Be Safe

by Doug Weaver

  But he’s not done yet. He says that even the goddamned cross itself was usurped by the Gentiles; that making the sign of the cross was first a Jewish thing, that Jews were doing this for hundreds of years before Christianity because they were, with this making-the-cross gesture, simulating the Hebrew letter that the word ‘Torah’ begins with and the goddamned Gentiles couldn’t even let them have that. Then he says that it’s obvious to him that the Gentile dope addicts were here to “supersede” all the Jews; and that it just starts with one person and then another and then more and more and then you have the Holocaust all over again. And this guy is starting to foam at the mouth and it’s catching and various people around the room are screaming “Never again!” And the detectives had to calm the crowd down several times, all the while reassuring everybody there that they were aware of the situation and for everybody to try to be patient.

  Korn’s jaw just kind of goes slack, and he looks down. “Wow” he says. Then I guess to diffuse the tension he asks me if I want to run down to Antonio’s with him and get a couple of burritos.

  “Sure” I say, and we both head out the door, and just before the door closes behind us, Jimmy S. comes running up and he’s asking where we’re headed and he’s all out of breath and it’s obvious he’s risen from his prolonged period of spaz hibernation. His red pompadour has been deflated and it’s pretty clear that he probably hasn’t even used the bathroom yet. I tell him we’re gonna get some burritos and would he like to come with us. And he just looks at us weird like we’re completely crazy and says “No, not hungry;” that he’s just gonna head out for a while. I’m relieved he’s not coming, and I say “Cool, be safe.”

  Antonio’s is only a few blocks away down on Vermont – and it’s open 24/7. We leave Korn’s car in the driveway and head down Kenmore on foot. Neither of us says much though so we just walk, only occasionally mentioning dope craft and its attendant cast of characters and their dramas du jour. We both kind of notice a couple of guys who’ve been walking toward us at a right angle – actually I notice that they’ve noticed us – no big deal – just the usual Gaydar kind of thing. Between both Korn and me we concede to these guys at the appropriate moment a voiceless head nod, the subtext of which is the widely accepted “Wazzup?” meaning we’re aware of them and further communication might be forthcoming. They nod back, offering their own silent “Wazzups” as we meet each other. We stop momentarily, turning our attention to them – for confirmation’s sake: There’s definitely interest there. We’re definitely hovering, weighing our schedules and responsibilities against a possible sexual liaison which, admittedly, would be a nice distraction though, so Korn and I stupidly kind of just stand there gawking at these two guys. After a few really awkward moments, introductions are made: Hi, I’m so-and-so/Hi, I’m so-and-so, and so on. A few more moments pass in silence and the two kind of pull away from us – we’re walking in the same direction now. We stop to watch these two guys receding from our view, but that’s as far as it goes. The wisdom of pursuing such a seemingly huge diversion at the moment is questionable because the heaviness of Javier’s’ revelation re: the Neighborhood Watch meeting seems to want to us to focus on more serious stuff, and they’re moving considerably faster than Korn and me. There’s an occasional turn of the head along with additional slight nods between us and these other guys, but mostly Korn and I just walk in silence since almost all conversation at this point seems portentous, even though we’re both buoyed somewhat by the fact that all four of us seem to be headed in the direction of Antonio’s.

  I think about God and about being inside Korn’s house, and I can see it surrounded by all these people who hate us – well, maybe they don’t really “hate” us because that would mean that they had some bit of behavior-centered context to base their feelings on – but they at least think we’re evil. I think about the moms and dads and their kids and the whole thought of this question that they want answered more than anything: why are they being punished with our presence? And I think about my mom and dad and how different my upbringing must have been – we were low-grade Methodists – nothing, absolutely nothing rose to the level of existential punishment in my entire life. God was a guy with a long beard who lived in the sky and he had blue robes and thick white hair and he exerted less influence on us than the Ford parked in the driveway. I know his robes were blue because I won a Bible once that had colored pictures of God and Jesus and everybody. In order to win this Bible I had to recite the Ten Commandments to our church’s entire congregation one Sunday morning, but I choked and only made it up to maybe Commandment Three or Four – but the pastor gave me the Bible anyway and everybody applauded my pathetic performance. My dad was bald and in our domestic life at home, my mom played the piano and danced all at the same time. They drank a lot and seemed to have a pretty good time. The whole idea of existence was never brought up, much less God’s punishment for just breathing.

  Even though Javier’s description of the Neighborhood Watch meeting was pretty intense, this little walk to Antonio’s seems to banish this harshness further and further away into some benign mental territory, and for some reason I get this vivid memory of John and Marsha from when I was like five years old and we lived in National City, which is a suburb outside of San Diego, and I know now that it’s the closest thing to a ghetto I ever lived in, at least before I was an adult. John and Marsha were these two wasps that I claimed as pets – their home was inside a cardboard box that at one time held some large appliance like a stove or refrigerator or something. I just assumed they were married because there were only two of them, and there was this honeycomb-like stuff that was kind of silky – and I guess that’s where I imagined they slept at night. Come to think about it though, I’m not even sure if John and Marsha were different genders or even alive or whether they were wasp corpses that I played with inside this cardboard box. I use the term “played with” kind of generously because all I really remember about my interaction with them was that Marsha would swoon in her soprano wasp voice when she said with great passion, John’s name: Oh, John! And John being the male would then repeat Marsha’s name when it was his turn, but in a resonant baritone – at least as much of a baritone as a five-year-old can muster: Oh, Marsha! And they’d continue on like that: Oh, John! Oh, Marsha! Oh, John! Oh, Marsha!

  I ask Korn, who’s walking beside me, if he ever had any pets when he was a kid, to which he says “Yeah, a medium-sized poodle named Bandito,” end of comment. I want to share my memory about my pet wasps with him but I keep my mouth shut because – I don’t know why, but probably because I don’t know Korn very well and I’m afraid he’ll maybe think I’m weird, meaning that I’ve misconstrued the nature of his invitation to Antonio’s – that maybe I’ve elevated it to the level of sleepover, the kind when you were a kid and you tossed out avalanches of confession-tainted words detailing the facets of your pre-pubescent existence to every pajama-clad torso that was attached to heads with faces covered with microscopic pores and well-scrubbed sets of aural canals, the meaning of which might be understood as tiny proclamations of camaraderie and undying loyalty that are usually reserved for that variety of friend that exists in the realm of “best” – but most of all, I’m not exactly a hundred percent sure that this walk to Antonio’s isn’t a kind of a first date, and I kind of instinctively suspect that “confession” and “first date” can’t exist together at the same time and place – except of course if, by some really cool existential somersault, the temperature in this part of Los Angeles has fallen to just above absolute zero, which would blow apart not only the binaries of confession/first date, but each and every one of them beginning with life/death; black/white and so on, and would render the whole concept of “burrito” or “date” moot and would actually kill not only our appetites, but both Korn and me too. I mean, I haven’t dated anybody for years where you don’t use drugs and the two of you go out and do something, like watch a m
ovie. And neither of us is high, so I don’t say anything because the last time I tried going on a date with somebody while we were both “sober” it was a disaster.

  There was this weekend and I’d just moved into my place in Highland Park. And I had plenty of drugs but I didn’t know any people at all except in Hollywood, which was miles away. I don’t know what got into my head. I don’t know what made me – I can hardly breathe the word – “lonely.” I guess I was questioning myself – my lifestyle for a minute – or I was thinking what dope fiends always think: imagining a life where you can use drugs and have a meaningful relationship all at the same time – having your cake and eating it too – like that might have been possible. But that’s beside the point now because I went ahead and did it: I called somebody I used to get high with to go and see a movie. I can see the folly of it now, but at the time, all I could see was the inadequacy of a life shaped by dope deals and motel rooms and syringes and bags of meth and containers of Dilaudid. So when I learned that Kevin and Barry had broken up, I went ahead and started spending more and more time with Barry. And it’s not like I didn’t consider the plusses and minuses when choosing somebody to hang out with either. I felt a certain kinship with Barry – we enjoyed the same music, he was good looking, he shot enough dope to kill an elephant, and our names both started with “B”: Barry and Bert. And he never seemed to get arrested either, which is a major plus in my book. I mean, who needed all that drama of being separated due to going to jail, especially if you both got arrested and were in adjacent tanks and the only time you could see each other was during church on Sundays? Some guys thrive on that kind of shit, but not me.

  I imagined a perfect relationship growing between Barry and me where we rented movies and listened to music and fucked like monkeys, all, of course, while completely twisted from shooting dope. In my mind we had a happy life of selling dope and doing chores around the house, like washing dishes, mopping the floor and other concessions to domesticity. There were even times when my thoughts meandered across the boundary of drug use that didn’t include shooting meth, but was limited to a happy existence of smoking marijuana and rationally abandoning harder drugs instead to a life shaped by endeavor, albeit of a really minor variety. I know guys who just smoke pot. I’ve actually lived with some of them. And I conjured a similar existence for myself where I’d wake up, drink a cup of coffee and smoke a joint then head (on foot) to a legitimate workspace that was close by where I’d build furniture with hammers and saws and screws and glue and the appropriate sized pieces of wood. It wouldn’t be easy but it would be fulfilling and most of all, I’d be happy and satisfied with life. But even the second or third time I’d entertained this notion, I knew it was bullshit. I’d tried it before. And by “try” I didn’t actually try this scheme – I only made it to the wood working section of Home Depot where I admired power tools and daydreamed of building a chair, something that – because of my 100 percent lack of expertise on the subject – and my insistence on consideration of chair-building as a muse – probably cost me more energy in imagining the process rather than actually learning how to do it, and wore me out sufficiently that I headed back to my home where I dove into the spoon more eagerly than usual.

  The only minus to a life lived with Barry was that he quacked, which is actually one of his charms if you think about it. When Barry got loaded, which was all the time, instead of speaking in English he quacked like a duck. Some people thought this was really weird but I understood it. Barry seemed to know that language was meaningless, at least the torrent of dope-induced paranoid police schemes and gang plots that fall out of most people’s mouths while they’re loaded…so a stream of quacks was just as meaningful in the scheme of things. Barry’s quacking was kind of like a cat purring: he wouldn’t do it unless he felt completely safe and at ease. But miraculously Barry agreed to go to the movies with me – sober – at least sans meth.

  ###

  So there we are at the Arclight in Hollywood – and we aren’t that loaded. We smoked a little dope in the morning is all. And we’re sitting in the theater and that dorky-looking guy is giving his little speech about “Welcome to the Arclight” blah, blah, and the movie’s only been on for a few seconds and Barry nudges me. I look over and he pulls out a couple of syringes from his shirt pocket and says really soft “follow me.” So we pad out of the theater then make our way into the men’s room and go into a stall, which at the Arclight they’re about the size of a small condominium – and we shoot up these sizeable doses of meth, which it turns out was kind of a mistake looking back on it in hindsight. Because when you shoot meth, right when it hits you, you basically turn into a walking hardon. So the men’s room at the Arclight becomes our own personal little motel room. We sort of set up house there and we’re just hanging out, and whenever a good-looking guy walks in Barry and I kind of go crazy on him – Barry quacking like a motherfucker with his dick in his hand and me walking in circles with my pants around my ankles and jacking off with my eyes all wide like saucers and everything. And this goes on for a while until these security guards finally come in and “escort” Barry and me out of the theater. So that was my big date.

  ###

  Besides the food at Antonio’s, which is widely accepted as “pretty good” and definitely authentic is the joint’s music, which is never allowed to blast louder than maybe “4” or possibly “5” on the loudspeakers’ volume rheostat. It’s the oom-pah-pah style of Mexican music that’s never questioned for some weird reason, even though it would be interesting to trace how the Lutheran and obviously Teutonic oom-pah-pah provenance of Oktoberfest drinking music, with its maniacal allegiance to not only the maintenance of a strict three-quarter meter, the 1-2-3 numerical embodiment of OOM-pah-pah, but also the starched creases and collars of oom-pah-pah blaring musicians that, no matter if it’s twenty Fahrenheit degrees outside or 120 degrees, they maintain their crisp edges. It would be great to learn how this music somehow found its way from the fatherland into the decidedly more laid-back Catholic souls of tamale-laden Mexican musicians.

  The middle-aged guy working behind the window at Antonio’s is a little on the plump side and he wears a too-small T-shirt with the word WOOF emblazoned across what in more athletic men is the area of the chest identified as their pectoral muscles. He’s what’s known in the community as a bear, or in less generous terms, the kind of guy who’s found a way to capitalize on his aversion to exercise along with his considerable appetite for pasta, cheese and peach cobbler. Some guys in the Bear community have developed a pretty underhanded strategy for getting naked with other guys who might be in better shape. Painfully aware that no matter how deep into the animal kingdom they’ve placed themselves, some bears have – in an effort to locate habitually ingesting too much cholesterol into a neutral realm – they’ve created Awareness Groups – groups whose advertised purpose was to “raise” awareness, which would smooth the way for those who’d suffered a stumble or two on their ascent into twenty-first century American acceptance – where nakedness is mandatory and handling someone else’s cock has deftly been plucked from the realm of desire and plopped smack dab into one they’ve labeled as honor-driven: Would you mind if I “honor” your body? Would you mind if I “honor” your cock? He’s a nice guy though – almost too nice. And while he probably understands that the WOOF written on his shirt is an interjection connoting animalistic hunger/desire, he probably isn’t aware that it embodies a desperate hope for reciprocal proclamations of desire emanating from both the desiring and desired: I’m woofing at you and inviting you to please – please – woof back at me. But in the case of this guy, WOOF remains a flaccid entity whose objects are so widely dispersed throughout the universe, both seen and unseen, that the concept of objectification will never escape the realm of the theoretical. This WOOF may have begun its life as a raucous declaration of horny intentions, but has eroded into a sad plea for simple acknowledgem
ent. He’s solicitous to a fault and I suspect he’s extremely lonely.