Almost Home

by Jessica Blank

  She stays by my side, though. Every time she goes someplace new, which is about every ten minutes, she brings me with her. Come on, she’ll say. Let’s go to Winchell’s or Tang’s or the Dollar Chinese by El Centro. Never back to 7-Eleven, the alley, or Benito’s, though. Not back to those guys.

  I follow her, of course. I think if I just stay near her and don’t talk too much I can see her through whatever tunnel she’s in, and be there at the end of it when she wants to be pulled out. I think maybe I could be some kind of light. It’s funny that I think that, considering what I’ve known since I was ten about the way the city grimes you, how the dirt dulls out anything you were trying to find that was shiny. I guess I must think we’re exempt.

  We’re at a Winchell’s when I see that we’re not. It’s not the Winchell’s where she told me about her dad, but they all look the same inside, remind me of the bubble of that day. Somehow I figure if she trusted me once at those yellow tables, maybe she’ll do it again. She’s been shaking all morning but it’s starting to subside, and once I even say something that makes her laugh and snort black coffee out her nose. I’m eating crullers which I put between us on the table so she knows that she can have some if she wants.

  In the middle of a sentence she stands up to hit the bathroom. That part is normal; she’s got a bad stomach, she says, and I’m used to her running off to deal with it. What isn’t normal is that on the way back, wiping water off her mouth, she bends down to talk to this comb-over guy at the back table who’s been watching us. She never talks to strangers. Lots of them try; guys mostly, all older. I always just ignore them but Tracy fends them off, makes clever cutting comments I always wish I thought of. But this guy tugs at her shirt as she passes him and when she turns around, ready to fight, he says something that makes her stop. I can see the conversation: she asks him something, he makes some kind of offer, she bites her lip and thinks. I squint to read their lips and frown hard straight at Tracy, try to pull her back to our table like a magnet.

  She does, finally, but with a switch in her hips that looks weird against her skinny weasel body. He follows her. He takes Tracy’s seat across from me; she squeezes in next to him. He’s sweaty and yellow and smells like old grease. He picks up a cruller and eats it in about five seconds. I hate him.

  Tracy is acting polite, which I’ve never seen. She’s like my mom around her boss, with the same sweet stilted way of talking my mom always calls Being Professional. It’s bizarre. Tracy introduces the comb-over guy as Rob-He’s-a-Director. She says he has a job for us, if we want it, and since we’re so broke she thought . . . He cuts in and says “I’m paying your friend Tracy in candy, but she said you wouldn’t want it so I’m prepared to give you cash. That way it works for both of you.” He smiles at me all slick and friendly in a way that’s not friendly at all. Tracy looks at her lap. I know what candy is.

  I could tell you that all of a sudden it all makes sense, the bitten fingernails, the stomach, the shakes; the jumpy-eyed swearing at strangers and the way Critter wasn’t Tracy’s boyfriend but she always, always left with him. I could tell you that it all makes sense, but the truth is that it doesn’t. It comes together, sure, in a way that makes the facts line up, provides an explanation. But it doesn’t make sense at all.

  I sit there while he keeps on talking, goes on and on describing the setup and how it would work, how little we’d actually have to do, how basically it’s just taking our clothes off and that’s not so bad now is it, and I’m up on the white tile ceiling, pressed up against the blackened mildew in the cracks and looking down at Tracy looking down, her face in her lap, and she won’t ever ever raise her eyes to look at me. I can see the whole room, everyone with their faces on their laps or hands or donuts, everyone just walking by, driving by, moving through, eyes like the wax museum, blinders on. All these people falling down and scraping knees and everyone just forging ahead, afraid to touch anything but the air around each other, and it isn’t enough, it doesn’t make anyone stop crying at all.

  I tell Tracy I love her. In my periphery I see Rob the Director get cagey, calculate me as a risk. But he’s far away, out at the corners of things, unreal. I switch size like Alice, and as fast as my vision had spread to hold the whole room, now it shrinks like a pinned pupil tight on Tracy. I tell Tracy I love her and I tell her look at me, lift her chin up and look at my eyes. I’ll help you, I say, I know how and I’ll do it. I’ll come and get you like your sister or that girl on the sidewalk, take you, keep you safe, make you stop crying. I know how. I put my hand on hers and hold it, tight so I can feel the bones, the blood, the lines in her palm. She’s shaking again.

  It would be so easy to lay into Rob, tell him to fuck off and spit at his feet, scare him away from both of us. But Tracy’s moved in so close to Rob she’s almost hidden behind his skinny greasy shoulder, like I’m a thing she needs to be protected from. Here I am saying that I love her, holding her hand past the air around her and down to the bones, and she’s cowering behind this stranger bearing candy.

  “Tracy?” I say, finally asking for an answer. I know the risks of asking Tracy questions. I know she could point her caged-coyote face at me, turn quick and testy behind the eyes, swear at me or spit. I know I’m drawing a line down the middle and making her choose, risking that she’ll bolt and burst our bubble. But I don’t have a choice. She’s so far away right now that if I don’t ask she’ll slip out of sight. I ask her the question. She shakes her head at her lap, inches in closer to Rob. She’s taken sides; now she’ll stick to her story.

  It’s funny how it all still looks the same out the car window. Somewhere in that tangle of city Tracy’s probably painted up in some grainy-video basement, playing out the TV-movie myth; and looking from the outside you’d think it was scary or sad enough to change the landscape, but it’s not. The signs are the same, MEL’S and HOLLYWOOD perched on the fault lines, withstanding the earthquakes of what can happen to one person here, and I’m watching from another set of windows in another car, and nothing looks much different.

  I don’t think that places change you. They’re too fixed, too solid to do much of anything. The things that really change you are the things that change themselves: ground opening up along a fault and gulping down your house, people picking sides, their answers to your questions. Tracy changed me and I still don’t understand it. She’s land that split and swallowed parts of me; no matter how hard I press the sides together the crack won’t close, the pieces won’t click back into place.

  I never say good-bye that day. I say I love you one more time and walk out of Winchell’s, keep walking till I hit Highland which turns into Cahuenga by the 101. It’s easier to get a ride this time: I can tell which cars to hold my thumb out for and which ones will just keep driving. I know how to spot the blinders now, and I don’t try to get the passersby to look my way. I just wait to see a set of eyes that’s still open, unfixed, who’ll stop and take me north, past home and out of Hollywood, beyond what I can see or touch or travel, toward names I’ve always heard but never seen.

  tracy

  i could list for you the places I’ve been: Reno. Vegas. Bakersfield San Bernardino Riverside. None of them is home and I always come back to L.A., which isn’t home either, it just knows me. I could tell you how it feels to hitch through desert till your eyes bleed from dust and you bruise your toes kicking dirt, how the rigs pull through like shiny metal monsters, windshields shielding the creeps inside and you hate each truck for being shiny and purple and bigger than you but when they slow down you climb in and then you’re part of it and moving.

  I could tell you the names of everyone I’ve known or tricked or slept with, but they all leave anyway or I do and besides I quit keeping track really. There are lots of things I’ve known and done but when you’re standing on a sidewalk in the city you always leave and then come back to and it’s still not home, your history is like an itchy phantom limb: you can feel it, but it isn’t really there.

  I could
tell you all this shit and probably you’d like it, but I won’t. Suffice it to say I’m on the sidewalk by the St. Moritz Hotel, Sunset past the 101, eleven thirty or so in the morning on a Tuesday, and I’m waiting for Rob. Rob is my director. He has bad skin and gooped-up combed-over hair and wears his acid-wash like it’s still 1988. He drives a ’91 Civic and is always on time to pick me up. We hit House of Pies sometimes, other times IHOP; the old-lady waitresses scowl, I eat my eggs, and then we go to work.

  I am Rob’s star, which I think is hilarious. He calls me that: his star, his leading lady. He positions other girls around me like I’m some sun and they’re orbiting, pretending he’s some bigwig who “assembles girls.” Really he brings them in when they’re strung out, pissed off and cold. Whichever ones show up on his stretch of sidewalk are the ones who get brought up to his studio on the outer fringes of Toluca Lake, and I’m the star because I’m always there. But he’d have you think that was the plan from the start.

  I’ve gotten used to it: now it’s just another condition, like heat, cold, wet jeans. After a while you stop noticing the camera, the parade of dry-eyed junkie girls gets regular, you see yourself in all of them. It’s normal. The first time it was weird, though, like the first time of anything is weird, and you suck in and breathe through it and it’s over soon and added to the list of things you are. The naked-for-a-stranger part was fine, crossed that bridge long before, but the camera got under my skin, comb-over Rob with his acid-wash yelling out instructions, the fat girl who batted sleepy eyes at me and wouldn’t talk. The whole thing was too planned out, too much of a production, more like a television show or the Superbowl than what I was used to (old lonely guys in rooms). Too much icing. The effort of it all was pathetic, I preferred the tragic grandpas, the camera made me sick; but what was I going to do, complain? Rob had drugs.

  Ah, drugs. I could tell you about those too, but you know already. For a while they spice things up or blot them out, make it better or at least extra; it’s you using them, and then it becomes the other way around. That’s all it is. Just another puppet string pulling at your elbows, making you move. At first I fought it, swore to quit, jaw set, but after a few go-rounds I realized it was like trying to quit being hungry. I never had the willpower to be anorexic. There’s only so much you can transcend. So I got skinny the easy way, ha-ha.

  The rest of them never come up by the St. Moritz. They all stay down on Santa Monica by Benito’s, Critter and Rusty and Germ and fucking Scabius, probably Laura too. I’ve been around those kids a bunch of months, since I rolled into L.A. the last time; they’re the closest thing to family I’ve got, which still isn’t very close. Once I shift five blocks up and three blocks over I’m as good as out of town to them.

  It didn’t have to be like that. When Rob first asked me to work, I tried to get Laura to come with me. I figured it was a deal for both of us: she had zero clue how to make money out here, being from Ludlow or wherever; I needed the junk and wasn’t about to go back to Critter for it. Plus we could do it together, which would make the whole thing more fun.

  It’d been like that—together and more fun—for two weeks already, since she showed up at the hostel all fresh-faced in clean clothes with her Wal-Mart backpack, pony-tailed brown hair, a brand-spanking-new runaway. Freckles, even. Pretty quick it was just me and her: at the Dollar Chinese, Tang’s Donut, spare-changing up on Hollywood. Company, and I didn’t even have to fuck her. I’d never had that, not in San Bernie or Bakersfield, sure as hell not back in Nevada. I mean I always had someone, but only with a trade-off. You always have to fuck someone or take care of them or buy them shit, and if you don’t they walk away.

  Laura didn’t want anything from me, though; that part was new, and it put us on the same side of things. Compadres, or whatever. So when comb-over Rob showed up like some greasy angel to find me four days clean, shaking and puking in the donut-store bathroom, I figured Laura and me were all set.

  Rob’d been courting me almost a month now, at this Winchell’s and the one off Vine, eyeing me when I wasn’t with Critter, asking if he could help me with anything. He was pretty nasty, with these forehead pimples I was just about dying to pop, even though he was clearly way past thirty and should’ve outgrown his zits a long fuckin’ time ago. I never wanted shit to do with Rob: I had Critter, my knight in crusty armor, who gave me junk like it was roses and he was my boyfriend or some fuckin’ thing. Pretty easy, as far as trade-offs go. Kind of luxurious, even, till he broke my fuckin’ cheekbone.

  Back when Critter was around, Rob would try to touch my sleeve and I’d stare him down; my eyes went straight through like they were a power drill and he was paper. Just another greased-up weedy sidewalk cat who wanted ass. I wouldn’t talk to him. But I’d gone kind of AWOL these three days since Critter punched me. I wasn’t about to be the girl who lets herself get hit for drugs; that shit gets around quick, and before you know it you’re getting gang-banged in some Taco Bell bathroom. That, and I had no other source. I was sick as hell, my fever dreams kept me from sleeping, and I couldn’t tell Laura about the junk or she’d get scared and run away. I was fucked.

  So this day was Rob’s lucky one, I guess, and mine. I normally wouldn’t work for someone else, but if me and Laura were a team I figured we would both be safe.

  I guess Laura didn’t see it that way, though. Instead she just stared at me like I was a TV set till Rob stopped talking, and then pulled this shit of saying she loved me in the middle of fucking Winchell’s Donut, over two crullers, in front of Rob, and taking off. It didn’t make any sense; why she would do that and then go. I mean, it made sense that she’d go; someone always does. But I don’t know why she had to say she loved me. If she loved me, whatever the fuck that meant, she’d be with me: in Rob’s Civic, headed up Ventura toward the Valley.

  But no, so now I was by myself again, surprise, thighs sticking to the ripped red leather vinyl of the seat, no a/c in the car of course, just a crappy fan spitting stale air through the plastic vents into my eyes. Rob kept trying to talk to me, find out where I was from and who my parents were, small talk, that kind of shit. I told him I came from a family of Gypsies in France. He narrowed his eyes at me like he was weighing whether or not to believe it and then spat out the window. His spit was white and stringy like an egg. It blew back on the glass behind him and stuck there, quivering in the wind.

  Here is the order it goes in with Rob: eat, shoot a scene, then drugs. My first day he had me do one scene after another after another, different other girls, positions, scenarios. For some Internet thing, he said. He worked me till I was dried out and my skin stung, eyes pulled out of focus by the sharp of the fluorescents, mouth sour. I was too freaked out to protest, locked in his concrete warehouse with no ride to pick me up, and I didn’t know if he was the type to use a knife or what.

  But at the end he kept his promise and then let me go, so when I came back two days later I knew what I was dealing with and I laid it out. One scene, then I got paid. If he wanted more, okay, but I got to shoot up after every one. That way I could just lay back. Plus he would get me a room at the St. Moritz, by the week, which he wasn’t allowed to come into ever. And some shit to take home with me, to last me till the next day, every time. He got all ruffled, puffed out his skinny chest like we were birds, but I knew he wasn’t any bigger than me. “This is a business transaction,” I told him. “You want my business?” And of course he did.

  Now it’s been four weeks of this. Some nights I stay up there at his warehouse in Toluca Lake, when I’m too stoned to take the ride down to the St. Moritz. But mostly I go back to my room and eat Chinese food, I guess like grown-ups when they go home after work. Which is weird because I’m not a grown-up, and Hollywood isn’t home.

  I never sleep in alleys anymore. I don’t have to: I’ve got sheets now and a bed and a lock on the door, all paid for. Critter always wanted that: our own room, a little home. He’d talk about it like it would change things, like it would keep u
s safe and make us real. I knew that wasn’t ever true, but I’d go along with it because it felt good just to watch someone believe something. Sometimes I think about going down to Benito’s to find him, bring him up here, lock the door behind us. But I can’t. He’d ask me who was paying for the room.

  And anyway, I’m not running after any of those guys.

  No way I’m chasing after Scabius’s nasty face or Critter’s fist. No one came looking for me when I left. Rusty’s the only person who ever came to find me, and that was way back in Venice when he didn’t have anybody else and he was broke. No one looks for you unless they need something. And I don’t need anything from them.

  So it’s eleven thirty on a Tuesday and I’m outside the St. Moritz. Rob pulls up before I’m finished with my cigarette, which is a good excuse to make him wait. He sits in the Civic watching me, jittery, and I can tell he’s tapping his foot down by the brake pedal. Cops come around here all the time, as if it would actually make a difference, and even though I told Rob I’m eighteen, I know he knows I’m not.

  I smoke it down to the filter before I stub it out. When I get in the car I can taste the fiberglass. I run my tongue over my teeth. Rob hands me half a soda; the wet sweaty cup feels like it might crumple and spill Fanta in my lap, but I drink it anyway. He seems nervous: I can feel it even looking out the window.