Sick City

by Tony O'Neill

  Randal stood there, very still for a moment. Then, taking a deep breath, he said, “Okay. If that’s the way it’s gotta be, then fine. Tell Cheryl thanks for the room. I’ll call you about picking up the rest of my stuff. . . .”

  And then, Randal was gone.

  ——————

  He found the restaurant, a shady-looking hole in the wall surrounded by shops selling votive candles and bootleg Dora the Explorer dolls. It had a grimy-looking C rating in the window, and the inside looked dark and empty. Outside a winehead loitered, looking for change. There was a door covered with gang tags, with three unmarked buzzers. He rang each of them in turn. Nothing. He tried again, holding each one down for longer. Suddenly there was a buzzing, and the door unlocked momentarily. Randal pushed it open and stepped into the narrow stairwell, letting the door close behind him with a heavy clunk.

  The stairwell was bare concrete and dimly lit. Making his way up, he felt a familiar smell assault him, drowning out the background stench of stale urine. The smell of freshly cooked cocaine. His stomach knotted and unknotted in anticipation. As he made it up the first flight, the door immediately to his right opened a little, and a strange figure peeked out from the gloom. He was tall, at least six and a half feet, and dressed head to toe in black. Tight black denim jeans, cowboy boots that had been spray-painted black, a filthy black silk shirt open to the belly and exposing a corrugated, emaciated frame underneath. His face looked as though it were eating itself from the inside out, the sunken cheeks covered with coarse black hair that formed into a pointed goatee. The eyebrows were thick and prominent, the hair pulled back into a ponytail. The eyes seemed shocking amidst the monochromatic face—they were pale blue, like the iridescent glow of the ocean. They burned through Randal and made him feel breathless. In another life, this guy could have been the leader of a cult, or some kind of messianic figure. Randal approached him and said, “I’m here to see Jeffrey.”

  “Jeffrey is . . . indisposed right now,” the figure said. There was no doubting the voice. The same creepy, nasal whine that he had heard in room 317 of the Mark Twain. Randal would not be so easily dissuaded this time.

  “He called me and told me to come. I’d like to see him. Now.”

  The figure—Damian, for this must be his place—shook his head, but made no move to close the door. He was just testing Randal. Randal stood toe to toe with Damian. Damian had a few inches on him but was all skin and bone. Randal had no doubt that he could snap this motherfucker in two given the opportunity.

  “Now,” he insisted, leaving no room for interpretation.

  He shoved Damian aside and stepped inside the cavernous loft space. It was dark. The windows had black cloths draped over them, and the only light came from the flat-screen television that was blaring some particularly intense kind of S and M porn. It smelled in there. It smelled something awful. Body odor, crack, and drying semen. On-screen a young boy was tied up and being throat-fucked by a fat, hairy man in a leather mask. Randal gagged a little. In front of the flat screen was a futon. On the futon lay a figure that looked for all the world like the survivor of a Nazi death camp. Randal edged closer.

  All around the room were canvases, outrageously oversized canvases. The art was cartoonish, painted in vivid colors, and all with the same recurring visual joke. The largest one, the one that caught Randal’s eye straightaway, depicted a nude man, shackled by handcuffs. He was kneeling in front of a devil, replete with red skin and horns. Where the devil’s penis should have been, instead there was a huge, phallic crack pipe that was jutting out of the skin. The man was sucking on it with an agonized look on his face. The devil was looking toward the viewer, with a nasty grin. Scrawled across this image were the words SUCK IT, YOU SCUM in neon yellow cursive script. All of the canvases featured similar portraits of emaciated young men and women, either sucking on phallic crack pipes or with their own genitals transformed into limp syringes. They were the ugliest pictures Randal had ever seen.

  Randal shuddered; he wanted to get the fuck out of this place right now.

  He approached the figure and stopped. Around the futon were a few tripods—one with a rolling video camera focused on the figure, another with a still camera pointed toward the action. A pair of eyes, heavy and bloodshot, tried to focus on him. A cracked, bloody smile flickered across the lips. He was laying there in a cruciform position, the arms stick-thin, withered down to the bone, and the sallow chest exposed. The flesh of the arms was alive with red and purple weeping sores forming around the filthy, fresh injection sites. On the forehead was a large bloody welt that looked like some kind of grotesque, bleeding third eye. The hair was filthier and more matted than ever.

  “Hey, man,” the figure said, “long time no see. What’s been going on?”

  Randal shook his head and said, “Jeffrey. What the fuck did you do to yourself?” And when he said that, Jeffrey’s smile vanished, and he started to sob a little. The tears wouldn’t come, and his eyes stung; it had been days since he had drunk water or pissed, or did anything except suck on the pipe, probe with the needle, and wait for the morbid beating of his heart to stop. He tried to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but it came out all fucked up. Randal reached out to Jeffrey, and the odor that came up from him stuck in his throat, the smell of weeks without bathing, of weeks of sweat and filth and grime, of beating his penis bloody to pornography and filling his lungs with fetid, numbing crack smoke.

  “We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Randal said. He sensed that Damian was behind him, so he turned.

  “He’s coming with me,” Randal snarled.

  “But I’m not finished with him yet,” Damian said.

  “Oh yes you are, fuckhead. Get out of my way.”

  “No, wait—look. . . .” Damian gestured to a canvas that was half finished. There was a picture of Jeffrey, nude and splayed, the track marks somehow more terrible when rendered in neon pinks and yellows, both hands reaching down to his crotch, where he played with an enormous glass phallus that was vomiting white smoke rings into the air.

  “I call it The Eternal Orgasm. I already have a buyer for it. He took it on the basis of the initial sketches. . . .”

  “You mean people pay MONEY for this shit?”

  Damian sighed. “Don’t think that your philistinism impresses me, because it doesn’t. I am an artist. Jeffrey is my subject. I’ve been working on him for weeks. Trying to strip him down to his essential core. If I can’t capture his soul on the canvas, then the picture is a failure.”

  Randal looked around the loft.

  “Your shit looks like the work of a sexually frustrated twelve-year-old on magic mushrooms,” Randal said, “and your subject is coming with me. Come on, Jeffrey, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Damian shrugged. “Sure, whatever. He’ll be back.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What are you? His boyfriend or something?”

  “Keep talking, shithead. I’ll stick those fucking paintbrushes up your ass!”

  Randal turned away and helped Jeffrey to his feet.

  “My shit,” Jeffrey croaked.

  “You don’t need it.”

  “No! I mean, my bag. The stuff. Everything’s in there. Everything.”

  Randal scanned the room and saw a small canvas tote bag stuck away in the corner. It was one of those goofy, cheap canvas bags that they give away to promote movies, this one a comedy starring Eddie Murphy that had become notorious in Hollywood for losing almost ninety million dollars. Randal knew a few people who had lost their jobs over that stink. Hoping that this wasn’t an omen, Randal grabbed the bag.

  · · ·

  “Dude!” Damian said. “Leave your shit here. It’s cool. You can pick it up the next time you swing by. . . .”

  Randal walked over to Damian and, without warning, punched him firmly in the face. Damian’s nose exploded in a shower of crimson, and he collapsed to the floor. When he didn’t move, Randal gave him a curious prod with his
foot. Nothing. The bastard was unconscious.

  “I knocked the fucker out!” Randal said, almost to himself. Then he looked at Jeffrey, as he shook his aching hand. “I thought you could only do that in the movies! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  As Randal carried the bag down the stairs and supported Jeffrey’s stinking frame, he said, “What the fuck were you doing with fucking Lurch back there?” Jeffrey muttered, “Art, man. It’s fucking art . . . ,” his eyes turning back a little in his head. The coke was working its way out of his system, and unconsciousness threatened to take him before he had even made it to the car.

  “Fuck me,” Randal said as they took off, “I think I broke my fucking knuckle. That’s the first time I ever punched anyone, you know that? You want to go back to the hotel? Jeffrey?”

  Randal looked into the rearview mirror. Jeffrey was passed out, drooling slightly. As they crawled through the traffic heading toward Hollywood, Randal kept glancing in the rearview mirror. His hands were trembling. Jeffrey was snoring softly, and the bag was still there, a magical hangover from their days in the treatment center when the world had seemed full of possibilities, and the future theirs for the taking.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Dr. Mike was watching his wife’s mouth move. He knew there were words coming out of it, but all he could really hear was the furious, paranoid beating of his own heart. The only words he could focus on were the ones spoken by Detective Lang yesterday.

  . . . found dead . . . overdosed . . . hot pants fuchsia . . . cell phone rec-ords . . . prescription narcotics . . . repainting the guest bedrooms . . .

  “Huh?”

  Dr. Mike suddenly jerked out of his thoughts and looked at Anne, questioningly.

  “Hot pants fuchsia. It’s the color I want to use on the guest bedrooms. Marco says that hot pants fuchsia is really in right now and . . .”

  “Yeah, I’m all for it.” The doctor managed a weak grin.

  Anne looked at him sternly and took a sip from her glass.

  “Jesus, Mike. Could you at least pretend to give a shit? Marco said that with the housing market the way it is, a remodel like this would practically pay for itself. . . .”

  The doctor nodded, watching her wet red lips flap up and down. Inside his skull the Voice started up again. The Voice had started up as soon as he’d hung up the phone yesterday with the promise that he would stop by Lang’s office to answer questions . . . “informally.” It was increasing in ferocity as the hours dragged on, screaming at him, “You’re SCREWED! Ruined! Nice move blowing up that bitch’s cell phone! And leaving those fucking messages!” The Voice assumed a whiny, mocking tone and blubbered, “Oh, PLEASE, Champagne . . . ! Just call me back . . . let me know that you’re okay . . . I want to HELLLPP you . . . !”

  “ . . . And what’s more, Marco says that he could get us a deal on the draperies. You know, he knows a lot of queens in the business. . . .”

  As the doctor nodded dumbly, his mouth dry and his guts churning with that horrible childhood before-the-dentist feeling, the Voice demanded, “Jesus CHRIST! How could you be so fucking STUPID? Such an AMATEUR?”

  And that was the worst part of it. There was nothing the doctor could do but agree with the Voice. He had gone over the moment so many times in the last twenty-four hours that the images were permanently engraved in his mind. He had turned it over all of last night as he listened to Anne’s quiet, steady snores, praying for the relief of sleep. That moment, before the final liaison with Champagne, when he had looked over the bottles as he was shoving them into his bag, and he had actually thought, I’d better remove the labels. Why had he failed to act upon this notion? And when Champagne had asked for more prescriptions, that moment of hesitation before writing something that could be so easily traced back to him. . . . Why? Why had he shrugged away that hesitation and done something so bone-headed anyway?

  This thought led him back to another memory worn smooth over the years with relentless, anguished replays. Ten years earlier, when Anne had been pregnant with Michael Jr. and coming back on an early-morning flight from Houston . . . and the girl, Tamara, had been ushered out of the house and into a waiting cab. As he had stood, watching the cab driving away, he’d suddenly thought, I’d better check the bed. Tamara was needy and young, and he wouldn’t have put it past her to leave some token of her presence in their marital bed. And after thinking this, he had shrugged, went to the shower, and left for work as usual.

  Back then, it had been a thong, scrunched up and shoved underneath Anne’s pillow, that had blown his world apart . . . resulting in a separation that lasted until after Michael Jr. was born, five years of worthless relationship counseling that had left things in more of a mess than before, and the sexual stalemate that had defined the next ten years of their marriage. Replaying that incident over the years he had come to a conclusion that seemed terribly prescient now:

  In some strange, unspoken way he had WANTED to get caught. And today, with this new tsunami of hurt about to engulf him, he knew that the only explanation for his behavior was that he had wanted to get caught again. He smiled a nauseated smile as he thought this, and the smile seemed to spur Anne on further in her monologue. She seemed utterly oblivious to how pale and weak her husband appeared.

  Arriving at this conclusion, Dr. Mike felt as though he were standing on the edge of some great, gaping black maw. He felt a sense of desolation and sadness greater than anything he had ever known before. He knew that he had now gotten exactly what that rotten, fucked-up, self-flagellating part of his psyche had wanted all along. Instead of pitching himself into the void, the void would swallow everything around him. His wife. His kids. His career. Everything he had been building since his days as a radio host back in Santa Barbara. All of it was about to be sucked away from him. If he had been his own patient, he would have looked at himself with a knowing smile and said, “You have a narcissistic personality, with a deep, repressed masochistic streak. You also have some issues with sexual compulsion that I think we need to work on.” But now that he was analyzing himself from the other side of the desk, the words seemed hollow, empty, and not at all encompassing of the complex, unique person he felt he was.

  “Anne,” he said suddenly, his own voice taking him by surprise, “we have to talk.”

  “We ARE talking, Mike. Jesus, can’t you ever let me finish without interrupting? You do this all of the damn time and it’s—”

  “Shut UP! For Christ’s sake, won’t you just shut up and LISTEN to me!”

  · · ·

  This silenced her, as effectively as a slap to the face. They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Now that he knew in his heart that he was about to lose her, she suddenly seemed beautiful to him once more. The coldness and the hardness that he’d long perceived in her face now seemed to melt away, revealing hidden traces of the woman he had fallen in love with all those years ago when they had met working in local radio. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He slipped them back on and his gaze met hers.

  In a faltering voice, Dr. Mike said, “Anne. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Things had been bad all week. Trina had spent most of her time in the motel, waiting for Pat to return from prowling the streets, trying to get a lead on Jeffrey. His already terse style of communication had gotten even more tight-lipped than usual, so that he barely even grunted at her anymore. Trina began to fear that unless something changed, Pat could conceivably decide to take off without her. The one thing that Trina feared more than anything else was being abandoned. For once in her life someone had taken her in, looked after her. Now she felt as though she were incrementally losing Pat with each successive day.

  Sometimes, alone in the motel room, she would pull out the briefcase that contained the money. She even tried to open it, but found that Pat had locked it and changed the combination. She pushed aside the dread feeling that this discovery gave her. More tha
n once, the thought had crossed her mind to empty the case and split by herself. It sometimes seemed that it would be the only way to protect herself. If Pat beat her to the punch, she would be stranded. No job, no money, nothing. With this kind of money, she supposed, she could disappear. At the very least she could get her goddamned nose fixed.

  But fear kept her rooted to the spot. Fear of having to start over somewhere new. But most of all, fear of Pat. He seemed to have a sixth sense about people, and she imagined that he could probably hear these thoughts as they went on in her head. Just thinking about leaving seemed like a dangerous thing to do. Sometimes she caught him looking at her. Not looking at her the way he looked at her when he wanted to fuck her, but in a different way. Looking at her like a butcher might look at a slaughtered pig, deciding the best way to chop the animal down into its component pieces. As soon as the thoughts of leaving would surface, she’d shout them down.

  Pat is my man. We’ve gone through something together, something that means that you stick together for life. I saw him kill a man. I helped him to kill a man.

  This is our life now. Like Bonnie and fucking Clyde.

  This childish thought gave her some comfort. Sometimes, alone in the motel room, she would shoot some meth and stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror, playing with Tyler’s gun. She’d point the gun at the mirror, admiring the way she looked holding it.

  “Beg me if you wanna live, motherfucker!” she would whisper to herself. It made her feel good, it made her feel more real than she’d ever thought possible. For once, her life was as colorful, vibrant, and REAL as the movies were. In those moments she felt what she guessed was true love for Pat. Someone had finally liberated her from the tyranny of dull, disappointing reality.