by Lunch Lydia
We ended up at Al’s Bar, a funky double storefront in an industrial park just outside of downtown. Its regulars were a sloppy mix of arty locals, musicians, would-be musicians, and the occasional record company minion looking for the next big thing. The odd hip tourist would wander in after squandering half a tank of gas trying to find the joint. Marty and I were ready to escalate our adventures and an unsuspecting visitor would entail both the least resistance and minimal repercussions. We spotted a drunk Australian at the bar ordering double vodkas, flashing a fat wad of cash from a snakeskin wallet. We looked at each other and chuckled. X marks the spot.
I started bullshitting with the drunkard, soliciting small chunks of information out of him. His jumbled ramblings full of boast and pomp. In town for a few days, meetings with Hollywood executives, the usual line. Told him about a hot underground club called FUCK, full of half-naked bodies engaged in outrageous acts of mutilation, fornication. If he didn’t mind driving, we’d be happy to get him in. He fell for it. We had no intention of leaving the area with him. In for a little fun. At his expense.
His rental car was parked near the rear of Al’s Bar. The entire neighborhood was deserted, dark, desolate. I hopped in the front seat with the mark, Marty slithering into the backseat behind him. We drove a block or two south. I was already moist, anxious. I heard the snap pop open on the buck. Could feel Marty slicing up the backseat, long, slow slits, the soft smell of leather erupting. Marty started right in on him, confusing the lost little Aussie, asking in a filthy whisper if he liked my tits, if he’d like to screw me, if he wanted to pull over to the abandoned garage across the street, maybe get his dick sucked. Even in his drink-inspired stupor, the mark realized something was up. Too stupid to do anything about it. Still didn’t notice the squealing of leather being ravaged in the backseat. Marty carving pentagrams, hieroglyphs, obscenities.
Marty became belligerent. Accusing the Australian of being queer, cheap, square, stupid. Whispering in the mark’s ear, maybe he didn’t even have a dick. Wouldn’t have a dick … if he didn’t ease the car over, give us the keys and disappear. NOW. The buck knife held firmly against his right ear, a small nick kissing a red pearl.
The mark turns to me for sympathy. Panic setting in. Bloodshot eyes full of alcohol tears. Marty cackles. Tells him he’s looking in the wrong direction for mercy, pity, a handout. Help. Insists I’m the one who instigated this ugly prank. I’m the bloodsucking murder junkie who loves to watch big strong men beg for their lives like tiny baby girls. If he was looking for a reason, we didn’t have one. Weren’t reasonable. Were never reasonable. Didn’t need a reason. He was a punk mark who had insulted us with his rude refusal when offered up some fine pussy. If he was a real man … he would have been all over that shit. Marty confessing that he’d never pass up pussy … Pussy was gold, man. Manna from heaven. Pussy was IT. A man that didn’t worship pussy didn’t value his life. Life begins with pussy, and for the lucky man it ENDS in pussy.
The idiot was already in tears. Begging us to take his wallet. He wanted us to have it, he had a couple hundred, a few credit cards. Begging us to spare him. Offering up his watch, his boots, his leather coat. Anything but the car. He couldn’t turn over the car, it was a company rental, he’d be screwed if he let that happen. I spat in his face, “YOU’RE SO FUCKING STUPID … YOU DON’T EVEN DESERVE TO DIE!” Not wanting to waste a perfectly good murder on this idiotic sack of shit.
Marty, grinning in the backseat, relieved him of his wallet. I felt like snatching the keys from the ignition, just to fuck with him. I let it slide. Bored with him by now. We jumped out of the car. The mark sped away. It’d take him at least a half an hour to navigate his way out of the industrial park, floundering for the exit which led to the downtown freeway. We took a small detour on the way back to the truck. Snuck inside an abandoned guard post to kiss and grope. Heat and relief flooding the small structure as we fucked like high school students out on a first date. Laughing about the idiot’s resolve to hold onto the company car. Unreal the way some people behaved. That kick kept us going for a few days. Until that old itch reappeared. An itch we couldn’t resist.
We’d often wander the freeways hunting for hitchhikers. Pick up anyone who stuck their thumb out. Stuff them into the front of the pickup. Tight squeeze. Never had a game plan. We’d drive in silence, vibing on the possibilities. Instinctively clicking into each other’s zone.
Amazed that anyone still had the fucking nerve to get inside a mobile death trap. Of course, I did it all the time. Accept rides from just about anyone. But I was different. I had a motive. Had the edge. Was prepared. Better prepared than the potential assailant. Armed with mace, the buck knife. A threat to their sanity. Teasing them with innuendo. Short skirts. Red lips. Anxious for one false move. A reason, excuse. To spray them. Stick ’em. Terrorize.
We used the map like the I Ching. Open to a random page. Drop the car keys. Drive. The cab of the truck, a Coney Island of the mind. A netherworld of perpetual twilight. Red, white, gold lights scattershot over endless highway. Driving for miles to get nowhere. Lost, the ideal location. Trapped in a time zone where the calendar freezes. Steel cocoon. Metal womb.
Flagged down while stalking the Hollywood Hills. She jumped in front of the truck. Hysterical. Small-boned black teenager. Waving frantically. Screaming for help. Dressed in waitress get-up. Pulled over, pulled her up into the front seat. Told her to calm down, stroking her hair. Two middleaged white men abducted her at gunpoint from the bus stop in front of the donut shop she worked at in Watts. Might have been cops. Threatened to shoot if she didn’t suck them off. She did. Got dumped up in the hills. Asked for a ride back to the bus stop. Couldn’t go home yet. Had to work on an excuse. If she told her father what happened, there’d be hell to pay. He’d go on a rampage.
We drove in silence back to Watts. Marty and I both getting off on her fear. Evil enough to consider turning back around, driving her back up to the hills, and repeating her nightmare. The thought alone was enough. We dropped her at the bus stop, spent on the horrible misdeeds we had both been entertaining.
Like every other junkie, we were hooked. Poisoned on adrenalin. Addicted to it. Strung out. You up the ante and crash twice as hard the next time. Need twice as much to get off. Started making me sick. Sucking up the filthy remnants trailing fear’s shadow.
Neither one of us were ready to bloody our hands by breaking the Sixth Commandment. Yet always taunting the other closer to committing the ultimate act. Even against each other. Marty would get pissed, insisting I was brainwashing him, sending secret signals, impregnating him with polluted ideas. Begging him to kill me. He’d explode from the other room, screaming at me to stop instigating … Mind-fucking. Teasing. I’d play innocent. Tell him he was losing it. Didn’t know what he was talking about. He was full of shit. He knew exactly what I was doing. Scaring the shit out of him. Taunting him with the vitality of my power source. A power he would have loved to consume. Forever hating himself for doing it. It was a hook. It had us both trapped.
We drove out to the desert. Something had to give. We weren’t getting along anymore. Spontaneity drained. Even our games were becoming predictable. Ended up at the Lost Heads Ranch. A once vital, now ruined patch of dead green. A winding dirt road, stretching endlessly, led up to the summit. Littered with rusty Chevys shot to shit with buckeye. Now roosts for prairie dogs, king snakes. Decided to park the truck, kick up a little sand. Feasting on the dry heat. Dead calm. Silence. Deep breaths. Gut swell. Fever. The horizon expanding and contracting. Heatwaves. Ripples. Then SNAP. The buck comes out. Marty tackles me, knocking me down. Sand storm. Dust devils. He kneels on top of me. Hair down over one eye. Hand to my throat. Choking. Countdown to extinction. Presses the blade to breastbone. Ready to poke. Astral high. Out of my mind. High on adrenalin. Blind with lust. Light rain from clear sky kisses face. Sweet heavenly tears sprinkle cheeks. I love you I love you I love you … whispered mantra. Marty collapses on top of me, together con
vulsing.
I woke up in the emergency room. Six scrubs in babyblue, three doctors, and a couple of nurses flanking my gurney. Sugar-water I.V. in one hand, stabbing the other eight or nine times with a hypodermic trying to draw blood, administer drugs to wake me up, knock me out. Evil spawn tore a hole in my tube like the return of Rosemary’s Baby. Had to be cut out. Killed. Or be killed. By little fists beating to get out of my insides. Devil child, unholy terror tears a scar on Mommy’s tummy, from hip to hip. We had to snatch the little wretch from his hiding spot. Tunnel dweller burrows a root up the wrong canal. Alien termination.
Nightmare in the operating theater. Anesthesia wears off midway through abdominal surgery. Bloody skin flaps clamped open exposing raw flesh. Vision and sound return in a scramble as I astral project over the table. Engulfed in a blanket of pain, silent shriek of prayer begging to be released from the agony of organs being scraped by the scalpel. Mute pleading to the Latin Gods of the Apothecary, Have mercy with the ether, O Lord God on High … No mercy is granted, as I, for what seems like hours, roam above the butchery and bloodshed pretending to catalog my sins, beseeching every god, goddess, and even the Great Dark One himself to deliver me from this endless agony. Surgical rape. Gross mutilation.
A week of morphine did nothing to mask the pain of soft tissue fusing. Crawling in and out of consciousness, the sluggish stupor of fevered sleep. Vicious hallucinations. Altered dreamstates. Visions of alien abduction, insemination, vivisection. Horror.
*
Released. On the probation of abstinence for six weeks. The final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Marty. I couldn’t stomach the thought of someone else having to take care of me. Made me bitter, withdrawn. Resentful. Blamed his evil prick for tricking one of my eggs to scramble. Couldn’t stand to be looked at, touched, talked to. Wanted to be left alone, sick kitten on the corner of the bed. Left to recuperate. I asked him to split. Maybe we’d hook up again when I was functioning. Neutered, I was nothing. Angered, he packed up his shit. Loaded up the truck. Took off. I hated myself for doing it. But I had to.
Like sexually frustrated teenagers, poltergeists began dancing around the house. Bizarre geometric patterns of softly colored lights would configure around the windows and doors, warning that something or someone was either attempting to gain entry or had decided to flee. Hoping to capture release. Interior windows would self-destruct, shattering into large splinters which somersaulted into the floor. The mailman had warned me of strange gray shadows hovering on the porch in front of the door. Made him too frightened to climb the three small steps. I’d have to make other arrangements to pick up my post.
Mysterious fires began to appear on the land bordering my backyard. The neighbor’s dog would stand in my driveway, howling for hours, chasing its own tail in wide circles. Voices which sounded dwarfed, muffled, emanating from under my bed. I was being haunted. Probably by myself, the ghost of my aborted child signifying that it still lingered. Stubbornly clinging to the only life it knew. A netherworld of endless possibilities forever stifled.
Two weeks later I got a call. Marty’s brother. Now he was in intensive care. Had crashed the truck on the Malibu freeway. Steering column forced itself into liver, bruising kidneys, breaking ribs, smashing hip bones. Didn’t know if he’d make it out. The passenger in the oncoming car wasn’t so lucky. D.O.A. The driver struggling to recover from massive head trauma. Told me not to go to the hospital. Marty hadn’t come out of the coma. Might never come out. Too early to predict. There was nothing I could do except wait.
Marty spent sixty-three days hooked up to tubes, monitors, machines that flushed the bruised kidneys. His liver had been severed in two. Multiple operations to sew it up, drain it out. More blood was flushed through his system than anyone else in the hospital’s history. He made it though. Can’t kill someone that fucking stubborn. Proud of the scar that now ran from breast to pelvic bone. The parents of the other victims dropped the charges of vehicular homicide still pending. Said he’d suffered enough. He’s still suffering. Through his third hip replacement operation all these years later. Never complained though. Not once.
Marty had a unique relationship with pain. It was almost a reminder of his existence. A safety zone where he could retreat to divest himself of all other responsibilities. Extreme physical pain elevates you to a zenlike state that shuts everything else out. It is the great divider, separating those who know how to embrace it, be cleansed by it, heal from it, almost enjoy it, from those who would shirk from it, avoid it at any cost, wither from the threat. Rather die than face life-threatening injuries, numerous operations, hospitalizations. Those who have been there share an uncommon bond that can never be severed.
By my early twenties I had already suffered through numerous cartilage ligament reconstructive surgeries, lymph node removals, an appendectomy, cryosurgery, an ectopic pregnancy with partial tubal ligation, and two years taunting death with Marty. We were amazed by the other’s capacity to flaunt injury and smile, a badge of outrageous courage, that neither man nor machine could strip us of. Virtually indestructible. Unless you broke us up into little pieces. Which we’ve both been trying to do our entire lives. Spit in the devil’s eye. Shit in the face of history.
Chicken-hawking teenage cholos whose hot hands reinvigorated my energy lapse. Plotting my next move, something had to give. Night panic started setting in. Feared my death wish would soon overcome, sending spiraling waves of magnetic energy in a pooling vortex whose pull would reel in the wrong asshole. You can never choose your executioner. They always choose you.
Early Sunday morning, a knock on the back door. Johnny. Tracked me down through vague connections I had maintained in New York. Stupid ear-to-ear grin. Invites himself in. Crusty and hung over. Drove up from San Pedro where he’d been holed up hiding out from the cops. I’d heard rumors that he’d been on a two-year bender since I’d left New York. Decorated our old apartment as shrine, candles stuck in old shoes I had left behind, illuminated pictures of the two of us, hand-drawn frames etched in blood. He ended up in Southern California via Florida after a nasty incident with a middleaged trick he had picked up in Times Square.
He wrapped the Burmese python around his neck and headed south, robbing mom-and-pop grocery stores, gas stations, banks in southern Georgia, on his way back to St. Petersburg. Nickel-and-diming chump change to feed his heroin habit, incurred supposedly on the heels of my abrupt departure from New York. Headed west, hoping to avoid the heat.
Even wrecked, that Brando edge was spellbinding. You were afraid to take your eyes off him. No idea what he’d try to pull next. Fascinating, like a burning building, televised surgery, alien autopsy. Charmed bastard. Roadblocking harm’s way.
He pulled out a small bindle of China White. I had somehow managed to avoid heroin, never done it before. Saw it take out too many assholes: years wasted on useless pursuit. Outrageous expense. Permanent stupor. Kick and kick again. Wasteful. He convinced me to take a hit. Small toke like your first joint. Knocked me flat on my ass. Passed out to wake up and puke. He stood over me laughing. Said it was the usual first response. That I’d get used to it. Learn to love the vomit. I told him to fuck off. It was my first and last experience with that shit. Never touched it again. Glad I did it though. Cured my curiosity.
Straightened out the next morning. Johnny in bed beside me. Propped up on one elbow, smirking. I had lost twenty-three hours to a somnambulant blur. Couldn’t even remember if we’d fucked or not. I was still in recovery from surgery. Prayed he hadn’t plowed his monstrous prick into my delicate flower. Filthy bastard. Grinning. I screamed at him to get the fuck out. Not come back. Lose my address. Split or I’d call the pigs and turn him in. He smiled sweetly, kissed my forehead, got dressed, and left. Fucker.
I sold what little shit Marty and I had accumulated. All the furniture, the stereo, my books, records, and most of my clothes. I had to evacuate L.A. immediately. Before I got sucked back into Johnny’s bullshit. Finagled enough
for a one-way ticket to Europe. Standby.
Amsterdam. A psychedelic Disneyland littered with sex shops, tattoo parlors, and street after street of window after window of aging whores. Felt right at home. Pot shops on every other corner. Hundreds of cafés full of thousands of tourists, artists, would-be artists, filmmakers, and every other form of degenerate imaginable. The influx of drunken Italians, stoned Moroccans, ignorant Americans, and the loutish English made it a pickpocket’s paradise.
Had the number of a deejay who specialized in underground music. When such a thing still existed. Met him a few years before at a performance I had pulled off at the International Theater of Poetry and Pain. He offered me his apartment for the month of August, if I could help him meet his deadline. Organizing his yearly summer marathon, which was programmed to run in his absence. He was leaving for Thailand in thirty-six hours. Another lucky fluke.
He suggested I call Babbette. A deliciously overripe avant-garde filmmaker. Her specialty was in-depth documentaries on ’70s radicals. She had just been awarded a small grant to produce an independent feature for French TV and was looking for someone to help with all aspects of production. I signed on. Pilfering twenty percent of the budget. Turning in a screenplay whose themes of jealousy, erotic madness, isolation, and rejection were mirror images of escapades I had been orchestrating for years.
I had three weeks to pen the beast before shooting began. Three weeks to stalk the flea markets, bookshops, art galleries, after-hours clubs, and drug emporiums in between manic bursts of frazzled note-taking which would be razored into the script. The filming began the day after I turned the screenplay in. A jumbled mess of raw emotion.
I met Styn on the shoot. He was in charge of special effects. Mysterious doors that opened and closed. Holes drilled into the forehead. Bloody noses. Battle wounds. I was already sleeping with two of the actors, had bedded a few of the women who catered the meals. He offered respite from the grueling task of writing, codirecting, and starring in a film that would never be seen anyway.
