by Drew Stepek
A man got out of a pickup truck that looked a lot like Rodderick’s. Scrap yard, huh? He walked to the back and grabbed a bag out of the bed. The girl got out to join him.
“It ain’t much, Amethyst.” He pointed at a log cabin. “I made a room for you that was my office.”
The girl grabbed another bag. “Anything will be better than sleeping by mom’s side while she faded away.”
The man dropped his bag and lifted his finger to deliver a stern message. “Your mother was a good woman.”
The girl’s face started welling up. “Then, why did you leave us?” she finally screamed and then ran into the cabin.
“Just what I need. A teenager,” the dad said in an almost inappropriate tone.
Rodderick closed the door to the fridge and walked back toward me, eventually handing me a beer.
I took the beer and cheersed him. “I don’t mean to sound like a dick, but is this—” I pointed to the screens, “—the big surprise?”
“You’re not being a dick.” He cheersed me back and took a sip.
“Then what’s the surprise? Why did you agree to meet with me to begin with?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and he muted the compound’s sound system. “When I found out that you were in Austin, I… umm… I wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me? You already thanked me for taking care of the McCoys and the RTL.”
“Not that. I wanted to thank you for making me who I am.”
I backwashed into my bottle, causing it to overflow with head. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re not making this easy for me.” He walked back to the pantry, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and threw them to me. “Clean that up, please.”
I started cleaning the foam off of the side of the island and the floor.
“What did Father McAteer tell you back at St. Matthews, RJ? About why you’re alive.”
“I don’t know. He told me the church rounded up a bunch of hookers and street people. They didn’t want them to have abortions. They kept us alive because of the church’s stance on abortion. And they dumped us on the street for whatever insane reason.”
“That’s half the story,” he said.
“Still not following.” I paused sopping up the beer.
“It wasn’t the church’s decision to bring you to life. It wasn’t the church’s decision in any of the cities. I brought you here to thank you, RJ. Well,” he paused. “Not you only.”
I nodded my head and half smiled. I felt a tug at my arm. I tried to brush it off. I guessed that The Gooch wanted to see how the rich and famous lived as well. Either that, or he could feel my heart speeding up.
He took another sip of his beer and took off his beanie. “This is hard, so bear with me.” He started pacing around me. “I had cancer when I was young.” He started to cry. I think. “I was almost DOA just like you and your kind.”
“I thought we were the same.”
“Not entirely.” He patted under his eyes with his knit cap. I didn’t see any tears. I guess he wasn’t a great actor after all. “My parents heard about some experimental treatment. I became part of that program. I became what I am because of you. You and the rest of your kind were brought to life and kept in the basement of that church through a pharmaceutical research project.”
Something flicked at my ears a few times. I waved it away. “That’s not true.”
“I’m afraid it is true. The church became a farm to grow organs and bone marrow and stem cells for kids with cancer.”
His words, the truth, burned me like he had just thrown acid in my face.
He tapped on his stomach. “There’s probably some of you inside me.”
“Wait. Back up.” I tossed the balled-up towels on the bar. “Fat Mac told me that he put us out on the street because it was an act of God that we were alive or something like that.”
“Total transparency, RJ. He went against the investors who paid to grow you by leaving you on the street. He was supposed to dispose of your bodies when you reached a certain age. He did the wrong thing.”
I felt a scratch on the back of my neck. I swatted at it like it was a gnat. “So, I’m the wrong thing?” I grabbed a bottle of whiskey by the neck off of the bar and held it up to his face.
“No, no, no,” he said, stepping back. “I wanted to thank you for my life. My parents thank you for my life.” He pointed back to the TV. “Look at all I’ve achieved. Look at all we’ve achieved. You’re here now, right? You’re alive.”
My veins growled and a swarm of legs crept all over my skin as if The Gooch had dumped an ant farm down the back of my jeans.
“So, you think that bringing me here and saying thank you is going to make us straight?” I turned the bottle back over and set it down. No matter how I felt about what he was saying, I was there for Paulina. Her dream of toys tugged me back to the reason I was there.
“I don’t mean to offend you or sound indifferent to you saving my life. I just wanted you to know that I appreciate it.” He grinned. The tears, if there ever were any, dried up pretty quickly.
I looked around his kitchen and thought about the alley where I grew up. I didn’t know how to respond.
He untwisted the top on the whiskey and poured three shots. “Linnwood is on his way here. I want you both to work for me. I want to make this—” he waved his hand between us, “—right.”
“I’m not sure if that’s okay.” I felt pricks underneath my toenails. The Gooch wanted his fix. I grabbed the shot out of his hand and slammed it down.
“Well, unfortunately I can’t really give you time to think about it. C’mon, man. This is your dream. Linnwod running the coke and you running the heroin in Austin.”
“Austin sucks. I can’t wait to get out of here.” I wet dog shook the whiskey down.
“You’re part of my gang now, RJ,” he said as he took his shot.
My nostrils flared. “You don’t want to play gangster with me, homeboy.”
His arrogance sucked all the air out of the room. He put up his hands and twiddled his fingers, mocking me. “Oooo. Fucking L.A. badass.” He put his fist out to bump.
“What the fuck, dude?” I smacked his hand.
He stepped into my face as he lifted up the whiskey bottle and took a swig. “I don’t think it’s fair, either. That’s why I’m doing this to pay it forward.”
Then he suddenly threw the whiskey bottle across the kitchen and it exploded against a cabinet. “Bitch! You’re a guest in my fucking palace and I just thanked you for my life. That simple. You don’t have to do anything.” He put up his fingers and started counting. “I had cancer. My parents had money. It went away. I have powers. I’m stinking rich. Every little fucking girl in the world wants my dick inside of them.” He pressed his open palm toward my face. “I love heroin. So, let’s go get high.”
I sat back down on the barstool and swiveled it back toward the island, where I rested my beer.
“You don’t even know the scope of my operation. This isn’t a club for a bunch of homeless people. This is the big time. Everything you’ve ever wanted. Think about it. I’m giving you a magnificent gift.”
My body felt warm like I had a fever. It could have been because I was angry that this little, rich prick just added another bleak chapter to my life, but it was more likely that I just wanted to curl up next to my favorite pillow.
HErOiN!
The tugging started again. “How do you know what I want? You haven’t even asked me why I wanted to meet with you. It wasn’t to be your mule. That’s what Linn wants. I came here to smooth shit over for him. I came because Eldritch—”
“That fucking loser. He is the biggest failure I’ve ever met. This guy dressed in all his stupid vampire clothes had such a boner for me that he got my cell number off of a call sheet that we used on the set of the second Nightshayde movie. He seemed cool at first but then he started stalking me. I stopped answering his calls and texts. Guy blows up my phone. It’s
annoying.”
I turned my empty beer bottle on its side and started spinning it around on the counter. I stared at it, trying to block The Gooch. I was there for Paulina. I wasn’t there to get high. “So, you did get his texts when we first got to Austin?”
He paused for a second.
“No, I don’t think so.” He looked at the ceiling as if he was trying to remember. “What texts?”
“Eldritch sent you a bunch of texts when we got here.”
“I told you I changed my number.”
I stopped the bottle from spinning and pointed it at him. “No, you didn’t.”
“Well, I did,” he insisted. “Why are we even talking about him?” He turned away from me and headed back to the fridge. “You want another beer?”
Even after drinking the beer and the whiskey my mouth was dry. I was hungry. More hungry than usual. I desperately wanted to follow him and get high and then just kill him. The bottle stopped spinning, letting it back in.
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin.
The thought of it began clouding my mind and The Gooch was taking the opportunity to ambush me.
The itch was becoming unbearable. I was so close to scratching, but I was sick of hearing about how great this guy had it. How he got the life. How he got the fame.
He sighed as he handed me another beer. “I guess you’re jonesing, huh?”
“What makes you think that?”
He opened a cabinet drawer on the side of the island and pulled out a spoon. “Because you’re sweating and you’re swatting at the air like there are bugs in here.” He put the spoon in front of me.
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin.
“I’m not a meth addict. I’m not swatting at shit.” I wiped my face with the balled-up towels that I used to clean the floor. They smelled.
“Gross, you pig. Use a new towel.” He handed me the roll again.
I knocked it over. “I’m good.”
“I hope you know that if I decided to let you in, you can’t be using all my product. That’s why King Cobra’s small-time shit went out of business.”
“Look, Mack. I don’t want to be in business with you. I’m here for Perry.” I groaned. I was becoming delirious. Was it right for me to want to play with my toys before I got Paulina hers? I don’t think Eldritch would see a problem with that as long as I got done what needed to get done. Back at the hotel, he had winked at me and patted me on the shoulder.
“Fuck off, you L.A. trash.” Stephan walked out of the kitchen. “Do you want me to call you a cab? Or do you just want to leave with Perry before we even get this agreement started?”
I wanted to just rip him limb from limb but The Gooch kept saying one thing and one thing only.
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin.
“If you want to get high, follow me.”
Blindly, I stepped down off the stool and started following him like he was the Pied Piper. Little did I know that I was still going to have to endure at least fifteen more minutes of his gratuitous bragging before I even saw any product.
Upon exiting the kitchen, we entered into the colossal foyer area. It was less gaudy than the solid-gold snake entrance to the Battlesnakes’s compound, but it was disgusting, nonetheless. It looked like the designers at IKEA teamed up with Hot Topic and started mass-producing the least cool items from Eldritch’s loft and lacquered everything with brush metal spray paint.
“Do you know what Rodderick means?” he asked as he pointed to several street art pieces that lined the floor around the factory fabricated pseudo-Gothic staircase.
Everything was becoming a blur. I couldn’t even understand what the fuck he was yapping about.
He pointed to a painting of a crown and a family crest at the top of the stairs. I had seen this a thousand times in films where assholes would point to paintings or statues and overanalyze how it represents their power. “Stephan is a French word that means crown. Likewise, Rodderick comes from the Germans and it means ‘famous power’.” He stopped for a second and looked deep into the painting, only taking his eyes off of it to make sure that I was understand the veiled message.
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin.
I bobbed my head. “What about that junk, dude? Come on. Fuck!”
TuG. Tug. TUg.
He looked at the painting one last time and let out a small gasp. Then, he started walking across the last leg of the foyer, down a hall, toward two large doors.
He paused and reflected. “I have been around the world. The thing is that I have seen the strangest things right here in America.”
FliCk. FLick. FlicK.
I followed him down the hall, panting like a starving dog. The street art ended and framed posters from all of his vampire movies decorated the walls. I stopped at one, all it said was…
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin.
I closed my eyes, trying to do anything to drive away from The Gooch’s trap.
He walked up to the two large doors and opened one up. “After you,” he said, bowing and inviting me in by rolling his hand like a medieval squire.
This dude was becoming weirder by the second.
ScrAtcH. SCraTch. ScRAtch.
I pulled at the flesh on my arms. “Are we there yet?’”
He winked at me at he looked up from his bowing stance. “We shall see, won’t we?”
“There’s heroin in that room, right?”
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin.
“Among other things.” He stood up, brushed off his shirt and lifted one of his eyebrows.
“Is it fucking in there or not?”
He opened the doors and I ran inside, frantic for the feast. He started flipping on the lights and all the electronic devices, one by one from his phone. The room was filled with all his toys. All his fucking toys. A pool table. Huge TVs. Leather sofas and chairs. Video games. Action figures. Dolls. Trucks. Race cars. This was a pedophile’s playroom.
“And this is where I bring the little human girls,” he whispered.
He hit the touchscreen on his phone again and the volume his film, playing from ten different colossal TVs thundered so loudly that it felt like we were in the front row at a Slayer concert.
I stopped.
ThE woRld’S beSt hEroin?
Out of nowhere, I heard bumpers coming alive as he hit the last switch on the phone. In the corner of the gigantic room, almost hidden in the dark, I saw something illuminate that clawed me back from the sweats and the fevers and the itch. It was a Nightshayde pinball machine.
“Fuck you, Gooch,” I said aloud.
“What did you call me?”
I dug my feet into the floor and curled my fingers into fists. “I thought you said you weren’t a child molester.”
“What was that?”
“You fucking heard me.”
He tossed his phone down on the couch. “I don’t think I did, asshole.”
I pointed to an overflowing toy chest. “What is all this?”
“C’mon, bro. It isn’t wrong if they want it.”
“Fuck you. Fuck your ‘thank you’. Fuck your operation. And fuck your ‘World’s Best Heroin’.”
He looked at me dumbfounded and then shoved me. “Prick.”
I grabbed a glass sitting on one of the bars and whizzed it at one of the TVs. It demolished the screen right as Amethyst Rose was dramatically looking at her reflection in a swamp.
I hocked up a loogie and spit it on the wood floor between us. “Let’s go, Hamster Fist.”
Rodderick hurdled himself on top of me, crashing me through a glass table. “You want to know how bad a hamster fist hurts, you ungrateful piece of shit?” He bomb-fisted me in the face twenty times. “Why are you here, RJ? Why the fuck are you in my town, bitch?”
As I twisted my face to avoid the slaughter, glass tugged away at my right cheek all the way up to my tear ducts, almost yanking my eye out of my face. I spit blood back at him and managed to break the iron frame from the table behind my head. I put it up as a shield in fr
ont of my nose, so he moved on to punching me in the throat and the chest. I bulldozed the steel frame under his chin and got on top of him.
“I want to leave,” I screamed.
His throat was tight under the frame and he gasped for air. He picked up a die-cast fire engine next to him and slammed it into the side of my face. I got dizzy and let up on the choke hold enough for him to get to his feet. I fell forward onto my hands, trying to click the pain out of my jaw, which was dislocated again.
He danced around me and kicked me several times in the back of the head. I melted onto the floor. I don’t know what he got next, it felt like a wrench, but he pounded it onto the back of my neck until everything went black.
I was awakened by the feeling of my teeth being dragged across the gravel on the driveway to Rodderick’s back entrance. Unlike every other time that I had passed out or gone to sleep since arriving in Austin, I didn’t dream. It might have had something to do with the fact that Rodderick had beaten me so profusely that my brain wasn’t working. The guy handed me my ass.
As I tried to come back to the world of the “living,” I spit some chips and dirt out of my mouth. “Where…?”
Rodderick grabbed me by the hair and pulled me toward him. “Shut the fuck up!” He bounced my face into the headlight on a car. It zapped into the pusing, healing sore that the table had torn into my cheek. The headlight cover fell off and the light illuminated the veins in my eyelid. Rather than help me to my feet, he let me fall forward. I wasn’t off the hook though, because he walked back a few steps and then punted me in the face, nearly knocking me unconscious again. I flipped onto my back and felt something broken in my back pocket pierce my ass cheek. I felt around. The phone that Cody gave me was demolished from the melee.
I was disorientated because my right eye was glowing from the light and my left eye was swollen over. At least I was mending. I laid there, waiting for him to finish me off. He mumbled something but it just came out as a garbled mess.
I heard a car door open and shut. Footsteps crunched the gravel and stopped.
“Hey, man. Are you going to pay to get that fixed?”