When the bar where I work closes, I hit the after-hours places, drink till the sun comes up; sometimes I wake up on a table. On Fridays after work, I drive to Island City, where Oz lives. Oz is part owner of the bar. He wears a purple kimono and glides along like a phantom on wheels. He’s a big-time coke dealer, but he’s broken the cardinal rule and gotten himself hooked on the product. He smokes cocaine. We call it freebasing. (This is 1981; there is no word yet for crack.) Oz cooks it up in the kitchen and brings it into the living room on a platter: big, amorphous, soapy yellow chunks. It is a secret art. He is the only one who knows how to do it — except I’ve watched him from around the corner, and now I know how to do it, too.
We sit around the wet bar in the corner of his living room, watching the glass pipe float from hand to hand. The first hit sends you through the roof of the sky. No greater high. It makes an orgasm seem like a stubbed toe. You love with the power of God, love all things, even the catshit in the litter box under the sink. You wait for the pipe to return so you can stuff your lungs with the scorch of scarlet rapture, the rock-melt pummeling your brain like a boxer hitting a speed bag. The smoke spins like a magic ball in the chamber: you see yourself in it, a demon tumbling, spirit tricked out of you. The sun blossoms in the curtains. The conversation dies. Oz glides in and out of the kitchen. He has an unlimited supply. There is always more pleasure, and always fire, but there is not always money, and that, outside of death, is the only thing that will stop you.
I stumble back to work at 5 P.M. like something dragged up from the bottom of a lake: no sleep, not even time for a shower. I feel as if I’ve traveled around the sun, like a bag of charcoal with legs. I have to get drunk to make it through. The customers break like waves against the bar. I spill drinks, drop glasses, give back too much change. The owners don’t care — they’re freebasing over at Oz’s. When the bar closes at two, I am embalmed, a flat EEG, not even enough energy to pull on the cigarette dangling from my lips. I sleep the whole next day and dream I am a trout being fried in almonds. I vow I will never do it again. Next Friday, like clockwork, I am back at Oz’s.
I have a steady girl, Charlene. She spends her days before a drafting table at Cuvier Design, her nights on a stool in the gin dimness of the seven bars on Seventh Street. Her lovers will always be bartenders, the men who serve her. She is lithe and brainy, small breasted and tall. She is the only girl I have ever known who does not pretend she’s OK, who laughs at her ruin in the mirror. Her eyes are fierce and unreadable. She is waiting for her dream lover to return from Arizona. She is the lure of the cannot-have, the cannot-be-known.
Charlene and I take turns destroying each other: she goes out and fucks someone else, so I go out and fuck someone else, so she goes out and fucks someone else. We are like two dimwitted lumberjacks in a face-slapping contest. If God took a picture of us, the caption underneath would read: The blind lead the blind, and they both shall fall into the ditch. Charlene fits in perfectly with the rest of my life. I am drunk half the time and she is drunk the other. On Friday night after work, she is nowhere to be found, and I am out the door and in my car. Oz’s is the only place on earth where you can get any love. It is one hundred dollars a gram and it burns all night.
Some nights I walk in the cemetery. It is peaceful there, my only peace. I listen to the dead sing Sinatra while the moon cracks lime through the trees. In the day I sit on a park bench or lie in the grass and burn. The devils drift by and murmur in my ear; the buzzards circle slowly, but can’t land until the fire is out. I get up and drag my feet across the grass, still smoldering. I have to stop this life, and I could use a little help. I call Charlene, but she tells me her dream lover has returned from Arizona. So I pack a bag, glance at the sun, and limp down to my car, and the next thing I know I am a thousand miles away, sitting in a Denny’s in Tarzana with my mom and dad, at a little table in the center of the room. There are eggs in front of me, yolks shimmering in a pool of grease, and my mother is saying:
We’re glad to have you back.
My father is beaming at me. He has a face like a jug of red wine, dark Greek black hair coiled on his head. He is shoveling in the eggs, buttering his toast. While I was gone, my mother left him, went to live with an ex-marine colonel in a trailer. She got out when she discovered both of the colonel’s previous marriages had ended in suicide. I take a drink of my juice. The acid burns my jowls.
Do you have any plans? asks my mother.
I can barely hear her over the roaring fire in my ears. The waitress comes by and dumps a pitcher of ice water over my head. It feels good. She smiles and points to a No Smoking sign. I nod. The sun floods through the windows. No, no plans, I say.
Are you going to stick around for a while?
I pick up my fork and pierce one of the yolks, watch the yellow run and pool around the parsley. Two waitresses in tight brown polyester almost collide carrying full trays. A crowd of church people comes in the door, and there is nowhere for them to sit. The fork gets so hot in my fingers I have to set it down. I don’t know, I say.
Why don’t you eat?
He’s had a long trip, says my father. My father has just come up from San Diego. He will spend the night with my mother. She hasn’t decided whether she wants him back; she is holding on to the divorce papers. My father is Wreck Number One. He drinks too much — usually every night — but he hasn’t been drinking for some weeks now. He sips his coffee and watches the waitresses, the people waiting in line to eat. I am Wreck Number Two.
My mother studies me, her eyes disks of gray steel. My arm lies smoldering like a baked cobra on the table. You’ll find someone else, she says to me. My father rattles his cup in the saucer. My mother changes the subject. You’d probably like to get some rest, she says.
The flesh on my neck crackles like scorched pork. My hands flare up, and I hide them under the table, wrap them in a wet napkin.
If you want to stay for a while, I can get you a job, she says.
My mother works for a computer company. She is high up in the ranks. I am twenty-six years old and have never had a good job. Maybe I’ll stay for a while, I say.
Good, she says, leaning back in her chair. She glances at my father. My father beams.
I start work the next day. They put me in front of a computer and give me a stack of papers with figures. I am supposed to transfer the figures to the screen. It seems easy. No one bothers me, although I hear a few people whispering about me in the hall. I go to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face and arms.
I live with my mother in her condo in Tarzana. I have my own little room. She is rarely home. I sit outside on a bench by a cypress tree and think of Charlene, and I am like a man standing under a rocket taking off for the moon. Now and then, the neighbor lady dashes over and blasts me with a fire extinguisher. When my mother comes home, we have dinner together.
I work eight-hour days, then drive home in the rush-hour traffic, one of the five million lost and alone. I listen to the radio, watch the other drivers. There is no love in this city, only cars streaming through an endless sepia shimmer. There are fires in the windows of the houses, tiny pinpoints of flame in the curve of every windshield. The sky is orange. The freeways are long rivers of steel.
On the weekends, I go to Santa Anita, a beautiful racetrack set against the mountains. Occasionally, my sister goes with me. She is Wreck Number Three. My mother has gotten her a job, too. She started six months ago. She’s come with me to the track six or seven times now, and she’s never won a race. It takes a special talent to lose like that, beyond the realm of probability. It’s become a joke with us: she picks the horse, and we wait for it to come stumbling around the turn in sixth or seventh place. It is usually dark by the time we leave. They run the last race in darkness, the sweat of the horses like chrome as they flash past.
A guy named Bill befriends me at work. He is one of the loneliest people I have ever met. He is from the tiny town of Suicide, Louisiana, and talks exactly like Andy Griffith — smooth and cheerful and satisfied, sucking on his words like lemon drops, his head tilted back and his ears sticking out. He’s as round as a baby, with a big, round, pale face and soft, curly brown hair. He is so friendly and trusting I worry about him, grinning and cackling with please-don’t-kill-me laughter. Come on over to my sister’s house tonight, I say. We’ll have a few drinks.
My sister lives in a ground-floor apartment in El Segundo with a guy named Frank who works at a histology lab. In the evenings, he and my sister sit home and drink. They’re both mean drunks, like two fighting cocks in a cage. One night he might split her skull open, the next she might smash a chair over his head. When the cops come, my sister wants to fight them, too. Once, she knocked a cop down while wearing handcuffs. In the morning, she doesn’t remember.
Bill has a gram of coke and wants to toot it up with us. Ever smoke it? I say. No, he says, wrinkling his brow. We hop back in the car and drive to a head shop, where we buy a glass pipe, some brass screens, and a Pyrex vial. We stop at a liquor store and pick up a pint of Bacardi 151.
When we get back, I cook the coke, drop half of it in the Pyrex vial with water and baking soda, then draw out the pure crystals on a paper clip. Everyone stares as I lay them on a saucer. Then I stuff a dozen of the circular screens into the mouth of the glass pipe, drop in a lump, dip a Q-Tip in the rum, light it, and apply it to the lump. The lump slowly vaporizes, the chamber tumbles with smoke, and I breathe it in and hit the vault of heaven. I pass the pipe around and watch their expressions change. They lean down like winged monkeys ladling up love from a boiling glass ball. It seems better than love: the blue of the TV, even the news is good. We sit, eyes locked, each of us isolated in flames, more alone with every blue dip of the rum.
When the gram is gone, we are crisp and empty, huddled like some small cannibal tribe in a dark jungle praying to Death. It’s an ancient tale: the ecstasy of deception. The devil leans in the doorway, collection plate in hand. No one’s quite figured it out yet, drawn up the anatomy chart of pleasure, but one thing’s for sure: we all want more. Bill gets on the phone and makes the connection. In an hour we are set up with two more grams. We try to take it a little slower this time, but it’s no use: we blaze through it. We have to get another gram. That’s all we have cash for, and the dealer doesn’t take checks.
When the last gram is gone, we start looking for crumbs, flaming the crystal patterns off the walls of the pipe chamber. We watch TV and the room seems ugly. We despise each other, like tricked apes. My eyes feel like two coals in a heap of ashes. Bill talks about this new stuff he’s read about: crack. It’s like cocaine, he says, but stronger; once you try it, you can’t quit. Sounds pretty scary, I say. They’re already getting hooked on it in the ghettos, he says. We start a game of cards but don’t finish. It’s getting late. Bill and I drive home.
My father comes up to visit every few weeks. He is retired. At home he goes to ballgames, attends the symphony, plays poker every Friday with his friends. He wants my mother to come back to San Diego, to the house where I grew up. He’s quit drinking, he says: for good. If he had to, I know he’d move into the condo with us, sell the house, give up his friends, his past. He’d live in LA and sit on that bench by the cypress tree and wait for her to come home each day.
There is a bar down the street, and I go there sometimes. The people sitting on their stools look to the door every time it opens. They are just like me, waiting for someone who will never show. A wounded girl comes in and sits across from me. She smiles, takes a drink. She is burning, but I can’t help her: you can’t fight fire with fire, no matter what they say. We sit by the window in the flames of the sun.
On the weekends, Bill and I go out to Hollywood Park. I’ve taught him how to read a racing form. It doesn’t matter to him if he wins or loses, as long as he’s not alone. We go over to my sister’s afterward and pool our money together and buy four grams. I cook it half a gram at a time, and we try to make it last.
I think of Charlene, knowing there is no point in it, but I am like steel that will not be forged, forever being turned in flames. As always, I have made bad connections, bad decisions. I need to start fresh. Again.
I tell my mother I am going to quit my job, and she nods patiently. Bill and I go to the track one more time, have one more weekend at my sister’s. My sister has a bandage over her eye. I start to ask her why she doesn’t leave the bum, but then I see Charlene standing before me and I understand: for love — even the illusion of love — we pay the price, whatever it is.
My father comes up. We are going to drive back to San Diego together. I will stay there a day or two, then head east and north. The minute we get in the car he wants to talk about my mother. She has torn up the divorce papers, he says. He is going to sell the house where I grew up and move to LA. I drive, and we listen to Mahler’s Ninth. I look out the windows, past the blazing hills and the pomegranate trees and the rivers of fire. LA is pretty at sunset. Once we get past Orange County, the traffic begins to thin out.
This story originally appeared in Hyper Age.
— Ed.
