I thanked him heaps and got in my own car, waited until he took off before I polished off another couple fat speed bumps.
I was wired like I’d never been before. The three days I’d already been awake rolled off like a daydream. I could do anything, I could go anywhere. I was probably going to go home and play solitaire, rearrange my furniture and pick at my face until noon tomorrow. But the infinite potential was all the sweeter, because I planned to waste it.
Traffic on the 405 was totally fucked up, as the early bird commuters, the all-night drunks and the passing-through pre-holiday traffic tried speed-dating by crashing into each other. I was sitting in the same spot between Roscoe and Sherman for about fifteen minutes, and had just ejected the only CD in my car, which I’d heard a thousand times, when I felt a funny shooting pain in my left arm, like a hot wire inside the bone. I’d heard that a heart attack starts with chest pains and pain in the right arm, so hey, must be some mistake. . . but I’m left-handed.
Before I could put the same CD back in the stereo, my chest was hammered by a white-hot anvil. Everything past my nose went white as the pain kicked me again and again. My arms turned to noodles and dropped the CD and the tray with the lines I’d been about to snort. To the extent that I could think anything, I thought I was about to die. I was only twenty-three, but my heart was pushing sixty, and hot for early retirement.
But my life, mercifully, didn’t flash before my eyes. Instead, all I could think about was that last thing Gus Drum told me, before I got out of his car.
“I had to get you out of there, and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t go back to him, or any other dealer. Because it can really drain you, when you know that someone else is nailing you with the waiting game. It can be fatal. So watch out for stuff. Always make an appointment at the DMV, and stay the hell out of traffic.”
Sure, crazy guy. No problem. If I believed him, I should’ve been pissed, but I was too awestruck by having scored four hundred worth of crank without blowing anybody.
And now, I was dying. The drugs and the two-pack a day habit no doubt had contributed, but my broken, dying heart knew for sure what was killing me. The assholes who’d locked fenders and were sitting on the center divider drinking their coffees and getting chewed out by their automated insurance hotlines were murdering me. I wondered what it was doing for them. If my untimely death would fix their minivans, if their hair was getting darker and growing over bald spots, if their coffee even tasted sweeter.
Bullshit. I was wasting my last moments on earth tweaking on some lunatic’s bullshit rant, and it was probably my highly suggestible, overstimulated imagination, that had triggered my heart attack. That and the drugs.
I had to get a handle on myself, call 911, get an ambulance, hide the drugs and hope for the best. . .
And just like that, it was gone.
The anvil. The pain.
Gone.
So was the traffic in front of me. The tow trucks had taken away the wrecks, and the traffic was flowing freely in every lane but mine. Hundreds of horns tooted a symphonic “Fuck you, lady!” at me from here to Magic Mountain.
I touched my chest. A cage full of hummingbirds fluttered against my ribs, but my heart never felt stronger. My mind was clear as glass, as if I’d just awakened from a nap in a hammock.
I sat there a few seconds longer, feeling my heartbeat, until I heard car doors open and slam behind me. I threw my car into gear and raced home.
I called Gus the next day. The business card he’d given me looked like a joke. It wasn’t. His business was called VAN NUYS TRAGEDY TRAFFIC SCHOOL. “Everybody else has improv comedy, so I figured it would stand out.” He had a storefront classroom in a strip mall. He only ran a couple classes a week. He didn’t advertise and he had a horrible rating online, but he still had to turn away customers, because he was the cheapest and he still showed Red Asphalt. He wasn’t working for money. With the right kind of eyes, what he was doing was like a vampire running a blood bank, or a cannibal moyel. He invited me to come out and feed with him. He was ten minutes late starting class, and started over every time someone came in late. He told them where they could and couldn’t go for lunch and a bunch of other horseshit, then he showed a bunch of traffic snuff films, then he told them rambling useless anecdotes about traffic laws in other states. Then they broke for lunch. Some students were already so broken down that they just sat at their desks, pretending to nap. When he started up again, he spoke even slower, and let the dumbest people in the class ask questions or tell their own anecdotes. I watched students’ hair turning gray and falling out on their Ed Hardy hooded sweatsuits, saw them become so bored and stupefied that they couldn’t even complain, couldn’t even recognize that time was passing at all.
I didn’t sleep for another week. And I never finished that bag of crank. Tragedy Traffic School cured me.
By the time I did collapse in a sleep deeper than death, I’d figured out so much of how it worked, but I was too pissed at Gus to call him, yet. It was as much a trap as a trick, because knowing about it cut both ways, and the more you know, the more sensitive you are.
When you know about the waiting game, the line at the post office can take years off your life. Traffic lights create pinprick hemorrhages in the brain. Getting stood up for a big date could leave you like a Hammer Dracula in a tanning booth.
And that was what he’d made me. A vampire.
We can’t go out in the daytime. We can’t fly, unless we can be that last, lucky one who holds the plane up at the jetway. When you hear these stories about idiots phoning in bomb threats to delay a plane, they don’t sound so stupid, if you realize how big a psychic jolt they sucked off everyone on board, the airline, the media, and you, if you’re watching.
They’re feeding off you, those people who drag their heels in the fast lane to create rush hour traffic on the weekend. Those dumbshits who take ten minutes to order a bucket at Kentucky Fred Chicken, or write a check at the supermarket. If they know they’re doing it, they can suck you dry, and all it takes to make you a vampire or a victim is knowing that it’s going on.
And now, you know, too.
Gus was thrilled when I finally called him. He told almost nobody about his thesis, because of all the obvious risks, but he’d seen something in me. He didn’t mean that like any other man would mean it, and he wasn’t gay, that I knew. He had sex with things and ideas, right out in front of people, and it creeped them out a bit, but they didn’t know the half of it.
He was looking for a partner, to test his theories. To apply them in practical experiments.
My parents didn’t know I’d been kicked out of college yet. I was game. And I hadn’t been idly tweaking, over the previous week. I’d begun brainstorming techniques for harvesting this new untapped energy, and I’d begun some experiments of my own.
Advertise as a babysitter or dogwalker or housekeeper in your town—but not your immediate neighborhood, obviously. On a disposable cellphone, schedule several gigs for the same day, then sit back and listen to the phone ring. I stood up blind dates and watched them stew from a sniper’s vantage. I set up meetings via Craigslist to sell fictitious used cars and bathed in the psychic wrath of six angry jerks in four states.
Those were pretty satisfying, but nothing compared to the jolt I got from burning all my friends. This is hard to do, if you’re already a tweaker, but just by working the Chigger Jones playbook, I wore them all down and weaned myself off crank, cigarettes and almost all solid food.
With someone in my waiting room, I didn’t need to eat, sleep or go to the bathroom. I didn’t need to clean my house.
Gus told me I was wasting my time. “If you’re not there to collect the psychic payoff, it’s just waste heat, darling.” Already debating games and theory like old colleagues in the bowling alley, where we hogged two lanes on Family Night.
He dismissed my telephonic responses as “psychosomatic voodoo,” and laughed until he puked at my anecdotal e
vidence. The several occasions where calls from angry bill collectors had triggered multiple orgasms or peak moments in which I’d spontaneously written pitch-perfect sonnets—all trash.
But Gus’s need to intimately collect the energy payoff was pure and simple masochism. He’d book himself on open mic nights at packed coffeehouses, then sit and ineptly detune his banjo until the mellow hipsters screamed obscenities and threw mugs at him. He never, ever had cash when he left a parking garage, and took a half hour to fill out the forms to pay the two-dollar fee by mail while traffic backed up all the way to the roof.
His apartment was a shrine to notoriety, but not the kind you’d think. Serial killer iconography was an undertone in Gus Drum’s reeking den. His walls were covered in posters of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson, Andy Kaufman, the Tylenol Killer and Bill Clinton, whom he called the greatest psychic vampires of the age. News clippings of lesser lights—the Cubs fan douche who caught the ball and killed Chicago in the ’04 playoffs, the shoe-bomber. . . All geniuses.
The waiting game had only been a gateway drug. He wanted a way to fix on the truly hard stuff.
Wouldn’t it be better, to be loved? I asked.
Sure, if you’re lovable. Interpersonal love is mutual parasitism; it always fails, because one selfish partner sucks the other one dry. True, everlasting love is a perfect balance of two suckers, sucking the same energy off each other until death. He looked around, uncomfortable. Did he think I was coming on to him?
“But if everybody loved you. . . ? Like Marilyn Monroe or John Wayne. . . That’s the kind of immortality you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“That’s the worst kind of situation. It’s a cage of eyes and idiots holding you down so the whole world sucks you dry like seven billion lampreys, and feeds you only their half-wit fantasies. Look how deformed and insane Michael Jackson got because of all the people who blindly loved him. He would’ve died in the late 80’s, if he hadn’t ingeniously cultivated that pedophile rap to turn the energy flow around. Look at the before and after pics of every President. Look at Carson, when he retired from The Tonight Show, looking like a fucking mummy. . . You have any idea how many old people died in their sleep within the first month of Leno taking over? All those old people, and middle-aged meatbags who used him for life support. . .
“With fame, you sacrifice all control. People fall for imaginary boyfriends or girlfriends, mistresses or daddies, but they throw them away just as quickly, and then they’re left strung out on the hardest to acquire drug there is, the collective love of all humankind. No, that way lies madness.
“But people never really get tired of hating you, if you do something bad enough. It can be a mask you put on and discard, and walk away clean and shiny. Because they can never really know you, but if they hate you for what you did, you don’t need to be there.”
“If what you’re saying is true, Andy Kaufman got brain cancer from wrestling chicks and doing bad comedy. You want to turn the whole world against you, you can do it yourself.”
“Why? Look at you. Look what you’ve gotten out of this, already. But it’s getting tired, isn’t it? The work you’ve got to do, just to keep it flowing your way. The damage they can inflict on you, if it turns against you. This is something pure, and eternal. One big score, and the probability curve blows out. If what I believe is true, then it could create a singularity, and that’s a conservative estimate. I think there’s an afterlife, but only the truly loved and the truly hated get to go. The rest of us, the psychically inert, create it in the collective unconscious. We go there in dreams. We see it as a tunnel of light filled with everybody we always wanted to meet in Heaven when we think we’re really going to die.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody. Not really.” I used to say, I’d kill the whole world at once, but I didn’t even feel right eating hamburgers.
“What is this, if not one percent of a murder?
“I’m not talking about becoming terrorists, but look at Guy Fawkes. If you kill people, I think it complicates it. I think your victims go with you. I need your help with this, Liz. I need you to help me engineer it so nobody gets hurt, but everybody in the world at the same time says, ‘Fuck that guy.’ And I will go into Hell with my eyes open, and take over.”
I still thought we had a good thing going, but I had to agree, it was already wearing kind of thin. If I could keep this up without going to jail or getting killed, could I keep from aging for a decade? Five? Gus didn’t want to live forever, the way he was. He wanted trouble. He was sure that the energy we’d begun to steal could be turned to new and bigger uses, but without me, he couldn’t make them real.
“Mercedes drivers unconsciously believe they’ve paid enough to ignore traffic laws. BMW drivers just don’t give a fuck. Lexus drivers hurry so they’ll be mistaken for Mercedes drivers. Audi drivers think their invisible.”
He drove down a long residential street, cruising around aimlessly until a Porsche got stuck behind us. At a Stop sign, he bent to retrieve a Nurse With Wound CD off the floorboard. The Porsche’s horn sounded like Valkyries on the rag. The driver gave him a theatrical middle finger.
“If you meet the insult with an equally angry gesture, you just trade psychic paint. The only winner in a car dispute is the one who walks away still angry. Nothing pisses them off more than knowing they’ve failed to ruin your day.” He waved and blew the Porsche driver—a smooth jazz record producer, if ever I saw one—a big wet kiss. We got another angry chorus of the Wagner-horn.
“Goethe said it’s a miracle anyone can communicate anything to anyone else. It isn’t, but it should be. Nothing’s more instantly irritating than a failure to communicate your anger.”
At the next stop sign, a little girl had set up a lemonade stand. Gus angled his Volvo so its nose kissed the yellow line, got out and bought a cup of lemonade.
A steady stream of cars coming the other way trapped the Porsche driver in our net. Gus ordered seconds. I watched the smooth jazz guy’s head explode. The waiting was spun-sugar. The hating was pure heroin.
We went down to Ventura Boulevard and walked and talked and broke parking meters. He wanted to stop at the bank, but we kept circling around the intersection with Sepulveda, looking at his watch. It was late afternoon. The sunlight turned to dirty gold as the smog layer caught the light. This stretch of Sepulveda was twelve lanes wide. We were standing at the corner across from the Galleria, but Gus didn’t seem to want to cross.
A family of orthodox Jews came up alongside us. I goofed on Papa’s dour black coat and fedora, so like a 40’s noir dick, except for his long, red-brown beard and those curlicue bangs. His wife and two young boys were also sensibly but significantly dressed up, and had that wary look that people who wear their faith on their sleeve always get in mixed company.
Papa led his flock to the edge of the curb and looked at the lights, then turned to look at us and hesitantly asked, “You are going to cross?”
“Oh yes, we’re crossing.”
The light changed and the northbound Sepulveda traffic crawled, but the pedestrian sign flashed a steady DON’T WALK.
“You pushed the button?” he asked.
“No, I can’t do that.” Gus smiled shyly. “Buttons have germs. Not allowed to touch germs.”
Papa crossed his arms. “That’s not true.”
“Maybe not, but I believe it. You push the button, and see.”
He must be in a fix. They were late for temple and had to park far away. It was still shabbas until the sun went down, and God wanted them to play like they lived in the Bronze Age once a week, or they might start to relate to their neighbors and get sensible haircuts. Poor Papa’s religion forbade him to push the button. He was at our mercy.
Papa looked sidelong at me, but he wasn’t allowed to talk to strange women, either. He turned back to Gus, cracking his knuckles. “No more nonsense, please. My family must cross. Please push the button.”
“Well, what if you’re right, and it i
s a sin to push the button? Isn’t it a sin to make me push the button?”
This was not normally a violent man. Maybe a watchmaker, with those soft, oddly callused hands and wire-rimmed spectacles that made his eyes absurdly huge, but he was livid, trembling a breath away from going all Krystallnacht on my best friend. “Are you mocking my faith?”
Gus got up and came close to the man. “Are you mocking my mental illness?” Maybe he put too much emphasis on the “my” part of it, because the debate was over.
Papa took hold of Gus by the lapels of his Navy-surplus raincoat and shook him. His wife called, “Ze’ev, stop!” and covered her boys’ eyes.
Gus couldn’t stop laughing. Neither could I.
“You think it’s funny? You think my belief is a joke?” Maybe he came to his senses right then, and just wanted Gus gone. But Gus said, “The Holocaust was a joke. This is just sad.”
Papa shoved him away, but Gus tottered and stumbled and fell across the hood of a taxi. The cab squealed to a stop and threw him into the crosswalk, where he lay prone, curled up with laughter.
Horns honked. Papa pushed the button and dragged his weeping wife and kids across the street.
Gus refused the ambulance, but he had to go to the ER. Lacerations and contusions on his head, back and thighs, a mild concussion and two molars knocked out. When the nurse left us alone, he got on the scale and made me measure him.
The teeth were already growing back.
And he was two inches taller.
If there are still things that man was truly never meant to know, it must be a short list. With all the wrong knowledge in all the wrong hands since long before we were born, you would think we would have decided to use our powers for good, or at least for self-enrichment. In a movie, this would be where the bad guys who have secretly monopolized the waiting and hating games send their ninjas after us, and we kick their asses and save the world. But the powers that shared our little secret lived in stygian pits in a world of undisclosed locations, quite removed from our own. Through arcane exercises of obscene wealth and power, they had turned American public life into an eternal pie-fight, and much of the developing world into misery factories.
Strategies Against Nature Page 8
