by A. W. Gray
Gerald froze in mid-stroke. The bedposts rattled and rocked. The floor and ceiling wrenched in opposite directions. The walls quivered. Glassware tinkled. Jesus H. Christ, Gerald thought. A torrent of water drenched the sliding glass doors on his left. The pool Gerald thought, the fucking water is sloshing out of the pool. The woman clamped her legs around his waist. “Come on, baby.” she moaned. “Come on, come on.” Plaster rained down on Gerald’s back.
He gripped her inner thighs and tried to pry her legs apart. She squeezed him even tighter. He gritted his teeth. “Quake. Quake, goddammit.”
She squealed and threw her arms around his neck, pumping faster and faster with her hips. “Quick. Oh yes, baby, quick, quick, quick…”
Gerald let go of her thighs and wrestled with her forearms. She’s fucking strangling me, he thought, oh Jesus Christ, I’m going to die right here. Old superstud is headed for the big clusterfuck up yonder. Jesus Christ, I’m going to…The room tilted. The bed bucked and squeaked. The intertwined couple pitched sideways, hit the carpet rolling, and bounced across the floor to slam into the base of the sliding doors. Gerald stared out through the glass. Seen in a shower of moonlight, the carport buckled. The concrete split. With a squeal of bending metal, the woman’s Mercedes lurched, then tumbled trunk-over-hood-ornament down the incline to vanish in the blackness of Topanga Canyon. More plaster fell. To hell with this, Gerald thought. He turned over, yanked the woman on top, and used her body as a shield.
The quake subsided as quickly as it had come. The tilted room was still as death. Dust hung in the air. Gerald inhaled. He sneezed.
The woman’s eyelids fluttered. A grain of mascara dribbled onto her cheek. She looked toward the pool, rolling waves now subsiding, untangled herself from him and rose on her haunches. “What happened, Boots?” Then, more shrilly, “What happened, Boots?”
He looked at her, skinny thighs and drooping boobs, the gray in her hair illuminated by a slant of lunar brilliance. “Earthquake,” he said. “You never seen an earthquake before?”
She raised her hand to cracked lips. “Earthquake?”
He struggled to his feet, canting himself against the tilt of the floor. His clothes had fallen against the wall. He walked side-hop, pulled on his red silk briefs, and picked up his hand-tooled leather boots. His Stetson was upside down on the carpet. He jammed the hat on his head. “Right. Earthquake. Right.”
She sniffled. “My house, Boots. My house.”
Gerald thought, Boots your ass. In the distance an air-raid siren whined. “You think your house is fucked,” Gerald said, “you should’ve seen your car.” He shrugged into his oversized western shirt, flowered quilting at the shoulders, and closed the snaps one at a time.
She looked through the glass toward the shattered carport. “My car. My car…”
He found his loose, boot-cut jeans, planted his rump on the corner of the bed to slide his legs in. Then he yanked on his boots and pulled his pants legs down. “Your car.”
Her mouth twisted in anguish. “What are you doing?”
He stood, flipped on the bed lamp and looked in the mirror. What a bod, Gerald thought, tapered waist, thighs to make women drool. “Getting dressed,” he said. “What’s it look like I’m doing? I got an appointment.” He turned sideways, watching his reflection as he humped his pelvis forward. Weight in fucking gold, Gerald thought.
“You’re not leaving me.” A tear rolled down her cheek.
He gently closed his eyes. Jesus, he guessed it would be hard on her, him going. Tough shit, Gerald thought. “Got to,” he said.
“But when will I see you again?” Turning to him, cupping her veined breasts, fifty-five if she was a day, thinking the floppy boobs were a turn-on to him, trying to sex him up.
“Rest of the month you can come by the club. February I got an audition down at Chippendale’s.” He dusted plaster from his hands. “If the club ain’t fallen down. Fuck me, is this something, or what?” He dug a pouch from his back pocket and snorted a palmful of Mexican brown. The woman’s image blurred, then cleared.
She pouted, standing, her belly pooching out. “I was going to cook us breakfast.” Seeing him watching, sucking in her stomach and raising up on her toes.
He listed a step to his left, then steadied himself with a hand on the dresser. “Doubt your stove’s working.” The bed lamp extinguished. “There goes the power. Poof, huh?” he said. Liking the darkness better, so’s he didn’t have to see this pitiful old broad.
She stepped toward him in the semilight. “Don’t leave me, Boots.”
Her vanity chair was on its side, her purse on the floor, contents spilling out. He grabbed the soft leather flap and hoisted the purse up, fishing around inside. “Tell you what, being as how I’m not sticking around for breakfast, I’m knocking a hundred off your tab.” He dug out a wad of bills. “Only three hundred you owe me, okay? Bargain days.” He dropped the purse and stumped toward the kitchen, elevated heels bunching his calf muscles. “I’m taking some beer,” he said.
She followed him, leaning forward, fighting her way uphill. “Is it just the money?”
He opened the refrigerator, gravity taking hold and slamming the door into the kitchen wall. He found a six-pack of Silver Bullets and pried out one can.
She reached the doorway, grasping the jambs on both sides. “It is, isn’t it?”
He popped the ring tab and glugged. “Hmm?”
“The money.”
“Well, what do you think it is? Shit, look at you.” He dangled the torn carton from his fingertips.
Tears welled in her eyes. She sobbed.
“Don’t start fucking crying,” he said. “Look, you want a good humping, you come to the right place. It’s what you’re paying for. It’s what I keep myself looking like this for. You’re expecting a friend, go someplace else. I got too many women to take care of, be hanging around with one.”
Three hours and two ass-kicking aftershocks later, southeast bound on the Hollywood Freeway, Gerald slammed the lever into park. He climbed down from his midnight blue Ford Bronco and tilted his Stetson back, looking behind him at Five lanes of bumper-to-bumper stock-still Caddys, Mercedeses, beat-up Fords and Chevys, a guy with skinny arms on his right driving a Jag. As far as Gerald could see, people riding their horns, cussing, shooting the finger; traffic backed up all the way, Gerald figured, to the ocean and then some. Same in the opposite direction, the downtown L.A. skyline towering over an endless row of cars, no movement in the traffic, Gerald thinking, Jesus, maybe everybody’ll just sit here till they starve to fucking death.
He’d been doing just fine, zipping along at a steady fifty-five on the Ventura, figuring to be in his apartment five-thirty, six o’clock, when he’d come to the big cloverleaf where the Ventura and San Diego freeways joined, autos bottlenecked coming from the south on the San Diego, Jesus, five-fifteen in the morning, what did all these fucking people think they were doing? Deejay on 96.5, only C&W station in Los Angeles worth listening to, explained it this way: the Santa Monica Freeway had collapsed, diverting all traffic north to the Ventura, there to hook onto the Hollywood to proceed downtown.
What’s this collapsed, Gerald had thought, you mean the freeway just…? He pictured the scene, the ground cracking open and swallowing the whole fucking road, moles the size of elephants eating people, dragging them down into the bowels of the earth. He’d grabbed his cellular then and punched in the station’s listener hotline number, which he did every so often to correct some asshole who’d called in misinformation about Patsy Cline’s birthplace or something. Seventeen consecutive times he’d gotten the busy signal, bawwk, bawwnk, as he moved foot by foot down the Ventura to the Hollywood, forest-covered mountains on his left, the Hollywood sign on the hillside hazy in smog, the dropoff on his right showing low-slung office buildings, the round Capitol Records structure near Sunset Boulevard.
He’d kept his cool, smiling left and right at pissed-off horn honkers, watching a couple in a Mazda, the girl draped all over the man, the guy wiggling around behind the steering wheel like maybe getting a hand job in the middle of the freeway. Now, less than a hundred yards short of his Normandie Avenue exit, stopped dead still, Gerald standing alongside his Bronco with his hat tilted back. The Bronco was in the wrong lane, two spaces over from the righthand shoulder, Skinny-in-the-Jag directly beside him, and between Skinny and the shoulder a woman in a Suburban packed with snaggle-toothed kids. Gerald halfway expected another aftershock, pictured the whole fucking freeway as it twisted snake fashion, autos flying left and right and banging into the railings.
He went around the nose of the Jag and past the Suburban to eyeball the shoulder, satisfying himself that there was room between the curb and rail for the Bronco to drive the hundred yards to the Normandie exit, piece of cake, no sweat. Then he retraced his steps and moved alongside the Jag, Skinny cutting his gaze and then looking quickly away, ignoring the crazy cowboy wandering around on the Hollywood Freeway expecting a handout, selling flowers or something.
Gerald knocked on the window, the guy inside wearing a cloth vest and no shirt, goatee on a pointed chin, ignoring someone Five feet away rapping on the glass. One thing Gerald couldn’t stand, people ignoring him. He braced his hands on the roof and shoved, rocking the Jag on its springs, rattling Skinny around inside. The guy’s thin lips twisted in shock. Bony hands opened the console compartment and dug inside for what Gerald thought was a gun—every asshole on the road packed a cannon these days, Jesus, what were things coming to?—but what turned out to be a Vicks inhaler. The guy pumped with his thumb and sucked air. The window hummed partway down, the guy scared out of his wits but putting on a front. “Hey, yeah, whaddya want?” Tremor in the voice, effeminate tone. Likely a fag, Gerald thought.
Gerald bent close and grinned. “Listen, I need you to back up.”
The man was confused now, peering over his shoulder at a green Buick Century whose bumper was two yards from the Jag’s rear end.
“See, what I’m doing,” Gerald said, “I’m going to pull in front of you, drive down the shoulder to get off on Normandie.”
“Not enough room for you to do that,” the guy said. The window slid up. End of conversation.
Gerald banged on the window. The guy put both hands on the wheel and looked straight ahead. Gerald rocked the boat once more, the guy now turning his head to mouth silently, “Leave me alone.” Or maybe yelling it, the window cutting off the noise. Guy had no idea who he was fucking with. The woman in the Suburban stared openly, lips parted, all the little fuckers in the backseat with their noses pressed.
Gerald squinched his eyes closed. He couldn’t take this, a goddam fruit acting like hot shit, making an ass out of Gerald in front of the woman and kids. He pointed just-a-minute, left old Skinny to wonder what was happening next, retreated to the back end of his Bronco and opened the tail door. He rummaged around inside and finally slammed the gate while holding a tire iron with a ninety-degree bend. He returned to the Jag, the guy now seeing what was coming, his lips moving, throwing his forearms up to cover his face as Gerald reared back and smashed in the window. The glass sagged, cracks spider-webbing as Gerald raised the iron to strike again. The second blow did the trick, shards scattering inside the Jag, cutting the guy’s forearm, broken glass tinkling on leather seats.
Gerald reached in, bunched the vest up in his fist and yanked, the guy trying to fend Gerald off, smearing blood on the quilting at Gerald’s shoulders. As the man struggled and squawked like a chicken, Gerald said, “Hold still. You hold still and listen, I’ll break your fucking neck,”
The man froze. His eyes moved from side to side in their sockets.
“I asked you nice to back up,” Gerald said. “See what you did?”
The guy tried to pull away, clawing at Gerald’s bunched-up fist.
“Now, you’re going to back that fucking car up and out of my way, you hear me?” Gerald yelled. “You don’t, I’ll put something in your mouth you’re not going to like. Or you might like it, you little fuck, I’m not too sure about you. You listening to me?”
The guy nodded in terror. Blood streamed down his forearm. Gerald released his hold and stood back, the guy panicked out of his skull, jamming the Five-speed into reverse, the Jag leaping backward to slam the Buick’s front bumper, the Buick recoiling and banging into a station wagon. Guy inside the Buick putting his own window down to yell, “You dumb cocksucker,” all of which Gerald ignored.
Gerald now eye-measured the distance between the nose of the Jag and the car in front, and nodded in satisfaction. He walked around, climbed into the Bronco, and dropped the tire iron on the floorboard alongside two crumpled Silver Bullets. He backed up, cutting his wheels to the left, then whipped the steering wheel right as he inched by the nose of the Jag, Skinny watching as though hypnotized, the woman in the Suburban already in reverse, busting her ass to give Gerald room.
He reached the shoulder, twisting the wheel hard to the left, feeling the impact as the Bronco scraped the side rail, then straightened out and floored the accelerator, people in the traffic jam gaping at him as he transversed the hundred yards and lurched into the Normandie exit at fifty miles an hour. He bumped down the access, ran the red light, and squealed onto Normandie, adjusting the dial on the radio, switching the sound to the rear speakers, humming “I got friends in low places’’ along with Garth Brooks.
Gerald Hodge couldn’t stand people ignoring him. Damn near made him lose control.
On the twelve-block jaunt from the freeway to the corner of Fifth and Normandie, Gerald snorted his second palmful of Mexican Brown of the day, popped another top and drank half of his third Coors’ Light. Dead ahead were the high-rise office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard, the sun climbing above the horizon, the temperature a coolish mid-sixties. There was a fresh crack in the pavement between Sixth and Fifth but no other sign of earthquake damage, three- and four-story stucco apartments with palm trees growing along the curbs on both sides. He made a squealing left turn onto Fifth, fishtailed a quarter block before yanking the wheel hard left once more, and scooted into the covered parking beneath his own pale green apartment building. There was a lady in a cloth coat across the street, walking a giant white poodle, and as Gerald whipped into his numbered parking slot she gave him the evil eye. Gerald slid out of the Bronco, hefted what was left of the six-pack, and shot the woman the finger. She averted her gaze, interrupted the dog’s pissing against a palm trunk, and hustled the animal away.
Gerald rode the clanking elevator up to the third level, pausing with his finger on the button, which would halt the car on two, then changing his mind. The second floor was where the manager lived, and Gerald’s rent was eight days late. Old bastard had slipped a note in Gerald’s mailbox, in fact, which pissed him off no end. The three hundred dollars he’d earned banging the woman plus the tips poked in the waistband of his briefs by panting females last night would cover the rent, no sweat, but Gerald wanted to teach the apartment manager a lesson. Nobody dunned Gerald Hodge, no way. Old fart didn’t know who he was fucking with. Besides, if Gerald were to pony up the rent today he might not have enough left for heroin money. He exited the elevator, went down to stand outside his door, and fumbled in his pocket for his key. He froze.
The door was ajar. He snuffled through his nose, lifted his hat brim, and scratched his head. He’d never given anybody a key to his place, especially not broads. Earthquake? he thought, the vibrations knocking the latch from its slot. Could be. He nudged his way through the entry and stood in the foyer.
The TV was on in the living room, familiar theme music playing that Gerald had heard before but couldn’t quite put his finger on. He got down into a half crouch, placed the six-pack carefully on the floor, and, lifting one leg at a time, quietly removed his boots. Then he crept down a short en
try hall into the kitchen, ducked down behind the low counter, and slowly raised up to peer into the living room.
The drapes were drawn. Dancing light from the console TV illuminated a cloth divan and footstools, a cheap coffee table, one beanbag chair, photos hung on the wall of Gerald in costume: Boots, Badman, the Incredible Hump. A VCR with its red power light glowing sat on top of the TV. Bare feet with painted toenails were up on the coffee table, long legs bent at the knees.
Gerald rose. In the TV picture, Julia Roberts stood on a street corner wearing a leather mini and thigh-length boots, surrounded by women in curve-hugging pants or tiny skirts, all yelling and whistling at passing cars, Hey, baby, want a date, universal whore language. A gray sports car rounded the corner with Richard Gere in the driver’s seat, the window sliding down as he pulled over. Julia Roberts approached the car in a hip-slinging gait and—as two soft clicks sounded within Gerald’s living room—suddenly reversed her direction, retreating to join the other women once more, the car window rising to hide Richard Gere from view as the car backed around the corner and disappeared behind a building, hookers snapping their fingers and blowing kisses.
Two more clicks sounded. The sports car repeated its performance, coming forward with the window sliding down as Julia Roberts sashayed toward the curb.
Gerald went on into the living room and planted his rump on the arm of the sofa. “The one with her ass stuck out,” he said.
Click. The car backed up. Click. The image froze, a tall hooker on Julia Roberts’s left now center screen, bent from the waist, her hand extended toward the car, bottom thrust out in red skin-tight stretch pants and spike heels.
“Prime ass, huh?” a soft, cultured female voice said. “Choice ass.” The woman bent forward to place the VCR remote on the table.
“Best ass I ever laid eyes on,” Gerald said.