Ryan Jahn - Low Life

They headed to a place called Wally’s on Broadway and grabbed a table. Robert and Chris ordered their lunches. Simon sat and waited for their sandwiches to arrive before unpacking his own. When he first began eating his lunches here with Robert and Chris – four months ago, three months after he started working in the same building with them, though it felt like he’d been working here forever: every day was the same and they seemed to stack infinitely into his past like a line of dominoes – there was some trouble with the manager. This was a restaurant, not a park. He couldn’t just bring his own food in here and spread out. But since then they’d worked it out, and the manager let it slide.

When Babette brought out Simon’s daily 7-Up, she smiled and said hello. Simon returned the smile, pulled the paper sleeve off the top of his straw, and took a draw. It was cold and sweet and helped to settle his stomach.

He fell into his car, the work day over. The car was a gray 1987 Volvo. The paint was peeling from the hood where the heat of the engine had cooked it and from the trunk where several different owners had set the gas cap when refilling the tank. He started the engine, thumbed the button on the left of the transmission’s handle, and dragged it down to drive. He pulled out into the slow flow of traffic, edging in with his right fender – this was a oneway street – forcing the car behind him either to stop or hit him. Take your pick, pal. In five minutes he was back on Wilshire and heading toward home. But then he drove right past the Filboyd Apartments and past the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated forty years earlier, and onward. The Ambassador was under construction, being turned into a school, its history knocked away with the walls, goodbye Cocoanut Grove, hello detention, and there was nothing left of it but its steel skeleton surrounded by great pits of earth and a chain-link fence. Los Angeles was a city that perpetually razed its own past. History was for people who hadn’t yet made it here. This was the edge of the new world and it would remain so. You couldn’t go any further, and who would want to? Just ignore the slums and the dirt and the poor and try not to trip over any broken dreams while walking down Hollywood Boulevard.

In another few miles he reached his destination. The front of the place simply read

and though he had never seen an actual book inside, there were certainly plenty of magazines.

He parked his car on a side street just off Wilshire, checked the meter, found that whoever had parked there last had left him twenty-three minutes of free parking, added a quarter’s worth of time, and then walked along the cracked sidewalk toward the arcade.

The metal gate which acted as a front door was locked. It was always locked. Simon pressed a button on the wall to his right and heard a bell chime inside. He looked up at the camera mounted above the door. A moment later, a buzzing sound. Simon pulled on the door. It opened.

The place was humid and smelled of ocean salt and rotting undersea vegetation or – more likely – of something that resembled those combined odors; it was fifteen miles to the nearest beach in Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel spun slowly and bikinied women lay on brightly colored towels, and the only seabirds this far inland were gulls hanging out behind the seafood restaurant on Fourth and Vermont, picking through the shrimp shells and lobster tails left in its dumpster.

At the counter – behind which stood a bored-looking fellow in a burgundy tracksuit, who was flipping through a wrestling magazine – Simon exchanged a twenty-dollar bill for twenty one-dollar bills, and then made his way through the front room, where rows of magazine covers displayed various fetishes – close-ups of well-manicured feet with red and blue polished toenails; the tiny breasts, puffy nipples and bald vaginas of women pretending to be prepubescent girls; submissive women whose waists were cinched by corsets and whose asses were welted red by thorough canings; nurses wielding enema nozzles; pig-tailed women in diapers tonguing pacifiers – and then through a doorway and up a single step into the back room above whose door was a sign which labeled it the

A few lonesome middle-aged men with glistening black eyes were hanging around outside the booths, apparently looking to find someone with whom to share some of their time inside before heading home to their wives (Simon saw several wedding bands). He avoided eye contact, not wanting to give anyone the wrong idea, and made his way to a booth with a green light glowing above it. The booths with red lights above them were occupied, their doors locked, and the faint sounds of videotaped sex issued from the cracks beneath their doors.

There was a television built into one of the walls inside the booth, and to its right a slot for collecting dollar bills. On the wall opposite the television, a built-in wood bench. On the floor beside it, a trash can half-filled with wadded-up kleenexes and paper towels and fast-food napkins. The stench of rotting ectoplasm was overwhelming.

Simon put a dollar bill into the slot beside the television, and the screen came aglow, filling the small room with sickly light.

The television displayed six channels of pornography, which came in six distinct flavors. Simon chose channel three – a woman in a black leather mask was flogging a completely nude man, who was on hands and knees on a cracked concrete floor in some anonymous warehouse (probably a warehouse just over the hill in Sherman Oaks or Encino). She called him terrible names while she beat him.

Simon did not sit down, but his knees felt shaky.

When he got back to the Filboyd Apartments he could not find parking on Wilshire, so he turned left onto a side street lined with apartment buildings and drove north toward Sixth. Near the end of the block, beneath a broken streetlamp – all of the lamps were out on this block, while across Sixth they were turning on in the dim evening light – he found a spot he could barely squeeze his car into, and proceeded to do so, his right front fender poking only slightly into a red zone. A fire plug jutted from a brown patch of grass about ten feet away.

He stepped from the Volvo, slammed the door shut, put his key into the scratched-up keyhole, and gave it a turn from twelve to three. There was a satisfying resistance, and then all four doors locked simultaneously with a chorus of thwacks. He turned away from the car and started south toward home, stuffing keys into his pocket.

Both the sun and the moon were visible as they changed shifts, the moon high and the sun sinking below the horizon. The clouds looked like pulled cotton. The nearest stars – or perhaps they were planets – poked through the darkening sky like flashlights in a distant wood.

A few steps from his car he stopped to light a cigarette. After getting it lighted, he flipped the cap over the silver Zippo, snuffing the flame, and stuck it warm into his pants pocket. He could feel the heat of it against his thigh. He took a drag and felt the smoke swirling within his lungs, heavy and hot and somehow comforting. He exhaled through his nostrils. His father – adoptive: Simon didn’t know who his birth parents were, though in his youth he had often made up different stories about them, and about why they dumped him off at an Austin, Texas, police station when he was only three months old – used to smoke Camel Filters and often exhaled through his nostrils. When he was a small boy he thought it was the coolest thing in the world, how someone could take smoke into his mouth and exhale it through his nose. It seemed like it must be some kind of magic.

He continued walking south. He made it only seven steps before something terrible happened.