}}}Carey. 1987. Los Angeles, California. West Hollywood.}}}}}}}}}
“Whoa, hold on, seriously?” Jell-O Jimmy paused while handing me the bottle. He narrowed his eyes, then took his arm back. Cradled the whiskey against him like a baby.
“What?” I said. “End of story. Pass the bottle.”
“Nah, no way,” Jimmy said.
We called him Jell-O because he was always jiggling a little bit. Thought it was the DTs at first, but no—he had some kind of brain disease. The shaking was just gonna get worse and worse, until he couldn’t even feed himself. So we called him Jell-O. Sure, it’s gallows humor, but when you’re actually up on the gallows, you just call it humor.
“The fuck you mean, no?” I said. I kicked the rusted-out shell of a little charcoal grill we were using as a fire pit. It shot sparks in the air. “What about the deal?”
“The deal,” Jimmy said, holding the bottle out, then yanking it back, “is you tell me stories and you get to share my hooch.”
“Right,” I said. “I finished this story. Gimme the bottle and I’ll start another one.”
“That ain’t finished!” he cried, jumping to his feet. The scratchy blue U-Haul moving blanket fell from around his shoulders. “Look, your stories are crazy bullshit, man. But why I like you—why you get to put your diseased lips on my bottle—is that they make sense. I can follow ’em. Larry the Lizardman, he thinks reptiles run the government, but when you talk to him about it, it don’t make sense. Jumps all over the place. Starts talking about his kids and radio waves and shit. Mary, that chick squats down in the ’ducts? She thinks we’re all really underground and there’s a bigger world around us, and our sky is its ground, but she clams up after that. Doesn’t like talking about it. Your crazy though, it’s entertaining because it almost sounds like stories. And stories have a proper ending.”
“But they’re not stories,” I said. I wasn’t so far gone that I babbled this stuff at the normals. That’s a sure way to get locked up. But why bother pretending with the other hobos? To them, I told the truth. “They’re my life.”
“Listen, man. Listen: took you two weeks to tell me about that other ninja chick, what’s her name?”
“Meryll,” I said. I hated saying it. It felt like I was stealing something.
“Right, that was a good story. This Rosa chick, she’s the same deal and you’re just like ‘we met, kicked some ass, then I killed her.’ That’s a shitty ending! She deserves a better story, so tell me a better one, or no bottle.”
He sat back down and gave me the snake eyes, the ones that say he’s putting his foot down. For real this time. And that means I’m going to have to fight him for that bottle. Sucker-punch an altogether pretty decent guy with a brain disease and then steal his liquor. Well, that, or go sober for the night.
I’m not going sober for the night.
“With Meryll,” I said, “that was her story. It was important to tell that one right, because it was about her, and who she was, and what this fight does to people. You had to understand her, so you’d know it was them that did it to her—she wasn’t some kinda monster. They are.”
“But it ain’t about that with Rosa? And the other one—the kid at the start, the one you tricked into coming outta the freezer. Why don’t they get the same treatment? We got time! All the time in the world! And I’m buying the hooch, so spin me those tales, man.”
“Rosa and the kid,” I said, chucking some more garbage onto the fire. “Those stories aren’t about them. They’re about me. You don’t have to understand me. I am a fucking monster.”
Jimmy didn’t have much to say about that. When folks get maudlin around here, it’s best to just shut up and let it play out. We sat there watching the toxic fire eat away the edges of a Styrofoam container. We listened to cars down on the 110 honk their horns—always that angry, too-long honk that ends in a fistfight or a gunshot. We pulled up little chunks of ice plant, squeezed the juice out of ’em, chucked them at nothing in particular.
I was just about to make my move: tell Jimmy the cops had pulled up, then when he looked away, wham! Right in the side of the head. Where the jaw hooks up to the skull. Always floors ’em. Grab the bottle before it spills, and find a new place to spend my nights. Then Jimmy held the whiskey out to me and said:
“All right. Finish your story, then. But I liked Rosa’s better.”
“Me too, man,” I said, and I took a drink.