Sick City

by Tony O'Neill

  Jeffrey shrugged. “Bumped into a few of them at meetings, you know, right after I got out. Freebase Alex, Georgie the Pimp . . . but I didn’t keep it up. Those fucking meetings depress me. Did you graduate?”

  “They booted me out over some bullshit. It wasn’t the first time. Too many fucking rules, you know?”

  “Listen, Randal, I don’t want you to think that I’ll be busting your balls or running off to Luke to go tell stories. What you do is your own business, man. I’m here for fourteen days and then I’m getting the fuck outta Dodge. What are you in here for?”

  “You mean what drugs, or why am I putting myself through this bullshit again?”

  “Both.”

  Randal shrugged. “Meth. Really, I’m here because I don’t have a choice. You?”

  “Something similar to you, I guess. I got nowhere I need to be.”

  “Have you met Dr. fucking Mike yet?”

  Jeffrey shrugged. “Nope.”

  “Me neither. He showed up last Friday and gave a fucking pep talk in the canteen, but that could have just been some asshole in a gray wig for all I know. I’m beginning to think that he’s like the Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to the doctor behind the curtain. . . .”

  “You think they’ll wheel in a television set so he can talk to us?”

  Randal yawned. “You hungry? The one thing they do have in this place that’s okay is the bagels. No poppy seed, though. They say it dirties up the urine tests or some bullshit. C’mon . . . I’ll show you around. . . .”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After getting off the stage with the final chords of “Dazed and Confused” ringing out through the club’s PA, Trina saw Pat by the bar. He was drinking, and one of the other girls was hanging around him. They made eye contact, and he waved at her. She walked over and shoved her way in between them.

  “Hey, baby,” she said.

  “Trina! I saw you dancing, girl. That was real hot shit, baby. You pick your own music? It was way better than the garbage most of these chicks dance to.”

  “Yeah. I won’t dance to anything but Zeppelin. That shit just makes me move.”

  At this the other girl left, scowling, looking for trade.

  “So how you doin’, sweetie?”

  “Good, I guess. Quiet tonight. You gonna buy me a drink?”

  Pat pushed a twenty over to the barman and said, “Whatever she’s drinking.”

  “Just a Pepsi.”

  · · ·

  Pat looked at her. “That’s the second time I bought you a drink, and the second time you ordered a Pepsi. You the clean-living type or something?”

  Trina shook her head. “Nuh-uh. I don’t drink at work.”

  “I know why you don’t drink,” Pat said, smiling.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Pat leaned in close. “Yeah. It’s all in your eyes. Or at least your pupils.”

  Trina was silent for a moment. The barkeep brought the soda. She sipped it through the straw. She looked back at Pat again.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, smirking.

  “Sure, baby. You got a steady supply for that stuff?”

  Trina nodded. “Steady enough.”

  “Well, you let Uncle Pat know if you need anything. Anything.” He leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Coke, heroin, speed, pills, whatever. You let me know, ’kay?”

  He leaned back again. Trina smiled at him.

  “Whereja get those scratches from?”

  “Oh, these?” Pat raised a large hand with fingers like clubs to his face, and touched the red marks that ran down the sides of his cheeks. “I, uh, I guess you could say that I got them in the heat of passion.”

  “Hmmm. Who’s the lucky girl?”

  For a moment Pat’s eyes glazed over. He thought about Salvia’s face, pressed hard into the mattress, struggling for breath as he tore her ass up. How he had twisted those stinking fucking dreadlocks around his fist and yanked on them so hard that the mattress barely muted her screams. How he’d had to knock some sense into her when he was done, and she’d been dumb enough to come at him with her fucking bitch nails.

  “No one,” Pat said, shaking himself out of his thoughts, “I don’t think I’ll be seeing her again.”

  Trina leaned in close. “You don’t like the rough stuff, huh?”

  “With the right lady, I like anything. You know something? You got a great smile, honey. A real knockout.”

  “Thank you. You’re sweet.”

  “That’s me,” Pat said, “a real fuckin’ sweetheart. Say, what time do you knock off at?”

  “Two a.m.”

  “You wanna go eat afterward?”

  Trina looked around. Making dates with the clients was frowned upon. The barkeep was busy mixing a drink for one of the girls. There was no one in earshot. Trina said, “Sure. But, uh, meet me somewhere else. If they saw that we were hanging out, you know, away from the club, they wouldn’t like it.”

  “Oh, honey,” Pat said with a cold smile, “they wouldn’t do shit, believe me. But whatever you’d like to do is cool. You wanna meet me at Astro Burger? Around two twenty?”

  “M’kay.”

  “It’s a date,” Pat said.

  “Is it?”

  He shrugged, smiled at her, and then stood up. He looked at his watch. “That’s me. Duty calls.”

  ——————

  It was four thirty in the morning and Pat had blood on his face. He was driving away from Trina’s apartment building at a good clip. Trina was kneeling in the passenger seat, looking through the back window.

  “There’s no one following us,” she said.

  “There’d better not be,” Pat growled. Then, looking in the rearview mirror, “The cops’ll be there soon.”

  “Shit,” Trina hissed, turning around. “They have witnesses. This is fucked up.”

  “They have one witness, and I dunno if he’s gonna be talking for a while. They don’t know who I am. It’s cool. Nobody saw you. It was a break and enter gone wrong, that’s all.”

  “GodDAMN that fucking bitch!” Trina hissed. “Don’t they need to give me notice before they change the locks?”

  Pat shrugged. Trina thought about the piles of unopened mail from Manny’s lawyers. She looked around the inside of the car.

  “You got my stuff, right?”

  “It’s all here. Don’t worry.”

  After talking for an hour at Astro Burger, Pat had asked if Trina wanted to stop by his room. She said sure, but she needed to pick up her medication from her apartment first. They drove in tandem to Pat’s motel on Hollywood Boulevard, and then took Trina’s car over to her place. They pulled up outside of the building around four in the morning, and Pat waited in the car while Trina crept across the deserted forecourt to get her stuff.

  Pat was fiddling with the radio when Trina wrenched the car’s door open moments later.

  “Motherfucker!” she spat. “Look at this shit!”

  She handed a piece of paper to Pat. She had found it taped to her front door. Pat looked the eviction notice over, and then tossed it on the floor. “They changed your locks already?”

  “Yeah. Fuck, man, all of my shit is in there. My fucking clothes, my drugs, everything is in there. That fucking bitch! The housing court said that they couldn’t do this. . . .”

  “Listen,” Pat said, “I can get in there for you. But I won’t have a lot of time. We’ll load up the car and split. You can crash at my place if you like. I got plenty of room. It’s a nice motel; they got free HBO and an ice machine in the corridor. It’ll be an adventure. You up for an adventure?”

  Trina looked out at the deserted street. The skies were still inky. “Sure,” she said, “I guess.”

  “Okay, come on.”

  They got out of the car, and Pat opened the trunk. Inside there was an assortment of tools. Pat picked up a stubby metal crowbar and a claw hammer and said, “We’re gonna have to be quick. Grab the shit you need fas
t. It’s gonna make some noise when I open the door, so the fuckin’ neighbors are gonna be lookin’, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Now, as they drove away from her apartment with everything she could grab shoved into a bag, Trina said, “You’re bleeding.”

  “It ain’t mine. Who the fuck was that bastard anyway?”

  “The landlord. Musta heard you breaking in. Shit. What if he IDs us?”

  “He ain’t gonna be talking. I got him good with the crowbar. If he even wakes up, that motherfucker’s brain is gonna be scrambled. Nobody’s ID’ing nobody. You wanna get some booze? I can stop at a liquor store.”

  Once they were a safe distance away and sure they weren’t being followed, Pat slowed the car down and merged with the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard.

  When the excitement had died down, Trina said, “Shit, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you caught up in all of this drama.”

  Pat laughed. “It’s cool. I kinda like it. Is your life always so fuckin’ exciting?”

  “Feels like it.”

  “Well, I think we’re gonna get on then.” Pat reached over and placed a hand on the back of Trina’s neck. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m all fucked up. My nerves are shot.”

  Pat started massaging her neck with a strong heavy hand. Trina half closed her eyes and let her head flop back a little.

  “You got your stuff. We’ll pick up a bottle, go back to my place, and you can unwind. This kind of shit is always for the best. Think of it as a new start.”

  Trina laughed. “Yeah. A new start. I left most of my shit in that fucking apartment. All of my outfits for work. Goddamn.”

  “I’ll take you shopping. Tomorrow. We’ll go to Rodeo fucking Drive if you like. Howzat sound?”

  Trina looked over to Pat and smiled. “It sounds like bullshit. But I like it. Keep talking. . . .”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sundays were cleaning day. Each “client” at the center was assigned a task—everything from cleaning out the ashtrays along the length and breadth of the building to working in the laundry room, raking the sand in the recreation area, or cleaning the bathrooms. With Luke assigning jobs for their section, Randal and Jeffrey found themselves with the shittiest work detail available: bathroom cleanup. The bathrooms were cavernous and stale, and as filthy as you would imagine a bathroom that accommodated one hundred men would be. Randal was at work in the showers, scrubbing the mildew from the walls with a filthy sponge. Jeffrey was looking at the stinking row of toilet stalls with a dejected look on his face.

  “How come I have to do the fucking bogs?”

  “The what?”

  “The bogs. The toilets! I want to do the showers.”

  “Fuck off. The showers are my gig. It says it on the worksheet. Randal—showers and glass. You’re on the toilets.”

  “Jesus.”

  Of course the staff framed this unpaid manual labor as being somehow essential to their recovery. They had to learn to take responsibility, their caseworkers said, they had to relearn basic skills like keeping a clean home.

  “Clean home,” Jeffrey’s caseworker had explained, “clean mind.”

  It seemed like a bullshit excuse to Jeffrey. Just another scam to save money, just like the shitty food and the itchy, prison-issue bedsheets. They charged enough money to be here. Couldn’t they afford a professional cleaning crew? Jeffrey started to unload his cart of cleaning equipment. Randal looked over to his partner. “And, Jeffrey—take your time, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ll assign you some other bullshit job. I made that mistake already. That ball-busting cunt Luke’ll work you like a bitch if you let him. You’ll be sent over to one of the other bathrooms to help that crew, or some shit like that. Don’t think that if you rush through this they’ll let you go smoke a cigarette, or put your feet up. It doesn’t work like that.”

  Jeffrey had already had his fill of the section supervisor. He had been on Jeffrey’s back lately, too, reprimanding him earlier in the day for saying good morning to a female client.

  “Talking with the female patients is forbidden, Jeffrey.”

  “I said good morning. That’s all.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We don’t want the complication of people forming romantic relationships while in therapy. So to keep it simple, we enforce a strict noncommunication rule between the men and women.”

  “But, Luke—I’m gay. You do know that, right? So really it’s YOU I shouldn’t be talking to.”

  “If you continue with this insubordinate attitude, I will have to bring it up with Dr. Mike at our next meeting. . . .”

  Jeffrey looked around the filthy bathroom, and then at Randal.

  “Jesus, fuck. What is that asshole’s problem anyway?”

  “Same as mine. Same as yours. He’s pissed off he can’t get high. He just won’t admit it.”

  They scrubbed in silence for a while, each lost in his private miseries. Finding his attention wavering, Jeffrey looked over to Randal again. So far his new roommate had been tight-lipped about everything besides how much he hated the facility, and how he’d rather be anywhere else but here. Beyond that, he wasn’t the type to spill his guts about himself in the regular group meetings. That trait was pretty unusual in this place. People seemed to trip over themselves in their hurry to reveal their darkest, most intimate secrets to rooms full of strangers. This was of course encouraged, but it made Jeffrey profoundly uncomfortable. For someone raised in an Irish Catholic household where emotions were never discussed, the urge to confess all to a room full of strangers, to share your most hidden thoughts, to cry in front of other people, was totally unfathomable. Jeffrey knew that if he wanted to “participate in the recovery process” he would have to get over this phobia, but he wasn’t sure he could do it. He could not understand how someone who had been in treatment for only a day or two could discuss the sexual abuse they suffered as a child, or the secret self-loathing that had fueled their drug use so readily. Jeffrey couldn’t help respecting Randal’s stoicism, despite the fact that the others—and especially the counselors—seemed to take it as a direct challenge to their authority.

  Something else about Randal intrigued Jeffrey. There was an aspect of Randal’s character that reminded him in a way of Bill. He had that same air of authority. It was hard to pinpoint—maybe it was just in the way he carried himself physically, or in his ability to take control of a group of people and steer the conversation without even trying, but Jeffrey guessed that on the outside Randal was someone who commanded quite a bit of respect. Even in his current, pitiful position, hunched over so he could scrub the crap out of the communal showers, Randal seemed like somebody important. Curious, Jeffrey took the opportunity to ask, “So what happened? I mean, really, how did you end up in here?”

  Randal paused. He looked back to Jeffrey. For a moment Jeffrey thought Randal was going to bat the question aside, like he usually did whenever someone tried to get him to talk about himself in group. Instead, as Randal started scrubbing again, he talked.

  “I woke up on a city bus. I’d shit my pants, my father was dead, and I’d missed the funeral. My brother told me I had to get to rehab or they’d cut me off.”

  Jeffrey quietly said, “Oh, sorry. I mean, I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

  “It’s okay. It wasn’t a shock. My father had been dying for a long time. Cancer. It had eaten away at the old man so much that all they could do was pump him full of morphine to try to stop him waking up the other patients with his screaming. I’d known it was coming. Everybody knew. It didn’t make it any easier. . . . I’d been clean for, shit, six months. No meth, no booze, no nothing. Longest six months of my life. I was dealing with these soulless movie assholes all day long. You see, my family is in the movie business. My pop founded Metro Studios.”

  There was a pause as Jeffrey processed this information.

  “He founded Metro Studios?”

 
“Uh-huh.”

  “Holy shit, really? That’s big-time.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they say. I grew up in the industry. A real son of Hollywood. When I got out of rehab last time, the family decided that I should start working for my brother, Harvey. I guess they wanted to prove to me that I could live a productive life, or something. He gave me some bullshit job in one of his offices in Studio City. So for a while I’d have to put on my shirt and pants, and show up to the office at nine in the morning. A genuine working stiff. It was hard. I mean, every day it was a struggle not to get high. But I did it! I don’t know how, but I fucking did it. I was going crazy, holed up in my little cubicle, making small talk with all of the assholes my brother employed. I mean, I was the only person over twenty-five, and they were all so fucking enthusiastic and insincere it made me wanna puke. I grew up in that world. I know what a fucking despicable, shitty, inhuman business the movies are. And these stupid assholes just couldn’t wait to clamp their jaws on that teat and start sucking.

  “They had come from all over the fucking country, all of them lured to Hollywood by the promise of the movie industry. My brother paid them peanuts, the studio was churning out crap endlessly, every so often some brain-dead actor would come in for a meeting and curse them out because they didn’t put the right kind of soy milk in the coffee, and yet these kids thought they were the luckiest motherfuckers alive. When it comes to the movies, people just . . . man, they can’t think straight. They’ll put up with anything! I don’t get it.”

  Randal scrubbed the dark brown gunk from in between the tiles of the cubicle with a little more fervor than before when he said this. He sprayed more cleaning solution on there. The brown shit started to come away. Over his shoulder he could hear Jeffrey scrubbing the toilets, waiting for Randal to continue the story. Down the halls were yells, screams, whistles, and laughs. The song of cleaning day.

  “The thing is, my old man was the only person in this world I still gave a shit about. Not Harvey, not Mom, none of the others, just Pop. Pop was the one who was always there to help me out when shit got too crazy. You know, my father had Harvey, and Harvey was the one who had Pop’s business head, and his knack for making money. He was the good son, you know? All I got from the old man was a receding fucking hairline. That, and enough money to REALLY fuck myself up. I mean, they sent me to the best fucking schools in the country. They even sent me to this fucking Swiss finishing school up in the fucking mountains until I got kicked outta there for screwing the broad that was teaching us French. I mean . . . they tried anything and everything to get me to stop screwing up. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to stop! From the beginning I was this way, always into something . . . huffing paint fumes, or shooting speed, or showing up to class with a head full of strong acid. Whatever I could get my hands on, that was what I wanted. That’s what they didn’t understand. I never came to them on my knees, begging for their help to stop. As bad as it ever got, I never really wanted to quit. There was no problem that my drug use ever caused that I figured couldn’t be solved with more drugs. Pop was the only one in the family who seemed to have accepted the way I was. I mean, shit, that’s who I am. He figured it was best not to rock the boat, and let’s just try to keep me alive, you know?”