by Jerry Stahl
Harold also swore he didn’t mind the “dumbasses” and “morons” they yelled after him when he left. “Fuck do I care? I used to have the black Cadillac, wear the shades, do the whole look-at-me-I-wear-black-and-think-dark-thoughts-’cause-I’m-the-real-deal junkie thing. Now I go for the normal. I’m a dope fiend in Dockers. Less hassles.”
Harold babbled a bit when dope was in the same room with him. He was shooting the stuff we copped him on Fourth and Bonnie Brae in return for the car. (Well, sort of. It was a loose deal. A junkie deal. By definition half-assed.) The dealer was a freckled and orange-’froed African American named Red. He shorted me the bonus bag on a seven-for-a-C-note. But it wasn’t my money, and I wasn’t going to argue with a young brother who picked his teeth with a steak knife. (For that matter, I wouldn’t argue with an old white lady who picked her teeth with a steak knife. Well, I’d probably argue less.)
Harold babbled some more, wept briefly, and passed out after fixing, toppling sideways in slow motion on his motel bed. Nora slapped his face a couple of times. It seemed more precautionary than hateful. Then again . . .
We slipped the dope out from Harold’s left sock, the same place he kept it in our SESSIE days. Nora fixed after Harold keeled over, then me. We only had one needle, and after we both lied that we’d never done this before—of course we’d been tested!—we both got well. (Nora geezed discreetly, somewhere between her legs. Which, I confess, got me hotter than all the porn in China.) After the dope was gone, we “borrowed” Harold’s car keys and headed out.
EIGHTEEN
“You Can’t Do a Gangster Lean in a Prius”
I pressed the button to start the hybrid, adjusting, as usual, to its unearthly silence and spine-crushing mobile ashtray-like designer comfort. Once driving, as was the local custom, I eased sideways and low in my seat, steering left-handed. Nora elbowed my elbow off the armrest. “You can’t do a gangster lean in a Prius.”
“You’re right,” I replied, and recited another slogan I would never sell. “Prius. On the right side of history, on the wrong side of cool.”
(“Let the words pass through you. You are but a vessel . . .” This is from the inspirational how-to-write self-helper All the Letters in My Keyboard Spell God by Dover Dannerson, an ex-SESSIE turned bestselling inspirational scribe. Which in itself was a kind of inspiration, considering that Dover, not to be catty, pretty much ran on Adderall and Xanax, battled a baker’s dozen of sexual harassment allegations from his time at Squibb, and lived with his parents.)
“Harold is definitely not cool,” I say to Nora, again taking in the comfort-free Prius, from sacro-punishment seat to toilet-seat blue dashboard plastic.
“Cool is a fascist construct,” Nora says, surprising me, once more, by speaking in the voice of someone I hadn’t met before, though I’d been with her for a while. Someone educated. Maybe an autodidact. Borderline literary/political or totally schizophrenic. Something delicious.
Comfort-wise, the Prius was about on par with our tent, there on the back lawn of LA City Hall with all the others. Despite the media bullshit about patchouli—code name for retro pot-smoking hippie scum—I didn’t smell any. (Not as much patchouli as I smelled when I used to have to ride the bus into Hollywood to the methadone clinic, and the Catholic girls in plaid skirts going to Immaculate Heart got on in five-packs. In Asia, you may not know, they use patchouli for snakebites and fly repellant. But the Catholic schoolgirls weren’t repelling anything. The flies and snakes were on board, staring hard at newspapers and billboards, trying not to look pervy, foaming over all that plaid-skirt jailbait.)
Our second night, after sundown, a political tweaker named Spang had a teach-in on American foreign policy, going from John Foster Dulles and his secret ties to the Nazis to the current paramilitarization of domestic police. “What we saw in UC Davis were storm troopers, Obama’s Brownshirts!” I was impressed by how many Occupiers stuck around to the end. The way Spang licked his corner-cracked lips, picked his skin, and halted mid-sentence to clutch his chest, he had to be feeling the side effects of something. Maybe not even the sides. Something, in any case, that really agreed with him. Despite the flaky lips and jitters. “Arming domestic police forces with paramilitary weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil . . .”
This resonated, even if it came by way of Spang. (“Ideas,” as playwright and human breast milk aficionado George Bernard Shaw once opined, “are not responsible for the people who embrace them.”) It was, after all, the same with pharmaceuticals—nobody makes a pill nobody takes. R&D, manufacturing, drug trials to see whether the shit kills you or makes you shit uranium—fuck all that! The heavy lifting is creating the need. You want to sell restless-knee medication, you have to convince people they have restless knees. “Oh, look, Doris, my leg is jiggling!” The cops needed Oakland to start jiggling so they could march out the cartridge launchers ad and Cairo body armor.
I could have told all this to Spang. Instead I listened to him, and a revolving roster of other speakers, until sunup. Nora had other plans. She had blossomed in the outdoor political context. Gone, when she wanted to, from taciturn to eloquent. I thought maybe she grew up in a commune. She thought Occupy was like being homeless with tents and a library. The day Scott Olsen got shot in the head by a gas cartridge, we watched the YouTube of him being carried out on some Spanish lady’s iPhone. Each viewing of the travesty refueled the viewers. Only Nora wasn’t interested in some viral video. She was, as she said, “interested in the virus who pulled the trigger.” It wasn’t long after the news of Scott Olsen’s brain injury that she pulled me aside and dragged me up to the City Hall steps. Talked low during the General Administration meeting. “Scott Bergstresser.”
“What about him?”
“We got his address.”
“Jesus.” I played it jokey, but not. “So you’re going to SF to take him out?”
“Don’t have to.”
“Good,” I whispered. “I mean, we already committed—”
I stopped myself. We’d never actually discussed . . . the thing. She leaned over and grabbed me by the shoulders, as close to an embrace as we ever enjoyed. Nora wasn’t a snuggle-bunny. But everything was changing. (The tent, by the way, seemed to fire her up; inside, our first night, she spread herself open and slapped her clit like she was punishing a puppy while I slid in and out of her from behind. She liked to expose herself while facing the other way, as if she could let one part of herself out of the cage as long as the other part didn’t have to know about it. A woman of dimension.)
More on that later. If I remember. For now, as we headed north on Alvarado in the Prius, toward Sunset Boulevard, Nora studied my eyes. Deciding, I sensed, if she could safely peel off the next layer of whatever it was that separated who she really was from who she acted like. “Don’t think of it as murder,” she whispered. “Think of it as Occupy Death.”
“Occupy Death? Wow. You are wasting yourself on greeting cards.”
She regarded me a moment—was that pity in her eyes or disbelief?—and continued. “What I’m saying is I don’t have to go up north to do it. He totally has a girlfriend in Echo Park he’s coming down to visit.”
I tried to play it off. What surprised me, more than the fact that she could possibly know this or that she’d said “totally,” was that Bergstresser would be going to Echo Park. “He’s a cop. Doesn’t seem like the type who’s into . . .”
“Unless he’s gassing them,” Nora said, twisting her lip in thought, considering something, and then letting it go. Letting me know—or so I psychically surmised—that she’d made the decision to trust me. “His girlfriend,” she went on. “She’s one of us.”
“Which us?”
“OCI—Occupy Counterintelligence. There’s a Shadow Assembly.”
“Wait. You’re saying Occupy has spies? Moles? You mean you brought us there
on purpose?”
Wheels within wheels! She ignored the question. “It’s not formally structured. If someone wants to work counterintelligence they just do. My friend Susie is a sex worker.”
“And Officer What’s-His-Nazi thinks she’s his girlfriend?”
“Why do you think they call it work? She’s donating her talent to the cause. Doesn’t matter. The house is on Echo Palk Boulevard, way up the hill from Sunset. Catty-corner to a coffee shop with outside tables. It’s called Fix.”
“Of course it is. So we do the latte thing and case the place. As soon as we pull this little Prius over and get some money. Any ideas how we do that?”
“How do you think?” I thought I detected an eye roll, but it was hard to tell with Nora. She had bangs. Sometimes they covered her eyes, sometimes they just film-noired her. She eased a Citibank card out of her panties and flashed it at me. I wanted to lick it. “We’re giving the banks a chance to balance their karma, do something good.”
“Whose card is it?”
“A man named”—she tilted the card to read—“Askew. Lester.”
“Les Askew. Cool name. Kind of Jim Thompson-y.”
“Fuck Jim Thompson, what’s cool is Mr. Askew wrote his PIN number on a piece of paper and stuck it in his wallet.”
Nora blew bangs out of her eyes. Waiting for my reaction. I knew, by now, the best reaction with Nora was not to have one. Except this time she was grinning. A first. One gold tooth I fell in love with on the spot.
“Cash is good,” I said. But what I was thinking, what hit me all over again, was how I’d killed a guy in a bus station toilet. That had to make the crime more suspicious. I knew I’d have to change my appearance: no doubt they had Homeland Security cameras hanging from the roof like bats. I’d be on a dozen of them. If anybody was looking. Going into the men’s room right after the big man in glasses who never came out. Why hadn’t I gone blond already, or bought a hat?
When I turned right onto Sunset, toward Echo Park, Nora curled her legs up underneath her on the seat, exactly as she’d done the first time I saw her, on that Greyhound bus. I felt like I’d known her longer—was it years or days?—and simultaneously like I didn’t know her at all. (I know, I know . . . But sometimes you just have to embrace the cliché.) I was still sitting on a million questions. The first one being, what were we going to do when we got where we were going? The second—well, the second wasn’t a question. More of a reminder. As in, “Nora, this isn’t some four-eyed old man in a train station toilet we’re talking about. This is a violent, violent, presumably sociopathic, Occupy-hating tool of the state, doubtless armed to the teeth with Homeland Security–funded paramilitary gear.” (Not that I was some para-gear head, but the online outlets since 9/11 were amazing: army-navy stores on steroids, with fun and hard-to-get items like backyard minesweepers, stand-alone DVR systems with four digital wireless cameras and five-hundred-gigabyte hard disk drives, beef jerky that could last through the apocalypse.) Of course, it wasn’t the arms or psychopathology I was chewing my gums about. It was the needle they inject you with for cop-killing.
Do you ever feel like you know too much about the wrong things, not enough about the right ones?
At a red light on Sunset and Echo Park Boulevard, a Mexican girl crossed in front of us, wearing low-slung capris pants that strained at the seams over her Marilyn hips. Mexican Marilyn had both arms around a skinny boy with a six-inch pompahawk. They mad-dogged us and then the boy grabbed one of his chiquita’s butt cheeks to let us know he could. Nora slid her eyes my way and shrugged. “Some guys like ’em assy.”
It was so not the kind of thing she said that I had to laugh. As I did she bent forward and tugged her forever-slipping-off sandal-strap back up her ankle. She had the dirtiest feet I’d ever seen in my life. Something, to my own weird surprise, I found not repulsive. Was I now, on top of murderer, SESSIE, and ex-Christian Swingler, drifting into foot-sucking territory? Some toe-sucking This little piggy went to market action? Is that how it worked? You toppled one barrier—did one thing you’d thought you would never do—and soon you were committing all manner of formerly unthinkable acts with routine frequency? After murder comes shrimping?
Does life turn us into what we are or keep us from ever having to find out? I guess it depends on the life.
NINETEEN
Prayer of Affirmation
Just for today, help me not be who I really am.
TWENTY
Temporary Blonde
So this is life. Driving in a junkie’s Prius with Nora to find Deputy Sheriff Bergstresser, virally loathed tool of the state. We arrive at eleven in the morning. Nora tells me to turn around, park facing downhill.
“Done this before, baby?”
“Don’t call me baby.”
Along the way from Occupy, she’d changed into a platinum blond wig and black men’s suit pants. (I mean the pants were black, not, necessarily, that they were pre-owned by African Americans. Though who knows?) Over this she wore a green-on-white Lilly Ledbetter T-shirt. I’d slapped on aviator shades and a thrift-store trucker hat that read “RODRIGO LEAF & TREE,” providing, in Echo Park, a level of camouflage a stickbug on a bare branch would envy. I promised myself I would dye my hair. Later I actually did, peroxide blond, and it was a big mistake. Once I was blond, I looked paler and vaguely pedophilic. My peroxide-stripped hair revealed a rat-tongue-colored scalp beneath. Which I’d never noticed before. That or the peroxide had peeled the weathered flesh-tone top layer off my scalp. Whatever the reason, I had that lives-in-a-subway-tunnel look. One of the Mole People. So I ended up just wearing the hat I got in the first place. Like the other Rodrigo employees or the other hipsters wearing their hats.
In my East Side get-up, I kept thinking of Tom Clancy, how he appears on his book covers in uniform. With his own special insignias. The admiral of that nuclear destroyer they give you when you sell enough right-wing fantasy porn to have a staff and put them in paramilitary-wear, like L. Ron Hubbard and the Sea Org staff, or Anthony Scalia in the Supreme Court robes he designed himself. Epaulettes!
I imagine Admiral Tom going to bed at night doubt-free. Maybe sharing a bunk with Rush Limbaugh. Modern-day J. Edgar and Clyde Tolson. Who gets to be Jack Ryan tonight? I’m tired of being the president—I want to be lassoed and rode like a teaser pony! The mind wanders when what’s in front of it requires avoidance for the mind to function. And . . .
When you can’t forget, there’s heroin . . . (When there’s no heroin, you can’t forget.)
Book Three
Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.
BILLIE HOLIDAY
TWENTY-ONE
Party Time
We had time to kill. So to speak.
Nora knew the car the deputy drove. A cherry 1968 Dodge Charger, sky blue, convertible. Rear bumble stripes.
“What else could he drive?”
She sounded defiant, as though it were common knowledge that, after a hard day felling veterans and Occupy types, serial law-enforcement canister launchers all tooled around with screaming headers and a forty-year-old 440 Magnum under the hood.
I kind of wished Jay and Riegle, my Christian Swingles crime buddies, could have been here to help set up the play. It seemed like another lifetime, the day we tried to take off that pharmacy in Tulsa for oxys. No muss, no fuss. Of course, it was an utter and complete debacle. But still, someone had my back.
Nora was a different kind of crime partner. I had no idea what her background was. I had a variety of details. Some conflicting. What I didn’t have was a particular truth. One minute Nora might have been the Ma Barker of movement vengeance. The next she might have been off her meds. Or on them. Sylvia Plath with ankle tats. Strange, deep water. With skin of beautiful and toxic near-iridescence.
It started to drizzle. One of those peculiar LA mini rains where the sun keeps blaring
, so the raindrops feel inappropriate. Evidence of something gone off in local nature, like when you see a coyote on your street at two in the afternoon. Just standing there. Staring. Supposedly, daytime sightings meant the coyote was rabid. Same with skunks and raccoons. But I never took it that way. It was more likely we were the diseased ones, and the fucking animals just weren’t going to pretend otherwise anymore. (Sometimes a coyote would just be there when you opened the door of your house. They didn’t even bother to bare their teeth. They didn’t need to. It was enough to just let us know they were waiting.)
We were headed for the coffee shop Nora knew, but I wasn’t sure I needed caffeine. I was having waking flashbacks, in the form of hallucinated surveillance videos: Spectacles’s purpling face as he expired, atop the toilet, his mouth formed in a final, soul-curdling O so close to my face I could breathe his Scope. Reliving the moment, I reenacted my lethal paper-clip move in my head, with quivering thumb, quivering digits, the way guitar players, or idiots who want you to think they’re guitar players, will run their fingers up and down an imaginary neck as they wait in the checkout line in front of you, or doze next to you on a plane. Then again, the finger-moving is (or can be) a form of practice. John Coltrane, according to his wife Alice, holed up in his upstairs room in Philadelphia for eighteen hours at a pop, composing and rehearsing with just his fingers, no horn, reinventing his instrument without actually playing it. It did not occur to me that I was rehearsing.