by Tony O'Neill
Jeffrey nodded. The staccato thump of belt buckle on flesh resumed next door, as the pimp got back to work straightening out his girl.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
It was early evening in the Spotlight. At this time of the night there was an uneasy truce between the transvestites, the male prostitutes, and the speed freaks. Depending on what time of day you set foot in the Spotlight, one of these three social groups would dominate the bar. But at eight p.m., with the final rays of sunlight still creeping around the sticky black PVC curtain that hung in front of the door, and before the evening crowd had yet gotten good and drunk, no one particular group had dominance. A couple of lonely-looking men with five o’clock shadows and makeup melting off their faces sat close to the jukebox, sadly miming along to Sammy Davis Jr. singing “I Gotta Be Me.” Their faces told silent tales of lives gone horribly wrong, of worlds that had long since imploded. By the bar, an alcoholic with a long-ago broken nose that had healed up in such a way it looked like a smushed piece of Play-Doh was trying to convince a female barfly that he had connections in the movie industry. It was the oldest hustle in the book, and they both knew it, but they carried on the dance anyway, the gestures and lines worn smooth over the years with repetition.
“You could totally be in the movies,” he was saying to her, edging ever closer. He had been up all night already and his earlier bar friends were long gone. All he had going for him was a dog called Fuckface that was sleeping in the trunk of his car and three months of unpaid rent on the roach-infested hole he called his apartment. The object of his attentions looked to be in her late forties, and brightly colored patches of makeup gave her the look of a battered wife.
“Well, I do got legs,” she was saying, stretching one of them out and looking at the calf admiringly. “My second husband was from the Dominican Republic. He used to go crazy for my legs. He was shot and killed three years ago.”
“They are great legs,” the man said. “Who shot your husband?”
“The guy who worked at the 7-Eleven he was robbing. I heard the guy was a Buddhist or a Hindu, or one of those fuckin’ crazy things. The ones who worship cows and shit. Anyway, I thought those bastards were all pacifists. He sure as hell wasn’t a pacifist when he blew poor Enrique away. Goddamn his soul.”
“That’s a tough break. . . . You got your SAG card? I know a guy who can get you one if you need it. . . .”
In the back room, under the glow of the Coors sign, Randal looked at Spider. Spider had a vaguely familiar look about him. Maybe it was that he reminded Randal of vermin. He had a long, pointed nose that seemed to be missing whiskers, but no—it was something else. He looked like a dwarf in reverse. Like somebody had transplanted a child’s face onto an adult’s body. Sure, it was wrinkled and fucked up, but somehow the features still looked childlike. He may have been cute as a kid, but now there was something grotesque about him, unnatural.
Spider drained a shot of Wild Turkey and washed it back with a slug of beer. He looked over at Jeffrey. “So what’s the deal?” he said. “You said that you had some business for me.”
“You still got those connections in the porn industry?”
At the mention of his porn connections, Spider suddenly got antsy. He looked at Randal and said, “What’s Jeffrey been telling you?”
Randal shrugged. “Just that you know some people. That’s all.”
“Be cool, Spider. Randal’s good people. He’s okay.”
“I just don’t like to talk about that shit,” Spider said, glaring at his empty bourbon glass.
“Another?” Randal said, getting up before Spider had a chance to say yes. Before the meeting, Jeffrey had told Randal the whole story of Spider’s career in porn. He heard that there had been some kind of a stink on an S and M video he’d done a few years ago that made him pretty much unemployable within the mainstream porn industry. Something to do with a strangulation scene that went wrong. The way that Jeffrey told it, nobody had even realized that the kid was dead until after Spider had ejaculated. The Russian mafia financed the films, and they had forced Spider to help dispose of the corpse. The dead kid was illegal, underage, and vanished as if he had never even existed.
· · ·
“I mean, you gotta imagine the effect this had on him,” Jeffrey had explained back in the hotel room. “Spider supposedly doesn’t dig guys anyway. Now he has to fuck this Russian kid while tightening a leather belt around his throat. Afterward, Spider realizes the kid died and now not only is he a faggot for money, he’s a necrophiliac, too. And it’s all on tape. The guy shooting the video hands Spider a handsaw and tells him to get to work while he goes to buy a shovel and some lime. Let’s just say that Spider didn’t do movies for a while after that.”
When Randal returned with the drink, Spider’s mood had changed again. Jeffrey and Spider were having a conversation that, judging from the smiles on their faces, could only be about drugs.
“You got some go fast?” Spider said, shooting a gap-toothed grin at Randal. “You mind if I, uh . . . ?”
“Sure.” Under the table, Randal passed the baggie to Spider.
“Be right back, boys!” he said, walking toward the bathroom.
Once he was out of sight, Jeffrey said, “I don’t know why the fuck we’re dealing with this guy. He’s a total fuckup.”
“I can see he’s a total fuckup. But that’s beside the point. He knows Dimitri Barakov, who is big fucking time in the porn industry. I’ve heard of that motherfucker—he’s a billionaire. You won’t hear his name mentioned at those fucking Adult Movie conventions, but he bankrolls everything.”
· · ·
“Man, I just don’t think that the fucking Russian mafia is the direction we should be taking this. This is movie history, man. We need to get it into the hands of a proper collector. . . .”
“I agree,” Randal hissed, “but we don’t got time for that. If we sell to Du Wald we have to pay out Stevie. There’s no time to find another freak like Rupert. If Spider’s porn connections matched the offer, we’d take one hundred percent. I mean, Spider might want a cut, but believe me, I can read people. This guy? He’s a first-class moron. We could probably pay him off with some fucking meth and he’d be happy. People are looking for us right now, you said it yourself. We need to cash this shit in and get the fuck out of LA. Right?”
“Right,” Jeffrey conceded.
As soon as Spider returned, Randal took the baggie from him and snorted more himself. He shivered under the bathroom’s short-circuiting fluorescent light. The chemical stench of the speed made his lungs feel as though they had been scrubbed out with Ajax. He was snorting more and more of it, just to keep the fear away. He knew that he was right around the corner from another insane, self-destructive bout. As many times as he had put himself through this and sworn that he would never do it again, Randal seemed incapable of avoiding doing the same fucking thing over and over. Once he started up on meth, he knew that he needed it daily. He needed it to get out of bed in the morning. He needed it to think straight. He needed it to fuel this whole caper, so that he could escape and never look back. He could sense that he was days away from starting up with needles again, and when that happened. . . . Snorting a huge nostril full of the burning powder from the tip of his car key, Randal again made himself a promise.
Once we sell the tape and get out of LA, I will never do this shit again.
He didn’t laugh as he thought this.
He flushed the toilet and walked back out to the bar. His brain was frantically spinning off in many different directions.
He slid back into his seat, his eyes burning holes through the ozone. As he sat down, it came to him in a moment of idiot genius. Why Spider’s face was so familiar.
“ . . . toldja what that motherfucker did to me. You know they sold that fucking clip, anyway? Out there somewhere, some corpse fucker is using it for jerk-off material.”
“That’s rough.”
“But you know . . . I could m
ake the call. It would have to come through me. But you know, I have a relationship with those guys, so if I’m gonna put my good name out there . . . there’d better be something in it for me. So what is it? What’s this big deal that you’re trying to unload? It is porn, right?”
Jeffrey nodded his head. Spider dropped his voice down.
“Specialist stuff, huh? What is it? Kids? Animals? It’s okay. I’m broad-minded. You won’t offend me. . . .”
“Little Wonder!” Randal finally blurted, when he could hold his tongue no longer. “You were in Little Wonder. You were Jimmy! The neighbor’s kid!”
· · ·
At the mention of these words, Spider’s face collapsed in upon itself. He scowled and then emptied his glass with a flourish.
“What the fuck’s a little wonder?” Jeffrey asked no one in particular.
“Yeah, that was me. So fucking what?” Spider spat.
“Little Wonder was this great TV show. Back when I was a kid. Ahead of its time. Too fuckin’ dark for network TV. Didn’t the scientist . . . Mr. Fester . . . didn’t he murder his son during the opening credits?”
“It wasn’t murder. It was an accident. In the lab.”
“Right. He kills his son in some kind of terrible accident. Remember, this is a sitcom aimed at the same audience as Punky Brewster. He kills his kid and then attempts to hide the crime by building a replacement. A robot kid. Little Wonder!”
Jeffrey looked at Spider through slit eyes.
“You played a robot on a TV show?”
“No!” Spider sneered, as if the very idea were preposterous. Then he quietly added, “I played the kid who lived next door to a robot. The one that knew that the kid was a phony. I was always trying to catch out Mr. Fester.”
“Shit,” Randal said, shaking his head in wonder, “how long did you guys last? A season or two at most, right?”
“Seven episodes.”
“Jesus. Seven episodes. It was like a fucking Shakespearean drama, I’m telling you.” Randal slipped the baggie of meth to Jeffrey. “It was ahead of its time. People weren’t ready for that shit. Today, on HBO, maybe. You can get away with weird, dark shit like that. But back then on the networks . . . ”
· · ·
“They killed us,” Spider said, matter-of-factly. “Killed us. I never worked again. Landon Bruce, the guy who played Mr. Fester . . . he did a few episodes of The Love Boat and then burnt his face up in an accident on the set of some Italian movie about cannibals. After that . . .” Spider shrugged.
“What about the kid? What about Little Wonder?”
“AIDS. Heard the chick he married was a junkie. You know how that goes.”
They sat and considered this for a moment. Over by the bar, the guy with the broken nose was rubbing the thigh of the barfly and whispering filth into her ear. She was giggling and for a moment she looked like a fourteen-year-old girl. Jeffrey said, “I’m gonna powder my nose,” and split for the bathroom.
When they were alone Randal said, “You should write a book, man. One of those fucking tell-alls.”
“Fuck off,” laughed Spider. “Get me a drink.”
“I’m serious! Think of all of the kids our age who were scarred for life by that show.”
“They don’t wanna hear stories like mine!” Spider growled. “They want shit that’ll make them feel warm and gooey inside. Shit that won’t make ’em think too hard. They’d want me to say how I found God, or love, or golf, or fuckin’ L. Ron Hubbard, or some shit. You know something, man? I’m already where I want to be. I got sixty dollars in my pocket, and I’m gonna pick up an eight ball of meth when we’re done here. I wouldn’t switch places with Leonardo DiCaprio right now. I got everything I need. Nah . . .”
He looked around the bar once more and grabbed Randal’s shoulder with a pleading, shaking hand. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.
“They don’t want that! They want the candy-coated, low-fat, mocha latte garbage that they’re used to! They like their junkies nice and presentable. They like ’em sorry. They like ’em boo-hooing and asking for forgiveness. Well, fuck that. Fuck writing books. Now . . . are you gonna buy me a fucking drink?”
Jeffrey sailed across the dirty floor like he was ice skating. He knocked on the table and said, “Well, ladies, what did I miss?”
Chapter Forty
It was later that evening. Spider clutched the phone. He listened to it ring. Nobody is going to pick up, he thought, maybe nobody will pick up. He was not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. Suddenly there was a click, and a voice said, “Yeah?”
“Hey, Jeff. It’s Spider. Uh-huh. Yeah, I’m calling about that thing. The THING. The thing we talked about, your MOVIE PROJECT?”
“Yeah, well, I spoke to Dimitri. Dimitri Barakov, yeah. Uh-huh. Anyway, this dude’s interested. Really interested. He’s a high roller, man. You know those porn guys. He finances the shit. Uh-huh. Out in the Valley someplace . . . someplace where, uh, rich white people live, I dunno. He doesn’t have me over for dinner or anything. Anyway, look—are you interested? He wants to meet.”
· · ·
“Dimitri. D-I-M-I-T-R-I. That’s all you need to know. Projector? Yeah, sure, he’s got all of that. He wants to meet you first. He wants to talk to you. He wants to see the item.”
“What? I dunno about that. Can’t he just come to where you guys are? Mac—Mac—really? MacArthur Park? Come on. This guy don’t wanna. He don’t. He . . . hold on.”
Spider covered the mouthpiece and said, “They want to meet in MacArthur Park. They’re as high as fucking kites right now, all tweaked out and shit. They’re paranoid. They wanna do it in public. ‘See the whites of your eyes,’ he said. . . .”
Spider was careful as he recited this, very aware of the gun that was resting on Pat’s lap. He got the nod. Took his hand off the receiver.
“Okay, I’ll tell him. Lemme get a pen.”
Spider said this even though there was a pen and a notepad laid out for him already. He picked it up and started to write. When he was done he said, “Okay, I got it. When are we gonna talk about my fee? Oh, yeah, this guy’s serious. He’ll take it right off of you if it isn’t bullshit. Okay. Okay. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, right after you guys are done, okay? Peace.”
Spider replaced the handset. Everything was silent in Pat’s motel room for a moment. Then Trina walked out from the bathroom, clapping her hands slowly.
“Fucking bravo,” she said.
Pat cocked the gun, pointing it away from Spider.
“Good,” he said, “you did good.”
Spider passed the notepad over to Pat. “Tomorrow, at noon. This is the address. It’s a fast-food joint.”
Pat looked it over. “Fuckin’ MacArthur Park, man. There’ll be cops all over the place. This is gonna require some fucking diplomacy.”
Spider shrugged. After a moment he said, “So I guess we’re done here?”
“I guess.”
“So is it cool for me to, uh . . . ?” Spider looked toward the door.
“Sure,” Pat said, cracking a grin. “Go right ahead.”
Spider looked at Trina, doubtfully. She smiled at him. Spider stood, slowly, wary of making sudden movements, considering the loaded gun in Pat’s hand. Spider shrugged and looked around the room one more time. His eyes fell on the pile of meth that was heaped on the nightstand.
“Hey, Pat, you, uh, mind if I . . . ? You said I could get an ounce.”
Pat grinned even wider.
“Sure, baby. You wanna take it with you now?”
Spider nodded slowly.
Pat gestured to the bureau. “There’s some packages weighed out in there. Take one.”
Spider looked at Pat again. Pat was grinning still. “Okay, cool,” Spider said, “thanks, Pat.”
“Anytime. I appreciate the help, Spider.”
Spider walked over to the bureau and opened it. Inside were several fat packages stuffed full of meth. Spider took one, hel
d it up for Pat to see, and then pocketed it. He looked at Trina, who was leaning against the wall, arms folded, regarding Spider with curious indifference on her face.
“Well,” Spider said, straightening up and walking toward the door, “I guess I’ll see you two around.”
“Lemme see you out,” Pat said. He stood and walked toward Spider. Spider tried the door, but it was locked.
“Ya need to open that dead bolt, up there,” Pat said, pointing upward.
Spider reached up, and as he did so, Pat clubbed him on the back of the skull with the handle of the gun. With a grunt Spider fell to the floor. Pat sat on top of him and smashed the gun into Spider’s skull several times, with brutal grunts. The flesh split, exposing bone underneath, and blood sprayed lightly on Pat’s face. When he was done, Spider was bleeding and unconscious.
“Can you believe that motherfucker?” Pat said to Trina as he washed the blood off his face in the bathroom sink. “Thinking he was gonna walk out of here with an ounce of my shit!” Pat laughed his wheezy laugh.
Trina peered down at Spider. Pat was right, she thought, it’s easier the second time. Her squeamishness was all gone.
“Stupid bastard,” she said.
“He had balls, though, I’ll give him that. I hope to fuck he doesn’t have AIDS or some shit. Motherfucker bled all over me.”
“Balls are overrated,” Trina said.
“Gimme the thing. The needle.”
As much as Pat hated to waste drugs, he used a massive overdose of an opiate called fentanyl to finish Spider off. He put the needle into the scarred, bulging vein running down Spider’s neck and fed the shit in slow. When Spider stopped breathing, Pat went down to his car and removed a tarp from the trunk. They wrapped the body in the tarp and carried him downstairs. They passed a woman on the stairs, and Pat said, “Howdy, ma’am,” to her as they passed. The woman ignored them and carried on upstairs. They stuffed Spider’s body in the trunk.
“Now where?” Trina asked, slightly out of breath.
“First we drop our friend off,” Pat said, nodding toward the trunk. “I know a Dumpster by Fifth and Alameda where homeboy will fit right in. Then . . . you in the mood for Korean food?”