Sick City

by Tony O'Neill

  “Can you turn that fucking shit off?” he’d barked eventually. “This fucking music is driving me crazy.”

  “This is Prince Far I, mon. Bumbaclaat!”

  “It sounds exactly like all of the other stuff you play. How can you tell this stuff apart? It all sounds exactly the fucking same. It’s driving me crazy, Levi. Have a heart, man!”

  “Well, mon,” Levi sighed, “you have cloth ears. Maybe you’d appreciate dis better if you had a smoke.”

  “You got anything?”

  “Nah. . . . Even mi fucking mouthwash is alcohol-free. . . .”

  · · ·

  Thankful not to hear the relentless beat of Levi’s music, Randal pushed the door open. The room was in darkness. He thought he had the place to himself for a moment, before he noticed that Levi was sitting in the room with the blinds drawn. He was perched on the edge of his bed, with his head in his hands.

  “Levi? Are you okay?”

  Levi shook his head quickly and turned away from Randal. “Get out, mon. Me need some space.”

  From the sound of his voice, Randal knew that Levi was crying. Randal crept forward.

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  Randal looked around the room. On the floor were ripped-up shreds of paper. He looked over at the nightstand. Haile Selassie was up there, alone. He looked back at the floor. The shards of paper were all that was left of the picture of Michelle.

  “Is that your girl on the floor?” he asked.

  Levi looked up, his eyes bloodshot and his cheeks wet. “Nosy motherfucker, ain’t you?” he hissed.

  Randal shrugged, but did not leave.

  “Yeah. Bitch up and left. Said she can’t wait for me. Wants to move back in with her mom.”

  “She’ll come around. Just give her some space. . . .”

  “Space? The bitch GOT space. That’s the problem. And it’s not just that. She’s fucking some dude. I need to get the fuck out of here and talk to her.”

  “But your parole . . .”

  “Fuck my parole. I know a guy who can get me a passport, yeah? I could pick her ass up and we could be out of here before they even know I’m gone.”

  “I dunno, man. That sounds like a bad idea, listen . . .”

  · · ·

  Randal walked over to Levi. He placed a hand on Levi’s shoulder. He felt Levi tense up under his touch, so he pulled back a little. “Just . . . look, I just came here to pick up my copy of the Big Book. I have a meeting. Just don’t do anything stupid, okay? We’ll talk it out when I get back.”

  “Yeah, mon. Sure,” Levi said. Randal nodded and picked up the book. He looked back at Levi.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Levi sniffed, and said, “You know what the worst fucking part is? The part that really fucking kills me?”

  “What?”

  Levi shook with rage as he hissed, “She’s fucking a nigger. As if leaving me wasn’t enough, as if crushing my fucking dreams wasn’t enough, now she’s fucking a nigger. GodDAMN!”

  Levi started to bawl, like a little child. Randal looked over at the picture of Haile Selassie, and then back at Levi, who was balling his fists and trembling as he sobbed. “Look, I’ll see you in a little while,” he said, before he crept out, softly closing the door behind him. He moved on down the corridor for his daily meeting.

  By the time he made it back to his room, Levi, the stereo system, Haile Selassie, and all of that fucking reggae music was gone. All that remained were the torn-up fragments of Michelle’s picture. Randal walked back downstairs to the front office and asked for some tape.

  “What for?”

  “There’s a rip in my copy of the Big Book.”

  The kid behind the counter sniffed and passed over the tape. “Make sure you bring it back,” he said.

  “Yes, captain.”

  · · ·

  Randal returned to the room and silently gathered the pieces of the photograph together. He laid them out flat on the nightstand and arranged them like a jigsaw puzzle. It was tricky, and it took a while, but he was able to repair the picture. It looked messy, and most of the rips were plainly visible, but it was better than nothing.

  “It’s just you and me now, Michelle,” he said to the picture, “you and me.”

  Randal placed the picture under his pillow. Tomorrow there would be questions asked about Levi’s departure, but for tonight he had his own room, and a girl in a bikini to keep him company. Life was good.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After the prayers and the coffee, Jeffrey sat staring at the men in the circle sullenly. It was his first meeting, and surprise sur-FUCKING-prise—it was the same bullshit as always. Jeffrey looked around at the collection of grinning, evangelical ex-dopers and -drunks, banging on about the Big Book, and the twelve steps, with the lobotomized zeal of the newly saved.

  The detox had been several days of barely conscious sweating and hallucinating madness. The incident with the Hammer had unnerved him greatly. For days afterward, Jeffrey expected to wake up in his detox bed to find the Hammer looming over him in his SS gear, ready to administer some bloody revenge with a gigantic sex toy. By the fifth day the worst of the opiate withdrawals were over, and the paranoia started to fade, but Jeffrey was left with a post-kick reservoir of rage and hatred inside of his soul, which was not being soothed away by having to sit in this pointless, airless meeting on his first day in population.

  Jeffrey cast an unimpressed eye around the room. Look at these fucking jokers, he thought. It doesn’t take a fucking genius to work out where they came from. Let’s see. This fucker here, with the gut and the shiny, comfortable-looking face. Drinker. Probably got a family, and a nice house in the Palisades. Probably here because his wife is sick of him getting drunk and making an ass of himself at important social gatherings. Or maybe he groped the maid after a few mid-afternoon cocktails, and she complained to the wife. Either way, he’ll be clean and serene in his allotted thirty days, and will probably become a twelve-step lifer. It’s like joining the country club for people like him, except they just talk about getting drunk instead of actually doing it.

  Jeffrey shifted uncomfortably in his hard plastic seat. He was only marginally aware that the meeting’s main speaker was still talking.

  This guy . . . man, opposite end of the spectrum. Those tattoos are prison tattoos. No fucking doubt about it. He’s probably here on condition that he completes, otherwise he’s going back to jail. He’s Latino, so he probably got busted with an amount of coke that a white guy would have walked for, and now he’s caught up in this bullshit system and will have to play along with all of it. This poor fucker will do everything by the book, graduate, relapse, and be locked up again within twelve months.

  This chick here is a painkiller freak. You can spot them a mile off. That smoothed-over, alien face of the wealthy and the bored. Hm. OxyContin, Ambien, Xanax, maybe a glass of red wine. Probably been doing that for forty years. Maybe she’s getting divorced, and this shit is about to get brought up in the case, and she’s doing this to ensure she gets a big enough chunk of her husband’s assets.

  · · ·

  “That’s when I was at my lowest ebb . . . ,” the guy was saying, “that’s when I knew I’d reached my rock bottom. Finally, with no other options, I somehow found the strength to let go, and let God. I picked up the Big Book one more time, and I started to read. . . .”

  I mean, that’s the fucking problem with this fucking shit, Jeffrey thought, sulkily, nobody REALLY buys it. It’s like some kind of Chinese face-saving ritual. Everybody goes along with it for whatever reason—fat boy over here doesn’t want his wife to kick him out because he groped Esmeralda, this poor fucker over here doesn’t want to go back to jail because he enjoys smoking a pipe at the end of a bullshit week of cleaning dishes for white people, and this rich old cunt wants to make sure she isn’t painted as a drunk and a pill freak in the divorce proceedings so she can truly screw
over her cheating rat bastard of a husband.

  And what is everybody’s get-out clause? God. That’s why the fucking twelve steps have such a place in this society, because all of them, all of these fucking Americans are so fucking strung out on God that they’s start shitting their pants if he was taken away. Not spirituality, of course. Nothing so demanding as having to actually consider the idea of something greater than themselves. Just a word: “God.” God as an abstract idea. God: the word that wipes away the sins of unfaithful politicians, crooked lawyers, drug-using heiresses, and soap actors who drive drunk. “I found a relationship with God.” And all of America waves their hand like a gin-soaked priest after confession. “Go forth, your sins are forgiven.”

  After less than two hours out of the detox ward, Jeffrey was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t in fact made a very stupid decision by agreeing to the minimum two-week stay in population. Maybe he should have just split after getting out of the detox ward. I mean, Christ, what exactly did he hope to achieve by staying here longer than was absolutely necessary?

  The meeting’s chair had shared an interminable story in which he detailed a short burst of drug use, followed by thirty years of hanging around AA meetings sharing his “experience.” When he opened the meeting up, everybody sat there, sullen and silent for a moment. Then someone raised his hand.

  “Hi, my name is Randal, and I’m an addict.”

  “Hi, Randal,” the room chimed.

  Jeffrey took in this guy and smiled. He had some of his own sullen indifference in his face at least. There was something eerily familiar about the face. Was he a celebrity? He had spotted one disgraced local politician and a girl who was either a model or an anorexic, looking extremely uncomfortable in the lunch queue. Not a great celebrity-to-nobody ratio. Tyler would have been disappointed. But this guy . . . there was something that rang a bell with Jeffrey. Maybe he used to be famous. He was handsome, but there was a certain hardness to the face now, probably the result of decades of drug use.

  “So uh, I’ve been here for a week now,” the guy said. “I mean in population. I’m feeling a mixture of emotions. Mostly I’m wondering just why the fuck I’m putting myself through this again. I thank you for sharing your story with us, but Jesus, every time I’m in these places, all I wanna do is get fucked up. I mean, really, AA makes me want to smoke meth. Ah, well, fuck that. Everything makes me want to smoke meth. I was tying my shoes this morning, and that made me want to smoke meth. I mean, my problem with not smoking meth is that everything seems so fucking boring now. I get the program. I really do. I understand! But I wonder if I get with the program, and say that’s it—no more drugs, no more booze, no more fucking around . . . I mean, I might live to be eighty or something, but Jesus Christ it sounds like hell, you know?”

  This elicited some nervous giggles from the room. The guy had a model’s cheekbones in a certain light, though he was slightly demented-looking. He was in his late thirties and had dyed his thinning hair platinum, and that gave him a strange, permanently startled look. He was wearing expensive-looking clothes, out of place with his on-the-skids persona.

  “I mean . . . ,” Randal went on, “it’s totally cool that you’ve been clean for thirty years, and I’m not trying to belittle your life or your experience . . . but you know, I don’t know if it’s for me. I mean, thirty years sober would seem like a life sentence to me.”

  Then Randal fell silent. He looked at his shoes. He was done sharing. There was an awkward quiet in the room while everybody waited for someone else to raise their hand. After a few moments the shiny-faced fat guy raised his hand and started talking about how his drinking had been getting out of control and his wife and daughter were pissed at him.

  “It came to a head . . . at a party over at the Weinsteins’ house, when I, uh, got drunk and, well, I did some-thing I’m pretty ashamed of. Something inappropriate. With . . . with one of the Weinsteins’ hired help. I mean, uh, I don’t really remember much of what went on, but everybody else certainly does, and I doubt my wife is going to forget it in a hurry. . . .”

  Back to our regularly scheduled programming, Jeffrey thought, sitting back in his chair and closing his eyes. . . .

  ——————

  Later that day Jeffrey was introduced to Luke, a balding ex–crack smoker from New York with a dirty smoker’s laugh and graying stubble on his square jaw. Luke was to be Jeffrey’s mentor for the first few days.

  “Just till we get ya situated, y’know? You’re gonna be on the third floor. You been in treatment before?”

  “Yes.”

  Luke smirked. “Yeah, I kinda figured. You can usually tell the returnees from the candy-asses. Well, you don’t need the sales pitch from me then. But they’re a nice bunch here. You’re rooming with a new guy. Well, uh . . .”

  Luke leaned in conspiratorially.

  “This guy’s kind of a problem, to be honest. From what I see of him, he’s a real example of self-will run riot. I’m not keen on putting a new guy with him, but his room is the only one with a spare bed at the moment. If you have any concerns, you just talk to me, okay?”

  “Sure thing.”

  They walked up two flights of stairs and into a long corridor with staticky, electric blue carpeting. The place had the look of a vaguely high-end European youth hostel. The air smelled faintly of Pine-Sol and air freshener, and off in the distance the whine of vacuum cleaners toiled away. When they came to the right door Luke knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again and walked in.

  · · ·

  The room was nondescript and clean. There were two twin beds separated by a nightstand with a lamp on it. On the farther bed lay Randal, the guy Jeffrey had seen in the meeting earlier in the day. Randal was reading a magazine and blasting music in his headphones. Sensing movement, he looked up. He jumped to his feet and said, “Shit, sorry, didn’t hear you guys!”

  “Randal—I’d like you to meet Jeff.”

  “Jeffrey,” Jeffrey corrected, shaking Randal’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Saw you in the meeting this morning. You were talking about tying your shoelaces.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Right.”

  “What are you reading?” Luke asked.

  “Oh, uh, nuthin’. Just a magazine.”

  “Is it recovery-related?”

  “Uh?”

  “Recovery. As you know, Randal, we have a rule here that only recovery-related literature is allowed inside of the facility.”

  “Actually, Luke, yes, yes, it is. I’m actually reading a pretty inspiring story of one man’s struggle to overcome addiction, and, uh, I think that there’s some lessons in here that I can apply to my own, uh . . .”

  “May I see it?”

  Jeffrey watched with amusement as Randal tried to fast-talk Luke. “Well, uh, I mean if you’d like to . . .”

  He reluctantly handed it over.

  “ADDICTED TO PUSSY,” Luke read, “THE MAN WHO CLAIMS TO HAVE SLEPT WITH OVER 10,000 PROSTITUTES.”

  “It’s actually very inspiring. He, um, well, I think he’s just getting to the part where he weaned himself off of, you know, the hookers. . . .”

  “This isn’t recovery-orientated, Randal, and you damn well know it. This is going to have to go into the confiscated box.”

  “How is this not recovery-related? Sexual addiction is a problem I can relate to. . . .”

  “Then read the Big Book, or read one of Dr. Mike’s own books on sexual compulsion and addiction. Don’t try to tell me that Sexual Tourist magazine has anything to offer you right now. I mean, Jesus, Sexual Tourist magazine? Where did you find this?”

  “There’s a great twenty-four-hour newsstand on Holly-wood and Cahuenga.”

  “Hm. Anyway, can you try to keep this kind of bullshit to a minimum? I don’t want you fucking with other people’s recovery. If Jeffrey tells me that there are any more fucking shenanigans in this room, we’ll bounce your ass right out of here. Capisce?”
/>   “Sure.”

  Jeffrey tossed his bag to the floor.

  “I’ll see you boys downstairs,” Luke said, turning to leave. “We have our afternoon meeting in thirty minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  And with that Luke was gone. Randal flopped back onto his bed.

  “What the fuck is up with that guy, man? You heard the way that jerk-off talks? Who the fuck uses the words ‘shenanigans’ and ‘capisce’ in the same fucking sentence?”

  “He seems a little high-strung,” Jeffrey agreed.

  Jeffrey started to unpack his bag.

  “Hey, listen . . . you an actor or something?” Jeffrey asked. “You seem kind of familiar. . . .”

  “An actor? No, thank Christ. You aren’t an actor, are you?”

  “Nah. I’m no one.”

  “You seem familiar, too. You been in treatment before? Don’t I know you from Tarzana?”

  “I was there in oh-six,” Jeffrey said, “sixty-day bit in the summer, I think.”

  “Hm. I wasn’t there in oh-six—oh-three, I think. You been to Utah?”

  “What, Cirque Lodge?”

  “No, for the fuckin’ nightlife. Yeah, Cirque Lodge.”

  “Nah.”

  “Fun place. I was in there with Lindsay Lohan. Word on the grapevine was that she fucked her way through every crackhead and drunk in that place. She split before I got a turn though. Pure Hollywood trash.”

  As he shoved his clothes into drawers, Jeffrey suddenly said: “Cri-Help. You were in Cri-Help!”

  “Sure. That woulda been . . . fuck, ninety-six? Seven?”

  “Ninety-seven!” Jeffrey laughed. “I remember you. You roomed with Big Mike. Jesus, you keep in contact with any of those guys?”

  Randal shrugged. “You remember Don? The truck driver?”

  “Yeah. Crackhead, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s him. He died. Heart attack. Was doing, like, sixty miles an hour at the time. Went off the freeway and demolished a roadside diner.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. Recognized his face on the news report. Besides that . . . ah, I don’t really keep in touch with people from these places. It’s not like I’m ever gonna see them again, you know? You?”