“How now, Maceo Xijun,” it crowed, “Your land is your own, again, and the new age is upon us. The world shall tremble before the might of the people of the living god.”
Maceo bowed his head, but not in worship. He could not bear to look upon it—let alone smell it—any longer. “I gave you no sacrifice, but you took from me. . . You took all that I prayed to you to protect. . .”
“I took nothing from you, Maceo Nahuat Xijun; the life force took your wife, your daughter. It must be fed. There can be no rebirth without death.” It waved one bulldozer claw at the south. The smoke of Cancún burning was a door one hundred miles high hanging open, and beyond lay starless night. “Blood moves the sun through the heavens, but my appetites are more subtle.”
Maceo bit his lip. “Were you so treacherous with my ancestors?”
“But I am not the god of your ancestors,” the god laughed. “I am your god. And you did give me tribute. Your hate made me, Maceo Xijun. It fed me, and so I fed it, spirit feeding matter, matter feeding spirit, as with all things. Your sacrifice birthed me into the world and gave me flesh, power, worship—”
“I am nothing but hate, now, so take this as your last sacrifice,” said Maceo, laying bare his throat and looking up to the red-gold ruin of dawn. “Take my life—”
“I already have your life, do I not?” his god said, “and I have much use for it in this world.” The god leaned down into his face, diesel-sewage-sex-death breath making him gag.
He met its gaze for a moment, hoping this was only a joke. “You would still. . . have me be your priest—”
“No, Maceo Xijun, I would have you drive a cab.” Maceo’s face fell to the ground, so he had the small mercy that he did not see the face of his god as it added, “in Mexico City.”
WAITING ROOM
You probably all think you know everything you need to know about Augustus Drum, even if most of you don’t know his name. The “self-confessed domestic terrorist” is exactly who you made him, and turned the hate of the whole city, the whole world, on his head. You don’t realize this is exactly what he wants. You don’t have any idea how powerful he’s become.
We were bored and poor in the worst place on Earth to be those things. We were just looking for a new way to get by. But we fucked up so bad, we invented a new religion.
Right now, he wants nothing more than to be torn apart by an angry mob, or to spend the rest of his life in a cell, collecting death threats. That kind of hatred is a magical force purer than love, but it’s wild magic. One misstep can turn it into carcinogenic radiation stronger than gamma rays. But you’ll never touch him, let alone catch him. I think Gus has sealed all the openings of his body, now. He owns your hatred.
You’ve made him into a god.
•
The first night we met, he showed me just enough to save my life. Anyone would have fallen for him, sold their worldly possessions and moved out to his desert ranch to await Helter Skelter, if they met him like I met him.
I ran into him at Chigger Jones’s Waiting Room. Chigger was half-Chinese and half something else, not black, so bag the PC crap about the name. Those big red spider-ticks in the mountains that suck your blood until their abdomens burst: that’s where the name came from.
When you’re as tweaked as I was, time flows in subjective avalanches and snarls, so an engrossing solitaire tournament can fly by in minutes while the clock spins its hands off, or it can crawl backwards, when you’re on someone else’s schedule. No matter what time of day or night you called to score from Chigger, he’d say, “Come on down, I got you,” but you’d end up sitting on his couch for an hour or four while he ran around trying to hook up a wholesaler, watching infomercials and anime with the sound muted and horrible Bangkok hip hop cranked on the creaky stereo with only one speaker. Playing cribbage with Chigger’s manic-depressive Thai mail-order bride if you were lucky, nodding on the couch and trying to ignore the other customers in Chigger’s waiting room, if you weren’t.
I went out to my car to ransack the floorboards for an old magazine to read, and when I came back in, fuming and chewing a really tender hangnail, I almost tripped over this scrawny scarecrow in a black Hawaiian shirt and plaid golf pants, squatting in front of Chigger’s “entertainment center” like some kind of human booby trap. With his bony batwing elbows and knees extended, he took up an enormous amount of space, ostensibly trying to figure out which broken-off knob controlled the volume on the stereo.
I wasn’t going to notice him. There’s no percentage in noticing people you don’t already know in LA. I moved aside so he could pass and he just whisked by like I wasn’t there. In fact, I rocked back on my heels and fell on my ass trying not to run into his highness.
This is what bugs me about Los Angeles. Nobody can navigate public space as a pedestrian anymore. In the vacuum of postmodern manners, somebody decided to adopt the rules of the road. Everybody walks around as if they’re driving their car. No need to exchange information unless a collision actually occurs. No eye contact, or you could wind up talking to a crazy person. Or a boring one. Excuses when offered usually come out as an atrophied, “scyooss’m,” if any kind of sound at all escapes.
I had been awake for an almost two-day tweak, looking only to score an eight-ball of ice-grade crystal meth, but I hadn’t forgotten my manners. Vulnerable as it made me, it also made me ready to fight an oncoming car, if I was in the right. “Excuse me,” I grumbled.
He didn’t move.
I gave him another three seconds, counted on chattering teeth, to make good. His back was turned to me, but I could sense in the tightening of his stupid neck that he was smiling. When he still didn’t move, I wishboned his arm and drove him face-first into the wall.
“Listen, shithead,” I said, “I didn’t ask for permission to cross your space. I warned you. Where I come from, ‘Excuse me’ is good manners, but it isn’t an invitation or a friend request. It’s a polite command.”
And I let him go. He rolled against the wall to face me and looked me up and down as if I’d only just now become something alive, transformed out of previously inert matter. “You’re not from LA, are you?”
“I’ve been here as long as anybody else. Why?”
“You don’t admit fault in an accident. Unless you actually trade paint. . .”
Chigger’s other customers would often try to sell me car stereo parts or CD wallets or a broken popcorn popper, or they’d try to get me to go in on some hare-brained scheme to rip Chigger or someone else off. Sometimes they’d even hit on me, which was hilarious, given how terminally out of the game I was. I had decided a long time ago that I would make myself feel good on my own schedule, and not tangle with anyone else’s. But Chigger was getting so in between me and my bliss, that I might as well be fucking him.
And that’s exactly why Gus Drum got my attention. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you can make the next person to come in the door say ‘Excuse me.’”
It’s a sucker bet. People apologize here like it costs them money, but somehow the effort of enunciating a full apology with vowels and everything is too much.
“D’you ever wonder what Chigger gets out of making you wait?”
“Excuse me. . .” I said, putting my shades back on, though it was three in the morning.
His were darker, and covered half his face. A thick, rusty beard hid the rest, until he smiled, which he did, now. He flopped down in an ancient, leaky beanbag chair, sending little Styrofoam beads erupting everywhere. “I said, ‘D’you ever—’”
“I heard you. I was just trying to excuse myself from conversation.” We were alone in the living room, and Chigger’d been gone for two hours. I was busy interviewing my eight-year old self in my head, and didn’t relish anyone else’s armpit-fart philosophy, right now.
He was a compact, wasted looking little dude. He had this face that you could easily see on the lead in a family sitcom, back when dads capably steered the ship, instead of being the butt of every lame joke. I hadn
’t put on glasses to hide so much as to hide myself looking at him, but once I did, I couldn’t stop.
“You’re pretty tweaked out right now, so you can almost feel it, but you don’t know what it is. It’s worse than coming down, isn’t it, this hanging out for what feels like forever, waiting for someone else to make you feel okay, again? He’s feeding on you.”
Funny. I actually laughed, for the first time in I don’t know how long. He laughed with me, a jagged chuckle, but it put me on my guard. Tweakers don’t laugh, unless they’re scared, and this fellow wasn’t afraid of anything.
A pretty low trick, but if Operation Rescue could ambush you in front of a Planned Parenthood, why couldn’t sobriety freaks lurk in drug dealers’ waiting rooms?
“Seriously, though,” he added, reeling in my attention, “Chigger doesn’t use his own shit, so what gets him high? Because he always is, but he’s tripping on something you can’t buy.”
“Listen,” I cut him off, “this is fascinating, but I have this really rich inner life I’m kind of embroiled in, so—”
“You’re waiting to score, right?”
“Well, duh. . .” Starting to get pissed, thinking this guy was going to run me out of here before I hooked up, wondering where else I could go, at this hour.
He dug in the pockets of his hoodie and came out with a fistful of tiny Ziploc bags and paper bindles, dumped them among the wreckage strewn across Chigger’s glass-top coffee table. “Help yourself.”
“How much?”
“Gratis. I never touch the stuff. I just had to buy it for research.”
I got my purse and started to leave.
“Wait, please, I’m not a cop or a reporter, or anything. I’m a grad student at UCLA. I bought all this with grant money.”
“This isn’t sounding any less weird.” But my eyes roved over the treats on the table, and I decided to stay. I’d put up with way weirder shit, to score.
He had ether-reeking peanut butter crank in super chunky nuggets; white, odorless big-grain stuff like sea salt, from some Mex pharmacy; too-fine, pink stuff that must’ve been cut with Mr. Bubble; the whole range from crushed No-Doz in a soiled stroke mag bindle to pure, Pentagon-grade ice.
“A lot of this shit is poison,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t know, honestly. Never touch it, and I’m not researching drugs. I’m studying the psychophenomenology of drug deals as a critical proof for my master’s thesis.”
I might have whited out for a minute from the burn of five lines of ice, which I’d slalomed through in the time it took him to nod. When I came to, my head had a fresh set of batteries, and I was almost foolishly grateful. “That sounds amazing! So what’s your thesis about?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Offering me another bindle and a cigarette, he airily said, “For almost two years, I have been on the trail of a subtle form of psychic vampirism that forms the secret basis for all civilized human interaction.
It turned out there was lots of grant money to be reaped in researching the neurological processes of time perception. From environmental engineering of DMV and post offices to make wait times seem less onerous, to direct cortical stimulation to induce a waking hibernation state for space travel. The big money was in corrections. With jails overcrowded and private jails flunking out until slave labor came back in style, the holy grail was a means of making every day seem like a year. The oppressive environment and the constant threat of being raped or murdered weren’t enough. The government wanted a switch they could flip in the brain to make incarceration an eternal near-death experience, and not the good kind with angels and dead relatives. They wanted to see liver spots and palsies in hardened thirty-year old cons. And he kept promising it to them, so he had funding to chase his own holy grail.
“It is the secret which has kept churches and tyrants in power when they serve no good but their own, and which accounts everything from the healing power of true love and the violent insanity of mailmen and other bureaucrats, and why the Pope wears a pointy hat. . . and why Chigger Jones and every other drug dealer always makes you wait. It’s a secret that powerful secret societies have killed to protect, from Socrates and Giordano Bruno to Houdini and John Lennon, and I am about to share it with you.”
I was all ears.
He told me about state changes in the charges of subatomic particles, about the flux and warp of the energies that hold our atoms together. How they radiate or consume with state changes in the mind. Gus couldn’t measure it yet, but he could see its effects, and suddenly, half the crazy shit in western history, and almost everything about the modern world, made perfect sense. Why every “official” function, from the DMV to court to college graduations and weddings, involved endless rituals and empty waiting.
“Churches were the earliest attempts to drain psychic energy from the people and harness it. The costumes, the litanies and songs, were just filler. The real rituals were in the Simon Says games of kneel and stand and repeat-after-me, and the steeples, altars and pulpits were attempts at imitative magic, to draw that stolen energy and send it to the mother church, where a lot of old vampires in dresses got fat as ticks off the focused devotion and tired patience of hundreds of thousands of churches, every Sunday.”
He had the tiger of my amped-out mind by the tail, so I was crestfallen when Chigger Jones came barging in with a, “What’s all this, then?” like he’d caught Gus in bed with his Thai bride.
“We were just about to give up on you,” Gus said, hopping out of the beanbag to offer Chigger a fat roll of twenties. “I’ll take an eight-ball, and another for my friend.”
Totally nonplussed, Chigger took the money, but urged us to sit back down. “Hold on, bro. . . I still gotta measure it out, and shit. If you guys wanna watch a movie, or something. . .”
“We’re in kind of a hurry, so I’ll take whatever you’ve got in one bag.”
Chigger patted himself down. He didn’t like this, but he was too stoned to put on the brakes. “I got a quarter ounce in—”
“We’ll take it,” Gus pushed money at him. “I’m done here. You want to hang out, or come with me?”
I picked up the baggies and bindles Gus left on the table and kissed Chigger on the nose as I left. I never saw him again, but Gus Drum didn’t cure me. He just put me onto something stronger.
We drove around Mid-Wilshire in his musty old Volvo station wagon. He didn’t ask me to split the shit. Just gave it to me, like a pack of smokes.
“You know that pain you get, when someone tells you to meet them somewhere, and they’re late? And you’re looking at your watch to see if it’s broken, and every car that passes could be theirs, everybody on the street looks like them for just an instant, and you feel like your hair’s turning gray, and the gravity gets doubled? It’s real.
“When you’re waiting, you’re on their clock, and they’re draining you. That’s what makes powerful people powerful, though most of them don’t even really know what it is, or how it works.”
“But I always feel like that.”
“Because someone’s always making you wait. Every traffic light, every boring job, every concert that starts two hours late.”
“But what good does it do them? If I’m waiting for somebody, it doesn’t enrich them.”
“They’re still feeding on you, but they’re inefficient about it, if they don’t know what they’re doing. Energy gets wasted, turns back on itself and makes the victims agitated, makes crowds get ugly. Someone has to be a lightning rod for all that stolen energy, and if they know what they’re doing, they can do almost anything.”
“That’s a pretty neat thesis you got there. But—” I paused to snort a monster line. He asked me for a lighter, though he didn’t take out a cigarette.
He flicked the lighter once. No flame.
Sad sigh. “Is this a store-bought lighter?”
“Never learned how to make my own.”
Gus tossed my dead lighter out the window and took out a magent
a Bic, just like mine, but scuffed and dented and stained with scorchy haloes of all the bowls of smoldering sin it had covered. The safety guard was broken off, so the wheel rested against a naked spigot.
It looked like something a bum wouldn’t pick up out of the gutter, but it lit the first time he thumbed the wheel. The flame was lemon yellow and strong enough to cast our shadows outside the car.
“Haven’t you ever noticed how stolen lighters burn longer? Doesn’t matter how new it is, when you swipe it. Store-bought Bic lighters are dead after a couple hundred lights, but if you steal one, it’ll last for thousands of lights.”
“Why, d’you suppose?”
He just looked at me like I’d failed the last test he felt like giving. The lighter in his hand still burned, and now little ghostly blobs of melted plastic vapor came burping out of the flame. But he sighed again, and because I was cute, tried one more time. “It’s not burning butane, anymore. It burns brighter, hotter, longer, because someone else misses it. They’re looking in their coats, in their closets and under car seats and couch cushions for it. Even when they replace it, they’re still itching over that loss, added up with all the other things that they couldn’t hold on to, in life. It’s the cleanest-burning fuel in the world.”
I shook out a cigarette and asked for the lighter. He gave it to me, but when I fired up the butt, a cop flipped on his lights and blasted past us. Gus panicked and started the car and took me back to my car out front of Chigger’s place, and that’s how I stole his lighter.
I still have it here, that crappy old magenta Bic lighter. It’s ten years old. I hardly ever light a cigarette with anything else, though I must have stolen ten thousand lighters since then.
It still works.
I wonder who he stole it from, and if he still feels it, burning a little bit of his soul every time I thumb the wheel.
He didn’t play any games with me when he dropped me off, just gave me his number, “if I wanted to help out with some stuff.” Or if I wanted to get off drugs and onto something real. He said it like throwing out dinner, sometime, maybe.
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