by Joe Ide
He took Anaheim to the freeway, trying to keep to the speed limit. It was a short but depressing drive, the city fathers and mothers having no use for trees or green strips. He went past Pronto Auto Body, where he’d had a dent fixed with filler so cheap you could dig it out with your fingernail, and Bed Time Furniture, where they sold reconditioned mattresses as new, and the Clean King coin laundry, where you had to wait for a machine on Saturdays, and the strip mall where Looney Hopkins was shot and the empty lot where Luis Delgado was shot and the barbershop where Isaiah had his hair cut and old men played dominoes and Tristar Liquor Mart, where the cash register was behind bulletproof glass and the clerk had an assault rifle.
The Intercontinental Hotel was in Century City, a moneyed enclave of shopping, office buildings, and luxury condos right down the road from Beverly Hills. The hotel’s Grand Salon was teeming with suits, the din so loud you couldn’t pick out an individual voice. Isaiah made his way through the crowd, everybody holding a drink, talking over the noise or waiting for their turn to speak like somebody’d said On your mark. Nobody noticed him, but he was embarrassed anyway. If he hadn’t been so nervous he’d have thought to wear something better than jeans and Timberlands. He posted up near the bar and looked for Sarita, hoping he wasn’t too late or too early or on the wrong side of the room or in the wrong place altogether.
A tall black man in a sharp navy blue suit and caramel-colored shoes came toward him. Thirties, fit, condescending eyes and so well groomed he could have been airbrushed. “Excuse me,” he said, “but you don’t belong here, now do you?” He had the confidence of success, charm just short of pretentious and a wide Billy Dee Williams smile. “You thought you’d wander in here off the street and help yourself to champagne and jumbo prawns and no one would call you out?”
Isaiah considered telling him he was waiting for Sarita but didn’t. This was one of those guys that screamed at his assistant, wore handmade shirts and only drank French wine. “I haven’t had anything to eat or drink,” Isaiah said, “and how do you know I don’t belong here?”
“I know everyone that was invited to Arthur’s birthday party and that didn’t include you,” the man said. He straightened his already straight tie, leaned in, his voice confidential but the volume the same. “Can I give you a piece of advice?” he said. “If you’re going to pretend to be something you’re not, the least you could do is dress the part.”
“You mean like your watch?” Isaiah said.
“What? What are you talking about?” the man said.
Isaiah had investigated employee theft at the Jewelry Bazaar and learned to tell the difference between platinum and rhodium plating, diamonds and cubic zirconia, 18K gold and polished 70/30 anodes, and real versus counterfeit watches. “Your watch is pretending to be a Rolex,” he said.
“You mean it’s counterfeit?” the man said. “That’s ridiculous.” He looked at the fat gold disk like it was turning into a frog.
“Check out the second hand,” Isaiah said. “It’s ticking. On a real Yacht-Master, it sweeps, and the date should be magnified two and a half times and yours is closer to two. Can I give you a piece of advice? If you’re supposed to be a big-time attorney? Buy yourself a real watch.”
They looked at each other, the Billy Dee smile pulled tight as a garrote.
“Leave now or I’m calling security,” the man said.
A faint scent of citrus and cypress trees arrived before she did. Sarita was making her way through the crowd. She looked like a champion Thoroughbred coming through a herd of plow horses even in her dark suit and her hair pulled back. “Isaiah?” she said. She gave him a big hug and held on. “It’s so good to see you!” She leaned away but kept her hands on his shoulders. “My God, you’re the spitting image of Marcus.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You look great, Sarita.”
“Oh, have you two met?” she said. “Isaiah Quintabe, this is my colleague, Kevin Marshall.”
“How do you do,” Kevin said, like he was about to draw his weapon.
“I’m doing just fine,” Isaiah said.
“Will you excuse us, Kevin?” Sarita said. “Isaiah and I need to talk.”
“Sure,” Kevin said. He huffed dismissively and walked away.
“What was that all about?” Sarita said.
“It was nothing.”
“I’m sorry about this, but I had to be here. One of the partners is having a birthday. Let’s go someplace and talk.”
They went outside and walked south on the Avenue of the Stars, a wide clean street with a strip of manicured drought-resistant plants running down the middle and a water feature that sparkled like bobbled ice cubes. They apologized to each other for not staying in touch and reminisced about Marcus and the old apartment and the neighborhood and all the people they had in common. Sarita had read about Isaiah’s exploits. Since the article had come out about him in The Scene, others had appeared in Vibe and the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Isaiah wouldn’t do interviews, but his clients were eager to talk about the quiet, unassuming young man who took on their problems when nobody else cared and got paid with live chickens and blueberry muffins.
“Marcus would have been so proud and happy for you,” she said. “He was the only person I ever met who could be unabashedly joyful. God, I miss him.”
“Me too,” Isaiah said, whispering so he wouldn’t choke up.
They walked past a high-rise looming like a sentry, wearing its hundreds of reflective windows like shields. Beyond that, there was nothing on either side of the street except tall hedges fronting tall iron fences, the tops of the bars bent outward, the rooftops of places you couldn’t afford peeking over the top.
“When Marcus died I was devastated,” Sarita said. “Every place I went I waited for him to stop messing around and show himself. I was crying all the time, and when I wasn’t doing that I was sleeping. But then law school started, and I couldn’t afford to drop out. It was a struggle but a good thing too. Studying kept me from throwing myself under a bus.”
Isaiah was content to let her talk; it was a good excuse to look at her. She was as beautiful as ever, but the shining, unstoppable enthusiasm he remembered was gone, and in its place was a tension, a guardedness, like, I’m in the real world now and they don’t mess around.
She’d grown up near MacArthur Park, on the other side of Cambodia Town, a hood like any other. She worked two jobs while she made the dean’s list at Long Beach State. Then she went to Stanford Law and did a semester abroad before she graduated with honors. She was hired immediately by a small firm in San Francisco. It was a good place to get started, but after a couple of years she was ready to paint on a bigger canvas. When she got an offer to join the two hundred and twenty-one lawyers at Edgars, Mehlman, Cross and Severeid in LA for almost double the money, she jumped at it. She’d only been there a year, but it felt like forever. The workload was crushing, sixty–seventy hours a week; a relentless grind of client meetings, reading the fine print, redlining contracts, taking depositions, court appearances, filling out process documents, making a thousand phone calls and answering a thousand emails with nothing to look forward to except more of the same. Seven years minimum to be a partner. Five if you were on the fast track.
“I’m a cog in a machine that cares nothing about me except my billable hours,” she said.
They crossed over an overpass, Olympic Boulevard, a traffic jam even at this hour, brake lights extending into the horizon.
“What are you going to do?” Isaiah said.
“Stay for a while, get some experience, have something high-profile on my LinkedIn page, and then—I don’t know. Work for a nonprofit, be a prosecutor. Do something meaningful.” Isaiah wondered when she was going to talk about whatever she came to talk about. All this chatter was a prelude to something but that was okay. If she wanted him to do something that was fine with him.
The Avenue of the Stars ended at Pico Boulevard, the Hillcrest Country Club across the stree
t, Fox Studios around the corner. They stopped there, Sarita turning to him, nervous. “There’s something else,” she said. “It’s about my sister.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Isaiah said.
“Half sister. Same father, different mothers. Janine lives in Vegas. She’s a great kid and I love her to death, but she’s a gambling addict, always getting herself into one situation or another. I kept loaning her money until I realized I was feeding her habit and cut her off. My dad did too. Both of us were waiting for her to hit rock bottom and get some help. Well, be careful what you wish for. She’s hit rock bottom, and she definitely needs help. Her and that idiot boyfriend of hers.”
“What can I do?” Isaiah said, eager to find out so he could go do it, come back and tell her. Sarita’s chin fell, her eyes closing in despair. Isaiah wanted to hug her but didn’t know if he should.
“Oh, Isaiah,” she said, “Janine is in so much trouble.”
“What did you say?” Janine said.
“I said Bears and Packers,” Benny called out from the shower. He’d been in there for twenty minutes scrubbing himself with vinegar and baking soda to get the garbage smell off. “We take the dog and the points for two bucks. If we push it’s only five percent juice if we get it down with Shelton.”
“We’re off the boards with Shelton,” Janine said. She picked up Benny’s underwear with two fingers, put it in the wastebasket, and put the wastebasket outside.
“What we do is we spread the bets around,” Benny said. “I got a tip from Nate, the handicapper, the guy that bets at Caesars? The seventh at Belmont. We put down two—no, make it three bucks, we key the six horse and wheel the rest for second. Angelo’s laying down big.”
“Isn’t Nate the guy who told you Gary’s Gone Girl was a sure thing at the Santa Anita Cup?”
“The horse stumbled out of the gate, happens all the time.”
“The horse stumbled out of the gate because it broke its leg before the fucking race,” Janine said. “And where do we get these bucks you’re talking about?”
Benny came out of the bathroom drying his hair and smelling a little like salad dressing. “Didn’t you get a paycheck?”
“I took an advance from Sal the last time I played there.”
“You got nothing?”
“I owed him more than my check. He said he’d give me a hundred if I let him look at my junk.”
“A hundred to let him look?”
“He’s such a perv. He said he wanted to find out if a Chinese vagina really went sideways.”
“You should have done it,” Benny said.
“I did,” Janine said.
Benny stopped short, nodding, trying to be adult about it. “Sure, sure, okay, we need the money.”
Janine wondered if Benny really believed she’d show her junk to Sal and watched him rummage around for some boxers he’d only worn two or three times. She loved how he looked. The child’s trusting brown eyes and the sweet doofy face. The haircut needed work. Too Jesus Christ-ey but his body more than made up for it, his muscles smooth and rounded like a suit of armor for a skinny guy with a big penis.
Benny got the milk out of the midget fridge and drank it straight from the carton. “I think I swallowed a rat turd. What about your dad?”
“No chance,” Janine said, reminding herself not to drink milk or kiss Benny. “He won’t even speak to me until I go back to GA and get a sponsor.”
They’d met at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in the Sunday-school room at All Saints Methodist Church. Between the two of them they knew most of the people there. Benny said all they needed was a deck of cards and they could play Hold ’Em. That made her laugh. They sat at the back and made dollar bets on whether the speaker would say I hit rock bottom, I ruined my life, or I destroyed my family. Benny won two out of three. After the meeting they went to the Venetian and played a little, just messing around, wanting to see if the other just gambled too much or had a full-on jones. It takes a junkie to know a junkie. When they hit a blackjack on the same hand they knew it was destiny. They had sex in Janine’s VW bus and almost got married at the Golden Moments Wedding Chapel, but the ceremony cost a hundred and twenty-nine dollars and they needed the money to gamble.
“Leo’s right,” Janine said. “We’re in a slump. We’re not gonna make the vig by the weekend. We need to get the money some other way.”
“See, that’s a fucked-up attitude,” Benny said. “That’s why we’ve been losing. You think we’re gonna lose so we do.”
“Check yourself, dude. You lost most of the money.”
“Remember at Bally’s, I was playing that progressive machine over by the sports book? I was up three bills until you came along and jinxed me with that story about crapping out five times. I lost the three bills and three more after that.”
“Fuck you, Benny. You just don’t know when to quit.”
“Oh, and you do?”
They were arguing more lately, the stress of owing Leo getting to them. The squalor didn’t help. When her dad threw her out, and she moved into the motel room, Benny was happy about it but she was secretly horrified. The room looked more like a recycling station than a place to live, the smell of weed and dirty laundry part of the decor, the bathroom like it was the only one in the men’s dorm.
Benny was searching for his pants now, pawing through the rubble of their lifestyle, kicking shoes out of the way. “Where’s my fucking pants?” he said. “They were right fucking here!”
Janine could sense his edges unraveling, threads of his psyche coming loose. A night in the landfill must have been horrible and humiliating. The slope was too steep to climb so he had to hike out. She imagined him clomping over and down the shifting, crunching, slippery peaks of trash and garbage, his bare feet plunging into rotting chicken bones, fish heads, coffee grounds, and little blue bags full of dog shit. He said the smell was so strong, he puked over and over again. By the time he got to the access road the sun was coming up. Leo had taken his phone away so he had to borrow one from a backhoe driver.
“You should camp somewhere else, buddy,” the driver said. “You could die out there.”
“Camping?” Benny said, standing there, slop dripping off him. “You think I was camping?”
Benny found his pants hanging on a doorknob. “Who do we know with money?” he said. He was still wet from the shower and couldn’t yank them on, hopping around like he was in a potato sack race.
“We know a lot of people with money,” Janine said, “but none of them are gonna give us a loan.”
“There’s gotta be somebody!” Benny said. His voice was gravelly and strangled, his pants puddled around his ankles, the child’s eyes spilling tears. Janine looked away. Nobody wants an audience when they’re having a breakdown.
“What about your dad?” Benny said.
“You already asked me that. He won’t loan me money, Benny. We talked about this a hundred times.”
“What do we owe Leo now? Three weeks’ vig?”
“Four.”
“That’s only what, fourteen hundred? Your dad’s rich. What does he care?”
“Then you ask him, Benny. You have such a great relationship.”
Her dad hated Benny but he would have hated anyone who wasn’t a nice Chinese boy with a backpack, a bad haircut, and a scholarship in chemistry. The gambling made him crazy. He told her he’d played high-stakes mah jong when he was younger and had screwed up his life. How exactly he didn’t say. But the shit really hit the roulette wheel when she told him she was dropping out of college to be a DJ. She thought he would have taken it better if she’d said she wanted to be a cabdriver or a cowboy.
Benny got the vodka out of the cupboard. He unscrewed the cap and took a long glug, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Janine looked at him.
“I’m getting wasted, okay?” he said. “I fucking deserve it.”
“Yeah, I guess you do,” she said softly.
Benny swatted the motor
cycle magazines off the couch and sat down, the cushions so dirty the lines on the plaid were blurred. “I’m so fucked up,” he said, crying now. “I’m sorry, Janine. I’m sorry I can’t do better.”
She sat down beside him and put her arm around him, her head touching his. “It’s all right, Benny. You’re having a bad run, that’s all. Everybody does.”
Benny took another long glug, not bothering to wipe off his mouth, his lips loose and glistening. “It’s gotta be your dad. There’s nobody else.”
“Dad’s not an option, okay?” She got up and hugged herself, more afraid than angry, the man she loved falling apart. “Seriously, Benny, lay off.”
Benny sat there, staring like the blackness of the landfill was staring back at him. He guzzled the rest of the vodka and dropped the bottle on the floor. “I’m going to the store,” he said. “Want something?”
“No, I’m good,” Janine said, pretending to do something with her phone.
Benny got up and went to the door. “Leo said you’re next.”
“Next? Next for what?”
“The landfill. Sure you don’t want something?”
Chapter Three
Whale Fat
They walked back to the hotel, Sarita telling him about Janine, the story pouring out of her. It never occurred to him that her last name, Van, was Chinese.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Sarita said.
“Hard to believe,” Isaiah said. He never ceased to be amazed at the messes people got themselves into. This one was in his top ten. “Do you want me to go to Vegas? Check it out?”