by Gary Indiana
Elena felt undermined by news of my second job, which would leave her completely alone after dark in a senseless-killing neighborhood. She became stingy with her surplus Eskatrol, which was supposed to reward me for staying in Watts after hours. I pleaded, begged, and promised to become a monster of office efficiency until she doled out a few precious capsules. The drug tended to soften her long-term memory, so if I waited a few days I could usually wheedle more from her. But this was too contingent on Elena’s mercurial moods, and I started looking for other sources. Skot, the nerdy-genius-looking ringleader of Science Holiday, put me on to a dealer named Benny, who, actually, sold bennies, as well as opies, dexies, and downers. The new supplier quickly became difficult. After I scored from him a few times at the House of Pies in Los Feliz, Benny decided that we would be friends.
“I like the way your mind works,” he told me. These have always been ominous words, regardless of who says them. “We should hang out.”
Hanging out with dealers is never much of an idea. Drop the wrong word, state a contrary opinion, reject their advances, or decline to read their poetry, and you can kiss your drug supply good-bye. You may also discover, as I did with Benny, that the mind of a dealer is quite twisted enough in a drug transaction without risking greater exposure to it.
Benny, who had suggestions of Ratso Rizzo in his general affect as well as his physiognomy—a great limp mane of oily black hair, and a reedy frame he covered in stained pinstripes and pointed ankle boots—had taken up permanent residence in the darkest side of nighttime Los Angeles, where people on copious drugs were unfixed in space and time, their movements determined by random phone calls at all hours from strung-out customers and far-gone freaks throwing parties. There were no cell phones in those days, dealers relied on answering services, pagers, and a network of public phones. I went to lots of parties with Benny, each weirder than the next, in pitch-dark apartments where clumps of wild-eyed protoplasm huddled around amplifiers or tables streaked with coke or powdered meth. An enormous amount of imperious staring went on at these soirees, where any social interaction only served as a time filler, instantly dropped the second more drugs arrived.
Benny’s customers had a scary Manson Family smell wafting off them. They had other smells, equally unappealing. Everything moved too quickly, or else with slothlike slowness, from one sinister tribal meeting to another, each a tableau of spiked hair and scads of cloudy syringes, bleary interiors sealed in a bubble of amber silence, often dominated by some garrulous vampire with an unimaginable backstory and a cruel mouth. No inhibitions then about sharing needles, so people often had the waxy yellow pallor of hepatitis under their ghoulish makeup.
Some were livid faces I’d noticed in clubs, or glimpsed in coffee shop windows, and it sometimes gave me a little thrill to find out where the faces lived, what things they kept in their refrigerators, who their familiars were. One avid girl with zeppelin tits who dressed exclusively in spangled Lurex had a bungalow on lower Beachwood where possums and other wildlife meandered in and out of her living room through holes in the walls. A man who looked like Basil Rathbone as a child had turned his rambling flat into a papier-mâché cave, a womb where his associates nodded out for days on heroin, rousing themselves from hibernation with shots of meth, unpredictably flailing around like sped-up cartoon figures while still submerged in private dreams, shouting at invisible adversaries, uncertain whether they were in a loft downtown or somewhere in Century City or possibly in Echo Park or even West Adams.
In short, Benny lived among the lunatic undead. Far from having a consuming interest in the way my mind worked, he was vigilantly concerned about how my car worked, since his ancient Camry had been kaput for weeks and he had recently been moving around on buses. Public transport carried a taint of pennilessness unhelpful in Benny’s profession, in which making people wait for calculated periods of time was an essential skill. Like the tenants of the Bryson, Bennie loved me for my car, and not my golden hair.
He craved company, though. His face lit up when I agreed to drive him around. He had customers all over the city, but none seemed engaged with him in a personal way. He provided a service; they took him for granted. He admired his buyers overmuch, or pretended to. He took a speed-breathless interest in anything they said, but their interest in him was visibly limited. At numerous stops I had an impression of being hurried on our way after Bennie made his deliveries.
“Benny’s kind of a nothing,” Skot told me, with the casual cruelty of his torpid crowd.
I never pieced Benny’s story together, only heard this and that, here and there. His mother had hanged herself in the family garage a few years earlier. His father, a celebrity gynecologist, lived somewhere in Sylmar with his third wife and owned a getaway cottage in Tahoe. Benny had taught eighth grade in a Catholic girl’s school, lost his job over some mild sexual impropriety, and had qualified for psychiatric disability that paid him a miniscule check every month. For a small-time dealer, he moved a lot of product. But also he took a lot of product, and was forever scraping bottom like everyone he knew. He was twenty-eight or -nine. I imagined anyone slightly older, or slightly taller, as infinitely worldlier and more sophisticated, less vulnerable, less clueless—I never imagined him as immature and as scared by living as I was, somehow it eluded me.
As most people running on amphetamine do, Benny talked too much, talked incessantly, seemed to be talking even when he wasn’t talking, talked in his sleep no doubt, talked to walls if there was no one else around to talk to. I won’t say he had theories, that would be taking things too far. He had themes, various themes, that touched on everything and nothing in the known and unknown worlds. He talked about Rimbaud and Beckett and William Burroughs, Heinrich von Kleist, Coomaraswamy, Buckminster Fuller, Norman O. Brown, cannibalism, Karl Marx. He talked about invisible things, telepathic transactions, imperceptible rumblings in the San Andreas fault, how he knew that person x would be at Licorice Pizza at such and such an hour, why he had an unquenchable lust for schoolgirls in uniform. Everything in his head spilled out of him in a torrent, excitedly, as if his brain were having an orgasm. He was one of the few people who have ever literally given me a headache.
Yet speed makes people oddly tolerant of anything happening around them, even when their heads are exploding. Although I perceived a definite need to detach myself from Benny’s sphere in the middle future, this didn’t come entirely into focus until one night when I drove him home, to a peculiarly situated one-story house that was little more than a shack on stilts, somewhere in Laurel Canyon, and let him talk me into coming in.
I have seen many chaotic interiors, as we all have, and lived in plenty of them too, but I only remember a few occasions when I walked into someone’s living space and confronted a disorder so incomprehensible that it scared me out of my wits. Once, in New York, after J. J. Mitchell and I had snorted a terrifying quantity of poppers standing in the bar at Second Avenue and Fourth, we accepted an invitation from a man whose name I’ve forgotten—no, I haven’t, it was Dicken, like the singular of Dickens—to continue drinking and snorting poppers in his apartment, a place in Turtle Bay where the entire floor surface proved to be covered in a thick mulch of trash. Not only was it carpeted in rich, loamy garbage, but this garbage was concealed under spread-out newspapers. Worse, in order to locate some little object he wanted, our host plunged his hand into the exact spot in this tremulous mess where whatever it was—a cigarette lighter? a cock ring?—happened to be located. In effect, he had a mental navigational map of the waste matter strewn over every inch of his apartment, and all his non-refuse items like keys and clothing and money were mixed in with things like takeout containers full of rotting spareribs, empty Orangina bottles, beer cans, pizza crusts, cigarette butts, and anything else likely to act as a magnet for vermin.
But Benny’s hillside home easily eclipsed even that stupendous disarray. Stepping into his living room was like entering the scrambled brain of a serial killer through a
portal of used motor oil. Garbage covered not only the floor but the chairs, tables, sofa, and every other available surface. And this was the tip of the iceberg, because much of the rear wall, perched over a graduated canyon slope, had been somehow demolished, as if a giant fist had punched through it. There was simply no physical boundary between the living room and the outdoors, and the slope itself was covered in even more garbage. It resembled a municipal dump. This dump had an oddly theatrical look, as if its contents had been carefully groomed for a visually arresting effect. It appeared that Benny had been tossing his detritus, organic and other, into this open area ever since moving into the house.
Of course, in tropical countries, open-sided houses or houses with open courtyards are unexceptionally common. Even in the jungles of Colombia and Peru, I have stayed in such houses, entirely open to the elements and dangerous predators, without the slightest alarm. However, Benny’s house, on the distaff side of Los Angeles, seemed to be dissolving like fertilizer into its unsanitary yard, if I may call it that. His profusion of waste looked like a welcome wagon for coyotes and mountain lions.
The truly alarming thing was that Benny apparently lived in this rococo squalor as if it were the most unremarkable of human environments. I seldom listened closely to anything he said, but as he slogged through squishy heaps of grunge to the kitchen, came back with two cans of beer, handed me one, then cleared mountains of shit from a chair seat and a bit of the sofa, dug a glass bong from somewhere in the surrounding rubble, and proceeded to fill it with weed, I became aware that he was blathering incoherently about Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically something about superior beings destroyed by pity, and “the clever animals have to die.” I also noticed that Benny’s dark brown, sometimes black eyes had taken on a certain blazing, fanatical sheen. The Ratzo Rizzo aspect of his face had hardened into a hungry-looking rodent visage.
He inhaled a massive hit, then jumped up and bleated out through a thick nimbus of smoke:
“I know! You wanna see something really gross?”
Without waiting for an answer, Benny tramped off into another room. After an interlude of indefinable thrashing noises he returned, holding between his hands what appeared to be a small aquarium with a large clump of matter inside it, not floating, exactly, but suspended in clear, hardened glue. As he brought it closer, the clump became legible as … a dead cat. A partially flattened, dead little tabby with its eyes open, its mottled orange and white fur frozen forever in a state of shock.
“Oh my God.”
I threw up a little. In that place it didn’t matter.
“I didn’t kill it! Some car ran over it on Franklin Avenue!”
“Okay, but still—”
“Yeah, but look at it, right? It’s like art or something.”
“I can’t look, will you put that fucking thing away?”
“You wouldn’t say that if you walked into a museum and saw this.”
“I don’t see that happening, Benny. But all right. It’s … nice.”
“No, it’s gross. What did Picasso say? You do it first ugly, then other people do it pretty?”
“Right, it’s nice and gross … please, I’m sensitive.”
“It kind of changes colors in the light.” Benny planted the aquarium down on a pile of magazines and stomped around the room to view it from different vantage points.
“It has a kind of chiaroscuro thing going on, there’s these ripples that are like those scattery types of clouds.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah, I can see that. Do you have anything more to drink?”
Who could know that in ten or fifteen years a larger version of Benny’s aquarium with a different animal in it would be worth millions of dollars?
He’s insane, I thought, taking an agitated hit off the bong. He’s insane, and he’s brought me here to kill me. For the fun of it, probably, like Leopold and Loeb. Then he’ll have his own car to drive. My car. Little seedpods of sweat popped out all over my skin, paranoia amped up by grass. Yes, this rat-faced bastard was going to murder me and dump the body out on the trash heap.
Benny’s face leaned into my face. His eyes bore into my eyes. His wolf-rat or rat-wolf expression laughed at my frightened-mouse expression. He droned on in his heavy voice, about something, something, puffing sententiously on an unfiltered Camel, and he looked absolutely ancient, as if thirty or forty years of the future had abruptly piled up on his face.
My trepidation subsided into an altogether different perception of Benny’s acute loneliness and social ineptitude. At his friends’ houses he fawned over certain individuals who made him nervous, excessively flattered people he felt afraid of … his consistent failure to charm, and now, here, in his own lair, all this ominous, ingratiating blabber about Nietzsche … and the dead cat … the thought arrived, finally: nobody really likes their drug dealer.
“I haven’t slept in like, four days.” Benny brought this out with the haggard, chain-dragging weariness of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“Have you been eating?” I asked, feeling cornered into assuming a maternal concern that didn’t suit me at all.
“Yeah, I had some tacos at that stand on Hillhurst,” he said with considerable pathos.
“When was that?”
“Yesterday, I think. Yes, definitely yesterday.”
“Benny, you can’t keep taking this shit and not eat,” I said, sounding more and more like my mother. I hadn’t completely shaken the idea of him as a homicidal maniac, and remembered reading somewhere that if you thought someone might kill you, you should try to make them see you as a human being like themselves. “I force myself. I tell myself, ‘Gary, your body is all you have.’ Otherwise when you come down it’s a train wreck. Look, I’ll drive you to Tommy’s. Eat a burrito. It’s right by where I live. You can stay there tonight if you feel like it.”
The thought of Benny sleeping at my place horrified me. But if I didn’t get out of there soon, I would end up sleeping at his place, an even more horrible prospect.
“Eating, shitting, fucking, sleeping. That’s about all there is, isn’t it. No wonder people go berserk.”
“Is that a yes or a no? At least take a Tuinal and get some rest.”
Benny pulled off his boots and sprawled himself across the couch, as if to say that rubbish was his home and he would never spurn it for faraway places.
“Tuinal … is … such … a … pansy … drug. No offense or anything.”
After drinking six or seven beers and smoking two packs of cigarettes on meth autopilot, I felt ready to vomit again. Benny seemed less and less menacing. Riding the wiggy oscillations of an onrushing speed crash, he’d grown lachrymose and expansive, even abject, and came close to sobbing as he went mournfully on about what a great scene had been there in LA in the old days, by which I felt certain he meant only a few days earlier.
“Everything was new. You could reach out your hand and touch it, it was all there.” His hand reached into the queasy emptiness of the universe in quest of this nebulous everything, displaying grimy nails. “It was really only a few people, everyone knew you, you knew everyone … I never thought things could change like that,” he concluded, snapping his fingers.
“I’m not clear what you’re telling me,” I said, unsure what to do with my face. I felt a pressing need to escape Benny’s highly emotional aura before it crystallized into something depressingly stark and terrible. There is nothing comforting in one addict telling another to look forward to a brighter day, so I refrained from extolling the virtues of food any further. “Anyway, I have to get up and go to work in the morning.”
I couldn’t stop answering his calls: answering machines were an expensive novelty, the concept of “screening” didn’t exist. So I kept one excuse or another not to see him on file in my head, ready on the first ring, and deflected him long enough that he stopped phoning me. I couldn’t separate Benny from the image of his psychotic environment, the dead cat, and the spectacular morbidity and self-loathing they por
tended. This left a significant gap in the drug stockpile, until Dane tented a house in Calabasas owned by a croaker who wrote him a script for Obitrol.
It often happens that an expected storm fails to materialize, or proves less spectacular than anticipated. Hours and hours of media airtime are cleared to cover it. Television reporters are deployed to ocean-side locations where large waves are churning in the background, and close-ups of puddles are said to represent “the eye of the storm.” The expectation of catastrophe becomes impatience at its not arriving, with the threat of boredom becoming palpable desperation to fill “dead air.”
twelve
This afternoon I took a cab to the Plaza de Armas, thinking I might buy a watch for J. I’d prefer to buy him a crumbly, century-old photo album. But those albums are enormous and weigh tons. Impossible to ship, because it’s Cuba and the gift would arrive a year from now, if ever. Impossibly heavy in my luggage. Anyway, an immigration officer might figure out I’ve been here from looking at the album. (The intelligence services know anyway but aren’t supposed to.) It’s illegal in a convoluted way. It’s legal to physically travel here, but illegal to spend any money, because the embargo falls under the authority of the Treasury Department.
I already went through the Joe McCarthy rigmarole you have to endure if you’re caught, a few years ago. I nipped that third degree in the bud after twenty minutes, in a detention facility at the Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. After the third body search and the fourth forensic study of every item in my luggage, I forced through my teeth the news that I was dying from untreatable cancer, and had gone to visit lifelong friends, “probably for the last time.” “I’m an old man, and I’m going be dead soon,” I said, working up to showstopping, histrionic, artfully class-inflected anger and bitterness. “Do you mind?” As I said this I broke into copious sobs, choked back tears to blow my nose in a Kleenex, apologized for being so emotional, and burst into tears again. Finally the horrified tub of lard from immigration, his voice suddenly benign and laced with cancer terror, said, “I think we’re done here.” I wasn’t an actor in my salad days for nothing.
