by Doug Weaver
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Jimmy moves across the boulevard in spurts and starts, expending way more energy than necessary, much like his less-than-tranquil sleeping style. He looks like a cross between a ‘70s V-8 Crown Vic who’s forgotten that it’s been banished to spend its golden years while beating itself to death in a demolition derby with other similarly aged vehicles, and a groveling apologist pleading to be left alone. He heads west toward Martel and that huge modern apartment complex where The Geisha has lived for the past six months or so. Jimmy tries to resist thinking poorly about the Geisha because somewhere deep down in his memory he remembers a time when he was a more generous man, when he took with a grain of salt humanity’s imperfections as simply the necessary parts of some great beautiful tapestry. At one time Jimmy may have tried to stuff his dislike of the Geisha into a manageable little bindle and perhaps decided to visit another vendor instead of the one he’s become used to – to add perspective to unpleasant tasks. But that’s the thing about habits. The Geisha’s an asshole. It has something to do with putting on airs. Actually, hardly anybody likes him. He’s a low-level dealer who behaves the way he thinks drug dealers should act – meaning that he holds court and wastes everybody’s time, even though it’s pretty obvious that this behavior is born from choice instead of necessity: my dealer wasted my time, so I will waste everybody else’s time. But as luck would have it, once the doorbell is pushed, Jimmy’s given speedy admittance and, once inside the building’s lobby, he takes the elevator up to the Sixth Floor, where he prepares himself to endure the usual duties The Geisha burdens on him after he’s slammed a half-gram of free meth into his veins. The Geisha’s price for a “free” shot of speed is the substantial duty of trying to administer a shot to The Geisha himself, a task peppered with pitfalls that would test the endurance of bona fide surgeons and saints, much less the enfeebled abilities and attention span of Jimmy S. As they are in obese people, The Geisha’s veins are practically invisible. But The Geisha’s not overweight. His veins are diminished because he’s diminished – physically speaking. He appears almost gossamer, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he jumped out of his sixth floor window and just floated away with the breeze, which in Hollywood, actually smells a little bit like bad milk most of the time. But that’s just the obvious physical challenge of the task. Anticipation of an impending rush will cause most dope fiends who are hard to hit to insist that whoever is doing the hitting to just keep jabbing, which always results in a bloody mess. And dope fiends being original examples of low self-worth, will often offer their arms as sacrifices to the cause. The existential challenge lies in the post-shot neighborhood, because 1) after receiving a shot, The Geisha gets completely Tandaleo of the Jungle, murmuring and drooling over whatever piece of meat is nearby (Jimmy), and performing a come-fuck-me Dance of Salome; and 2) once the dope hits him, The Geisha shits his panties.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sometimes in deluxe recovery facilities a cloud of adversity arrives and casts its shadow over everything and everyone, which can cause even the most powerful and esteemed former addicts to rely on their current undrugged, undesperate, unsullied circumstances to shape their reaction to new stimuli that will result in them forgetting their most basic mission, which is to keep drugs out of the facility. George P. was such a dark cloud – not really a cloud, but more like a plague, so powerful and cunning – and charming was his performance that even MaryAnn and Ben, the husband and wife there’s-no-doubt-that-we’re-hope-to-die-no-hope-drug-addicts founders and current directors of the facility, fell for his act. George P. was a black man who’d arrived at Cri-Life from Corcoran Prison, where he was serving a twenty-five-year sentence for killing somebody, which should have been a pretty strong hint that one might consider taking him with a grain of salt before accepting the truth of his presenting persona, which was figuratively and literally a tap-dancing Uncle Tom complete with profound stammer and downcast eyes. Every morning George would shuffle into the tech office and charm all who witnessed him: “Ca-ca-ca-caaaan I jus’ get sum soap?” The staff, both permanent and temporary, almost ninety-nine percent of whom were white, a fact not lost on George, who’d perfectly predicted the reaction to not only the unassuming, humble nature of his query, but the entirely self-effacing manner with which it was delivered: “Of course, you can have some soap, George! Here, take several.”
George always refused the offer of extra soap: “N-n-n-no thank ye, ma’am/sah – one’ll be fine wid me. Th-th-thank ye kindly though,” the reaction to which, after the prescribed number of repetitions, was universal: “Poor George. George is so – sweet – and clean! Poor George!”
George was neither sweet nor deserving of sympathy – and the “clean” referred to only described the kind made possible by the use of soap and water. Shortly after arriving at the facility, George devised a method to have large quantities of heroin dropped at various points around the perimeter of Cri-Life, something that kept him and dozens of the most sinister clients behind its walls completely gowed for months, almost all of whom confessed, after the scheme and its attendant contraband were discovered, that George was no stammering tap dancer. During the investigation that followed George’s Shit Storm, he was described by those who partook with him as a cold-hearted monk with perfect diction and a laser focus of intent. He was no more an Uncle Tom than was William Rhenquist. Even before he’d climbed off the prison bus that bore him from the verdant north of the state all the way to the parched wasteland of North Hollywood, George quickly banished the welcoming arms of Cri-Life, its staff and its promise of a meaningful life unimpaired by heroin or cocaine or any other substance directly and without reservation to the realm of “quaint.” He was being true to the promise he’d made to himself decades earlier: If he somehow exited the walls of Corcoran Prison not in a pine box, he was going to get high. Period.
In the annals of detailed record keeping in the state mandated hourly, daily and weekly journals describing life at Cri-Life, there has never been such an upheaval as was precipitated by the appearance of George P. It was, to put it bluntly, the kind of mess that all institutions, be they small like Cri-Life or bigger like the Catholic Church, inevitably experience, no matter how redundant their safeguards seem to be.
So after the initial excision of obviously “guilty” residents (which included George P., obviously), an Investigation began in earnest, and fairly quickly grew and took shape during marathon meetings held between Ben and MaryAnn, and many of the most trusted hierarchy of administrators and CDWs, a messy schedule-destroying condition that most of these administrators and CDWs accepted as a necessary step to getting the facility back on track, but that some, including Rick, equated with dying and going to Heaven. Possibly because he’d studied law, but probably because he retained the status of being one of the all-time biggest solid gold assholes who’d ever walked the earth, staff meetings to Rick came as close to scoring a bull’s eye in terms of hitting his sweet spot as anything else in existence. To be fair, society is better off because of meetings. Meetings are the essential test tubes of compromise and consensus when it comes to shaping policy about everything from how to address pandemics to cobbling together train schedules to devising signage with the most appropriate language with which to shame healthy youths into relinquishing their seats so that the elderly and disabled on public transportation might have a spot to sit on. And to the spiritually centered kind of person with generous hearts, intellects and souls, meetings are necessarily tedious affairs that are to be endured. But not for Rick. He thrived in meetings, not only offering his thoughts at every opportunity, he even relieved Cathy P., the de facto taker of minutes from meeting to meeting, a duty that Rick took responsibility for due to some early fatherly advice which laid out in no uncertain terms the importance of being able to shape the record of official proceedings, legal or not.
“Become friends with the court stenographer, son. Buy him
/her gifts – fuck ‘em if you’d like, but remember this: it’s the record that’s important, not what people think they said,” advice that actually turns out to be pretty much true for a number of reasons: 1) No matter how much this or that interlocutor might object to inaccuracies in the official transcript of proceedings, it’s the record that’s considered sacrosanct. The note taker is the last word. 2) Laziness. The process available to actually challenge the accuracy of a legal transcript is so onerous that it becomes counterproductive, actually having the ability to cut into the barrister’s allotted time to collect his/her sacred fees. To underscore his commitment to record keeping, Rick’s father actually, sometime in the 1960s when personalized license plates were introduced in California, had learned from a friendly court stenographer, whom he’d met during one of his first criminal trials – and had actually impregnated after one of many alcohol-fueled post-trial get-togethers when he’d followed this stenographer into the ladies’ room of Trader Vic’s, the traditional watering ground/party palace for much of the west side’s legal community, how to spell certain words with their little shorthand machines. He’d had the letters tpubg u emblazoned onto his de Ville’s license plates, groupings of letters that the Department of Motor Vehicles only a decade later learned meant Fuck You when unpacked into plain old English words. Being a pretty sharp cookie, Rick’s father had discerned the fact that his number one son, Rick, had, probably from birth, but certainly in his formative years, displayed traits that suggested he was prone to taking it up the ass, and being true to his impossibly progressive ideals, had encouraged Rick, after he’d graduated from the law school at Loyola University, to have tpubg phe imprinted on his license plates, the short-hand equivalent of Fuck Me.
It was during one of the many meetings at Cri-Life that Rick, in a surprising flash of creativity, suggested that maybe – just maybe – the arrival of George P. was actually a blessing, a statement that guaranteed him unwavering attention from everybody in the room. The biggest hurdle facing most recovery facilities in California is fiscal. There is never enough money, something that, according to Rick, could be solved easily enough with the help of George P. It’s been stated that recovery houses aren’t democracies. True enough. But one thing that they are is fair, at least when rendered in very broad strokes, something that Rick saw as only a minor impediment to his plan of identifying undesirable residents, then kicking them out after linking them, whether it was true or not, with George P.’s boondoggle.
And Rick, being himself a pretty sharp cookie, had offered his own unsolicited rejoinder to the as yet realized objections: Complete with raised palm with which to ward off dissents, and signifying please allow me to continue, Rick offered the overused aphorism that’s often dredged up by lazy debaters to address injustice: “Life just isn’t fair sometimes – but we must consider the greater good – no?” Rick thought that ending this declarative statement with a negative query imbued it with a certain academic gravitas, and had actually, the first time he heard it just before earning his bachelor’s degree in Physical Therapy, given him goose bumps when the Intro to Human Kinesiology instructor had offered the proposition: “A good shoulders routine is just the same as poetry, no?” Put simply, Rick proposed using the catastrophe brought on by George P.’s introduction of heroin into the facility as the springboard that could be used for kicking out every state-funded-dope-fiend-who-at-least-presents-as-someone-who-wants-a-better-life, which necessarily included 100 percent of the gang bangers, about ninety-five percent of the crackheads, and about eighty-five percent of the AIDS/HIV cohort, which would leave veritable acres of unused, pristine and empty beds languishing for a warm and necessarily flush-with-money private-pay client, a state of recovery house grace that the administrators who ran facilities in Malibu had honed to perfection over the decades.
There were, of course, the expected amount of disapproving harrumphs from most of the meeting attendees, along with a peppering of sforzandi achieved by table slapping and a generous amount of plain old fuck yous to express disbelief and outrage.
“That would fundamentally change the face of Cri-Life!”
“Ridiculous suggestion!”
“How dare you!” – expressions that only fueled Rick’s arguments.
Disapproval was met, point by point, with seemingly well-thought out evidence – complete with charts and graphs that Rick had fashioned over the two weeks that had passed since George was kicked out. In the process of making his case to the assembled hierarchy of Cri-Life officials, Rick wanted to be perceived as the grownup in the room, generously listening to and weighing dissenting arguments which flowed from the mouths of folks like Janice E., and all her “hokey-pokey” world view, to many of the heavily tattooed ex-cons of a certain age, whose societal aspirations, due to the completely successful brainwashing born from decades of institutional living and which took shape simply because they didn’t know any better, were necessarily foreshortened into a guttural chorus of phlegm-heavy exhales, to Ben and MaryAnn, who seemed more befuddled than argumentative. Rick waited for a lull in the anti-Rick cacophony to pepper his loftily-perched positions with a generous amount of buttery impatience: “You will perhaps allow me to say…I speak now with sincerity…You will forgive me for expressing myself with, shall I say, frankness,” a style of speech that pretty much disarmed most of those present, whose rhetorical templates had been modeled over the years, after the silver tongues of Jerry Springer, Glenn Beck and various prison employees.
Grudgingly, Rick’s position won out, and he, of course, volunteered to become Cri-Life’s tip of the spear in its wholesale restructuring, and it was a duty that Rick turned out to be quite good at. But more than embodying merely the tip of the spear, Rick assumed the responsibility of being the spear’s entire shaft as well. He convinced everyone in attendance that his plan could only be successful if it were left to him to painstakingly if need be question each of the Cri-Life residents one by one. As mentioned earlier, Rick had a remarkable smile – not because of the way some people’s smiles reflect the benevolence of their souls, or the way they might invite intimacy. Rick’s smile was remarkable because of its overt artifice. He bleached his teeth several times a week, which rendered the sight of them while he was fashioning a grin as something more akin to a blazing Klieg light rather than as a reflection of his humanity. Even if he’d wanted to intimidate the residents by donning the costume of a medieval inquisitor, complete with miter, orb and staff, the simple act of smiling struck fear into their hearts. Also, the brightness of his teeth was set off and accentuated not by his clothes, which were simply Levis or khakis along with various button-down shirts, but by his impressive musculature, the Yeah, I know I’m ripped kind; and skin tone, which he maintained at a dark latte hue. Rick preferred to search out the objects of his inquiries rather than having them simply report to his office, a strategy that he believed imbued his mission with a certain alleatoric quality, and was something that he thought gave him a tactical advantage because of its unpredictability. With clipboard in hand, he could be seen standing just outside the thick glass double doors that led to the facility’s smoking/hanging around patio, and scanning his list of targets and comparing them to whomever was in his line of sight, then stopping to ruminate for a few moments on the best way to present. Just as Bernard Gui, in the fourteenth century had compiled a handbook for inquisitors to study when searching out, questioning and ultimately exposing heretics to Roman Catholic dogma, Rick employed a similar tactic, albeit one a bit more improvised, but no less magisterial. Upon his initial approach to a subject, Rick became merciless and aggressive, but nevertheless retained an overtly-constructed warmth, something he believed would put his trembling targets more at ease. “Hi, Audrey – very nice outfit you’re wearing. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions? Would you mind very much if we could sit at the other end of the track – under the tree maybe for some shade?” (broad smile)
“We’ll have more privacy over there. After you, please.”
Even armed with the knowledge that most of the at-risk residents he intended to elicit tacit – or even not so tacit confessions from, were lightweights in terms of their rhetorical readiness with which to meet an interrogation – because – well, it’s obvious: dope fiends are often the first ones to admit that they’re the dregs of society with just about zero value compared to the hardworking broodmares and broodmasters of the world, whose worth can usually be measured by the size of their debt for the upkeep of said broods. Dope fiends are quick to admit to lying, which, in the scheme of things, are mere pebbles of societal transgressions compared to the boulders of bad behavior they’d prefer to keep mum about because the less that’s really known about this shit, the better, right? Rick nevertheless questioned his targets in a meticulously baroque manner that turned out to prove the validity of Parkinson’s Law: The Job Expands to Fill the Time Allotted To Do It.
