by Tony O'Neill
“I know, I know,” Randal laughed, “I look like shit. If it’s any consolation . . . so do you.”
· · ·
With that, they hugged. To the others in attendance they were just two old friends brought together by grief. People saw them standing there, hanging on to each other, and thought, They must have really cared for Stevie. They weren’t to know that all of their grief was reserved for themselves.
——————
After a long church service, enlivened only by a eulogy from Tatum O’Neal and a graveside meltdown from Baby, who threw herself onto the coffin before fainting outright, Jeffrey and Randal sat in the half-deserted gloom of the Spotlight bar on Ivar. The place still smelled the same—a musty, long-ago smell, with an undertow of bleach. The place had the usual crowd of male prostitutes, worn-down transvestites, and other lost souls. They had the table by the jukebox.
“So his liver gave out, huh?” Randal said. “Goddamn.”
“Uh-huh. He refused to stop drinking, even when the doctors told him that the thing was failing. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that he could fuck up an eighteen-year-old’s liver in less than a year. Thought they were lying to him. Even when he turned yellow as a fucking block of Velveeta he refused to give up his vodka gimlets for breakfast.”
“How come you got to know Stevie so well?” Randal said. “You used to think he was a fucking asshole.”
“He was a fucking asshole. He was Damian’s friend. They took quite a shine to each other toward the end. He did a portrait of him, not so long ago. . . .”
“Shit,” Randal said, looking over to the bar, where Damian was waiting to get the drinks, “I can’t get over that motherfucker. Look at him! A fucking artist. How the fuck is that prick making a living as an artist?”
As he said that, Jeffrey let his eyes move toward the bar where Damian was standing. His six-foot-six frame was draped in a leather trench coat. His stick-thin legs were clad in black denim and tucked into a pair of ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He dropped the money on the bar and started walking back toward them, drinks in hand.
Randal looked Damian up and down, still shaking his head.
“No offense, man, but I’m still finding it hard to believe that you’re paying your way with those fucking paintings.”
Damian smiled, with no real humor. He slipped a glass of Johnny Walker over to Randal.
“You might dislike my art,” he said, in that nasal whine, “but it just paid for your drinks.”
“Damian has a patron,” Jeffrey said, raising his own glass to his lips, “a very generous patron. He has been buying up every canvas that Damian can produce. You know him, actually.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Rupert Du Wald. The collector. He says that Damian is possessed by genius.”
Randal looked at Damian, and then at Jeffrey. He noticed that Damian’s yellow teeth had been replaced with fancy platinum and white diamond numbers that made him look even more ludicrous than before. Randal croaked, “Excuse me,” and stood, walking toward the bathroom.
When Jeffrey followed him in a moment later, he could hear Randal snorting meth in the cubicle. He knocked on the door softly and said, “You got room for a little one inside?”
“Sure, come in.”
“Thanks.”
Bunched together around the filthy toilet, Randal held the key with a mound of meth on the tip up to Jeffrey’s nose. Jeffrey took a blast in each nostril, making his eyes tear up.
“You heard the latest about Dr. Mike?” Jeffrey asked.
“He’s in prison, isn’t he? Over those prescriptions?”
“Nah! He was out after three months. No, I mean the billboards are up all over the city. DR MIKE: RECOVERY AND REDEMPTION. The motherfucker has landed a new show on VH1. About how he found God in prison, and now he’s gonna use the lessons he learned inside to help others, and blah, blah, blah. . . . He’s on Oprah next week.”
Randal laughed, sadly.
“I guess you can’t keep a good man down. . . .”
“I guess. So listen . . . Randal . . . Damian and I . . . we have something to discuss with you.”
“Damian and I? Why exactly ARE you hanging out with this dick again, man? Seriously, the guy’s a fuckwad. A talentless, know-nothing asshole. Just because that wannabe freak Du Wald is buying into his shit doesn’t make it any better, you know.”
“Randal, I’m broke. Totally, utterly fucking broke. I never made it back to England. I never even made it out of Hollywood. Every bit of that money went into my arms. Look at this.”
Jeffrey pulled up the sleeves of his jacket, exposing his long, pale arms. They were a tapestry of needle marks, running from an angry purple welt at the crook of the arm all the way down to the bruised, swollen wrists. Then, for the coup de grace he tilted his head back, exposing a trail of angry-looking needle marks dotting the length of his throat, barely hidden with thickly applied makeup.
“Jesus, Jeffrey,” Randal breathed, “what the fuck did you do to yourself?”
Jeffrey let his chin drop again.
“Speedballs. I got hooked on fucking speedballs. The coke took me down so fast, man. So fast.” Jeffrey clicked his fingers. “Like THAT. . . .”
“Are you still using?”
Jeffrey shrugged. “I’m on the methadone program. There’s a clinic in Hollywood. I go there every morning to get my dose. I can barely afford that. That’s why I’ve gone back to working for Damian. He pays well. He did a whole series of abstract pieces based around my tracks. But listen, there’s something else.”
“What?”
“You remember some of the shit that Du Wald had in his place? The collection?”
“Sure.”
“Damian has been spending a lot of time with Du Wald. They’re real friendly these days. He managed to get these. . . .”
Jeffrey reached around to his back pocket, pulled out a small notebook, and handed it to Randal. Randal flipped the pages. There was a sequence of numbers, scrawled in spidery handwriting. “So what? What the fuck is this?”
“There are pass codes to every door, safe alarm, and case in the fucking house. All of them.”
Randal looked at the book again, feeling his throat go dry.
“And that’s not all,” Jeffrey was whispering. “He knows someone. Movie executive. Real interested in something that Du Wald had. The penis. You remember the penis that he said belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte? Well, this guy is offering six mil cash, no questions asked. All we’d have to do is get it.”
“But . . . but . . . what about Lurch?” Randal stammered. “Why doesn’t he do it himself?”
“This weekend, Du Wald is taking him to meet some of his art collector buddies in Italy. They’re going to be gone for seven days. If we’re going to do it, we have to do it then. Damian needs to have an alibi. Du Wald has no fucking idea that you and I are still around. As far as he’s concerned, we took the money and split a year ago.”
“But what’s going to happen . . . I mean, shit! How the fuck could we get away with it?”
“We got the pass codes. Who knows how long it would be before he even realizes that it’s gone? Damian has secured another vintage Cartier box, exactly like the one that Du Wald has the dick in. He’s even come up with a fake dick that looks pretty close.”
“How did he make a fake Napoleon Bonaparte dick?”
“With a blowtorch and some beef jerky. It looks exactly the same to me.”
“Well,” Randal said dryly, “he IS an artist after all. You said six million?”
“Six million. A chance to start over. We take the dick, and when Damian gets back we sell it to his contact. Then all three of us go our separate ways. Just like that.”
· · ·
When they made it back to the table, Damian was looking intently at something small, squirming on a beer mat. As they took their seats Damian said, “Get a load of this.”
They looked down. It was a cockroach. It
was on its back, six legs squirming madly in the air.
“Fucking thing tried to crawl into my rum and coke,” Damian said.
Jeffrey went to brush it away, but Damian grabbed his wrist and said, “Wait.”
Damian took a finger and flipped the roach right side up again. It froze for a moment, as if barely believing its luck, before making a break for the edge of the table. With a lightning reflex, Damian flicked it again, flipping it up into the air, landing it on its back once more. The legs resumed their wiggling.
“I love cockroaches,” Damian said, “I love their hardheadedness. Look at that fucking thing, squirming away, trying to right itself again. You know it would squirm and squirm for days if you let it? And then, if I flip it again, it will make a break for it. I used to do this for hours, when I had a dope habit, and my only friends were the roaches. Flip ’em. Watch ’em squirm. Flip ’em back. Watch ’em run. Flip ’em . . .”
“Yeah,” Randal said, “good times.”
Damian looked up. “Do you know that a cockroach can live for up to two weeks without its head? You cut its head off, and it’s so determined to live it doesn’t even realize that it’s dead already.”
Randal shrugged. “I fucking hate roaches.”
“Everybody puts the cockroach down. But it is the most tenacious, hardheaded motherfucker out there. Its survival instinct is amazing. No other creature on earth comes close. The humble fucking cockroach. A lesson to us all. Off you go.”
With that, Damian flipped it over one more time, and they watched it crawl to the edge of the table and fall off of it, scuttling away to some shadowy corner. Randal smirked at Jeffrey and said, “Deep, isn’t he?” They followed the roach’s progress for a while before turning back to Damian. Damian smiled.
“So, do we have something to talk about, boys?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Randal said, “I guess we do. We got about six million things to talk about.”
Damian laughed coldly.
“Before we get down to it, would you boys like another drink?”
Randal drained his glass, and Jeffrey did the same. “Sure,” Jeffrey said, “a drink would be good.”
Damian nodded and stood. He stretched like a cat and sauntered over to the bar. Jeffrey looked at Randal.
“You getting cold feet?”
Randal shook his head.
“No.”
“If this isn’t for you, you can walk. No hard feelings. I could find someone else. I just thought . . .”
“No. I want this. I need this. We both do.”
They pondered this as they watched Damian order the drinks, and a stray beam of sunlight illuminated the bar as someone left, casting a sudden focus on the gray, spectral faces inside. Randal had the fleeting impression that this moment had somehow been captured, preserved in amber: his hand hovering over an empty glass, the sad-faced transvestite with the five o’clock shadow pushing a coin into the jukebox, a Cuban Chinese scowling at the barkeep, the dust particles hanging suspended in the stale, musty air.
They looked at each other: Jeffrey lurking in a borrowed suit two sizes too big for his starved frame, open sores running the length of both arms; Randal’s puckered mouth, toothless, and penniless, eaten away from the inside by the ravages of meth and booze. For a moment they smiled. Looking past their desperate circumstances, their physical deterioration, their battered faces, in that instant they looked like two children, eyes burning with barely contained excitement. Just as a toss of the dice had once taken everything away from their own mentor, Dr. Mike, another toss of the dice now promised them a way out of the hell they had created for themselves. With all of the wealthy perverts, sickos, collectors, and freaks that this city seemed to breed, opportunities were everywhere. You just had to have the right kind of eyes, and you could see them, lurking in shadowy doorways like opportunistic crackheads. With a bit of luck, something would come along eventually. Shit, sometimes one toss of the dice is all you need.
Then the moment passed, and the bar seemed to come alive again. With a clunk, the jukebox whirled into life and a familiar song began to play. They sat and waited for Damian, waiting for whatever madness would come along, tapping their glasses absently with their fingers, alive again, truly alive for the first time in as long as they could remember.
Acknowledgments
Notes from a Mexican bar, somewhere in Los Angeles, Sept. 2009
Vanessa and I are sitting in El Chavito, a Mexican bar on Hollywood near Vermont that looks like a concrete bunker, drinking cheap happy-hour margaritas. On the jukebox, Chet Baker sings about falling in love too easily. The diet pills are starting to kick in, giving my stomach a strange, disembodied feeling. The last time we got drunk here we ended up in the Valley with Ron Jeremy, partying with porn directors and watching a deaf girl with enormous silicone breasts cane Ron’s ass with a riding crop. Writing is a dangerous profession, as William Burroughs once observed, and when you throw cheap, potent margaritas into the mix the danger is magnified exponentially.
“So what are you going to write for the acknowledgments?” Vanessa asks. “You keep saying that you’re going to write them, but it’s been weeks now.”
“I don’t know. Nobody ever reads the acknowledgments, do they? I’ve been agonizing over it, and the worst part is that nobody is even going to notice. Maybe I’ll get inspired if we drink more.”
“What do you have so far?”
I pull out a notebook full of spidery, handwritten notes. I look up for a moment. Over Vanessa’s shoulder I notice a crazed-looking man staring at me. From the sidewalk, he peers into the bar through the open door. He has dried vomit caked around his mouth and a T-shirt that says, MY OTHER GIRLFRIEND IS A MODEL. He beckons me over. I put the book down, walk over, and talk to him for a few moments. I come back.
“What did that freak want?”
“He said he needed a dollar to pay for his headshots. I guess even the fucking bums are actors around here.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No. I told him I’d give him the dollar if he’d sign an exclusive management agreement with me, but he refused and stormed off.”
“I can’t blame him. So what do you have?”
“Um, okay.” I start reading. “I would like to thank my wife, Vanessa, whose patience and support helped to make Sick City possible.”
“Do you mention that I saved your life?”
“What? Uh, no, I just say that . . .”
“You should put that I saved your life. You were injecting heroin and smoking crack when you met me. Put that in there. The only thing you were writing back then was phony prescriptions.”
“Okay. I’ll put that in. ‘Phony prescriptions.’ Anyway, the next bit goes, ‘My agent, Michael Murphy, at the Max and Co Literary Agency and Social Club, who is so much more than just an amazing agent, he is a tireless campaigner on my behalf for all of my craziest suggestions, a formidable ideas man, a pit bull when he needs to be, a teddy bear when he thinks no one is watching, and most of all a 100-percent, for-real, wont-let-you-down-in-a-crisis, always-have-your-back-no-matter-what kind of a friend.’ Man, that’s a long sentence. I’d better break it up or something.”
“Do you think he’ll get mad because you called him a teddy bear?”
“You think he might? I meant teddy bear in a nice way.”
“What man likes to be called a teddy bear, Tony?”
I sigh and cross that line out.
“Okay, how about this bit? ‘My editor, Michael Signorelli, who edits with a surgeon’s grace and an artist’s sensitivity . . . Thank you. You always leave the place in a better condition than you found it.’ ”
“That’s good. Are you going to mention that night we got him so drunk he ended up dancing to Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” in some sleazy Avenue A eighties club?”
“No. I don’t think he’d like it if I mentioned that. The last thing I need is my editor pissed off at me. Wait, I need more drinks.”
“Okay, the next line is, ‘Carrie Kania, whose belief in my writing really changed everything for me. Carrie really is one in a million: she possesses that rare mix of vision and the street smarts to make her vision a reality.’ ”
“That’s good. Wow, Carrie, me, your daughter . . . you got a lot of strong women around you. That’s good. No wonder you’re still alive.”
“In fact, all of my friends at Harper Perennial: Alberto Rojas, Amy Baker, Michael Morrison, Milan Bozic, and everyone who was involved in putting this book out. After all, my job was easy. I drink cocktails and write stories. You guys do all of the legwork, and I really appreciate it.”
“You got to lose that. That line is terrible. You make it sound like you sit around getting drunk all day, and the books just write themselves. You know your problem? You’re kind of like those people who are totally against drugs and try to ram it down people’s throats. Except you’re the opposite. You’re like a preacher or something: ‘Getting loaded is great!’ Tony, nobody likes a preacher.”
“I was just trying to liven it up a little. You didn’t think it was funny?”
Vanessa shakes her head at me, half-smiling.
“Goddamnit.” I start striking out more lines. I wonder if maybe I should become a preacher. That’s where the real money is.
“All right. Okay, the next bit is, ‘I want to thank George Lewis, whose conversations about Hollywood folklore were the initial inspiration behind Sick City.’ ”
“He was the one who told you about the sex tape? So, is it real or not?”
