Dead Boys

by RICHARD LANGE

  Paul wants to see what I did in the bathroom. The bead on my caulking is a little crooked, and I also didn’t do the greatest job matching the pattern on the linoleum in a couple spots. He tries to be funny when he points these things out. I turn on the shower, and the pipes rattle and groan.

  “There’s a project for you,” I say.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he replies. “Don’t worry about anything.”

  “Oh, so you’re the big daddy now.”

  “What do you mean ‘now.’ ”

  I pretend to swing at him, and he pretends to block my punch.

  Everyone walks me to the curb. I put my TV in the trunk. The lock is broken, but it shuts tight. Mom presses some money on me. I take it without counting it. She tells me again I’m making a mistake. That’s fine. That’s her part in this thing. I promise Paul I’ll pay him back. The three of them are waving as I drive off. My people.

  YOU PICK YOURSELF up and go on. That’s what you do. Over and over and over. The big drunk Limey wants to know where the movie star footprints are. Three blocks west, I tell him. Across the street. Can’t miss them. I draw him another Guinness.

  Martin’s drinking rum. He’s a director. Videos, I think. A nice kid. I show him the Spider-Man comic, my good luck charm. I keep it in a Ziploc bag behind the bar. “Ever seen one of these?” I say.

  When my shift is over, I walk the Boulevard. I’m still not drinking, so I try to keep myself occupied. It’s Friday night, and the tourists are out. I offer to take a picture of a German family crouched around Clint Eastwood’s star. Music blasts out of a souvenir shop, and there are so many lights my eyes hurt. Dizzy, dreamy, I flop down on a bus bench and smile at the passing cars. Sometimes happiness sneaks up on you like a piece of a song on the wind. Just that random, just that rare. Jenny Pool, Jenny Pool, Jenny Pool. Hollywood sends its love.

  Blind-Made Products

  DEE DEE’S MOVING AGAIN, FOR THE THIRD TIME THIS year. She doesn’t feel safe anymore, not since she asked the Mexican guy down the hall if he would fix her leaky faucet and his wife called her a puta and threatened to kill her. She says her life has taken a dangerous turn, and she’s always on the run from one assassin or another. That’s just the speed talking. Her green hair bugs me, too, and the haughty tone she adopts with waitresses and 7-Eleven clerks. But Grady’s God-knows-why sweet on her, and he’s my only friend, so here I am, watching her have a nervous breakdown and wishing I was somewhere else.

  Grady promised she’d be packed and ready to roll by the time we arrived with the truck, but it’s been an hour already and the boxes are still empty, and now Dee Dee has collapsed on the living room floor, crying because she can’t decide where to stick what. My advice would be to drag it all out to the sidewalk and burn it. The dirty stuffed animals, the torn paperbacks. The thrift-store ball gowns and ancient punk rock records. All of it. Because there’s something morbid about hauling around so many mementos of your worthless past. Something morbid and resigned.

  “Why won’t you help?” Dee Dee wails, and Grady leaves me sitting alone on the couch to kneel beside her. He lights her cigarette, cracks a few jokes, and pretty soon she’s laughing. I could join in when they begin filling boxes, I guess, but I don’t. I don’t feel like it. The hot wind that’s been blowing off the desert for days rattles the screen in the window frame and snatches up a blackened match from the coffee table. I stick my finger into the hole in my beer can and wonder how hard I would have to twist it to cut myself to the bone.

  DON’T GET ME wrong. I used to do pretty well with the ladies. I don’t know what it was, but for a while there I had it. The way some retarded people can play piano or memorize baseball stats, I could pick up girls. Black, white, brown. Twins once, at the same time; a mother and daughter separately. A veterinarian with too many dogs, a welfare queen who used her government check to buy me quaaludes, a former Sea World mermaid, a blind girl. A beautiful blind girl.

  I spent years jumping from woman to woman. It was fun and all, but you get caught up in a grind like that, and you fall behind in other areas. That’s why I was glad when it ended, when the magic finally faded. Suddenly everyone saw right through me, and I couldn’t have been happier. Really.

  Being alone took some getting used to, of course. I had my booze and pills and whatnot, but some nights I just wanted to die. I kept telling myself there had to be more to life than breaking hearts. I pressed on. I let the years pass. And now I’m doing fine.

  MORE PEOPLE WERE supposed to be here to help Dee Dee move. Grady said it was going to be like a party. We’d have a couple beers, everyone would carry down a box or a piece of furniture, we’d follow the truck to the new place, unload, and have a few more beers. It didn’t work out that way, though. Grady and I are the only suckers who showed, and Dee Dee’s idea of a festive spread is a bag of stale Doritos and a warm six-pack of Bud.

  Grady does his best to keep me entertained as he and I wrangle the futon and kitchen table down the narrow stairway. He just got back from Vegas, where he hit a royal on video poker. A thousand and change. He goes through every hand the machine dealt him leading up to the jackpot, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that other people’s gambling stories bore the shit out of me. He’s going to use the money to get Dee Dee some new head shots — she’s taking acting classes again — and he wants to buy another gun.

  We break for cigarettes after carrying down what seems like a hundred milk crates full of junk. Grady stretches out on the U-Haul’s ramp, I sit on the curb. There’s a hot spot on my left foot from my new steel-toes. I unlace the boot and pull it off and roll down my sock to see how close I am to blistering.

  “Think she’s got any Band-Aids?” I ask.

  “Somewhere, man, I’m sure,” Grady replies. He reaches into one of the boxes and pulls out a grinning ceramic monkey on a surfboard. “This won’t help?”

  The battered ice-cream truck parked down the street is playing “It’s a Small World.” A bunch of Mexican kids have gathered at its door. They hop up and down and spin in circles and kung fu their buddies. One little girl stands apart from the rest, waving a dollar bill over her head. I don’t have any children. Nobody I know has any children. And nobody wants any. I squash an ant with my thumb. Then another. Then another.

  Grady flicks away his half-smoked cigarette. “As of now, I’m quitting these,” he announces.

  The wind picks up. It’s like a sick old man breathing in my face. I lie down and watch the shaggy crowns of the palm trees toss back and forth high overhead. The dry fronds crack and rustle and hiss.

  “She wants me to torch her car,” Grady says. He’s running his hands over his crewcut, a nervous habit he’s picked up lately.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Like for the insurance. You take it out somewhere and set it on fire, so she can collect.”

  “I know you’re not that stupid.”

  He shoots me a fuck-you look. “I said she wants me to, that’s all.”

  Grady loans me money. He steals CDs for me from the record store where he works. When I got my DUI, he bitched at the cops until they cuffed him and put him in the backseat of the cruiser, too, because he didn’t want me to go to jail by myself. You can see why I worry about him.

  WHILE HE AND Dee Dee are carrying down more boxes, I’m left alone in her bedroom. I pick up one of her pillows and press it to my nose, then move to the dresser, where I finger her hairbrush, her makeup sponges, her lipstick.

  The top drawer of the dresser is full of panties arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures. I slide my hand across them, then wriggle my fist deep into their silky depths and stand there buried to the forearm, listening to the wind slam a tree against the side of the building. My car insurance is due and I’m completely broke again. A mother lode of G-strings, and this is where my mind goes. My, how things have changed. Grady and Dee Dee come tromping up the stairs, and I grab a box of comic books to ta
ke to the truck.

  THE BLIND GIRL’s name was Mercedes. She was a Filipina who attended the Braille Institute, which was down the street from where I lived at the time. It was a funny neighborhood. The traffic signals chirped like birds to alert the students when to cross, and there was a small factory a few blocks away, Blind-Made Products, where many of them worked. In the morning they gathered in the doughnut shop, some in dark glasses, the bolder ones with their dead eyes bared. I loved to watch them prepare their coffee. Their hands seemed to have an intelligence all their own as they tore open sugar packets and tapped about in search of cream.

  I met Mercedes at the liquor store. She’d asked for gummi bears, but the Korean clerk kept leading her to the chewing gum display.

  “No,” she said after running her fingers over the racks for the third time. “Gummi bears.”

  I stepped in and took her arm, steering her to what she wanted, and we ended up spending the rest of the day together. She lived with her parents out in Palms somewhere and rode the bus east every morning to the institute. At first we rendezvoused in the doughnut shop when her classes were over and walked together to my place, but after two weeks she’d memorized the route, so I’d wait in the apartment, listening for the zipping sound her cane made against the sidewalk as she worked her way up the block.

  She was one of those who preferred to wear dark glasses, and even when she took them off, she kept her eyes closed. We’d smoke dope and listen to music, and when we fucked, those incredible hands of hers would roam my body like soft, warm spiders. She liked to talk about religion — silly shit. Once she told me that she believed God was blind.

  She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever been with, but since she couldn’t see me, I wasn’t sure if it counted.

  GRADY’S GOING TO drive the U-Haul to Dee Dee’s new place, and he asks me to ride over with her in her Malibu. It’s been sputtering at stoplights lately — the fuel pump, he suspects — and he’d feel better if she had someone with her in case it conks out. When I seem a bit hesitant, he gives me twenty dollars to pick up a twelve-pack on the way and tells me I can keep the change.

  Dee Dee’s a complete idiot behind the wheel, nosing right up to slower cars in front of us and laying on the horn, a cigarette in one hand, an open beer between her legs. I roll down my window and try to relax. Most of the signs are in Korean on this stretch of Western. We pass a building I remember seeing on TV during the riots. They interviewed the owner as he stood in front with a rifle, holding off looters. About all he could say in English was “Why?”

  We get stuck behind a bus, and the exhaust makes me light-headed. I watch the eight-ball air fresheners hanging over the rearview mirror swing back and forth and pretend I’m being hypnotized. A Jeep full of vatos pulls up beside us, and one of the guys points at Dee Dee’s hair and laughs.

  “Fuck you!” she yells, flipping him off. The gob he spits lands on the hood, and the next thing I know she’s halfway out the door. I yank her back inside, but the vatos are in a fighting mood. They spill into the street waving baseball bats and tire irons, and I realize I’ve died this way before, in dreams.

  The first of them reaches the car just as the light changes and traffic begins to move. A passing police cruiser slows for a look, and the driver of the Jeep whistles a warning. The vatos break off their attack and return to the Jeep, which speeds away while the black-and-white screeches through a U-turn to follow, one of the cops already calling in the plates.

  My voice is shaking as bad as my hands when I shout at Dee Dee, “If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll leave you to the fucking lions.”

  “I spilled my beer,” she sobs. Big, black mascara tears crawl down her cheeks.

  I screwed her once, eight or ten years ago, back in my heyday. A quickie car date in the parking lot of some goth club off Melrose. She went by Trixie then, something like that, and what attracted me to her was her blue eyes, maybe, or the rings she wore on every finger, little screaming skulls. Anyway, I never saw her again until Grady brought her around a couple of months ago, and if she remembers me, she hasn’t let on.

  She cleans her face with a fast-food napkin from under the seat and goes right back to swearing and swerving.

  “You know what that motherfucker said to me?” she asks out of nowhere as we’re passing over the Hollywood freeway.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Grady. He said, ‘I can rebuild you, baby. I have the technology.’ ”

  I see the sheet of black plastic coming from a hundred yards away. It flaps and billows in the wind like an angry ghost. Pursing my lips, I empty my lungs in a quick puff, as if to ward it off, but this wayward shred of night has its heart set upon devouring us. It swoops low over the road and skips across two lanes before whipping up to flatten itself against the windshield with a loud slap. We can’t see anything ahead of us, yet Dee Dee doesn’t ease up on the accelerator one bit. I sit back and grit my teeth and wait for her to lose her nerve.

  She finally screams, “Do something!” and I stick my arm out the window, but the plastic slithers from my touch and launches itself again into the air, where it shoots straight up into the sky, up and up and up, to join the satellites and space junk. Dee Dee and I laugh and fiddle with the radio and keep on driving, any righteous wonder the moment warrants swept away by the cheap high of shared relief.

  DEE DEE’S NEW apartment is a block north of Hollywood Boulevard, in a scabby, has-been building that’s supposedly haunted by Sal Mineo. Luckily a few of her friends are waiting, because the elevator is out of order, and everything will have to be carried up to the fourth floor. After Dee Dee jump-starts the late arrivals with a line or two of her stash, they’re raring to go. “Beep beep,” they shout as they squeeze past me, competing among themselves to see who can haul the biggest loads. I take up a position in the back of the truck and spend the next hour sliding boxes and furniture down the ramp to Dee Dee’s buddies. They make a couple of remarks about me not doing my share, but fuck it, I’ve got nothing to prove to these boneheads.

  More and more people straggle in, and it actually begins to resemble a party. The unloading goes quickly, and when it’s done, Dee Dee takes everyone up to the roof of the building to cool off. It’s just an expanse of gravel with a few potted palms scattered about and some rusty patio furniture, but the wind has lost its burn now that the sun is setting, and the Hollywood sign glows a pretty pink. Soon reggae is snaking out of a boom box, and a girl with a pierced eyebrow hands me another beer before I’ve finished the one I’m drinking. Someone discovers a barbecue grill, and a contingent is dispatched to buy hot dogs and veggie burgers.

  I drag a lawn chair to the edge of the roof. The sky out this way is a map of hell — blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds. I stare at it until I think I have it memorized, then lower my eyes to an open window in the next building, through which I can see a fat man lying on his couch, watching television. There is an empty birdcage in the apartment, a treadmill. He scratches his belly and coughs. These lives, these lives.

  The girl with the eyebrow ring approaches tentatively. She’s playing with a yo-yo. She stands with her back to me for a few seconds, taking in the sunset, but I can tell she has something prepared.

  “You went out with my sister,” she says when she finally turns to face me.

  “What was her name?”

  “Christina. About five years ago.”

  The aromatherapist, with all her little vials and potions. She thought she could help me, but my sense of smell was shot. Too many cigarettes. Christina’s sister walks the dog, then jerks the yo-yo out of its stall into a cat’s cradle. She’s hot, in a black nail polish kind of way.

  “How is Christina?” I ask.

  “Married. Pregnant.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Like you give a shit,” she says.

  The yo-yo zips out and stops about an inch from my face before racing back up the string to her hand. She wraps it in her fist like she
’s going to clock me with it.

  “Are you mad at me?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I am. I’m fucking pissed.”

  I get up from my chair and walk back to where everybody’s hanging out. A couple of guys I know are there now, Charlie and Nick. We talk about their band for a while, drink a few more beers.

  MERCEDES’ BLINDNESS BROUGHT out the best in most people. Strangers were always grabbing her arm, trying to help her. We’d be eating breakfast at Denny’s and old women would come up to our table and say, “God bless you, dear,” and shove a few dollars into her hand. The neighborhood where the Braille Institute was located was a little rough — I heard gunshots almost every night — but Mercedes never had a problem. In fact, the only time she was robbed, the thief apologized. “I’m a drug addict,” he confessed before snatching her purse, which she later told her parents she’d left on the bus, because her getting mugged would have been just the excuse they needed to keep her locked up at home.

  She planned to go to college someday. She wanted to work with children. She also wanted to visit France. “Why?” I asked. It was a legitimate question. I mean, she was blind. That was the only time I saw her cry. She had a cat named Lilly and a brother named José. Once when we were high in my apartment, she got confused and walked into the kitchen, thinking it was the bathroom. “It’s okay to laugh,” she said, so I did.

  Saturdays we’d go places together — Griffith Park, the rose garden down by USC. She’d ask me to describe the flowers, the trees, the carousel, but this was beyond me. I couldn’t find the words. She said I was lazy, that if I cared about her I’d try. So I practiced. The moon looks like a drop of milk, I’d say to myself in the mirror, like a pearl, like a peephole into heaven. I never worked up the nerve to repeat any of it to her, though. She bought me a shirt for my birthday, the ugliest shirt I’d ever seen.

  THE PARTY MOVES back down to Dee Dee’s new apartment, and Grady pulls me into the bathroom and offers me one of the lines of speed he’s laid out on the plastic case of a Motörhead CD. I’ve been trying to stay away from that shit, but I’m drunk already, and I want to drink more. The speed sears the inside of my nose and drives tears into my eyes.