“A gift,” they told him, “for projecting alternate personalities, infiltrating, remembering, reporting back.”
“A spy,” Coy translated. “A snitch, a weasel.”
“A very well-paid actor,” they replied, “and without groupies or paparazzi or know-nothing audiences to worry about.”
It would mean kicking heroin, or at least the kind of habit he had then. They told him stories about junkies who had gained control of their addictions. It was called “the Higher Discipline,” more demanding than religious or athletic or military discipline because of the abyss you had to dare successfully every moment of every day. They took Coy to meet some of these transcended junkies, and he was amazed at their energy, their color, the bounce in their stride, the improvisational quickness of mind. If Coy performed up to spec or beyond, there would also be the bonus incentive of a once-a-year fix of Percodan, then regarded as the Rolls-Royce of opiates.
Of course, it would mean leaving Hope and Amethyst for good. But nobody at home, he kept reminding himself, had been happy for a real long time, and the Viggies promised to send Hope an anonymous one-time payment, suggesting strongly that it was from Coy. It would have to look like something he’d left them in a will, however, because in order to carry out this particular job he must assume one or more new identities, and the old identity of Coy Harlingen must cease to be.
“Fake my death? Oh, I don’t know, man, I mean, that’s really bad karma. Don’t know if I want to what Little Anthony & the Imperials call ‘tempt the hand of fate,’ you know?”
“Why think of this as death? why not reincarnation instead? Everybody wishes they had a different life. Here’s your opportunity. Plus you get to have fun, to take chances with your ass unparalleled even in the world of heroin abuse, and the pay is far, far better than scale, assuming you ever worked for scale.”
“Can I get some new choppers?”
“False teeth? That could be arranged.”
The fix was also in, they assured him, with Coy’s dealer, El Drano, to provide some especially lethal unstepped-on China White to be found at the scene of the overdose. Coy was advised to use only enough to be plausible in the emergency room but not enough to kill him.
“Not my favorite part of the caper,” Coy confessed to Doc. “It was like, I better not fuck up this time, I better have my wits about me, and of course I didn’t. As it was, I nearly ate the Big Wiener anyway.”
“Where’d your dealer get this heroin from?” Doc asked as pretty much a formality.
“Some bunch of heavies who bring it in direct—not the connection El Drano usually dealt with. Whoever they were, they had him scared shitless, even though he was just the cutout guy, in there to keep it from being traced back to this other source. But they kept telling him, ‘Never say a word.’ Silence, that was their big thing. So when he showed up floating in the canal the other day, you know, naturally I couldn’t help but wonder?”
“Could’ve been anything, though,” Doc said, “he had a long history.”
“Maybe.”
Eventually, like other turned souls before him, Coy put in some discomfort time at the Chryskylodon program kicking heroin, from which visits to the Smile Maintenance Workshop of Rudy Blatnoyd, D.D.S., seemed almost like vacations. The new teeth meant a new embouchure, and that also took some adjusting, but finally, one night there he was in a toilet stall at LAX, passing compromising notes on toilet paper under the partition to a state legislator with hidden sexual longings whom the Viggies wished to have, as they put it, “on the team.” After this—he guessed—audition, the assignments gradually got more demanding—preparation sometimes included reading Herbert Marcuse and Chairman Mao and the comprehension issues that came along with that, plus daily workouts at a dojo in Whittier, dialect coaching in outer Hollywood, evasive driving lessons out in Chatsworth.
It didn’t take long for Coy to become aware that the patriots who were running him were being run themselves by another level of power altogether, which seemed to feel entitled to fuck with the lives of all who weren’t as good or bright as they were, which meant everybody. Coy learned they’d labeled him an “addictive personality,” betting that once committed to snitching for his country, he would find the life as hard to kick as heroin, if not harder. Pretty soon they had him hanging around campuses—university, community college, and high school—and slowly learning to infiltrate antiwar, antidraft, anticapitalist groups of all kinds. For the first months, he was so busy he didn’t have time to think about what he’d actually done, or if there was any future in it. One night he was in Westwood shadowing elements of a group at UCLA called the Bong Users’ Revolutionary Brigades (BURBs), when he noticed a little girl who would have been about Amethyst’s age, breathless with excitement in front of a lighted bookstore window, calling to her mother to come and look. “Books, Mama! Books!” Coy stood nailed in his tracks, while his quarry went on with their evening. It was the first time since signing on with the Viggies that he’d given any thought to the family he had abandoned for something he must have believed was more important.
In that moment everything was clear—the karmic error of faking his own death, the chances that people he was helping to set up were looking at deep possibilities including real death, and clearest of all how much he missed Hope and Amethyst—more, desperately more, than he’d ever thought he would. With no resources, sympathy or support, Coy all of a sudden, too late, wanted his old life back.
“And that’s around the time you asked me to look in on them?”
“Yep, that’s how desperate I was.”
“This is it here, right?”
Doc pulled over on the shoulder near the apron of the Boards’ driveway. “One thing.”
“Uh-oh.”
“The original job offer from Vigilant California—who was it that called you?”
Coy looked Doc over, as if for the first time. “When I started spying, I used to wonder why people ask the questions they do. Then I began to notice how often they already know the answer but just want to hear it from another voice, like outside their own head?”
“All right,” Doc said.
“Better go talk to Shasta Fay, I think.”
DRIVING BACK DOWN to the coast road, Doc managed to put himself on a full-scale paranoid trip about Shasta, and how she must have been using, all the time she and Doc were together, maybe since before they’d met, a devoted junkie taking every chance she could to slip out into the fine breezy nights and go someplace they’d’ve been looking after her outfit for her so she wouldn’t have to hide it at home from Doc . . . just to be back for a while among the junkie fellowship, to have a break from this hopeless stooge of the creditor class she was already planning to split on and so forth. It took him nearly all the way to Gordita to remember that once again he was being an asshole. By the time he got back to his place and reconfigured his hair into something halfway groovy, and set off up the esplanade to El Porto, with night fallen and the surf invisible, he was back to his old wised-up self, short on optimism, ready to be played for a patsy again. Normal.
The surf shop downstairs had closed early, but there were lights up in the Saint’s windows, and Doc didn’t have to knock but two or three times before Shasta opened the door and even smiled at him before saying hi, c’mon in. She was barelegged in some kind of Mexican shirt, pale purple with some orange embroidery on it, and had her hair wrapped in a towel, smelling like she did just out of the shower. He knew there was a reason he’d fallen in love with her back then, he kept forgetting it, but now that he half-remembered, he had to grab himself mentally by the head and execute a quick brainshake before he could trust himself to say anything.
Shasta introduced him to her dog Mildred and took some time rattling around in the kitchen. Flip had covered most of one living-room wall with an enlarged photo of a gigantic monster wave at Makaha last wint
er, with a tiny but instantly recognizable Greg Noll cradled in it like a faithful worshipper in the fist of God.
Shasta came in with a six-pack of Coors from the fridge. “You know Mickey’s back,” she said.
“Some rumor, yeah.”
“Oh, he’s back home all right, yep, back home with Sloane and the kids, and so what? C’est la vie.”
“Que sera sera.”
“You got it.”
“Have you seen him?”
“How likely is that? These days I’m only an embarrassment.”
“Sure, but maybe if you did something about your hair . . .”
“Fucker.” She reached, undid the towel and threw it at him, shook her hair out—he didn’t want to say violently, exactly, but there was a look in her eye he remembered, or thought he did. “How’s this?”
He angled his head as if she’d asked a serious question. “Darker than it was.”
“Back to my old dirty-blond ways. Mickey liked it almost platinum, used to spring for this colorist down on Rodeo Drive?” and Doc knew beyond all doubt that she and Penny had met at that same hair salon, where at least one topic of discussion had been him, and sure enough, “Word’s around that you have this thing about Manson chicks?”
“Y—well, ‘thing,’ guess it depends what you— Are you sure you want to be doing that?”
She had unbuttoned her shirt and now, looking him in the eye, began unhurriedly to stroke her nipples. Mildred glanced up in momentary interest, then, shaking her head slowly side to side, got off the couch and left the room. “Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners,” Shasta continued, “who do exactly what you want before you even know what that is. You don’t even have to say a word out loud, they get it all by ESP. Your kind of chick, Doc, that’s the lowdown on you.”
“Hey. You the one’s been stealin my magazines?”
She slid out of the shirt and down on her knees, and crawled slowly over to where Doc was sitting with an untouched can of beer and a hardon, and, kneeling, she carefully took off his huaraches and gave each bare foot a soft kiss. “Now,” she whispered, “what would Charlie do?”
Probably not what Doc would do, which was find half a joint in his shirt pocket and light it up. Which he did. “You want some of this?” She raised her face, and he held the joint to her lips while she inhaled. They smoked in silence till Doc had to put what was left in a little alligator clip he carried with him. “Look, I’m sorry about Mickey, but—”
“Mickey.” She gave Doc a good long look. “Mickey could have taught all you swingin beach bums a thing or two. He was just so powerful. Sometimes he could almost make you feel invisible. Fast, brutal, not what you’d call a considerate lover, an animal, actually, but Sloane adored that about him, and Luz—you could tell, we all did. It’s so nice to be made to feel invisible that way sometimes . . .”
“Yeah, and guys love to hear shit like this.”
“. . . he’d bring me to lunch in Beverly Hills, one big hand all the way around my bare arm, steering me blind down out of those bright streets into some space where it was dark and cool and you couldn’t smell any food, only alcohol—they’d all be drinking, tables full of them in a room that could’ve been any size, and they all knew Mickey there, they wanted, some of them, to be Mickey. . . . He might as well have been bringing me in on a leash. He kept me in these little microminidresses, never allowed me to wear anything underneath, just offering me to whoever wanted to stare. Or grab. Or sometimes he’d fix me up with his friends. And I’d have to do whatever they wanted. . . .”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Oh I’m so sorry, Doc, are you getting upset, do you want me to stop?” By now she was draped across his lap, her hands beneath her playing with her pussy, her ass irresistibly presented, her intentions, even to Doc, clear enough. “If my girlfriend had run away to be the bought-and-sold whore of some scumbag developer? I’d just be so angry I don’t know what I’d do. Well, no, I’m even lying about that, I know what I’d do. If I had the faithless little bitch over my lap like this—” Which was about as far as she got. Doc managed to get in no more than a half dozen sincere smacks before her busy hands had them both coming all over the place. “You fucker!” she cried—not, Doc guessed, at him—“you bastard . . .”
He only remembered later to look for telltale zombie symptoms, in case wherever she’d been they’d processed her somehow, the way they’d done to Mickey, but it seemed like the same old Shasta. Of course, she still could have made a deal to escape Mickey’s fate, in which case who was it with, and what was the payback? Before he could ask about any of that, she was talking, quietly, and he knew he’d better listen.
“I said I was up north with family stuff, but what really happened was, was a couple of apes found me and took me to San Pedro and put me on this boat? and I never knew what their real plans for me were, because when we got to Maui, I hustled my way off.”
“Some first mate who digs beautiful asses no doubt.”
“Chief cook, actually. Then at Pukalani I ran into Flip hitchhiking, and he handed me the keys to this place and asked me to house-sit. Why are you looking so weird all of a sudden?”
“Around the same time that was happening, Vehi Fairfield gave me some acid and while I was tripping I saw you, on that same boat, the Golden Fang. I was out in the wind someplace, I don’t know, kept tryin to get on board, kept close as long as I could . . . now it’s you that’s lookin weird.”
“I knew it! I felt something then, and all I could think of was that somehow it might be you. It was so creepy.”
“Must’ve been me, then.”
“No, I mean it felt like . . . being haunted? It’s why the first island we got to, I sent you that card.”
“Vehi’s spirit guide said you weren’t on the ship by choice, but that you’d be okay.”
“I wonder if he knew that everybody on board was packing. Officers, crew, passengers.”
She didn’t exactly ask about it, but Porfirio, the chief cook, had been happy to explain. “Pirates.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“The cargoes we carry, señorita, are highly desirable, particularly in the Third World.”
“Think I could borrow something from the ship’s armory to carry with me, just in case?”
“You are a passenger. We will protect you.”
“You’re sure that’s what I am, and not just more desirable cargo.”
“But this is flirting, yes?”
“Yeah, yeah?” Doc said after a while. “So you said . . .”
“I said, ‘Ooh, Porfirio, I hope they’re not planning to sell me to some horrible Chinese Communist gang of perverts who’ll do all kinds of horrible Chinese stuff to me. . . .’”
Doc found some of Fritz’s Thai weed and lit up. “Yeah,” after offering her a hit, “and Porfirio said?”
“‘Allow me do it all to you first, señorita, with your permission of course, so that you will at least know what to expect.’”
“Uh huh?”
“Well, you know these sailing ships, all the ropes and chains and pulleys and hooks and things. . . .”
“Okay, that does it—let’s see that cute red ass there.”
“But . . . Doc . . . what did I say?” She knelt on the couch, put her face down on a pillow, and presented herself.
“You need a tattoo right here. How about ‘Bad, Bad Girl’?”
She looked back, her eyes slitted and pink. “Figured you’d go more for a marijuana leaf. . . .”
“Hmm. Maybe I better—”
“No . . .”
“What kind of a ChiCom sex slave are you anyhow? You want to just . . . arch your back—yeah, beautiful, like that. . . .”
They started fucking, and it didn’t take very long this time eit
her. A little later she said, “This doesn’t mean we’re back together.”
“No. No, course not. Can I tell you something anyway?”
“Sure.”
“I wasn’t really pissed off at you, you know, ever, Shasta, not about us, I never felt like I was any kind of a injured party or nothing. Fact, for a while, when Mickey really looked like another one of these straight-to-freak converts, I was even willing to cut him some slack for that. I trusted you on how sincere he was.”
“Trouble is,” a little sadly, “so did I.”
“And if anybody should be revenging themself on anybody’s ass around here . . .”
“Oh,” said Shasta. “Oh. Well. Let me give that some thought.”
She went in the kitchen and found a box of Froot Loops, and they put on the TV and sat companionably eating dry cereal and watching the Knicks and the Lakers, Doc would have said just like in the old days, except this was now and he’d come to know a lot less than he thought he did then.
“Don’t you need the sound on?”
“Nah, it’s all those sneakers, when they squeak like that?”
At halftime she looked over and said, “Something’s on your mind.”
“Coy Harlingen. I ran into him down in Hermosa.”
“So he really didn’t OD like everybody said.”
“Even better’n that, he’s clean now.”
“Glad to hear it. Long may he wave.”
“But he’s caught in something he doesn’t want to be in. He’s been working as a snitch for the LAPD, and I also saw him on the tube at some Fascism for Freedom rally, pretending to scream at Nixon, working undercover for this outfit called Vigilant California?”
“Then,” Shasta murmured, “I guess that one’s on my ticket, ’cause it was me who put Coy in touch with Burke Stodger, and it was Burke who set him up with the Viggies.” No excuse, she went on, it was during that very freaky time for everybody up in Hollywood right after Sharon Tate. It had occurred to very few in the hopeful-starlet community that regular features and low body weight might not after all be counted on to buy you a thing that mattered. The shock of the Cielo Drive murders was bad enough out in civilian life, but the impact on Shasta and her friends was paralyzing. You could be the sweetest girl in the business, smart with your money, careful about dope, aware of how far to trust people in this town, which was not at all, you could be nice to everybody—focus pullers, grips, even writers, people you didn’t even have to say hello to—and still be horribly murdered for your trouble. Once-overs you’d found ways to ignore now had you looking for the particular highlight off some creep’s eyes that would send you behind double and triple locks to a room lit only by the TV screen, and whatever was in the fridge to last you till you felt together enough to step outside again.
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