Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Hills

“Goddamnit, Megan, look at us,” he said. “We’re jonesing. I gotta chase the dragon and I mean right now!”

She jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and got the last piece of the OC tablet, bringing it to the coffee table and placing it in the crease of the foil.

“This ain’t a complete half,” Jonas accused. “You smoked a bite off it, didn’t you?”

Megan didn’t reply and he was too desperate to press her.

“Just hurry up,” he said.

Megan placed the flame of the lighter underneath the foil and heated the OxyContin tablet. Jonas picked up the empty ink tube, which, unlike a drinking straw, would not burn easily, and put it in his mouth. Megan tilted the foil, and as the heated fragment slid down the crease propelled by gravity and heated from beneath the foil, Jonas hungrily inhaled, and even swallowed as much rising smoke as he could, chasing that smoking ox down the crease before it burned up completely.

“You’re not worried about me, are you, Jonas?” Megan said. “Don’t you think I need a taste, too?”

Jonas said to her, “You call this chasing the dragon? All you left me was a crumb. There ain’t enough ox here to chase a fucking lizard.”

He waited for the rush, but all he got was an anemic feeling of lethargy. They were developing such a tolerance that for weeks neither of them had felt the warm flush of the skin or the wonderful drowsy euphoria that they used to get when there was enough for them both. When they weren’t so addicted.

“Wilbur only deals in cash, no credit,” Megan said between coughs. “I tried hard to talk a couple of OCs out of him when he came on to me, but he smells awful. I wouldn’t ever let him so much as touch me for anything, Jonas. There’re some things I won’t do.” She gulped back a sob and said, “I don’t want to ever come to that!” She threw herself facedown on the sofa then and wept.

He looked at her, thinking, yeah, pretty soon she’d have the Lady Gaga hair and a tramp stamp or two, like the last woman he’d let live with him. She’d probably end up peddling her ass on Sunset Boulevard. Then he tried to remember the girl he’d met when she was selling clothes at the Gap. Why was it that every girl he met turned into a degenerate?

“Goddamnit,” Jonas said, “we need enough bank for that fucking quack over in Echo Park. He’ll write us scrips for anything we want if the money’s right.”

Then Jonas felt a deep depression envelop him and he stopped looking at Megan and said, “I got fired,” to Cuddles, her calico cat, who was squatting on a kitchen chair sleepily watching all the human drama unfolding.

The calico cat just yawned, lifted a back leg, and licked her ass, but Megan sat up and said, “You what? Oh, Jonas, what’re we going to do?”

“Don’t worry,” Jonas said. “For quite a while I been thinking a lot about the Bling Ring. They only fucked up and got caught ’cause they didn’t stay focused. I think they had a cool idea, though. You and me, we could do it right.”

“Do what right?”

“Walk into the houses of celebrities and other rich people and take what we want. And make enough to live decent and stop slaving for all the foreign shitbags that’re taking over the whole town.”

“You’re not making sense,” Megan said. Then she started coughing again and her sweating increased.

“I’m making sense for the first time in a long time,” Jonas insisted.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Megan said, wiping her face on her T-shirt. “It’s stressful to talk like this when you’re all beat-up and not thinking.”

“Baby, it’s easy,” he said, “and the Bling Ring had a blast doing it.”

“It’s not like running out and boosting from department stores,” Megan said. “Breaking into houses? That’s very different and very scary.”

“Whadda you mean ‘breaking’?” Jonas said. “Those rich morons up in the Hollywood Hills, they leave their houses wide open. Know where Paris Hilton kept her house key? Under the fucking doormat. And they leave their windows unlocked. And you’re getting so skinny these days, you could crawl through a doggie door too small for a fucking Chihuahua. Nothing could stop us from getting into any house we want.”

Megan Burke suddenly flashed on how it had been in the beginning with Jonas Claymore, back when she was someone else and so was he. At first, they’d smoked pot on dates before doing zannies and benzos. It was carefree and it was fun at first. Then came the perks and norcos. And then they’d started smoking OxyContin, and after riding the ox for all these months, they had become unrecognizable people. Megan didn’t know this Jonas, and in fact, she didn’t even know this Megan that she had become.

“Can we please talk tomorrow, Jonas?” Megan pleaded. “This is nerve-racking and it’s making me burbly.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jonas moaned, eyes rolling back, not wanting to be reminded that he, too, was experiencing bouts of diarrhea since the jonesing episodes started. “I ain’t got enough tribulations in life, I gotta hook up with a chick with irritable bowel syndrome? Why can’t I catch a break just for once?”

“Sorry. Gotta do number two,” Megan said, getting up and running to the bathroom.

“Go ahead, jingle bowels,” he said. “Drop a deuce for me while you’re at it.”

Two weeks after the red carpet event at the Kodak Theatre, Hollywood Nate Weiss was lying on the sofa in his North Hollywood apartment, where he lived alone, considering the business card he’d received from the director Rudy Ressler. For years, while working red carpet events and taking every opportunity to chat up the rich and famous, he’d been given plenty of business cards by virtue of being an LAPD cop from people who hoped he could fix a ticket or do other things for them that were equally impossible. He’d tried and mostly failed to meet the kind of people who could get him real work. No one was more aware than Nate that the clock was not on his side.

The last job where he’d had a speaking role was three years ago in an indie production that had vanished and not even gone to DVD. He’d been a day player on that one and of course had been typecast as an LAPD cop. His scripted line was “Put your hands on your head and grab the wall.”

When he’d tried to tell the director, a no-talent bully ten years younger, that it was impossible to grab a wall or anything else when your hands were on your head, the director said, “And what’re your qualifications in such matters?”

The assistant director then whispered to the director that Nate was an LAPD police officer in his other life, and the director grumbled something and then said to Nate, “Just go, ‘Up against the wall.’ And try to act excited because you’ve collared a perp you’ve been looking for.” Then he turned to the assistant director and said, “Or maybe we should have the lieutenant say that?”

“Say what?” the AD asked.

“We just collared a perp we’ve been looking for,” the annoyed director said.

“Excuse me,” Nate interrupted. “The words perp and collar are terms used in the East, and though they’re very popular on TV shows, we don’t use either of them at LAPD. Would you like me to give you some substitute words that we use out here in the West?”

The director had dead-stared him for a moment and said, “Just say ‘Up against the wall’ and let it go at that. So okay, Officer… whatever your name is, let’s try to get it right in one take and move the fuck on!”

Nate figured he must’ve gotten it right in one take. Either that or the little putz simply had had enough of him, because he growled, “Cut,” two seconds after Nate delivered the line. Then he said, “Print it.”