by Tony O'Neill
“Backseat, hombre. The lady gets to ride shotgun.”
As Sunray slinked into the backseat, Pat opened the passenger door for Salvia and winked at her.
“Go ahead, hon. Maybe some of my manners’ll rub off on the kid before the night’s out. . . .”
He slammed the door behind her, and whistled that Phil Collins tune again, as he walked around to get into the driver’s side, jangling his keys as he went.
Chapter Eight
Jeffrey woke up and screamed, “Jesus!” He was on Tyler’s couch. Tyler was crouched down at the other end of it. He had the toes of Jeffrey’s left foot in his mouth. When Jeffrey screamed “Jesus!” Tyler froze, and looked up to Jeffrey’s uncomprehending face. He took the toes out of his mouth.
“Okay, I know this looks bad,” he said, “but . . . I was . . . oh, Jesus, man, I don’t have an excuse. I was fucking loaded, and horny, and your feet just looked . . . well, they looked spectacular.”
Jeffrey pulled his feet away from Tyler and sat up.
“Oh, God,” he said. “What time is it?”
“It’s like three a.m.”
“Why are you awake?”
“I’ve been up all night. That coke you gave me was amazing. Is there any more?”
“Yeah. There’s more. Jesus, I gotta check into treatment today. Why couldn’t you have let me sleep?”
“I tried not to wake you up, dude. I saw your toes and I couldn’t help myself. Sorry.”
Jeffrey reached for his lighter and lit a cigarette. He looked around and said, “Where’s my stuff?”
“Safe. I put all of the valuables in a tote bag and stuck it up in the crawlspace. I figured you’d need the suitcase for rehab. No point you dragging all of that other fucking junk around with you.”
“It isn’t junk. . . .”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s safe as fucking houses, man. The bag’s a collector’s item, bro. From the last movie I worked on—The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Did you ever see that one?”
“Nah. Don’t think I did.”
Before he had started dealing drugs full-time, Tyler had been moonlighting as a set dresser’s assistant. This basically meant that he did all of the grunt labor on the set, for cheap. When it came to the movies, though, Tyler had a kind of reverse Midas touch. No matter how big the budget, no matter how hot the star, whatever movie Tyler worked on seemed to sink without a trace. Luckily for the movie industry, Tyler soon lost interest in that career and decided to get into drug dealing instead.
“It’s a great fucking movie, bro. Eddie Murphy plays a nightclub owner on Mars. It’s like one of his best roles, so fucking underappreciated. Anyway, dude, you can hang on to the bag. It’s yours. You’re gonna make a fortune on eBay with that fucker one day.”
“As long as my shit’s safe, man. My whole fucking life is in that bag. It’s all I got.”
“Don’t stress! I’ll guard it with my fucking life, okay? Anyway—dude, we’re amigos, yeah? I got your back. You can count on Tyler.”
Jeffrey coughed and rubbed his eyes. “I need it. The rest of the dope is in there.” He checked his watch. “This is my last day of freedom. Better make the most of it.”
“I’ll get it!” Tyler sang, jumping to his feet. “I’ll get some more of that coke, too.”
Later that day, Jeffrey found himself surrounded by the kind of jeans that cost two hundred dollars and looked like they’d gone through a shredder. The plasma screens at J. Ransom on La Brea were playing some shitty song by Coldplay, but Jeffrey had drowned out the noise with his own headphones. David Bowie was singing about drawing something awful on his carpet. He leafed through the designer labels, and his mind turned once again to Bill. It was Bill who had first brought him to this place. His first suit—at least his first suit not bought specifically for a court appearance—was a black Dior number that Bill had picked up for his birthday. He knew that he was wasting valuable cash by buying the clothes he’d need for a stint in treatment at a place where socks started at the sixty-dollar mark, but he could not resist one last stroll around the place. The staff had all known Bill’s face and would trip over themselves to fawn over him. Alone, Jeffrey was just another civilian, now totally ignored by the snooty little bastards.
Sex and commerce. It had always been this way. The main thing that growing up sharing a double bed with three brothers in a Belfast council flat had taught Jeffrey was that he didn’t want to struggle for the rest of his life. His mother seemed to take some pride in how desperately they all lived, as if by enduring hell on earth she would somehow be guaranteed paradise on the other end. Apart from this sense of martyrdom Jeffrey didn’t remember too much else about his mother. When he left Belfast at fifteen and never returned, his abiding impressions of her were about her fetish for crucifixes and the empty bottles of diazepam she’d leave lying around the place. Nobody in the family mourned Jeffrey’s departure. There was no room at home for a smart-mouthed, snobby kid who thought he was too good to live this way. Especially one kicked out of the Christian Brothers school for forming “inappropriate relationships” with the older boys.
His late teens and twenties had been a time of borderline alcoholism and risky sex. London’s Piccadilly was his entire universe, and the all-night cafés, where he ate pills and waited for anxious men in suits to buy his time, were the closest thing to a real home he knew up until then. In the other hustlers, strays, and addicts of Piccadilly Jeffrey found something approximating a real family. When his friends would be beaten senseless by a client, get robbed, or locked up, it caused him deep, genuine pain. That’s why he got his first tattoo, the necklace of barbed wire. Back then a tattoo like that had the power to unnerve potential clients, pacify them even. Not like today. Jeffrey looked over at one kid folding a Ralph Lauren sweater, with diamond earrings and a skull tattoo on his forearm. He had a platinum streak in his hair and wore two-hundred-dollar designer frames. Now tattoos implied as much threat as a fucking low-fat mocha latte.
· · ·
When Bill had come along, it had been the right place and the right time. Without Bill, Jeffrey was just another rent boy who was getting too long in the tooth. Most of his contemporaries sank into chronic alcoholism and drug abuse once their looks started to go. But in Bill, Jeffrey had found the holy fucking grail, the thing that prostitutes the world over dream of: the ideal sugar daddy. Bill had been caring, considerate, generous, and—once Jeffrey got over the fact that he was almost forty years older than him—attractive. Maybe Jeffrey only had a hard-on for Bill’s status, but a hard-on was a hard-on just the same. Jeffrey wondered, not for the first time that morning, why the fuck Bill had to go and die on him.
He looked up again at the video screens. It was that stupid fucking “Rehab” song, sung by the girl who looked like Ronnie Spector after going through a car wash. Jeffrey looked at his watch. Minus two hours and counting. He was already wondering if he was doing the right thing by checking into rehab again. In his back pocket was a carefully folded square of aluminum foil, with cocaine and heroin melted onto it. In his breast pocket, a pack of Marlboro Lights with an aluminum pipe carefully squirreled away in there. Suddenly he needed more, and he needed it right now. Trembling, he placed the ninety-dollar boxer shorts back where he’d found them and stumbled out onto the street, gulping the air down.
Later, Jeffrey was in the back of a gypsy cab, on the way to Clean and Serene. They had made a stop at a Del Taco drive-thru line. He had paid the driver an extra forty to let him smoke in the back. The driver was listening to talk radio. On it, some ranting right-wing commentator was suggesting that America nuke Venezuela. The driver was Indian and agreed loudly with most of what the commentator said. An air freshener shaped like Old Glory hung from the rearview mirror.
They were waiting to pick up a Macho Burrito and a strawberry milk shake, and Jeffrey was smoking a speedball off of the square of aluminum foil. He blew the smoke out the window as the cab lurched forward. The server said, “Fou
r twenty-seven,” and Jeffrey passed the money over. He took the food and the driver pulled out of the drive-thru lane.
When he was sufficiently high, Jeffrey could once again recognize that his only option was rehab. If he wasn’t together enough to sell off the merchandise then he would be truly screwed. All of the years he had put in with Bill would have been for nothing. There was no place else to go. He hadn’t spoken to his family in years and had no experience as anything but a kept man. He had one shot to get his life in order, and this was it. Getting clean was the only possible first step. This was always the way: Jeffrey could only seriously consider getting clean when he was high. Then the terror loosened somewhat.
As they headed to rehab, Jeffrey forced the burrito down. The cocaine had sapped his appetite, but he was determined to eat something good this morning before he was forced to survive on a diet of shitty institutional food. He drank the milk shake and chased it all with a few more hits off of the foil. He made the driver pull over so he could get out and vomit the whole lot back up again in front of several horrified people waiting at a bus stop. Once he did that, he felt good. He was ready.
Jeffrey looked out to the streets. Los Angeles was such a garish, ugly place. He’d noticed that the first day he arrived from England. Nothing matched. The faux 1950s motel signs, the raggedy palm trees, the screaming billboards, the tacky neon . . . all of it a collision of styles, colors, and mismatched eras that made no sense together. Yet, somehow, there was something almost hypnotic about it. It had drawn him in all of those years ago when Bill had first brought him here after meeting in an Internet chat room.
“This place gets under your skin,” Bill had told him then, “and it never really leaves. Kind of like having a drug habit, you know? You can leave this city, but a part of it will always be lodged in your brain, calling you back. It becomes a part of you.”
He wondered if he would really be strong enough to leave LA once and for all. Or was he doomed to return, like a helpless junkie to the needle? The radio spewed, and the sirens wailed. Jeffrey picked up the foil and continued toward the bright, clean corridors of Clean and Serene. In an hour there would be interviews, paperwork, payment up front, and the first dose of medication. There would be several days of sweating and twisting on thin cotton sheets, drifting in and out of consciousness while the opiates worked their way out of his system. But for now, that was all still an abstract concern. With the coke and heroin inside of him, Jeffrey feared nothing at all.
Chapter Nine
They drove in silence. Champagne stole a few glances at the doctor as they glided down the Pacific Coast Highway in his gleaming black Mercedes. His eyes were fixed dead ahead, and she could see something churning within him, some battle raging, barely concealed, beneath the surface. His smile was fixed onto his face, almost a grimace now, his mouth twitched as if unable to form the words that sat heavy on his tongue. She smiled to herself and watched the road. He wordlessly put a CD on to break the silence. She recognized it. Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. White boy music, she thought. There was something vaguely ridiculous about the sight of him with his gray hair and his sober business suit driving his Mercedes and listening to the Chili Peppers. She felt momentarily disgusted, like she had noticed he was wearing a toupee.
She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the tinted passenger windows. Her long straight hair was parted in the middle, framing a face that had—over the years—earned Champagne a lot of money. She was born with surprisingly delicate features, and naturally full lips. The cocaine had eaten away at her puppy fat, just enough to accentuate the dramatic angles of her cheekbones. Her eyes seemed almost too big for her face, but the eyes were what kept them coming back. Mostly they were empty, but through some quirk of genetics, men tended to see what they wanted reflected in them. They saw feeling glimpses of unfathomable depth in those eyes, so sleepy, and sad. In some instinctual way Champagne understood this and made sure never to disrupt the fantasy. Part of being a good whore was learning when not to speak, knowing how to use silence effectively. Now, her features teetered on the brink: soon, the starved look around the eyes would harden her face and eat away at her beauty. But now, as she was caught between gorgeousness and devastation, she looked more desirable than ever.
When she first got the call, Champagne assumed that it was some jerk-off dirtbag pulling a prank. Ever since putting her picture and number in the back of the LA Weekly a year ago, she’d gotten a lot of those. Some fucking freak asking her if she could take a fist in her ass, while he was frenziedly jerking off down the line. No intention of ever seeing her or spending money: ninety percent of the guys out there just wanted to see what they could get for free. They reminded her of dogs, panting wetly and dry-humping lampposts in the summer heat. Champagne was well aware of Dr. Mike, just as anybody with a TV set would be.
“Yeah, right,” Champagne had laughed, “you’re Dr. Mike from the TV. And you have my cell number, and you’re calling me personally. Keep talking, fuckhead.”
But the more the doctor had spoken, mentioning Lai, and the Good Morning show, she realized that somehow this was all true. Dr. Mike, the celebrity doctor from the television, was calling Champagne to talk about her drug problem. For a moment, Champagne was furious with Lai for her seemingly endless attempts to interfere with Champagne’s private life. But as Champagne’s mom had once told her when she was a little boy: angels come in all kinds of disguises. She kept him on the line, talking. Thankfully, she started to realize that recovery wasn’t all that was on the doctor’s mind.
It was in the way that he insisted he would have to see her “in private” in a voice that quivered with nerves. The way he told her that her sister had told him a lot about the “special circumstances” of her case, and that he felt he could be a “comfort” to her. The biggest signpost of all was that he made her agree not to breathe a word of this to anyone. “If you can’t agree to that, we cannot see each other, and I cannot offer my services to you. I treat all of my clients on the promise of anonymity, and I ask that you respect my boundaries also.”
Champagne knew little about the world of celebrity, but she knew enough to realize when a man with wealth and power was offering a mutually beneficial arrangement.
As they started the ascent to the house, she tried her best to look unfazed. After all, a lot of wealthy men had taken her on dates before. The wealthy were the worst. The ones with wives, kids. They were the ones who wanted it the nastiest. The ones who strove to give off the air of normalcy. The ones who would vote against gay marriage or liberalizing the drug laws. They were always the ones who wanted to be tied up, pissed on, fucked in the ass. The straighter the outward appearance, the kinkier they were in the bedroom.
But even by the standards of her wealthiest johns, the building that they were approaching was eye-popping. It was a huge terra-cotta-colored mansion, with luscious palm trees and thriving vegetation surrounding it, with a gate and intercom system that wouldn’t have been out of place on a maximum-security prison. When they pulled up, the doctor said, “Here we are!” and the cheeriness of the comment seemed forced, out of place. He was nervous, she could sense that. She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Thank you, Doctor.” He never seemed to quite meet her gaze. In person, there was something obscenely insincere about him. They got out of the car, and she looked around. The afternoon was bright and mild, and for once the smog was clear. She could see the city splayed before her—glittering and empty, like a just-paid whore.
She took the pipe and the baggie of rocks out of her purse as they stood there. She said, “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”
He watched her, leaning against his car. Her legs were long and tan, and the thought of what was underneath her minidress made his mouth dry. He shook his head, stammering, “There’s no one around. Go ahead.”
She put it to her lips. Held the lighter, twirled the pipe expertly, and exhaled a plume of chemical gray smoke. Dr. Mike caught
a scent that was at once alien and familiar to him. He watched her as she closed her eyes, swaying, as if dancing to a slow song that only she could hear. He waited a moment, cleared his throat, and said, “Shall we go inside?”
The house was palatial and very cold. Or maybe that was the effect of the crack. Everything seemed to gleam—perfect, in place, new. Champagne ran her hands over the marble countertops and said, “Nice place. Lots of room.”
“Hm-hm,” Dr. Mike said. He emerged from the kitchen with two glasses in his hand.
“Is Absolut okay?” he asked. “I’m afraid we’re out of the good stuff. I just keep this around the house so that the cleaning lady won’t steal the Grey Goose.”
She took the glass and said, “So this is where you fix your patients, huh?”
Dr. Mike shook his head.
“I maintain a private practice in Pasadena. I do see patients here sometimes. But only certain . . . select clients.”
“Celebrities?”
Dr. Mike nodded his head slightly. “You could say that,” he said.
Champagne looked at the glass in her hand. It was full of crushed ice and had a slice of lime in it. She took a sip and handed it back to him. “Needs more vodka,” Champagne said. “This tastes like lemonade.”
Dr. Mike returned to the kitchen and topped up her drink. When he came back to the living room, Champagne was sitting on the white leather couch, unbuttoning her shirt a little. He stood there and took in the long, smooth legs. The leather boots. The necklace with her name spelled out in silver that sat between her breasts. He felt momentarily breathless with revulsion and desire.
“Why are we here, Doctor?”
“I told you. Your sister asked that I—”
“Why are we here, Doctor?” Champagne asked again. Dr. Mike was a little taken aback by how utterly unfazed Champagne was by the house, the situation . . . by him. He had expected it to be different. It had always been different before. It was almost as if she didn’t know who he was. He felt himself getting tense and a hard lump forming in his throat.
