“Where’s Williams?” I screamed in Sev’s face once I found him, once it was over and the band had left the stage. I’d yelled myself hoarse during the set and now confronted semideafness there on the edge of the throng while it clapped and pounded for an encore.
“He’s here.”
“No.” I looked around. “He wouldn’t watch from this far away. He wouldn’t hang back at the bar. He wanted to be here in the first place.”
“Yeah,” Severin said, but it went up at the end like a question, like he suddenly understood my concern. At last. “Where is he?”
As disciplined as his father was, as clean, Little Will was the opposite. I grabbed Sev’s elbow, and since we didn’t care about seconds, about anything the band might think to do now, we raced toward the bathrooms. The crowd had thinned just enough so we were able to push our way through. My vocal cords ached; the room was so dense with cigarette smoke and marijuana it hurt just to breathe. My eyes stung with the sweat that dripped off my forehead. We raced past a couple making out and into the bathroom, Severin and I like cops on a bust. We kicked open the door but the room looked empty. Surely no one wanted to blow it and miss the encore—they might play “Patience,” or “Sweet Child”—but the second stall was locked. The “stall,” such as it was. You can imagine what the crapper was like in this place. One set of walls was completely demolished, leaving only a basin without a seat, while the remaining one looked like a public school broom closet.
“Yo,” Severin said. The green door was crisscrossed with switchblade graffiti. To our left was a slender urinal, one tiny sink. “Anybody in there?”
No answer. Yo would’ve provoked one. I mean, what if we’d been black people?
“Yo?”
We rushed the stall on Sev’s second yo. It smelled like a port-o-let, like ancient turds and urine and vomit, a medicinal touch of something—Jäger, tequila—besides, like whoever’d barfed hadn’t digested the liquid he’d yakked up. The door gave against our weight and we tumbled into the tiny stall. Williams was on the floor, down among the muck and the slime and the brown mire, those viscous strands that caked the base of the toilet.
“Shit.” I knelt next to him, Severin crowding in behind me. What did it matter where we put our hands? “What is this?”
I grabbed him. His body’s pure inertia made it look like he was sleeping, though when I knelt and touched him he was perfectly still, and the back of his head was wet. He’d been lying in this place for a while.
“Jesus!” I lifted him up. He was breathing. The front of his shirt was wet too, and I realized people had come in here and pissed on him, just let him stay crumpled where he was when they hosed him down.
“Oh!” I lifted him. Not till I got him out of the stall did I realize the liquid on the back of his head was blood. “Oh fuck, Sev, look!”
There was a blue bandanna, Crip-colored, knotted above his elbow.
“What is this?”
Sev just grunted. We were dragging him toward the sink when it hit me. If we’d searched the floor we’d have found matches, spoon, baggie, syringe. How much evidence did I need?
“Severin, what the fuck?” I turned the spigot uselessly. What were you supposed to do? When someone OD’d weren’t you supposed to put him in the bath, use cold water, ice cubes, something like that? I didn’t know. “How long has Williams been using heroin?”
We ran water on his face for a second. A pathetic trickle.
“Not long,” Sev said. “And not often.”
“Have you been using it too?”
Severin just looked at me ambiguously. “Let’s get him out of here.”
We lugged him by the hair and I draped one of his arms over my shoulders, Severin taking the other. He was breathing. Alive, but perhaps barely, and for how long?
“Christ, Sev!” It was amazing how fast you could travel when you needed to, how fast and slow you could go at once. “What exactly is going on here?”
My face and his in the mirror, my own a sick parody of its schoolboy self—with my longish hair plastered to my forehead, I looked ten again, supercilious and vacant and beautiful—while Sev’s was wise and sharp-chinned. Not for the first time, that vast gulf yawned between who we were and what we knew, of ourselves and of one another. We lunged through the door, dragging our half-living friend. Outside we’d look for a cab, an ambulance, what?
“You’re not going to answer me?”
We made it to the street. I hadn’t seen the band return, but now that we were outside, the building started to vibrate again with muffled, cavernous sound. The night was empty, whatever time it was, that morally uncertain hour when the cars came far apart and all drove slow.
Split-second decision time. We went for Sev’s car. We had to go now! Williams wasn’t dead, he wasn’t even bluish, quite, though his skin had a fishy pallor. He moaned as we dragged him across Sunset.
“Let’s get him to the hospital,” Sev said. We’d pushed him into the passenger seat and now I was scrambling into the back. “Let’s fucking go.”
“Fine.” I was in and he was starting up the car and the radio blared the elephantine screeching of some treated art–rock guitar. “Hit it!”
“We’re going to Cedars of Lebanon.”
“What? Severin, there is no Cedars of Lebanon!” His car tracked out onto Sunset, racing across both lanes under a violet sky, the night that was already beginning to pale. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”
True. The hospital was called Cedars-Sinai now and it was just down the hill in West Hollywood. Cedars of Lebanon had shut down when we were kids. In its place now was the Scientology Centre.
“Where are you going?” I yelled. “Sev, the hospital’s the other way!”
The stereo yipped inanely. We passed Spago, the old one where Beau had taken us both to celebrate our high school graduation. We’d sat next to Prince and Morris Day of the Time, the two men dining out to plot their dominance of the future. It was 1985.
“Turn around! Severin, turn around!”
But he didn’t. And Spago was closed now too, not just for the night but forever, windows sheeted with ply and the once-elegant yellow building grown fissured and decrepit, the façade splintered with spidery lines. There is no hospital. We raced down the Strip and I just threw my head back. Williams and my brother had been into something they shouldn’t have. And what did I know, since the two of them had betrayed me this completely? Anyone could’ve been into anything, our father could’ve been the goddamn pope, Mahatma Gandhi, a pedophile. I closed my eyes and breathed, the wind whipping and fluttering through the poorly sealed joints of the car. The radio wailed. Where in God’s name were we going?
II
DRUGS ENTERED OUR lives in 1977. Williams and Severin and I had been together for a year and a half, and until then, nothing could’ve divided us. We hammered out our bond at St. Jerome, a year in which we were all preoccupied with comic books and baseball cards and skateboards. If we argued about anything, it was that Severin was a Mets fan. Seriously? Jerry Koosman? Williams and I were Angelenos, and aside from the detestation of the Yankees seemingly shared by all reasonable people, Severin’s city was a pure abstraction. It was TV, it was cop shows, it was mentioned on the news. Severin’s mom had gone missing, we knew that—after his sister died, Rachel had just abandoned him in Beau’s lap—but we never discussed it. Leave that to Hal Linden and Abe Vigoda. Instead we chewed our brittle pink rectangles of Topps gum and sat on my front stoop on summer afternoons. Hung out there and very occasionally at Little Will’s, in the asphalt-and-seawater swamp of the Marina, where Will’s parents bird-dogged us a little more closely than mine. The mood there was louche, dangerous. I don’t suppose I wondered why a youngish agent and his wife would choose to live so far from Bel Air: we were too busy constructing our little cosmos, staining the sidewalk with saliva bombs, and I was too enraptured, too fascinated by the Farquarsens’ more bohemian scene. Teddy and my mom shunted me to public scho
ol for fourth grade and off I went, moving from St. Jerome to Roosevelt, on Montana Avenue. God knows what my mom thought when she saw me so tight with Beau’s son. In my darker moments, I’ve wondered if she moved me to keep Severin and me apart, but that probably isn’t true. As my mother began her disintegration—those first crises of her early thirties, the quiet acceleration of her drinking—I was too youthfully self-absorbed to notice. And while Will and Sev were left in the gentle garden of St. Jerome, I was loosed into the wild. Those Episcopal hippies had nothing on the haggard lifers who ran Roosevelt Elementary, those ossified schoolmarms and weary bureaucrats, nor on the insanity that took hold across the playground’s concrete jungle. As my best friends went on with their youthful arts educations, I embarked upon a different kind. Clifford Contreras pinched my chin and shook it like I was a camel at a bazaar. Kids named Matzel, Leinbach, and O’Brien—Irishers and Germans, whose last names were all anyone ever needed—punished me daily, whipping my ass at basketball and aiming for the head when we played strikeout. A girl named Bunny walked the playground and changed my life, her hair swinging like a bellpull, shaking off light. I was a scrawny little gleep with horn-rims of my own, like Severin, only blonder. The others were from the complexes closer to Wilshire, the boxy sheds whose once-modern “elegance” had curdled toward lower-middle-class neglect. Santa Monica then was just the northerly extension of Venice: not quite ghetto, but hairy enough. You could get jacked in the parking lot of the A&W Restaurant; there were chicken hawks along the pier. Closer to Pico there was a gang, the I-9ers, whose legend scared me off the streets. Severin, who still had his New Yorker’s instilled fearlessness, walked them without a problem; Little Will, who lived on the edges of the Marina, where the kids were born with criminal records, did the same. Yet I was the one Jamie Cullen approached one day on the playground, while I was standing over by the green wooden backboards that served mixed purposes, for handball or for strikeout, where we chucked tennis balls and called our own pitches. A strike could bruise your ribs.
“Hey, brah,” Jamie slurred. “C’mere.”
“Hey, what?” He’d never talked to me, but even I knew there was only ever one chance to convince people you weren’t a pussy. I was a pussy, but still. “What d’you want?”
Jamie was leonine, darker-skinned, quiet, and sinister. His mother was Hawaiian. He wore a heavy flannel shirt even when it was hot. He nodded. “Over here.”
I walked over toward him, in the patch of shadow that fell behind the backboard. I was wary of getting my ass kicked, but Jamie wasn’t really a bully. His brother was an I-9er, and this meant that he never had to prove anything. He opened his fist when I got near him. Three white pills lay on his palm, bigger than aspirin. RORER 714.
“You want to buy these?”
It was recess. No teachers were near. I half knew what he had. I’d heard bigger kids, fifth and sixth graders, talk about Columbia gold and smoking out. But Quaaludes were something else.
“How much?”
I wasn’t going to buy them, but I wasn’t going to flinch.
“Five bucks. Each.”
“I don’t have money,” I lied. I was nine. “Sorry.”
He slid the pills back into his pocket, the shirt I suddenly realized was a drug dealer’s coat. Or maybe I didn’t know that till later, since I didn’t know what a dealer was yet either. Jamie’s sleepy, serpentine demeanor was enough. He had raccoon eyes, pillowy lips like Mick Jagger’s.
“Just thought I’d aaask, brah.”
I brought money the next day. I didn’t want to take drugs, but I wanted to own them.
“Hey, Jamie.”
We were just where we were yesterday. He looked over as if he’d never seen me in his life, as if whatever happened back then—when?—was but a distant dream.
“Those, um.” I watched Jamie. “Those . . . pills.”
He leaned against the backboard and looked at me sidelong. Like I was a complete Val for daring to speak to him at all.
“You know? You offered me some shit?”
I got bold. Where it came from, I don’t know. Junior high kids at Lincoln were onto this stuff already, not me. I was in the middle of something, an occult transformation. I’d given up my glasses, wore a replica USC football jersey, short-sleeved and porous. I felt athletic and limber, but suddenly sports were only a metaphor, and that muddy little baseball diamond behind us was just a place to win girls. An orange Corvette slid past along Lincoln, blaring Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”
“Oh, riiight,” Jamie said. “Naaate. That’s your name, huh?”
Every vowel was extended, bent into that casual dudespeak that was just the way we were. Parody California all you like, but it meant something else to us, was simply an attempt, I think, to keep our sexuality under control. I reached into my pocket and took out twenty bucks I’d lifted from Teddy’s billfold that morning. Jamie looked at me like I’d just whipped out my pecker. He shook his head and I tucked the money back out of view.
After school, we met in the bathroom. He stood by the towel dispenser, smoking a Marlboro. The floor in there was like a garage’s, smooth and gray and stained.
“Hey.” Jamie stepped forward and this time had a palm full of different things. A joint that was twisted super-tight at both ends and a couple of melted-looking yellow capsules.
“What’s that?” I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of urine and borax.
“Kine, brah. And some yellow jackets.”
“Yellow jackets.” I sanded this off at the last minute so it wasn’t a question. It didn’t really matter what these did. “How much?”
“Ten.”
I gave him twenty and split.
“Hey brah.”
I whirled. My sneakers, twin-toned, powder and navy blue Vans, skeetched across the floor.
“Don’t be a pussy. I’ll fuck you up.”
I was a pussy, like I said, so I hoped there wasn’t a pure cause/ effect between Jamie’s two statements. But I just burst out into the shadowed halls and ran all the way home. I hadn’t yet formed an intention. Possession for now was its own reward. I hid the stuff in my room, first in my five-dollar combination “safe,” then in my hamster’s cage, and finally—as I realized I didn’t want to enable rodent suicide—in my sock drawer. Obvious, but my mother wasn’t tossing my cell just yet. And so, without any danger of being found out, I forgot about them. My drugs. Six months passed, and it wasn’t until August that they came up again.
“Whatchoowannado?”
“I dunno, man.” Fifth grade was the year I became a man, and Williams too transformed from snickering punk to full-on dude, a boy child in excelsis. In Dogtown T and vato hat, he was Tony Alva at half size, cool as fuck. “Whatchoowannado?”
In our spare time, which was all of it, we took turns speaking like Steven Tyler, racing our words together the way he’d done to introduce the songs when our mothers took us to see Aerosmith at the Sports Arena. It didn’t occur to us that cocaine would’ve been helpful in achieving the desired effect. Cocaine. That drug, thankfully, came later.
“Shee-yit.” Williams’s Tyler was actually pretty convincing. “Dunno.”
We were up in my room, which was where we tended to hang out in those days. His house was too far away, involved taking the 3 or the 8 to the 2 and then a long skate down Main Street. It was too long, too risky, that pregentrified corridor of porn theaters and liquor outlets. It involved too many opportunities to be hassled (everything was “hassle.” Don’t hassle me, brah). We’d pick up our skateboards—I’d just switched my laminated Sims Taperkick for a ten-inch Alva—and joust with them, beating at each other’s hands. We pored over comic books almost as fervently as we did Teddy’s copies of Swank and Oui. Only now we were into Conan the Barbarian, the issues drawn by Barry Smith especially, and something about that barrel-chested, longhaired savage flashing his blue-shadowed pecs really turned us on.
“Dude,” I said, slipping into a mellow patter to
counteract all that Tyleresque speed jive. I remembered my drugs. “You wanna . . . get high?”
“Sure.” Williams pissed me off by not even batting an eye. “I’d love to do that.”
“You would? I’ve got some yellows, dude. I’ve got weed.”
We were suddenly speaking this language, it had angles; we pretended to experience we hadn’t had or else were inducted simply by assimilating its vocabulary.
I went into my closet and came back with the skinny, desiccated J and three pollen-colored pills. They looked like cheap vitamins. This was all the leverage I had in the world. “Check it out.”
My bedroom was decorated in blue denim then, my bedspread and pillowcases, but the carpets were a burnt brown and the white ledge of my wall-built desk still held the trappings of my childhood: atlases, Narnia books, Ralph’s glass cage full of shavings even after the animal had died.
“Huh.” Williams came over, inspected. “Coo-el.”
Outside the street was empty, almost frighteningly quiet. His father and Teddy and Beau were at work. They’d already made their big move. And just so, we were about to make ours.
We went outside, passing my mother who was talking to the housekeeper in the vestibule. The vacuum cleaner whined, the family terrier yapped. My mom didn’t even give us a glance.
American Dream Machine Page 17
