I took my time getting to Venice. There wasn’t any rush. I rode six buses to get to Culver City, doubling back on myself, walking blocks in between each route so it would be harder to figure out where I’d come from or where I was going if anyone reviewed the transit cameras.
I was on the 260, my last bus, sitting near the back, trying not to think about what lay ahead, finding distraction in my surroundings. Most cities followed a familiar design. They had a heart, usually a financial district, a soul, theaters and culture, organs of retail, commerce and industry, brains of education, and suburban limbs where people lived. Los Angeles wasn’t most cities. It was as though a great creator had tipped all the body parts onto the map and cloned some of them at random. There were a lot of suburban limbs growing through what should have been organs of commerce, the soul had been shrunk, cut up, and scattered throughout the huge sprawl, and the heart was a place few people went. Folk lived in their cars, using the city’s veins to travel from one part to another, and that made for a sense of isolation among the millions who lived in the huge Frankenstein. I shared space with the handful of people on the bus, but I didn’t know them or their lives, nor they mine. Today, that was a good thing.
High above the streets was the billboard life we aspired to: smiling faces promising happiness from a soda can; artful photos of GM wheat wraps hugging factory-fed, machine-slaughtered fried chicken; movies selling us the lie heroes always win. But down on the ground was life as lived, up close and for real. Jaundice-yellow signs in barred windows promising cash for gold, homeless folk foraging in trash cans, seemingly productive citizens doing their daily rinse and repeat—work, home, sleep—occasionally wondering why no matter how hard they tried, they could never reach the life the billboards promised.
Don’t think on it, friend. The billboard life is there to tantalize, not to be realized. There isn’t enough happiness to go around. It’s as rare as gold. The folk living the billboard life know it. They sell us the dream of their life and we pay dearly for it, climbing over each other in the hope we’ll be the ones to join them. Put two cars in your drive, make your mortgage payments, take that vacation, keep your head down and work hard, and… what’s that?
Financial crash, road crash, medical crash.
Crashes of all kinds, unforeseen and unexpected.
Impacts.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we’re going to have to take the little ladder you were building toward the billboard life and snake you back down to the gutter where you belong.
See, when you’ve had bad luck, you know it can happen to anyone. You know just how much of it there is to go around. But folk at the top living the billboard life haven’t had bad luck. That’s why they’re on the billboard. They think they made it there through hard work, that the people far below them, seen dimly through their privacy glass, are stuck in the gutters of the real world because they didn’t work hard enough, dabbled in drink or drugs, or lack the ambition to climb to the shining world of the billboards. They never think about the good luck, or lack of bad luck, that put them in paradise. Why would they?
Do you ever think about what really put you where you are? It becomes much harder to justify the big house, the fast car, the full bank account and toned Pilates belly, if you realize it hasn’t been earned. I work hard, they say. So does the nurse who inserted your father’s catheter, the driver who takes your kids to school, the construction workers who laid your swimming pool. The billboarders don’t realize success self-selects an entitled outlook on the world. I earned this, they think, without any sense that millions of smarter, harder-working people are stuck in the gutter, far, far below.
Every face I saw on the street was yet more justification for Walter Glaze’s death. He was one of the billboarders, living high above the rest of us, but he’d risen on wings of evil. The poor folk on the bus, those drifting in the gutters of life, each and every single one of them had more right to Walter Glaze’s wealth. I was going to take a stand for all the little guys and girls, and most importantly for the one I loved most: Skye.
By the time I got off the bus in Culver City, my churning stomach had calmed, the bile wasn’t rising quite so much, and I was resolved.
I walked along Venice Boulevard to the corner of Motor Avenue and bought a green ski mask from the surplus store. I slipped it into my hoodie pocket, pressing it against the heavy revolver. I got a pair of blue latex gloves from a late-night pharmacy.
It was 9:45 p.m. when I left the store, and I walked the streets for a while, aimlessly wandering block after block, watching the slow-moving minutes tick by. Habit got the better of me, and the bright lights of a liquor store on Washington Place drew me like a tractor beam. I bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from an emaciated clerk who didn’t even turn her dead eyes toward me as she slipped it into a brown paper bag.
It was mission fuel, I told myself as I started drinking. By the time I reached Grand Canal, I was a third of the way to the thick glass bottom. My belly felt warm and my mind clear and calm, like the stillest Lake Michigan beach day. As I neared the nightclub, I put on the gloves, pulled the ski mask over my head, and jogged a little to reach the alleyway. I ran along the back of the building into the dark shadows near the staff entrance and wedged my way between two of the large dumpsters. It was a dank, grimy place that stank of urine and garbage, but the smells didn’t offend me. I sat on the ground with my back against the alley wall, watching the staff entrance through the narrow gap, drinking.
Always drinking.
After a few minutes sitting in the shadows of waste, I realized I hadn’t scoped the place out properly, that Walter Glaze might not even be in tonight, but by the time I hit the halfway mark, I was bottle happy and didn’t care.