He dumped his purchases on the rusty chrome kitchen table, wanting to catch an hour of shut-eye, knowing that an hour was about all he could hope for before his eyes snapped open. Like all tweakers, he was sometimes awake for days, and he'd tinker with that banged-up Jap car or maybe play video games until he crashed right there in the living room, his hand still on the controls that allowed him to shoot down a dozen video cops who were trying to stop his video surrogate from stealing a video Mercedes.
No such luck. Just as he fell across the unmade bed, he heard Olive Oyl clumping into the house from the back door. Jesus, she walked heavy for a stick of a woman. Riverdance was quieter. He wondered if she had hep C by now. Or Christ! Maybe AIDS? He'd never shared a needle on the rare occasions when he'd skin-popped ice, but she'd probably done it. He vowed to quit boning her and only let her blow him when he was totally desperate.
Then he heard that tremulous little voice. "Farley, you home?"
"I'm home," he said. "And I need to catch some z's, Olive. Take a walk for a while, okay?"
"We working tonight, Farley?" She entered the bedroom.
"Yeah," he said.
"Want a knobber?" she asked. "Help you to sleep."
Jesus, her speed bumps were worse than his. They looked like she scratched them with a garden tool. And her grille showed three gaps in front. When the hell had she lost the third tooth? How come he hadn't noticed before? Now she was skinnier than Mick Jagger and sort of looked like him except older.
"No, I don't want a knobber," he said. "Just go play video games or something."
"I think I got a shot at some extra work, Farley," she said. "I met this guy at Pablo's Tacos. He does casting for extras. He said he was looking for someone my type. He gave me his card and said to call next Monday. Isn't that cool?"
"That's so chill, Olive," he said. "What is it, Night of the Living Dead, Part Two?"
Unfazed, Olive said, "Awesome, ain't it? Me, in a movie? Of course it might just be a TV show or something."
"Totally awesome," he said, closing his eyes, trying to unwire his circuits.
"Of course he might just be some Hollywood Casanova wanting in my pants," Olive said with a gap-toothed grin.
"You're perfectly safe with Hollywood Casanovas," Farley mumbled. "You got nothing to spank. Now get the fuck outta here."
When she was gone he actually succeeded in falling asleep, and he dreamed of basketball games in the gym at Hollywood High School and boning that cheerleader who had always dissed and avoided him.
Trombone Teddy had a decent day panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard that afternoon. Nothing like the old days, when he still had a horn, when he'd stand out there on the boulevard and play cool licks like Kai Winding and J. J. Johnson, jamming as good as any of the black jazzmen he'd played with in the nightclub down on Washington and La Brea forty years ago, when cool jazz was king.
In those days the black audiences were always the best and treated him like he was one of them. And in fact he had gotten his share of chocolate cooz in those days, before pot and bennies and alcohol beat him down, before he hocked his trombone a hundred times and finally had to sell it. The horn had gotten him enough money to keep in scotch for oh, maybe a week or so if he remembered right. And no trash booze for Teddy. He drank Jack then, all that liquid gold sliding down his throat and warming his belly.
He remembered those old days like it was this afternoon. It was yesterday he couldn't recall sometimes. Nowadays he drank anything he could get, but oh, how he remembered the Jack and the jazz, and those sweet mommas whispering in his ear and taking him home to feed him gumbo. That's when life was sweet. Forty years and a million drinks ago.
While Trombone Teddy yawned and scratched and knew it was time to leave the sleeping bag that was home in the portico of a derelict office building east of the old Hollywood Cemetery, time to hit the streets for some nighttime panhandling, Farley Ramsdale woke from his fitful hour of sleep after a nightmare he couldn't remember.
Farley yelled, "Olive!" No response. Was that dumb bitch sleeping again? It burned his ass how she could be such a strung-out crystal fiend and still sleep as much as she did. Maybe she was shooting smack in her twat or someplace else he'd never look and the heroin was smoothing out all the ice she smoked? Could that be it? He'd have to watch her better.
"Olive!" he yelled again. "Where the fuck are you?"
Then he heard her sleepy voice coming from the living room. "Farley, I'm right here." She'd been asleep, all right.
"Well, move your skinny ass and rig some mail traps. We got work to do tonight."
"Okay, Farley," she yelled, sounding more alert then.
By the time Farley had taken a leak and splashed water on his face and brushed most of the tangles out of his hair and cursed Olive for not washing the towels in the bathroom, she had finished with the traps.
When he entered the kitchen, she was frying some cheese sandwiches in the skillet and had poured two glasses of orange juice. The mousetraps were now rigged to lengths of string four feet long. He picked up each trap and tested it.
"They okay, Farley?"
"Yeah, they're okay."
He sat at the table knowing he had to drink the juice and eat the sandwich, though he didn't want either. That was one good thing about letting Olive Oyl stay in his house. When he looked at her, he knew he had to take better care of himself. She looked sixty years old but swore she was forty-one, and he believed her. She had the IQ of a schnauzer or a U. S. congressman and was too scared to lie, even though he hadn't laid a hand on her in anger. Not yet, anyway.
"Did you borrow Sam's Pinto like I told you?" he asked when she put the cheese sandwich in front of him.
"Yes, Farley. It's out front."
"Gas in it?"
"I don't have no money, Farley."
He shook his head and forced himself to bite into the sandwich, chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. Dying for a candy bar.
"Did you make a couple auxiliary traps just in case?"
"A couple what?"
"Additional different fucking traps. With duct tape?"
"Oh yes."
Olive went to the little back porch leading to the yard and got the traps from the top of the washer, where she'd put them. She brought them in and placed them on the drain board. Twelve-inch strips of duct tape, sticky side out with strings threaded through holes cut in the tape.
"Olive, don't put the sticky side down on the fucking wet drain board," he said, thinking that choking down the rest of the sandwich would take great willpower. "You'll lose some of the stickiness. Ain't that fucking obvious?"
"Okay, Farley," she said, looping the strings around knobs on the cupboard doors and hanging them there.
Jesus, he had to dump this broad. She was dumber than any white woman he'd ever met with the exception of his aunt Agnes, who was a certifiable re-tard. Too much crystal had turned Olive's brain to coleslaw.
"Eat your sandwich and let's go to work," he said.
Trombone Teddy had to go to work too. After sundown he was heading west from his sleeping bag, thinking if he could panhandle enough on the boulevard tonight he was definitely going to buy some new socks. He was getting a blister on his left foot.
He was still eight blocks from tall cotton, that part of the boulevard where all those tourists as well as locals flock on balmy nights when the Santa Anas blow in, making people's allergies act up but making some people antsy and hungry for action, when he spotted a man and woman standing by a blue mailbox half a block ahead of him at the corner of Gower Street. The corner was south of the boulevard on a street that was a mix of businesses, apartments, and houses.
It was dark tonight and extra smoggy, so there wasn't any starlight, and the smog-shrouded moon was low, but Teddy could make them out, leaning over the mailbox, the man doing something and the woman acting like a lookout or something. Teddy walked closer, huddling in the shadows of a two-story office building where he could see them better. He may
have lost part of his hearing and maybe his chops on the trombone, and he'd lost his sex drive for sure, but he'd always had good vision. He could see what they were doing. Tweakers, he thought. Stealing mail.
Teddy was right, of course. Farley had dropped the mousetrap into the mailbox and was fishing it around by the string, trying to catch some letters on the glue pad. He had something that felt like a thick envelope. He fished it up slowly, very slowly, but it was heavy and he didn't have enough of it stuck to the pad, so it fell free.
"Goddamnit, Olive!"
"What'd I do, Farley?" she asked, running a few steps toward him from her lookout position on the corner.
He couldn't think of what to say she'd done wrong, but he always yelled at her for something when life fucked him over, which was most of the time, so he said, "You ain't watching the streets. You're standing here talking is what."
"That's because you said `Goddamnit, Olive,'" she explained. "So that's why I -"
"Get back to the fucking corner!" he said, dropping the mousetrap into the blue mailbox.
Try as he might, he couldn't hook the glue trap onto the thick envelope, but after giving up on it, he did manage to sweep up several letters and even a fairly heavy ten-by-twelve-inch envelope that was nearly as thick as the one he couldn't catch. He tried the duct tape, but it didn't work any better than the mousetrap.
He squeezed the large envelope and said, "Looks like a movie script. Like we need a goddamn movie script."
"What, Farley?" Olive said, running over to him again.
"You can have this one, Olive," Farley said, handing her the envelope. "You're the future movie star around here."
Farley tucked the mail under Olive's baggy shirt and inside her jeans in case the cops stopped them. He knew the cops would bust him right along with her but he figured he'd have a better shot at a plea bargain if they didn't actually find any evidence on his person. He was pretty sure that Olive wouldn't snitch him off and would go ahead and take the rap. Especially if he promised that her bed in the house would be there when she got out. Where else did she have to go?
They walked right past one of the old homeless Hollywood street people when they rounded the corner by the car. He scared the shit out of Farley when he stepped out of the shadows and said, "Got any spare change, Mister?"
Farley reached into his pocket, took out an empty hand and said to Teddy, "April Fool, shitbag. Now get the fuck outta my face."
Teddy watched them walk to an old blue Pinto, open the doors, and get in. He watched the guy turn on the lights and start the engine. He stared at the license plate for a minute and said the number aloud. Then he repeated it. He knew he could remember it long enough to borrow a pencil from somebody and write it down. The next time a cop rousted him for being drunk in public or panhandling or pissing in somebody's storefront, maybe he could use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Chapter THREE
THERE WERE HAPPIER partners than the pair in 6-X-76 on Sunday of that May weekend. Fausto Gamboa, one of the most senior patrol officers at Hollywood Station, had long since surrendered his P3 status, needing a break from being a training officer to rookies still on probation. He had been happily working as a P2 with another Hollywood old-timer named Ron LeCroix, who was at home healing up from painful hemorrhoid surgery that he'd avoided too long and was probably just going to retire.
Fausto was always being mistaken for a Hawaiian or Samoan. Though the Vietnam veteran wasn't tall, only five foot nine, he was very big. The bridge of his nose had been flattened in teenage street fights, and his wrists, hands, and shoulders belonged on a guy tall enough to easily dunk a basketball. His legs were so massive he probably could have dunked one if he'd uncoiled those calf and thigh muscles in a vertical leap. His wavy hair was steel-gray and his face was lined and saddle leather-brown, as though he'd spent years picking cotton and grapes in the Central Valley as his father had done after arriving in California with a truckload of other illegal Mexican immigrants. Fausto had never set eyes on a cotton crop but somehow had inherited his father's weathered face.
Fausto was in a particularly foul mood lately, sick and tired of telling every cop at Hollywood Station how he'd lost in court to Darth Vader. The story of that loss had traveled fast on the concrete jungle wireless.
It wasn't every day that you get to write Darth Vader a ticket, even in Hollywood, and everyone agreed it could only happen there. Fausto Gamboa and his partner Ron LeCroix had been on patrol on an uneventful early evening when they got a call on their MDT computer that Darth Vader was exposing himself near the corner of Hollywood and Highland. They drove to that location and spotted the man in black cycling down Hollywood Boulevard on an old Schwinn three-speed bike. But there was often more than one Darth Vader hanging around Grauman's, Darths of different ethnicity. This one was a diminutive black Darth Vader.
They weren't sure they had the right Darth until they saw what had obviously prompted the call. Darth wasn't wearing his black tights under his black shorts that evening, and his manhood was dangling off the front of the bike saddle. A motorist had spotted the exposed trekker's meat and had called the cops.
Fausto was driving and he pulled the car behind Darth Vader and tooted the horn, which had no effect in slowing down the cyclist. He tooted again. Same result. Then he turned on the siren and blasted him. Twice. No response.
"Fuck this," Ron LeCroix said. "Pull beside him."
When Fausto drew up next to the cyclist, his partner leaned out the window and got Darth's attention by waving him to the curb. Once there, Darth put down the kickstand, got off the bike, and took off his mask and helmet. Then they saw why their attempts to stop him had been ineffective. He was wearing a headset and listening to music.
It was Fausto's turn to write a ticket, so he got out the book and took Darth's ID.
Darth Vader, aka Henry Louis Mossman, said, "Wait a minute here. Why you writing me?"
"It's a vehicle code violation to operate a bike on the streets wearing a headset," Fausto said. "And in the future, I'd advise you to wear underwear or tights under those short shorts."
"Ain't this some shit?" Darth Vader said.
"You couldn't even hear our siren," Fausto said to the littlest Darth.
"Bullshit!" Darth said. "I'll see you in court, gud-damnit! This is a humbug!"
"Up to you." Fausto finished writing the ticket.
When the two cops got back in their car that evening and resumed patrol, Fausto said to Ron LeCroix, "That little panhandler will never take me to court. He'll tear up the ticket, and when it goes to warrant, we'll be throwing his ass in the slam."
Fausto Gamboa didn't know Darth Vader.
After several weeks had passed, Fausto found himself in traffic court on Hill Street in downtown L. A. with about a hundred other cops and as many miscreants awaiting their turn before the judge.
Before his case was called, Fausto turned to a cop in uniform next to him and said, "My guy's a loony-tune panhandler. He'll never show up."
Fausto Gamboa didn't know Darth Vader.
Not only did he show up, but he showed up in costume, this time wearing black tights under the short shorts. All courtroom business came to a standstill when he entered after his name was called. And the sleepy-eyed judge perked up a bit. In fact, everyone in the courtroom-cops, scofflaws, court clerk, even the bailiff-was watching with interest.
Officer Fausto Gamboa, standing before the bench as is the custom in traffic court, told his story of how he'd gotten the call, spotted Darth Vader, and realized that Darth didn't know his unit was waving in the breeze. And that he couldn't be made to pull over because he was wearing a headset and listening to music, which the cops discovered after they finally stopped the spaceman.
When it was Darth's turn, he removed the helmet and mask, displaying the headset that he said he wore on the day in question. He did a recitation of the vehicle code section that prohibits the wearing of a headset while operating a bike on city stre
ets.
Then he said, "Your Honor, I would like the court to observe that this headset contains only one earpiece. The vehicle code section clearly refers to both ears being blocked. This officer did not know the vehicle code section then and he don't know it now. The fact is, I did hear the officer's horn and siren but I did not think that it was for me. I wasn't doing nothing illegal, so why should I get all goosey and pull over jist because I hear a siren?"
When he was finished, the judge said to Fausto, "Officer, did you examine the headset that Mr. Mossman was wearing that day?"
"I saw it, Your Honor," Fausto said.
"Does this look like the headset?" the judge asked.
"Well . . . it looks . . . similar."
"Officer, can you say for sure that the headset you saw that day had two earpieces, or did it have only one, like the headset you are looking at now?"
"Your Honor, I hit the siren twice and he failed to yield to a police vehicle. It was obvious he couldn't hear me."
"I see," the judge said. "In this case I think we should give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Mossman. We find him not guilty of the offense cited."
There was applause and chortling in the courtroom until the bailiff silenced it, and when business was concluded, Darth Vader put on his helmet and with every eye still on him said to all, "May the force be with you."
Now Ron LeCroix and his hemorrhoids were gone, and Fausto Gamboa, still smarting from having his ass kicked by Darth Vader, gave the Oracle a big argument the moment he learned that he was being teamed with Officer Budgie Polk. When Fausto was a young cop, women didn't work regular patrol assignments at the LAPD, and he sneered when he said to the Oracle, "Is she one of them who maybe trades badges with a boyfriend copper like they used to do class rings in my day?"
"She's a good officer," the Oracle said. "Give her a chance."
"Or is she the kind who gets to partner with her boyfriend and hooks her pinkie through his belt loop when they walk the boulevard beat?"
Hollywood Station (2006) Page 3