by John O'Brien
Later, out on the street, blood running high with adventure and thin with bourbon, Ben decides to get laid. Naturally, since he lacks both the skill and the inclination to pursue a socially acceptable sex act, this means finding a hooker. As attractive as he must be to women, drunken and slurring and slobbering all over them, they just don’t seem interested in him. Actually, they usually are at first, and he suspects that they would be later, but there’s that unsightly hump of getting acquainted that neither he nor they can quite get over. Anyway, to him there’s no better meshing of social and biological functions than paid sex. It’s always gratifying, leaving him quite pleased with himself and with the world in general. He is amused by men who proudly proclaim that they have never paid for it. This remark, so unnecessarily spoken yet spoken out of great necessity to the speaker, indicates to Ben that these guys are either completely superficial, or strongly homosexual and running scared, or… what? Why must they assert this, and always using the exact same phrase? Unless of course they’re stating that money is more sacred to them than sex, a position that would truly separate a man from his species.
Paid sex isn’t as free as it used to be; it has become a virtual moral casualty of law enforcement’s circuitous efforts against related violent crimes. So Ben is not sure where to go to find a street hooker these days. There is a house on the Westside that he used to frequent, but he doesn’t want to spend that kind of money, especially now that his income has all come in and is really fixed. He gets into his car and heads for the low rent districts—bop popping on a budget—where he used to go and where they used to be. Stopping at a liquor store he buys a can of budget malt liquor, just to keep up the spirit of tonight’s continuing drama. At times like this he likes to think of his life as one big piece of performance art. Not structured enough to be an actual play, it is full of irrationality and minuscule details and can only be viewed from the inside out. Once. By him. If he doesn’t black out. He titles this episode: Pinching pennies and prostitutes—frugal fucking in LA.
Arriving way down on the east end of Sunset he points his car west and begins driving slowly, at the speed limit, in the right lane. This is different from real driving, as he is not trying to get anywhere. It’s more like sitting in your car and observing the passing sights while the planet rotates underneath. He loves this part of town, loves the fact that there are people here who would gladly slit his throat for the money in his pocket, something to keep in mind in case he decides to hire the work out. He feels somehow close to these people, but at the same time he knows that they despise him from the word go, because whatever he is—they don’t know, and that doesn’t matter—it is what they cannot be. The oppressive air hangs still above the street and seems to sweat the inexhaustible supply of perennial refuse that surrounds and infiltrates every scene. The filth of the road is blown on to the sidewalk, from there pushed against the buildings, finally coming to its semi-permanent resting place under ledges and in doorframes of abandoned businesses. Empty wine bottles wearing paper bags and newspaper circulars telling stories about produce and canned spaghetti serve as the makings of a disposable bed for disposable humans. Doors that would pass for nailed shut open briefly and spit out black men wearing leather blazers and berets who stoop at the passenger window of a waiting Cadillac; a moment later the car pulls away. Bob’s Lucky Stop Liquor No. 6 is shutting down for the night. A Korean man, presumably Bob, pulls along an iron track the first of three black accordion security gates that, when closed, go nicely with similar iron that covers the display window. Painted on its glass, behind the bars, is a smiling blond dressed in black velvet and holding a glass of whiskey: Ben’s dream: prisoner of a liquor store. So far there are no women for hire, but then he’s still too far east; perhaps closer to Western. He drives on.
Normandie, Winoa, Kingsley, Harvard, Hobart, Serrano, and Western, were once a great Hollywood district bounteous with girls at the peak of their powers who traded in pussies and tongues and lived the prime of their lives in a lightning flash, witnessing the brief rise and fall of their street values pass in the space of a few short years. Now it is populated by desperate women, far fewer in number, and leading much harder and shorter lives, heroines of subsistence in service of whoremaster heroin, this world not yet cracked. But even these dying embers are not visible to Ben as he scans from left side to road to right side to road. Smooth, observational, and moving at a nearly constant twenty-five miles per hour, he and his car glide through the green light at Western and Sunset and slip properly into the heart of Hollywood.
On the top of the steering wheel rests his left hand, and around the third finger of his hand is wrapped a gold wedding band. Rendered barren of its original significance, it is the only tangible relic of a marriage long gone by. Two years earlier he had removed it, having finally convinced a girl that still wanted to believe in him that he was indeed of no value to anyone, least of all to her, and certainly not to himself. They parted with no malice, she regretful, he drunk. His initial infatuation with blameless drinking and womanizing quickly wore thin as things settled back into the downward spiral that he had become accustomed to; settled back, in fact, with no delay and no surprise to him. He has never deciphered what was the chicken and what was the egg; his drinking encouraged her resentment and her resentment accelerated his drinking. Given the choice, he prefers sucking vodka to thinking about it, her. A month ago, as the full horror of his situation and found intentions began to fascinate him, he took to wearing the ring again. Now it clicks lightly on the wheel as his finger absently hops up and down, and his car continues to roll down Sunset. Wilton, Van Ness, Bronson, Tamarind, still a fruitless search: no more proffered apples.
He spots a girl peeking around a corner, but when he pulls to the side and slows, leaning towards the passenger window and beckoning her, she flees. He is at Gower and decides to stop at one of the crusty little bars in that area, where John Steinbeck once drank, or so Ben has read. He gets inside just in time for last call. The lateness of the hour has taken him by surprise—very unusual—and he can relax only with the knowledge that back at home he is adequately stocked for the night. The inconvenience of having to keep track of time is steadily growing as his inclination and even his ability to do so diminishes. It is probably too late for a Sunset date, but intent on continuing the search he talks the bartender into pouring two glasses of iced vodka which he downs directly. He leaves the bar as the lights go up and returns to his car. As this new alcohol enters his blood, he and his dark designs slip back into the ever heavy flow of traffic. Vine, Morningside, Cahuenga through Highland, and then Hollywood High-land on to La Brea; not until he arrives at the corner of Sunset and Sierra Bonita does he see the girl that he will pay to fuck. She is a young Hispanic girl, and Ben appreciates the reasonable rhyme of her appearance with the street she has chosen to stand on.
He pulls to the curb and says, “Good evening.”
Before meeting his eyes she cautiously looks up and down the street. Satisfied that they are not being watched she approaches his car and, hands on knees, bends to the window.
“You wanna date? You wanna date me?” she says.
Her eyes never stop moving. She looks at Ben, then to her left, then at his lap, then across the street, then at his feet. She seems to digest everything she looks at in one quick glance, so that when she looks again it is not because she wants to see more but because she wants to see the same thing now, to see if her original information needs to be updated.
Ben knows that she knows that he is not a cop, and he is somewhat amused at her defensive manner: a caged rat that repeatedly reenters the cage. Willing to shoulder the legal exposure and hopefully put her at ease, he turns over some of his cards.
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for a straight forty-five minutes. You get the room,” he says. Then, because he can never resist the poetry of completion, he shows her the money, thereby either tempting her assent or tightening his own noose.
Her eyes
grab the money, then let go. “The room is twenty. You pay for it,” she says, not because she wouldn’t, but because she thinks that he will.
Normally this would prompt him to split. He made a good clean offer and now he’s being sucked on. “Okay,” he says, not because it is, but because he suddenly feels that a surrender here will fit nicely into the big picture.
The motel is just across the street; he’ll park on a side street and meet her by the office. But when he steps out of the car and stands upright he is struck with a wave of alcohol that has been building in his seated body. Vodka on ice is nice. When he reaches his whore he is much drunker than he’d like to be and too drunk to realize it: less control, right where he needs it most.
He awakens on the floor of his apartment, just inside the door, ten miles and six hours away from his last memory. Springing to his knees he checks for his wallet. It is in his pocket and still contains the forty-four one hundred dollar bills that he stuffed into it at the bar. Pausing on all fours, he stares at the floor as if to read his next direction there. He manages to get to his feet and open the door. Miraculously, but not surprisingly, his car is parked soundly on the street. This was too much, too far to drive in a blackout. He can only hope that he didn’t hurt anyone while driving home, but he’s pretty sure that if he had it would have already come to him in a rush of nausea and spectacular recollection. For further confirmation he staggers out to the car; it bears no scars, and he relaxes. He goes back inside for a drink and to sit down and try to reconstruct what happened with the hooker.
As he sits at the kitchen table, tentatively gulping vodka and whatever-was-in-the-fridge, random memories of the night before flash in and out of his head. With no respect for chronology they are like a slide show at a stranger’s house, the box of slides having been dropped and hastily reassembled just before presentation. He is always very uncomfortable with these absences of palpable participation in his own life, and the fact that they are increasing in both intensity and frequency makes him long to be anonymous. Never considering a backward step, he thinks only of Las Vegas and how it is clearly time to go there. He won’t feel right today until he can establish at least an outline of last night. In the past he would call whomever he had been drinking with and ask them, or even pick up clues from his wife; for back then he was often at home in front of the television before the blackout. Now he is and was alone, and that’s how he must go about remembering whatever he can. Ice clinks in his empty glass. Outside there are the sounds of morning.
He has an image of being near a garbage hopper, presumably in the rear of the motel. He has no recollection of the inside of a motel room. Pursuing that thought, he remembers the girl taking the room money from him and going to the office alone. When she returned she offered some sort of vague explanation and led him to the back of the building. Apparently his condition was not lost on her; she must have kept the room money, as his pocket is empty. In fact, after watching him dig out that twenty, she may have taken the rest of the money from his front pocket and thought that she had cleaned him out. That could be why his wallet is intact.
He has an image of leaning on dirty steel as the girl kneeled before him, his penis in her mouth. He cannot remember coming, or even having an erection.
He has an image of the girl hugging him and kissing his neck. He tried to kiss her mouth and she turned quickly. She bent to kiss his hand and started sucking on his fingers. As she fondled his penis she continued sucking his fingers.
He has an image of her pulling him by the hand as they crossed the street. She closed his car door for him. In his mirror he saw her cross the street again.
He has an image of endless driving, of a locked liquor store, of being in Inglewood and not knowing his way home.
Well, he thinks, not as bad as I thought; I remember a lot of it. He pours another drink and, now in better spirits, decides to clean up and have a few at the bar down the street. There he’ll seriously think about Las Vegas: when he will leave, what to do with all his stuff. Actually, he already knows what he will do with his stuff; he just needs to work out the details.
Washing his hands, he notices that the wedding ring is missing from his finger. He pauses and looks at himself in the mirror, confirming in his mind that he should be wearing it; that is, he was wearing it last night and can’t remember taking it off. As logic completes what his memory can only begin, the what-must-have-happened unfolds in his own eyes. The word bitch arrives at his lips, but he refrains from phonation. After all, she was just doing her job.
The perpetual cloud of alcohol wears momentarily thin, or perhaps it is just his survival instinct beating through. Either way, before leaving for the nearby bar he is struck with the realization that he hasn’t eaten for quite some time—hasn’t eaten substantially for even longer. Though he is not hungry, and though the very thought of solid food brings a clear and present rush of nausea to his gut, he knows that he must make a go of it, must try to eat something. If for no better reason than to extend his drinking base, to sustain the heart that pumps the blood that carries the alcohol to his brain, he seeks out nutrition.
The refrigerator abruptly clicks off its motor when he opens the door and, now awake after a long nap, yawns a breathy white mist at his face. Ben scans its interior for his options. In disuse it has remained neat and clean. Not one to let things spoil—other things—he has kept the fridge free from moldy cheese and rotten milk, free from the usual assortment of unidentified dying objects usually found in the overstocked refrigerators of happy, healthy families. It contains only a partial chocolate bar, a baked but not eaten potato which he throws in the garbage, a tub of margarine, an ice cube tray filled with water which he returns to the freezer, several bottles of gone-flat mixers and sodas, a small bag of coffee, and a green pepper purchased last week, now in the final stages of edibility. Inclined to something green he selects the pepper and, taking a gulp of vodka for courage, slices it into quarters. Discarding the shriveled areas of the vegetable, he is left with two cavernous sections; they rest alone in the center of his plate. The sweat beads on his forehead as he bites half of one of the pieces and chews. He swallows the small pulpy quantity and waits while watching for distraction a high-mileage, very beat cat run across the street. A protest begins in his outraged stomach. Reflexively he pushes away from the table and bends slightly forward. Determined not to surrender this little bit of hard won food, he stiffens in his chair and slowly blows air out of his mouth, a trick used by him in the past to successfully fight nausea in public. Painfully, white faced in his kitchen chair, he fights the good fight, and manages to keep down the bite of green pepper until the crisis passes. Then hopeful, renewed, proud of his victory, and rather sated, he tosses out the remaining food and jaunts out the door.
At the bar he settles into his barstool position and begins working on the nuts and bolts of going to Las Vegas. Having deduced the inevitability of the trip he sees no reason to delay it further. When he gets to Vegas his first act will be… his first act will be to have a drink, and his second act will be to pawn his watch. Time will be money. Hopefully, he will never again know what time it is. If he should want a drink, he need only go out and buy one—anytime, anywhere. The bartender puts his vodka down hard on the bar and collects a few bills from the little pile in front of Ben, all the time shaking his head in silent disapproval.
“I think when I’m done with this I’ll have gin and tonic, Bombay gin and tonic,” says Ben just to taunt him.
The bartender, unable to keep silent any longer, flares at him. “You should be having coffee! All the time in here, do you know what time it is? You’re a young man. It’s none of my business, but if you could see what I see you wouldn’t do this to yourself.”
Ben is moved. Perhaps he is being unintentionally cruel to this caring human being by making him participate in Ben’s Personal Theater of Tragedy. But what happened here? This man is a bartender. Ben’s a drunk. What’s the problem? Tough call, the old guy�
�s trying to show some unbridled compassion, some unconditional concern. Ben could cry here if he worked at it, so he decides to burn the bridge.
“I understand what you’re saying and why you’re saying it,” he says to the bartender. “I appreciate your concern, and it’s not my intention to make you uncomfortable. Serve me today, and I won’t ever come in here again. If I do you can eighty-six me.”
“Sure, sure, I can eighty-six you now if I want. Stop fucking with me. I don’t give a fuck what you do.” He picks up a bottle of gin and fills a glass, slamming it down angrily in front of Ben. “On the house, son,” he says and knocks the bar twice with his knuckles.
Ben turns his back to the bar and sits looking at the room. He is jolted by a tug at his sleeve. Turning, he finds the image of a middle aged man whom he has seen muttering to himself on the street and sometimes in the bar. The man is making noises at Ben. Unintelligible, the sounds are similar to snorts and grunts, with the vocal cords being struck only sporadically. Figuring that this is probably a visual aid sent over by the bartender, Ben nods in sarcastic acknowledgement to the man who is indeed watching from the far end of the bar, and offers a five dollar bill to the impaired man who then shuffles away, clutching it. The scene saddens Ben, as does any encounter with hurt persons, life’s victims. As he gets up to leave he feels the familiar nausea and shortness of breath. His heart is beating very fast these days, and he’s not been able to give it any sort of proper fuel. He can tell already that his own body won’t outlast his mind, but what if it did? That would be truly awful, he thinks, everybody thinks.
He goes directly to the liquor store and replenishes his home supply, this time with gin: a new leaf, a fresh start, a new man. He also buys a roll of heavy duty trash bags and a can of charcoal lighter, and convinces the reluctant clerk to give up as many empty liquor boxes as Ben can carry home. Ben combines the boxes as efficiently as possible inside of each other and, after putting his purchases in the innermost box, ends up with a fairly compact package. He won’t need to go home for the car; he can carry his disposal kit easily in his arms.
