A limousine swerved into the turn lane and naturally stopped right in front of Rudy's convertible, demanding passage and screwing up his view. Fucking—sorry, Sheri—flipping aristocrats, flopping aristocrats—bunch of rich assholes—was asshole swearing?—he'd have to get a ruling from the new fucking language queen.
The driver of the limo sat there and stared out at Rudy from underneath his chauffeur hat. Well? Finally, Rudy gave up waiting and started shooting, car and all. That brought the chauffeur out to protest in a phony English accent, "You don't have permission to take photographs of us."
"Take a look around, sucker! You think you own the street?"
Rudy already had enough material. He gave the stooge just enough eye to make him nervous, then retreated to the convertible and climbed in. He had already run into enough Hollywood types who demanded a ten-page contract before they let you crack a camera lens anywhere near their ugly faces. Pompous suckers with their noses so high in the air, you could see all of the way into their brains and their half-dozen overworked cells.
Rudy backed into a U-turn and sped off south. He passed a hotdog stand with an enormous ten-foot-long plastic frankfurter on the roof. The day before, he had waited an hour for a mob of fat, unhealthy customers to queue up at the window. Hilarious shot. Now on a late Sunday afternoon, he wanted something quieter, a nice little contrast, maybe one of the makeshift black Southern Baptist churches south of Hollywood in the setting sun.
In the three or four weeks he had been at this, Rudy figured, he must have taken more than two thousand pictures. Most of them were garbage—nearly all of them, if he was being honest—but already the camera had started to turn his hand into an extension of his eye. He was learning at a frightening pace, filling his head with so many facts and figures, he didn't know where to stuff them all. The guys at Samy's had talked him into going straight Manual and forcing himself to control his equipment. No more auto-program-instamatic bullshit. He had spent days with the experts on the fourth professional floor. They seemed to have adopted him, once he wised up and started dropping the name of his partner Sam Spaulding.
Rudy did feel guilty about that little exaggeration, but how else was he going to get anyone to take him seriously? He had figured it would never come back to him, what with Sam sick and retired and Lydia stuck in the office with Sheri. And it hadn't, until the Axelrod mess.
Flipping Lydia. She could be one imperious bitch when she wanted. Between her and Sheri. Lydia kept bugging him to work on the studio portrait end of the business to bring in real money. As if. Rudy guessed what really pissed off Lydia, was his use of her husband's name with the spoiled little Axelrod bride and her arrogant mother. Both of them trading on the fingernails old man Axelrod broke off, scraping his way to the top of the Torrance shipping business. Rudy despised pompous more than anything. It didn't help that fools like that made such easy marks. Lydia and Sheri got their panties all in a wad over nothing. All they had to do was show the Axelrod girl his photographs, and she would beg them to let her out of the contract.
Rudy came to a screeching halt in Inglewood, a block south of Florence. A Latino up on a ladder at six o'clock on a Sunday, painting a sign that would read AUTO SERVICE in large, bright, orange capitals. The man had outlined the letters from left to right, and now was filling them in from right to left. He was half-way through the V in V-I-C-E. His wife and three children sat behind him in a beat-up old car at the curb, the children reading and studying, the wife patiently watching her husband work.
If there were two subjects that thrilled Rudy, they were families and working people. Not the saccharine-sweet Hollywood varieties, but the real thing. In his search for photographic subjects, Rudy—who had never held down a straight job in his life, who couldn't even spell family—had found himself obsessed with both. As if in capturing his awe of those people, he could steal a sliver of their souls.
He leapt out of the convertible and started shooting as he crossed the street, catching them before the usual self-consciousness kicked in and screwed up the photos. The man glanced out at Rudy, turned back to his sign, and might have got the joke—VICE in garish orange letters on a white wall warmed by the late afternoon sun.
"Buenos noches," Rudy tried, and the man returned the greeting. The wife climbed out of the car and smiled politely. Latinos, Rudy thought. If he had to guess, this wasn't the man's second job, it was his third. Breaking his back all day in a filthy warehouse, passing through home on his way to delivering pizzas all night, then painting signs and doing odd jobs all weekend. And all the while, the pompous whites who paid him dreaming up more acceptable words for spic and demanding that the government deport his sorry ass.
The man streamed a Babel of Spanish, and Rudy quickly realized communication wasn't on the horizon. The man made a sign of climbing back and painting more if Rudy wanted—no, he had enough shots already, gracias. The wife brought out a jug of bright red liquid and a handful of cups—no, he wasn't thirsty. They played the gentle pantomime, until Rudy retreated to his car and climbed in. With a wave, he sped off down the avenue into Inglewood, agog at the respect they had shown each other. That they had shown him.
Suddenly, at an intersection, Rudy pulled over to the empty curb and gripped the steering wheel, awash in sweat, his neck and shoulders a tangle of taut steel cables. These panic attacks seemed to hit him after every inspired shot, every inexplicably wonderful moment. He still couldn't understand how or why his life had suddenly turned around. On a dime, and all because some old fart decided it was time to die? With so little grasp of it all—with so little grasp of his own talent—Rudy just knew it would all slip away one day, as easily as it had appeared. He forced himself to breath, to relax. He glanced around him. And saw the building.
There were two distinct structures, two haphazard stacks of odd glass boxes joined over a passageway. Rudy guessed that it might have been a car dealer or an electronics store. The owners had painted the glass cubes a psychedelic miasma of orange and red. They must have gone out of business, because a chain link fence surrounded the building and the forest of weeds in its parking lot. The fence hadn't prevented the graffiti brigade from adding their own psychotic colors, so in the last of the sun, the building exploded like fireworks shot into the eye.
Rudy was a sucker for great color—just look at the cool clothes he wore when he was stepping out. He figured he had twenty minutes before the sun evaporated and the building faded to a tired nighttime shambles. He fumbled in his pocket for the spare memory card and battery and leaned down to the floor of the passenger seat for the Nikon. But then a movement across the street stopped him.
A huge body-builder of a black man, in skin-tight white sling shirt, sunglasses, and head stocking, ambled out of the passage. He leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette, and glanced casually up and down the street. Maybe a little too casually for Rudy's taste. No way the giant was a lookout—a lookout could have peered out the second-story windows just by scraping off a sliver of paint—but there was nothing about the violent dude to suggest that he was in a hurry to say cheese. Rudy crouched down in his seat and watched.
A few minutes more, and a pair of ten-year-old boys exited from the passage, dressed in teenage gangsta chic. Muscle man snapped his fingers and pointed, and they quickly took off in Rudy's direction. They stumbled through the fence onto the sidewalk and crossed the intersection, giggling inanely, oblivious to the few cars cruising through.
Drugs. Fucking drugs. Rudy had seen it all before. He had seen ten-year-olds just like these two, high on heroin fed to them by the adult scum around them. Watched them shake and shiver, gasping on vomit, strapped to a bed in juvie, kicking a habit that felt like the screaming fist of God. He had spotted them in juvie and in a gutter, but mostly he had found one of them in the mirror in his mother's bathroom. Fuck! The closer the two child addicts came to his car, the farther over the edge Rudy crashed. Fuck! One of them stumbled, fell, and scraped his knee. Rudy wanted to scream, to
beat the shit out of the steering wheel, to leap out across the street and beat the pusherman to death with his camera...
A hard knock at the car window startled Rudy back to reality. Muscle man stood there next to him, leaning down, breathing on him, dangerous and threatening. Where had he come from? Rudy brought the window down less than four inches. At least the car was still in drive, his foot punishing the brake.
"You need something?" the man asked.
Rudy thought as fast as he could. "No, I thought I was having a heart attack or something." And he looked it too.
"So go somewhere else to die, motherfucker. This ain't your neighborhood."
"Sure." Rudy turned to glance ahead at the intersection.
Muscle man started to back off, then gaped and shouted, "Wait a minute! Is that a fucking camera?" His trunk of an arm shot through the inches of open window and caught Rudy by the throat, just as Rudy floored the accelerator. The surge snapped the man's arm the wrong way into the back window and out of the car. Rudy screeched to a halt and glanced in his rear view mirror. The dude knelt twenty feet behind the car, sunglasses scattered, one arm broken by the looks of it, the other quickly reaching behind him into the small of his back.
Rudy had no idea what happened next, except his gearbox shifted into reverse, one foot smashed the brake, the other floored the accelerator, tires smoked and screamed, and the car hurtled backward like a missile shot into hell.
Chapter 15
Sam stood at the sink in the bathroom and stared intently at the gaunt old geezer in the mirror. That old man, like so many cancer patients, had hoped that the effects of the chemo would bypass him, that he would be the one in a million to keep his hair and plod around the apartment pretending to feel a pulse. The tufts of hair in the sink, and the pasty white skin and echo-canyon eyes in the mirror, testified otherwise. He started to compute camera settings, but ran out of mental energy along the way.
Sam adjusted the colostomy bag belt, braced himself against the sink, and reached up with the beard trimmer of his electric razor. It was hard going. The arm movements stretched his torso and, with it, the incisions where they had cut into him. The incisions hurt—viciously, depending on how he moved—but every stab was a reminder of the excruciating ulcers and golf-ball-sized polyp they had cut out of him. He just didn't want to open anything up again, if it meant one extra visit to that scum-sucking doctor.
Sam aimed for the sink with the razor, but it wasn't that simple. With half of his head shaved, the white porcelain, the linoleum floor, and his dressing gown were littered with the fine, textureless clumps of gray. How was he ever going to clean up this disaster? Miss Lydia wouldn't be pleased, but it was too late now. He kept at it, until the only surface in the room that didn't sport any hair was his bald head.
He had to do something about the mess, so he shuffled off the dressing gown Lydia had forced him to wear, dropped it to the floor, and prodded it awkwardly into a corner with his right toe. Some of the hair went along, but not enough to make a difference. And not only that—he now stood naked in the middle of the bathroom, with nowhere near the energy or mobility to pick up the dressing gown again. What the hell was he going to do?
He spotted Lydia's ugly pink gown hanging off the back of the door and tugged on it. He missed, and it fell to the floor and revealed the full-length mirror behind it. Jesus! Colostomy fight at the OK corral. But the joke failed to get a rise out of the flaccid old bald guy in the mirror with the plastic belt and the hideous bag hanging off his thigh. He who had chased bullets all over the planet now found that world narrowed down to the tiniest of gaps between life and death in a yellow-tiled South Redondo bathroom.
"Fuck it," Sam heard his deceased brother Henry wheezing from his own deathbed thirteen years earlier. "I'm outta here. I'm not gonna miss nobody, and nobody's gonna miss me." Sam hadn't disagreed, sitting by Henry's living corpse in the South Gate house where they grew up. "Nobody's gonna hold me up to piss. Just burn me with my fucking boots on." Henry still issuing orders, as if anyone gave a shit what he said anymore.
"Say hi to Ma in hell," Sam had offered, going along with his brother's tough guy pose.
"Fuck no. I always told you she made me keep you out of the business, but that was bullshit. She didn't give a fuck. It was all me. Looking out for you, dumb fuck that you were. You and all those wars and that bitch Vera. You know I had her killed, don't you?"
"Sure," Sam snorted. Whatever line of bullshit the dead man wanted to take with him.
"Fucking A, I did. I bought you the studio and when that other broad showed up—"
"Vera?"
"No, the other one! What's her—"
"Lydia."
"Whatever. Vera went nuts. She told Mischa she was gonna fuck her up—"
"Why—"
"Who knows? But I had Mischa and that other homo—"
"Donny."
"—shoot her up. Believe that? Fucking queer shot up his own sister."
"Yeah, I believed it," Sam said now to the colostomy-bagged ghost in the mirror. Mischa had confirmed everything years later, the night when he and Sam drove up to Marina del Rey to spread Donny's ashes off the yacht the two lovers bought with the wages of all their sins. Right before a tearful Mischa took the elevator to the top of the tallest office building in El Segundo, smashed a chair through a window, and leapt out after it.
Sam pulled on the toilet seat top and let it slam closed. He sat down, adjusted the bag on his thigh, and drove out conscious thought. He was still there, cold, lost, and humiliated, when Lydia found him a half-hour later.
"What's this?" she cried, taking in the disaster.
"Come here."
"What?"
"I said come here!"
Lydia crossed the room to within grappling distance, and Sam hooked and hauled her in. He wrapped his arms around her thighs. "Hey...," she said soothingly and patted his non-existent hair.
Sam buried his nose in her skirt. "I have to tell you something."
"Tell me what?"
"When I was in Louisville..." He left the sentence wound up like that, couldn't bring himself to finish it. Not a peep from the beautiful mouth above him. Finally, he dared to glance up. She had read his mind and was crying, not loud, but Lydia-like—dignified, tears trickling out of that awful black eye. "I'm sorry," Sam whispered, then back in her skirt, "I am so sorry about your mother."
"I wondered when you didn't mention her. You want something to eat? I picked up groceries before I realized you couldn't eat any of the stuff I bought."
Sam glanced up at her, surprised. "Are you okay?"
"Of course not. I always hated my brother. I take it he got the house?"
"Sold it."
"Whatever. I missed my chance—Mom and I, we both did. I'm just not missing any more. What? Why are you looking at me?"
"Because you're so beautiful—"
"You say so."
"And because I can't remember what Gastro Dude said about sex."
"Don't even!" she laughed. "Of all the ridiculous notions!"
But she giggled all of the way through dressing him in her ugly pink gown, giggled with a quiet hysteria leading him out to the makeshift bed on the living room sofa, giggled handing him his nightly mug of inedible broth, and giggled tuning into some TV dance show she insisted on watching.
"Be careful," he warned, playing along and pretending to let her bully him into enduring the show with her. "This could come back to haunt you." He had meant when he recovered, but the joke crashed like a wrecking ball through her mood. "Wait! I didn't say..." But by then, she had already fled to the bedroom and slammed the door.
Chapter 16
Sheri was eight days past her eleventh birthday when she finally gave up on Marta and leapt for adulthood. What caught the attention of Hermosa Beach Social Services was the excruciating calm and the vivid, utterly convincing detail with which she described her life as a lost flower child's child. As one interviewer remarked to another, i
t was as if Sheri had researched the manual before showing up in their offices and outlining a textbook case for intervention. Impossible, of course—if she was a child prodigy, then surely the standardized school tests would have picked it up—but as it happened, that pretty much summed things up.
Marta and Sheri had drifted up, down, and around America for years before settling in Southern California. By 1980, most of the American youth counter-culture had either overdosed or graduated to prison, Wall Street, or selling cars for the family dealership. You had to look really hard to find kindred flower-power souls without a hustle or an agenda. The advantage of Hermosa Beach was, if things fell apart on the lodging front, Marta and Sheri could always sack out on the beach for a night or two. This rarely happened—Marta had a finely tuned eye when it came to the ins and outs of free lodging, food, and sex—but you never knew. So on the night Sheri finally lost patience with her mother, they were living in a throwback commune of sorts, an open-access fleabag of a house on one of the anonymous walk streets off the Strand.
Sheri actually didn't mind the hovel. By a miracle, the occupants—no one sobered up long enough to figure who owned what—had gotten together and decided that an eleven-year-old child probably needed her own bedroom away from all the sex. After all, accidents did and had happened. So for months, Sheri slept clear through the night without the disgusting elevator music of ten or twenty sweating, groaning adults churning around her.
Then one night, the final straw crushed the camel's back, as Sheri and Marta lay out on the beach under the stars, with some Ripple-guzzling Tom-Dick-Harry and a vacant girl guitarist who claimed to have nearly made it with Jerry Garcia. The Hermosa Beach authorities had only recently started to worry over the intersection between sloppy communes, pot smoking, and real estate values, so law enforcement was still spotty.
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