Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  LOST ANGELS

  David J. Schow

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / David J. Schow

  Copy-edited by: Kurt M. Criscione

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by: Grant Christian

  LICENSE NOTES

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  The Kill Riff

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION (BY RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON)

  PAMELA'S GET

  BRASS

  CALENDAR GIRL

  THE FALLING MAN

  MONSTER MOVIES

  AFTERWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  David J. Schow is my friend. Has been for years.

  I'll try and ignore that; be objective. Either way, I promise you, this will come out the same.

  If you've read even a little of David's extraordinary work, you know what I mean when I say he's something of a be-bop clairvoyant. Indirectly predicting trends. Setting others. Often mocking both; leaving unsettled imitators far behind. Indeed, in a field a climb with performing monkeys and dexterous copycats, David is like some finely made glockenspiel; endlessly inventive, always in perfect pitch.

  All the stories collected in Lost Angels share a jazz immediacy; radiant, unconventional meters of sound and thought. These qualities alone would be more than enough for most writers to go far. David's work only begins there.

  Observe his octaves. The countless choices available to him. When it suits his peculiar recipes, however complex, he can instantly abandon the dialects of anarchy. Then, effortlessly, he'll descend into perfect pools of formalism; a skilled defector who stuns with beautiful language. Call it lyrical, I'd agree with you. For as long as I've read him, he's always been something of a choirboy, however illicit his prose. I marvel at the impossible harmony.

  Indeed, if you read David's work carefully, you'll sense the secret tenderness. It hides behind savage armament, careful to give only glimpses of itself. But the shadings will move you. Maybe a phrase. A quiet observation he seemed to coin for you alone. There is poignancy everywhere in his talent, amid the exquisite threat.

  I don't know exactly where his rocket-sled talent comes from. I know something about his past. Family; emotional DNA. But it's all inadequate to explain how his gift might have occurred. It doesn't really explain a writer who over and over does more with a single short story than many do with a career. Read "Pamela's Get" or "Red Light?' They are breath takers and put innumerable horror novels to shame.

  And always, there is that precarious, nuclear hum.

  That flammable sense David gives you he's working without a fuse and if he goes too far, there's nothing there to save him. His characters share this plague. Throughout Lost Angels stories is a sense of real dread and danger. Aching. Madness. You can sometimes know why; how he does it. What you've responded to. But there are many times it simply isn't clear. It bends around corners too deftly, graceful beyond exact definition. But you are sure it's there, out to get you ... Like sensing menace and loathing in a stranger's neutral expression. You feel what isn't there. How can it be explained?

  How can it be denied?

  In David's frantically tiered work, as with superstitions, what is evoked is always what is most disturbing. The quiet, violent ruination his people are drawn into. The blue-digits-on-the-arm eeriness. The tragedy of the blood; its horrific inscription on walls and floors. The tension and hypnosis of the words. The perfect wrongness of everything.

  When David moved to novel writing, his superb shorter fiction quickly got an older brother. His first major, showroom performance was The Kill Riff, an outlandish, razor-ride, braiding rock 'n' roll and horror in startling shades of red. The book garnered much respect and excitement among critics and readers. Other novels will certainly follow. David's interests expand as quickly as his talents and movies have been the next stop in an intriguing, rather meteoric career; moving images, ideally suited to the velocity of his visions on paper.

  When David recently began in scriptwriting, an important career step which I was honored to help in bringing about, he scaled one more inky Matterhorn without looking down. And his skills prevailed once again, winning him instant advocates, much new opportunity in the eccentric rapids of Hollywood and, not incidentally, his first movie script ever written, produced. This is not usual. But somehow for David, it was.

  As a man, David stands gunslinger-straight when you talk to him, gathered hair to mid-back. He is a striking Eiffel in his black clothes and boots and looks very much like a Boschian musketeer. Without intending it, he has a way of scaring people with his daunting speed of mind. But if you remain steady long enough to allow David's eclipse of lesser talents and company to simply occur, you'll find you can warm your palms on his friendship. He's also poisonously funny, with a sense of humor he should probably carry in a holster. If you've known him for a number of years, as I have, you begin to conclude he's not unlike one of those fascinations who can catch a whizzing bullet in their smile from fifty yards away, and hand it over like a high calibre Tic Tac. It's just David does it with dangerous ideas, provocative approaches. Thousand mile an hour brain twisters.

  And he just smiles.

  If I didn't know him better, I'd swear he was up to something ... The water balloon grin. The short sheeting, sociopathic amusement. The generally perverse twinkle. Sometimes you wonder where David ends and misdemeanors begin.

  As brothers of the night, I've traveled with David, hung-out together in some strange places. Talked neck-deep into very bad hours. I've been compared to him, been one fourth of our version of the British Invasion with the Splatter Punk movement, being Gear and Fab and Virulent.

  David and I will probably know each other forever; connected. Likely dissected.

  And through it all, however insane it gets, two things remain clear to me:

  1) as a writer, David is on fire.

  2) the fire can't be contained.

  So, I'm done.

  Take it, pal.

  Richard Christian Matheson

  October 1989

  Malibu, California

  We look

  into the eyes

  of those

  we have killed

  and wonder

  why they do not thank us.

  PAMELA'S GET

  "This is a scam, young lady. Or some sort of unpolished joke I lack the crust to understand."

  That young lady had been aimed and fired like a bullet: Me Caesar - you bimbo. Jaime's lip tried to curl, but when pow-wowing with Pavel Drake it was always a more prudent strategy to maintain a corporate attitude, an unfeeling stonewall posture. Beneath the black slate circle of the cocktail table her fist locked tight, an evil flower, slowly feeding. She was going to have to tread very cautiously to get what she wanted from this man - this cruel and condescending being whom she had kept distant from any part of her life he might corrupt. Until tonight. Now she had a painful lot to do, and maybe not much time lef
t to do it in.

  That Obscure Object of Desire was a membership-only Beverly Hills venue waitressed by foldout-class women two steps down from the game show and soap opera stratum of failure. Some still managed a local television commercial or two; all were leftovers, staling, what a Hollywood Hopeful looks like on the wane. The cheap thrill was to witness these budding stars as they shanghaied themselves into topless duty after hawking carpets and spas on the tube, still desperately pretty, willing to risk nearly anything for one more shot at popcorn fame. Every customer was therefore a potential backer for a career breakthrough, so each got a generous smile ... and the only thing tainting the biological purity of such mutual parasitism was the bitterness calcifying each smile. Those smiles told you stories of how hope could sabotage lives.

  Industry people - that is, movie, TV, and music video rollers, high and low - pointedly shunned the Object; some kinds of failures might prove disastrously communicable. The mainstay clientele consisted of businessmen who could appreciate such failure, in the way a conqueror might savor the captured vintages of a newly ransacked village. The Object offered the opportunity to taste the blood of one killed right beside you, and enjoy that taste because it meant you were still alive. Fat billfolds were entreated and a Hellfire Club mentality encouraged.

  It was not a place a man would invite a woman for whom he held the slightest degree of good regard. It was a useful arena for tacit humiliation, or the nastier subtleties of revenge.

  Jaime watched Pamela Drake's father reread the single typed page she had given him. "Maybe you should order a drink' he said, releasing a huge sigh, his eyes still relentlessly scanning. Seeking faults, footholds for assault.

  A thinly misted glass of ice water stood untouched before her on its cocktail napkin. Drake's purely professional scotch and soda was half dead. At his beckoning a splay-breasted cooch hostess jiggled over to swap empties for fulls. Jaime did not want anything from the Object getting inside of her, but her throat was arid and she knew the way Drake's brain worked. A libation might signal some rough truce. Just this once. That was all she needed.

  "White wine," she said. "Dry." Stay generic. One glass. Give a little that you might gain everything. If she had been out boozing with Pamela, outrageous new drinks in funny colors would have been the ground rule.

  Fifty-six, without a thread of gray, was Pavel Drake of Drake Polyvinyl Products Inc. He dyes his hair, she thought, suddenly shocked. Any vanity implied a crumb of human feeling somewhere in the convolutions of this man's mean, small mind. In this place of hopelessness, where women were literally Objectified, it was a spark of hope.

  Jaime needed hope. Because if the man sitting across from her did not affix his signature to that piece of paper, she was going to die.

  Tears had rinsed the mascara down Jaime's face hours before. There was no denying that the person in the box had been her best friend - the kind you are permitted one per lifetime, with luck; the kind you win if the timing is just so and the clockwork of the universe smiles on you in its random way. Jaime had watched the box slide into the ground at half past ten in the morning, signing off the eight years of that friendship, leaving her to hold nothing but death and thoughts of death.

  She refused to believe the way she had just stood there, dumbly, Wayfarer shades hiding the ravaged state of her eyes, her black stiletto heels sinking slowly into the cemetery turf as Pamela was subjected to ritual and clumsy eulogizing. She had died intestate so there had been no cremation; whatever she had insisted upon in private did not count here. Case closed. The box's showroom finish was kissed by grave dirt, and the strangers in attendance (relatives lacking better diversions this weekend) would soon depart to make merry on Pavel Drake's tab, their pocket obligation dispatched. If there was a casting house where one rented extras for funerals - natty folks with gerbil eyes and tight, insurance-broker smiles - then Drake had scribbled them a hefty check. It was all very businesslike. Jaime's eyes kept looking for the camera crews.

  Thank God for Jason.

  He ignored the cattle and stepped across the line to wrap Jaime up in a genuine hug. She linked arms with him and hung on. They were the only two attendees on the far side of the grave, away from the tent and folding chairs.

  People expect their parents to die some dim date in the future. No one is surprised when Grandpa stops drooling long enough to bite the big one. Jaime knew she herself would experience what the medics called an "event" if she drank or tooted or drove too fast, or kept getting horizontal with those faceless and monied Brentwood body-builders. They had great asses, charm and cash to burn, and hard chromium eyes that flattened and rejected her once the contour of flesh beneath clothing was no longer sufficient mystery to hold them. When you saw yourself crying in the mirrors, when your own eyes reflected back the pain inside, then you expected bad news, if only subconsciously. But buddies just did not keel over from unannounced pulmonary embolisms, not after a 20/20 checkup. Especially not buddies like Pamela, who seemed put on the earth to babysit you through one crisis after another. They were not supposed to die at twenty-eight, sitting on a sofa, eyes open, holding cold coffee in a mug that read MY OTHER COFFEE CUP IS A MERCEDES. No.

  The tears just would not stanch, and Jaime hated her own loss of control. There could never be enough tears for Pamela. Mickey was nowhere in sight; he hadn't bothered to show up. This angered Jaime, and she saw that Jason was flat pissed. His eyes glinted as they scanned the group and came back to her, minus Mickey. Then they settled into a dull expression of hurt and loss.

  Jaime knew then just what had been lost, to all of them.

  She could call up a picture postcard-perfect image of the foursome right now: Pamela, cross-legged on a leather hassock in her living room, sipping white Bordeaux and waving her hands. Jason would be on the floor, unconsciously assuming a Sears’ catalogue model pose so perfect it was funny. He'd refill glasses and sit with one forearm hooked around Pamela's thigh in a comfy way that looked possessive yet not restrictive. He hated being what he called the "whore of fashion" and so was shaggier than GQ might dictate. He was sexier than an incubus anyway. While Pamela animatedly held forth, he'd roll his eyes in that here-we-go-again expression that made him look like a befuddled cocker spaniel.

  And then came Mickey, less polished, not as brash, but still a contender. His position would be directly across from Pamela's, and he would lean into her commentary as though inviting charades. Unerringly, he would call from the air the very words her gesticulations begged, causing her to take a big gulp of wine and nod yes, yes!

  Last, watching all, submerged in the cushions of Pamela's throne-like Prince recliner, eyes bemused and just visible above the silvery rim of the wine goblet, would be her. Jaime. Thinking.

  A perverse, I-told-you-so feeling welled up within her. More than once, she had dutifully dunned Pamela about neatening her affairs on paper. Both had acknowledged that day in the misty future when one would precede the other into death, leaving the other to clean up and carry on. Neither of them had counted on their coffee conversation lopping over into nerve-numbing reality so bloody soon.

  Now it was just one more thing to prompt the tears.

  "I want to be cremated when I buy it," Pamela had said. "I hate the idea of people standing around, sniffling, going oh woe! while I do nothing but suck formaldehyde, you know what I mean? Yuck." Her eyes, deep green, lambent as the glass of a champagne bottle, scanned Jaime's neat rooms. Her lips busied themselves, worrying, as she contemplated just what she did want at her funeral, instead.

  Pamela was a slender woman, given to jeans and Reeboks and the first tee or sweat off a chair back or doorknob that could pass the Pamela Drake patented Nasal Cleanliness Test. She'd settled down on the floor, nursing one of Jaime's new Napas mugs, heavy porcelain and full of hot cinnamon coffee. Her fingertips, nails bitten rigorously to the quick, traced patterns in the burgundy carpeting.

  Jaime had gone to the bedroom to shuck her working duds. Pamela raised
her voice. "Don't you ever get the feeling those uniforms are gonna smother you?" She rose and wandered into the hallway. The bedroom door was demurely half-shut.

  "Nope" came Jaime's voice from beyond. "Did it ever occur to you that if you had been born ten years earlier, you would have been sucked into the hippie mythos and would now be a screaming, headband-wearing anachronism?"

  "Ho, ho, ho."

  "I'm serious, girl. Put together 1984 and designer denim and you get uniforms that would do Orwell proud."

  Pamela booted the door open, grinning like a gremlin. Jaime, naked to the waist, yelped and jumped for cover, then gave it up as hopeless.

  "Hey, whoa, it's only me!" Pamela's hands were up. "I come to learn, not to grope. I want to glimpse corporate America with its uniform off"

  "Do you mind?" Pamela was always jumping frantically ahead, and Jaime resented straining to keep pace. When the decorum had been passed out, Jaime had gotten both her own and Pamela's shares.

  Pamela blew out breath in a huff. "Geez, okay, already!" She lifted her arms and stripped off her Ducks Deluxe T-shirt, tossing it to the floor and seizing Jaime's bare arm to drag her to the dressing mirror. She posed them side-by-side, adopting an exaggerated buddy stance with one hip cocked. "There. Check this out. The gene pool doesn't have a prayer."

  Jaime covered her eyes and laughed, helpless now.

  She admired the casual street-poet disdain with which Pamela wore clothes, or discarded them. She liked Pamela's body as well. It was lower slung, larger breasted, not padded. She had scrappy, healthy honey-blond hair in contrast to Jaime's over-styled brunette, which got trimmed shorter every year in an endless process of distillation. Where Pamela had none, Jaime had fingernails - sculpted, medium length, glossy, perfect. Pamela had wide tiger-paw feet that Jaime at first thought were snubbed and odd looking, then came to love for their musculature and power. Pamela squinted, going on tiptoe to hold her right breast level with Jaime's left. "I think your tits are more proportionate than mine." she said with an absolutely straight face. "I'm gonna be in trouble when I turn fifty."