by Tony O'Neill
Last night was just another incident in a catalogue of atrocities that kept coming and coming. The more he gambled, the more shitty-ass beer they brought to his table. After a lot of meth, and maybe thirteen or fourteen cans of Schlitz, topped off with flat well whiskey and cokes, he had met a woman at the casino. He could not remember if he had negotiated a price for her or if she had just been so drunk that she actually wanted to sleep with him. One of his last memories of the Western Hotel and Casino was a security guy hammering on the bathroom door and demanding that they get the fuck out of the stall. After that, the images faded into a numb blackness.
Randal slowly pushed the head from off of his chest. He didn’t want to wake this woman up. When he finally maneuvered her onto the pillow, he got a glimpse of her face. She looked older than he remembered. Her skin was pitted, scarred, and something else came back to him suddenly. He remembered going down on her, and the yeasty, vinegary taste that had almost made him gag. She was shaved bald down there, and her cunt hung almost inside out between her legs. Randal started to wonder what horrors this pussy had seen, and suddenly his guts lurched again. He burped and tasted tequila.
Tequila. The tequila fumes brought more memories trudging guiltily forward, like shame-faced suspects in a gang rape lineup. That’s where they had gone afterward! They had staggered to some backstreet Mexican bar that had a few lonely-looking prostitutes in it. It was dark in there. Empty, too. Juan Gabriel was on the jukebox, singing “Querida.” He had remembered that much. “I love this song,” she had said. It was dark, and she had seemed passable. Petite. Randal looked at the shape of the body in the bed next to him. What had seemed like petite in the bar now seemed borderline dwarfish. Did she even hit the five-feet mark? Her face was half turned away from him, but from what he could see from the shape of her forehead, her bone structure, there was something abnormal about her. Some kind of genetic disorder. He thought back to the bar again. An old man had stood up, and was doing a strange slow-motion dance, his thin wet lips silently mouthing the lyrics, his eyes fluttering behind half-closed lids. She had said, “I have drugs, let’s go do them,” and there, under the bathroom’s bloodred light, they had locked the door and snorted something that might have been ketamine. Whatever it was had had a strange effect on him, and the rest of his memories seemed to throb with a psychotic glow.
The next memory was a flash of being thrown out of a supermarket and shouting death threats at a manager wearing a polyester shirt. There were threats that the cops would be called. Had he bought condoms? He had no idea. The next memory took place in the hotel.
Randal sat up. The room he stayed in was totally bare, except for the bed. All over the threadbare carpet lay electrical cables, thick, strong, black electrical cables. Where had they come from? There was a backpack on the floor. So, she was wearing a backpack last night. Was she carrying electrical cables around with her? Why would she . . . ? Oh, yes. He remembered now.
“Tie me up,” she had demanded, “tie me up and fuck me!”
Randal had a hazy memory of trying to tie this woman up. Randal had never been much good at knots, and the more he tried to secure her with the cables, the more they had slipped. And she was loud, hectoring. “Jesus Christ, tie me up! Fuck me! Treat me like a bitch!” When he finally had her trussed up, the cables kept coming loose. It had taken almost half an hour, and if it wasn’t for the meth, his hard-on would have long since vanished. He remembered taking a long look at her stumpy body, then the short, thick legs, which seemed to narrow down into points like pig trotters, the arms, which were too short for the body, the unnaturally long torso. The large head, sloping forehead, pug nose. Everything about this woman seemed out of proportion to Randal. He thankfully remembered that he had turned off the light next, and everything else unfolded in the forgiving glow of the streetlights outside.
And then he recalled what she said when she was trussed up with those electrical wires.
“I’m getting married this weekend. I wanna have one more night of fun. Fuck me, Mike!”
Randal had almost corrected her and then decided against it. He looked down at his throbbing, chemically induced hard-on. He silently apologized to his dick and then advanced toward the thing on the bed. She was on her belly. Even in the dim yellow light, he could see that her back was a grotesquerie of bumps, blemishes, liver spots, and dead center a large black mole with a single hair sticking out of it.
He remembered sliding his prick into that terrible, meaty hole. She had turned to face him, that little squashed-up nose, those gerbil eyes too far apart, and that huge forehead contorted with rage as she spat, “What the fuck is this? A Nicholas fucking Sparks novel? Are you trying to romance me, cocksucker? I told you, I’m getting married. Fuck me, Mike! Hurt me! Do me nasty!”
Randal started pumping hard into her, his dick totally numb. He was receiving so little sensation from this, he knew it would be hours before he’d be able to come. He started wondering if he could fake an orgasm using the dim light as a cover. It had been done before.
The more he pumped into her, the more she hectored him. “What the fuck is this? Rape me! Tear me apart!”
As she said this, he became aware of the smell rising from her. Some hideous mix of Bengay and a rank, acidic body odor. He looked over to the windowsill. A half-empty bottle of Olde English sat there. He pulled out, walked over, and brushed a roach from the neck of it. He finished the bottle. It was lukewarm and totally flat. He shivered.
“You fucking faggot!” the girl had screamed. “If I wanted this kind of shit, I’d have fucked my fiancé! You fucking shit sniffer! Cocksucker! Fucking pretty boy shit eater!”
Randal recalled throwing the bottle on the floor and screaming at her. The bottle shattered. Someone started beating against the wall. He advanced on her.
Now he looked over the side of the bed, and there was the broken glass, and a bloody footprint, too. So that explained the pain in his feet. Jesus Christ.
There was more. He’d walked over to her, crunching the glass underfoot. If she wanted it, she was going to get it. His dick jutted toward her like an instrument of destruction. He was going to shut her up, once and for all. He spread her ass cheeks, spat a great phlegmy wad straight into the asshole, and then shoved his way in suddenly and violently. That had done it. She had tried to fling him off, but he grabbed hold of her meaty hips and thrust into her quickly and brutally, and she actually struggled against the constraints, but he held on to her hip with one hand and pressed her face into the pillow with the other, and the relentless meth-induced hammering into the thing on the mattress went on for so long that Randal felt himself coming in and out of it. Days passed. The sun rose and set on the walls. Governments rose and fell. The universe contracted, and all that was meaningful was the pistonlike movement of his cock as it thrust in and out and in and out. Everything was an abstraction. The room. The woman. The emptiness inside of him. All of it dissolved around him, until there was nothing but his prick, and the hole he was shoving it into.
Her screams turned into cries of passion, curses, insults, until, sometime before he himself made it to orgasm, she seemed to have simply passed out altogether. When he’d finally filled her rectum with come, he had flopped next to her on the bed, bathed in stinking chemical sweat, and the blackness that had been threatening him all night finally enveloped him.
That was it. When the full story came back to him, Randal hopped out of the bed, across the bloody pile of glass, and crept toward the bathroom. He shut the door and vomited as quietly as he could into the toilet. When the heaving was over he noticed the smell rising from his crotch. He looked down.
His penis was smeared brown. He touched it. It had mostly solidified, but there was no doubting it—he was covered in shit. He gagged again, and more stomach acid came.
· · ·
Shaking, trying not to breathe through his nose, Randal washed the stuff off of himself the best he could. As he did so he caught sight of himself in the mirror. His skin looke
d gray, ashen. The knocked-out teeth had aged him terribly. He saw his father when he looked in the mirror, all shriveled up, sucked in, and eaten alive from the inside out. He looked at his prick again. He spotted something solid and half digested glued to his flesh. After that, he did not look down until it was all off and the sink was full of muddy-looking water. He crept out of the bathroom and found his clothes, piled up in a corner. He slid his underwear on and then his T-shirt. He picked up his pants. As he picked them up, the wallet, keys, cell phone, and a few dollars in change fell out of the pockets and clattered onto the hardwood floor.
He froze. He looked over to the sleeping mass on his bed. She turned, quieted down for a moment, and then started snoring again. Randal picked up his cell phone. He glanced at the screen and was surprised to see a missed call. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity these days. YOU HAVE 1 TEXT MESSAGE, the screen said. He pressed a button. The screen read, from: jeffrey.
Randal stared at the phone for a moment. He hadn’t spoken to Jeffrey in a long time. They had halfheartedly kept up communication in the first few months following Randal’s departure, but then as the drugs had taken over they had drifted out of contact. The last he had heard was that Jeffrey was planning to return to England. Seeing the Los Angeles area code, Randal guessed that Jeffrey’s plans had changed. Scrolling down to see the message, Randal felt a shiver of recognition. It simply read, STEVIE ROX DEAD. FUNERAL THURSDAY @ 3PM BLESSED SACRAMENT CHURCH, HOLLYWOOD. R U OK? X JEFFREY.
Randal looked around the room. This run-down hole, with its threadbare carpets, by-the-hour rates, and regular visits by the LVPD had been his home for a long time. He thought of Stevie Rox, and Jeffrey, but most of all about Hollywood herself. No sooner had he resigned himself to one fate than she came calling again like some insane ex-girlfriend he couldn’t drink or fuck out of his mind. Just thinking about stepping foot in Hollywood again, for any reason at all, filled him with a curious kind of thrill. Maybe Jeffrey was doing better than he was. Maybe he would have some money to loan his friend. But as soon as the thought surfaced, a wave of anxiety shuddered through him. The idea of returning to Hollywood penniless and hopelessly strung out again terrified him. Then he could no longer deny the fact that he had fucked up his last opportunity. That he really was what his brother had called him for so long: a world-class, grade-A, prime piece of fuckup.
Should he stay? Should he go? He looked up to the wet patch on the ceiling and said, “I need a sign. What the fuck should I do?”
“Wha?” said the woman on the bed.
Randal started putting the trousers on as quickly as possible. Goddamnit, where were his socks? He grabbed the wallet. Grabbed the car keys. She was sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes.
“Hi, lover,” she said, “where you going?”
“Beer,” Randal stuttered, “I’m going to get beer.”
She smiled at him sadly.
“Well, you sure had fun last night,” she said, “I guess you enjoyed it more than I did. Not that I’m complaining . . . but, you know . . . you were kinda selfish.”
Randal shivered. “That’s me. Selfish. Listen, uh, I’ll be back, okay?”
“Sure.”
She looked at him with a puzzled, sleepy expression on her face as he searched around for his socks. Then, deciding fuck it, he grabbed his shoes and shook them. A fat roach fell out of one and scuttled into a hole in the wall. He stuck his shoes on without socks. The chunks of glass still buried in his foot made him stifle a sob.
“I’m getting married this weekend,” she said, “and that’s it. I’m gonna be faithful. Magnanimous. You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?” There was something tragic about the way she said it that made him almost reconsider leaving. Part of him wanted to go over to her and give her a hug. But only a small part.
“No. I don’t think that. I’m sure you’ll make him very happy. Good for you,” Randal said, and he opened the door.
Randal stopped in his tracks. He was frozen by what he saw. He had been half joking when he’d looked up and asked for a sign. He wasn’t expecting one so blatant, so shocking. He stood there, mouth hanging open, rocking back and forth on his heels for a while.
“Hey, Mike!” the voice called from inside.
Randal continued to stare out of the doorway dumbfounded. Then he croaked, “Yeah?”
“Get me some Cisco, will ya?”
“Sure thing.”
“The red one!”
“Okay.”
“And make sure it’s cold!”
At this Randal started to laugh. He closed the door behind him, now knowing that he would never step foot back in room 314 again. It’ll be cold all right, he thought. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and looked at the absurd panorama before him. The streets of downtown Las Vegas were covered in a thick white blanket of snow. The cheesy neon genie lamp that advertised the motel to the prostitutes, johns, and down-on-their-luck addicts who frequented the place had a fat layer of white on top of it. The walkway and the parking lot were covered under a silent, heavy carpet of frost. The snow was still falling, thick, intricate flakes heading downward in arcane patterns. All of the filth, and the shit, and the human wreckage of downtown were hidden for a moment. For a moment, the streets almost looked beautiful.
Randal shivered, walking out into the white toward his car. The air was clear and sharp, and it made his lungs feel freshly scrubbed out. His feet crunching into the frost was the only sound. The room had two more days left on it. Anything of value had long since been stolen, lost, or pawned. All he had was his wallet, the clothes on his back, and a car that might not make it all the way to Los Angeles. He sat down in the driver’s seat and fumbled with his wallet. Finding the last of the meth, he took out his keys and inhaled a generous blast in each nostril. Then he stuck the key in the ignition and turned the engine over. What was that great rallying cry of the American spirit? “Go west, young man!” Randal looked at his shriveled face in the rearview mirror. He turned the radio on and caught the end of a Missing Persons song, “Walking in LA.” Deciding that maybe old men can go west, too, Randal stuck the car in Drive and started on the road to home.
Two
Somewhere in the church, over the lilting melody of the pipe organ, a noise, a barely human noise, was building in waves, growing louder, stifling out everything else. In the pews, supported by her tarot reader and her hairdresser, Baby was wailing, inconsolable, playing the grieving bride behind a black veil perfectly appointed to match her Armani suit. And front and center was Stevie Rox, as ugly in death as he was in life, bloated, stuffed, plugged, painted, and rigid as a board. The coffin was dark mahogany, with a white silk interior. Ray-Bans shielded his extinguished eyes. Chubby hands clutched a crucifix to his chest, all decked out in a three-piece Yves Saint Laurent suit and a garish, European-style silk shirt.
The mourners lined up around the coffin, passing by him in turn, and each remembered how Stevie had touched their lives. They were a particularly Hollywood mix of actors and celebrities, businessmen, drug dealers, adult movie stars, and other rootless, wasteful children of Los Angeles. An Oscar winner stood over Stevie: once famed for his intense, soul-searching performances in the first wave of great American independent cinema, and now relegated to playing lovable curmudgeons in romantic comedies pitched at aging baby boomers. His iconic features were now shriveled as a prune. He let his hands dance over the white silk as he whispered his good-byes, remembering the prostitutes that Stevie would send over to his house, unannounced. The next day Stevie would call him up, cackling. “How did ya like the flowers I sent over last night?” That’s what he called them, “flowers.” “Oh, sure, they were beautiful, Stevie. The nicest arrangement yet.”
Next there was a young woman who looked down on Stevie’s corpse with a cold smile. She thought of screen tests and hush-hush abortions. She whispered, “I hope you burn in hell, you rotten cocksucker . . . ,” before walking on. Stevie’s coke connection was next. He slipped a
n eight ball of cocaine into Stevie’s top pocket, a promise he’d made to Stevie a long time ago, and one that he had decided to keep. Stevie was ambivalent about the thought of an afterlife, but he had wanted to make sure that, just in case, he’d have some blow for the long eternity ahead. Stevie had paid for his dealer’s house, his cars, and his daughter’s college tuition. It was the least he could do. “Godspeed, Stevie. . . .” And then came a skeletal figure who had only met Stevie twice. His lank hair was combed back, tight against his skull. His skin was gray. The light in his eyes was all but burned out. It looked as if he were the one who should have been in the casket. Jeffrey shook his head slightly, amazed that he had outlived Stevie Rox. Stevie Rox, who had, in his own little way, helped to bankroll this last, final spiral into utter hopelessness.
· · ·
Looking down at Stevie, he remembered the last time he saw him, sitting on the edge of his indoor pool, in that monstrous villa in the Pacific Palisades, smoking a cigar and casually flicking the ash into the water. The way he had looked at the envelope of cash they had handed to him. That wide, bloody smile.
“Boys,” he had said, “I guess this is what they call a win-win situation.”
And now, just over a year later, Stevie was dead of liver failure. The morticians had done their best to play down just how yellow Stevie had looked in the last weeks. Jeffrey was standing there in a borrowed suit, wondering where exactly he would get the money to score when he finished with the last of his heroin. The thought brought about a twinge of psychosomatic withdrawal: a shudder in the gut, a loosening of the bowels, an internal chill that shook him with a wave of nausea. He tried to catch his breath. As he did, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Are you a friend of Bill W.’s?” a familiar voice asked.
Jeffrey turned. He blinked his eyes, as if to adjust his focus. He found himself staring into a face transformed. The features were almost the same, but the face seemed to have aged terribly in the preceding year. Maybe it was the missing teeth that did it. It made the cheeks seem even more sucked in, the mouth more puckered, like a little old man. Almost every last trace of that remaining youthful beauty was now gone. The bleached hair was thinner now, the skin blotchy.
