Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

Linda looks at me like Reggie did on the side of the freeway when my car broke down, like I’m not the same person I was a few seconds ago. While I’m making myself another drink to replace the one Simone spilled, she slips her dress over her head, grabs her shoes, and runs away.

I step out onto the walkway a few minutes later, but she’s nowhere to be seen. There’s a commotion in the courtyard. Someone panicked during the quake and jumped over the second-floor railing. The body is lying in the parking lot, as still as a perfect summer night in the desert, and the blood that’s leaked out of it looks like a big red pillow. My throat tightens and tears come to my eyes, and I almost cry out, “Simone!” until I see that it’s one of the junkies from the room next door, a guy with long, dark hair. Some joke, baby. All of the tenants have gathered around him, the poor families and the whores and pimps and dopers. They’re all standing together, staring down at him, while Mrs. Cho calls for an ambulance on her cell phone.

The sun is hidden behind a thick brown haze, which means that either the whole Valley’s on fire or summer is just around the corner. A thin trickle of blood slithers away from the dead junkie’s head, across the asphalt and under the fence to the cracked white concrete of the pool deck. It picks up speed there and spills over into the water, turning the deep end pink.

So now that’s ruined, too. Are you happy?

No, she’s not. Not yet.

EVERY JUNKIE I’VE EVER KNOWN HAS HAD A THING FOR Neil Young. Be he a punk, a metalhead, or just your garden-variety handlebar-mustachioed dirtbag, if he hauls around a monkey, he’s going to have Decade in his collection, and he’s bound to ruin more than a few parties by insisting that you play at least some of it, no matter that the prettiest girl in the room is begging for something she can dance to. Even if he gets off dope, he sticks with Neil, because by then Neil’s become the soundtrack to his outlaw past. Let him hear “Old Man” or “Sugar Mountain” years after the fact, and everything in him will hum like a just-struck tuning fork as mind and body and blood harmonize in mutual longing for a time when desire was an easy itch to scratch.

So this is why, when the deejay announces that a rock block of Neil is coming up next, three classic cuts in a row, I know there’s no hope of Jim budging until the last song ends. We’re sitting in the parking lot of the Busy B market, where Jim’s been working security for the past few months. He’s training me for the night shift, but it’s already two minutes past the time we were supposed to have punched in. I want to make a good impression on my first night on the job, but Jim just laughs at me and, sure enough, turns up the radio of his mom’s old Lincoln. His latest thing is that I’m too full of myself, and he says it again now. “Does the sun care what kind of impression it makes?” he asks. “Does a bird?” He picked this up in rehab, the idea that all the world’s problems stem from a surfeit of ego. My immediate inclination is to tell him to stuff the Intro to Eastern Thought bullshit, but because he’s convinced the owner of the store to hire me, and because he’s now sort of my boss, I have to humor him.

He pushes the button on the door that reclines the driver’s seat so that he’ll be closer to the rear speakers, the only ones that still work. The seat’s smooth electric descent reminds me of those machines that scan your body and produce color pictures of all the cancer in it, and this is funny to me in a sick way, because Jim actually had cancer when we were in college. He got over it, but only after they removed his testicles and replaced them with plastic ones. Guys who lose their arms or legs, you see them on TV, playing wheelchair basketball and using their hooks to hurl shotputs and shit, but what do you do to prove you’re as much of a man as you ever were if you lose your balls? Big, fucking stupid skinhead that he was, Jim chose heroin. His claim to fame was that he could shoot three times as much as anyone and still beat you at chess. Then he got pulled over in a stolen car and did a year in County, got popped dealing, and drew another year. His dad died during this stretch, and they wouldn’t release him to attend the funeral. Something about the shame of that straightened him right out. He rid himself of his addiction and his ego, had his swastika tattoo covered over with the yin/yang symbol, and metamorphosed into a true-blue, eight-buck-an-hour crime fighter. When anybody asks, he says he’s a loss-prevention specialist, and somewhere on his person is a gun he’s not licensed to carry, bought from a drunken off-duty cop at a barbecue in Simi Valley.

The rain comes down so hard it cracks the night into a million pieces. All I can see through the windshield is glistening shards of cars and blacktop and the kaleidoscopic whorl of a woman skedaddling across the parking lot. I roll my window down a bit and stick my fingers out, and licking them afterward is like running my tongue along a galvanized nail. Old Neil’s whining about four dead in Ohio when Scarlett Johansson suddenly pops into my head stark naked. This has been happening a lot lately, and, frankly, it’s starting to piss me off. I mean, I’ve seen some of her movies, and she once strolled through a bar I was drinking in, but I’m not exactly a fan. I don’t tell Scarlett this, of course, not when I’m lying on top of her on a bed veiled by mosquito netting, syrupy waves kissing the sand outside our super-deluxe grass shack. Her pale, pale skin soaks up so much moonlight, she gleams icy blue, but her thigh throbs hot beneath mine, and sweat beads along the thin trail of hair that runs from her navel down the flat plane of her stomach to the balmy darkness between her legs. I snap at her nipples and growl like a dog, which makes her laugh and laugh. She places a hand under my chin and pulls my face to hers, the insistent prodding of her heels against my ass urging me to go to it. “Not so fast, Scarlett baby,” I say. “I didn’t ask for this, but I’ll damn sure make it mine.”

The rain has eased into a lacy drizzle. Small drops are overtaken and swallowed by bigger drops that slide down the fenders of the cars like great glowing tears as I follow Jim across the parking lot, holding up my pants to keep my cuffs from dragging in the puddles. His extra uniform doesn’t fit me too well, not even with all the safety pins and duct tape we used to take it in, and the gaudy tin badge hanging over my heart, SPECIAL OFFICER, is a surplus-store joke. Jim assures me that it won’t matter. He says most of the customers are Central American refugees who were so terrorized by their armies and police back home, they’re afraid to look a Cub Scout in the eye.

I want to trust him on this. I want to believe that for once we’re seeing the world through the same prescription, because it’s a rough neighborhood, graffiti twisting like angry black vines up the sides of the buildings, half the streetlights shot out. On the way down from the freeway we passed under a pair of Nikes dangling from a telephone line — a gang signal, I’ve heard, drugs for sale or something. The market itself is a windowless bunker that’s been tarted up with a thin coat of hot pink paint. A high cinder-block wall protects the loading dock and Dumpsters out back, topped by coiled razor wire that looks, if you squint, like the skeleton of some nightmare snake chewing on its own tail.

The automatic doors are on the fritz, propped open with coffee cans filled with cement. Mr. Ho, the owner, wobbles on a stool at the front of the store, behind a high desk surrounded on three sides by thick Plexiglas. He has skinny little legs and a big potbelly, and his forehead is shiny with the pomade he uses to slick back his thinning hair.