Kill All Angels

by Robert Brockway

  Well, maybe not.

  “Yes, no doubt about it,” I said.

  We drank our beers quietly for a minute.

  “But how do we get back at them?” I said.

  “I don’t know, but—” Matt said, then backtracked. “Wait, ‘we’?”

  “What? Randall was your friend, too—are you saying you’re not with me on this?”

  “Hell yes I’m saying that. Why would you think I was? I’m not a fighter, man. Even if what you wanted me to fight was remotely human, they’d still kick my ass.”

  “We fought them before, in New York—” I tried to remind him, but he cut me off.

  “No, dude. You fought them. I ran the hell away, remember? I ran right out of the apartment when they busted through the door. Then I ran down the street. Then, for good measure, I ran all the way across the god damn country. I didn’t know they’d be here, too.”

  “Well, now it’s time to stop running,” I said, trying to bolster myself for an inspirational speech.

  “Bullshit,” Matt said, instantly. “This is the best time for running, and that’s exactly what me and Melissa are going to do, the second she gets back.”

  “You’re just going to bail on me now?”

  “Now? Are you not listening? We bailed the second we found out about all this. We thought you and Randall were just here to get drunk and go to shows and catch some sun. If we had any idea you two were going after these things, we would not have let you stay here. We want no part of any of this. We just want to get high and fuck and be happy, man. That sounds way better than getting butchered in a sewer somewhere.”

  Now I crumpled my beer can in my fist and whipped it at the TV. Matt jumped to his feet.

  “Some of us don’t have that fucking option, Matt!” I screamed, and immediately regretted it. Lightning crackled around my back and chest.

  He just stared at me, a big dumb sad bear look on his face.

  I settled back into the couch.

  “But you’re right,” I said. “You guys do have the option. Take it. You don’t have to run anywhere. I’ll be gone by tomorrow. Just give me a few hours to rest up.”

  “No, man, you don’t have to—”

  “Yeah, I do. If they knew where I was right now, they’d be here already. You two will be safe here. But if I stay any longer, they might find me.”

  Matt wanted to object further, I could tell. But he didn’t. He just looked out the window for a while, instead of at me.

  “But you’re going to fetch me beers and blankets until then,” I said.

  He smiled at me.

  “Fuck your heartwarming moment,” I snapped. “I said get me a god damn beer. Go!”

  Matt laughed and left for the kitchen.

  When Safety Pins came home and found me and Matt completely trashed in the living room—me tucked into a nest of pillows, blankets, empty beer cans, and pizza crusts; Matt laying flat on his back across the coffee table, his head lolling upside down, trying to toss wadded up napkins across the room into some expensive-looking African basket thing—all she said was “do I need to do a liquor run or did you leave me some?”

  She should’ve been mine.

  All of her pretension, her poser affectations, her fad-chasing—none of it mattered to me right then, because she didn’t yell at us about the mess, or the fact that we were hammered at 5:30 in the evening, she just … understood. And she joined right in. And also because she still had some seriously rockin’ tits.

  I am not a picky man.

  We cried. We swore bloody oaths. We told our favorite Randall stories: I related, for probably the twentieth time, the tale of 4th of July, 1975, and how Randall ended up with a penny permanently embedded in his ballsack. Matt told a little story about the time we all went to Coney Island, and he didn’t have enough money for lunch. Randall waited until everybody was distracted, then quietly slipped off to buy Matt a couple of chili dogs. He said not to tell anybody. Safety Pins talked about how she’d always found him super hot, and she really admired his fashion—he was so unique, you know? He just didn’t give a damn about gender roles and stuff.

  I told her she should thank god every day for those tits.

  We drank to Randall. Then we drank to him again. Then we drank to old times. Then we drank to Burt Reynolds for some reason. Then we just drank.

  I woke up the next morning still feeling like a giant had scraped me off the bottom of his shoe, with the added benefit of a massive hangover. I limped to the bathroom and threw up, nearly passing out from the pain it brought to my ribs. I drank three huge glasses of water, then stole an entire loaf of bread and half a bottle of fine-looking Scotch from the kitchen. I raided the guest house for my few meager belongings, shoved them into my ripped JanSport, and left without saying good-bye.

  Matt and Safety Pins would sleep until noon, then get up and be all sad about my disappearance for a few hours. Then they’d grab Mexican and margaritas at some little hole in the wall that only they knew about, and they’d fuck on their giant round bed, beside their giant square windows looking down on Los Angeles like a postcard. They’d forget, and they’d be fine. Besides, this whole Beverly Hillbillies thing was never my scene. Bastards like me, they don’t deserve comfort and affluence. They deserve cold pavement and jeans that haven’t been washed in years. They deserved to have to fight off stray dogs for their dinner and beg cash from passersby. They deserved the looks of disdain the real people would give them instead of that cash. They deserved the god damn street. And that’s just where I was going.

  EIGHT

  }}}Carey. 1982. Los Angeles, California. Koreatown.}}}}}}}}}

  It doesn’t rain in L.A., it pours. The water here doesn’t fall in waves of droplets, it’s like somebody turned on a million faucets in the sky and they dump a solid stream of vaguely acidic water straight into your face, down the gap between your shirt and back, and into the holes in your duct-taped Chucks. Because rain is so rare in Los Angeles, all the dirt and the grime and the oil just soaks right into the ground. There’s a thin film of pollution wrapped over every single surface in L.A., settled into the fine cracks, nestled right into the pores of the city. And then it rains, and all that shit washes up to the surface. You can barely walk down the street without skiing on a layer of grease.

  L.A. drivers are bad enough on the average day—pushed to the brink by traffic and heat—then you factor in their total inability to drive in anything but mild sunshine, plus this slurry of crap you could use to lubricate the engine of an aircraft carrier, and it’s downright deadly out there for a pedestrian.

  I lost “pedestrian” status last year. Now I’m somewhere between “burden on society” and “scary hobo.” If the cars don’t slow for pedestrians, they don’t even stop for the burdens and the hobos.

  At first it wasn’t so bad, being on the street in Southern California. It’s mostly warm, though some of the nights get colder than you might think. There are plenty of hidden corners in the urban maze to slip away and get some sleep. Occasionally, while begging, you’ll luck across some C-list celebrity trying to appease his success-guilt, or some adman trying to impress an aspiring actress, and they’ll fork over way too much cash. There are lots of cheap Mexican food places, but beer is kinda expensive. It all seems to balance out.

  But after a while, the vibe out here gets to you. It’s the gulf between the rich and the poor. It doesn’t feel so stark elsewhere. Not even in NYC. Back there, you get the feeling that even the millionaires take the subway or grab a slice at a dingy pizza place every once in a while. But L.A. feels like there are two worlds. There’s yours: a sepia-toned sprawl full of rats and cockroaches, where junkies die in the gutters and the street sweepers don’t even stop to move them. And then above your shitty world, propped up on great concrete pillars surrounded by spikes and wrapped in barbed wire, there’s a shiny and clean place, full of green trees and blue seas and gorgeous girls laughing big, showing teeth that shine like headlights.

&
nbsp; It didn’t bother me, being a scumbag in New York. It bothers me out here.

  But then again, it should bother me. Cowards, fuckups, and failures shouldn’t feel cozy and placated; there should be a spot inside them that’s raw and red and never stops aching. If there isn’t, then you’re not human anymore. I nurture my wound whenever I can. I cultivate it when I’m wrapped up in my thin sleeping bag behind the butcher in Koreatown, absorbing all the cold from the pavement through my tailbone. I tend to it by savoring every disgusted look I get when I swoop down on the tables in outdoor restaurants and grab the leftovers before the waiters can get to them. I grow that little wound every day.

  But hell, even I need a break once in a while. I heard X was playing at the HK Café in Chinatown. I usually crash further west, but X was worth half a day’s walk. Normally, I’d take Daisy for a trip that far, but between the busted brakes, the rain, and her bald tires, the decision was pretty much made for me. It’s not that I cared whether I lived or died—please never accuse me of that—just that I’d spend more time crashing than I would riding. I wouldn’t make the show in time if I rode. Besides, she’d probably been stowed too long. Downtime doesn’t do a motorcycle good. Battery’s probably dead, tires even flatter than usual, rats in the airbox again. Walking, it was.

  I figured all my old tricks for sneaking into shows still played out West, and if they didn’t, well, there’s always the punk kids. One of them will trade a ticket, or at least the cost of it, if I go buy them beer. Of that I can be sure: Punk priorities are the same, everywhere you go.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time, before the fucking afternoon monsoon hit. By the time I made Chinatown every inch of me had been soaked so thoroughly that I was starting to prune, and that was just the start of my night. I still had to either skirt security or court a clique of underage, sober punks. And the HK looked tougher to slip into than I thought. I’d been there a few times before, back when me and Randa—…

  I’d been there a few times before.

  But back then I’d been a paying customer. I hadn’t paid much attention to how easy it would be to sneak in. And the answer was looking like “not very.” There was a bouncer/ticket taker out front, beneath the cheap neon sign advertising “genuine Chinese dishes,” and a dark red metal door with peeling paint around back that led to the kitchen. But that was it. For sneaking into venues, you generally wanted a side or band entrance—someplace nonemployees, or at least temporary employees, would walk out to smoke, and you could just jog right up, catch the door, say “thanks, man,” and slip by like you had business in there. The HK Café was primarily a restaurant: The front door was manned, the back door led straight into a busy kitchen, and that was it. Unless I could distract the bouncer, I wasn’t slipping in. I looked around—there were a lot of places I could start fires, but none that wouldn’t do more damage than I was comfortable with tonight.

  Fine.

  Time to play the beer-fairy. But that means standing out here in the grease-trap rain even longer, scouting the crowd for nervous kids with that sad look in their eyes that said they’d struck out at shoulder-tapping. There was a promising group of four young guys with shaved heads, but I didn’t know the skinhead protocol out here in L.A. They might be shaky from a lack of quality lager in their system, or they might be shaky because they’re itching for an excuse to stomp a hobo. A little flock of new wavers had staked out an awning half a block down while they waited for the doors to open. I was already approaching them when I saw one whip out a little flask and pass it around. They were taken care of. Everybody else looked of age, or already hammered.

  Shit.

  I bummed around the crowd for another half hour, hoping a good set of sober punks would come along and save me, but no such luck. The doors opened, the crowd filtered inside, the bouncer grabbed his little podium and pulled it in after him, and the doors closed again.

  The rain showed no sign of letting up. I settled for trying to find somewhere relatively dry against the club itself, so I could at least listen to muffled guitars filtered through drywall. Looking toward the front, there seemed to be a little gap between the buildings on the right. Not quite an alleyway, but big enough to slide into. I slogged over there, my Chucks so soaked they were actually spraying out more water than they absorbed, and slid into the gap. The light from the streetlamps didn’t make it into the little alcove, so I kept my eyes on my feet and my hand on the wall while I pushed in far enough to stay dry. I bumped into a corner where the wall of the HK Café staggered out a bit, so I slid around it, hoping the gutters extended farther back there.

  Three Chinese guys were huddled in the far end of the access way, hunched over and smoking. Trying to stay dry like me. One had on a filthy white apron. The other two were dressed nearly identically—a sort of ’50s greaser meets Bruce Lee outfit. Tight black jeans, white T-shirt, black mechanic’s jacket, slick-backed hair.

  There were two options: Either they were with one of the opening bands, or they were in some kind of gang.

  The cook turned and caught me looming back there in the dark, looking suspicious as hell. He whispered something in that jumpy little singsong of theirs, and the two others turned to look at me. I could tell by their stance alone, these men did not have rock in their heart. I slipped back around the outcropping and jogged toward the main plaza, but that goddamned L.A. muck sent me sprawling. I hit the ground chin-first, felt a tooth chip. I tried to push myself up, but my hands just slipped away, too. I settled for half-crawling, half-falling toward the end of the alcove. If I could just make it to the main square I would—well, honestly, I would probably still get my ass kicked.

  The relationship between the punks and the Chinese is a complicated one. They know there’s money to be made from us, hosting shows nobody else will host, selling cheap beer and fried anything to the drunken gweilo. But they also know we get out of hand. We trash their venues, we piss on their walls, we disrespect their workers. I mean, not all of us—there are plenty of courteous punks out there (I’m uh … not always one of them)—but enough of us cause trouble to strain the relationship. So the Chinese seeing me trespassing in their workers-only zone, well after the doors to the show were closed? That could be enough to set them off.

  But at least if I made the main square, they probably wouldn’t knife me or anything. Too many potential witnesses.

  I hope.

  Hey, apparently that’s all moot, though, because this fucking California mud-oil is like crawling through half-melted Jell-O. I heard squishy footsteps behind me, then a shoe on my ass, then my face was in the mud. I didn’t make it anywhere near the exit. I tried to roll over to show the Chinese guys how utterly harmless I was—you know, lie to them—but they weren’t having it. One of them stood behind me—the cook, I assumed, because I was flanked on either side by skinny black jeans and boat shoes. One of them kicked my arm out from under me when I tried to push myself up. Face down in the muck again. Tasted like exhaust fumes, match heads, and dog shit. The one that kicked my arm was now standing on my elbow, pinning it down. The other one put a foot on the back of my head and pressed.

  I was facedown in the sucking mud. Nose, mouth, and eyes engulfed in it. I tried to turn my head, to break the seal and breathe, but I couldn’t. There was something hard to either side of me, like I’d fallen in the gap between two paving stones. The Chinese greasers either didn’t realize I couldn’t breathe, or didn’t care. They weren’t letting up. I struggled with my free hand, grabbed the pant leg of the one pinning my head, but I couldn’t get enough leverage to yank it from under him. I could only hold on and squeeze. My other hand spasmed open and closed on nothing. I kicked with my legs, but they slid uselessly in the muck. I pushed out with my tongue, lapping up the filthy slime like it was pudding, but the rain just filled in the gaps as soon as I could make them. I could feel the muck up my nose, slithering into my sinuses, filling the insides of my face and throat with thick, cold grime. My will broke. My lungs seized,
trying to suck in air, and I inhaled pure mud. A shock shot through me, like I’d caught a bullet to the chest.

  I thought they said drowning doesn’t hurt. Maybe that only counts if it’s water, because drowning in shit hurts like crazy.

  I felt a heavy thump reverberate through the paving stones on either side of my head. Angry birdsong as the Chinese guys panicked, a few more solid bumps, and then the pressure was off my head and arms. I whipped my neck back, coughed, gagged, threw up about a pint of mud and took a long, agonizing breath. It probably hadn’t even been a minute, but it felt like I hadn’t used my lungs in years. Like they’d atrophied from neglect, filled up with dust, got eaten through by moths, and now precious air was leaking out through all the cracks and holes. I couldn’t do anything, could only lay there, splayed out, sucking oxygen and fighting back the multicolored tide lapping at the edges of my vision. I was distantly aware of the sounds of fighting somewhere behind me. Barking and yelping, swearing in Chinese, meaty thwacks of fists on faces.

  When I could move, I didn’t bother looking back. I speed-crawled the rest of the way down the alcove until my hands slapped brick. I hauled myself to my feet and bolted well into the center of the square before I collapsed again. I fell backward against the concrete base of a light post and stared hard through the charcoal-gray curtain of rain. The access way was just shadow at first. Then something moved back there, coming toward me. A figured emerged—a man, bit on the short and slight side—but I couldn’t make out the details. The rain was too heavy, and I still had muck in my eyes. The guy saw me, though, and he approached. I was still too winded to run, could only sit there and hope it wasn’t one of the Chinese guys.

  He stepped into the circle of light.

  It was one of the Chinese guys.

  Of course it was. Do you deserve any less, asshole?

  But no—it wasn’t one of the Chinese guys. It was just a Chinese guy. This one was wearing torn jeans over filthy long johns, a thick, black leather motorcycle jacket, and a Dead Kennedys T-shirt—the anarchic DK logo scribbled in red on black. His head was shaved, save for a row of six-inch liberty spikes down the center of his skull. He had a thin dusting of beard in that awkward transition phase, like he was still trying to decide whether to grow it out or not. He took a few steps closer to me, paused, and waved way too enthusiastically.