by Peter Wild
Still, I am always so glad to see them because they have yet to ‘assimilate’–or succumb to the rules of our metro-area camouflage. The women wear brightly embroidered hats and headscarves, exuberantly patterned skirts with shirts that don’t match. Checks, flowers, beads, narrow stripes, wide stripes, textile mosaics–all in a single outfit, the desired effect being an approximation of the clothes they wore at home. They refuse, in other words, to abandon the beautiful for the appropriate. If you want to talk to them you have to speak either to their generally polite and sociable kids or to Wat. Wat is a counsellor and community liaison and is able to tell jokes in three languages, including, I suspect, Latin.
He thinks I am funny because I am always having trouble with my car. ‘Hey…’ he cajoles, when I use the front desk phone again. Once more calling my husband, Nurse Johnnie, to pick me up because my car won’t start in the-20 degree Fahrenheit February temperatures: ‘…Always Car Trouble…You Little Red Riding Hood. Car Trouble is you wolf. Little Trouble Girl.’
I am not a young girl any more, but an actual young one pipes up next to me. ‘That’s a song…Little Trouble Girl…’
Leopard-print coat, died orange hair, pale white make-up over acne…Is she even twenty-five? What’s she been googling? More to the black and howling point: which one of my aborted children is she…?
Wat is fascinated. ‘…A song?’
‘Yeah, Sonic Youth,’ she says. ‘They were a group. They had a song that was called something like “Little Trouble Girl”.’
And although I always say I’ll keep quiet, I never, ever do. The memory crashes through the window, horn honking, shattered glass, headlights on high beam: how they used to warm up before they performed in Tompkin’s Square Park, which was practically my front yard at the time, their snarling but somehow affectless music sending its barbed tendrils through the window of my first-floor apartment, yanking me into another day full of withdrawal, no money, desperation, guilt and a permanent taste in my mouth of having swallowed an ashtray. They were Hell’s alarm clock.
I hated the sound they made, as if they were not really angry, but using the sounds and chord progressions of anger to create something that was wilfully hard to interpret. I was in the minority though, most people liked them in those days, not that anyone would have used the word ‘liked’. No one ever had any expression on their faces, you had to know someone very well before you declared an actual opinion, lest you show enthusiam. It was as if eighth grade would never end, and no one, but no one, no matter how much they supposedly knew me, would ever lend me ten dollars to try to buy something that wouldn’t leave me conned and shaking, as sick as I was before. That was the sound I made.
‘God,’ I said to the youngster: ‘I hated that group.’
She looked confused. If I’d been so unhip as to hate Sonic Youth how was it that I’d lived right upstairs from where they played so many of their famous gigs?
Wat, as usual, thought the whole thing was funny. ‘One person’s tea is other person’s urine sample.’
The clinic had mostly cleared out by this time and Wat, accompanied by the little retro-punker, came outside with me to have a look at the car. She said she could possibly give it a jump. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’ I smiled at her. She smiled back, blushing under her clown-white foundation; two red splashes of colour it took a bit of willpower not to pinch.
In the parking lot we stood under the huge, brushed steel siding of the winter sky. This is the view of the city you get when you are by the outskirts, it’s downtown still rising up before you: a scraped and lead-tinted scene of smoked-glass windows like a million sightless, square eyes, wind-crazed ribbons of white steam rising from invisible heating ducts, overpasses arcing off into the distance, shelters tucked away, where only the people who need them know how to get to the line they will have to stand on.
We gathered around my 2003 BMW – a gift from a deceased relative. ‘Nice car,’ Wat declared, as if to encourage me. ‘Must be nice.’ The young woman smiled; the expression and smile distinctly regional, a local way to express envy and suspicion while attempting to conceal.
Just then, however, I didn’t like my car very well at all. In the first place I don’t like cars since I didn’t learn to drive until I was thirty-nine years old and never became comfortable with them. In the second, someone had clearly broken into mine. The door handle had been hit with some kind of mallet, which was entirely unnecessary since I deliberately didn’t lock it in the hopes that it would be stolen and I would have an excuse to get a car that worked.
‘That’s new.’ I nodded at the dented handle, and yanked the door towards me. At first I thought my car alarm had gone off. But then the young woman grabbed Wat’s arm and pointed, stuttering. The sound was an alarm, of sorts, and had the same jarring effect, more so because the shriek wasn’t mechanical but organic, a sharp, desperate, instantly panic-inducing wail coming from inside a tiny bundle of pink blankets.
In two years of coming to the clinic, I had seen Wat almost every day, but I had never once seen him look startled the way he was now. He even spoke in his own language first before he translated, which he never did with us English speakers.
‘Oh God’s dammits,’ he blurted, and reached down and picked up a small bundle.
The infant squirmed faintly. Its mouth looked like the kind of rosebud you would see in a florist shop behind a refrigerated glass counter – tiny, moist and fresh, dusted with ice crystals. I didn’t know where Wat had come from; I wondered whether he had seen babies before, abandoned or dead babies. God’s Dammits.
I grabbed at the piece of paper pinned to the blanket. It said: ‘You have nicist car at methdone clinic.’
The young punk girl stared and stared. I looked at Wat.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK. Someone got confuse-d.’ He hit the ‘d’ on the end of confused hard, as if it didn’t come naturally to him to put things in the American past tense, but he was the social worker. He would know what to do.
And what, if I looked at things realistically, did I know? The titles of certain old songs, many of which I had never liked to begin with. And the young woman? She didn’t even know how old those songs really were. I held out my arms to Wat.
‘For one minute,’ he said, ‘then we have bring her to safe release spot in ER.’
All around us things were cold, with no awnings or trees to break the blasts of wind. The baby’s living body, in contrast, felt shockingly warm.
‘This Little Trouble Girl,’ he said. ‘Not a song this time.’
He was diplomatically unclear as to which one of us he was speaking.
I held the baby for one minute. Sixty seconds is a long time to stand without talking in a windswept parking lot, looking at a baby with a rosebud mouth, a very, very little trouble girl, who is going–facts are facts–to see a lot of trouble.
on the strip
rachel trezise
When the opportunity to contribute to Noise emerged, I’d recently returned from a month-long trip to the States where I was struck by the huge chasm between the lifestyles of the rich and poor (although this seems to be an increasing problem in the UK, too). I wanted to write about it, but I had no idea what form the writing would take or what kind of character(s) it would focus on. ‘On the Strip’ was the ideal vehicle, most obviously because the lyrics seem to be about a teenage runaway trying to survive in the big city. (I was particularly enamoured with the line ‘messing with stars and doing tricks’.) But also because the track has two faces: Gordon’s glib and sublime vocals and a raw and grubby guitar breakdown towards the end of the song, indicative of something dirty and unknown, hiding behind the palpable.
Thursday night, amber sun setting in the pink sky, distant neon stuttering on. Melissa turns out of La Brea, left on Sunset. New-old black patent ballet pumps nipping the hardened skin of her toes. Love-heart tattoo on her sallow ankle, from when her body belonged to her. Ironic, actually: her ankle’d never known any stupid fucken love.
Struts past people eating dinner at Clafoutis, half-plastic retards who came here on the short bus, expecting some fucken nothin’. Throws her clumsy sequin purse back on her shoulder, keeps walking. Passes a smoke shop, a fat black guy on the leather couch, staring out at her, a chunky brown cigar hiding his sneering mouth. ‘Fuck you,’ she says under her breath, the words never far from her lips, going around and around in her head like she has Tourette’s. Probably does, has every fucken thing else. ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.’ That’s all it’s worth saying to some people. Sometimes, she wishes she had a dick so she could really fuck them; a fucken big eighteen-inch tool to bust some pussy apart. Ironic, actually.
At the liquor store, she pulls a bunch of coins out of her hot-pants; eight dollars, ten cents. The clerk watches her in the mirror as she slowly roams the aisles, the bright lights illuminating her paper-white skin, her skanky leather coat. She picks bottles up, one after another, holding them in her bitten, juddering fingers, squinting at the labels. Then she takes a quart of Grey Goose to the counter.
The clerk frowns at her.
‘I ain’t got no ID,’ she says, grinning, revealing a broad gap where her incisor should be. She does have an ID, a fake one, in her purse someplace. She can’t be bothered looking for it now.
And he sells her the vodka after all.
Back up the sidewalk, at Larrabee, a group of kids hanging out by the Viper Room, a boy and two girls gathered under the awning. ‘Man, I am pissed at that asshole,’ the guy says, kicking the fireplug, because the doorman won’t let him in. Bruce Barry, cute little wild kid who peddles itsy bits of coke, PCP sometimes.
Melissa throws her purse back on her shoulder, walks towards them.
‘Hey,’ one of the girls says, pointing at Melissa’s pantyhose. ‘I just love those stockings. They’re sweet.’ Fucken satellite dish for a face, hybrid Brit–Yank accent; daughter of some overpaid sex-addict movie star with a condo in Brentwood. Fucken place is overrun with teenagers trying to outdo their parents, kids with credit cards for brains. They all want to hang out with ‘real’ people, get a taste of some authentic rebellion. Go around talking to the bums in Barnsdell Park.
Melissa looks down at the leopard-print nylon clinging to her legs. Stole them from a thrift store in Pasadena last week, still stinking of some other bitch’s cunt juice. These rich kids, they love all that shit.
‘Sweet,’ the girl says again, nodding to herself, probably picking up CBS.
The other girl lights a cigarette, takes a long, hard drag. About the most shocking thing you can do in Hollywood, inhale nicotine. Ironic, actually.
Bruce is still kicking the hydrant, eyes as wide as cookies. Sugared off his pretty little face. Fucken kids. Find all kinds of narcotics hidden in their parents’ closet but they can’t order themselves a fucken Martini. Melissa unthreads her bottle top, throws it at the trash can, lifts the bag to her mouth. Bruce watches as she swallows the scorching liquid, holding the bottle-neck in her lips, sucking like a baby. He saunters up to the wall, waits for a couple of tourists to pass. Drives his hand in his pants pocket.
Melissa follows him, gives him what’s left of the quart, takes the baggie out of his manicured fucken hand.
‘All right,’ he says, peering at the sticker. ‘Vodka, dude.’
Melissa holds a thumbful of powder to her nostril, snorts. Stupid crumb of flake, stepped on fourteen or fifteen fucken times. Didn’t care for toot after all; just a starter preceding an entrée, like a basket of fucken bread.
West again, towards the end of the strip, throwing her purse on her shoulder, muscles anaesthetised a little. Involuntary tears in her eyes, the store signs blurring into calligraphy, coloured lights reflecting in the patent of her shoes. Stops next to the big Hustler depot, stands in the darkness on Beverly Drive. ‘Relax…It’s Just Sex,’ it says, on the customers’ paper bags. Stupid rich sluts and amateur porn actresses, coming and going, armfuls of toys and DVDs, tossing their useless money into the savings account of a paraplegic, someone who is incapable of having sex. As if a fucken big rubber dildo liberates them. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, pushing the blow around her system, an itsy buzz at the top of her spine. Back on the Strip. The best money in the whole of the state. She doesn’t come here too often, though. Doesn’t go anywhere too often. Keep moving around, otherwise people get to recognising you. The other trick is, only do white guys. Get caught up with anyone from South Central, you’ve already slit your own fucken throat. No colours, no blacks, no Meskins, no Gooks. Then you might be all right. Those motherfuckers talk to each other, live in tight little communities. Caucasians don’t even look at each other; they hate the fucken sight of themselves. Rattle on about how much their stretch Hummer cost, wouldn’t say nothing ’bout no hooker case it got back to their butt-ugly wife.
Half hour later the car rolls up. Ratty-looking guy in an olive Honda Accord, eyes set too close together. He stares out of the windshield, all cautious and jumpy. Melissa pouts at him, sizing him up as she slowly folds back a lapel, revealing what’s on offer. Mr John Doe: average white American with two kids in elementary school, and a wife who don’t give head. She gets in the car, sets her purse on her scrawny knees. He turns left, drives vigilantly along the Strip, past the groups of kids outside the Roxy, trying to sell tickets for tonight’s show. Past the lit signpost at the Rainbow Bar & Grill. ‘So what’s the damage, honey?’ he says, as he signals on to Doheny. ‘For the works, the whole thing?’
Melissa shrugs. Grins an itsy bit. Make them think it’s your first time doing this sort of thing, then you’re halfway there. ‘Two hundred dollars?’ she says, all practised hesitance. Looks up at him with puppy-dog peepers. Damage. He got that right.
‘One fifty?’ he says, acting the operator. Corduroy fucken pants, the chicken-flavoured top ramen he ate for dinner still on his breath. He’s pulling into an empty car lot behind Greystone Park. The headlights cut two parallel streaks through the darkness, illuminating the thick laurel bush surrounding the lot, a pile of trash and a ripped couch in one corner. He twists the key, the engine ticking down. The lights disappear. He looks at her, one eyebrow raised.
Unhooks her seat belt, that’s the first thing Melissa does. ‘Show it to me,’ she says. ‘Show me the cash.’ Quickly she unties the ribbons holding her purse together, while he gropes around in his pants. Swiftly circumvents the thin lining of the purse, feeling for the A-shaped handle. She’s got its nickel contour in her hand when the guy turns back to her, a bunch of twenty-dollar bills rolled up in a rubber band, balancing in his fleshy palm. He puts it on the dash, smiling proudly, the red light from the digital clock reflecting in the white of his right eye. ‘Protection?’ Melissa says. ‘You got that?’ He releases a high-pitched, swooshy little giggle, as if to say, Of course I’ve got that, starts scrabbling about in his frayed pants again. Melissa whips the butterfly knife from her purse, sticks him in his thigh.
‘Haaar,’ the guy yells, jerking back in his seat, his hand going to the leg, a plastic condom wrapper diving from his fingers. His itsy, screwy eyes popping from their sockets like eggs from a hen’s snatch.
Melissa sits up on the bucket seat, pounds his groin with her clenched fist. Paralyses him for a moment while she stretches over his reeling body, releases the driver’s door. ‘Come on, asshole,’ she says, ‘get out.’ Shoves him. Elbows him. He drops on to the ground, his frame warped into a malformed fetal position, one leg sprawled under the car, bawling like a kid. ‘What is this?’ he’s saying, words jammed with drool. Melissa crawls into the driver’s seat. Thrusts one leg out the door, lands a ballet pump on his chest, holds him still while she heaves the blade out of his leg. ‘What is this?’ he hollers, rolling around in the dirt.
‘It’s a fucken carjack, you asshole,’ she says. She throws her blade under the passenger seat, starts the engine, slams the door. Runs over something, probably his foot, says, ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck…’ Licentious men are so weak and stupi
d. They’d turn themselves inside out looking for a spanking-wet pussy; wouldn’t see no danger comin’ till it’d slit their fucken throats. Don’t worry about him. He’s not gonna die. He’s not gonna go to the rollers either, ’cause they’d bust him for soliciting. Don’t you know? Prostitutes go to heaven. It’s their clients that go to hell.
The money roll falls into her lap as she turns back on to Sunset. Damage. Protection. Ironic, actually.
It wasn’t always this fucken easy. She wasn’t always this fucken astute. When she first came to California, as green as the shit in a discarded diaper, she hung around with a couple other girls, on Los Feliz and Vermont. One night, four years ago, a gleaming black Aston Martin with Florida licence plates pulled up against the sidewalk. This hand came out of the electric window, thick, clean fingers gesturing at her. She couldn’t believe that he chose her. The other girls were from the Valley, wore vinyl miniskirts and heavy gold hoop earrings. They’d stand a little away from the edge, legs crossed at the knee, their fists planted on their big butts, bangles from their wrists to their elbows. Their pimps taught them all that shit: what to wear, how to act, they’d been doing it for years. Melissa had only done it once. She could still taste the burnt-rubber tang on her tongue, from giving some fucken rich medical freshman a blowjob two days before. ‘Just close your eyes,’ Stephanie’d said, slurring. ‘You won’t even feel it. You won’t feel a thing.’ That bitch must have turned all her tricks high as a fucken moose, ’cause when you lose one sense, the other four get stronger.
