Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

She works as a B-girl, flirting with men, dancing with them, getting them to buy her watered-down drinks at premium prices. A hand on the knee. A kiss on the corner of the mouth. A suggestive look. It can be a difficult job. You must laugh at stupid jokes. You can’t allow yourself to cringe at the stink of garlic on breath. Your feet get bruised as the clumsier ones are always tenderizing your meat out on the dance floor.

And the men get grabby. Sometimes they get violent.

She’s been accosted on more than one occasion in this very parking lot by drunken men who wanted to take what she was unwilling to give them — or sell them.

Men are animals. You have to be careful with them. You have to tempt them, let them hope they might get to see what’s hidden under your skirt without ever letting them believe it’s a promise. If you let it get too far you’ll find yourself in a dangerous situation.

It’s made worse by the fact that some of the girls have a price. There’s a dressing room upstairs, and it’s a rare night that Candice doesn’t see men get dragged up there by their ties like obedient puppies on leashes.

Only once was she unable to fight off an attacker. He left her torn and bleeding in this very parking lot, a mere twenty feet from where she now stands, took the money she’d earned that night, spit on her, called her a cunt and a whore.

For two weeks afterwards she looked like she went several rounds with Rocky Marciano, and though she couldn’t afford the time off, she stayed home until the bruises healed. Once she returned to work the mere thought of walking out here in the dark was traumatizing. She couldn’t do it alone. She tried to be strong on her first day back, to put on a brave face, but halfway to her car she found herself shaking and crying, unable to force her feet further into the darkness. She stood paralyzed until one of the other girls saw her and walked her to her car.

It took months before she could walk out here by herself.

She’s more cautious now, more careful. Men are animals. And she has a boy to raise, a boy whose father is already absent. She doesn’t want him to lose his mother as well. She wants him to retain some innocence for as long as possible.

She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, looks toward the Sugar Cube’s back door. Vivian said she’d only be a minute, said she just had to use the ladies’ room, but it has to have been a quarter hour now, and Candice isn’t dressed for this chill night air.

She looks up at the moon, bright behind a thin film of disintegrating clouds, and feels a small surge of anger. Directed neither at the moon nor at Vivian, but at her husband Neil, who’s probably asleep on the couch in their little falling-down house on Bunker Hill. Once again he left her stranded. When he gets off work — he’s head mail clerk at a downtown office building — he often hops on a streetcar and takes it here to the nightclub, says hey, just wanted to see your pretty face, I’ll only stay a few minutes, but minutes turn into hours, and by the time he’s pushing out the door, the streetcars have stopped running. So what does he do? Sometimes he gets a cab, but too often he stumbles to the car, drives it home, collapses onto the couch, and falls into a drunken sleep without even realizing he’s once again left her without a way home. It happens at least once a week, usually after a busy Saturday night when she’s at her most tired, when her feet are killing her, when she’s been grabbed one time too many by one chump too many, and wants nothing so much as the comfort of her own bed.

She cares for Neil, despite his flaws, despite the way he treats her son, but sometimes she feels like strangling him till he’s dead. He can be so thoughtless, and all tomorrow’s apologies mean nothing to her now. They’ll mean very little then.

Vivian finally pushes through the back door and sways across the parking lot toward her, saying sorry about that, had to get some money out of Heath.

‘Money for what?’

‘Leland did some work for him couple weeks ago, asked me to collect it.’

Candice nods, takes another drag from her cigarette, offers it to Vivian, who pinches it between two fingers, sucks the last drag from it, and flicks it out to the asphalt. It hits the ground and a small scattering of orange embers flash on the air, briefly looking like a miniature fireworks show — one for the ants and beetles — before going dark.

‘Where’s he been lately, anyway?’

‘Leland?’

She nods.

‘Had a movie last week, five full days of work.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Twelve hours a day every day.’

‘Was it a speaking part?’

‘Not this time. But maybe soon. It’s about building relationships with producers. You know, it’s less to do with talent than knowing the right people.’

‘Come on,’ Candice says, pulling on a locked door, ‘my lady parts are freezing off.’

They get into the car and Vivian starts the engine.

‘You need to do something about Neil. The way he leaves you stranded is rotten.’

‘He doesn’t mean it.’

‘If it only happened once I’d believe that.’

Candice shrugs, and as Vivian pulls the car out of the parking lot and into the street she turns to the passenger’s-side window and looks through it, out at the city, her breath fogging the glass in front of her.

She likes this part of the night. The bars have closed and the night owls have gone home, everyone from the zoot-suited Mexicans to the Negro-speaking hipsters, but it’s too early yet for even the earliest risers to be pushing through their front doors. The city is still and silent and possesses the feeling of possibility, like an unhatched egg. You can almost forget it was long ago parceled out and sold. You can almost forget that crooks live in its mansions while honest people live in tarpaper shacks. You can almost forget that racial violence rages everywhere, from Hollywood Stars games at Wrigley Field to burning crosses in the yards of Negroes who dared to buy homes in white neighborhoods. You can almost forget that gangsters dine with famous actors and grin from newspaper photographs while honest, hardworking men die unknown.

You can almost forget, but not quite.

She knows the chief of police, William H. Parker, has promised to clean the place up, but she knows too that the Bloody Christmas beatings were only three months ago now, and if the man can’t control his own cops, how is he supposed to control a city?

The answer’s simple. He can’t. And in truth she doesn’t blame him for that. Los Angeles is a monster, a beast whose primary nutrients are Hollywood glitter and dumb violence. No one could control such an animal.

They drive north till they hit Sunset Boulevard, then head east, past the point where it hooks right and becomes Macy Street. A few minutes after that Vivian turns the car left onto Bunker Hill Avenue, and Candice finds herself surrounded by the comforting familiarity of her neighborhood, crumbling though it is.

The car rolls north on a street punctuated by potholes. Up ahead, on the right, in front of their small house, their small crumbling house with its asphalt-shingle roof, sits their car, a 1948 Chevrolet Fleetmaster. The driver’s-side door hangs open. Key’s probably still jutting from the ignition as well. It wouldn’t be the first time. Lucky the car wasn’t stolen by some leather-jacketed hoodlum looking to joyride.

Sometimes she could just-

Her thought is cut off by the sight of something on the asphalt beside the car, something about the size of a man. Not only the size of a man but the shape. A man on his back with his head tilted to the right, toward the parked car.

Whatever it is, the sound of the approaching vehicle doesn’t cause it to stir. It simply lies there, still as a mountain.