by Tony O'Neill
Looking slightly shocked by Kenny’s outburst, Kristina quickly composed herself like the professional she was and simpered, “I just had shower, Mister Azura. Before coming.”
“Yeah? Well I’m taking a guess that you don’t live in this fuckin’ neighbourhood, right? I mean, I doubt you make that much sucking dick, right honey?”
Kristina looked confused.
“Lemmie guess? Santa Monica between Fairfax and La Brea, somewhere down there in fuckin’ borscht land, right? So that’s at least forty minutes you’ve been sitting in a cab getting all stale and funky. Why don’t you stop sitting there looking useless and go freshen up for me, okay? Despite what Al Pacino mighta led you to believe there ain’t nuthin’ enticing to me about the fuckin’ scent of a woman, okay? Chop chop!”
The girl just stared at him, as if not understanding a word of Kenny’s coke-garbled insults, so he simply resorted to pointing the bathroom and yelling “GO CLEAN YOUR SNATCH!” Kristina had a pretty ropey grasp of English, having just arrived in the US two months ago from a small town outside of Moscow, but she did understand his agitated tone of voice well enough. She’d had it drilled into her by her new bosses at Angel LA Escorts that Mr. Azura was a rich, valued customer who must be obeyed, so she trotted toward the bathroom as ordered with a submissive, simpering smile on her face.
“And hurry it up!” Kenny called after her, muttering darkly to himself as he clicked over to Gibby again.
“Gibby!” He cleared his throat. “So where’s the goddamned script?”
Gibby, momentarily caught unawares, stammered, “Wh-wh-what?”
“Fuck is wrong with you? You having a fuckin’ seizure over there? The SCRIPT Gibby, where the fuck is it?”
“You didn’t say that you… needed to see it!”
“Gibby. I am about to sign off on a contract that will make you and Jacques a hell of a lot of money. Or, I should say, that will put a hell of a lot of MY money – and Chainsaw’s money for that matter – in your hands so you can deliver Black Neon, yes? Now tell me, Gibby. Do I look like a pretty Korean cocktail waitress to you?”
“I’m sorry Kenny, I don’t follow.”
“A pretty. Korean. Cocktail waitress. Do I look like one to you? It’s a simple fucking question Gibby, so stop stuttering and start answering…”
“No Kenny,” Gibby answered evenly, “you do not look like a pretty Korean cocktail waitress.”
“Fuckin’ goddamn straight I don’t. So why are you trying to stick your fucking DICK in me? You expect me to sign off on this shit without even a script? I know that Jacques is a talented motherfucker, but as for you Gibby, I don’t know. If I can’t even count on you to get me a few scenes of this script he’s working on, then a part of me has to wonder exactly what fucking value you add to all of this? I know what I’m bringing to the table, Gibby. You do know what I’m bringing, right?”
“Yes,” Gibby croaked, mindful not to set Kenny off again, “you’re bringing the money.”
“Correct. Correct-a-fuckin-mundo. And lets be clear on this point – I’m bringing a lot of money. That’s not to mention my vast expertise in the movie game, plus my contacts. I am fucking untouchable in this town, Gibby, and you should be feeling pretty fucking lucky that you are getting the benefit of my experience and my extraordinary fucking brain if you ask me.” Kenny snorted loudly, dislodging a chunk of cocaine that proceeded to drip down the back of his throat throughout the rest of the conversation. “Now, I know what Jacques is bringing to the table. I’ve admired Jacques for a long fucking time, Gibby, you know that. Truth is, I don’t think that Fellini is worthy of rolling the used condoms off of Jacques’ dick. But you, Gibby? You are a fuckin’ enigma to me. What exactly do you do, except lurk down there with the rest of the trolls and the parasites leeching off a percentange of Jacques’ genius, and stuttering like a fuckin’ retard when I ask you when I can see a simple fucking script?”
Gibby gripped the phone so hard that the plastic casing started to groan and creak ominously. He took a deep breath and said, “When will you need it by?”
“Hold on.”
The line clicked again, and Gibby found himself listening to that awful musak one more time.
Kristina had emerged from the bathroom naked, one of Kenny’s monogrammed towels wrapped around her lithe body. Kenny gestured wildly at her to come over to him.
“Drop the towel,” he hissed.
Kristina did as she was told. Kenny cast an appraising eye over her pale, thin body. He twirled his finger, gesturing for her to turn around. “Slowly,” he warned. When her back was turned to him he said, “Bend over. Touch your toes.”
The girl did as instructed. Kenny squatted down so his face was level with her buttocks. He put his face between her ass cheeks and inhaled deeply, his nostrils nicely cleared out by the coke. He filled his lungs with the bouquet of her freshly soaped asshole. Standing, Kenny snapped his fingers and pointed her toward the bed. She went over there and lay down, waiting for him obediently. He clicked over to Gibby again.
“Gibby.”
“I’m here, Kenny.”
“Good. In the meeting you mentioned that he is working with James Stein on the script, yes?”
“That’s correct.”
“I’ve heard Stein is washed up. My assistant has informed me that he has written seven books since Point of No Return. Shitty reviews, dwindling sales, and I haven’t even heard of any of them. This worries me, Gibby. So I want to see some of what they’ve come up with. Just to put my mind at rest, yes?”
“Well…” Gibby lied, “I believe that they’re pretty much done, but Jacques is being quite secretive about it. It’s part of his… process, you know? You know how artists can be.”
“Gibby, I will accept the artist defense from Jacques, because he is undoubtedly a fucking artist. From you, however, that shit will not fly. I want to see something, and I don’t care if you have to sneak it from his fucking laptop while he is taking a nap. I want to see something, do you understand me?”
“Yes. I understand you completely, Kenny.”
“Good.”
Kenny’s eyes drifted over to Kristina, who was watching the small, agitated man who had paid for her time with wide, doe-like eyes. Kenny cleared his throat.
“Well then, I have some business I gotta take care of now. Let’s touch base at the end of the week, okay? You know where to find me in the meantime.”
Before Gibby could say another word the line went dead.
Dropping his pants and stepping out of them, Kenny advanced on Kristina. He clicked a remote control that caused music to swell from his $94,000 Avant-Garde Trio Classico speaker system. It was the German Symphony Orchestra and Sting performing If I Ever Lose My Faith In You from the Live In Berlin album (which Kenny considered to be one of the Police front man’s finest recorded efforts). With speakers this good, Kenny often told his guests, it was better than sitting in the front row of the concert itself. As he advanced on the young hooker, Kenny mimed conducting the music, and sang along with what was undoubtedly one of his favourite songs of all time. He climbed on the bed, straddled her chest and said “Lie flat, face up with your mouth open. Do you gag easily?”
Kristina shook her head. She got into position without question. “Hope you don’t,” Kenny muttered, “The last bitch puked all over my designer Egyptian cotton sheets...” Then he straddled her head and rammed his cock into her gullet without so much as a warning. He proceeded to roughly fuck her face with all of the detached aggression of a man using a plunger to fix a badly blocked toilet.
Back at his place, Gibby slumped on his couch, unbuttoned his shirt and sat there cradling his head in his hands for a while. He knew for a fact that there would be no script. He felt that they had dodged a bullet in the original meeting when Jacques had managed to steer the conversation away from scripts altogether, but
now Gibby was faced with the unenviable task of producing material from a script that did not exist in an attempt to pacify a rampaging, coke-crazed dwarf with the power of life and death over his career.
He thought back to how he had left Jacques at that awful, fleabag hotel, fat, sweaty and drooling over himself in the aftermath of his accidental PCP freak-out. He wondered absently what kind of degenerate shit Jacques was currently up to, while he should be working on the script of Black Neon. He thought about a lifetime spent catering to no-talent, ill-tempered, self-aggrandizing assholes like Jacques so he could lap up his meagre cut, the fifteen per cent backwash from the sewage his clients foisted upon the great, consuming maw that was the general population. Jesus Christ. Gibby realized he truly was a man out of time. What the fuck did someone who actually cared about creating something vital, lasting and timely have to offer this air-conditioned cesspool?
Even Jacques – who had certainly at one point been possessed by the zeal to create something pure – had either grown out of such naïveté, or had the urge beaten out of him by a decade of drugs, relationships gone bad, and relentless media vilification. Sure, he had recently climbed back into the ring but more and more Gibby could see that Jacques was a mere shadow of the man who had once created Dead Flowers. Now he was staggering around Hollywood like a weakened bull with colourful banderillas sticking out of its back, making some final, instinctual charge toward a target it could barely comprehend anymore.
Hoping to find some kind of a distraction from his thoughts he turned on the news. The top story was about some freak called Rupert something-or-other who’d just paid nine thousand dollars for a pair of Queen Elizabeth II’s used panties. He flicked the TV off with a shudder, concluding that the world had gone quite mad. He went to pour himself a stiff drink.
TWENTY-THREE
“My folks were immigrants, my mom was Haitian, my pop Ecuadorian. They settled in Houston, that’s were I was born and raised. We lived in a trailer park. Place called the Lone Pines, in North Houston. It was a tiny fucking place, but it was okay. We were happy, I guess. We were happiest when my pop was out working and it was just mom and me.”
“Wait – you’re half Haitian? You never told me.”
“You never asked. But yeah, I don’t look it I know. Anyhow, my pop he was a super over at a housing complex called the Dayton Plaza, fixing toilets, leaky ceilings, all that kinda shit. He also did a bit of work on the side for a guy called Angel Caribe. Angel was a coyote, had a network of guys smuggling people across the desert from Mexico, Guatemala, all over the damn place.”
“Damn, so this Caribe guy was some kinda gangster, huh?”
“He was some kinda something all right. He was pretty well known in Houston back then. He put a lot of money back into the community, building immigration advice centres, donating to schools, community centres, political campaigns, all that kinda shit. Some people considered him to be something of a Robin Hood type. That was just romantic bullshit though. Truth was he was just a businessman, pure and simple. I actually met him once, long time after the fact. Handsome older guy with silver hair and one of those George Hamilton tans that scream money. But back when this all went down – I was fifteen at the time – I’d never even laid eyes on him. I didn’t even know my pop was involved with him. The only place I’d heard Caribe’s name was on the local news.” Lupita looked over to Genesis who had her eyes closed. The gauze was red and moist. “How’s the hand feeling? Those pills helping any?”
“I guess. I still feel pretty shitty, Lupe. Keep talking, it stops me thinking about how much it hurts. So what did your pop do for him? Was he like a hit man or some shit?”
Lupita laughed. “No, hun. Not even close. My pop was strictly small time. The only person my pop was comfortable hitting was me. He’d get home after a day of unblocking white folks’ toilets, and he’d take it out on mom and me. If I looked at him funny, I’d get it. If I didn’t eat enough – or I ate too much for that matter – I’d be liable to get my ass kicked. You never knew what was gonna set him off. My pop was basically a coward, an angry, dumbshit fucking nobody. Everybody treated him like shit. They walked all over him. Outside of our trailer he was the weakest, most powerless motherfucker you could possibly meet. I guess that’s why he acted like such a fuckin’ tyrant when he got home. Made him feel like a man or some shit. Pass me a cigarette, will ya? Here… you got a lighter? Great. Thanks hun.” Lupita exhaled through her nose, and her eyes looked kind of dreamy as she said, “No… my pop working for a local gangster? Well, let’s just say that the thought never entered my fucking head. As it goes, he worked as a go-between for Caribe. When people arrived this side of the border, my pop would act as a broker, hooking them up with off-the-books work, or maybe with guys who dealt with phony paperwork, birth certificates, work permits and that kinda shit. Strictly small time, coupla hundred bucks here and there at most. Mom didn’t even know, ’cos any extra money that pop made doing that shit went on the horses.”
“So your pop liked to gamble, huh?”
“He liked to gamble, he liked to drink, he liked to do every damn thing. Anyway, the first I know anything about my pop and Angel Caribe happens this particular afternoon. My mom is in the kitchen cooking, and she’s singing along to the radio. Remember it real clear. She was singing along to Emotional Rescue, you know the Rolling Stones? It was funny, ’cos my mom had a pretty shaky grasp on the English language and she’d just make up the words she didn’t understand. And let’s just say she didn’t have much of a singing voice. Anyway, I was in the next room watching TV, and mom was singing, and a van pulls up outside… There’s a knock at the door. I heard my mom answer it, and then screaming, banging around. I figured it was maybe pop, drunk again. But then I hear other people yelling and all kinds of shit, and all of a sudden my mom is shoved into the room at fucking gunpoint. This little bastard, tubby guy with a pencil moustache is with her. Looked a bit like a shorter, fatter version of Charles Bronson. He’s got my mom’s hair in his fist, and a gun pointed at her forehead.”
“Jesus Christ. What did you do?”
“What do you think I did? I was fifteen years old. I stood there about to piss my pants. Behind this Charles Bronson-lookin’ motherfucker there are two other goons. Chollo types, you know? The bastard with the gun says, in Spanish, We’re looking for Jesus Garcia, girl. Where is he?”
“That’s your pop?”
“One and the same. Now I’m just standing there, gawping. All I can think is Someone is pointing a gun at my mom’s head. It’s like my fucking brain has disconnected from my mouth altogether. Now my mom she doesn’t speak much Spanish, but I guess she figured out what they wanted. She starts trying to tell them that pop ain’t around, but she’s freaking out, and her English is real bad, and it’s all coming out garbled. The guy, he just raises the gun a little, and smashes the butt of it down on my mom’s nose. Crack! My mom screams and there’s a lot of blood. Like my mom’s face is covered in it. Her knees buckle, but this fucker’s got her good by the hair and he keeps her on her feet. I’m about to run over there to help her, but I see the other two guys have got guns too, and they’re pointed right at me. So I stand real fucking still.”
“Jesus Christ, Lupe. That’s horrible. What the fuck was going on?”
“Well, my mom is crying and mumbling in French, you know? She’s just hysterical at this point. So I kinda snap out of it, and I start talking real fast. I tell the guy that my pop is at work, he’s not around. I ask ’em what they want, tell ’em we didn’t do anything. Anything I can think of to get these assholes out of our home, you know? That’s when the guys says, Your father works for Angel Caribe, yes? Now this makes no sense to me. My pop – that stupid, broke-ass motherfucking slob – working for a gangster? There’s no fucking way. I tell him, no, he fixes toilets for a living. The guy laughs at that. He puts the gun back against mom’s head. He says to me, Ah, of course he does. The shit
has to flow, yes?
“So then his two goons come into the room and start turning the place over. I mean really trashing the joint. Ripping drawers out, overturning the tables. One of them pulls the TV over, busts the screen open. Soon they’re just walking around on our broken stuff and I can hear it all crunching underneath their boots. Then one of them, a tall guy with a wart on his nose, starts yelling, Where does he keep the money? Where does he keep the money he makes working for Caribe?
“I want to tell these crazy bastards that if we had any real money, then why the fuck would we be living in a trailer park? But the words won’t come out. All I can think about is my mom, with all of that blood dripping down her face and a gun pointed at her head. They’re surrounding me. Then all of a sudden, everything goes black. One of the guys pulled a plastic bag or somethin’ over my face. I can feel the gun pointing in my back. One of them says to me, If you try to run, you’ll be dead before you make it two steps. Now move.”
“Jesus Christ, Lupe. You musta been freaking the fuck out. So they took you?”
“Marched me out to their van, broad fucking daylight. I couldn’t see shit, but they musta had like a false bottom in the van because the next thing I know I’m tossed into this little space, felt like a fucking coffin or something. I can’t even stretch my legs out; I’m all pretzeled up in there. And it’s hot. I’m trapped. When I heard the lid come down on me I started struggling, but I couldn’t move a muscle. I tried to push it up, but the lid – or whatever it was – was on tight. I hear the doors slam, then the engine starting. I could feel it, smell it. The whole place filled up with this rotten gasoline smell. Then I feel us driving away. That’s when I really started freaking out. I realized just what kind of a fucked-up position I was in. These crazy bastards had me in a van, my mom – well, I didn’t know what had happened to her, but I figured she was back at the trailer all fucked up. The scariest thing is that nobody knows where I am. I didn’t even know where I was. I just lay there, and all I could think was I’m gonna die. These crazy bastards are gonna kill me and there isn’t jack shit I can do about it.” Lupita had a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes when she said this.
