Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

He might float it by Tom-Tom, tho. She probably knew somebody with a crew. Maybe she’d even done it before, not a bank or anything, just a small business or somebody’s house, not a home invasion, just a robbery when no one was there. He knew she used to rob dealers. He knew from Jerzy that she used googlearth to scope out celebrity mansions. Jerzy said she started doing that during Million Dollar Listing speedball marathons, then they started doing it together, virtual bling-ringing, they’d check out a celeb house or rental using an address one of his personal twats shittered to him & they could like totally case the back entrances & shit, places where the might sneak out in an attempt to dodge the frontyardarazzi, Jerzy would then be waiting in the back or wherever they’d scoped, Tom-Tom was so good at it she could like land them right in Courteney Cox’s swimming pool & they’d just hang there a while scoping the house from every conceivable angle just like they were hangin for the weekend on a little raft, the googlearth let you look toward this or that neighbor then you could fly over to the house Colin Farrell was renting & just hang & then fly back to Courteney’s or out to the beach to James Cameron’s or The Edge’s. Jerzy had T 2do the same shit with restaurants too but now everyone was doing it, all the celebrigoogleartherazzi. Jerzy said Tom-Tom could zillow what a house cost, she could zillow when it was sold & to what bullshit shell company belonging to J Aniston, Lindsay, Olivia Wilde or whomever.

Then Rikki got prudent & thought, If I’m gunna do a stickup it’s gunna need to wait til after the baby & my adoption hearing. Cause I don’t want to fuck either of those up .

Ree was due right around the time his adoption court date was set.

. .

Jerzy played the NatGeo doc for Rikki on his laptop. They were parked on Mulholland outside the gates of The Summit, waiting with 11 other britney spearshooters for her to leave the house. Everyone’d been there at least 6 hours; the papp-posse was starting to thin out. Britney wasn’t Jerzy’s thing but it’d been a slow day, all he got was Paz de la Huerta, Toni Collette & Mamie Gummer, anyway, he thought he’d show the scene to the kid.

He told Rikki that hummingbirds could only store enough energy to get them through the night so they were always just a few hours away from total starvation. Just like dope fiends yuckyuck. Jerzy asked how long he thought a hummingbird could live. Rikki said I don’t know a week maybe a month? A year? Jerzy said they could go 10-years-PLUS (the internet said) but that 1st yr was oooh it was TOUGH. Hey tell me about it. Jesus H a 10 yr-old hummingbird has got to be having his share of senior moments. Probably get alzheimer’s, water on the birdbrain, need to start leaving post-its on nests & feeders ahahahahaha. Hey Dr Phil told me a good one. Guy with alzheimer’s goes to a singles bar. He sees this chick & he’s gunna hit on her. So he goes up & says “Do I come here often?” teeheehee you don’t get it do you. Well I ain’t gunna splain. I ain’t gunna explainate. Ain gunna explainify. Ain gunna explainobrag the explainentials. Ain gunna explain the giraffe—— holy SHIT 10 fucking YEARS of flutterin n fibrillatin n fuckin hustling to meet your insane daily food nut, plus whatever’s required to fuel your insaner metabolism like some adrenal torment devised by the GODS 10 FUCKING YEARS! the very thought of it had Jerzy continuously tweak-freaking, half-worried that the pondering of it alone might bring on another hopefully nonfatal tachycardiac episode of his own.

Jerzy said (the internet said) that sometimes praying mantises were called devil’s horses. They were cannibals & meateaters holy shit YES fucking insect carnivores! It was like some shit out of Starship Troopers, which happened to be one of his alltime faves, some Starship Trooper shit come to life! But more than that, it was biblical , it was germane , it was more of the 4 Horseman shit that Suge told him at Cedars, the same shit he tried to run down to MoMA: White was Victory/Mantis, Black was famine/Hummingbird, Red was hummingblood… Mind you, the devil’s horsemen were not scavengers, nope, huh -uh, they weren’t like jackals either (hell- O! Can I tell you why they aren’t like jackals, Rikki? They aren’t like jackals cause they’re fucking INSECTS! Hel- lo) because they don’t eat dead things , that just aint kosher. . though under certain laboratory conditions , when, say, a rat cadaver was manipulated by some bored entomologist to simulate movement, the mantis could be tricked into pigging out. The Reanimators! Yech. Mantises could hide in plain sight by undulating like leaves in the wind. Double yech. Whoa creepy. Jerzy told him he read on the internet that mantises could kill fucking field mice & tree frogs & soft-shelled turtles —triple ugh! They seemed to be OCD sticklers too: when random offal detachSPLAT’d to the ground during an hellacious arthropodal chow, the morsel stayed on the ground like when a society lady drops a fork, you know suddenly it’s untouchable.

Hey Rikki do you feel me? Rikki? can you feel me?

Jerzy said the internet said Arabs thought mantises always prayed toward Mecca. The internet said Americans used to think or maybe still do that a mantis could blind a sleeping man & murder a baby in its crib. ( SID = Sudden Insect Death ) The internet said the French believed a praying mantis can point the direction home for a child who was lost. Well some of the French maybe. . . . …

Rikki said “Hey dude, enough, I don’t want this shit in my head.”

Jerzy said “ I didn’t put shit in your head, bro, you put it in mine . You & Fishburne , right? I’m just reminding you of shit you already know . And you’re going to need to know it , bro. So you better be listening.”

Rikki said (with a smile at least) “Dude you are seriously fucked up. You oughta lay that PCP pipe down for a little. Whatever it is you’re doin. Cause that shit is fuckin you up .”

“If I lay it down you be pickin it up for sure.”

. .

Nighttime. Rikki did a bootie bump right there in the truck while Jerzy was off stalking the wild honeyshot! — Madonna & her daughter, at La Dolce Vita. J’d been after Lourdes’ hirsute honeydew for a few months now, stalking the elusive Little Madge vadge, a rare vintage indeed for Harry’s privates reserve. H ’round the M was in Jerzy’s front pocket now, seeing that Jerzy was the 1st & only snatcherazzo Harry deigned reach out to, the only one he thought would understand , & not judge. Jerzy had been pleased to introdouche himself.

Before Jerzy jumped out, he handed his young cohort a syringe of YES sans the spike. The boy really took to the meth/roxie combo where have I been all your life . He was smoking crystal now too, he’d do it in Tom-Tom’s room, he didn’t want ReeRee to see-see, Tom-Tom would laugh her spooky laugh not her goodtime girl laugh, T 2seemed to mind Rikki the least when he did dope in front of her. Some kind of control trip.

Rikki bootie-bumped at the house but never in a car. A car! Dude! Get over yourself… hiked his pants down under dark Bev Hills residential moon trees a hundred yards north of Sta Monica blvd. & shazam the deed was done. When Jerzy returned, Rikki was in some kind of reverie, & startled. His pants were still down, right above the knees, he had an oblivious deathclutch on the base of his rockhard dick, holding it there like a bouquet at Queer Prom. Jerzy cackled. Get a room, bro. Pretty good size camel on him tho, lotsa explainin to do down there… très deboner oops I mean debonair. What Rikki did next took Jerzy by surprise: he stroked it a few times & came, gluegunning the glove compartment. Rikki never did that in front of a man before but knew it was just business, the business of meth, when he got home there was some crap in his pants too, decent amount, what shocked Jerzy was that the kid had managed to spackle at all because sometimes he jacked 10 hrs straight w/o liftoff.