Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

Dee Dee’s a complete idiot behind the wheel, nosing right up to slower cars in front of us and laying on the horn, a cigarette in one hand, an open beer between her legs. I roll down my window and try to relax. Most of the signs are in Korean on this stretch of Western. We pass a building I remember seeing on TV during the riots. They interviewed the owner as he stood in front with a rifle, holding off looters. About all he could say in English was “Why?”

We get stuck behind a bus, and the exhaust makes me light-headed. I watch the eight-ball air fresheners hanging over the rearview mirror swing back and forth and pretend I’m being hypnotized. A Jeep full of vatos pulls up beside us, and one of the guys points at Dee Dee’s hair and laughs.

“Fuck you!” she yells, flipping him off. The gob he spits lands on the hood, and the next thing I know she’s halfway out the door. I yank her back inside, but the vatos are in a fighting mood. They spill into the street waving baseball bats and tire irons, and I realize I’ve died this way before, in dreams.

The first of them reaches the car just as the light changes and traffic begins to move. A passing police cruiser slows for a look, and the driver of the Jeep whistles a warning. The vatos break off their attack and return to the Jeep, which speeds away while the black-and-white screeches through a U-turn to follow, one of the cops already calling in the plates.

My voice is shaking as bad as my hands when I shout at Dee Dee, “If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll leave you to the fucking lions.”

“I spilled my beer,” she sobs. Big, black mascara tears crawl down her cheeks.

I screwed her once, eight or ten years ago, back in my heyday. A quickie car date in the parking lot of some goth club off Melrose. She went by Trixie then, something like that, and what attracted me to her was her blue eyes, maybe, or the rings she wore on every finger, little screaming skulls. Anyway, I never saw her again until Grady brought her around a couple of months ago, and if she remembers me, she hasn’t let on.

She cleans her face with a fast-food napkin from under the seat and goes right back to swearing and swerving.

“You know what that motherfucker said to me?” she asks out of nowhere as we’re passing over the Hollywood freeway.

“Who?” I ask.

“Grady. He said, ‘I can rebuild you, baby. I have the technology.’ ”

I see the sheet of black plastic coming from a hundred yards away. It flaps and billows in the wind like an angry ghost. Pursing my lips, I empty my lungs in a quick puff, as if to ward it off, but this wayward shred of night has its heart set upon devouring us. It swoops low over the road and skips across two lanes before whipping up to flatten itself against the windshield with a loud slap. We can’t see anything ahead of us, yet Dee Dee doesn’t ease up on the accelerator one bit. I sit back and grit my teeth and wait for her to lose her nerve.

She finally screams, “Do something!” and I stick my arm out the window, but the plastic slithers from my touch and launches itself again into the air, where it shoots straight up into the sky, up and up and up, to join the satellites and space junk. Dee Dee and I laugh and fiddle with the radio and keep on driving, any righteous wonder the moment warrants swept away by the cheap high of shared relief.

DEE DEE’S NEW apartment is a block north of Hollywood Boulevard, in a scabby, has-been building that’s supposedly haunted by Sal Mineo. Luckily a few of her friends are waiting, because the elevator is out of order, and everything will have to be carried up to the fourth floor. After Dee Dee jump-starts the late arrivals with a line or two of her stash, they’re raring to go. “Beep beep,” they shout as they squeeze past me, competing among themselves to see who can haul the biggest loads. I take up a position in the back of the truck and spend the next hour sliding boxes and furniture down the ramp to Dee Dee’s buddies. They make a couple of remarks about me not doing my share, but fuck it, I’ve got nothing to prove to these boneheads.

More and more people straggle in, and it actually begins to resemble a party. The unloading goes quickly, and when it’s done, Dee Dee takes everyone up to the roof of the building to cool off. It’s just an expanse of gravel with a few potted palms scattered about and some rusty patio furniture, but the wind has lost its burn now that the sun is setting, and the Hollywood sign glows a pretty pink. Soon reggae is snaking out of a boom box, and a girl with a pierced eyebrow hands me another beer before I’ve finished the one I’m drinking. Someone discovers a barbecue grill, and a contingent is dispatched to buy hot dogs and veggie burgers.

I drag a lawn chair to the edge of the roof. The sky out this way is a map of hell — blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds. I stare at it until I think I have it memorized, then lower my eyes to an open window in the next building, through which I can see a fat man lying on his couch, watching television. There is an empty birdcage in the apartment, a treadmill. He scratches his belly and coughs. These lives, these lives.

The girl with the eyebrow ring approaches tentatively. She’s playing with a yo-yo. She stands with her back to me for a few seconds, taking in the sunset, but I can tell she has something prepared.

“You went out with my sister,” she says when she finally turns to face me.

“What was her name?”

“Christina. About five years ago.”

The aromatherapist, with all her little vials and potions. She thought she could help me, but my sense of smell was shot. Too many cigarettes. Christina’s sister walks the dog, then jerks the yo-yo out of its stall into a cat’s cradle. She’s hot, in a black nail polish kind of way.

“How is Christina?” I ask.

“Married. Pregnant.”

“Good for her.”

“Like you give a shit,” she says.

The yo-yo zips out and stops about an inch from my face before racing back up the string to her hand. She wraps it in her fist like she’s going to clock me with it.

“Are you mad at me?” I ask.

“Yeah, I am. I’m fucking pissed.”

I get up from my chair and walk back to where everybody’s hanging out. A couple of guys I know are there now, Charlie and Nick. We talk about their band for a while, drink a few more beers.

MERCEDES’ BLINDNESS BROUGHT out the best in most people. Strangers were always grabbing her arm, trying to help her. We’d be eating breakfast at Denny’s and old women would come up to our table and say, “God bless you, dear,” and shove a few dollars into her hand. The neighborhood where the Braille Institute was located was a little rough — I heard gunshots almost every night — but Mercedes never had a problem. In fact, the only time she was robbed, the thief apologized. “I’m a drug addict,” he confessed before snatching her purse, which she later told her parents she’d left on the bus, because her getting mugged would have been just the excuse they needed to keep her locked up at home.

She planned to go to college someday. She wanted to work with children. She also wanted to visit France. “Why?” I asked. It was a legitimate question. I mean, she was blind. That was the only time I saw her cry. She had a cat named Lilly and a brother named José. Once when we were high in my apartment, she got confused and walked into the kitchen, thinking it was the bathroom. “It’s okay to laugh,” she said, so I did.

Saturdays we’d go places together — Griffith Park, the rose garden down by USC. She’d ask me to describe the flowers, the trees, the carousel, but this was beyond me. I couldn’t find the words. She said I was lazy, that if I cared about her I’d try. So I practiced. The moon looks like a drop of milk, I’d say to myself in the mirror, like a pearl, like a peephole into heaven. I never worked up the nerve to repeat any of it to her, though. She bought me a shirt for my birthday, the ugliest shirt I’d ever seen.