Sick City

by Tony O'Neill

  “I heardja! Listen, babe, I’ll talk to Henry about showing up unannounced like that, okay? That shit ain’t cool. I swear. Look, Pat wasn’t at the hotel, he was over in the Spotlight, I had to go find him. Then we had to wait for some guy to show up so he could do business. Now we had to walk to pick up his car. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever, just make sure you get over here before this dreadlocked bitch starts burning some fuckin’ patchouli or talking to me about my aura, okay?”

  “Okay, okay, babe.”

  He snapped the phone shut. Pat stepped out of the bodega, ripping open a packet of Parliaments. His garish Hawaiian shirt billowed around his taut, muscular frame. He looked like some strange cross between an alcoholic country singer on the skids and an aging Hells Angel. But despite the face that had worn out like twenty miles of unpaved road after decades of pummeling himself with booze and methamphetamines, the eyes still burned with an astounding intensity. And like the eyes of a rabid dog, if you stared into them for too long you ran the risk of having your face ripped off.

  The older man lit a cigarette and twisted his eyes up against the rays of the dying sun. Then Pat playfully clipped Bee around the back of his head and growled in his two-packs-a-day gurgle: “C’mon, shithead, the car’s right here. S’yer old lady on your back again?”

  Bee just shrugged as they walked toward a rust-bucket red 1984 Toyota Corolla. The tinted windows were filthy, the paint peeling. Pat wrenched the door open. It hadn’t been locked. Nobody would want to steal this piece of shit anyway.

  “What happened to the Trans Am?”

  “Scrapped it. Fuckin’ transmission gave out.”

  · · ·

  Bee’s thick, greasy hair was combed back flat against his skull and his red eyes were hidden behind a pair of bootleg Ray-Ban Wayfarers. As they sailed down Hollywood Boulevard, Bee said: “Every time I see you, you got another piece a shit car. Why dontcha just buy a decent one?”

  Pat shrugged. The reason was simple. In his line of work it helped to switch vehicles often. That’s why he routinely bought junkers and drove them until they died, then dumped ’em and replaced ’em. He didn’t need the heat noticing him because he was driving some fancy-ass car around making deliveries. In fact, the only car he’d ever kept was an ancient Volkswagen Bug that just kept going and going. But after four years he got sick of looking at it, so he traded it to a whore for two eight balls of cocaine. The fucking Krauts sure as hell knew how to build cars. But he didn’t need to tell the kid any of that. Instead, he said: “Those beaner chicks can be ballbusters, huh?”

  Bee was staring at his cell phone absently, waiting for it to buzz into life again with more of Carla’s screams. “Huh?”

  “Ballbusters. The Mexicans. Ah was married to one for a year ana half, back when I was a young buck. Almost broke her goddamned neck a few times.”

  “Huh? What, Carla? She’s Dominican.”

  “It’s that fuckin’ Indian blood . . . ,” Pat went on, ignoring him. “Makes ’em crazy. Does she drink?”

  “Uh, no, not really. She mostly just likes to get high.”

  “You’re lucky. They get crazy on that goddamned firewater. Get a few drinks into Maria and—whoo!—watch out, boy. The bitch would flip the fuck out. Came at me with a kitchen knife once, calling me a no good son of a bitch, sayin’ I was screwing around on her. That’s how I got this. . . .” Pat raised his chin, exposing a thin scar across the Adam’s apple. “I had to knock her ass out! She comes around the next day and shakes me awake. ‘Pat! Pat! My tooth’s missing! What happened to my tooth?’ I tole her that she fell in the bathroom and hit her face on the sink. Fuckin’ dumb bitch believed it, too. She couldn’t remember a goddamned thing. Turn that radio on.”

  Bee turned it on, caught some lousy station playing country music.

  “Were you? Screwing around on her?”

  “Shit, of course. She knew goddamn well! Only really bothered her when she was drunk. Turn that hick shit off. Find something decent, man.”

  Bee started turning the dial. “What happened to Maria?”

  “She ain’t around no more,” Pat replied.

  Bee nervously switched the station. Pat glared at Bee for a moment like he was thinking of snapping his spine. Then he looked back to the road. A flat-toned woman was talking about the Dow Jones.

  “Switch it.”

  A hip-hop station.

  “Yeah, right. Switch it.”

  An alternative rock station.

  “Fuck that. Switch.”

  A ’70s rock station. “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Bee almost pulled his hand back, sure that Pat would say “Stop.” Instead he barked, “No.”

  Bee switched. Pulsing electronic beats.

  “Fuck off.”

  Phil Collins singing “Against All Odds.” Bee’s hand hovered by the radio.

  “Don’t touch that motherfucking dial. Listen, man. Listen to this fucker’s voice.”

  Bee watched Pat out of the corner of his eye. It looked as though Pat was driving with his eyes closed. His head swayed in time with the lilting piano.

  “You like music, right?” Pat snapped suddenly, fixing Bee in a cold stare.

  “Yeah. I like drum and bass.”

  “Drum and bass? What is that? Some kinda faggot music?”

  Pat’s eyes, as cold as long-dead stars, glared at Bee. Bee shut the fuck up. Pat’s leathery face remained cool, but the voice dripped with barely concealed violence. The twinkling of Pat’s pendant, as the sun turned the sky a dirty shade of gold. Then Pat started laughing, which was a disconcerting sound, like the wheeze of a deflating air bed.

  “How can I just let you walk away . . . ?”

  “Just let you leave without a trace?”

  “Fucking beautiful song, man. You HEAR that mother-fucker? You hear that VOICE? THAT’S the blues. I tell you, that’s BLUER than any nigger blues singer I ever heard. That’s PAIN, baby. That’s real pain. That’s from the fuckin’ soul, man.”

  · · ·

  “Yeah,” Bee croaked.

  Pat gripped the steering wheel, momentarily lost in the swelling of the song. His skull rings twinkled as he drummed his fingers. His head was shaved. His high cheekbones cast deep shadows on his sucked-in cheeks. A graying handlebar mustache gave him the look of a starved vulture. An inked thunderbolt on the throat marked him as a killer, and a spiderweb on the left cheek as a habitual prisoner.

  “Okay, listen, this is the bit I’m talking about. The chorus. Shhh.”

  Bee was a twenty-one-year-old aspiring tattoo artist and speed freak. A character collector. The kind of guy who relished going into shitty bars in the bad part of town and talking to the locals, just so he could go back like some explorer returning from a desolate, forgotten continent, and repeat the stories verbatim to all and sundry. However, he was completely out of his depth with someone like Pat, and he knew it. Pat was a lifelong meth freak and career criminal. Pat’s once amusing anecdotes had gotten progressively darker over time, until Bee started feeling more like an accomplice to Pat’s criminality than just another member of Pat’s constantly rotating audience. A part of Bee aspired toward the outlaw cool of a man like Pat. But only a small part. Mostly, Pat scared the shit out of Bee. If Pat didn’t have the hookup for some of the finest methamphetamines in Los Angeles County, Bee would have surely limited his contact with the crazy old bastard already.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, drums kicked in at the top of the second verse. Thud, thudthud, thud-thud-thud-thud! Pat cranked the volume to its maximum level. The interior of the car vibrated, as the speakers rattled and protested, distorting and crackling ominously.

  “This was a fucking golden era for music. This was the last era of the fuckin’ troubadour. The last era of the great love song. . . .”

  Pat had not slept in many days. In the two years that Bee had known Pat, he had never known him to sleep or eat. The music was painfully loud. Phil Collins’s voice burrowed into Be
e’s skull.

  “I mean, shit, I don’t think that no one out there—NO ONE—has written a better song about the fucking horror and absurdity of relationships. Of what love does to a man. I mean—bitches fuck you up! That’s what Phil is saying here, you know what I mean?”

  The meth he had smoked earlier was making Bee’s head throb and his chest hurt. Pat was still talking, he had never stopped, his voice was getting louder, and louder, more insistent and hectoring.

  “Phil Collins! Man—you can’t fake that shit! That’s a man who obviously had his nuts handed to him by a broad, you dig?”

  Bee noticed beads of sweat standing out on Pat’s brow. Goddamn, Pat looked like his heart was about to explode.

  “YOU KNOW SOMETHING? IF SOMEONE . . . IF SOME MOTHERFUCKER SAT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING RIGHT NOW AND TOLD ME THAT THIS SONG DIDN’T MAKE THEM FEEL SOMETHING, YOU KNOW WHAT? I’D HAVE TO BUST THEIR FUCKING ASS. I’D FUCK THEM UP. YOU KNOW WHY? YOU KNOW WHY, BEE?”

  Unsure of how to answer, Bee just shrugged.

  “BECAUSE THEY’D BE FUCKING WITH ME. YOU COULD ONLY SAY SOMETHING SO STUPID IF YOU WERE TRYING TO FUCK WITH ME. I MEAN, SHIT. IF THIS SONG DON’T MAKE YA FEEL SOMETHING YOU GOTTA BE DEAD OR A FAGGOT OR SOMETHING. GODDAMN. AM I RIGHT? HUH? AM I RIGHT, BEE, HUH?”

  “You got it, man,” Bee answered quickly. “It’s a classic. A total classic. None better.”

  Pat smiled. He lowered the music slightly. He seemed calmer now. His eyes were wet, gleaming.

  “He sure was an ugly son of a bitch, though,” Pat mumbled to himself as they sailed past Rampart. “Kind of amazing he managed to get laid in the first place, if ya think about it. . . .”

  When they arrived at Bee’s tiny apartment, Carla’s pissy mood relented somewhat now that Pat was here with the speed. Pat knocked on the door and cooed, “Home honey, we’re high,” and laughed a crackly laugh at his own joke. Carla opened the door and ushered them inside, dead-bolting it afterward. “Here comes the candy man.” Pat grinned, giving Carla a kiss on the cheek. “How are ya, baby?”

  “Doin’ better now.” Carla smiled, handing Pat some twenties.

  “Ain’t that the truth. . . .”

  Henry, his girl Heather, and the girl from San Francisco with the dyed green dreadlocks immediately flocked toward Pat to buy. When everybody was fixed up, Pat lingered for a while to bang a little speed himself. They sat around the apartment, loading the pipe, cutting up the rocky gray powder with razor blades, absorbed in the process of preparing the drugs. Pat noticed the dreadlocked couple watching him hungrily as he prepared his shot. Pat instinctively recognized that they were junkies. New junkies for sure, baby junkies, but junkies just the same. It was the way that they stared at the needle as if it were a twenty-dollar steak. They looked young and clueless. The boy, whose name was Sunray, was wearing what looked to be a pair of girl’s jeans slung low at the hips. The girl was pale and pretty despite her ridiculous dyed green dreadlocks.

  “You guys from San Francisco?” Pat said to Sunray absently, as he tapped the air bubbles from his syringe.

  “Yeah, how d’you know?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  Pat returned his attention to the needle. You never could tell who was or wasn’t a faggot in San Francisco. He slid the spike into his scarred, leathery forearm, pulling back the plunger, sending a plume of thick blood blossoming into the syringe. Then he pushed the speed in, his lips pulled back, exposing yellow teeth, worn flat by decades of meth-induced grinding.

  When Pat withdrew the needle from his arm and sucked away the black-red bloodspot that bubbled from the crook there, the girl with dreadlocks asked, “Uh, that’s a cool pendant. Who is it?”

  The meth made the blood pound in Pat’s ears. His jaw was clamped in a grimace of pure euphoria. He said, “What’s your name, baby?”

  His eyes burrowed into her. She stammered, “Salvia.”

  “Salvia . . .” He grinned, breaking her gaze and addressing the room while pointing to the pendant. It was on a gold chain and featured a portrait of a man with a neckerchief and mustache, rendered in semiprecious stones in a religious-iconic style. “This is Jesus Malverde. The patron saint of drug dealers. Old Jesus here was a Mexican bandit who was executed in 1909. He’s a bit of a folk hero south of the border. The beaners believe that wearing an image of this guy will keep you alive when you’re in . . . my line of business.”

  “Wow . . . where did you get it?”

  “I took it. I’m not one for patron saints and shit like that. But the spics, that’s a different story. They’re a superstitious bunch.”

  Pat looked over to Carla, and then to Henry. Henry dropped his gaze.

  “No offense,” he grinned, “I don’t mean to talk bad of all y’all. I’m sure there’s plenty of you who don’t believe in all of that shit. Just in my experience it seems that most of ya do.”

  Pat was thirty years the senior of anybody in the room. His weathered face exuded a quiet authority. The stench of cooking meth filled the room as the pipe went around. The others sat in rapt attention before him.

  “Now, the other day I had a bit of business around Westlake. I went there to meet a friend. I found out that my friend was having some . . . problems. There was some other motherfucker filling in for him. The prick was a real smart-mouthed little beaner. Mouth fulla gold, thought he was real fuckin’ smooth.”

  Listening, Henry felt his jaw tighten. He glanced at the girl he was here with. She was staring at Pat, rapt, oblivious to Henry’s discomfort. He began to feel anger rise in his chest but knew better than to talk back to the man with the drugs.

  “So I tell this guy that I want five balloons. He tells me, no, eighty bucks only buys four balloons. I tell him I’ve been buying dope around here for a long time, and I want five. Eventually the little bastard relents and gives me the other balloon. I make a mental note to check the merchandise later. Sure enough, when I pull over the car and open it up, it’s bunk. The last balloon is a piece of gum, wrapped in wax paper. Not fucking cool. So I turn the car around, and go back to express my displeasure.”

  The pipe and lighter made their way to Pat. He paused long enough to heat the glass bulb with the butane flame and suck in the pungent chemical fumes. He passed the pipe on and exhaled a cloud of gray smoke.

  “So that’s where I picked up Mr. Malverde, and also this. . . .” Pat had been digging around in his pocket as he spoke, and on the word “this” he produced something small and shiny. The others strained to look. It was a gold tooth, bent out of shape a little, but still recognizable, twinkling in the dim light.

  “That’s the last time that goddamn spic’ll try an’ stiff me on a deal, I tellya. I dragged that motherfucker four city blocks by his goddamned head, before I let him go.”

  “Hey, man!”

  All eyes turned to Henry. He glared at Pat.

  · · ·

  “Problem, kid?”

  “Why don’t you quit it with all of that spic shit, man? It ain’t cool. My mom is Colombian. Carla’s dominicano. You got two spics sitting right here.”

  Pat stared at Henry with blank, insect eyes. Henry was a slight kid, pretty and young. Pat smirked. He took in the diamond earrings and the neatly trimmed goatee. He was pretty sure the kid was more naïve than ballsy. Bee tried to catch Henry’s gaze so he could motion for him to shut the fuck up. Pat leaned toward Henry, who remained oblivious to Bee’s warnings.

  “You ever been to prison, kid? I don’t mean county jail. I mean prison.”

  Henry shook his head, slowly.

  “Well, I have. That’s where you really get to see people as they truly are. I watched the fucking spics hold down a white boy no older than you are now and fuck the shit outta him. Just because he wasn’t affiliated. Because he didn’t believe in choosing his friends carefully. So they took him for their lapdog. Seven or eight of them broke him in like that, knocked him around until he was about ready to do anything they asked. He was real screwy after that. They
knocked something outta his head, and he never got it back. Inside, boy . . . that’s where you get to smell the STINK of humanity up close. A spell inside the pen will knock that we’re-all-in-this-together peace, love, an’ harmony shit outta ya straightaway. You get me?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Henry relented, smiled a weak smile, and stared at his shoes. He could not meet Pat’s gaze again for a long while. Salvia and her boyfriend, Sunray, gave each other a look.

  “Ask him,” Sunray hissed.

  “I will, shut up!”

  “What’s up, honey?” Pat grinned, turning his attention to her.

  “Do you have any dope? We just came down from San Francisco, and uh, we’re both getting a bit . . . anxious.”

  “Heroin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit. If you’da asked me an hour ago, I’d have said yeah. I don’t touch that stuff myself. That stuff is bad news. But I got some buddies who are into it, and . . . I buy and sell it once in a while . . . shit, I could maybe, uh . . . you kids need it tonight?”

  Sunray nodded, “Yeah.”

  “You wanna go for a ride? I think I know one guy who’ll be around this time of the evening. . . .”

  Sunray looked doubtful, but Salvia said, “Sure. I mean, if you think you can get hold of someone. . . .”

  “Yeah, Uncle Pat’ll take care of ya.”

  He stood. Looked around the room, hooked his thumbs in his belt. “You take care, man,” he said to Bee. “I’ll be seein’ ya.”

  Salvia and Sunray stood: “Nice to meet you, Carla. . . .”

  Carla nodded and returned her attention to the pipe.

  “Nice to meet you, too, Henry . . . ,” Salvia said.

  Henry stood, hugged them awkwardly. “Yeah. Take care.” He watched them go with Pat, uneasily. Well, fuck it. At least he was out of here now.

  · · ·

  The three of them walked out into the balmy night and walked toward the car. Sunray went to get into the passenger side, and Pat stopped him.