Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

  MARYROSE DIES ON Wednesday, and Campbell finds out about it a couple of hours later, when Tony calls him at the bar. During the conversation Campbell goes from staring at some LMU chick’s fake ID to sitting on the sidewalk. He slaps away any helping hands and shuts his ears to all consolation. His and Maryrose’s thing was them against the world, and to let anyone in now would be a betrayal. He keeps waiting to cry but never does. The ground doesn’t open up, the moon stays where it is in the sky. When his legs work again, he gets up and walks. Straight down Sunset toward the ocean. He crosses PCH early the next morning and collapses on the sand. The fog is so thick he can’t see the waves, only hear them pounding the shore. Good. Nothing. Anymore. Ever. The cops show up later that day, after he’s ridden the bus back to the apartment. The detective who does the talking is a tall woman with white, white teeth. Campbell answers all her questions with lies. He doesn’t do dope, Maryrose didn’t do dope, and Tony is a fucking saint. The woman and her partner move gingerly around the place, like they’re afraid to touch anything, and when Campbell coughs, the woman winces and claps a protective hand over her nose.

  THEY TALKED ABOUT getting a dog, even went to the shelter to look for one. All they found there were psychotic pit bulls and shivering Chihuahuas, and the smell and the barking drove them out after just a few minutes. “Are you telling me normal people can deal with that?” Maryrose said. She liked to cook but forgot pots on the stove, left them simmering until the smoke alarm went off. Driving too. She’d wrecked a couple of cars, and the one she had when Campbell met her bore the dents and scrapes of a dozen close calls, a hundred little lapses, each a new wound to lick. When she was straight she wanted to be what she wasn’t: productive and reliable, focused and stable. “Some people are just made messy,” Campbell told her. “Not me,” she replied. “I was born right and got twisted.” Whole days went by like that, where he couldn’t crack her codes. When she was happy, though, when she was high, contentment oozed from her like sweet-smelling sap. She’d name the ducks in Echo Park, dance to the music of the ice cream truck, and press her lips to his throat and leave them there. When she was happy, when she was high.

  DOC STARTS TEXTING Campbell at all hours, stuff like Hey, man and Ragin’ tonight? What it boils down to is he wants dope. Campbell tries to blow him off in the beginning, because dealing to a movie star seems like a good way to get busted, but then his own habit gets out of hand, and he has no money, and Doc pays double for everything and doesn’t like to party alone. Campbell spends one night at the guy’s house, a couple more the next week, and then he’s practically living there. They sleep all day and order in from expensive restaurants. Doc’s name is magic. A chef from one of the places actually delivers the food himself and puts the finishing touches on the meal in the house’s kitchen. The girls who drop by every now and then aren’t whores, but they’ll take whatever they can get. Tall, leggy creatures, they know how to sit in short dresses and run in high heels, and all their conversations are in another language about some other world. Doc is always relieved when they leave for their parties and clubs, when it’s finally just him and Campbell and the dope comes out.

  One day they drive down to the Strip to eat lunch. Afterward a display of sunglasses in the window of a store catches Doc’s eye. He goes inside and tries on a few pairs and makes Campbell try some too, sharing a mirror with him. “Those are hot on you,” he says about one pair. “Like Michael Pitt hot.” He insists on buying them for Campbell. Seven-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Campbell wears them later that afternoon when he makes a quick trip to the east side to replenish their stash. The bums look jaunty through the perfectly tinted lenses, the poor Mexicans happy. “How much do you think these cost?” Campbell asks Tony. “What the fuck do I care?” Tony replies. The sun is going down on his way back to the canyon, shining through the windshield at an annoying angle. With his new glasses he can stare right into it and take all the glare it has to give.

  MARYROSE DIES ON Wednesday. There’s a funeral two weeks later, but Campbell isn’t invited. He moves out of Tony’s and in with a bartender from Little Joy. Everything is good until the guy finds blood spattered on the bathroom wall and a syringe under the couch and tells Campbell to pack his shit and go. “I’ve lived with junkies before,” he says. “They’re nothing but holes that can’t be filled. And they steal.” So it’s back to Tony’s, back to the house where Maryrose died. He continues to shoot up on the couch where she shot up and to shower in the tub where her heart stopped beating. It’s a curse, having to relive the worst over and over, trying to breathe that air, and he knows that if he doesn’t get away, he’s going to die too.

  The first step is to retake the reins of his habit, be a man about it. Without too much suffering he manages to taper off to two hits a day. What eventually derails him is some punk at the bar who knew Maryrose saying something stupid about “that’s what happens when an angel dances with the devil” and then, later, a photo he happens upon while scrolling through the pictures on his phone. It’s Maryrose the day before she OD’d, looking like a ghost already. And he’s the one who did that to her. She was just chipping when they met, and trying to keep up with him is what got her hooked. It’s not a new realization, but this time it hurts enough to serve as a reason for backsliding into a three-day bender that hollows out his head and scrapes his bones clean of flesh. Oh, baby, he thinks when he finally pops to the surface on a bright fall morning when the tree shadows look like claws grabbing at the sidewalk, I can’t come meet you there ever again.

  HE AND MARYROSE tried to kick together after a bad balloon of what was supposed to be tar burned going in and made them both vomit their souls into the kitchen sink. This even after they’d been warned not to buy from that dealer by someone whose brother had ended up in the hospital just from smoking the stuff. If they were so strung out they’d risk shooting rat poison, it was time to quit. They threw some clothes into a suitcase, gassed up Campbell’s Toyota, and headed out into the desert. Traffic on the freeway inched along, and the city stretched on forever. They stopped for lunch at Del Taco, but neither of them could eat. Then the army of windmills near Palm Springs freaked Maryrose out, the relentless turning of their giant blades suggesting an inexorability that was at odds with her lace-winged fantasy of bucking her fate. They checked into a desiccated motel on the shore of the Salton Sea. Even though the thermometer outside the office read 100 degrees, Maryrose wanted to walk down to the beach. It was covered with fish bones and scavenging gulls and had a stench that stuck in their throats. Back in the room they turned the noisy air conditioner to high and shivered under the thin blanket, unable to decide if they were hot or cold. Maryrose clutched her cramping stomach and kicked her feet. “My legs,” she moaned. “My legs.” She sat up, lay down, and sat up again. Gritting his teeth against his own agony, Campbell limped into the bathroom and drew her a glass of water. She drank it down but immediately vomited onto the linoleum next to the bed. Campbell placed his hand on her burning forehead and tried to mumbo jumbo some of her pain into him. He finally passed out for a while, waking near dawn.

  They dragged themselves out to the car as soon as the sun bubbled red on the horizon and turned back toward L.A. Tony was still up from the night before. He sold them some shit, and they fixed right then and there, marveling at how fine they suddenly felt. They never discussed the trip as a failure, only joked about what fools they’d been for thinking they could go cold turkey. Vague plans were floated to try to kick again in a month or so, this time with some Xanax or Klonopin to help with the withdrawals, but they always found some reason to put it off.

  AWW, DAMN, HERE they come up the drive: Doc’s agent, Doc’s manager, and Doc’s little brother, to serve as muscle. “Shoot me up quick,” Doc demands, thrusting out his arm. Campbell ignores him, more worried about gathering his belongings before he gets the bum’s rush. He’s hurrying up the stairs when they come through the door. Doc yells at them to keep the fuck away and let him be, but C
ampbell can hear in his voice that he’s ready to get off the roller coaster. Doc’s brother busts in on Campbell as he’s stuffing his clothes into his backpack. “If you’re not out of here in two minutes, I’m calling the cops,” the brother says. When Campbell walks past him, he shoves Campbell toward the stairs, almost knocking him down. “Touch me again, and I’ll sue,” Campbell says. “You’re not suing anybody, you fucking loser,” the brother scoffs. Doc is sitting on the sofa between his manager and his agent. He’s crying like a scared little boy, and his manager is stroking his hair and telling him everything will be fine. His brother stays on Campbell’s tail all the way out to the driveway. Campbell hops into his car and wills it to start on the first try. The rear window shatters as he reaches the street, making him flinch and slam on the brakes. Doc’s brother drops the other rock he’s holding and dares Campbell to make something of it. That very evening Campbell trades the fancy sunglasses for fifty dollars’ worth of junk.

  MARYROSE DIES ON Wednesday, and a year—a year!—later Campbell marks the anniversary by returning to Echo Park, which he’s been avoiding since her passing. He’s a month sober, going to meetings, but struggles every day. Martin quit too, Tony’s in jail, and Doc did a very public stint in rehab and emerged a hero. Campbell tosses some potato chips to the ducks, but not one of them has the energy to climb out of the water and waddle up the bank to get them. It’s the third day of a heat wave, and the sun is showing everyone who’s boss. Grass crumbles underfoot, palms hiss overhead, and the forsaken stand in the shadows of telephone poles, waiting for buses that are always late.

  Maryrose claimed that the first time she did dope was the first time in her life she felt normal. “Why do you think it’s called a fix?” she said. Campbell didn’t argue; he just liked to see her smile. They’d come down to this bench, eat paletas, and make up songs about the people passing by. She’d laugh herself silly crooning about a fat kid kicking a soccer ball, then collapse breathless into his arms. And that’s when he felt normal for the first time. But who’s going to believe that? Who even wants to hear it? Better to keep those memories to himself, to guard them like a treasure against time, the goddamn drip, drip, drip of days that would wash them away.

  Apocrypha

  IF I HAD MONEY, I’d go to Mexico. Not Tijuana or Ensenada, but farther down, real Mexico. Get my ass out of L.A. There was this guy in the army, Marcos, who was from a little town on the coast called Mazunte. He said you could live pretty good there for practically nothing. Tacos were fifty cents, beers a buck.

  “How do they feel about black folks?” I asked him.

  “They don’t care about anything but the color of your money,” he said.

  I already know how to speak enough Spanish to get by, how to ask for things and order food. Por favor and muchas gracias. The numbers to a hundred.

  THE CHINESE FAMILY across the hall are always cooking in their room. I told Papa-san to cut it out, but he just stood there nodding and smiling with his little boy and little girl wrapped around his legs. The next day I saw Mama-san coming up the stairs with another bag of groceries, and this morning the whole floor smells like deep-fried fish heads again. I’m not an unreasonable man. I ignore that there are four of them living in a room meant for two, and I put up with the kids playing in the hall when I’m trying to sleep, but I’m not going to let them torch the building.

  I pull on some pants and head downstairs. The elevator is broken, so it’s four flights on foot. The elevator’s always broken, or the toilet, or the sink. Roaches like you wouldn’t believe too. The hotel was built in 1928, and nobody’s done anything to it since. Why should they? There’s just a bunch of poor people living here, Chinamen and wetbacks, dope fiends and drunks. Hell, I’m sure the men with the money are on their knees every night praying this heap falls down so they can collect on the insurance and put up something new.

  The first person I see when I hit the lobby—the first person who sees me—is Alan. I call him Youngblood. He’s the boy who sweeps the floors and hoses off the sidewalk.

  “Hey, B, morning, B,” he says, bouncing off the couch and coming at me. “Gimme a dollar, man. I’m hungry as a motherfucker.”

  I raise my hand to shut him up, walk right past him. I don’t have time for his hustle today.

  “They’re cooking up there again,” I say to the man at the desk, yell at him through the bulletproof glass. He’s Chinese too, and every month so are more of the tenants. I know what’s going on, don’t think I don’t.

  “Okay, I talk to them,” the man says, barely looking up from his phone.

  “It’s a safety hazard,” I say.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay,” he says.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay to you,” I say. “Next time I’m calling the fire department.”

  Youngblood is waiting for me when I finish. He’s so skinny he uses one hand to hold up his jeans when he walks. Got lint in his hair, boogers in the corners of his eyes, and he smells like he hasn’t bathed in a week. That’s what dope’ll do to you.

  “Come on, B, slide me a dollar, and I’ll give you this,” he says.

  He holds out his hand. There’s a little silver disk in his palm, smaller than a dime.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “It’s a battery, for a watch.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Come on, B, be cool.”

  Right then the front door opens, and three dudes come gliding in, the light so bright behind them they look like they’re stepping out of the sun. I know two of them: J Bone, who stays down the hall from me, and his homeboy Dallas. A couple of grown-up crack babies, crazy as hell. The third one, the tall, good-looking kid in the suit and shiny shoes, is a stranger. He has an air about him like he doesn’t belong down here, like he ought to be pulling that suitcase through an airport in Vegas or Miami. He moves and laughs like a high roller, a player, the kind of brother you feel good just standing next to.

  He and his boys walk across the lobby, goofing on one another. When they get to the stairs, the player stops and says, “You mean I got to carry my shit up four floors?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” J Bone says. “No problem.”

  The Chinaman at the desk buzzes them through the gate, and up they go, their boisterousness lingering for a minute like a pretty girl’s perfume.

  “Who was that?” I say, mostly to myself.

  “That’s J Bone’s cousin,” Youngblood says. “Fresh outta County.”

  No, it’s not. It’s trouble. Come looking for me again.

  THE OLD MAN asks if I know anything about computers. He’s sitting in his office in back, jabbing at the keys of the laptop his son bought him to use for inventory but that the old man mainly plays solitaire on. He picks the thing up and sets it down hard on his desk as if trying to smack some sense into it.

  “Everything’s stuck,” he says.

  “Can’t help you there, boss,” I say. “I was out of school before they started teaching that stuff.”

  I’m up front in the showroom. I’ve been the security guard here for six years now, ten to six, Tuesday through Saturday. Just me and the old man, day after day, killing time in the smallest jewelry store in the district, where he’s lucky to buzz in ten customers a week. If I was eighty-two years old and had his money, I wouldn’t be running out my string here, but his wife’s dead, and his friends have moved away, and the world keeps changing so fast that I guess this is all he has left to anchor him, his trade, the last thing he knows by heart.

  I get up out of my chair—he doesn’t care if I sit when nobody’s in the store—and tuck in my uniform. Every so often I like to stretch my legs with a stroll around the showroom. The old man keeps the display cases looking nice, dusts the rings and bracelets and watches every day, wipes down the glass. I test him now and then by leaving a thumbprint somewhere, and it’s always gone the next morning.

  Another game I play to pass the time, I’ll watch the people walking by outside
and bet myself whether the next one’ll be black or Mexican, a man or a woman, wearing a hat or not, things like that. Or I’ll lean my chair back as far as it’ll go, see how long I can balance on the rear legs. The old man doesn’t like that one, always yells, “Stop fidgeting. You make me nervous.” And I’ve also learned to kind of sleep with my eyes open and my head up, half in this world, half in the other.

  I walk over to the door and look outside. It’s a hot day, and folks are keeping to the shade where they can. Some are waiting for a bus across the street, in front of the music store that blasts that oom pah pah oom pah pah all day long. Next to that’s a McDonald’s, then a bridal shop, then a big jewelry store with signs in the windows saying Compramos Oro, We Buy Gold.