}}}Carey. 1984. Los Angeles, California. Koreatown.}}}}}}}}}
I love my crash spot. Koreatown is home for me. Always will be. It’s a good middle ground—halfway between the ghetto and the beach. This is where L.A. hides its working class. People with actual jobs. Tasks that don’t require putting on makeup first. They ain’t pretty, and they ain’t happy, but they keep this city running. They understand when they see somebody on the skids. They understand you don’t need help or pity. Just beer money. On the east side they’ll kick you to death just for … well, just for kicks. Over by the beach is worse: They call security. Some mope with an innie-dick and a bicycle threatening to involve the real police if you don’t get moving.
But in Koreatown, tucked away in my little hidey-hole behind the butcher shop, nobody bugs me. Well, nobody except for Zang. But he’s basically nobody. Every couple of weeks he’ll poke me awake in the middle of the night. Tell me the fight needs me. That I’m wasting time like this.
“It was just a girl,” he’ll say. “Thousands like her die every day. They have died before you came along. They will die after you are gone.”
Always the middle of the night with that guy. Nudging me awake just when the liquor’s wearing off. Mouth dry, bladder burning, head spinning—I feel like such shit that I can only think about how shitty I feel. I tell him to piss off, and he stands there for god knows how long, staring at me silently, and then in the morning he’s gone.
It’s lucky for me, that he only comes in the middle of the night.
When the hangover fades to a dull roar and I’m capable of forming thoughts that aren’t “Jesus Christ I wish I would just die already,” I might listen to what he’s got to say. Sure, I’ve got all this guilt and loathing and disgust sloshing around in my guts—mixing up with the Jim Beam and the street tacos to form my very own special brand of acid, eating away at my stomach lining—but the hate is still there, too. And unless I drown it in booze, the hate is stronger. Every minute I’m sober I think about Randall. About Jie. About Meryll and Rosa. I bounce back and forth between what an asshole I am for doing the things I’ve done, and what assholes the angels are for making me do them. I think about taking Zang up on his offer. Spilling some blood.
But he doesn’t come around until later. And I’ve got time to kill, so I scrounge up liquor money and start drinking.
Then it’s the middle of the night, and I drank away the hate so all that’s left is self-pity and self-loathing and a bitch of a headache. I tell Zang to piss off, and we do our little dance again.