by Ken O'Steen
I was numb. Especially my gums. Bob had sent me off into the world with the only survival kit of any value, then: a gram of coke. It was the day when the word had come to him that the selling of the house had been finalized. He actually did something he’d done only once or twice over the years we’d been there: he knocked on the door of the guesthouse. When I joined him for a shot and a cigarette in the “big house,” he offered me the packet as a kind of parting consolation gift. My perception of his generosity was mitigated by the knowledge that he hated stimulants, and that his supplier occasionally threw in a package of powder with the usual order as a tangible form of gratitude to the best of his clientele. Bob accepted these gifts as if delighted to get them, knowing he could pass them on. There was certainly a measure of generosity in that. So every so often, I would receive a granular surprise from Bob.
After Lila had gone, and after I had amply commiserated with the detritus left behind from our time of never unwelcome stasis on the Westside, as on every similar special occasion in the past I followed the rituals attendant to ingesting what I assumed every other intelligent person considered to be the miracle elixir. Every chop, sniff, taste and rubbing of membrane yielded frissons of long lost and sublime anticipation, if akin to anything, perhaps akin to the excitement of the wildly improbable expectations of pubescent youth out on the town for the night, mercifully sans the atrocities of pubescence. It was certainly a “sober” realization of “maturity” that the only consumer item always worth its cost was drugs. It was one life lesson learned: the one sure and reliable path toward genuine physical ecstasy, and emotional uplift, temporarily at least, can be found through the consumption of the world’s natural properties which avail such benefits, aided only by man’s ingenuity, and perhaps some functional knowledge of chemistry. As of this writing, no one was in possession of knowledge of a permanent path…no matter the propaganda.
In this case, anticipation of the insouciance of this guaranteed artificial high, when facing that conspicuously frightening and relatively catastrophic moment, was the only thing that could conceivably mitigate the trauma of the moment’s approach, reliably ensuring something in that moment worthy of looking forward to. The numbness was the happy numbness antecedent to a customary form of numbness shortly to ensue, the sort inherent in a condition of permanent roaming. Likewise, it was a last grasp of invulnerable joy that was prelude to the miserable vulnerability of sleeping where and when you can. As it came to pass, it was surely the preferable way to tiptoe into the shallows of a reality that promised to drop off soon enough into depths lower than anything for which you might have prepared yourself by consulting Zagat. It would become clear right away when the numbness was gone, that this vast city, vast under any circumstance, when relegated to foot travel without recourse could cause you to regard the prospect of it much as you would the water if you were floating on a board in the middle of Lake George.
The first encounter with danger occurred when attempting to cross the parking lot of Fat Burger on Westwood Boulevard, where little could be more dangerous than salt and grease addicts pulling away from a drive-thru window aching to expedite their fix. Even with my recreational self-poisoning by “dangerous” drugs, my life expectancy promised to be much greater than theirs. I made this observation as a recovering salt and grease addict myself…one day at a time indeed. The stanchion for a streetlight just beyond the parking lot provided a convenient support to lean against, so I stopped, and removed the Stoli bottle, still a quarter full, from my bag and took a sip. The good feelings, far from nearing extinction were still on a rising trajectory. Bouncing from corner to corner during the traversal of Century City later in the night, the threat from limousines stretched to the length of barges, moving at speeds that had them gulping resources more thirstily than liquid fueled rockets, was no minimal threat to one peripatetic aficionado of socially menacing narcotics. Another walk through the valley of the shadow of death was the exit drives of upscale cocktail factories, where SUV’s rolled out of lots like Tyrannosauruses thundering off the steppes, coming at me from every direction.
The streets themselves seemed to be swirling with gilded malignance. Nevertheless, I could find many a hideaway where I could nip at vodka, so my outlook remained cheery; barely less artificial than that of cheerleaders of every race, religion or creed proclaiming as much from podiums, or talk show sofas everywhere; American cheerfulness as intoxicating as Apple Jack. Perhaps as much fun as anything was watching multiple Ollie Norths on a bank of televisions inside the window of Good Guys. A priest came and stood beside me, watching them with me. We were aware from the profusion of graphics on the screen, and the identities of guests, well labeled as they were, that the discussion concerned the right presumed by some to exist in the Bill of Rights to possess a weapon. It had to have been my imagination, or my artificial sense of fun causing me to react giddily to what sounded like the noise of rapidly discharging rounds wafting across an area code or two. After a minute, the priest turned to me, nodding toward the choir of silent Ollies, shook his head and said tartly, “What a pantomime of deceit.” Some taint of Jesuitical crypticness perhaps, but I agreed with him, I was almost certain.
I made myself a guest at a number of bus stops, taxi stands, plaza benches, and hotel entrances blessed with doormen; visited with a wide diversity of Angelinos enjoying the out of doors, all of my socializing of a convivial, sometimes bacchanalian nature, the escalating joie de vivre of transgressive origins causing me to converse with greater enjoyment to myself certainly, and to others if I gauged correctly. I crossed a picket line, though only to get to the other side. According to signs and shouts, which I for one endorsed, health benefits and a living wage for dusters of offices and swabbers of toilets were offensive to the sensibilities of executives at advertising and media companies whose conglomerations occupied the buildings the dusters and swabbers dusted and swabbed.
When a suggestion of lethargy crept into my step, I sat myself down at a sidewalk table out front of a conspicuously sleek bistro. I asked the waitress to bring me a paper cup, which surprisingly she did. I slipped the Stoli out of the bag and filled the cup. Before too long I was marveling at how much time I could spend transfixed by the erotic magnetism of a patch of a woman’s calf visible between the heel of a pump, and the hem of a jean. I made friends, and before long was partying as if it were any other night in recent times. The breeze was mild; the palms were swooning; and bougainvillea was in the air.
When closing time came, I did not return to home as usual. A point was reached, after a good deal of walking, when I began to run out of gas. When I started to feel especially ragged, I began to search out a cranny to crawl into for a spell of rest, and a modicum of shelter. When I woke up in the morning, lying in a crumple between the brick of a building and a hedge, I discovered myself hungry, cold and extremely stiff. It was a day of tedium and tedious marching to nowhere. Eventually, I decided to march in the opposite direction, westward, away from the SRO that was to be my destination in another fortnight. The time it would take me to get there, from whatever starting point I finally would begin from was no longer of concern. Walking had never been tedious, but today it was. It was the first of many similar days.