by Peter Craig
Under a burnt sunset, she began her errands as if embarking on a scavenger hunt. Jonah had made her a list of stops, with the rough hours that they were expecting her, and she took deep breaths and cruised along side streets to avoid the police. She was a poor driver under the best circumstances, and had no license other than her fake ID. With a cargo that would land her possibly a life sentence in prison—that is, if one of Jonah’s now spectral bosses didn’t get to her first—she became phobic about making left turns along the boulevards.
Nevertheless, she made her first appointment on time. She went to the caged front door of a small cottage in Silverlake, her hands sweating, her mouth dry; and when Marcello, the first client, greeted her—she was relieved. He seemed perfectly chosen as her introduction, a gregarious and somewhat older gay man, with a mustache and a tight haircut, completely at ease with himself, leading her into his clean and cozy living room. He had a massive bookshelf, and while he cut out and sampled a line, Lydia strolled along, reading the titles aloud quietly.
He said, “Don’t be nervous about this—that’s the main thing. Jonah explained the situation to me. He’s selling this stuff so dirt cheap, people are going to be suspicious. But I know him, and it’s a good deal—there’s some profits here for me. Even though it’s not exactly the best shit in the world, is it? You want a bump of this?”
She sat down and took a bump off her fingernail, sitting across the glass coffee table from him. He had piles of art books and a carved replica of a fertility goddess—one of the ancient, obese Venuses Lydia remembered from school. She smacked her lips, swallowed the chemical taste in her mouth. The man was sitting back with his legs crossed, talking in a leisurely way about how Jonah was getting on his nerves these days. “Uppity” was the word he used. Jonah used to have all kinds of spotty, ill-considered business ventures. Marcello said that he used to manage a band with Jonah, though Jonah’s involvement was passive, just money. The band couldn’t get along, “the lead singer was a cunt, forgive my language,” and they had all parted ways. “But I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a teeny little warning about Jonah—he has very unreasonable expectations of people. In my experience.”
“He’s giving me another chance.”
“Well, of course—he loves that. He loves to have screwups around, and he loves to forgive them—it’s so godlike of him. I’m sure you have to crawl on your hands and knees, and beg him for mercy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had something of a fetish about that. Dress you up like his odalisque, have you chained naked to a rock. He’ll spare you. He’ll look down upon you and grant you something. It’s all very Promethean. But you know what, Lydia—that’s your name, right? He will cut a person off like they never existed to him. He has that ability to just shut down. I’ve seen it.” He snapped his fingers as he moved his hand across his face. “You do whatever you have to do—but just know this: People who get close to him, they don’t ever get away. And those bangers he pays, those cholos up there, he’s got them brainwashed into some kind of cult. I don’t know where they’re from, I don’t know what gang they’re in—but they’re his gang now. It’s not just the money. He pays them well, sure. But those kids can tax drug dealers like me in any neighborhood, and they’ll make as much. No, he promises something, and I’ve always wondered what it was. My advice to you: Don’t trust those kids. There’s something else going on there.”
Versions of this same speech cropped up again throughout Lydia’s errands that day. She drove all over the West Side, traversing cluttered homes and apartments, uncovering a new landscape of kitchen tables and mirrors. She heard so many points of view as she swallowed up her friendly, ceremonial lines with the dealers, so many opinions, that she began to feel it was all one giant citywide speech, delivered house to house, in stammers, with long pauses of traffic in between. In Ladera Heights, four bantering black kids sat around her on a wooden table, one with dreadlocks and his shirt off, BGF tattoos and a tear inked under his eye, urging her not to be so nervous. “You get nervous, you make me nervous, a’ight.” He spoke in a forced sweetness, a kind of stagy gallantry in his tone, as if he might be tricking a less intelligent animal. She sat down in his bright kitchen, with the security cage open across the house and the sound of an argument outside. He said, “Jonah’s a manipulating motherfucker, if you want my personal opinion. Acting like Al Capone up there. Nah, nah. Dude don’t got his p’s and q’s straight. How he gonna send a pretty girl down here? Dressed like that? Looking like you selling some kind of Bowflex or shit.”
Just south of MacArthur Park, in an apartment building with every door opened onto a TV blasting Univision, the monologue was picked up by a thin Chicano man. “He say, I going to know you ain’t no cop—because you fly; and I’m like, no shit? But this is Jonah, mang—he always doing this to me. Selling this shit like it’s a favor.”
A housewife in Redondo, twittering over the long ash on her cigarette, perched over a Formica table and said, “I mean, it terrifies me. Can I just tell you something? I think, and this is just me, this is just me, I think he’s got some kind of death wish—I mean, there are people who get very, very upset about the way he undercuts the prices in this town. We have to keep it secret that we’re even doing business with him. Because a pound is going for six grand, and Jonah comes along with something at five—even if it’s not the purest—and he floods the market. People talk. I can make my profits on this, sure—but I don’t want to be around when this starts getting ugly.”
Past midnight, an aging hippie in a Venice bungalow, wearing huge, slightly damp shorts and a Billabong T-shirt, drawled his contribution to the other men in the room, “It’s fucking sketch business practices, bra’. Like that kid who fucking died, you know. Deke! Wake up. Who was that kid who died? Little Filipino dude. He’s fucking burnt, don’t listen to him. Anyway, this guy was Jonah’s bitch, basically. Delivered shit for him. One day they find him, L.A. River, fucking back of his head all blown out and shit. That’s why Jonah ain’t here, bra’. You don’t freelance in this town. You’re a brave woman. Powerpuff Girls.” He reached out his fist.
“Yeah, I heard about that Filipino kid,” said a skeleton-thin girl with fuchsia hair, past 1 a.m. off Washington Avenue. “I heard that kid got busted and he was back out. On his own, fucking like, recognizance. Cops make you sign a contract, you know. That you have to bring down another dealer. Buy and bust. I always heard Jonah’s people just got to him first. One of Jonah’s gangster kids up there. Boom: see ya!”
A biker in Southgate, three punks in Orange County, a Russian off Fairfax, and, near dawn, two whispering Korean kids on their way to school—they each filled in portions of Jonah’s history, like a tapestry of gossip, and Lydia understood that he had done this trick many times, scraping off the top of shipments that passed through his houses; and she knew that there had been foot soldiers like her, who had gone facedown into the Dumpsters, their heads blown out; and she still moved on, checking names off her list, feeling that the mystery she was assembling, the picture she was building out of so many different points, was simply her own death. She was locked in a slow suicide, and she kept on as if sleepwalking, as if the ultimate goal was something already decided in a nightmare. She did more lines as the sun came up, and she continued her errands, with no food, no water, only the manic and delirious fuel of each deal, moving through the detached, sprawling polyglot empire of Los Angeles, feeling that each section, from the undulating hills to the ugly flats of billboards and phone wires, was the fiefdom of some dealer, and that she was a traveler, all alone, meant to watch and wait and listen.
By the following evening, she had been up for twenty-four hours, and she would now linger in apartments and houses and lose track of time. In the no-man’s-land of warehouses, east of downtown, she sat in an upstairs room with an old painter who talked almost in a whisper, crushing the speed in a mortar and mixing water, soaking it in a cotton ball, and offering to shoot her up. She said no. She watched him wrap
the tourniquet on his arm, plunge in the needle, and cast himself into a new, perspiring state of watchfulness. Afterward, he offered her a thousand dollars to fuck him, becoming distracted by a distant idea, his face seeming to boil from the inside. He said, “Next time—you’ll say yes.”
She had been awake for thirty-six hours without so much as a drink of water when she pulled up to the shingled house in Topanga Canyon. The man who came to the door was in his early forties, with a craggy, prematurely old face. He was wearing a loose white shirt and old patched jeans, and he sniffled and led her unceremoniously inside, to where Lydia saw the back of a young boy’s head. He was on the couch, up late, watching television. She passed over a raised entry hall of Spanish tile, beyond a weighted door, into a bright kitchen, where a haggard woman sat in the breakfast nook. She could have been only in her thirties, but her face looked deflated. She made a joke, asking Lydia if she was the drug dealer or the hooker they’d ordered (she couldn’t tell the difference nowadays), and she laughed with a wet rattle in her throat. Lydia gave the man the bags, and he piled them on the kitchen counter. Lydia was mortified about the little boy in the other room.
While the man abruptly prepared a line, the woman began talking to Lydia about how much Jonah had been harassing them lately. “I mean, we would rather pay the extra money for some better shit. Our clients know the difference around here. We’re not a bunch of high school kids. No offense.”
The man did a line, rubbed his nostril, and said, “Nope. Nope. I’ve had it with this. You tell Jonah this is bullshit. This stuff is so fucking stepped on I could bake a cake out of it. No. And you know what?” He was livid, and pointing his slightly dusted fingertip at her. “I’m not going to get involved with Jonah anymore. It’s always some last-second panic—and he’s always got a dump truck of crap he needs to get rid of. Forget it. I don’t know what kind of business you people are running up there—but I got friends in high places, and I’ll smear his fucking name all over this town.”
“Don’t yell at her, Chris. It’s not her fault.”
“Hold on a second,” he said. He left the room and the door swung on its hinge.
The woman said, “It’s just that we have a bad history with Jonah.”
He returned with a tiny square of tin foil, and he poured it out into what looked like a soy sauce dish. He crushed it and went to the refrigerator. “Are we out of water? I’m not going to use fucking tap water.” He found a bottle of purified water and dripped some into the powder. He tossed down the cotton ball, and sucked the solution up into a syringe.
“I’m going to show you the difference here, kid. You’ve been doing so much crap for so long, you don’t know what this is supposed to feel like.”
Lydia refused, but the man stepped over her on the chair and grabbed her exhausted arm. She pulled away, and he fixed his eyes onto hers, saying, “You’re going to feel better than ever in your life. This is relief, kid. From everything you’ve just been through.”
He was so aggressive that Lydia stayed still, as if he held in his hands the final and unavoidable truth about her. He tied the rubber tourniquet over her arm and slapped at her vein. Lydia was reeling; she was alarmed by how much the drugs had overwhelmed her the past two days. The woman scooted closer beside her and held Lydia’s hand, and, as if Lydia were an infant, she said, “Shhh, it’s okay.” She sweetly petted through Lydia’s hair, tucking it around her ear, and she rubbed her shoulder, as the man slid down the needle and launched the solution and sent something through Lydia’s blood and spine that was like the finger of a god. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. The woman stroked her hair, whispering, and Lydia rolled with a pleasure that was as much as her body could stand, tingling and sensitized, feeling the air in her lungs like a million charged particles; the woman was whispering in her ear, and when Lydia looked up at her, her sunken, witchlike face no longer seemed ugly, but the husk of something once beautiful and alive and lonesome, just lost to everyone on the other side of this divide. And the woman kissed her and laughed, showing bad teeth, as Lydia slid farther back on the chair, startled, feeling her heart now like it might rush out of control.
And the man said, “Tell Jonah we’re not buying. Four pounds was the contract—and as far as I’m concerned, he broke it, sending this kind of bullshit over. You see the difference now.”
When Lydia left the house, she was so fired up that she could barely walk. It was an odd paradox: There was so much vigor behind each motion, each breath, each second that passed, that she no longer wanted to move.
This ecstatic feeling faded by the time she reached the apartment in the West Valley, sinking back into a raw and hungry feeling like the world was an unsolvable riddle. She drove up into the sprawling complex through Canoga Park, and she stepped out and moved toward the next address on her list, a far building beside the freeway and a tall sound barrier. When she saw the kid on his front stoop, she jumped backward.
He was heavy, in large, drooping pants; his thick cheeks were covered with sparse facial hair, and he had shaved his head down to the lumpy gray skin. He approached with his head down, loafing along.
He had been to the cottage in Culver City—several times. He was the man who had gone through her medicine cabinet, who had been mysteriously lurking around parties. She watched him approach across a walkway and toward the parking lot, and she was astounded that he showed no sign of recognition. Was this the person who had stolen the money? He must have recognized her, and as he accelerated his pace toward her, Lydia panicked. She saw him adjust something in the low waistband of his clownish pants. A gun, maybe?
Before he could reach her across the poorly lit cluster of cars, Lydia leapt back into the El Dorado and drove away, screeching out of the lot as he called and trotted after her. Her heart was racing, and she believed that she had—at last—found the thief.
But during the long drive back to Jonah’s, some new paranoia grabbed hold of her as she began to wonder why Jonah would know this cretin, and why he had put him on Lydia’s list of deliveries. He was the last man of the night, last on a long list, and she had been waiting to meet him in a dark, isolated parking lot beside the heavy white noise of passing cars. Did Jonah know this man? Did he do business with him? It seemed an insane coincidence, and she was determined not to let her mind race ahead of her.
She was no longer just shivering but flinching, having a hard time keeping the wheel straight. She was paranoid, of course. She hadn’t slept, the drugs were taking their toll. Keep your eyes open long enough and everything is part of a vast conspiracy. But she couldn’t overlook what seemed so clear, no matter how deeply she still wanted to believe in Jonah. No, no, repeat the arrangement: She’d made a mistake and she was taking responsibility. She was running errands, making back the cash. But what if she hadn’t made any mistake at all? She remembered that after Jonah put her back to bed with tranquilizers that night, he’d sent someone else to replace the packages—and he hadn’t even asked her where they’d been hidden. Lydia had the delirious sense that she had been put in that house long ago for this very reason: to make some visible mistake, to make secret deliveries, steal money or drugs out of stash houses, and maybe, never to be heard from again. Was Jonah using these tenants to steal from his own superiors? Was it possible that what Jonah had seen in Lydia, all those months ago, was a talent for vanishing without a trace?
ten
At the end of their second day together, Link drove his daughter back to the city, where she told him that her belongings were ferreted away in a Hollywood apartment. At dusk, they were heading west past the hundreds of windmills outside Palm Springs, just silhouettes now against a last hazy trail of light. Lydia was in a stupor of withdrawal, sagging against the closed windows, then jolting upright whenever he changed lanes. Just east of downtown, she started to regain some energy, chewing a stick of bubble gum from her backpack. She played with the radio, and announced, “You’re on empty.”
“I’m alway
s on empty. The gauge is broke.”
“Then how do you know when you’re going to run out of gas?”
“I got a sense for it.”
“You’re like the horse whisperer.”
She found a screeching hip-hop station, and listened to some mixture of heavy metal and rap, which she claimed that he should appreciate because it had guitars in it. Link thought it sounded like a bunch of screaming morons fucking up their parents’ record players. He turned it off and they rode in silence, until he asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up.
First she riffed off the lyrics from some rap, and he thought she was going to describe her ambitions to be a groupie: She had a way of acting silly instead of responding to him. But suddenly she calmed down and told him in a gloomy voice that she had once wanted to be a linguist or an archaeologist, whoever those people were who studied the history of languages and figured out migration trails. She had once had a book that explained the etymologies of every word, and it had been her favorite thing to read in the bathtub, although she had been distracted by the histories of the dirty words. That was all she could remember now. She told him that the “c-word” came from the Latin word for wedge, and later on: “It was the name of this street where all the hos hung out in Oxford: Gropecuntlane.”
She told him that “bastard” came from a French phrase, fils de bast, which meant something like “packsaddle son,” and that she was his packsaddle daughter.
The first written example of the f-word was in the 1200s: “John Le Fucker.”
“Get out of here,” said Link.
“I swear to God. Fock meant, like, dick in Old Swedish. And there’s all kinds of words like ‘fick,’ and ‘fack,’ and everything, all the way back to the cavemen—so it was seriously all over. But the first time anybody saw it in English, in writing anyway, it was this guy, a nickname or something. John Le Fucker.”