South on Highland: A Novel

by Liana Maeby

  “Are we expecting company?”

  “Nah, I took the liberty of ordering you two cups. They’re damn slow around here.”

  “I like your style, Tim.”

  “Hmm. I was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten around to telling you my name.”

  “Fuck.”

  Another chuckle. “Like you said . . .”

  “I like your style.”

  Tim and I continued to make quippy small talk throughout breakfast. I downed both cups of coffee and forced myself to eat half a croissant, for show. I tried my best to keep my eyes alert and undroopy, all while avoiding any line of chat that touched on the personal. Even still, I saw that Tim was noticing things about me without even trying. I knew his ex-junkie eyes saw me in infrared—as if each move I made were passing through an X-ray that betrayed my decaying skeleton—but I stayed there talking to him anyway. Tim had an easiness about him, an attitude that I interpreted as being casually accepting and nonjudgmental.

  I was wrong. The next time I saw Tim, we were both guests at a party inside one of the Chateau’s bungalows. Johnny had recently met with the potential producer of a new fake-indie looks-shitty-but-requires-a-big-budget project his agent had been trying to get off the ground for months. The producer was a rich geek in his thirties who clawed at the lifestyle Johnny embodied with every fiber of his expensively tailored yet somehow still ill-fitting sport coat. So when he invited my beau to a bash he was throwing right in our very backyard, Johnny decided his best course of action for landing the gig would be to give the guy the pure Hollywood lifestyle for all it was worth—which meant donning his best $200 plain white T-shirt, sliding into his most prebattered leather jacket, and bringing along his very authentic heroin-chic girlfriend.

  To prepare, Johnny and I shot speedballs and traipsed around our room to Some Girls. I drew thick black liquid lines above my eyelashes and stepped into five-inch heels. I treated the night as if it were a game to be won—and the cocaine rushing through my bloodstream was by no means an unwelcome member of my team, recently shunned as it may have been.

  The party was full of Hollywood businessmen and almost-models. As soon as we helped ourselves to flutes of champagne to take the dryness out of our mouths, Johnny tracked down Steven, the producer of note, and introduced me. I held out my hand to be kissed, like the asshole I had decided to play for the night, and Steven was delighted. He slobbered onto my skin and told Johnny I was “lovely”—an adjective I hadn’t elicited in quite some time.

  The models were dancing to something pulsing I’d never heard before, or maybe had a million times. They all fixed their eyes on Johnny, who leaned so smoothly into the corner of the room it seemed like he was part of the plaster. “Care to swing-dance?” Johnny whispered in my ear. “Maybe a little two-step? I hear you’re a natural at the cha-cha-cha.”

  “Easy, ballet boy,” I said. “Before I make you do a pirouette.”

  Half an hour later, I abandoned Johnny to a boring conversation with someone from his agency and wandered through the rooms of the bungalow. The place was basically a freestanding house, with chic upholstery that probably had to be cleaned as often as a baby’s bib, and mirrors on every wall. I downed my champagne and walked upstairs with the intention of giving my ankles a respite from standing at five inches of attention.

  I spotted Steven sitting in one of the bedrooms with a smattering of other rich guys. They were crowded around a mound of cocaine and took turns inhaling lines with a hundred-dollar bill. I smiled at Steven, and he beckoned me into the room, introducing me as Johnny’s beautiful girlfriend, Kayla.

  I grimaced. Hasn’t he heard of me? I permitted myself to think, remembering that I was supposed to be playing an asshole. I shook a few hands and took a seat at the table when it was offered to me. The men talked budgets and box offices and passed the rolled-up bill around. “Go ahead,” the guy next to me said as he handed me the fucked-up Benjamin.

  I looked at the mound of cocaine, all snowy white and wholesome-looking as a fresh Aspen day. I was way past the point where snorting drugs held any appeal for me. It was a waste of time and a waste of money, and, damn it, I had a needle right there in my silver leather handbag. But I couldn’t just whip out a medical syringe in the middle of a Hollywood party like it was a business card. I thought about sneaking some coke into my own bill and excusing myself to the bathroom, but there seemed to be no graceful way to do that. I considered sucking it up, and, well, sucking it up, but swiftly nixed the bullshit idea of nasal ingestion. Finally, I did the only thing left on my list of options. I turned to the crowd of stiff, too-loud producers, all bravado and dripping insecurity, and said, “Hey. You guys want to see me shoot this up?”

  There was a flash of silence as the group registered what I’d said and considered the sincerity of my offer. I saw curiosity, if not awe, creeping across their faces. “Hell yeah!” one of the guys shouted, and the rest of the men chimed in with their affirmations.

  I nodded. I rose calmly and headed toward the bathroom to fill my spoon with water. Out of sight, I mixed in a little heroin. I walked back to the bedroom, where the men were silent and anticipatory. I wrapped my legs around one of the guys, a pudgy and prematurely balding character, and removed the silk tie from around his neck. I secured it across my own bicep, and the man gulped. I dumped a moderate amount of cocaine into my spoon and heated the mixture with a lighter. I could feel all the hungry eyes in the room watching me, contact lenses salivating saline. These guys were ready to live vicariously through whatever reaction I had, and the asshole in me decided to make it worth their while. “Ready?” I asked.

  I felt the men draw a collective breath as I stuck the needle in my vein. I pushed the plunger down, conjuring a cloud of blood, and sucked the mixture into the syringe. I released and expelled the drugs into my bloodstream.

  Slowly, I inhaled, magnifying the ecstasy I felt for the benefit of the men. I let my eyes flutter and my mouth part. I moaned ever so lightly, oh so delicately. Then my head fell back with a thud, and my body slumped down into the chair.

  The men looked at each other cautiously. My body spasmed. More cautious looks came my way, which sent out more spasms. With my head tilted back, I started to slump lower and lower in the chair, until I reached the end of the seat, at which point I fell off with a thud. My body shook on the ground, and my head slammed against the leg of my chair. The men stared with their mouths open.

  “Oh fuck!” one of the guys finally said. “Is this bitch OD’ing?”

  At the mention of the word, the room morphed into a full-on panic zone. No one could take their eyes off me, but no one wanted to touch me either.

  “Do we call an ambulance?” one of the men asked.

  “Hell no. That shit’ll be on TMZ in an hour.”

  “What about the concierge?”

  They considered that one for a moment.

  “Let’s just fucking go!” It was Steven who spoke. Steven, with his carnal longing for danger and edginess. “And close the goddamn door!”

  At that, I stopped shaking and took a deep breath. The guys instantly grew silent, and the asshole I was playing laughed, feeding on the shock that was vibrating from wall to wall.

  “Fuck you guys,” I said, opening my eyes fully and sitting back up. “You fuckers were just going to leave me for dead.”

  Pure quiet now. The awe was still there, but it was mixed with something else: horror, I believe. As I stood up to go, repacking my kit as slowly as possible, I saw Tim standing in the doorway with a paper cup of coffee in his hand. There was no awe in his face and no horror either. There was just recognition of the very illest sort.

  The third time I saw Tim, I figured he’d been waiting for me. It was a morning a few days after the party (or afternoon, if you live in a normal-person time zone), and I was out on another of my aimless cigarette strolls. I hadn’t showered this time, and I wasn’t feeling nearly as high as I would have liked; my skin was crawling. I saw Tim’s silver h
ead as soon as I rounded the corner, and I watched him put his newspaper away the moment he spotted me. “Coffee,” he asked, although it wasn’t really a question.

  We sat down at the same patio table as before. This time, Tim ordered us three cups apiece, a sign that it was going to be a while. But instead of talking, instead of laying the spiel I’d been anticipating on me like a chemical weapon, Tim just watched me sitting there across from him. I fidgeted like a virus. I lit a cigarette and let it burn. After five minutes, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I exploded at my breakfast companion. “What the fuck?”

  Tim shrugged. The waiter brought over a basket of pastries and a cup of orange juice. Tim took a sip of juice and reached into the pocket of his jacket. He dumped a bunch of white capsules out on the table. I didn’t recognize them. Then he pulled out a small vial of liquid with a complicated and menacing label.

  “Hepatitis C,” he said, swallowing one of the capsules with a pull of orange juice. “Do you have it?”

  I shook my head.

  “You will soon enough.”

  “I don’t share needles,” I said defensively.

  “Neither did I.” Tim laughed hollowly. “Until I did.”

  “Look, I don’t even really have a problem. I mean, yeah, I shoot drugs, but I—”

  “Can stop anytime I want?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” I said, even though I was. “I’m not that much of a cliché.”

  “We’re all that much of a cliché,” Tim said.

  “Poetic.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “Okay, fine. You think I’m a junkie, so I must be a junkie. How grand. I appreciate your little silent intervention or whatever, but I know what I’ve gotten myself into. And when I need to, I’ll get myself out of it.”

  “Look, Leila. You’re smart and you’re beautiful and you’re talented.”

  I laughed.

  “I’d like to think I’d be having this same conversation right now if you were stupid and ugly and inept, but I probably wouldn’t be.”

  “That’s a good line. Don’t forget it.”

  “I’m not going to say I care about you, but I do like you. And unfortunately, I know right where you’re headed.”

  “To a life of lighting cigarettes on the wrong end.”

  “You have a problem.”

  “Inhaling carcinogenic paper and sucking on wet tobacco.”

  “You won’t let yourself see it, but you have a problem.”

  “Little girl lost, forever with those backwards cigarettes.”

  “Maybe no one has told you that yet, but now I have, and I’ll tell you again. You. Have. A problem.”

  “Fuck you,” I said and lit a backwards cigarette right in Tim’s face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Burnt Sienna was always my favorite crayon. While the other little girls in preschool were greedily snapping up the Shocking Pinks and Mountain Meadows, I would render whole landscapes in a monochromatic Burnt Sienna. Dark brown with flecks of rusty red, it’s the color of my hair during those periods I spend any amount of time in the sunlight. As a teenager, I briefly considered becoming a Suicide Girl, solely because I was enraged that none of the existing tattooed pinup babes had chosen the glorious crayon as their nickname. Burnt Sienna, eighteen years old, from Los Angeles, California. So you’d think I’d have been pleased when I returned to the Chateau after a dope run, opened my fresh bundle of tinfoil, and discovered that it contained a gram of chopped-up crayon in a hue none other than my precious Burnt Sienna. But, against all logic, I was not pleased at all. I was fucking pissed.

  My plan had been to wait for Johnny to get home before setting out to score, like I usually did, but his shoot was running late and I figured I’d make like a good little domestic partner and have the dope waiting for him when he returned—all purchased and prepared and laid out, needing only to be heated up. I didn’t have any phone numbers, but there was a taco truck downtown where Johnny and I had procured heroin a few times, so I asked the valet to fetch my beau’s car from the parking structure and drove over. I circled the block a few times like some kind of private eye before deciding to park a couple of blocks away. I knew I was in over my head immediately, but the pull of the opiates was too hard to resist. With nervousness coursing through my body, I walked to the lot where the truck was parked, as if I were carrying the weight of the act I was about to commit on my shoulders. It was making me shuffle, stooped-over and low to the ground, a cockroach ready to be crushed by anyone who happened to see me.

  I strolled up to the taco truck. I didn’t recognize any of the three guys inside, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t seen them before. I hardly recognized myself anymore. I smiled at the man behind the counter, then quickly changed my facial expression once I realized I was trying to sell myself as a heroin addict and had better not reveal that I still had all my teeth. I tried to remember what Johnny had said to the guy to let him know it was dope and not carne asada he desired, but I was drawing a blank. I perused the menu and asked, “What else do you have?”

  The man behind the counter shrugged. “You a vegetarian or something?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I was here before, and I got something . . . else.”

  “You remember what it was?”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t, like, normal, you know?”

  “You like green chile? We can put that on whatever.”

  “No, I mean like . . . something else. Altogether. Not food.”

  The guy just stared at me like I was standing before him in a straitjacket.

  “Um, one second,” I said.

  I stepped back from the truck and tried to figure out what to do. I could text Johnny and ask for the right thing to say, but that might come off as desperate, and I was trying to make it seem like my decision to avoid waiting a few more hours for him to get off work was actually an act of sweetness and consideration, not straight-up dope-fiending. I looked helplessly around the lot. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a kid who looked to be about sixteen. He beckoned me over with a thrust of his scraggly goatee. I lit a cigarette and sauntered over like Casual was my family name. I leaned up against the wall near the kid and looked at him out of the corner of my eye. “Chiva?” he asked.

  I nodded, and the boy leaned in closer. “Drop your money on the ground and walk to that alley over there.”

  I took the last two cigarettes from my pack and put them behind my ear. Then I stuffed my bills into the empty cardboard box and casually placed it on the ground for the kid to pick up. He took off, and I finished my cigarette before doing the Casuals proud again by strolling over to the alley the kid had gestured toward. Ten infinite minutes went by before he pedaled over on a little girl’s tricycle and placed a bundle into my hand. I stuffed it into my jacket pocket and walked quickly to my car, paranoia lurking in every step. When I was nearly back to the hotel, I allowed myself to relax. I grinned, pleased at my own self-sufficiency.

  I paced the hotel room, waiting for my Johnny to return. I figured I owed it to myself to sample my wares before he got back—reward therapy, because I had done such a good job and all. I got out my kit and bleached my needle. I arranged my cotton ball, my spoon, and my lighter in a neat little row on the nightstand. I went to the sink and poured water into a glass. Then I removed the bag of brown tar from my pocket and opened it up.

  For a few seconds, everything was fine. I was still getting a dizzy prehigh from anticipation, which simply increased when I unwrapped the tinfoil. It was only when I brought the chunk of dope up to my nose that I began to suspect something had gone wrong. Instead of the sticky-sweet aroma of burned brown sugar (heroin is basically just dessert, after all), this dark mound released a scent that was more chemical, more sterile, than what I expected. At first, I thought it was new-car I was picking up on, but my senses quickly latched on to something else—the smell of something that had, very long ago, actually been inside my nose. No, not speed or cocaine. Lo
ng before she even knew what those substances were, young Leila was destroying her nasal passages by shoving them full of crayons, sketching streaks of foreshadowing on the inside of her delicate proboscis. I always was pretty fucking gross.

  Still, I was in denial that the smell emanating from my chunk of brown heaven truly was that of crayon. I was enough of a heroin novice that I figured this batch of tar must simply have been cut with something unfamiliar. So I tapped a small chunk onto my spoon and mixed it with water. But when I held my lighter under the spoon, the substance didn’t melt with beautiful ease to mingle with the shot of water. It sat there like an angry, useless blob, releasing its waxy scent up into my nostrils tenfold. Fuck.

  I looked at the tinfoil package in disbelief. I grabbed one of my notebooks from the spot on the desk where it had remained untouched for weeks and opened it to a blank page. I took a chunk of the supposed tar and dragged it across the paper, where it left a thick trail of rusty brown. “Burnt Sienna,” I said out loud and laughed bitterly to no one.

  I poured the rest of the crayon chunks onto the bedspread and used them to draw a crude picture on a page of the notebook: a triangular house with a picket fence beneath a giant sun, all of it brown. I gave the sun a pair of Ray-Bans, and then I packed up my kit, hid the tinfoil at the bottom of the trash can, and resumed my act of waiting patiently for Johnny to return so we could go out and score.

  And score we did—real drugs—that night, and the next, and the one after that as well. Slowly, winter burned through itself, and the ashes of February blew around in the Santa Ana winds until they resettled as March. This particular month came to us as Los Angeles’s version of hell. The last gasps of the year’s demonic winds coincided with an unseasonal heat wave, and it made the air seem thick and charged with poisonous molecules. Ants who couldn’t take the torture of being underground marched to the surface in droves, attacking every kitchen and outdoor patio in the city. Fortunately for me and Johnny, our tiny hotel room didn’t have a kitchen, and I had mostly abandoned even those daily strolls around the hotel’s grounds.