Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  No answer.

  I waited a few minutes, then texted her again: "Hello?"

  A few more minutes went by. Then she replied: "I'll be right out."

  So now I was sitting in my car, in the fucking parking lot of some bar, waiting for her. It was the middle of the night. Why the fuck wasn't she ready? What was she doing in there? No courtesy. I was getting impatient. I was gonna tell her that next time she asks me to pick her up, she better be ready, or she can take the bus. I'm not gonna drive all over the place in the middle of the night and then sit in the car, waiting for her for half an hour. That's so inconsiderate!

  There was a dumpster in the back of the parking lot, behind the bar. It was dark, but one of the street lights cast enough light on the dumpster, that I could see two figures standing in front of it.

  What were they doing? Smoke break? Drug deal?

  I squinted a little to try to see better. Every now and then the lights of a passing car illuminated the scene.

  MOTHER. FUCKER!!! It was Jasmine, making out with some other girl! That must have been the new girl. They were making out by the dumpster, with long passionate kisses, while feeling each other up. Jasmine had her hand down the other girl's pants.

  I just watched for a few minutes. Jasmine was in no rush to leave. She was busy gettin' busy.

  I texted her again: "What the fuck is taking so long?"

  After a few second delay, I saw her pull her phone out and text me back: "I'll be right out. Just using the bathroom."

  What a lying piece of shit. I turned on the car and drove home.

  Another half hour later, I wasn't quite home yet, I got another text from her: "Where r u?"

  I texted back: "I'm right outside."

  "I don't c u. Where?" she replied.

  "In the back. By the dumpster. U fucking cunt."

  She tried to call me, but I didn't answer. She kept ringing my phone over and over, but I put it on silent.

  Once I got home, I took a long bath for an hour or two and tried to think about nothing. Then I checked my phone again, before turning off the lights to go to sleep.

  She had tried to call me at least a dozen times. She left me a bunch of text messages and voice mails: "Please come get me! I'm so sorry! I love you! I was drunk! You can't leave me here at the beach! All the bars are closing! I have no where to go! DON'T LEAVE ME HERE AT THE FUCKING BEACH!"

  I didn't care. Let her sleep at her new girlfriend's house.

  The next morning I checked her Facebook page. She had posted a bunch of passive aggressive memes and oneliners directed at me, like: "That feeling when the one person you trusted to always have your back let's you down."

  And: "What kind of a person says they'll pick you up and then leaves you stranded at the beach all night?"

  She was playing the victim. Like I was the one being mean to her for no reason at all.

  Jasmine spent the night sleeping on a bench at the beach. She had tried to text a bunch of her so-called friends, but no one bothered to go get her. The next day, Snickers, the Justin-Bieber-looking dyke who slept with everyone in jail, including Veronica, picked up Jasmine and took her home. They had also been dating in the past.

  I found out later that Snickers promised to take care of Jasmine, then fed her heroin, got her hooked again, and then pimped her out on Backpage, to pay for her own drug habit. Ahh, friendship among addicts. So beautiful and heart warming.

  A few days later, Anita called me from jail. I had met her when she was Veronica's roommate. Anita, Veronica and I were supposed to have a threeway relationship, but it never happened. I ended up having sex with Anita alone last year, after I found out that Veronica had cheated on me with Anita the night before.

  I hadn't heard from Anita in a few months. Like all of them, she had been in and out of jail a few times since I last saw her.

  She said: "I wanna be clean. I really do! I'm supposed to go live with my grandma when I get out, but I really don't want to. Can I come live with you? I think we would be good for each other. You deserve a good, honest woman like me. Someone mature who appreciates you. And you'll keep me sober. And we'll have so much fun together!"

  I was getting more and more jaded. I used to believe these lines not too long ago. But not anymore. I was becoming more cynical by the day. I believed nothing any drug addicted girl told me at this point. Regardless of whether any of these girls actually meant any of the stuff they said, the end result was always the same. I finally understood the game, and learned how to play it. They were gonna use me, and I was gonna use them.

  Anita was very good looking. She had been a legit catalog model in the past. I picked her up at her grandma's house. But her grandma wasn't home. Anita packed her stuff, and showed me an old photo album with pictures of her, when she was a model. She looked great now, but she was absolutely gorgeous in those professional photos. And in less than an hour or so, I was gonna get to fuck her. Who cared about anything else at this point? Not me.

  On the way home she told me she just needed to stop by her friend's house, to get some papers for her food stamps.

  So we drove through some shady neighborhood and stopped at a crappy old house. She ran inside for a few minutes, came out, and we were on our merry way again.

  Then she said she had to make another stop. This time to pick up her purse and her driver's license. She had left it with someone, before she got arrested, she said. When she came out, there was no purse. She said someone else had it now.

  Then we finally got home. We had sex. It was just as good as I remembered it. She used to be a gymnast, so she could pull her legs all the way back, until her knees were next to her ears and her feet were crossed behind her head. She looked like a pretzel. A very sexy, very naked pretzel.

  We tried to watch a movie in the living room afterwards. She went to the bathroom for a few minutes. When she came back out, her eyes were glazed over, and her face was red. She was sweating. That's when I realized that she had bought drugs at those two stops.

  "You're high, aren't you?" I asked. "You just did drugs in the bathroom. All that stuff about wanting to be sober was just bullshit. You're not even out of jail for 48 hours, and you're already high again."

  "No, I swear! I'm not high! I'm just tired! I haven't slept much lately." Then her eyes closed. She was nodding out on my couch. I just let her sleep in the living room and went to bed.

  The next day her grandmother called Anita's cell phone over and over. Turns out that Anita had run away, and I helped her do it. She was supposed to live with her grandmother in Cape Coral, away from her drug connections on the other side of town, in Fort Myers. But as soon as her grandmother went to work the next day, Anita escaped. And I was her unwitting escape car.

  Anita just stayed with me. She slept in my bed, as if she was my girlfriend, and we had sex every day. During the day we did stuff together, like go out to eat or go shopping. Sometimes together, and sometimes she ran errands on her own.

  She applied for a job at a new wine tasting restaurant that had just opened up a few days earlier, just down the street from the Coconut Point Mall. She said it would be awesome if she could get a job as a waitress there, because it was so close from my condo, she could walk to work every day if she wanted to.

  A few days later, Jasmine texted me: "I know u hate me. I'm really sorry I did that to u. I want to apologize. Can I make it up to u? I want to come back to u. Please? I hate it here at Snickers. She makes me go on dates on Backpage."

  I texted her back: "Sorry, I've moved on. Anita is living with me now."

  "That fucking bitch!" Jasmine replied. "All my stuff is still at your house! Don't let that bitch touch my stuff! I'm gonna come by right now to get my things. I just want my stuff, then I'm gone. Keep that ho away from me or I'll kick her ass."

  I told Anita about Jasmine's text and warned her that she was about to come over.

  "Yeah we'll see who kicks who's ass," Anita replied with an ominous tone in her voice.


  The first time I met Anita last year at Veronica's apartment, Anita had been walking around naked in front of me, pretending she couldn't find anything to wear.

  Now she was doing exactly the same thing again. She stripped her panties and bra off, and was completely naked. Then she looked at clothes in her drawer, pulling shirts out, holding them up in front of the mirror, and putting them away again.

  "You should put something on," I said. "Jasmine will be here any minute."

  "It's ok," Anita said casually. "We've all seen each other naked in jail. There's no privacy in there."

  The door bell rang. Jasmine was here. I opened the door. She gave me a quick dirty glance and then looked away. "Excuse me," she said in a snippy tone and walked right past me, towards my bedroom.

  Anita was standing next to my bed, naked and gorgeous.

  "Ohh hiiii!" she said, when she saw Jasmine walk into the room. She was super fake friendly.

  "Heyyyy gurl!" Jasmine replied, also super fake friendly. "Haven't seen you in a while. How are you?"

  They were acting like they were two old girlfriends who ran into each other at the mall.

  "Doing great!" Anita replied, "Really great!" while casually grabbing a piece of clothing from the bench at the foot of my bed, and then dropping it again. She was flaunting her nudity. Rubbing it in Jasmine's face. The whole thing was one giant fuck you. As if to say: "Sorry, honey, you've been replaced. He likes my pussy better than yours."

  I had followed Jasmine. I was standing behind her, when she went into my bedroom. She walked past naked Anita as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and grabbed her clothes out of my closet.

  With her hands full, she walked back out of the bedroom. I was still standing in the doorway, watching.

  "Excuse me," Jasmine said without making eye contact, and shoved me to the side to get through the door. She was fuming under all that fake friendliness.

  She walked out and slammed the front door behind her. She was mad!

  "Ohhh that was cold," I said.

  Anita started to laugh: "What do you mean?"

  "That whole thing with you standing there naked. Ouch!"

  Anita kept laughing. She was proud of herself: "Now Jasmine is gonna keep thinking about you fucking me."

  Anita stayed with me for another week or two. She kept nodding out more and more often. Always with those glazed eyes and sweating all over my couch, passing out for 10 to 12 hours at a time. I wasn't giving her any money. And she didn't have a job. So where the hell was she getting all these drugs?

  I finally realized that whenever she claimed to be visiting her grandma for a few hours during a weekday, when I knew that her grandmother was at work, she was really meeting up with dope boys and fucking them for drugs.

  The next time I dropped her off at her grandma's house, I left her there. She texted me a few hours later: "Come get me."

  "No, I'm good. Stay there. I know u've been fucking other guys behind my back. I'm not looking for a fuckbuddy. I'm looking for a real relationship."

  She replied with the usual. That she loved me and yada yada yada. But I just ignored it.

  THE ANGRY OLD SNIPER

  "Men mature until they're 14. Then they just continue to grow."

  Inge Meysel

  "Love is still the best excuse for acting stupid."

  Günter Grass

  Each of the girls I had been seeing lately had been asking me for a copy of the book. Even girls I didn't know were contacting me on Facebook or calling me out of the blue, asking me about the book.

  They all loved it, except Veronica and Lucy. Lucy had been randomly texting me every now and then, telling me that she hated me for making her look bad in the book: "How could you write that stuff about me? I look like a monster!"

  "All I did was write down exactly what happened. And you look bad because the shit you do to people is bad." I replied.

  Nicole texted me every now and then as well. Sometimes because she wanted to come over and get some sleep, and sometimes just to say hi. Every day I got calls from several different beautiful girls, who all wanted me to pick them up, and offered me their pussy. Life could be worse. And yet, I wasn't happy.

  One day I got a random call from some old dude. He said his name was Albert. He sounded like a senior citizen. He told me that I didn't know him, but we had a common friend: Lucy.

  Oh. Great.

  Albert said he read my book and loved it. Especially the part about Lucy. And Nicole. He said he fucked both of them regularly. I really didn't want to hear that. But I didn't want him to know that.

  He was obviously one of those creepy "hobbyists." That's what guys call themselves, who like to go fuck prostitutes. Most of them are older. Baby Boomers. And they're married. But they're tired of their old wives, so they cheat on them. Regularly. They call it a hobby. They even have "hobbyist" websites where they compare stories and statistics about the young girls they fuck, as if the girls were baseball players or race horses. I had found one of these websites by accident, when I was looking for Alice a few years ago.

  That was back in New York. But obviously they had hobbyist websites here in Florida, too. The creeps on these websites try to write down their experiences with a girl, as if it was something out of Fifty Shades of Grey. They tried to make their stories sound like erotica. With lots of gory details. But it was really just the sad ramblings of creepy old guys.

  And now one of these creeps was calling me, rambling on about what it was like to fuck Lucy, and that he knew exactly what I meant, when I described her slow, sensual blowjobs in my book: "You're right! She sucks my cock like nobody else! And don't you love it when she rides your cock and then turns around in the middle, with your cock still inside her, and she faces away from you and lets you watch her ass bounce up and down, while she fucks you?"

  He was describing Lucy's signature move. She had proudly shown me that move once or twice. And now he was rubbing in my face that he was fucking her too. But he wasn't just bragging or sharing a story with a like-minded fan of fine pussy. He wasn't just basking in the memory of a cherished story. He was trying to get under my skin. He wanted me to squirm. He wanted me to say that it bothered me. He was trying to torment me the same way Anita had tormented Jasmine, when she stood naked in my bedroom that day.

  But I wasn't gonna give that creep the satisfaction of seeing me lose my temper. I just said: "Yeah, well, good for you. But I really don't wanna hear these stories. I don't like to talk about her like that. Lucy isn't just a piece of meat to me. I care about her."

  Albert laughed a sinister laugh: "Oh come on, she's just a filthy little whore. Just a hole we can fuck, right? Everyone gets a turn with that pretty little whore. She's not yours. I probably fucked her more often that you did."

  Creepy fucking lowlife. I just hung up on him.

  Nicole called me later that day. I told her about the conversation I had with Albert. He had mentioned Nicole's name, too, so I figured she must know him.

  "Oh that guy!" she said and laughed. "He's so creepy. He's in his late sixties I think. Maybe older. Lucy fucks him."

  "Do you have sex with him too? He said he knows you."

  "Nooo! Eeeww! Gross! No, I'm not that desperate," Nicole laughed. "But I do know him. I met him a few times. One time he asked me to beat up Lucy for him."

  "What?!" I asked. "Why the hell did he want you to beat up Lucy? Does he know you're her aunt?"

  "Yeah, but he thinks I'll do anything for money. He said Lucy stole his phone, so he asked me to take it away from her and give it back to him. And he said he'd pay me $200 if I beat the shit out of her."

  "And did you do it?" I asked in disbelief.

  "He thinks I did," she laughed. "There's this phone app for The Walking Dead. You can take a selfie and then use the app to zombify your face. You can add blood stains and black eyes and stuff. I told Lucy that he wanted me to beat her up and give me money for it. So she posed for a picture and I used the app to add bl
ood stains to her face. And then I showed the photoshopped picture to Albert."

  That made me laugh, too. "And he believed that? He didn't see that the photo was doctored?"

  "I guess not," she replied. "He gave me the $200 and I split it with Lucy. I did take her phone though and gave it to him. Now she's not talking to me. Because it wasn't really his phone. He had bought that phone for her. But when she didn't do what he wanted her to do, he wanted the phone back."

  As it turned out, Lucy had been fucking this old guy ever since Darlene and Blizzard had picked her up from jail, and she and Darlene were posting escort ads on Backpage together.

  If Albert was one of her regular customers, he probably really did fuck her more often than I did by now. Gross.