Aunt Ava broke into tears. They came in sudden, racking sobs. Her husband reached for her hand, pulling her away from the doorway.
Alex moved in a slight circle toward the arch while they kept edging away from him. “Motherfuckers like you fucked me over bad,” Alex said, his escape route now clear. “I should—but fuck it. You talk all that shit, but you ain’t got no guts when it gets tough. Call the motherfuckin’ police. I’ll be long gone.” He backed from the kitchen door into the living room, pausing for a moment to look around. He saw nothing to hold him back, nothing he wanted to take with him. He pulled open the front door and stepped out into the night.
“On the fuckin’ run again,” he muttered as he reached the sidewalk and began to run. He laughed at his predicament. Destiny seemed to be either incarceration or the threat of it. “Fuck it! I’d rather be a fugitive than a captive. I don’t belong with those people.” He saw a dark alley and turned into it, looking for a place to hole up for a few hours, knowing that Ray and Ava would call the police, who would be looking for him in the area. When things cooled down he’d get away and find his friends in the underworld where he belonged.
22
Teresa’s voice had a lilt of affection that warmed Alex even over the telephone, though he did feel a momentary pang when she said she hoped he’d learned how to stay out of jail. “Things are so much better out here. Just be patient and willing to work and you’ll have what you want.” He didn’t deflate her optimistic advice by saying he was already a fugitive—or would be tomorrow when a parole violation warrant was issued.
“How can I see Wedo?” he asked.
“Did my mom tell you…?”
“She told me what’s happening. He still’s my partner.”
“I know … I still see him … when he has time. That stuff takes every minute of his life. He can’t even think about anything else. When he isn’t chasing it, he’s half asleep on the nod.”
“What about his phone number?”
“He doesn’t have a regular place to live. He’s here, there, with a friend, in a motel or hotel. He calls me.”
“You don’t have any place to reach him?”
“In a way. On Temple Street near downtown there’s a place called ‘The Traveler’s.’ He goes in there a lot, I guess. He said they’d take messages for him.”
“What is it … a bar?”
“I think it’s a café and a pool hall, but I’ve never been there. The number’s upstairs—”
“No, I’ll get it from the book—or find it.”
“When’re you coming by to see me? Lisa says you look really good, tanned and everything.”
“Sheeit! Lisa really looks good. I’ll come by in a few days, maybe on the weekend.”
Alex replaced the receiver. The telephone booth was in a gas station. He walked out—and out of the circle of light—and down half a block to the car he’d hotwired and stolen a mile from his aunt’s bungalow. By daylight he would have to abandon it. The owner would find it gone in the morning and report its theft. For that the license plates could be changed. He would have done that if it was an older car, the kind a teenager might drive; but he would be in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, and it was a gleaming new Packard.
Driving the huge automobile through the night, the dashboard radio giving forth sentimental songs, Alex’s earlier rage pendulumed to a mixture of melancholy, loneliness, and an inchoate longing. The feelings were not unalloyed agony; they were bittersweet. It was the ache of yearning, not of despair. At the particular time and under the particular circumstances, he was weary of his perpetual war with the whole world—a war he’d been fighting since before he had words to articulate such an idea—a war that, in the beginning, back in the mist of being four years old, had been an instinctive rebellion against being abandoned to foster homes and military schools. Now he somewhat understood his outcast condition, understood it more than even sympathetic adults would understand. In a few weeks he would have a fifteenth birthday, and he was already an outsider, a leper of the modern era. He had no family, the cold Calvinists he’d run from hours ago were certainly not his family. He already had a long record he could never escape. His choices were already severely truncated. He already belonged to the underworld and was locked out of the other world. What parents would let their nice daughters go out with him? Although he didn’t face the reality head-on even in his mind, and although there were other fires and yearnings, the main pain was longing to belong, to love and be loved. That was the irreducible truth. He would find Wedo and team up with him, if Wedo was willing—not because that was his real choice but because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Wedo was a junkie, and Alex had heard enough stories to be leery and prejudiced about junkies, but Wedo was Wedo, whom he knew down to the real truths of loyalty and friendship. No matter if Wedo was flawed, was nearly illiterate, he was a loyal friend. He would gladly accept Alex as a partner. Whatever he was doing to maintain his habit, Wedo would know that Alex was game for it.
Tonight it was too late to continue the hunt. Temple Street was “hot” at any hour, but especially so after midnight. Anyone there at such an hour would either be the law or outside the law.
Alex nevertheless drove toward Temple Street, but a couple of miles away he turned into a closed gas station and parked in the dark at the rear. He left the radio on and climbed to the back seat. He cracked the back door so he could push it open and slide through bushes into a back yard. He had an escape route. He tucked his hands between his legs, curled up, and went to sleep.
When dawn was orange streaks against eastern clouds, Alex left the stolen car and began walking toward Temple Street. Half an hour later the streets were glutted, the sun was morning-bright, and he was on the block where the Traveler’s Café & Pool Hall was located. The neighborhood was known to every junkie in sprawling Los Angeles County. When the city was dry everywhere else, Temple Street connections still had heroin for sale. Narcotics officers also knew it, making the neighborhood as “hot” as any; the café was “on fire.” Alex first walked by without going in, pausing for just a moment to look through the window, but unable to see much because of vapor fogging it. He circled the block, readying himself, and then opened the door and went in.
The café and pool hall had separate sidewalk entrances, while inside an archway at the rear connected them. The café never closed, but the pool hall did so at midnight, opening again at noon. Alex paused to briefly study the hangout. On the left was the counter with two dozen stools. At the right, until the archway, were high-backed booths. At the rear was the kitchen door, a hallway to restrooms and telephone, and a jukebox (now playing Mexican ranchero music). Alex walked toward the restrooms, unobtrusively glancing in each booth on the slim chance of spotting Wedo.
Alex didn’t see Wedo, but on the way out of the restroom, now thinking that he’d perch at the counter and wait a while, Alex did see a familiar face. It was very familiar, in fact, yet because of civilian clothes, a free-world haircut, and the gauntness of dissipation, it took several consternated seconds to dredge up the name. He might not have been able to if the name hadn’t been unusual: Itchy! Itchy Medina. Always small-boned, he was now really skinny. His nickname came from his constant fidgeting, shaking out an arm, bouncing in a chair, shaking his head as if to ease a neck cramp; it was an obvious pathological condition reduced to a nickname. In fact, the first thing Alex noticed was that Itchy wasn’t fidgeting. He hadn’t spotted Alex. He was in a booth with a young white man beside him. The young man took money from a shirt pocket and passed it over. The young man saw Alex watching and spoke to Itchy, who turned his head, furrows of puzzlement instantly on his face, his eyes narrow. But recognition came in seconds. Alex knew it by the spreading grin, and he grinned in return.
Itchy finished his business, taking the money out and counting it, then taking something from his mouth and slipping it into the young man’s hand. The customer was already starting to depart; he was in a hurry to get
to his spoon and needle.
Itchy beckoned Alex, who noticed Itchy’s expensive suit even while approaching. Itchy extended a hand as Alex sat down across the table. “Ese, Alex, mi carnal. What’s happening? When did you get out?”
“Two fuckin’ days, man … and I hung up the parole already.” However, Alex was thinking that he and Itchy hadn’t been close friends, certainly not brothers. They’d been nodding acquaintances with several mutual partners.
Itchy wrinkled his face in sympathy.
“You look like you’re doin’ real good,” Alex said. “Unless it was gumdrops you were sellin’ that guy.”
Itchy chuckled. “Yeah, I’m makin’ it … or maybe a little better than that.” He stopped there, offering no details beyond the obvious. Alex recalled hearing that Itchy’s uncle was Big Mike Medina, who had moved to Mexico on the eve of the war and who had been the first to recognize the U.S. market for brown Mexican heroin when the war foreclosed access to Turkey and the Golden Triangle of Asia. Big Mike was a multimillionaire “on the other side,” the euphemism for across the Mexican border.
“What’re you doin’ here?” Itchy asked. “You wanna score?”
“Naw. I’m lookin’ for a partner who fucks around in here, or at least buys smack in here.”
“What’s his name?”
“Wedo … Wedo Murphy.”
“Murphy! That jive-stutterin’ motherfucker! He owes me two bills.” Then Itchy saw the consternation on Alex’s face. “Hold it! I’m half-ass-jivin’. He owes me, but he’s good for it. He spends a lot of money with me … and gives a lot away. He’s been making some decent stings lately.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
Itchy shook his head. “He told me that he moves every few days. One motel to another. But you’ll find him. He comes in here to cop every day—from me.”
Alex listened, felt good, and simultaneously wondered what Wedo was doing to support a big heroin habit and the daily rates of motels and hotels. No matter how curious he was, Alex couldn’t ask Itchy. Although he was just turning fifteen, Alex had already incorporated many of the habits and values of the criminal underworld—and strong among these was a ban on curiosity about anyone’s “business.”
“Hey, man,” Itchy said, “how ’bout a fix? A freebie?”
“Naw, man,” Alex said, trying to show nonchalance. “I don’t dig the high. It makes me puke.”
“Just about everybody barfs the first couple of times. It still makes you feel good, man, good! Even the barfing doesn’t ruin it.”
“For me it does.”
“Okay. You ain’t doin’ nothin’, are you? Got somewhere to go?”
“No, a blank.”
“Well, carnal—me, I gotta fix pretty soon … so like take a walk with me. Tell me what’s happenin’ at the old reform school alma mater since I got out.… What happened to that colored guy they claim killed that cleaning woman in the ad building? The trial was going on when I left.”
“They’re still in trial—the third one. He’s had two hung juries already.”
“You think he did it?”
“I got no idea. I know he can run with a football. And he always seemed like a cool guy—didn’t fuck with anybody or start trouble.”
“Didn’t some college wanna help him get out and give him a scholarship?”
“I heard that, but it coulda been bullshit.”
While standing at the front door waiting for Itchy to pay his bill, Alex realized that the Chicano was more intelligent than he once would have credited him for. Alex had just assumed ignorance.
Before stepping down the sidewalk, Itchy paused in the doorway to scan both ways. Even without narcotics on him, he was in danger. California law had a vagrancy-addict statute; a couple of fresh needle marks might mean six months in the county jail. “I’m on bail on a mark’s beef right now,” Itchy explained.
“Adult court?”
“Sure. Kids don’t make bail, do they?”
The question was rhetorical, so Alex ignored it and asked another of his own. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen … last month. What about you?”
“Seventeen.”
“You got another year of being a child in the eyes of the law.”
“Unless I do something far out—some heinous crime—where they rule me unfit and transfer it to Superior Court.”
At the first corner they turned and began trudging several blocks through the rundown neighborhood. They recalled mutual acquaintances, half-forgotten incidents. Sometimes they reminisced about someone, or asked what had become of this youth or that one. Before they reached their destination, Alex knew how to reach four reform-school buddies, who were now young men. One was a prizefighter ready for his first main event. “He’d be a contender,” Itchy explained, “if he’d look out for himself and quick fuckin’ around with that needle. It’s gonna wash him up.” Another friend was “in” with Mickey Cohen, the reigning Los Angeles gangster—but really just a bookmaker with high media visibility. The friend took bets in a Ventura Boulevard cocktail lounge. Others were in San Quentin—while far more were in county jails waiting to go there. One was awaiting trial for a robbery-murder. He’d stayed out two weeks.
Alex’s friends were no longer juvenile delinquents, having passed the magical eighteenth birthday to reach legal manhood. The sudden metamorphosis seemed strange to Alex; he’d forgotten how much younger he was than his peers, at least younger in years.
Itchy led the way up a hillside street where the small frame houses were perched and pillared up steep flights of steps. They lacked front yards because they clung to the hillsides.
“I don’t live here,” Itchy said. “My mom and kid sister stay here.” He opened the gate and they went up the stairs. “I’ve got a choice pad in Hollywood, but this is where I was raised.” The bungalow was small and inexpensive, but it was obviously a home that someone cared for.
Mrs. Medina, also small-boned and thin, had seen them through the window and had the door open when they reached the porch. She embraced her son and smiled warmly when Alex was introduced.
“Some calls came for you, Henry,” she said. “I took the messages down for you. I’ll get them.”
“Later, Mom. We’re goin’ in the bathroom now.”
The happy smile dropped, but she said nothing in protest. The fight had been lost long ago.
In the bathroom, Itchy had the practiced dexterity of a surgeon. The “outfit” was wrapped in a filthy bandanna and stuffed up under the sink. Beige powder and water went in the spoon, four matches under the spoon brought a boil and dissolved the dope except for scum on top. A tiny ball of cotton was a strainer, as he drew it up through the eyedropper. Moments later, a belt wrapped around his bicep to distend the vein in the pit of his elbow, he tapped the needle in, knowing it was right when blood streaked the eyedropper. Alex noticed a three-inch line of bluish-black scar tissue along the vein. From institution lore, Alex knew the amount Itchy had used was tremendous, enough to kill two men, yet it had almost no visible effect on the Chicano. His voice got huskier, but that was about all.
“Last chance,” Itchy said, readying to put things away.
“Nope. Man, I know I’d like it—so I don’t want to try it anymore.”
Itchy grunted, scratched his nose, and repackaged the paraphernalia. He made little, semihumming noises of pleasure, as if enjoying what he was feeling within. Something had changed, something sensed rather than defined. It was as if there was a wall between him and intense feelings of any kind.
Alex looked around the neat bathroom. It was immaculate and had bright guest towels and a scale. It was very middle class. “I don’t see why you’re a fuckup,” Alex said. “I mean, man, you seem to be cool at home. Everybody else comes from a broken home, or their old man is a lush, or something is fucked up somehow … you know what I mean. They have all those theories. I fit ’em but you don’t.”
“Man, I thought you were a maniac in Pres
ton, the way you fucked up and went to the hole all the time. I still think you’re crazy, but you’re not stupid, ese.” He paused, saw that Alex was waiting for an answer, and continued: “I went to Catholic grammar school. So did my older brother … who’s graduating from U.S.C. law school this semester. But in this neighborhood, that ain’t the way to be in. My brother didn’t care about the fools on the corner, but I did. I wanted to be a bigshot to them, have some identity in the barrio, an’ all that shit. Bein’ the smartest in the class is to be a punk to them.”
“Yeah, I sure found that out in Whittier.”
“Right, ese! So I started fucking up to be accepted. The same with fixing. It was the most hep thing in the barrio … risky, but you know, eh? Besides, it takes away those nervous shakes of mine, the ones that got me this nickname.”
Knowing how important acceptance was, Alex nodded.
“And sellin’ dope is as much status as I can get here. It’s power, too … over junkies anyway. They really kiss your ass if you’ve got the dope bag.”
“What about your family?”
Itchy shrugged and made a discomfited face, obviously not wanting to delve into it. He fell silent, thinking, and without warning a “nod” came over him, a somnolence that drooped his chin to his chest. Alex had seen it before with Red Barzo and First Choice Floyd. A few seconds elapsed until Itchy jerked and came awake.
“What about Wedo?” Alex asked. “You say I can find him?”
“Oh, he’ll be around sometime today. I’m the priest he’s gotta see for his sacrament.” Itchy grinned, winked, and then closed his eyes, luxuriating in his wit and the euphoric ecstasy suffusing him.
* * *
At dusk Alex and Itchy were in the pool hall of The Traveler’s. The throbbing guitars and high-pitched singers of ranchero music came loud from the jukebox. Wedo Murphy pushed into the noisy, smoky room. Alex was leaning unobtrusively next to a wall while Itchy had two Chicanos in conversation. Alex had been watching the front door and saw Wedo instantly, watching him move through the crowd. His cheeks were gaunt and his eyes sunken. He was even skinnier than usual. His clothes were in style, as always, but they seemed unusually rumpled for the usually fastidious Wedo, who managed to keep knife-edge creases in pants and shirts even amidst the pervasive dirt and sloppiness of poverty. Now, however, his priorities had changed; the monkey had to be fed before anything else could be thought of.
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