Dog Eat Dog

by Edward Bunker

  It was the darkness before the dawn when the Mustang came off the Ridge Route onto the L.A. freeway system. Diesel sat slack-jawed and bleary-eyed beside him. The usual torrent of vehicles was a trickle, a handful of automobiles and a greater number of giant trucks timing themselves to arrive early in the morning. When he had gone to prison, L.A.’s vast sprawl ended at the north end of the San Fernando Valley. A few outposts of civilization, Magic Mountain among them, were in the desert beyond the rim around the valley. Now that was the Santa Clarita Valley, and it covered the desert with tract homes, Arco gas stations, and Denny’s coffee shops. The sight astounded him.

  As they whizzed along the fast lane, the terrain became more familiar. Troy felt excitement in his gut. He was coming home. Off to the left he could see the cross atop the mausoleum in Forest Lawn where movie star cadavers were entombed. Griffith Park bordered the freeway. It was ten times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. As a boy, Troy had rented saddle horses to ride the myriad bridle trails of Griffith Park. As a man, the body of a friend had been found with a bullet in his head on a park road. The murder remained unsolved. A sign read GENE AUTRY’S WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM, RIGHT LANE. That was something new. Then another sign stirred the emotions of memory: DODGER STADIUM, 1 MILE.

  Interstate 5 angled left, cutting through East L.A. Troy held to the right, up a slope onto the inbound Pasadena Freeway. It sliced through the hills of Elysian Park, home of the Police Academy, and when it came out of the hills it looked at the downtown L.A. skyline two miles away. What Troy saw was totally different from his memory. All his life the twenty-five-story City Hall had risen high above the low L.A. skyline. Now it was nearly hidden amid a forest of tall skyscrapers, nearly all built while he was gone. Had his city changed as much as the skyline?

  At 4th Street, they got off the freeway. The Westin Bonaventure was near the bottom of the ramp. Despite the hour, the Mexican doorman and bellhops pounced on their meager luggage and were grateful for the tip.

  When they were in the elevator, Diesel closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, and as soon as the room door was open, he fell out on the bed and started to snore. It reminded Troy of a little boy. He, too, wanted to sleep, but he had things to do first. He had no direct phone number for Greco, but he knew where to leave messages. He called the number Greco had given him. After two rings, “Sherry’s lounge,” a voice answered. “Alex the Greek told me to call here.” “He did, did he?” “Yeah. Let me leave a number where he can reach me.” “Sure. I don’t know when I’ll see him, but when I do …” “That’s all I can ask. I’m at the Bonaventure, room eight-seventeen.”

  After the phone call, Troy went to sleep. Two hours later the phone rang. He rolled over and picked it up. “If this is a goddamned Greek fascist—”

  “Hey … a liberal Greek fascist … When’d you raise, fool?”

  “When yo’ mama lemme out, sucker.”

  “Your mama’s my mama. Wanna talk about her?”

  They both laughed. “Hey, man, good to hear your voice,” Greco said. “I was wonderin’ if you were ever gettin’ out.”

  “How’re you doin’?” Troy asked.

  “Chicken today, feathers tomorrow. Fuckin’ lawyers get all the money.”

  “I heard they busted you.”

  “It won’t stick. The search was so bad they can’t even lie out of it. Of course, they overrated me again—two hundred grand bail. Plus the fuckin’ lawyer already got a chunk. The lawyer and the bondsmen are pimping me. Ha, ha, ha … You’re at the Bonaventure, huh?”

  “Me and Big Diesel.”

  “You got that crazy motherfucker with you, huh? He’s a big old tough guy.”

  “Where are you? When’re we gonna get together?”

  “I got some business ’til maybe noon. You gonna be there?”

  “I’ll be in and out—but I won’t be gone more’n half an hour at a time.”

  “Do you need a little dough?”

  “If the lawyer left you anything.”

  “I always got a little money for my ace. I got a good one for you.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll run it by you when I see you. You’ll be around.”

  “Yeah.” To himself, Troy added that he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for Alex Aris, aka Greco. Alex was notorious for being late. Once the police had a motel staked out, waiting for Alex to arrive. He was so late the cops gave up and closed the trap on those who waited. Alex drove up as the bust was going down. Instead of turning in, he kept going. The event had not added to his punctuality.

  Troy and Diesel slept till noon, ordered breakfast from room service, and showered and shaved, all the while waiting for Alex Aris to call. Troy wanted to go out. “I gotta look at my city,” he said. “I haven’t seen it in a long time.”

  “What about the call?”

  “He’ll be here when he gets here. I don’t wait for him.”

  “He’s not gonna be hot if you’re gone?”

  “Hell, no! How the fuck can he be indignant?” Troy called the hotel switchboard. “Tell anyone who calls that we’ll be back about six-thirty.”

  Troy and Diesel rode the elevator in the glass tube outside the building from the sunlight down to the shadowed canyons below. Figueroa’s sidewalks teemed with business-suited men and tailored women. It was a different street than he remembered. It seemed that every building had risen during his absence—thirty, forty, fifty floors high, and as beautiful as any skyscrapers he’d ever seen, even if many of their names were Japanese. He’d read that half the downtown office buildings were owned by Japanese companies. That didn’t bother him; nobody was going to move the buildings across the Pacific.

  “Which way we goin’?” Diesel asked.

  “Turn left. We’ll go over to Broadway.”

  Broadway was several long blocks to the east. When Troy was a child, it had been L.A.’s main street. Back then, yellow streetcars ran down the middle. Sometimes several yellow streetcars backed up at the intersections, loading and unloading. The red streetcars of Pacific Electric ran to the outlying areas. Troy had read that General Motors, Firestone, and others got control of the streetcar companies to deliberately liquidate them so they could sell tires and buses to the public. What was more immoral, that or robbing drug dealers?

  “You know something, Big D, a dude can justify just about anything to himself … and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? I don’t think anybody does evil in their own mind.”

  “Don’t ask me, brother. I don’t think about shit like that. I think about makin’ some money. I mean, there’s things I won’t do, but they get fewer and fewer when the money gets bigger and bigger.”

  Troy laughed and clapped his buddy on the back. It made Diesel feel good. What Troy thought of him was more important than what anybody else thought.

  As they crossed 7th and Olive, Troy remembered the furrier who had once been on the corner. One rainy night when he was a teenager, he’d tossed a cinder block through the display window. Amidst howling alarms he had reached inside with a broomhandle and pulled a mink coat through the window. The furrier was long gone, and any business that had merchandise of value now had steel shutters and folding steel gates.

  Each block they walked had fewer business suits and more signs in Spanish. Every corner had a panhandler, mostly unkempt black men extending Styrofoam cups, with an occasional white guy mixed in for leavening. It was something new to Troy. When he had gone away it hadn’t been like this. A mile to the east were the rescue missions for homeless men. At that time those who availed themselves of their services seldom ventured very far, and certainly not toward the office buildings to the west. A bleary-eyed black man sat in a doorway with a dog at his feet. Troy felt his pockets and turned to Diesel. “Gimme some ones.”

  “I only got a five.”

  “Gimme that.”

  As they went by, Troy handed the five to the black man with the dog. “God bless you, man,” was his r
eward.

  “The way I figure it,” Troy told Diesel, “if a homeless fool can look after a dog, I gotta do something for him. Besides that,” he grinned as he thought of it, “it might give me some good karma.” He didn’t really believe it—that fate made covenants—but why make the odds worse?

  Ahead of them, Troy saw the signs: DIAMONDS AND GOLD, BOUGHT AND SOLD. It was the West Coast diamond mart, jewelry stores one after another, each one glittering with precious jewels and gold. Many had armed security guards lounging in the doorways. That was new, but at least it wasn’t as bad as New York City, where shops along Fifth and Madison Avenues kept their doors locked and let people in only after looking them over. They’d been that way on his last visit fifteen years ago. From what he read in Newsweek, things had not improved.

  “You got one of these, didn’t you?” Diesel said.

  “Not down here. On Wilshire Boulevard. It’s gone now.”

  “You got a bundle, didn’t you?”

  “Not when it got counted down.”

  They reached Broadway and turned north toward the civic center half a dozen blocks away. Troy had walked this street since he was a child. Between 3rd and 9th Streets, Broadway once had a dozen movie theaters, not to mention the Paramount on 6th and the Warner’s Downtown at 7th and Hill. Some weekends he would come here, walk along until a movie poster caught his fancy. Now Troy looked at the theaters, or where they had been, and remembered what movie he had seen in this one or that one. Only three still showed movies; others were flea marts or churches. Christian preaching in Spanish had spared the Million Dollar, one of L.A.’s first great movie palaces. Gone, too, was the original Broadway Department Store at 4th Street, but its offspring formed a chain throughout California. Likewise into history had gone the original May Company and Eastern-Columbia. What a pretty green Deco building had housed it.

  The great shopping street was as busy as ever, but large spaces had been converted into flea marts, and smaller places into open-fronted stalls hawking cut-rate merchandise. Mexicans had always been part of any L.A. mosaic. All of the signs were in Spanish, as was the music coming from the open doors. “Damn, homeboy,” said Diesel, “is this L.A. or T.J.?” He meant Tijuana. “It don’t look like Beach Boys country to me.”

  Troy laughed at his cynicism. Southern California had once been close to paradise; now it seemed to be an outpost of the Third World—not because of skin color, but through its illiteracy, poverty, and class division. The ability to assimilate into the middle class had been overrun. At 4th and Broadway, they stopped to look west. A block away was a low hill. Once upon a time, L.A.’s famous Angel’s Flight, a funicular railway, ran from Hill Street to what had once been Victorian mansions on top, although by his youth they were rooming houses. Now Angel’s Flight was gone, as were the rooming houses, replaced by salmon and silver glass and aluminum shining in the hot sun of Southern California, somehow reminding Troy of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. The buildings were even more imposing because they rose from atop a hillside; that made them reach even higher into the sky. The towers were symbols of greater wealth than ever before.

  In contrast, beside them was the boarded-up bottom floor of the original Broadway Department Store, empty and gutted and lifeless except for fat rats and an occasional derelict. In his youth the rich had a Cadillac and the poor drove a Ford. Now the rich were in limousines and the poor pushed market carts piled with recyclable Coca-Cola cans. “Fuck it,” he muttered.

  “What’s up?” Diesel asked.

  “Just muttering in my beer, bro’.” He draped an affectionate arm around Diesel. “Hey, man, do you know how fucked up the world is?”

  “I like it that way. When it’s all fucked up, that’s when we fit in.”

  “No bullshit about that.”

  They walked toward the Civic Center, where suits and neckties were more common; then turned east on 2nd Street, and soon were again among the homeless poor; they overflowed the rescue missions and made condominiums from cardboard crates that they lined up on the sidewalk, usually outside parking lot fences or in an alley where nobody would bother them. Outside the rescue mission doors were long lines of black men. Troy saw nobody else in the line.

  They passed a man selling loose cigarettes from atop an apple box covered with a towel, and on the next corner a Hispanic woman with dark Indian features sold cups of mangoes or cantaloupe slices for a dollar apiece.

  “Check the alley,” Diesel said as they passed the mouth of one. Troy looked. Three young black men were passing a crack pipe, which gives off a powerful odor, but it was hidden by one of the foulest stenches in the world—that of human beings. The city had no latrines open to the general public, and those in public buildings and Pershing Square were closed to the homeless, so the ragged men in ragged clothes pissed in alleys, creating a stink that made Troy turn away.

  “Those suckers are sure bold,” Diesel said, referring to the crack-smoking trio.

  “I dunno. Would you go down there to bust them?”

  Diesel laughed. “I dunno. Maybe not. I’d probably faint if I had to smell that shit.”

  “How come a dog’s piss don’t stink? And human piss stinks worse’n a cat’s piss?”

  “How the fuck am I supposed to know that? You’re the one that reads the books.”

  “I don’t know either … But it’s something to think about.”

  “Let’s think about making some money. Maybe we oughta get back to the hotel. What if the Greek shows up?”

  They walked along Los Angeles, where, for several blocks, the shops specialized in men’s wear. Store after store had suits and shirts and neckties.

  “A dude could buy some nice rag around here.”

  “Yeah, if you know what you’re doin’. It all looks nice in the window. It’s after a couple cleanings that class shows.”

  “Kinda like life,” Diesel said.

  “Damn, bro’, you got a streak of the philosopher.”

  “Hangin’ around you does that to a fool.” He laughed.

  “Better turn here to get back to the hotel.”

  They turned the corner. Ahead of them was a wild-eyed young man in a sweatshirt cut off at one shoulder. His forearms were both tanned and grimy, while his upper arm was pale white. It was covered, as was his neck and cheek, with round sores that reminded Troy of ringworm. He held out a white Styrofoam cup, while from around his neck hung a sign: AIDS. The sores were cancer lesions.

  Most of the passersby veered to pass at a distance, but a heavyset black woman stopped and unsnapped her purse. As Troy and Diesel went by, they could see she was handing him a dollar and a small Christian tract. “… Praise Jesus,” was all they heard.

  “You believe in God, man?” Troy asked Diesel.

  “I don’t wanna, but I do. You know, them nuns got my ass right from the start until I was about eight. They planted it so deep, I can’t get it out no matter what.”

  “You’re going to Hell, huh?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Of course I do. I know better, but believin’ is deeper than knowin’, right?”

  “If you believe, you believe.”

  “I just hope Hell is way down the the line from now.”

  Back in the hotel room, the message light glowed on the phone. The switchboard said it was from “Larry.” He was in town and would call them in the morning.

  Troy would have gone out again, but Diesel’s legs ached from their walk, so they decided to stay in the room and order Dracula on the hotel’s cable service.

  The vile creature was being driven from England when the room phone rang. It was Alex Aris. The Greco was coming up the Harbor Freeway. “You wanna eat?” he asked.

  “I sure wanna talk,” Troy said. “See what we got going.”

  “It’s sweet, man. Where do you wanna meet?”

  “What about the Pacific Dining Car? That’s not far from the hotel. We could walk there.”


  “I wouldn’t walk around there at night, not anymore.”

  “I’ve been walkin’ around here all my life.”

  “Things change … and that area has really changed.”

  “What happened to all those old pensioners?”

  “They’re gone. Lemme tell you, that’s the most violent area in L.A. All Central Americans … not Chicanos like we know. Say some fool is from Nicaragua. Every morning they walk outside the village and there’s three or four bodies with their thumbs tied together and flies around the hole in their skull. When they see shit like that at five or six years old, an L.A. drive-by ain’t shit to them. I know you can take care of yourself—but I wouldn’t walk around there at night.”

  “Okay, you convinced me. How long ’fore you get there?”

  “I’m passing Florence Avenue. Say twenty minutes.”

  “Okay, I’m getting ready now.”

  The Pacific Dining Car, on 6th Street a few blocks west of the Harbor Freeway, was an ancient landmark by L.A. standards, having begun in 1921 in a sidetracked railroad diner. Over the years it had grown and changed into one of L.A.’s great steakhouses. It was close enough to City Hall and downtown so that many stacked-cut deals were made in one of its several rooms. It thrived even as the surrounding neighborhood became a colonia of immigrant Central Americans with the highest crime rate in the city. The Pacific Dining Car was an outpost of affluence amidst poverty. All of its customers arrived by automobile. The parking lot was fenced and secure, with parking attendants in red vests.