Timothy Hallinan: Everything but the Squeal

The curious life cycle of the botfly begins with an egg laid on a mammal's lip or fur. When the egg is licked and swallowed, its coating dissolves and a voracious larva is freed to float in the juices of the stomach. Eventually it begins to eat its way out, gaining weight as it goes. When it reaches the surface, usually through a flat muscle, the baby fly leaves behind an exit wound about the size of a.22 caliber bullet.

— Frederick Wendt, An Entomologist'sNotebook

Home is where you hang your head. -Groucho Marx

Oh, the little chickie hollered,

And the little chickie begged,

And they poured hot water

Up and down his leg. …

— Traditional American children's song

I

The Little Chickie Hollered

1 — Looking for Aimee

“H ey! No, no, no, no, no. How many times I gotta tell you, huh? You gitouta here. Gitouta here.” The Mountain's wooden geta sandals clattered over the concrete as he grabbed the Guitar Player by the frayed strap of the unstrung, bogus Stratocaster guitar he toted up and down Santa Monica Boulevard day and night. The Guitar Player's eyes, which had been closed in temporary bliss, opened as wide as they could, which is to say halfway, as the Mountain-three hundred quivering pounds of food-stained plaid shirt, scrubby beard, and yellow fangs-yanked him to his feet and launched him toward the sidewalk. The neck of the guitar knocked to the floor the dingy plastic tray containing the Guitar Player's cardinal sin: a package of store-bought sliced ham that he'd been surreptitiously dipping into somebody else's side order of the special teriyaki sauce, the one that Tommy, the Mountain's Okinawan boss, used only for teriyaki tacos.

There was no house rule against leaving leftovers for others-not much ever made it back into the kitchen-but bringing in food from outside was tantamount to kamikaze .

The eighty-six, which was part of the nightly floor show at the Oki-Burger, caught people's attention as though it were something new. At the other end of the Guitar Player's picnic-type table, the Toothless Man-two missing in front, top and bottom, nodded his head. “Maximum force,” he aspirated approvingly to the Young Old Woman, fourteen years old from behind and fifty from in front. The Young Old Woman, the only one who could understand him most of the time, cackled. She translated his conversation for the others and made his alibis to the cops. His speaking-tongue dog was what the others called her. When she wasn't being his speaking-tongue dog she worked the darker doorways with her back to the street, giving unpleasant surprises to fools on the prowl for pubescence.

One of the genuine teenage girls, seated at a table strategically near the sidewalk where a glimpse of her might make a straight hit the brakes, paused in a heroin nod-out long enough to giggle as the Mountain dispassionately lobbed the Guitar Player across the sidewalk and onto the back of a concrete bus bench. At the last possible instant, as he did almost every night, the Guitar Player managed to twist his body so that his ribs, rather than the imitation Stratocaster, cracked against the edge of the bench. “Wuff,” he said. He straightened up, wrapped himself in a tenuous shred of affronted dignity, and set off down the street toward the sheltering hedges of Plummer Park. The kids did a lot of business in Plummer Park.

The nodding girl continued to exceed the limits of her body's chemical tolerance long enough to giggle again and say something to an equally loaded friend through what sounded like a mouthful of highly glutinous mush. Me, I just took a sip on my very old Diet Coke and a sniff at my even older purple T-shirt and wondered how long it would be before everybody stopped thinking I was a cop.

It was three a.m. at Tommy's Oki-Burger, and all was as well as it was going to get. A little earlier the clatter of silverware two bright orange tables away had announced the fact that a skinhead in black leather had hit the bottom of the curve on downers. He'd bounced twice on the cement floor, and the Mountain had hauled him into the men's room to be treated to a refreshing dip in the toilet. A girl had broken out in bugs that no one else could see, and the Mountain had sprayed her with an imaginary can of Raid to calm her down. It worked. The LAPD cruised slowly by every fifteen minutes or so, one of them checking out the girls and trying to keep his tongue from hanging out the window while the other one drove. They switched seats and tongues on alternate passes.

“To protect and to serve,” the Mountain read off the side of the squad car, mopping down the table with a malodorous rag that might have been a recycled mummy wrapping. “Who they protecting, you think?”

“Each other,” I said. To my great relief, my Diet Coke had finally dried up. I pushed the empty cup away as though it had contained uranium.

“And who they serving?” The Mountain picked up the empty cup and rattled it and then snapped the rag at a fly guilty of being out after curfew. A vaguely cheesy and thoroughly unwholesome smell spread its leprous wings beneath my nose.

“They're not serving Diet Coke,” I said, fanning the vapor away. “And you're not either, not if you've got any pity in your soul. God, there must be something else to drink in this dump.”

The Mountain lowered his voice. “Don't spread it around,” he said, narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, “but I could offer you Diet Pepsi. And anyway, what do plainclothes cops care?”

On the whole, I liked the Mountain. He eighty-sixed people with style and he rarely held a grudge. I'd been hanging around the Oki-Burger four days and I'd told him at least twelve times that I wasn't a cop. I told him again now, scratching at my chin. My carefully cultivated four-day beard itched.

The Mountain gave me a knowing look and wiped his face with the damp mummy-wrap, making my skin crawl. “Nobody as grungy as you isn't a cop,” he said. “Whyn’t you go to Jack's? They're not as sharp there. You might pass for a human.”

I knew good advice when I heard it. I hauled my backside off the hardest wooden bench this side of bankruptcy court and headed for Jack's.

Jack's Triple-Burgers is on Hollywood, near La Brea, and Tommy's Oki-Burger is on Fountain, near Fairfax. It's easy to map the physical geography-they're about a mile and a half apart, and Jack's is farther north and east than Tommy's-but the emotional geography is more subtle. It had taken me a couple of days to figure out that Tommy's got the new runaways and Jack's got the Old Hands. The drugs of choice in Tommy's are downers, mainly codeine and other painkillers, but at Jack's nobody screws around with anything you don't enjoy at the sharp point of a needle. The occasional exceptions in both places are freebasers, folks whose idea of a day at the beach is a waterpipe filled with a brain-jolting mixture of cocaine and ether and, occasionally, PCP. The freebasers are rare in both establishments, though. Cocaine makes you alert and jumpy. By and large, both Tommy's and Jack's cater to a crowd that puts a high value on anesthesia.

The other difference is that the boys and girls at Tommy's sometimes-say no to a straight. He has to be pretty repulsive and not very prosperous-looking, and he's probably asking for something that would stun the Marquis de Sade, but the kids will say no. The boys and girls at Jack's don't. At Jack's, “Just say no” is a punch line.

To get to Jack's, I took the streets no one knows are there. Between Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards there runs a network of narrow, pinched little avenues, paved when cars were smaller, and lined on either side by small houses, mostly stucco, built in the thirties. They were dark now, most of them, tucked away behind weedy lawns, climbing roses, and chained dogs. Here and there light spilled through a window, and at one point I heard the sad strains of Brahms' Double Concerto. There were few families. Most of the children in these neighborhoods come and go with the night, passing back and forth between the boulevards where the money is, looking at the houses from the wrong side of the chain-link fences.