Casey started down the hill. Fast. Three huge steps, nearly running. Hollywood was close. A bus out of here had her name on it. By tomorrow this was all going to be just a fucked-up memory …
She took another step, but this one was smaller. And the next step was still smaller. Back to Seattle?—that’s where she was so hot to get back to? …
And instead of bolting down the hill, like she knew she would, she was standing still … What was back home? Her father who should be in jail? Her mother who would freak when she showed up again? Her mother’s shithead boyfriend who thought she was Satan? And even if someone—anyone—took her back, what was she gonna say to them?—I really proved how much I could take care of myself by running away and getting beaten and raped?
They wouldn’t understand. How could they?
Casey dropped onto the wet grass. Paul came down the hill and sat beside her.
They sat in silence. Children’s voices floated up from Wonderland. Casey stared ahead—stupidly she knew—as if a plane was going to fly by with a banner telling her what to do with her life.
“I feel the same way,” he said.
“You do?”
“Less than a year ago, I was living in a farm town outside of St. Paul.”
“What happened?”
“What happened was, in my tiny, little town—population, two thousand, one hundred and twenty to be exact—I did everything right. Everything. In my sophomore year I was president of the student council, I was the starting end on the football team, and by far the leading scorer on our basketball team, which made my parents, especially my dad, who was this big jock himself, super-fucking-proud. And one day I came home from basketball practice and saw everything I owned thrown out onto the front lawn. My dad had found my journal—I guess I hadn’t hidden it very well—and he was upstairs in my bedroom window throwing my all stuff out the window and screaming ‘Get off my lawn, you faggot! You’re not my son, you’re a goddamn faggot!’ And that was that. Nobody cared what I had done before that—I was just a goddamn faggot. Two days later, I was here.”
He leaned over and ran his hand down Casey’s hair. She shuddered a little.
“I like that.”
He did it again. And again.
She didn’t know where to go, or what to do, but she loved the feel of his hand on her hair.
Walking the Boulevard with Paul, Casey knew like she never knew anything else, that if she was going to survive here, she had to be strong. As strong as Paul.
“One way or another, you gotta make money,” Paul said. “There’s really only three things you can do. You can sit on the street begging tourist jerks for loose change—which is shit. I can tell you that from personal experience. But if you don’t look too much like you got the scabies, it works pretty good. Or—”
“What’s the scabies?”
“Disgusting little bugs. You don’t wanna know, trust me. Another thing is doing bump-and-runs.”
“Which is?”
“Find a tourist, run up, grab their pocketbooks, cameras, whatever you can, and bust away as fast as you can. It used to be pretty easy, but now they got these undercover cops all over the place, and even worse than that, lots of regular-looking tourists got guns on them now. So, way I see it, that’s not the greatest choice either. Or last thing, you can play the dating game, like I do.”
No way, Casey thought. Not now. Not ever.
“Hey, Saint Paul!” someone yelled down the Boulevard.
Casey turned around to see a girl in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings coming towards them. When she reached Paul, she planted a wet, sloppy kiss on his lips.
“Hey, Tulip. This is Casey—first girl in history you didn’t find first.”
“Who did?”
“Dennis,” Paul said.
“Pervert,” Tulip said. “You’re not still—”
“No. Thanks to Paul.”
“The Saint.”
“She ran away from him,” Paul said.
“Man, that’s great!” Tulip said. “I hope that asshole gets shot. Deserves it.”
“Tulip’s the best,” Paul told Casey. “You’re hungry, she’ll get you something to eat. You wanna call someone back home—she’s got a way to score you a calling card. You’re sick of sleeping under some freeway overpass, she’ll get you a squat. The best.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
Casey liked her. Casey had to pretend to be tough. But Tulip, even though she was pretty and not big at all—she was tough. Casey thought if she could just be like Tulip, that was all she would ever want.
They reached the end of the Boulevard and were surrounded by tourists at a huge, wild-looking theater. It might not mean anything to Paul and Tulip, but to Casey, this was the Chinese Theater! Footprint and handprints of the biggest stars in the world—Bruce Willis, Sean Connery, Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg. She snaked through mobs of tourists, where in two minutes, she heard ten different languages, and slipped her red high-tops in the same cement where Marilyn Monroe and Sofia Loren had carved out their tiny footprints in high heels.
Casey found Paul by the ticket booth, watching a line of people file through the doorway, handing their tickets to the ushers. “This is great,” she said.
“I guess.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Sure. When I first got here is was my favorite place in Hollywood. I came here every day for three weeks.”
“Every day?” Casey said.
“Yeah. But it wasn’t for the movies, believe me.”
“What was it?”
“Something better—where I was from, being queer was the biggest secret you could ever have. But my first day in LA, I came to a movie here and the ticket taker was this super cute guy who might as well have had gay written in big gold letters across his forehead. We started talking. His name was Ted. He had been in college and dropped out to come here to be an actor. He was incredibly smart. I mean, I did pretty good in school, but Ted was a thousand times smarter than I ever was. One thing follows another, I hang out for one show, and then another one. We just connected. And he had this deal worked out with the projectionist, who was this fat, lazy fuck, who would start the movies and then go to a bar on Orange, and pay Ted ten bucks to hang out in the booth and page him if the film broke or something. The booth was small and hot, but it had this old yellow couch which would get covered with the reflection of the movies off the booth’s glass. Pretty cool. That first day me and Ted hit the yellow couch and completely went at it. And then we did it every day.”
“Really?”
“Man, it was intense. I never knew anything like that before. He had an apartment up on Franklin which we sometimes went to even after doing it down here. But he shared it with a USC film student, who was this stone cold bitch who treated me like I was a piece of shit he stepped in. On top of that, Ted was always on the phone with his parents back in Connecticut who never stopped harassing him. And like a month after we hooked up, he just moves to Westwood, starts classes at UCLA, and biggest joke of all, decides he’s not really gay. Could’ve fooled me. I go out to Westwood to find him. Spent two whole days looking for him there. And when I finally found him, he’s got some girl hanging all over him. I run up to him. He introduces me to her—Stacy, like we’re old friends from back home—not the guy he spent the last three weeks fucking day and night. He says he and Stacy have a playwriting class, and gotta go. Part of me says follow him, follow him, you asshole … . But I just watched him go. I walked all the way home from Westwood. That night was the first time I fucked for money.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah … Sorta. Everyone else walks by the Chinese and looks at the footprints. I think about having my heart broken. ’Course I also think about that yellow couch and even with all the shit, it was still the greatest time with the greatest guy.”
He smiled, shrugged. Along with Tulip, they walked away from the Chinese, heading back to where they started. Casey understood that this was
a big part of life on the street—up one side of the Boulevard to La Brea, cross over and walk the other side back to Western. And when you’re finished, do it all over again. There were places to stop and kids to see, but it was all an endless loop. Hurrying straight towards them was a tall boy Casey’s age with thick, long blonde hair. With him was a Hispanic girl, a little older.
“Tulip, Tulip, pretty, pretty Tulip,” the boy said, speaking a mile a minute.
“No way,” Tulip said.
“Saint Paul, Saint Paul. Saint Paul!” the kid continued, never slowing. “Man, am I happy to see you!”
“No, man, I don’t have any money,” Paul said.
“What do you do with it? I see you out there all the time.”
“Yeah. A bunch of millionaires for dates.”
“Something’s wrong then, buddy.”
“No shit, Rancher.”
“No, I mean it—look at it, if you’re out there sucking cock for all those jerks, and you’re still crashing at that fucked construction site, the numbers don’t add up, do they now? Do they—”
“Ranch’—”
“They don’t. No way! But listen, I got something. We got something. Something big! Mary—she’s got this modeling gig tomorrow and we need a few bucks so she can get some makeup and shit.”
“That true?” Paul asked.
“Yeah,” Mary said. “It’s for a magazine. This guy’s gonna take a bunch of pictures of me. He’s got a studio over on Gower.”
“If this thing goes,” Rancher said, “they told us it’s gonna lead to real acting gigs for the same people.”
“They said that?”
“That’s the way it works, man. You know that.”
“If you’re, like, unbelievable lucky,” Tulip said.
“It ain’t luck, guys. Mary’s got the looks. Anyone can see that.”
Casey turned to her, and he was right. She had amber eyes, high cheekbones, and very long black hair. She was beautiful. As beautiful as any of the girls you saw in magazines.
“Just one good break and you’re on your way—one. It’s all it takes,” Mary said. She leaned into Paul and whispered loud enough for the rest to hear, “Some day, all you guys are gonna see me putting my hands into the cement at the Chinese.”
“No one wants it more than me,” Paul said.
“So whaddya say, Saint Paul, a few bucks for Mar’?” Rancher said.
“Not for rock.”
“No way. Not this time.”
Paul looked over at Mary.
“Makeup,” she said. “That’s all. Promise.”
Paul reached into his pocket, pulled out a couple of crinkled one-dollar bills and gave them to Mary. She threw her arms around him and said, “You’re the greatest!”
“Greatest idiot.”
As they hurried off, Mary sipped her arms around Rancher’s waist. There wasn’t a feather’s distance between them.
“Our very own Boulevard Romeo and Juliet,” Paul said. “One more girl who came here thinking she’s gonna be a movie star. Look around—you see any stars here?”
“On the sidewalk,” Tulip said.
“The only place.”
“But she’s so pretty, she could be,” Casey said.
“Right … star of the Boulevard crackheads,” Paul said.
Down the block, Rancher stopped, gently pushed Mary against a streetlight and they kissed. A long, sweet kiss, like they were they only ones on the street. Maybe they were crackheads, Casey thought, but at least they had each other, and that was something.
With his flannel shirt tied around his waist, bare-chested and defying the cold, Paul sat on a concrete trash can on Santa Monica, showing his stuff to an endless line of cars that moved at a mile an hour, as the drivers slowed to check him and the other boys out. On a low wall in front of the 7-11, across the sidewalk from Paul, Casey was having a Marlboro with the triplets, who were fooling around with their bikes. The three of them had come down from Winnipeg together and Casey thought nobody must be seriously looking for them—how hard could it be to find three identical fifteen-year-old hustlers? Tracy, the triplet who had been supplying Casey with the smokes all night, picked up his bike and offered it to her.
“The frame’s what makes it happen. Try it.”
Casey lifted it up easily.
“Weighs like nothing, right?” Tracy said.
“It better, for eight hundred and fifty,” his brother Timmy, said. He was nice, with a broad, toothy smile. Casey liked hanging out with him—all of them.
He leapt onto his bike and raced off, disappearing down Santa Monica, then up a side street. Casey heard a strange combination of laughter and retching behind her. She turned and saw a pack of six or seven skinhead kids, all wearing torn, studded leather jackets covered with weird, white handwriting. She couldn’t make out most of the words, but saw enough fucks and anarchy-A’s in circles to get the idea. The two oldest, rough-looking kids, were laughing hard at the youngest of the gang, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, as he leaned over the curb and was throwing up into the street. Beside him, rubbing him on the back was a girl who wasn’t a skinhead but running with them. One of the older skinheads, with a fat ring through his nose, held a nearly empty quart of Colt, leaned over the kid and the girl, taunting them.
“Can’t take it, huh, baby?”
“I can take it,” the little kid said in a voice that had yet to crack. “I can take it—”
And he threw up again. The pack took off down the street, but the girl wrapped her arm around his shoulder and stayed next to him.
“I’m sorry, June Bug,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. Just get the shit outta your body and you’ll be okay.”
Casey looked from the skinheads to Terry, another of the triplets.
“Poor kid,” she said.
“Yeah?” Terry said, “you won’t be saying that in a year, when he has a knife shoved up against your throat.”
Casey suddenly jumped back. Scared. Timmy had silently flown back behind Casey and pulled to a tight stop behind her—so tight his handlebars lightly bumped into her ass.
“He got ya,” Terry laughed.
He did. But then, she leaped backwards—up onto his handlebars. Timmy didn’t seem to mind, and rolled her back and forth. Casey liked that.
“Nice jump,” Timmy said.
“Gymnastics classes—four years.”
“Really?” Paul called over.
“Really and truly. I wanted to be a cheerleader. Can you believe it? Hey, I could’ve done it for your games. We could’ve gone out.”
“Right.”
“You didn’t go after cheerleaders? Not once?”
“Once.”
“See.”
“I was faking. Whole thing was a joke.”
“You were probably a good faker though?”
“Wanna see?” Paul said with a smile.
“Yeah.”
Casey waved for him to come over. Every minute he was with her was a great minute—she may have been grimy, cold, and living on the street—but Paul somehow made it better. He hopped off the trash can heading towards her—but a Camry pulled to a stop. Paul looked at Casey, then ran over to the car.
The little skinhead made it to his feet, and along with the girl, scrambled after the rest of their gang. Timmy leaned forward on his bike to where his face was beside Casey’s.
“Where to, madam?”
“Where to? … Hollywood!”
14
The street whipped past Casey. Perched on Timmy’s handlebars, she stretched her arms out in front of her, like she was reaching for something, and watched the Boulevard fly by—the Chinese Theater with its tall spires bathed in red light; the El Capitan with families pouring out after a show; the hot lights of L. Ron Hubbard’s place, its doors wide open to the cold; street kids grinding their skateboards on the curb in front of Joey’s; an endless row of shiny Harleys parked outside a bar next to the Egyptian Theater;
a linebacker-sized guy painted entirely in silver—his clothes, a top hat, face, everything—standing dead-still as tourists dropped money into a silver box by his feet; a tattoo parlor at Vine with a bunch of kids barely in their teens staring in the window; a guy with movie star-looks playing a piano on wheels, and miles and miles of blue, red, pink, and purple neon. Busses were chugging; low-riders cruising; cars honking; drunk kids leaning out a jeep yelling; and a little kid, maybe ten or eleven, in a pure white suit, playing the most beautiful song on a trumpet she had ever heard. Racing beside Casey and Timmy were the other two triplets. They took turns taking the lead, and whenever Timmy fell behind, Casey called out to him speed to back into first place, which he always did. She felt the wind blowing back her hair, her eyes were sweetly moist from the cool air rushing by, and a smile came to her face. Even the Boulevard itself was happening—the street had glass buried in it, so it literally glittered. This was the Hollywood she came for—and if the ride never ended, that would be okay with her.
15
Later, at a much slower speed, Casey and the triplets were back riding down Santa Monica Boulevard, heading for the 7-11. She had tired Timmy out, and now was sitting on Tracy’s handle bars. For once, Hollywood was fine with her. More than fine—no one telling you to go to sleep, to go home—do anything you didn’t want to do. Tracy was happy for the passenger and led the way with Casey leaning forward like a masthead. As she silently blew down the road, lit by orange-tinted streetlight lights, she saw her shadow passing like a flying ghost over one hustler after another. When they breezed by Carl’s Jr. at the corner of La Brea, Casey saw Paul.
“Hey. Stop.”
“You bet,” Tracy said. “I love this place.”
Casey thought it was pretty much like the rest—and then she saw it wasn’t. She jumped off and went over to Paul, who was surrounded by half a dozen girls—all cute—the oldest of whom couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Paul took a smoke from a girl who looked fourteen and was wearing a super-tight yellow miniskirt. Beside her was a girl a year or two younger and the cutest of all, wearing tiny shorts, a skimpy black bra and black leather boots which rose past her knees to the middle of her thighs.
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