Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir)

by Gary Phillips

  "Good punk scene here," I said. "Wasn't there?" I was from the East Coast and most of my knowledge of the West Coast scene had come from fanzines like Forced Exposure and Flipside.

  "True," Doc replied. "The old Safari Sam's in Huntington Beach saved our lives. But before that it was strip malls and before that it was orange groves." He pointed out the window at the strip malls, banks, and yogurt shops that tumored all over state roads from here to Florida and back. "Thirty-five years ago, when I was a kid, this was ten miles of orange groves."

  A Vons slid by on our right. I took nervous breaths and felt my heart beat like a rabbit's in my chest. A church with a high-peaked roof stood on our left with an announcement out front: WHY DO THEY WANT US DEAD? What the Bible says sbout Islam.

  Doc said, "Almost there."

  I nodded and made several more attempts at a deep breath.

  He took a left on Mauve and a sign reading NOT A THROUGH STREET greeted its as we headed down to the second-to-last house on the right. There was a Toyota in the driveway and we pulled up next to it, blocking one of the garage sides. I pointed, said, "What if someone needs to get out?"

  Doc shook his head. "No one needs to get out. Look. This is a call I only get a couple times a year-the situation has to be perfect. We are going into this house and we are going to score, okay?"

  "O " Y•

  "Like I said, this is rare. The patient is alone, they probably don't have much family, they may have none. My connection pretty much has the run of the place. It's like an opiate candy store in there and we are here to clean them out, understand?"

  It was starting to sound too good, but it also had a momentum that I couldn't pull against. Plus, I needed to get high pretty soon or I'd be a wreck. I wasn't in a position to argue.

  "Give me the money," Doc said.

  I reached into my front pocket, took out a rolled wad of moist bills, and gave them to him.

  Doc said, "Dude, you carry your money like a ten-year-old."

  ry "Sor "

  "You have to stop apologizing for everything too."

  "Uhm ... sorry?"

  He counted out the bills and folded and rearranged them.

  "Tell you what. After we make a few bucks here-will you use a fucking proper billfold if I buy you one?"

  "Is that like a wallet?"

  He shook his head. "The way you carry money, no one's ever going to take you seriously."

  "People take money seriously-they don't seem to care how it's folded."

  "You're wrong," Doc said. He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. Then a second. Then he put the cigarette out. He turned to me. "If anyone asks, you are my assistant."

  "Who's asking here?"

  "Inside. There should only be Sandra, my friend. But if someone is here ... family, friend, whatever. I am a medical professional Sandra called for an opinion and you are my assistant. Got it?"

  I nodded, looked down at my torn jeans and Chuck Taylors held together with electrical tape on the right toe, and thought, Yeah, medical assistant.

  "Great," Doc said. "Let's do this."

  The place looked like the Brady Bunch house. Midcentury modern blighted by a 1970s renovation and then left to domestic ghost town since. Doc's friend Sandra met us at the front door. She wore blue scrubs, with one of those infantilizing tops that nurses and hospital workers all wear these days. The shirt was loitered with Cookie Monsters and Ernies and Berts and some Muppet I didn't recognize that I figured might be Elmo. I shifted my carry bag to my other hand.

  "He's asleep," Sandra said quickly, and before I knew it we were in the house, the quiet suburbia of Tustin a whisper of lawn sprinklers and muffled TVs behind the closed door.

  Doc introduced me and we shook hands. Sandra wore a stethoscope draped over her shoulders the way people do in movies. I wondered when they stopped wearing them with the earpieces around their neck, the way they did when I was a kid and my mom was an ER nurse. I used to spend the midnight-to-7 a.m. shift with her on nights she couldn't get our neighbor Doris to watch me and my sister.

  The house smelled like the ERs of my childhood-the vague mix of cleaning fluids and urine and medicine and latex and rubbing alcohol. The latex and alcohol gave me the start of a hard-on and I thought about Amber and her latex nurse outfit. Doc grabbed two lollipops out of Sandra's pocket and gave me one.

  "Sandra and I have some business to attend to."

  She gestured upstairs. They headed up, with Doc telling me to wait for them.

  "Is there a bathroom down here?" I asked.

  Sandra told me to go into the living room and keep going to the right and back.

  Which would have been fine, except the living room was where her patient happened to be. I was alone in a room with a dying stranger. The poor bastard. I walked into the room slowly, afraid to startle the guy. There was a stairwell to my right, where Doc had followed Sandra upstairs to wherever they were now, their talk muffled behind walls and hard to distinguish under the gentle drone of an oxygen machine.

  As I walked forward, the main floor opened to a kitchen on the left and a huge sunken living room to the right. He was on a hospital-type bed in the middle of the room, facing away from me and toward a big-screen TV that was tuned to some talking heads, but the sound was muted. The oxygen machine droned on, interrupted by the beeps and peeps of a series of diagnostic indicators reading out numbers that were completely meaningless to me.

  The man was on his back, his head turned painfully to the side. A tube ran into his mouth. He was motionless, except for a mindless chewing of the tube. His eyes were open, but he didn't seem to register that I was there. His catheter bag seemed dangerously full and I made a mental note to mention that to Sandra when she came back down. It looked like it was going to spill onto the floor.

  I walked by, careful not to step on any of the various wires and tubes on my way to the bathroom.

  I closed the door behind me and searched the medicine cabinet. This, too, was mostly a time capsule from 1972. There was a container of Alberto V05 hair treatment. A glass bottle of Listerine. A jar of Brylcreem. There didn't seem to be much of anything worth taking, or anything from this century, aside from a bottle with two Xanax that I emptied on the spot. I took a couple of deep breaths and felt the candy Doc had given me in my pocket. I took it out, realizing it was a fentanyl lollipop.

  It was supposed to be cherry, but it was really just some odd vaguely red flavor. I licked it for about ten seconds before chewing it to pieces, sliding it down my throat, and waiting for whatever relief it might offer. I sat on the closed toilet lid and read through a series of forgettable New Yorker cartoons. I closed my eyes and let the back of my head rest on the cool tile and waited for the drugs to unclench me. Soon, soon, soon, I told myself. I tried to take deep breaths, and before long I found myself breathing in synch with the oxygen apparatus out in the other room. I opened my eyes. The bathroom was small and dusty. The tub was filled with cobwebs. There was a door that led to a side yard and, out of habit, I made sure it was locked. I took some more breaths and waited for the drugs to have some effect. I left the bathroom, hoping that Doc and Sharon would have returned to save me from being alone with the dying man.

  This is where drugs and straight people's image of drugs tend to part ways: in rooms where life and death are at cen ter stage. This guy, mind-numbed and clearly on his way out, probably would have cut a deal with whatever he believed in just to get a few more days of life-of a life like mine. That's just fact. It's not to make me think-think about how wrong what I'm doing is, think about the various paths we follow in life, think about what a stupid man I am for allowing this blessing of life to drift so far away from me. It simply IS.

  My life was shit and I'd been there before. All my yesterdays and all my tomorrows were lining up the same-that's what drugs do to you. They give you this illusion of control. I'd been through it enough to know it was fake. Any decent track record of clean time fucks your relapses. It's hard to see them as an
ything but the worst idea you've grabbed onto in quite a while.

  The guy on the bed would have cut any deal with any devil in the world to trade places with me. The sick thing, and I knew it was sick, was part of me would have traded with him for that steady morphine drip, quietly escorting me out of this life and into something quiet and peaceful, maybe.

  He had no chance. I had, depending on the studies you read, probably about a 2 to 3 percent chance to clean up if it was court-ordered, maybe a double-digit chance if I went in myself. I was the walking dead, but that was a lot better than him there in his living room, mindlessly chomping on the sad, gummed tube.

  I could still hear Doc and Sandra upstairs-they seemed to maybe be fucking, or at least in a conversational intimacy that suggested fucking. This brought my loneliness crashing down. I hate being left by myself in rooms, being alone where I don't know anyone. But it could have been worse-at least the dying guy couldn't talk. And this was a true blessing-he couldn't move those wet, sad eyes of his to focus on me. If, for a second, I thought he could see me going through his meds, going through what was left of his life so I could get high, I think one of the last things he might have seen was me killing myself. At least I hope it would have been.

  On a tray next to the bed was a box that looked like it had scripts in it. Score. They were fentanyl patches. The box had been opened, but there were several others under the bed. I grabbed five boxes. I tried several times to carry a sixth, but I dropped them all when I added one more, so I went with five and brought them back to my carrying bag.

  Like so much crap in America, the packaging was obscene and unnecessary. The boxes held six patches each. I tore open the boxes, trying to be quiet, as I wasn't sure if this was part of the deal with Sandra or not, and neatly stacked the patches until I had thirty of them ready for my bag. I would have taken more-would have taken every single one I could find-but I didn't want to fuck up our connection for the future. I'd love to be able to say I was thinking about the dying guy-and it does happen, the groundswell of a decent human surfacing in me from time to time, often enough to not seem like a miracle-but the truth is, in that moment, I'd forgotten about him and his need for his own painkillers. He didn't exist to me.

  I chewed another of the fentanyl lollipops I found. They seemed pretty useless. I wondered if they'd put this guy on Oxy or anything good, pillwise, before they had him on the patches and the pops.

  Inside the kitchen, next to the coffee cups, I discovered a cabinet filled with bottles of pills. The usual useless suspectsAdvil, Tylenol, gaggles of vitamins, and, scattered inside the cabinet, the snake-oil desperation of shark's fin and whale cartilage and shit like that. I pocketed a bottle with about ten ten-milligram Vicodin and kept scrambling through the cabinet until I found something worthwhile in a near-full jar of eighty-milligram OxyContin. I felt myself smile. I took two of the eighty-milligram tablets, crushing one and allowing the other to slide down my throat and release itself over time.

  There was nothing else of value in the cabinet. I swapped the contents of the Advil and OxyContin bottles and kept the Advil in my pocket.

  Back in the living room, I looked closely in the guy's eyes. Nothing registered. He was alive-that's what the machines seemed to be saying-but there wasn't much going on. I wondered, again, if I could cut him to get that vial out. I supposed I could-people could do all sorts of things they didn't want to do in life. Just not think about it, and get it done. It didn't have to be any more complicated than cutting into a steak, so long as you turned your brain off.

  I sat on the couch and looked through a TV Guide. I had no idea about any of the celebrities or shows-that's another thing dope does. The outside world of news and talk just goes away. You can't tell anyone a single current event, even if they offer you a million dollars. The world fades and recedes. I glanced around. There was an antique musket over the fireplace. Everything about the house felt old. Murder mysteries piled up by the end table. This guy, or maybe Sandra, really liked mysteries. There had to be a hundred new hardcovers in that room alone. There was Luna's great Penthouse CD open on the stereo-so, evidence of someone not old too. I suspected the CD was in the machine and I really wanted to hear it, but I didn't want to do anything wrong, so I didn't hit play.

  I listened more to what Doc and Sandra might be doing. If they were fucking, they were being fairly quiet about it. I fingered the fentanyl patches in my pocket. I wanted to ask Doc how much longer we'd have to wait. I was starting to get nervous. We'd been there for twenty-five minutes and I had no idea if this guy ever had visitors and, if he did, when they might be coming by.

  In any event, all this was Doc's call. I was just along for the ride. I went back into the bathroom, still feeling vaguely sick. Not dope sick anymore-the fentanyl and OxyContin had trickled some help into my blood and brain-but sick from the familiar nerves of being somewhere I didn't belong. The fear of being caught pressed on me like a vice. The fear of having to cut that guy open to get the morphine vial. But if I had to do it, I would.

  I started running the bath. When the water first came out, it was rust brown, and then slowly started to clear. The fentanyl patches work better if you're warm. I put one on my right arm and one each on my right and left thigh. I took some deep breaths and made the temperature as hot as I could stand it and lowered myself in. Then I took two more eighty-milligram OxyContin.

  Twenty minutes later I was nodding off. It felt so good, a warm waking dream, that I was worried I might be close to overdosing. I felt this incredible warmth inside me-it was like my heart was a glowing road flare and my bones were hollowedout bird bones. Balsa wood. I could have weighed ten pounds, the way I felt. Behind closed eyes I had firework displays blasting in slow motion. My head rolled from one side to the other and it didn't seem connected by anything thicker than dental floss.

  I heard the voices out in the living room. Yelling. A man's voice I didn't recognize.

  "I said, who the fuck is this?" he screamed.

  I heard Sandra's voice. "He's a doctor I'm consulting, Rick."

  And I thought, Rick? Who the hell is Rick?

  Rick yelled, "Consulting? Is that what the fuck you were doing? Consulting?"

  She started to talk again, but the man named Rick said, "Get the fuck downstairs-do you understand?"

  I stood on legs that could barely hold me up and banged into the towel rack and knew instantly the noise was too loud-Rick had to hear it even over his yelling. My bag was in there with me, along with twenty-seven patches and the bottle of OxyContin I'd taken and my clothes. I had a few lollipops. I thought about Doc, but didn't figure I could help him any. It was one of those situations where my presence could only add to the trouble.

  Behind that door. Rick. Doc. Sandra. The dying man, helpless to do anything about the anger that swirled around him.

  And what would adding me do to the situation? It couldn't make it better.

  I got dressed as quietly and as quickly as I could, without drying off. My clothes stuck to me and I held my arm out to the wall to keep myself upright. I double-checked my bag and made sure I had all the drugs.

  The guy kicked the door in as I was trying to reach for it.

  "And who the fuck is this wet fucking junkie?"

  I closed my eyes for a moment.

  "Back in the fucking room, junkie." Rick had a gun.

  The three fentanyl patches clung wetly to me and itched under my clothing. I looked at the side exit and noticed the doorjamb was all but destroyed by termites; it didn't look like anybody had used the door in a while and it didn't look like I'd be using it now, either.

  I came back into the living room. Rick had Doc and Sandra in front of the TV and told me to stand with them.

  "Dude, you took a bath?" Doc said.

  I nodded, not wanting or feeling much need to explain.

  Rick pointed with his gun hand at Doc. "So, you're a doctor?"

  Doc nodded.

  Rick said, "So am I. And THIS," h
e said, waving the gun around, "is my hospice connection." He looked hard at Sandra. "Or did someone forget that?"

  "I'm sorry, Rick."

  "Shut the fuck up!" he yelled.

  He wasn't on dope-he paced and chewed his lips and had picker scabs. All speed and meth shit. I can't take speed freaks-they pounce on everything, darty and unpredictable as bats at sunset.

  He walked back and forth. "Yeah, I've done fucking seventytwo-hour fucking shifts sewing up idiots like you, you careless fucks. Fucking zombies. You BUY this shit from me, you don't take it, is that understood? You better believe that's motherfucking understood."

  He rambled on for a bit, not even looking at us, just screaming, while the oxygen tank and the machines did their job.

  "You want to know something about our fucking insides?" Rick said. "My first day in ER they tell me to sew this guy up. They needed to get at the liver and you know what they fucking do to get at a liver? They take the fucking twenty-five feet of your guts and they put them in a silver tray next to you. Upper, lower intestine, all out and throbbing in a bowl, still connected to you but outside your fucking wrecked body, while the doctors fix you idiots. And then they tell me to put it back together and you know how we do that? We just motherfucking DUMP the guts back in, all thirty, forty feet of guts, any old place, and sew the fucker up. It takes about five days, and they're all back to where they're supposed to be."

  I was still kind of nodding, having real trouble seeing where the guy was headed with all this. He was reading in my brain like those poetry magnets that kids put together on fridges. Words not adding up to anything. He seemed careless and floppy with the gun and I thought about my dad, a state trooper who had killed at least one man, who I saw kill my dog when he was mad at me when I was a child. Shot my dog in the head and made me bury it as punishment. I thought of that man whose toxic blood ran through my veins and I tried to remember if you rushed guns or knives, and I figured it had to be guns because you'd run away from a knife, for sure.

  Rick was in front of the dying man's bed, now pointing the gun back and forth at all three of its like carny ducks he was getting a bead on. "And you motherfuckers want me to put you back together after you rip me off?"