We’re one big happy nasty family, and I bask in the creepy comfort of it.
The family’s on vacation in a Wild West ghost town when I’m ten. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, my mind alive with visions of Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp, with the great Roy Rogers singing on Trigger.
But it’s nothing like that. Just old dead buildings. Not wild at all. No ghosts.
My father, my brother, and my two sisters pose American Gothic for a family snapshot on a platform atop a scaffold the hangman used for executing cattle rustlers and low-down no-account murderous thieves and such.
I’m standing slightly apart from everyone, noose around my neck, eyes bugging and arms stiff, a goofball kid criminal being hanged to death.
I’ve progressed from being shot at Christmas to hanging in the Old West.
Horse is his name. He’s the guy I saw in the Hollywood Employment Agency waiting room. I thought I’d see him in 3-D, and here he is. Horse. He’s still tight and black, but it turns out that under all that dark ice he’s like an oversized goofy twelve-year-old, telling a story, or laughing at a joke, or saying hey to a friend. Then the next second he’s an old man.
Sunny introduces me to Horse. ‘Show the boy why they cawll ya Horse,’ Sunny laughs.
Horse smiles like he wants to be begged.
So Sunny begs.
‘Git it out! Come on, everybody… It’s showtime!’
Everyone gathers around Horse, who gets a funny crooked smile on his face with a trace of sad behind it. He likes the attention, you can tell, but at the same time I can see that he feels like a freak among freaks.
‘Listen here, ya better git that badboy out, or there’s gonna be trouble here ta-night!’ Sunny’s the ringmaster of bawdy debauchery, fueling the abused teenage hormones bouncing off the walls of 3-D.
Finally Horse unzips, fishes dramatically, and folds it out.
A baby’s arm with an apple in the fist. I believe that’s Tennessee Williams, but I’m not sure. Veins bulging like a relief map of the Amazon, it must weigh thirty pounds, and it looks like it’d take all the blood in his body just to fill it up. It’s a cock that could launch a thousand ships. The crowd gasps, mouths agape at the magnitude of the thing. I am floored, like when I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time.
Turns out Horse has been making money with it since he was ten years old, when his big sister charged her friends a quarter to look at it. By the time he was fourteen, that extraordinary organ was supporting his whole family. No one knows how old he is, but he makes a very good dollars.
Man, woman, doesn’t make any difference – if you got coin, you can have some kind of sex with Horse. It takes a lot of money for him to actually put it in you, but you can pay to look at it, or touch it, or whatever else you want. If you pay, Horse will play.
He launches into a story about some trick who paid him three Gs to rub his thing on the guy’s feet. He says it was a good business lesson, because he didn’t want to do it, so he kept saying no, and the more he said no, the more money the trick offered him, until suddenly he was at three Gs, and he said yes. Turns out it was the easiest money he ever made: He rubbed it on the trick’s feet for about thirty seconds, the freak cums, and that’s it. He says he felt so bad taking all that money he almost gave some of it back.
Almost.
He waits a long time for the second ‘almost,’ and he gets the big laugh.
‘Three grand for thirty seconds’ work … damn, my mama’d be proud. She always said I’d make it in the white man’s world.’
I saw Horse years later on the box of a pornographic movie, dressed as an old-time king surrounded by five or six very big-haired big-breasted babes staring struck dumb at his monument to manhood. He was wearing a crown, and that same sad sly crooked smile I saw that night in 3-D.
I smiled when I saw that box. There’s Horse, making it in the white man’s world. And the name of the movie, I believe, was King Dong.
Turns out Horse’s real name is Gordon.
I’m nine. Lulu’s our maid in Hueytown. She’s a deep-black woman with a molasses heart, and a warm well of patience, good sense, and human kindness. She introduces us to the rapture of barbecued chicken, the smoldering majesty of black-eyed peas, and the soothing beauty of sweet potato pie.
Lulu brings us baked goodies that make you glad you were born, and my mom gives her clothes and books for her kids. The other families make their maids take the bus home, but my mom drives Lulu in our faux-wood-paneled station wagon.
When we cross the railroad tracks into Coon Town, as my schoolmates at George Wallace Elementary School call it, I see big huge cars parked in front of crippled shanties with FOR RENT signs on them. Looking at those beat-to-shit, ramshackle shacks, I think, ‘Who in their right mind would want to rent a place like that, and why is there a shiny new car in front of it?’
Row after row of busted-up hovels and barefoot chilluns running with scrawny chickens pecking in dusty front yards next to nasty-looking skinny-ribbed dogs sniffing around for something to eat. When I see footage years later of Shantytown in apartheid-era South Africa, I’m reminded of taking Lulu home to the wrong side of the tracks.
My mom loved Lulu because Lulu was a remarkable woman who was managing to thrive in a hostile environment. It never dawned on my mother to consider what color Lulu was.
Jade wears a red leather micromini and a tiny red T that stops two inches above her belly button. She wears no shoes. Her hair is long and straight and shines like midnight oil. She’s little, but she takes up a lot of room dancing in the corner by herself, doing a hybrid Kabuki-geisha-hustle as Jimi Hendrix plays ‘Foxy Lady.’ She looks tough, like she doesn’t need anything or anyone, but freaky, like you could ask her to blow you on the White House lawn, and if she was in the right mood she’d do it. Turns out this is very close to the truth. She materialized out of the thinnest air. I don’t know anything about her, but I’ve already fallen deeply sweetly madly in love with her.
Kristy can’t dance like that.
When Sunny witnesses my Jade swoon, he leans in way close, puts his hand on my chest above my heart, his lips sucking distance from my ear, and whispers like my guardian devil:
‘Don’t even think ’boutit, boy!’
‘Who is she?’ I’m a man hearing what he wants to hear and disregarding the rest.
‘No, baby. Ah know my lips was movin’, but somehow the woids didn’t make it to your ears. Ah said, “Don’t. Even. Think. “Boutit.”’
He gets his Serious Sunny face on. It’s the same face he put on when he told me not to pull anything funny with the Hollywood Employment Agency, cuz they were people who would seriously kill you. Get the money up front.
‘Goil messed up,’ Sunny says.
‘We’re all messed up, Sunny,’ I say.
‘Yeah, but that goil MESSED UP!’ Sunny says.
‘Okay, you warned me. Now, who is she?’ I am persistent and stupid holding hands.
‘She Jade,’ says Sunny.
Jade.
With the money she’s probably making and the money I’m making, we could get a bitching apartment, a nasty car, a killer Harley, and we could have crazy freaky sex every day. How cool would that be? I can see the whole thing so clearly.
Jade.
9.
JADE
Love stinks.
—J. GEILS BAND
JADE’S NOT her real name. She never tells me her real name, and I never ask. No one knows where she lives. She drives a kooky pink convertible and she never wears shoes, even in restaurants.
I’m tooling up the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down in the pink of Jade’s convertible, cool seasalty air breezing our hair, the moon shining on the ocean and ‘Good Vibrations’ washing over us from the radio.
She doesn’t say anything, hasn’t spoken since we left the party. The only reason I know her name’s Jade is because Sunny told me so. In fact the only thing she said
to me all night was ‘You wanna go for a ride?’
But when she did I was out the door faster than you can say, ‘Heel, boy!’
I caught Sunny giving me his you’re-an-idiot-to-walk-out-that-door-with-that-girl look, but all I could do was shrug him a whattayagonnado? smile as I was swept like a felled tree down Jade’s flume.
One part of me wants her to talk, wants to know how this girl got to be Jade. But another part of me just doesn’t want to hear all her weepy stories, doesn’t want to tell her mine.
Then I remember reading in a magazine that living the High Life is just a state of mind. If you think you’re living the High Life, ipso facto, presto chango, you’re living the High Life. I have large cash money in my pocket. I’m roaring up the Pacific Coast Highway with all this Jade. I’m living the High Life.
But Kristy’s sitting in the living room of my mind. I should call her. I don’t wanna call her. I don’t need her.
I have Jade.
* * *
When I’m ten my dad pulls me aside after church one Sunday, and there, with Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior nailed to the cross and bleeding for my sins right over my head, he says, ‘Son, one day you’ll fall in love with a nice girl, and, well … you’ll want to make love to her. You’ll know you’re in love because your organ will become engorged with blood … Your partner’s whatsit will secrete a thick lubricant … you’ll mount her, penetrate, and thrust until you ejaculate your spermatozoa. The good news, son, is that if it’s done properly, you can get the whole thing over with in less than a minute!’
I’m sure that’s not actually what he said, but that’s what I remember. I spend the next few years trying to figure out where I’m gonna get a bloody organ, what I’m gonna lubricate it with, and where I’m gonna find something from the spermatazoic era to ejaculate.
Encased in steel and glass, I can see the Pacific Ocean waving at me all the way from Japan. I don’t know whose place this is, or why Jade has the key, or even where the hell I am, for that matter, but I am living the High Life.
Jade Asian handmaiden lapdances all around me. She still hasn’t spoken a word since we got here, and the more she doesn’t say anything, the more normal it seems, and the more I like it. All those words. What’s the point?
Jade lays out her equipment with the precision of an alchemist. Lights her candle. Lays her spike on the table. Dumps her white powder into her spoon. Floats her spoon under flame until her white powder melts into a spermy liquid. Draws clear liquid meticulously through the filter of a cigarette into her spike.
Today, kids, Mr. Wizard’s gonna teach you how to shoot heroin.
Jade lifts her skirt, finds a nice spot on her bottom, slides the spike into it, and slowly pumps a river of junk into her hungry ass. Then she unplugs the spike, sets the works down on the table, and slowly the sleepy sweetness sweeps through her. Her head lollygags like a nodding bobbing head doll in the back of an old Chevy, her eyes drift off into the sunset, and she strolls off down Big Easy Street.
She looks over at me. She wants me to come over.
The lady or the tiger.
In a heroin haze Jade pulls on me, so my belt buckle ends up next to her mouth. Looking down at her, I’m struck by how exquisitely absent she is. Part of her allure is physical, certainly, but part of it comes from the fact that she is just so far away. I want to reach down inside and pull her out.
Jade makes me her human pacifier, moaning low in the back of her throat like a big cat purring. Later I’ll find out she charges a thousand dollars an hour, and for that you can do whatever you want to Jade. She could work 24/7 if she wanted, but she only calls Sunny when she wants to work. Sometimes she calls ten times in a day, sometimes once in a month.
Somebody tells me later she’s from some millionaire family in the Orient. Somebody else says she’s the daughter of a Yakuza hired-killer heroin dealer. Somebody tells me she’s an orphan from Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
Jade brings me right to the edge and takes me back over and over, jacked right into my pleasure centers. Everything shuts out except Jade.
We have all our clothes on the whole time. Strange, I think, at this point in my life I work naked and have sex with my clothes on.
Jade reaches in her little bag she always carries with her, and pulls out something I can’t see.
OH GOD!
It’s a razor blade! I see me walking into the emergency room with my severed member in my hand. I see Sunny shaking his head, going, ‘Ah wahned ya, boy!’
It’s not a razor blade. It’s some lubey thing that makes me slip right into Jade, and she squeezes me like I’m dough she’s kneading.
Jade wants me to bodyslam her. So I am her madman, and I ram her with everything I’ve got. Her body goes dead limp, and she makes the same animal throat noises she was making before. She’s my junky Raggedy Ann and I’m her loverstudguy Andy.
Finally, when I let myself go, I shake like I’m attached to an industrial-strength paint mixer, ten-point-oh on the Richter scale, and leave my mind behind, screaming and wailing.
When I parachute back down, she’s kind of whimpering. I’m proud I could rock this girl’s world. Then I realize it’s not a sex whimper. Jade’s crying.
All of a sudden she doesn’t seem like some hot mysterious flower of the East. She seems like a sad broken little heroinaddict girl. What am I doing here? What am I doing? I want to go now. I want to be in my own bed. I want to be in my own life.
Jade disengages, collapses, and lapses into a deep sleep before she even hits the pillow, like she was shot by a sniper with a silencer.
In the morning after, Jade’s gone. I search the whole house for her, but Jade’s gone. I have a little-boy panic, synapses twitching with the memory of searching a vacant house for my mother.
Stop. Breathe. I put together another emergency meeting of the What Am I Gonna Do? Committee and decide to call Sunny, who comes and gets me, bitching and moaning the whole time with a litany of I-told-you-so’s and when-will-you-ever-listen-to-me’s, essential ingredients in any humble pie.
In the future, when I yearn for her, I remind myself of the long ride back to 3-D, with that cold underneath feeling of being ditched by Jade.
10.
BABA RAM
WAMMALAMMA-DINGDONG
It is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence,
and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic
in Eden.
—ELIZABETH BOWEN
LAUREL CANYON is an enchanted eucalyptus oasis in the middle of this Hollywood smogfarm metropolis. As I enter the log cabin house set behind a wildflower jasmine jungle, a solid block of patchouli incense musk nearly knocks me over. With driftwood tie-dye batik beanbags wind chimes macrame´ hanging plants and Mexican day-of-the-dead skeleton art everywhere, it looks like Woodstock exploded in Rainbow’s house.
Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey Jones, you better watch your speed…
Jams through the room.
Rainbow has long straight gray hair, wears feather earrings and a long tie-dyed dress with a hippie happy Buddha face on it I later realize is supposed to be Jerry Garcia. No makeup. No shoes.
‘Hi, come in. Want some ginseng tea?’ wafts out of Rainbow.
The customer’s always right. When in Rome, drink ginseng tea. While she fetches me tea, I survey lots of pots of pot plants. And cats. I count four, but I feel the presence of many more, and when I close my eyes I smell cat hanging under that pagan lovechild aroma.
‘Do you dig the Dead?’
Rainbow returns with my tea in a psychedelic homemade mug with a drawing of a face I later realize is supposed to be Jerry Garcia. The tea smells too earthy and dank for drinking, but I bring the Mother Earth medicine scent up to my lips and sip.
It’s good. And good for me.
She’s looking at me like she expects something. Oh, yeah – do I dig the dead? I’m conf
used. Is this some weird necrophilia deal Mr Hartley forgot to tell me about? Do I feel comfortable with that? Not really. No, she means Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead. I see me digging a grave and putting a dead Jerry Garcia in it.
‘Sure, I dig the Dead …’
I trot out my best hippieboy smile. Actually, I could care less about the Dead. Or the dead. I’m here to get paid. I look around for my envelope. No envelope. I don’t like that. I’m looking for a low-maintenance score, get in, get out, badda bing badda boom.
‘They’re so … essential, don’t you think?’ Rainbow says in that earnest way only hippies and Christians have.
Essential? The Dead? Sure, why not? But the really essential thing is: Where the hell’s my goddam money?
Relax, cowboy, you’re gonna get paid, go with the flow, flowing, in the flow.
‘Absolutely, yeah … sure …’ I’m nowhere near the flow.
‘I believe Jerry is the physical embodiment of the Godhead, don’t you?’ says Rainbow.
Hey, someone wants to pay me to say Jerry Garcia is the physical embodiment of the Godhead, that’s Easy Money.
‘Yeah, I can definitely see that …’
‘Give me your hand,’ says Rainbow.
I give her the hand. She takes it.
‘You have big hands,’ she says.
In my line of work that’s a compliment.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
She looks at me funny, like it wasn’t a compliment at all, just a statement of fact. But she doesn’t really seem to care, she’s looking into my palm like it holds the key to the sweet mysteries of life.
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