by Tony O'Neill
SICK
CITY
A Novel
TONY O’NEILL
FOR MUM AND DAD,
ROSE AND FRANK O'NEILL
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Two
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Epilogue
One
Two
Acknowledgments
Also by Tony O’Neill
Praise for Down and Out on Murder Mile
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Success is stumbling from failure to failure without
losing your enthusiasm.
—Winston Churchill
Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.
—Christopher Reeve
PART ONE
Chapter One
By noon Jeffrey decided it was time to go in and wake up the old man. He found him dead. Jeffrey stared mutely at the body for a minute. He’d seen dead bodies before, but never one he’d fucked in the previous twenty-four hours. Looking up, Jeffrey caught his own reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Impassive, he studied the corrugated contours of his ribs poking through the skin of his stick-thin torso. His arms were a tapestry of cheap, blurry tattoos. Designs once meant to shock or even threaten now just looked like half-faded bruises on his bony body. Around his throat an India-ink necklace of barbed wire. His dark, thick hair stood straight out from his skull, adding another half inch to his gangly frame. His eyes were gray, sleepy, and full of lost hope. Jeffrey pulled the sheet over the old man’s head and looked at his reflection again. He felt like a thirty-seven-year-old orphan.
He drifted back downstairs, poured another cup of coffee, and read the LA Times for a while. The television bleated something cheerfully moronic, so he turned it off again. Jeffrey sighed, and called Tyler, his on-again, off-again lover and OxyContin connection. Tyler sounded agitated and hungover.
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Bill died.”
Tyler, on his end of the phone line, took a bite of his toast and looked at his kitchen clock. He suddenly exclaimed, “Dude, the Steve Wilkos Show is on right now!”
Jeffrey lit a cigarette and listened as Tyler bounded into another room and switched the TV on. The static roar of faraway applause.
“Shit, it’s the pedophile one. I’ve seen this already. Check it out, Steve says, ‘You should pick on someone your own size. Why dontcha pick on me?’ You seen this one, bro?”
“No. I don’t watch TV.”
“Dude, this one’s awesome. Were you fucking him when he died?”
“No. He went in his sleep.”
“What you guys do last night?”
“Partied with some whores from Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“He was just watching and getting high?”
“Yeah.”
“Coke and poppers?”
“Yeah.”
“So, his heart finally gave out,” Tyler announced with a coroner’s certainty.
“Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”
“So, uh, you wanna come over?”
“Shit, Tyler, I’m kinda freaking out right now, you know? I mean, what do I do now?”
“Come over and get high with me!”
“No, I mean money, all of that shit! It’s so fucked up. I’ve been living with Bill for four fucking years, day in, day out, and now he’s dead and I’m shit outta luck. I could have married some rich cunt in Vegas for like two weeks and I’d be entitled to something. Shit’s so fucked up, man.”
“You oughta write a letter to the governor. Look, look—he’s gonna say it. ‘Why dontcha pick on me!’ Dude, Steve’s awesome.”
Jeffrey listened to Tyler watching TV for a while. When the silence became uncomfortable he said, “Okay, I’ll call you, bro.”
“Yup,” Tyler said, “let’s hang.”
Jeffrey re-cradled the phone, sat in his chair. Bill lay cooling in the bed upstairs.
——————
The silence lulled him into a dreamless half sleep. With a jerk, Jeffrey woke up in Bill’s vast, modernist glass and steel house overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. It seemed even more stark and cold with Bill having “left the building.” A lot of people wondered how the old man could afford a place like this on a retired cop’s salary. If anyone was bold enough to ask, the old man would just smile his cold predator’s smile and say, “Investments.”
If someone broached the subject with the old man’s “personal assistant,” Jeffrey would get a little defensive.
“Shit, books! Do you even KNOW some of the cases Bill was involved in back in the day? He was one of the first cops on the scene at the Tate murders! He wrote a book about it. The first one, ever! I mean, it’s outta print now, but in its day it was a big seller. He also . . . well, look, this is between you and me, right? ’Cos the higher-ups at the LAPD probably wouldn’t like this . . . but he’s written a few crime novels. Based on some of the cases he worked on. Under a pseudonym. Drake McKellen. Yeah, that’s the old man . . . Drake McKellen.”
This was usually enough. To most people, a few mass-market paperbacks on a drugstore rack were considered proof that the author must be independently wealthy. They didn’t know that unless you were Stephen King or John Grisham those seven and a half percent paperback royalties would have barely afforded a one-bedroom apartment in Los Feliz. No, the books were a hobby, just like the boys were. The old man’s tight-lipped defense of “investments” was actually pretty close to the truth.
Jeffrey went to the safe that lay behind the bloodred Warhol silkscreen of the electric chair. He entered the code. He removed one thousand dollars, one eight ball of cocaine, one ounce of marijuana, and a snub-nose, police-issue handgun. He left Bill’s passport, police badge, and gold retirement clock. He locked the safe and gently placed the silkscreen back in its original position. Then he walked upstairs.
He walked into Bill’s bedroom with a mixture of feelings—resignation, nausea, curiosity. He looked again at the body. Bill was now room temperature and stiff as a grotesque G.I. Joe doll. His mouth was pursed, wrinkled and tight like a puckered asshole. It gave the impression that when Bill had woken to find Death crawling over him, he had perversely decided to kiss it on the lips. The air hung heavy with the stench of stale farts. The room was silent and oppressive. The curtains were still drawn mid-afternoon, dust fragments danced lazily in a st
ray chink of sunlight. In another secret safe, the one that lay behind a false bookshelf loaded with novels by James Patterson, he typed in another code: 0765. The month and year that Bill joined the LAPD. From the secret safe, Jeffrey removed an external hard drive for a Macintosh computer, twelve CD-ROMs, a box of ancient metal film canisters, a jewelry box, another thousand dollars in cash, an eight ball of crack cocaine, and a half ounce of Chinese heroin.
Jeffrey held the film canister in his hands. It felt cool to the touch, yet still it radiated a kind of talismanic energy. He felt as if he were holding a newborn child in his hands, and that one sudden, spastic movement could prove disastrous, even fatal. In a way he was holding a life in his hands: the last remnants of the life of a Hollywood icon. The last performance by Sharon Tate, all that was left that had not been picked over by the media, the fans, the ghouls, and the curiosity seekers. In his hands was a film starring a slaughtered movie legend that had not been seen by anyone, other than a select crew of Hollywood degenerates, since it was originally shot decades ago.
He looked in Bill’s closet and found a decent-sized suitcase with wheels. He packed it with the contents of the bedroom safe, relocked it, and wheeled the case over to Bill’s bed. He kissed Bill’s cold, rubbery forehead. He felt for the first time that he was kissing a little old man.
· · ·
“Good-bye, Daddy,” Jeffrey said.
Bill said nothing.
Jeffrey dragged the case downstairs. He packed away the contents of the downstairs safe before forcing the zipper on the suitcase shut. Jeffrey booked a cab and walked back to the guesthouse. In his bedroom Jeffrey shoved his unfolded clothes into a canvas bag. The guesthouse was small and Spartan. Some gym equipment tossed in one room, a computer in a second room, a single twin bed shoved in what would pass for a closet in Bill’s house. This anonymous space had been Jeffrey’s home for the past four years. In his whole time here Jeffrey had hung almost nothing of himself on the walls. Within twenty minutes, his home of four years was bare and unoccupied. An icy, desolate feeling came over him. He returned to the main house and waited for the car in silence.
He knew for certain that Bill’s sons would be swarming over the house like locusts soon enough. Bill’s estate would be carved up between them. Jeffrey would be entitled to nothing. The family knew no more about Jeffrey than they did of the contents of the safes. This, Jeffrey took as his inheritance. In these past four years, Jeffrey had taken on the roles of the old man’s son, friend, wife, and lover. He had blended into Bill’s life with perfect anonymity. He had never seen the family beyond the pictures of bucktoothed, teenaged prom dates that turned into fat, red-faced married men, and the single picture of a bony, long-dead wife. Bill had retained a cool distance from his kin, as one of them climbed the political ladder in Washington and another made his millions in the Laundromat business. Jeffrey thought of the smell of Bill’s hair oil, of trimming his nose hairs and grooming his mustache, of the taste of his urine. He knew his quick, silent departure, stealing trinkets of cash and cocaine like a grave robber taking rings and gold fillings, was what Bill would have wanted. The contents of the film canister alone represented what Jeffrey supposed was a small fortune. Unloading the items would have to be done with care and meticulous planning.
Jeffrey considered the drugs in his possession. A brief, mad thought flitted across his mind. He thought of holing up in Tyler’s apartment for a while, and smoking and fucking his way to some kind of peace of mind. But Jeffrey was a pragmatist. He thought of how much trouble an eight ball of crack could cause, especially without Bill’s steady, guiding hand. He thought of London, seven years earlier, a crack-fueled lovers’ spat that resulted in his permanent exile from the city he’d most loved.
All of which had eventually brought him to Los Angeles, and to Bill. Now life had taken another unexpected turn. The decisions he made now would have repercussions that would be felt for a long, long time. On a sudden impulse, Jeffrey checked the Yellow Pages and ripped out a page. “Drug Rehabilitation” went into his back pocket. Jeffrey’s cell phone rang. The taxi was here. LA Yellow Cab, The name to trust since 1922.
Chapter Two
Dr. Mike adjusted his tie, fiddled with his cufflinks, and stared at his reflection one last time. There was a soft knock, and the door opened. A small, apologetic-looking man popped his shiny head through the door and said, “Dr. Mike? You’re up in five.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Dr. Mike returned for a moment to his own reflection. He smoothed his gray temples. Then, as if remembering something important, he looked back at the bald man and smiled at him. The man seemed momentarily stunned to be caught in the glare of that smile. That all-white, dazzling smile had been shining from billboards, televisions, magazine covers, and computer screens with relentless regularity recently. Then, snapping out of his awe-induced silence, he stammered something about the good work the doctor was doing and quickly backed out of the room.
· · ·
Dr. Mike looked at his watch. It was six fifteen a.m. On the green room’s coffee table was the morning paper, with the headline DEAN THE DOPER: CORONER SUSPECTS OD IN MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF DEAN MICHAELS. Dr. Mike had read the paper in preparation for the interview. He was quietly taken aback by the timing of the young actor’s death. A week before the new season of Detoxing America was due to air, Dr. Mike had ended up booked on every major network to speculate on the possible causes of the mysterious tragedy. And on every spot, he managed to turn the subject back around to his new reality show. Dr. Mike’s manager had been particularly happy with his seasoned dexterity.
“You should call a wing of your new house the Dean Michaels Wing,” he laughed.
Maybe I should hang the poor fucker’s headshot in my guest bathroom, Dr. Mike thought. He laughed and said, “Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll do that.”
Under the glare of studio lights, a pretty Asian girl patted Dr. Mike’s face with a final layer of powder.
“Uh, Dr. Mike?” she half whispered.
The doctor puckered his mouth in annoyance and opened his eyes.
“Yes?”
“My name is Lai. I, uh, just wanted to say what a big fan I am. And, uh, I have a brother. He’s an addict. I was just wondering if you had any advice. . . .”
Dr. Mike’s eyes traveled down from her face, to her throat, and rested on her breasts, which dangled half an inch from his arm. The smell of her perfume. He cleared his throat. He smiled at her.
“Would you like an autograph?”
The girl smiled back.
“Oh . . . oh, sure . . . I have a pen . . .”
“No . . . not now. I need to prepare. When I’m done. Uh, well, I have this thing to do. Afterward. What time do you . . . get off?”
“Well—around noon, usually . . .”
“Would you like to meet for lunch? I’ll be in the area around noon. I could . . . pick you up. Then we could . . . talk. About your brother.”
She finished powdering his face, slightly breathless.
“Oh. I’d be . . . that would be great. I mean, are you sure?”
Dr. Mike brought out the smile. The girl felt herself get light in the belly, the sudden giddy lurch of vertigo.
“I’m sure.”
He handed her a card, and she took it quickly. She slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans without anybody else seeing.
“Call me at noon,” he whispered.
“Okay.”
He watched her walk away.
“Dr. Mike! It’s a pleasure!”
Dr. Mike turned. He found himself looking at the glowing, healthy face of Matthew Bower. This was the second time he had met the Good Morning show host, but it would be their first on-camera encounter. Bower had eased into baldness with the same quiet dignity that Dr. Mike had eased into premature grayness. Both men together represented the ultimate sexual fantasy of a large portion of American females over the age of forty. They talked with a combination of an “I’m
a man in charge of my life” friendly insincerity and a “don’t fuck with me” professionalism.
“I wish we could be meeting under happier circumstances,” Dr. Mike said, solemnly.
“True. It’s a sad day. A very sad story all around. I really feel for his family.”
“The disease of addiction is a chronic and incurable one.”
When talking about addiction, Dr. Mike had a number of stock phrases—mostly bastardized or lifted outright from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous—a book that he liked to use more for its “profile” than its content. Using the book like a preacher uses the Bible, he scoured it for key phrases, nuggets of wisdom, and platitudes to advance his own theories. While talking about the death of Dean Michaels to interviewers and reporters these past few days, Dr. Mike would sometimes zone out completely. He could not talk about the specifics of the Michaels case, as the young actor was not his patient. But each and every question could be answered by using a profoundly ambiguous phrase like: “For the addict, one pill, one line, one drink is too many . . . paradoxically, one thousand are never enough.” The only time Dr. Mike really came alive was when he sensed it was the right moment to promote his show, Detoxing America. But even here there were stock phrases: “Revolutionary television,” “Entertainment that educates,” “The reality show that saves lives,” and of course the advertising tagline: “America is SICK. But the DOCTOR is IN.”
