Sick City

by Tony O'Neill

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  Dr. Mike was back on familiar ground. He pressed home his unexpected advantage. “I’m sure that those negative emotions made your disease stronger.”

  “Well, that’s just it. My pop wasted away in a hospital bed. All they could do was give him morphine to stop him from screaming. You see, my pop had a disease. It wasn’t his fault. One day he went to the doctor, they stuck a finger up his asshole, and told him he was rotting away from the inside out. It was an awful slow, painful death.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” Dr. Mike said in a monotone.

  “I am addicted to drugs because I’ve been taking them daily since the age of fourteen. Really, this is all my fault. I didn’t contract a disease. I chose this life.”

  Dr. Mike shook his head. “You didn’t choose this. It chose you. Usually it’s a combination of things. Genetics. Was your father an addict?”

  “No.”

  “Really? He never drank?”

  Randal laughed. “Sure, he drank. But he wasn’t an alcoholic.”

  “Are you sure of that? Not all alcoholics can be found pushing a shopping cart full of bottles down skid row. A functioning alcoholic can still have a healthy family life; in fact, he can seem perfectly normal in every way. . . .”

  “So what, then? If his life is unaffected, how is he an alcoholic? If he has a glass of wine with dinner, or cocktails at six, how is he an alcoholic exactly?”

  “The disease, Randal. It is all about the disease. Genetics is one factor. Childhood trauma is another. There are many factors that go into making an addict.”

  “Cancer is a disease,” Randal said quietly. “I just like to get high.”

  “I want you to be a success. I’ve spoken to your brother about your case, and I feel that with due diligence on your part we can help you. He’s very concerned about you. He loves you.”

  Randal smirked.

  “What are your success rates?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Here at Clean and Serene. When people graduate, and they attend meetings like you suggest, what are the success rates?”

  “This is a serious disease. Most people inside of this facility will not make it. You should take a look around. Within a year some of these people will be dead. Many of them will be back on drugs at least. A small percentage will remain clean.”

  “Jesus,” Randal said, “if I joined fucking Weight Watchers and they told me that in a year half of the class would be fatter than ever, some would have adult-onset diabetes, and maybe one or two would actually lose weight, I’d be asking for my money back. I read this thing I’d like to talk to you about. . . .”

  · · ·

  Dr. Mike sat back in his seat and sighed. He looked at his watch.

  “Make it quick, Randal. We have a few minutes only. And please, try to keep it recovery-related. I’m not here to debate you. I’m here to help you.”

  “You see, I’ve read a lot about the twelve steps, because Harvey lives and breathes that stuff. I mean, I just wanted to find out what the statistics were, because none of it seemed to add up to me. I read this thing about Dr. George Vaillant. He’s on the Alcoholics Anonymous World Service Board of Trustees. You see, he did this study—”

  “Oh, Christ,” Dr. Mike said, rolling his eyes. “This old story again?”

  “No, wait—listen. He’s an AA guy. He did the only study of treatment outcomes for people who do the whole AA thing. . . .”

  “Randal—”

  “He followed one hundred people who were trying to quit drinking with AA for eight years—”

  “Intellectualization, Randal! You are trying to intellectualize your problem—”

  “And he found that—please—let me finish—he found that only five percent made it, which is the same—”

  “Randal, our time is up. I suggest that we—”

  “Which is THE SAME percentage of people who spontaneously quit on their own!” Randal began to recite the part of the study that had stuck with him. To Randal, it had the same resonant power that the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous had to others in recovery. As Randal spoke, Dr. Mike stood and walked toward the door.

  · · ·

  “After initial discharge, only five patients in the Clinic sample never relapsed to alcoholic drinking, and there is compelling evidence that the results of our treatment were no better than the natural history of the disease.”

  “Thank you, Randal,” Dr. Mike was saying, “our time is up. We can continue this discussion at a later date.”

  “But don’t you see? It doesn’t work. IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK. So why are you selling me this?”

  Dr. Mike walked over to Randal.

  “Mr. Earnest,” he said, “this attitude is not going to be helpful to you in your recovery. If you don’t like the way my facility works, then you know where the front entrance is, and I will tell you again that door is NOT locked.”

  Randal stood. He was shaking slightly. He looked the doctor in the eyes.

  “But I WANT to quit. I don’t want to stay like this.” He was almost crying now. “I want to get better. But I don’t want to do it this way. . . .”

  Dr. Mike smiled, his face suddenly full of compassion. It caught Randal off guard slightly. The doctor moved toward him and held Randal’s hand, tenderly. Randal almost recoiled, but stopped himself. His hand was shaking.

  “Randal,” the doctor said, softly. “Randal. You’ve tried it your way. Yes? You’ve tried it your way. You’ve tried analyzing it, and overthinking it, and reading studies, and flying off to monasteries, and therapists, yes? You’ve tried it. Look at this. Look at your hands.”

  Randal looked down. Dr. Mike held Randal’s hand in his palm. The back of the hand was facing up. The skin was white and heavily scarred from years of the needle probing his flesh looking for working veins. Even now the wounds were fresh and angry. There were solid masses of toxins under the skin and discolored patches where it seemed that the hand was rotting away from some hideous disease.

  “This is where your way got you, Randal. Here. We follow a very simple program. You just do as you are instructed. One of our mottos here is Keep it simple, stupid. Keep it simple. Listen, and follow instruction. Okay?”

  In that moment, Randal realized why the doctor was where he was in life. Randal was dumbstruck. He just shook, and he could feel tears coming. He fought them back with all of his might, feeling used and pathetic. He croaked out, “Thank you, Doctor,” and left the office with the uneasy feeling that he had been taken advantage of, without quite knowing how.

  Dr. Mike closed the door and locked it. He sat down and called his wife. It went straight to her voice mail. Today she was in Beverly Hills, shopping. He left a message.

  “Hi, honey, it’s me. Just checking in with you. Hope you’re having a good day. It’s been crazy here today, so I wanted to call you quickly before it starts up again. I might be home a little late, so you’ll have to pick up the kids. I’ll e-mail you if I get a chance. Bye.”

  He pressed the receiver down and got a dial tone. He took the photograph out of his wallet and dialed the number on the back. On the third ring she picked up.

  “Hey. It’s, uh, it’s Mike. Are you at the hotel? Yeah. And it was all taken care of, yes? You didn’t need to sign in, show ID, any of that, correct? Okay, listen, I’m leaving now and I’ll be there shortly. Remember—don’t make any calls to room service, and stay in the room for now. As far as they’re concerned you’re a high-profile case of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. The staff have been instructed to stay away. Yes, I have the medication. See you soon.”

  He pressed the receiver again. He dialed 0.

  “Daisy? Hold all of my calls. I have an emergency with a client. Yes. I need to go off-site to deal with this; I’ll be back later. No. If it’s an emergency, e-mail me marked urgent if it really can’t wait. I have my BlackBerry. No calls. Thank you.”

  Chapter Eighteenr />
  “You awake, Randal?”

  “Yeah. Can’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.”

  They lay there for a few moments. The darkness in their room was almost total. The only light was a stray glimmer that crept in under the door.

  “What did you think of the doctor?” Jeffrey said.

  “I dunno, man. He seems to be saying the same shit they always say. He just does it with a movie star smile, that’s all.”

  “But don’t you think he has something?” Jeffrey said. “Something weird. Like a power . . . ah, I dunno.”

  “Celebrity,” Randal said. “He has celebrity. It IS a power. You know, at one point today he held my hand, and looked me in the eye, and told me that I was going to die if I didn’t do what he said.”

  “Yeah. He said something similar to me.”

  “But you know something? Even though I knew what that fucker was doing—even though I’ve been given this speech before—somehow, I felt for a moment that he was really empathizing with me. That he . . . understood me. I got choked up. I almost cried.”

  “Wow. You see? I think that there’s something different about him. You know, he talked to me about Bill. He said some stuff . . . about my father. Stuff I hadn’t thought about in a long time. About our relationship. It was pretty intense.”

  “That’s just it,” Randal said, “that’s what I don’t like about him. He has this fucking knack for getting inside of your head, but when he talks, it’s all of the same old shit. It’s just the way he presents it. I mean, think about it—hasn’t every drug counselor you’ve ever had tried to blame what you do on your parents?”

  “Well . . . well, yeah.”

  “And isn’t it a bit of a tired old fucking cliché that you were living with Bill because you saw him as some sort of surrogate father figure? I mean, haven’t you heard that old story before?”

  “Yeah. All the time from fucking therapists who don’t know the first thing about what Bill and I had.”

  “But Dr. Mike just said the same old shit to you, but somehow, he made it seem profound. It’s like when fucking De Niro is in a shitty movie. He can be working with the worst piece of shit script and somehow he sells it. Right?”

  “Yeah. Christopher Walken can do that shit, too.”

  “Right. I had that same feeling you get when you sit through the fucking Wedding Crashers or whatever, just to see if Walken still has some of that same Deer Hunter magic. You walk out of the theater thinking that Christopher Walken can act his ass off, but kinda pissed off that you had to sit through two hours of shit to see it happen. I dunno. I’ve been around celebrities a lot. And you know something, when he comes over to your house, De Niro has something kind of unreal about him. Inhuman. Like he can only really be a human being on the screen. When he’s sitting on your couch, drinking brandy with your pop, there’s something weirdly artificial about him. Like he’s half a person. That’s what I feel about Dr. Mike. That motherfucker is half a person.”

  They fell into silence again. Randal heard Jeffrey sitting up in the darkness.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “What kind of connections do you have? I mean in the industry?”

  Randal laughed a little. “Shit, I got connections. I know most of the big guys on a first-name basis, and the rest I can get to within a couple of phone calls. What, you gonna tell me you have a great idea for a fuckin’ movie or something?”

  “No.”

  “You ARE an actor. I fucking KNEW it!”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  There was a long pause as Jeffrey debated with himself one last time whether to really go ahead and talk to Randal about the tapes. He knew that Randal might just be the one person uniquely positioned to be able to help him with his problem, so he shoved his reservations aside and said, “I have a movie. I have a movie that I think is worth a lot of fucking money. The movie . . . it’s all I fucking have. It’s all I have to my name right now. But I don’t know what it’s worth or even what the fuck to do with it.”

  “I don’t follow you. You a filmmaker or something?”

  “No.”

  They lay there in silence for a moment. Randal had the vague idea that Jeffrey might turn out to be just another wannabe asshole who wouldn’t be able to get over his famous surname. When he signed checks in restaurants, he invariably had to listen to the waiter’s spiel that he was only doing this until the right part came along, or until he could get someone to buy his idea for a TV show about a crime-fighting dog with telekinetic powers. He remembered one bitch launching into a David Mamet monologue in the line at Ralph’s when all Randal wanted to do was get his groceries and get the fuck out of there.

  “Okay, here’s the story. I didn’t tell you this when we were talking the other day, but Bill used to be a cop. LAPD, homicide division. He was retired when I met him, and his family had no idea of the life he lived, especially in his later years, after his wife was dead and he could do what he wanted. There was a lot he had to keep secret. There was no room for a fag who wasn’t firmly in the closet in the force, especially back then.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But that’s not all. Bill was a drug user. No, fuck that. That sounds wrong. Bill was a drug connoisseur. He liked his boys young and his drugs pure. He was into some dark shit. The macabre, you know? Over the years he collected a lot of stuff. Stuff from the high-profile cases he worked. Stuff that the right collectors would pay a lot of money for.”

  “Okay. So, what?”

  “So when he died, I inherited what was left of his collection. A lot of the bigger items were sold off toward the end. He’d had a few surgeries, a heart bypass and a cancer scare. A lot of hospital bills. So a lot of it was gone before . . . before he passed. All of it except the movie.”

  In the gloom, Jeffrey heard Randal reposition himself. He was sitting up now, wide awake. Jeffrey had his attention, at least.

  “Okay, nice buildup,” Randal said. “I’m intrigued. So what’s the movie?”

  “Bill was one of the first cops on the scene at the Tate house, the night of the Manson murders. August 9, 1969. He said it was a fucking bloodbath. That’s the thing—over the years the whole fucking incident got so mythologized that it’s almost like it never happened in concrete reality. Like it was always some fucking awful movie about the death of the sixties. That night, though, nobody knew anything about what had gone on, and Bill was just a rookie cop showing up to a call about a murder. He was there with some old-timers on the force, and more than one tossed their fucking cookies when they saw the state the killers had left the victims in. He said the place looked like a slaughterhouse. Bill was a big movie buff. He knew who Sharon Tate was. He said it was the weirdest thing to see someone like Sharon Tate in that condition. I mean, she was beautiful. Totally beautiful and they fucking DESTROYED her. I know that Bill was never really the same after that night. That whole experience left a real mark on him.”

  “Anyway, he took some things. Said he had the feeling that this was history, you know? In all of the chaos it was easy for some items to . . . go astray. Things weren’t as strict back then, with forensics and all of that stuff. People were walking in and out of the crime scene unchecked. So he pocketed a few things. One of the bigger items he took was a box of film canisters. Eight millimeter and sixteen millimeter. Home movies, shit like that.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, he’d had the film for a while before he managed to get hold of a projector and actually check what was on there. Turned out that one of these film reels contained something pretty fucking crazy. Listen, I’m willing to tell you this, but you have to agree that I’m doing it on the understanding that it goes no further than this room. Yes?”

  Feeling slightly ridiculous, Randal said, “Jesus. Okay . . . sure.”

  Dropping his voice to a whisper, Jeffrey continued, “It was a movie shot at their house. It was a party scene. With some pretty
big people. Steve McQueen was there. Sharon. Roman Polanski. Lee Van Cleef. Mama Cass.”

  “Jesus Christ. Sounds like an interesting dinner party.”

  “Interesting is an understatement. The other tapes had similar things, even bigger celebrities floating in and out. . . . I mean, that was their world, right? It was before the fucking tabloids would stake you out and report on every little thing celebrities got up to . . . so it was just a different time. Even before Bill saw THIS tape, he thought that the others were special. You really got to see these people with their guards down, relaxing . . . candid.”

  “So what goes on in this last tape that’s so astonishing?”

  “Well, according to Bill, a lot of shit that they wouldn’t want to be made public. Drugs. Pills, booze. Everybody’s acting pretty loose, you know? And then as the fucking camera runs, everybody takes off their clothes, and they all take a pop at Sharon Tate.”

  “What?”

  Randal was not quite sure he was hearing right.

  “They all fuck her. Steve McQueen fucks her, and then he rolls off of her, and Yul Brynner has a go. Mama fuckin’ Cass is naked and eating her pussy, while someone is screwing her from behind. I mean, according to Bill it was a full-on drug and sex orgy. Twenty minutes or so of hard-core, uncensored fucking.”

  “No. I don’t buy it. Have you seen it with your own eyes?”

  “No.”

  “He was fucking with you, man. Seriously, something like that . . . I mean, you couldn’t keep a lid on it. You seriously expect me to believe that this boyfriend of yours sat on something like that for like, what? Thirty years? And he just goes and dies, leaving it to you? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Jeffrey remained silent for a moment.

  “I know that it sounds ridiculous,” he said deliberately, “but you don’t know Bill. I never saw the tape because in the whole time I was with Bill he wouldn’t let it out of the safe. But I saw other shit. Serious shit. He’d buy and sell and trade stuff with other guys in the force. I mean, unbelievable shit. You know Charles Ng?”

  “No. What’s he? A kung fu guy?”