You’re Talking to the Wrong Guy

I have no idea what time it is when I wake up to find Blake crouching over me and slapping my cheek while he holds ice to my chest. He pulls me up by my shirt collar and drops some of the ice down my pants.

I say, “What the hell are you doing?”

“You fell asleep,” he says. “I told you—no sleep. It’s bad for your head.”

I nod slowly. I move my head and neck a little and feel the tightening stiffness in the back of my neck. I pry the dwindling ice cube off my balls and throw it onto the parking lot.

Blake slaps my face a couple more times. My head throbs in pain after every slap.

“Enough,” I say.

“Good,” he says. “Was just waiting for you to fight back.” He takes a cigar out of his pocket and begins to light it. “So,” he says around puffs. “How’d your meeting go?”

“Fine,” I say. “And you?”

Blake reaches into my car and comes out with a Mickey’s Big Mouth, which he hands to me.

“Good news,” he says. “We’re hooked up on some Percs.”

“So let’s have them.”

“We’ve got a quick stop for that,” he says.

I’m starting to wake up and I remember my anger, the fright at him not coming back. “Where the fuck were you?” I say.

“What do you mean?” he says.

“You go off for drugs. You’re gone for God knows how long and you come back and tell me we have to take a ride to get them?” I look up at him. “Where were you?”

“I told you before,” he says. “I needed a ride. I took the ride. I needed money if I was going to hook us up.”

“The ride was about money?” I say.

“Most rides are,” he says.

I take a hit off the Mickey’s and the bitterness rolls over my teeth and I feel calmness begin to settle on me like a blanket. The years I didn’t drink, I swear, I was always on edge. It was living without an off switch and I’m sure I would have crashed and burned if I hadn’t started drinking again. Living sober had its pluses. My life would surely be less of a failure without alcohol, but I just never could figure out a way to relax without drinking up and shutting down.

“So you have money?” I say.

“That I do,” Blake says, and looks at his watch. “Kill that beer and let’s move.”

I finish the beer and put the glass on the log. When I stand, I’m more even and balanced than I expected.

When we start to pull out onto PCH, Blake says, “You shouldn’t say anything wrong with these guys. They weren’t my first choice for the drugs.”

“Define anything wrong,” I say.

Blake tells me we’re headed to Pedro, to this abandoned apartment building, to these bad people near the DMV in Pedro, which people around here pronounce Pee-dro. The DMV in Pedro is the most vile and crowded of the Southland since the Long Beach one was burned down after the first Rodney King verdict. Blake tells me he doesn’t know a lot about these men, but he’s been told to watch his tongue around them.

I tell him this thing Tara told me, that you can get through life with just two lines: I don’t know and You’re talking to the wrong guy/gal.

Blake says, “Maybe you shouldn’t talk at all.”

“That’s an option, I suppose.”

“Almost forgot,” Blake says, and reaches into his jacket and hands me a cassette tape. It’s a compilation tape. Blake makes these for me and for Hank Crow. This one’s called Songs from the Point of View of a Dead Guy.

“You found ninety minutes of songs from the point of view of a dead guy?” I say.

“I had to leave stuff off,” he says. “It’s a rich tradition.” The last tape he gave me was a He Shot His Woman Down collection, which was, appropriately enough, songs about men shooting women and was, I’m guessing, even harder to edit down to just ninety minutes of violent-loser-with-a-gun tales set to music.

I thank him and put the tape on the dashboard. It slides across the dash every time Blake turns left, so I put the tape halfway into the player and let the case slide to the floor.

The house is an abandoned fourplex, the kind that speckle Long Beach and South L.A. and Pedro, most of them built in the twenties. There’s a masking-tape X over the upper left window, and Blake points and nods.

“That’s their signal,” he says.

“Move the office frequently, do they?”

“More than porno producers,” Blake says. “Beeper culture.”

“They know you’re coming?” I say.

I decide to sit in the car when Blake goes into the apartment. I watch from the outside. There are no lights. Blake gets swallowed up into the darkness of a hallway in the abandoned fourplex, and comes out three or four tense moments later.

Blake starts the car and turns up the volume on the tape. I can see he’s a little shaken.

“Success?” I say.

“In a manner of speaking.” He drops a Ziploc full of pills in my hand. “Thanks for the ride.”

We start the ride home and the first song from the point of view of a dead guy is the Band’s version of “Long Black Veil.” Blake turns onto the 47, and moves toward Long Beach. The Band is singing telling their story—a cold wind’s blowing, it’s night and the woman in the song’s visiting the dead guy’s grave and she’s in her long black veil and she’s crying over his bones. A couple minutes later, halfway over the Vincent Thomas Bridge, we enter the Long Beach city limits, population half million, and I pop two Percodans and take a hit of warm beer from a bag in the backseat.