?”

“But we’re taking the drugs. And the money.”

“That’s different. None of that is permanent. Give it a month, and all of this shit is gonna be gone. I don’t want anything in our lives lingering around that might invite any spiritual trouble, you know what I mean?”

Genesis shook her head and smiled. “Tell you the truth, Lupe, I don’t have a fuckin’ clue about what you’re talking about. But it’s cool. If you say we’re in the clear, then I’ll take your word for it.”

On a whim Lupita crouched over Jacques’ corpse and flipped up the eye-patch. Underneath a perfectly normal eye stared vacantly back at her.

“Told you it was a put-on,” she muttered to herself.

“What’s that, Lupe?”

“Oh… nothin’.”

She put the patch back in place. Taking one last look around the dismal hotel room Lupita said “Looks like we’re all done here.” She stood and flexed her neck muscles, eliciting a series of pops and crunches, before heading for the door. “C’mon, Genesis hun. Let’s shake a tail feather, I wanna grab some food. It’s been a long fuckin’ day…”

She kissed Genesis on the forehead and they headed out, leaving Jacque Selzter’s corpse alone, cooling on the floor.

x

Randal had just made it back to his place and flicked on the TV when the cell rang again. They were showing Night of the Living Dead on cable. On screen a guy was teasing his sister: “They’re coming to get you Barbara…” He checked the phone and answered.

“Hey Gibby. Look, before you ask… I spent all day out there looking for him. Nobody’s seen nothing. If you ask me, he’s probably holed up somewhere with a couple of hookers and an 8-ball of coke, and you need to stop worrying. When he’s ready he’ll give you a call. And anyway, I’m tired man. It’s been a shitty day.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Gibby? You there?”

“Yeah.” Gibby’s voice sounded small and weak. “I heard from Jacques. Well, I heard from someone who knows where he is at least.”

“Told you. Look man, if you’re gonna rep someone as fucked up and irresponsible as this bastard, you gotta stop worrying about him. You’re gonna give yourself an ulcer. Fuckers like Jacques will probably outlive us all. People like him… Keith Richards… They’re like fuckin roaches, ya know?”

“Jacques is dead, Randal. I’m on my way over there now. He’s fucking dead. I’m in the shit, big time.”

“Oh.”

Randal kicked off his shoes, and tossed his keys on the coffee table with a clatter. He fell back into the couch still holding a paper sack from his local bodega and said, “Jesus man, I’m sorry to hear that. I really am.”

“Yeah.” Gibby sounded like all the life had leaked out of him. “Well look… I, uh, I just wanted to let you know. I appreciate you looking for him. Once I get a proper look at the situation I can let you know the details. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay. Take care, man.”

Randal closed the phone. He looked into the paper sack next to him, which contained a roll of Reynolds Wrap and a disposable lighter. He’d purchased the stuff on a strange kind of autopilot on his way back to the apartment. He thought of the heroin in his pocket. He closed his eyes, and sighed. Although heroin had not been his drug of choice, not really, Randal knew that this wouldn’t have any bearing on whether or not he would smoke it. After all, now that it was here in his possession, was there any other option? What it offered was irresistible in its promise. It offered the chance to feel different. That was something Randal had spent his whole life chasing after.

The big lie, Randal knew, was the idea that by smoking this heroin he would somehow fail. Relapse. Fuck it all up. Life wasn’t like that. Life was a series of seemingly small decisions that led to other seemingly small decisions. Life was the moment you stopped and looked at the twisting, convoluted path all of those small decisions had led you down. Here and now this small bag of heroin did not represent success or failure. It simply represented a choice: how do you want to feel right now? Where do you want to go tonight?

He looked at the TV again. He watched a gaunt-faced zombie pick up a brick, and smash its way into a car while the woman inside screamed hysterically.

He looked back down at the heroin in his hand.

Where do you want to go tonight?

xi

“John Bonham.” Lupita said.

“Anna Nicole Smith,” Genesis countered.

“Good one. Bon Scott.”

“Who?”

“Singer from AC/DC.”

“Oh.” Genesis looked thoughtful for a moment. “What about Elvis?”

“No. Elvis died taking a shit.”

“Oh yeah. What about Janis Joplin?”

“Nah.” Lupita took a long sip of her chocolate malt, “She OD’d on heroin for sure, but she didn’t choke on her own puke as far as I know.”

Genesis and Lupita were finishing up their drinks at Mel’s Diner on Highland. They were trying to name all the celebrities they could think of who had choked on their own vomit.

“Lousy way to go,” Genesis said thoughtfully, “I mean choking on your puke like that. I mean, the last thing you’d taste’d be your own barf? Jesus fuck, that’s awful.”

At a table across from them was a family of four with two young kids. As Genesis and Lupita’s conversation had grown louder and cruder, Lupita had caught the mother throwing some disgusted looks their way. After the waitress brought the check and Lupita dropped a twenty on the table, she finally made eye contact with the woman and smiled. The woman’s cheeks reddened and she looked away quickly.

Lupita got up out of her seat. She walked over to their table. The husband, a perfectly bland looking guy with a powder blue shirt and a wispy moustache, looked like he was about to say something, and then looked determinedly down at his plate. Genesis grabbed Lupita quickly and said, “C’mon, let’s get out of here. No point in causing a scene.”

Lupita shrugged Genesis away. “Excuse me.”

They continued to pretend she wasn’t there.

“Excuse me.” The husband finally looked up at her. “I saw you looking at us. I just wanted to say… Well, I just wanted to say I’m sorry if our conversation offended you. Sometimes I get a bit carried away, you know? You know how it is when you’re with the person you love… it’s like other people just don’t exist.”

She turned and planted a long lingering kiss on Genesis’s lips. The father and mother sputtered with horror as their two children ogled Genesis and Lupita with open mouths. Their tongues intertwined, wrapped around one another furiously. They finally broke off. Lupita turned her attention back to the family, casually wiping her wet mouth with the back of her hand.

“Here.” She dropped three twenties on their table. “Have dinner on us.”

“That’s… that’s really not necessary…” the father stammered.

“Sure it is,” Lupita said, taking Genesis by the arm, “I insist. Really.”

When they got out to the street, Genesis burst out laughing. “Jesus Christ, Lupe! They looked like they were about to shit their pants.”

“Hell, what’s the point in good fortune if you can’t spread the wealth around a little?”

Genesis kissed Lupita on the neck. As they headed back to the car Genesis said, “Okay, I got a good one. What about famous people who died in plane crashes?”

Lupita shrugged. “Buddy Holly.”

“That’s obvious. How about Ronnie Van Zant from Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

“Big Bopper.”

“Rich Snyder.”

“Who?”

“Guy who founded In and Out Burger. Who you been, girl?”

They laughed as they got into the car. They started the engine, and Lupita turned up the volume on the stereo. “Don’t Jump” by Billy Fury filled the car.

“This is undoubtedly the best rock’n’roll song about someone thinking about throwing themselves off a cliff ever recorded,” Lupita said.

“No doubt,” Genesis said.

Later they pulled up outside the place they were staying at, a nice little hotel called The Sunset in West Hollywood. This was their last night in Los Angeles before they split in the morning for San Francisco and Lupita had insisted that they stay somewhere decent. Genesis had been bugging Lupita to go to the Bay Area for the longest time. Anyway Lupita had some old friends she’d been meaning to look up. With the money and the drugs Jacques had been carrying around with him they wouldn’t have to worry about making a dollar for quite a while. It was a rare feeling, to feel free, to feel that you didn’t owe anybody anything. It was always fleeting, but sweet while it lasted.

They got out of the car. The night was cool and the air around them was alive with the steady rumble of traffic and the rhythmic chirp of crickets.

“It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.”

“I got a good feeling about us, Genesis hun…” Lupita said dreamily. “I got this weird feeling that everything is gonna be alright…”

She reached down and clasped Genesis’ hand in hers, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

Hand in hand, Genesis and Lupita walked off into The Sunset together.