by Jerry Stahl
TWENTY-TWO
Fix
At Fix, when we finally got there, I could barely make out the fair-trade coffee list, because the image of my victim’s large-pored cheeks and shiny glasses overlaid the words. I brain-sprayed men’s room murder details over everything. My victim’s pleading eyeballs gazed up at me from rows of blueberry muffins and chocolate croissants. B-movie psychosis.
I went with Zoka from Seattle. Brew of the day! Nora ordered an iced triple Americano into which she ripped open and dumped an aquarium bottom of NutraSweet.
She must have been dumping her ninth packet when I asked her about it.
“Sweet tooth?”
“Aspartame. Donald Rumsfeld’s cash cow for Searle.” She gave a little half smile without looking up. “You should really know about excitotoxins. The side effects are amazing. Like mad cow but faster. Turns your brain to mush and fumes. The shit’s illegal in Europe but Americans can’t say no. Better a cerebral hemorrhage than cellulite thighs.” She raised her eyes and took in the legion of tattooed Hollywood creatives. Wallet chains clanked on chairs when they got up to plug in their Macs, grab more coffee, or talk out a scene. Inked up as they were—and they were all inked up—only Nora had that German shepherd, baring its fangs. Daddy’s girl. That was Nora’s and Nora’s alone. I watched her watching them until she suddenly turned to me and said, “What do you make of this scene, anyway?”
“Are you crazy?” I took a scalding gulp. “Living in Echo Park, banging out cool-ass webcasts, maybe being in a band?” I let my fingers lightly drag across my mouth, as if touching the great delight of the life I was badly describing. “Wiping soy foam from your near-beard after a sunset latte . . .”
“Is somebody just a little judgmental?”
Ooof! She was right. Who the fuck was I? King of Anal Leakage? In this world of alienation, was my dirty secret that I just wanted to belong? To be part of a tribe. Corny McCornball. The problem is that the junkie tribe is a whole other category. Even though, here in Echo Park (gentrified gang-land, more or less) I now owned the requisite face fur, my people were fiends, not hipsters. I could have been pigment-free at an albino-convention. It wouldn’t have mattered. This was Hollywood. These people wanted to be “in the room.” I never set foot in a room I did not want to crawl out of immediately. Because, call me sentimental, just being human feels like a front when what you are is a two-legged need machine.
But hey! The great thing about being a junkie? (Or a degenerate gambler, or drunk, etc.) It shrunk ambition down to manageable doses. Heroin made for mindful and effective ego-management. “God, just let me get through the next five minutes. . . . God, don’t let the fucking security guard wake up. . . . God, just don’t let that skeek with face sabs have AIDS. The problem now—heading into the coffee shop (which actually seemed pretty cool, half inside counter, half metal tables on a fly-plagued patio)—was that I was low on junk. Which has its own strange side effect: unwanted awareness. Now erupting like some kind of mind-acne all over my brainpan. So that it hit me, hard: I’d capped a stellar career in side effects with random murder fueled by irrational attraction to a total stranger. A realization, I won’t lie, that made me half wish I’d gone the wannabe screenwriter route myself. (And why did I assume the caffeinates were wannabes? Was it too uncomfortable to imagine that other people in the world were actually accomplished and happy? What the fuck?) True, even if you were successful in show business there was always somebody to shit on you. If you worked in SESSIE-land, you shit on yourself. If, you know, you had pretensions.
Anyway. The thirteen keyboarders I walked by might well have been tapping out big money cutting-edge studio plums. But—don’t let me get a swelled head—under the glitz, what these young successes really craved was some quality high basic-cable rotation, like, say, my nonstop Crohn’s disease and adult diaper patter. Maybe it wasn’t as cool as a Johnny Depp Thin Man remake but my stuff ran at two in the afternoon in Omaha, during The Ed Show.
Walk a mile in my veins!
“Lloyd?”
Nora’s elbow snapped me out of my shame spiral. “Lloyd! Stop muttering.” She plopped her bag on a chair at the far end of the grungy fun-terrace. Through some fly-infested poplins we had a view of the “girlfriend’s” place, a powder-blue bungalow up a flight of crumbling concrete steps from the street, flanked by palm stumps.
Nora sat down and knocked back her triple Americano. “Can we get back to excitotoxins? Drink enough Diet Coke during pregnancy and, if you’re lucky, your baby’s just going to be mildly brain damaged. If you hit the jackpot, new Mommy’s going to have the lungs of a retired mineworker. And baby’s going to be born with Mermaid Syndrome.”
“Mermaid Syndrome? That sounds nice.” I was glad to be thinking of anything besides bus station toilet death.
“It’s lovely,” she said, grabbing my cup of Zoka and slurping half before I even touched it. “Newborns come out with their legs fused, like a mermaid’s tail. Hence the name. Oh, and they don’t have kidneys, but, come on, do babies need kidneys to be adorable?”
I snatched my coffee back and slammed it. Fair-trade heroin would have done more for my opiate receptors, but I needed something.
“For Christ’s sake, why do you know all this?”
Nora ignored my query and pointed through the buggy poplins. “Let’s focus, okay? There are ground-level windows, which means there’s a basement we can sneak in through if Susie forgets to leave the front door unlocked. I don’t like going in the back, because it just looks shady.”
“Wait, you’ve done this before?”
Again, she ignored the question.
“Neighbors notice somebody who’s walking around the back of a house instead of knocking on the front door or going straight in. The idea is to look like it’s no big deal. We’re just popping in for a visit. Nothing to make good citzens suspicious.”
“Unless there’s screaming, right?”
“Like you do when you’re dreaming?”
The thing about Nora, she could say the most vicious things, but there was a matter-of-factness to the delivery that made you think she wasn’t being vicious at all. She was just being . . . herself.
I had just finished my second “Zucotti Park”: Bruschetta, Gruyère, Tomato, and Green Olive Tapenade—when the Charger pulled in. He had the top down. A roundish ex-jock with a crew cut and a Harry Reems seventies porn-stache. His was the same sandy color as the one the Brawny Towel Man used to have, a couple of years before the Koch Brothers purchased Georgia-Pacific. A deal that also snagged them Dixie Cups and Angel Soft toilet paper. Because even an armadillo is softest on the bottom. (No, they didn’t use that one, either.)
Nora had slipped a Nikon out of her purse and worked the telephoto. “He’s that guy,” she said. I borrowed the camera. Took a picture of her that was really a picture of the little blue bungalow. Though I don’t actually know if there was any film in the camera. Holding a Nikon is one way you can stare at something without anybody noticing. Because you are a PHOTOGRAPHER. (People see you shooting with an iPhone, you’re just somebody shooting pictures with an iPhone.)
“What guy, my newly blond friend?”
She reached out and slapped my bicep. Such as it was. “The guy who rolls up the sleeves on a short-sleeved T-shirt. To make his muscle bigger.”
“He could be Brawny Man’s little playmate,” I said, “Li’l Brawny. Your friend must be thrilled.”
“Like I said, she’s a professional.” Nora shrugged and adjusted her own blond wig. I didn’t know if she’d like that I liked the look. She looked at me straight on, in the eye—such directness, in most people disconcerting and rare, was normal for her—and announced in a voice throatier than usual, “When this is over, I want to fuck you till your face collapses.”
(I’m a sucker for romance.)
Nora took back the camera. Then I paid and dropped my usual
inappropriately big please-love-me-because-I-hate-myself tip. Even though it was just a take-your-bagel-to-the-table kind of place. If the bill was ten, I liked to tip five. Even if all I had was eleven. There’s a logic to this, but who wants to hear it?
Not Nora, apparently. Making sure no one was looking, she scissored two fingers into the tip jar, removed the five I’d just dropped in, and replaced it with a single. “Your heart’s in the right place, but we don’t want them to remember us.”
Then she slipped a fork up her sleeve and off we went. No one looked up from their Final Drafts.
TWENTY-THREE
Burned Baby Toys
The deputy had found a spot right in front of the blue house, right behind a Prius. We ambled toward it, across the street. The Prius was the same color as Harold’s. “Wait,” I said, “is that ours?”
“Not yet,” Nora replied.
Stress, as always, made me a tad addled.
Nora pulled out a compact—that was a first—and checked her lipstick. But really she was looking behind us.
“Nothing suspicious,” she said, dabbing away.
“What’s suspicious is he got a spot right in front of his house. We had to drive up and down five times and we’re still half on red. It’s almost like somebody was waiting, just so they could pull out before he pulled in.”
“Lloyd.” She stopped in the middle of the street to stare at me. Her expression one of pained compassion. The kind you might give a mentally challenged man who tried to impress you with long division. Two into two equals November a hundred and five. “Maybe somebody took care of that,” she said gently.
All I could think to say to that was “Jesus, what movie are we in?”
Nora took my arm and smiled a big fake indulgent smile as we stepped, arm in arm, over the cracked curb toward the fifty or so stairs that wound upward from the street. She spoke through the faux smile, her voice low. “Did you ever think maybe Occupy was a setup?”
“Like Wall Street wanted to call attention to themselves for being white-collar thugs?”
“Like somebody wanted an excuse to crack down. To justify all the armor girdles and bulletproof Plexiglas shields. Everybody thinks it’s either Star Wars or Spaceballs. They miss the iconic subtext.”
“Iconic subtext? Watch your step. I think somebody’s clocking us from the window. Curtain just closed.”
“That’s my friend. Closed halfway means living room. Full closed, bedroom.” She paused, as if deciding whether to continue or to shut up and just head up the stairs for some afternoon Manson Family action. “It’s obvious, once you know. Instead of helmet, face shield, and vest, think hat, lace veil, and fur coat. The whole assemblage is classic femme fatale. Real-life black-and-white. You’ve got phalanx after phalanx of riot cops tricked out as husband-killing noir heroines. Instead of perfume in atomizers, the ladies have pepper spray.”
Here we were, chatting at the lip of the abyss. Well, another abyss. They came with such frequency now they’d started to seem like potholes. We stopped by the Prius, talking in the street next to the car after coffee, the way they teach you in the LA handbook.
“So,” I said, partly to prolong the conversation, partly to put off going up those steps, knowing that when we came down—if we came down—life would be massively re-twisted, once again. “You’re saying everybody screaming about the police being paramilitary is missing the point? They’re not fascist puppets, they’re militarized transvestites. You’re serious about this?”
“Not completely. But read Vineland. Thomas Pynchon thought the whole counterculture was cooked up by Nixon, so that Quaker drunk could have an excuse for a domestic crackdown.”
“Thomas Pynchon? You’ve read Thomas Pynchon?”
“Let’s just go, okay?” Nora wiped a brown wisp of hair that had drifted south, from under her wig. I saw the fork still lodged up her sleeve. No doubt she had other things up there. Metaphorically and otherwise. Or maybe it was just silverware. For all I knew she was planning a picnic. Before I could freak myself out any further, she discreetly handed me the plastic gloves and we headed up the stairs, careful not to turn our ankles in the weed-cracked concrete. Taggers had tagged the tree stump.
The house was a classic run-to-shit LA bungalow. Rusty porch swing, sagging chaise lounge. A blue recycling bin spilled empty Bud cans and Domino’s boxes. Approaching the door, we heard the sounds of what, on the covers of romance novels, used to be called “torrid lovemaking.” If part of romance involved screaming “filthy whore” and “cum bucket” from the bed of passion.
A frayed throw rug and lawn furniture graced the living room. But we didn’t stop. I followed Nora, who walked into the low-ceilinged bedroom like she’d been rolling up on humping policemen her whole life. “One thing I hate,” she whispered as she tossed Bergstresser’s balled-up jacket off a Barcalounger and scooped up his Taser, “is a guy who needs to degrade women to get off.” With that, we stepped into the bedroom, her friend Susie flipped the deputy sheriff off her stomach, and Nora Tasered his penis.
It happened that fast. The deputy stiffened like a cartoon cat, then curled double as if fried. For a second he stayed fetal, mewling through tears. The women just stared at him. I almost felt sorry for the man. It was awkward. Bergstresser wasn’t big so much as bulky, made more so in contrast to Susie, a weed-thin Asian with a pope’s hat bouffant that seemed untouched by the action.
The deputy’s eyes appealed to me, as the other male in the room. “Scum,” Nora muttered, and I felt both women daring me to offer guy-to-guy succor. I resisted the urge, but will not deny a sympathetic squeeze at the law enforcer’s high-pitched squeals.
I didn’t realize, before this, that Tasers could make you bleed. At least they made a penis bleed. Bergstresser, naked, was just another white man, in his case your basic jock-run-to-seed with a Drill Instructor vibe that played too old for middle-aged paunch. The man’s fear-shriveled organ. (In that condition, you couldn’t call it his manhood or maybe you could. It was more like Porky Pig’s tail. Freshly shellacked.
“Let’s do pepper spray,” Susie said. There seemed no great affection between her and my new life partner. Just two professionals being professional. No small talk. That or they were longtime lesbian lovers, and I was no more than a patsy in some homicidal eroto-political getaway. God knows what they’d do to me! I was as aroused as I was terrified. (Pretty much the norm with Nora, even solo.)
Nora stepped back to let Susie, walking and putting her jeans on at the same time, get by her. Why were all the women I ever met experts at sprinting and dressing?
“Probably good you just get out of here,” Nora said. Susie scowled, saying nothing. Just hopped and shimmied her feet through the jeans into her no-logo Cons—Converse All-Stars with the insignia ripped out. (Which, I admit, I didn’t quite get—since the brand was completely recognizable as what it was, even without the branding. What would Naomi Klein make of it? The No Logo logo. Unless that was the point: so you could have your consumer props and reject them too. As long as the shoes were stolen, you weren’t technically contributing to sweatshop culture. Now that Chuck Taylors were being manufactured by Chinese wage slaves who had never heard of Chuck Taylor.)
Susie’s ribs showed through a baby tee, under non-augmented breasts. A contrast to Nora, who was so politically on point it was hard to imagine how she would have decided to go mega-rack. Not everybody starts out radicalized. Even “Cracker Barrel” Ed Schultz was a hard-charging right-wing radio host until 1998. Now he’s a backbone of MSNBC and a progressive Rush Limbaugh body double. Miracles abound!
Reassembled, Susie tugged on polyurethane gloves and bent over Bergstresser’s pale, sweaty paunch. Dazed now, the man’s mewling took on a babylike quality, like a nervous infant dreaming of sweet mommy milk. Everything about him was pink as opossum skin. Not that I’m some country boy: possums hang around under houses in LA like
grubs under rocks. And surface at night. Sometimes I’d hear them on the porch, clawing at the screen. The ones I’d seen never played dead. Perhaps they were too intrigued with the sight of me, playing alive.
Holding her breath, Susie removed the barbs from the deputy’s bleeding organ and then wound the wires back into the Taser Nora still held in her hand.
That’s when I saw the hardware on the floor, under Bergstresser’s pants. “Don’t tell me the guy wears his Death Star gear around the house?”
“That’s not his, it’s mine,” Susie said.
“What, you hang out at a police supply store?”
“Yeah, it’s called Amazon.” She held up each item as she ID’d it. “MTW-800, military-grade black stun gun 6.8 million volts, rechargeable with flashlight, $28.99. NYPD tactical-support SWAT vest, $19.98. Rothco black VenTec tactical goggles, $9.89. Schampa CoolSkin balaclava, $6.98 used. Tactical SWAT helmet, $9. Everything you need to get your domestic paramilitary on. The sick fuck probably never had to leave his house.”
Susie and Nora exchanged some kind of private smile. Susie licked her lips like a hammy porn star, but Nora ignored that, too. She was all business. “Leave me the party gear” was all she said.
Susie smirked. “Mais oui, bitch.”
I had no idea of the history between these two. And I had no idea how to ask. I didn’t know Nora well enough for anything about her to be called secret. All I knew about her was what she told me. Nora seemed to keep her history, as she did her personality, on a need-to-know basis. Being a habitual, unregenerate babbler, this was a trait I admired mightily. I myself had become a habitual spritzer of personal history, a boundary-blind serial confessor, in the manner of those who’ve stumbled out of (or into) lives of addiction, gabbing with others of their ilk, transforming every exchange, in or out of twelve-step meetings, into some competitive bout of one-downmanship.