The Front of the Freeway
Page 6
“What, don’t you want it?”
“I don’t need it. I’ve got my business, JT, but you, you’re just getting started. This small time shit, selling sacks, it’s good and all, but if you really want to do this, at some point you’re going have to get out of the garden. Now come on, help me push this bitch.”
Tony pushes himself out of the grass and walks to the open driver’s side door behind him. He pitches the empty red can into the back seat, and it clatters against four more full metal canisters. Five inside, five in the trunk, four under the hood. The last one’s behind me, the icing on the metal flambé. Out of the garden. This isn’t about me. This isn’t even about weed anymore.
“You want me selling coke now.”
“No, I want you making money now. This is where the real money is—this is your ticket out. The weed, that’s pennies, man. And Romeo’s, that’s not a job, it’s just the cover you need to sneak out the back door. You know how much a gram goes for? How about a hundred of them? Shoot, this is Hollywood, every other waitress is a model on a coke diet.” Tony snuffs an imaginary line off his pointer finger and smiles at me expectantly. Maybe that’s it. Maybe Tony doesn’t need someone to talk to. He needs an audience. I force a smirk and grab the heavy red can behind me, a gallon of gas sloshing against the ribbed metal frame inside. The top snaps off with a soft pop, and I hang the bottle over the dark grey hood. A current bursts from the white plastic nozzle and falls heavily to the car, breaking on the flat aluminum hood, pelting the wide front window with a thousand thick, shimmering beads. Immediately the gas bites at my nose, and I can taste the fumes like a toxic cloud, but I walk the canister around the car, drenching it in the slick, translucent slime. Tony’s flicking a small metal lighter open, close, open, close, eyes stuck to the sweat-damped vehicle. After two passes I toss the empty can into the driver’s seat. The transmission’s set to neutral, and the dripping grey nose peers cautiously over the ledge of the long gravel coffin. I walk to the back and press my hands against the smooth, greased bumper, digging my feet in the torn grass. A two-ton metal box stuffed with fourteen gallons of gas and a pint of blood rolls slowly in the dirt, but Tony kicks the taillight and, with a heavy metallic sigh, the four-door ship sinks into the concrete valley. The bow bounces off the rough channel floor with a crash and sags into the aqueduct flat, groaning to a halt ten feet from the thick vein of water cut into the middle of the track, and Tony hands me the first mixed cocktail.
“Light?” Tony flips open the silver Zippo and strikes it against the end of the damp cloth dripping from the mouth of the bottle. After a second, a thin wisp of smoke meekly pulsing from the tail of the wilted rag explodes into a brilliant orange flame, climbing hungrily up the wet and hanging cloth.
“Maybe we should say something,” I offer, “like some last words.” Tony picks another brown bomb out of the dirt and pinches his eyebrows at me thoughtfully.
“What, like a funeral?”
“No, not like a funeral. Maybe like a toast.” Tony turns his eyes to the dark metal frame resting in the shaded valley and scratches his neck. After a second, he smiles, and turns two creased eyes back to me.
“Alright then, to what?” I want to say something clever about business, or something respectful for the cop, or anything about where the hell this is all going. But I don’t say all that.
“Strippers and coke.” Tony coughs a laugh and softly clinks the top of his drink against mine. The flame hanging from my bottle bites into the soft, saturated rag dripping from his, spreading smoothly towards a pair of slender glass necks.
“To the customers,” he agrees, dropping his hand almost to the ground behind him and hurling the little glass grenade high into the blackened sky. The bottle flutters across the dark canvas, a little flashing sun arching back to earth, and explodes across the tail of the waiting car, a wide ring of fire and glass spitting out across metal and water and concrete. I wind up too, careful to keep the waving flame off my hand, and launch the bottle into the ravine, soap and gas splashing over the blazing funeral pyre. And it feels good, pelting the aqueduct and Tony’s scrap-metal carriage with these little glass grenades, because it all feels like the start of something new, something different. Something to get ahead. Sure, maybe Tony’s a little psychotic, calling his own pitches while bombing his blood-stained car, but he’s the L.A. Moses, and I believe him when he says we’re getting out of here together. We watch the gas tanks catch flame in the ditch, erupting one after another like thunder claps, spitting fireballs and incinerating the tires and the roof and the frame, but I’m already thinking about new cars and comfortable living. And Tony’s going to take me there.
“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
—Charles Darwin
Even as militia from the thirteen colonies prepared to resist the British offensive, the colonists sensed the weight of colonial oppression leaving their shoulders…
The Harvard meth-head is at it again. I can hear him from the porch, hypnotizing my father from across a dark living room, filling my house in monotonous rhetoric with the dreary ghosts of the most important things that will never affect my life. There, there, he says, sit down and hold tight. The world is going by much too fast. He should be in there, my father, comfortably soaking up every mundane image, his life ending in tidy, 45-minute chunks, plus commercials, one episode at a time.
But not today.
The TV’s on, of course, the only light in the dark room, glowing like a mechanical sun in the shadows, painting the walls white, blue, red, white with every frantic flash of color. But my father’s not in front of it like usual—no beer, no pasta, no self-pitying monologues or dry fatherly lectures. Tonight he’s pressed to the wall in the back of the room, one hand balled to a fist at his side, the other gripping a phone against his ear, all of him demonically flashing white, blue, red, white perfectly in time with the flickering walls.
“Twenty-four years, Andrew, and all you have to say to me is you’re sorry?” He’s shouting now, beating the back of his fist against the hard plaster wall. I can see a wide patch of blood glistening on his knuckles, swollen and deformed in the meager pulsing light, three perfectly round holes punched out of the wall next to him. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I’m going to die on this fucking beat!”
White, blue, red, white.
I’ve heard my father yell before, but there’s blood in his voice now, bursting with something sinister and sad and enormous. The Jack Daniels stands tall on the counter behind him, an empty glass ghost looming in the black of the kitchen, and me in the middle of it all, frozen in the tense and boiling darkness.
“I think you know exactly what you can do with my badge, you son of a bitch!” The phone goes first, ricocheting off the refrigerator, bursting into a cloud of plastic and batteries. Then he grabs the Jack, hurling it across the room with the full force of his body. The bottle shatters against the rigid living room wall, exploding into a million crystal shards, gleaming and glinting over the slick tile floor. He paces for a second, desperately pulling his palms across his tired, sagging forehead, a groan dying in the back of his throat, and finally slumps to the floor, burying his face in his warped and bloodied hands. I hurry across the room and kneel beside him, gripping his shoulders and staring into the shadowed hollow of his covered face.
“‘You’re right where you belong,’” he spits from behind his long, trembling fingers, still shaking with frustration. “That’s what they told me, Julian. The Lieutenant finally retired, and when I told them I deserved the job, that’s what they told me. ‘You’re right where you belong.’” I can smell the whiskey stinking from his skin, choking my nostrils and biting at my eyes. He drops his hands to his lap, tensely slapping one curled fist against the other hand, his glossy, bloodshot eyes fixed on the floor. “I followed every order, every procedure. I did everything by the book, and now they’re going to leave me behind like the fuck
ing trash, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.” I want to tell him it’s just a job, but I know that’s a lie. It’s the foundation he built his whole miserable, orderly life on, and he’s starting to feel the cracks beneath him pinching at his feet. I roll to a seat on the floor next to him, wrapping my arms around my knees, staring into the pulsing square light blazing on the far side of the room.
“I quit my job,” I start, reaching for some common ground. Maybe he wants to see some order in my life, but right now I think we’re both pretty fed up with the career ladder, and I can see him at the bottom of it, staring up at the endless rungs, wondering if he ever should have grabbed one in the first place. He twists his heavy, greyed head enough to stare at my shoes and slowly sighs.
“Well, if you hate it, Julian, maybe it’s for the best.”
“I kind of got something else lined up, anyway. I think I’m going to end up happier.” I think. I still have to close this deal with Cesar, and I’m never sure what little insanity Tony’s going to pull me into next, but there’s something to be said about the uncertainty of it all, and the comfort of knowing I won’t find myself throwing empty bottles around my house over office politics. It’s like climbing out of a vice, pulling the locked metal teeth off of my ribs and breathing in for the first time. But my father’s caught too deep in the bear trap. There’s no climbing out for him, not right now. Nauseous from the flickering mechanical light, I push myself up and move to hit the light switch by the door.
“They killed one of us yesterday.” The blood’s back in my father’s voice, but not the same color as before. My foot freezes on the linoleum and a cold chill runs down my neck, gripping my lungs, freezing my blood. “Eddy…you remember, soon-to-be Sergeant Eddy? They sent him after some kids coming out of a toy store or something, thought it would help give the promotion some credibility. They killed him, Julian. This fucked up, bureaucratic machine, it’s killing me, one day at a time, and now it killed him, too.” Eddy Miller. He had a name. He must have had a family and a father and a life, too. Murderer, killer, accomplice—some excruciating voice screams from the back of my conscious, clawing through every thought and feeling that threatens to forget. That machine didn’t kill him; Tony did, with a .38 caliber Glock in the front of an Oldsmobile they’re never going to find.
“Who the fuck robs a baby store anyway?”
“Someone really desperate, I guess.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He wipes his nose and pushes himself to his feet, stumbling across a glass minefield of pointed shards towards his bedroom door. He used to walk on his toes, teaming with some hidden energy. Now the whiskey drags him around like a wet mop. He stops in the hallway and turns halfway to me, a somber, weathered face flickering in the dim light. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Son. I just need a win, you know?” Yeah, I know. And I want to scream, I think there’s a way out, Dad, and you can climb out from under all of this. But I can’t tell him all that, not yet. I need to my find my own way out first, and Cesar’s is the only name on my mind.
“This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”
—Al Capone
Tony gave me the keys to the Mercedes, which would have been a nice gesture if he hadn’t stolen the thing a week earlier. He swapped the SUV’s license plate with a Mercedes of Crenshaw plaque from the dealership and told me not to worry about it, but I’m still trying not to break my neck from checking over my shoulder for cops. But the beach is a long walk from downtown, and the buses don’t go to Malibu, not where I’m going. Besides, except for a few stray cars spotted along the beach highway, the traffic’s mostly clear, and there’s nothing more beautiful or rare in L.A. than an open road, so for now I take a deep breath of salted ocean air and lean on the gas.
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m sitting in a rich man’s wallet, smooth black leather wrapped around everything, and a lot of backlit buttons on the glossy oak dashboard that just look like money. A woman coos at me in French over the intercom. Tony said he doesn’t understand a word, but he thinks her voice is sexy, so I’m stuck with her for the ride. I don’t know what she’s saying either, but I’m pretty sure she likes me.
“Il fait quatre-vingts degrés.”
Count Tony usually doesn’t operate in daylight, but I guess this is my thing, and driving down PCH on a sunny afternoon is like driving through a van Gogh. The Pacific is a sea of gems stretching out from the long bending ocean highway, a deep blue expanse strewn with a thousand diamonds dancing and flashing under a low hanging California sun. On the other side, sprawling green hills ripple out across the countryside, peppered every few minutes by towering white castles, Home & Gardens mansions peering out from miniature, tamed forests or pointed metal gates. An electric chime hiccups inside the car again, breaking the spell; I know I should wear my seatbelt, but I never could stand the feeling of being tied down to something.
Cesar’s is one of these glass cathedrals, three reflective, jagged stories stacked on a creamy white foundation, but his isn’t perched high in the Malibu Hills like the others. Cesar’s sinks some three hundred feet down into rolling hillside, a thin ribbon of road climbing out from the translucent palace hidden like a glacier in the dry valley. I take a sharp right onto a long gravel track winding down through the sand and brush as a heavy metal briefcase slams against the wall of the trunk with a dull thud. $75,000 in hundreds straight from the Bank of Tony, to be returned with interest, of course, locked and bolted in an aluminum box, just in case I need to close today.
“Don’t let him bully you.” That’s the last thing Tony told me before I left. “If he’s going to work with you, he has to trust you, and if he’s going to trust you, he has to respect you. And if you lay down like a bitch, none of those things are going to happen.” Fine. I’ve never been much of a pushover, and I’ve been watching Tony close enough to play businessman myself. But it’s not Tony’s voice coming out of my mouth anymore. The strings are off my back. There’s a voice box a few feet in front of the automatic steel gate—here’s my chance.
“Hello?”
The gate’s about 12 feet high, a flowery pattern of twisted metal rolling into a single arch across the paved road, a mile-long spear-tipped fence jutting out from either side. Ten feet in front is a little black electronic box on a thick white stand, and I’m next to it, yelling at nobody.
“Hello?”
The box crackles with static and a muffled voice mumbles from the back of it.
“Name?”
I twist my mouth to a J and almost fumble out the name Julian, but I catch it and instead cough out, “It’s Tony.” The static snaps to silence, and for a second I’m frozen halfway out the window. Then, a harsh brass buzz, and the gate swings slowly open, an iron jaw unclenching, inviting me in. I roll forward cautiously, kicking up a spurt of loose gravel behind me, and edge down the mile-long paved tongue.
Cesar lives in the serrated shell of a broken ice sculpture, a lot of sharp glass angles jutting out like translucent knives from smooth white pillars and overhangs. Two long, crystal wings face the ocean, a reflective pair of arms hugging a wide, ivory patio with a squat, circular fountain in the middle of it all, bubbling with the mansion’s steady heartbeat. I pull up next to the concrete spring and kill the engine. Keeping my eyes on the massive glass entrance, I lean over to pop open the glove box and pull out Tony’s heavy black pistol. That’s the other thing he told me. Take this. And I did, I tucked it in the back of my pants under my belt without saying a word, but the weight of it pressed against my spine is more of a bad memory than anything. Keeping the barrel on the steering wheel, I press the small black release and the weight of a full magazine falls into my lap. One by one, I push the thick gold bullets out onto the passenger’s seat, chafing my thumb on their dense metal backs.
No more bodies.
&n
bsp; I kick open the door and jam the pistol into the back of my pants again, fidgeting with my t-shirt to hide the little jagged bulge as I walk to the front door. The entrance is a house of mirrors, a hundred thousand reflections doused in sunlight, but someone has to be behind them looking out at me. I skip up three rounded white steps to a tall glass frame and almost reach for the handle, but after a second the door clicks, and I nudge it open. The entrance is a Greek temple coated in a melted checkers board, black-and-white marble patterns dripping down the walls and across the floor, twisting up again into a massive, spiraling staircase wrapped around the room. Every glossy, ivory tile is trimmed with a sharp, black ink stroke, all framing a giant black marble Icarus in the center of the floor, his deceptively feathery wings spread at least ten feet from the ground, his outstretched arm straining to reach a pointed crystal chandelier trickling from the ceiling. So this is what real money looks like. Before I can wonder where to go next, a pair of footsteps echoes from the far side of the room, and Cesar steps out from behind the massive black-and-white staircase.
“Tony, my friend! Welcome!”
Icarus might be the biggest man in the room, but only barely. The room thunders with Cesar’s footsteps as he crosses the floor, his towering, muscular form gliding across the tile in long, smooth strides. A pair of cannonballs at his shoulders meet in a thick, trunk of a neck, supporting a squared Aztec jaw smiling politely at me from across the room. After a few quick steps the smile is in front of me, smirking above an outstretched hand. “It’s a pleasure, Tony.”