High Life

by Matthew Stokoe

I thought about doing a line, but I was wired to the gills already. The adrenaline I’d pumped in the bar hadn’t combined well with the speed and I felt nerved. In an hour I was supposed to be fucking some woman in Beverly Hills, but if I didn’t chill a little I’d spurt as soon as I stuck it in her. And if that happened I’d be fucked with the Latin and a potential source of decent bread would vanish into the sunset. My head said I should eat, but my guts weren’t into it. I smoked instead and mulled over what I’d learned.

  Karen had sold her kidney. Joey had sold his. To the same buyer? Obviously. Even in L.A. black-market organ acquisition couldn’t be that widespread. But as far as Karen had let on she’d gone to Malibu for her doctor fuck sessions. Joey hadn’t been in his guy’s car long enough to make it there from the drag. A problem? Same people with two operating theaters? Or did they move about as a precaution? Impossible to know. Right now I’d have to go with Joey’s info. A silver-haired old guy in a black Jag. Apparently still recruiting members for the kidney club among the trash of the drag. Only one way to check it—hang out there and hope I got lucky.

  Pulling out of the parking lot, on the way to my gig in Beverly Hills, a complication arose. My headlights caught a gray Plymouth across the street. Lights off, engine dead, but there was a dark man-shape behind the wheel. I looked close and saw a silhouette of slicked hair and heavy jowls paying attention to me. Ryan. Had to be.

  Rapid ignition. I got mobile and he wanted to follow, but I couldn’t have him click to my sex deal—too much to add to his already skewed imaginings.

  He was pointed at Pico. He must have followed me and figured I’d go back the way I came. I screamed right instead, figuring I could take Clover Field straight to Santa Monica and lose him on the way, then be free to motor on up to BH. He dropped seconds hauling a U-turn and I punched the Prelude down a street of bungalows and over the Santa Monica Freeway. I had a two-hundred-yard lead by the time he’d gotten himself straight.

  I split right from Clover Field about a minute past the freeway. Twenty-sixth Street. The lights phased my way as I crossed Olympic—talk about ass. Ryan caught my turn, though, and on the straightway the big engine in his Detroit cop car cut into my lead. No siren, no strobe, still out on his own.

  Shaking him by Santa Monica wasn’t going to happen. I went cold and dry. I was eyes through a windshield, hands on a wheel, feet on pedals. I knew if Ryan caught me his anger at my having dared to run from him would express itself physically. But if I could lose him maybe there was a chance we could both pretend I never knew he was there, that I was just out testing my wheels. Slim, but better than nothing.

  Past Colorado Avenue I was into a grid system. Evasive action. I cut from the straight at ninety degrees. I did it again. And again. Ryan managed to make it, I could see his predator headlights in my mirror, but he was later each time, each time a little farther behind. Until, on the other side of Wilshire, when I made the second of a series of turns, he hadn’t made the first. I was out of his eye-line at last, but he could still make a lucky guess, so I dog-legged it all the way over to San Vincente Boulevard. By the time I reached it, things were fine. No more Ryan. Left cursing in residential SaMo, hopefully.

  Wind down. Pull over. Deep breaths, fingers through hair. My stomach felt weird. Into a convenient McDonalds, then back to the car with a chocolate shake and a carton of fries. Forcing down a burger was out of the question.

  I sat for a while wondering what the fuck to do. Ryan was snowballing into something that would soon be impossible to shrug off. The semen collection in the market parking lot and the hassle in my apartment had been unpleasant and pervy. But actually being jacked enough to trail me across town and sit outside a bar on the off-chance of witnessing something useful raised things to a more worrying level.

  And now I’d just outrun him in a car chase.

  The only hope I had was to move fast enough to stay ahead of the game. And pray that if the shit ever hit the fan I had the name of Karen’s killer to save myself with.

  I started up, nauseous from the shake and fizzing with decayed adrenaline. I drove fast, but not fast enough to attract attention. The last thing I wanted was to pick up a cruiser on my way to Beverly Hills and my first solo performance. Especially as Ryan might catch the radio traffic.

  The gig went okay. I got to the place half an hour late, but it didn’t seem to matter. Big house, rose stucco, thirties style but fake. Set back from one of the streets northwest of Sunset. She let me in herself, it was too late for the servants. Sharp thin face, sharp thin body, she looked like a woman who lived on cigarettes and pills. Dyed brunette, around forty, maybe a minor tuck behind the ears. I wouldn’t choose her, but she didn’t disgust me either.

  A drink downstairs and small talk neither of us could really be bothered with, then up to the bedroom. Wild. Floor space for a couple of apartments, a sunken bath in a glass-walled conservatory that looked out over a cleverly lit and expensively maintained garden, a ceiling studded with small bulbs that twinkled like stars.

  She wasn’t interested in pretend love. We stripped off like wrestlers getting ready to hurt each other. I expected a bell to ring.

  She said she wanted to watch me piss in the bath before we got it on, so I stood on one side of it and let rip. She sat with her feet over the edge and caught the stream in her hands and splashed it over her tits and between her legs. The bath was stoppered and when I finished she climbed in and rolled around in what I’d left there.

  There was a dildo in the soap tray, she handed it up and got on all fours. I stuck it into her, first her cunt, then her ass. I had a hard-on by then, but the woman was off in some never-never land, moaning to herself, and I wasn’t sure what she expected. I chose the obvious route and fucked her from behind. She came, eventually—in fact, I beat her to it, but she was paying so I kept pumping until she made it.

  When I pulled out she lay on her back and licked her lips at me. I wanted to get a shower, get paid, and get home, but she was into value for money. She wanted me to puke on her.

  It took a few goes with my finger down the back of my throat. I had to stand over her, half bent, soft dick still wrapped in a condom full of come, and every time I retched I almost lost my balance on the slippery surface of the bath. I did it in the end, though, and by the time I finished, her tits and chest were covered with heavy gouts of creamy brown shake and chewed-up fries. She spent some time rubbing it over her belly and into the hair of her cunt.

  Twenty minutes later she was holding the front door open and handing me money—the Latin’s forty percent would go direct to him via one of her credit cards. I was dressed and freshly showered, but she was still naked and caked with drying puke. It looked like she planned to sleep that way.

  Chapter Twelve

  Early A.M. Venice looked blurred and dissolute, already a place I’d left. At least Ryan wasn’t waiting there for me. No gray Plymouth parked in the shadows, no disinterred Bela lurking in a stairwell across the street. I went up to do my packing.

  The apartment was as empty as I’d left it, but the emptiness had taken on a permanence now that a legion of future tenants would not dispel. At least not in the picture of it I’d take with me.

  I filled a couple of garbage bags with my stuff. There wasn’t much to take—clothes, bathroom things, my tapes of 28 FPS, my gossip magazines, the pill jar, the photo of the dead girl—but by the time I finished I was beat. It had been a long day and there was still plenty to do. I sat on the greasy carpet and smoked. When my body started aching too much to hold itself upright, I lay down and closed my eyes and tried to ignore the hissing in my head. At 7:50 the Casio on my wrist went off. Royston wasn’t due till 8:30, but I wanted to leave plenty of margin.

  I took the bags down to the car, then went back up for a last look around. I stood motionless in the room and tried to suck one small pleasurable past experience from its walls. All I got was stagnation and an old, old life turned to dust.

  I moved the car a lit
tle way down the street, but still in sight of my door, and waited. It didn’t take long. He arrived at 8:15, pulled up in a shiny black Cadillac, and bounded up the exterior steps like a dog expecting dinner. His glasses caught the light and his mouth made stretched, spastic shapes as he sucked air. I watched him knock on the door. No answer. Obviously. He knocked again, then brought out his copy of the key and disappeared inside.

  Thirty seconds later he stepped quickly out and stood at the top of the steps looking wildly around. He didn’t know I had the Prelude and so didn’t spot me hunched down in my seat with a magazine covering most of my face. He reentered the apartment. When he came out again it looked like he was crying. He walked jerkily down the steps like he couldn’t see where he was going.

  I felt blood in a hot flush crawl up from my groin to somewhere behind my eyes. It felt good, good, good. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to stand on the roof of my car and beat my chest. But then he’d get my number and be able to trace me. So I just pressed my thighs together and started the car moving. Right outta Venice, toward Santa Monica.

  Ripping off his furniture had been revenge for his meanness over the rent, and though I knew it was a petty emotion it still felt eminently satisfying. But its real value lay in that it was another defining landmark along the road out of the mainstream, another irreversible step further away from a pattern of living that had become obsolete. The old me would never have done it. Ergo I was becoming someone new.

  I drove with both windows down to feel the air. At Santa Monica I took the ramp to PCH and kept going. I could have stayed on that road clear to San Francisco and beyond. It crossed my mind. Just drive with the car getting emptier and emptier of gas, and with each mile part of me vaporizing and floating away too, until the car finally crunched to a stop on some graveled coastal overlook and I was completely gone.

  Blown away by the wind.

  If only.

  I drove through Malibu and same as always it wasn’t there. Low-level housefronts on the ocean side of the highway, the occasional discreet road winding into low hills on the other. You couldn’t see the beach, and what you could see of the houses didn’t tell you much. But you knew that wealth was close by, it was part of the legend.

  Half an hour north I had breakfast in the diner of some shabby beach town. Home fries, eggs, white toast, crisp bacon. I smoked over coffee and watched the sea through the window. Blue with the morning sun. Local surfers already out, sitting straddle-legged on angled boards, waiting for a set. Easy, if you could just get up in the morning, tool down to the beach, and hit the waves. Just do that every day and it be enough for you. A blissful ignorance where the horror of not being as good as a movie star didn’t exist. Where you didn’t know what you were missing, or if you did, you didn’t care.

  But I could never be like that, I wasn’t stupid enough.

  I found a place in a thirties wreck on Emmet Terrace—north of Hollywood Boulevard near the wax museum, east of Highland Avenue. The shell was beautiful—a faded sandy deco, ten stories high. Once it must have been a proud landmark, thrusting its chin out, Il Duce style, over the dream capital of the world. A man with a place here in the thirties would have looked out of his window through glass tinted gold with success and satisfaction. He would have stood on the top floor, impeccably tailored, holding a crystal tumbler of fine whiskey, the balmy air about him hazed lightly with Cuban cigar smoke, and felt that there was no better place on earth to be than right there, in Hollywood.

  But that was a different world ago, and the shell was the only thing left. The place had been chopped and divided, and divided again. A palace had been turned into a collection of boxes stacked on a rise above a street of cheap glitter.

  Still, I wasn’t complaining. I was out of Venice and I had a roof over my head in a part of town where sex and drugs ran close to the surface. One room, kitchen, and bathroom. Bare wooden floor, a mattress in the corner, a phone, a table, a chair, and, thank god, a TV. Sixth floor at the back, up in a cage elevator you had to open yourself. I had a view of houses going ass first into the hills.

  It was around midday and I was broke. Rent and security deposit hadn’t left me with much more than two days’ supply of coffee, cigarettes, and beer. I pulled down the blind to shut out the sun and turned the TV on. But there was a rip in the canvas and I had to position the set so the gash of light it let through didn’t fall on the screen. I put it next to the mattress, then lay there and ate my heart out at what I saw.

  Rene Russo had bought a six-million-dollar mansion next door to Dean Cain. Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were talking about a two-hundred-million-dollar co-project. Tom Cruise was expected to net twenty-six mil for Jerry Maguire.

  Alcohol and nicotine. Drift off with the TV on, leave it on forever. If I stay in front of it long enough maybe I’ll fall in.

  The night before caught up with me and I slept.

  A girl moaning on the next floor woke me around nine P.M.

  I phoned the Latin and gave him my new number. He didn’t have anything for me, but said he’d be in touch. I tried Rex for company, but his cell phone was off. There was no one else to call.

  I turned on a light and killed the TV. Sat back on the bed and stared at it. The dead gray screen looked like all the world shut off, like everything everywhere all over the planet had stopped.

  Panic. A feeling of being trapped forever in a room, in front of a blank screen, while life rushed riotously past on the other side of the walls. I got a beer out of the fridge in the kitchen.

  Time to be doing something, time to get hold of some bucks. It was a shame the Latin hadn’t been able to set me up, I would have liked to mark my first night in Hollywood with a gig that involved a woman and a certain amount of luxury. But, truthfully, being forced into street trade was probably closer to what I wanted that night. Furtiveness, squalor, men—so much more of a fuck-you to the mainstream.

  So …

  Out into the warm night, a few more beers under my belt and a cigarette between my lips. The pink-lit concrete of the parking lot behind my building had a dusty dryness that made it look like it might be comfortable to lie on. Some nights all of L.A. looked like that—airbrushed, pastel-tinted, something you wanted to run your hands over.

  Scoot over Hollywood and Sunset, park within striking distance of the drag. I was kid-perceiving as I wove through the hookers. Colors, smells, sound, the damn light, and the air itself crashed against my senses with a keenness unknown since childhood. I watched the customers jumping out of their lives for half an hour, into this trough of flesh. True colors, baby. This is what the world is. What it would be twenty-four hours a day if it hadn’t put a collar on itself. I felt stoned, though I wasn’t, and in a stoned kind of mind-babble I told myself that this slice of society had as much validity as any other, that because of its greater honesty maybe it had more.

  But I knew I was wrong, only one level of society had any validity at all—the one at the top. I moved away from the flashy concentration of whores and headed into butt-town, my mood getting rapidly more real.

  Last time I’d chickened out, but that was a long time ago. That was before Rex and the couple in the hills, before the Latin and the woman who paid me to vomit on her, before Joey and his man in a black Jag.

  It happened like clockwork. A Ford at the sidewalk, I was there as the window went down. Cool, a guy smaller than me, an easy pummel if things took a wrong turn. I got in. He spoke with a whine.

  “Do you know a place? I don’t like to do it in the car.”

  “Drive down an alley. Nobody cares around here.”

  “I don’t like to do it in the car. I don’t like people watching.”

  “Nobody’s going to watch.”

  “They will. There’ll be ten people around the car jerking off before we’re through. I know, it’s happened before. I’m not giving a free show. I mean it. Don’t you know a place we can go?”

  “Yeah, I know a place. Take a lef
t here.”

  “Oh, thank you. I didn’t mean to be difficult, it’s just that it has to be how I want it.”

  We took La Brea up to Sunset and across. Two streets back from Hollywood Boulevard there was a row of old office buildings—low-rise, six or seven stories of heavy, monoxided stone. The one on the end had its ground floor boarded up, but a black iron fire escape jagged up the side to the roof. Karen had brought me here once with a few of her friends—booze and dope around a hidden fire of orange crates—simple pleasures and good clean fun. Yes siree, out under the stars.

  He parked his car carefully, made sure he’d set all the locks and the alarm. On the steps he kept looking behind him, snapping glances into shadows like he expected this to be a setup with my gang waiting to roll him. Nervous. But I got the feeling the possibility of danger was all part of it for him. What he wanted was something with an edge to it, something stamped as unmistakably bad.

  Welcome to the club, dude.

  A small hut stood in the middle of the roof, an elevator housing or something. The best place for what we were about to do—shielded from view, a surface to lean against. It cast a shadow that swallowed us.

  “Are you sure no one comes up here?”

  “It’s safe. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay.” He nodded like he was giving final permission for things to go ahead. “How much?”

  What could I say? I should have checked with Rex. Street trade was a different scene than the Latin’s call service. A whole different scene. Karen got thirty K for a kidney. How much for the use of my dick and a spoonful of come?

  “What do you want to do?”

  He looked at me, building up the guts to ask.

  “Blow job?”

  I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  “And you fuck me afterwards.”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Okay.”

  He dragged his money out and forked it over. I couldn’t figure from the sound of his voice whether I’d asked for too much or too little.