Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

DOC WAS A lifeguard before he was a movie star, and that’s what he talks about when Campbell shows up at his house in Laurel Canyon with the dope he ordered. Martin is there too, and the three of them sit out on the deck, drinking beer and trying to pretend heroin isn’t the only thing they have in common. “When someone is super close to drowning, they don’t struggle or scream or splash,” Doc says. “What happens is, their mind shuts off and pure instinct takes over. They can’t cry for help, they can’t wave their arms, they can’t even grab a rope if you throw them one, because they’re totally focused on one thing: keeping their head above water and taking their next breath. What it looks like is climbing a ladder, like they’re trying to climb a ladder in the water, and if you don’t reach them within twenty or thirty seconds, they’re goners.” Doc smokes his junk because he doesn’t want marks, but he watches intently while Campbell and Martin fix. Afterward, Campbell lies on a chaise lounge and listens to the sounds of a party going on somewhere down-canyon, music and laughter riding on the back of a desert wind. He remembers a line from a book about Charles Manson, about how on the night of the Tate murders, which took place in another canyon not far from here, the same wind made it possible to hear ice cubes clinking a mile away. All of a sudden he’s uneasy, imagining a gang of acid-crazed hippies sneaking up on them. He stands and walks to the railing, his heart tossing in his chest, and scans the hillside below the house for an escape route. A coyote trail crisscrosses the slope like a nasty scar, and if he needed to, he could scramble down it to the road and be the lucky one who gets away.

MARYROSE DIES ON Wednesday, and Campbell finds out about it a couple of hours later, when Tony calls him at the bar. During the conversation Campbell goes from staring at some LMU chick’s fake ID to sitting on the sidewalk. He slaps away any helping hands and shuts his ears to all consolation. His and Maryrose’s thing was them against the world, and to let anyone in now would be a betrayal. He keeps waiting to cry but never does. The ground doesn’t open up, the moon stays where it is in the sky. When his legs work again, he gets up and walks. Straight down Sunset toward the ocean. He crosses PCH early the next morning and collapses on the sand. The fog is so thick he can’t see the waves, only hear them pounding the shore. Good. Nothing. Anymore. Ever. The cops show up later that day, after he’s ridden the bus back to the apartment. The detective who does the talking is a tall woman with white, white teeth. Campbell answers all her questions with lies. He doesn’t do dope, Maryrose didn’t do dope, and Tony is a fucking saint. The woman and her partner move gingerly around the place, like they’re afraid to touch anything, and when Campbell coughs, the woman winces and claps a protective hand over her nose.

THEY TALKED ABOUT getting a dog, even went to the shelter to look for one. All they found there were psychotic pit bulls and shivering Chihuahuas, and the smell and the barking drove them out after just a few minutes. “Are you telling me normal people can deal with that?” Maryrose said. She liked to cook but forgot pots on the stove, left them simmering until the smoke alarm went off. Driving too. She’d wrecked a couple of cars, and the one she had when Campbell met her bore the dents and scrapes of a dozen close calls, a hundred little lapses, each a new wound to lick. When she was straight she wanted to be what she wasn’t: productive and reliable, focused and stable. “Some people are just made messy,” Campbell told her. “Not me,” she replied. “I was born right and got twisted.” Whole days went by like that, where he couldn’t crack her codes. When she was happy, though, when she was high, contentment oozed from her like sweet-smelling sap. She’d name the ducks in Echo Park, dance to the music of the ice cream truck, and press her lips to his throat and leave them there. When she was happy, when she was high.

DOC STARTS TEXTING Campbell at all hours, stuff like Hey, man and Ragin’ tonight? What it boils down to is he wants dope. Campbell tries to blow him off in the beginning, because dealing to a movie star seems like a good way to get busted, but then his own habit gets out of hand, and he has no money, and Doc pays double for everything and doesn’t like to party alone. Campbell spends one night at the guy’s house, a couple more the next week, and then he’s practically living there. They sleep all day and order in from expensive restaurants. Doc’s name is magic. A chef from one of the places actually delivers the food himself and puts the finishing touches on the meal in the house’s kitchen. The girls who drop by every now and then aren’t whores, but they’ll take whatever they can get. Tall, leggy creatures, they know how to sit in short dresses and run in high heels, and all their conversations are in another language about some other world. Doc is always relieved when they leave for their parties and clubs, when it’s finally just him and Campbell and the dope comes out.

One day they drive down to the Strip to eat lunch. Afterward a display of sunglasses in the window of a store catches Doc’s eye. He goes inside and tries on a few pairs and makes Campbell try some too, sharing a mirror with him. “Those are hot on you,” he says about one pair. “Like Michael Pitt hot.” He insists on buying them for Campbell. Seven-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Campbell wears them later that afternoon when he makes a quick trip to the east side to replenish their stash. The bums look jaunty through the perfectly tinted lenses, the poor Mexicans happy. “How much do you think these cost?” Campbell asks Tony. “What the fuck do I care?” Tony replies. The sun is going down on his way back to the canyon, shining through the windshield at an annoying angle. With his new glasses he can stare right into it and take all the glare it has to give.

MARYROSE DIES ON Wednesday. There’s a funeral two weeks later, but Campbell isn’t invited. He moves out of Tony’s and in with a bartender from Little Joy. Everything is good until the guy finds blood spattered on the bathroom wall and a syringe under the couch and tells Campbell to pack his shit and go. “I’ve lived with junkies before,” he says. “They’re nothing but holes that can’t be filled. And they steal.” So it’s back to Tony’s, back to the house where Maryrose died. He continues to shoot up on the couch where she shot up and to shower in the tub where her heart stopped beating. It’s a curse, having to relive the worst over and over, trying to breathe that air, and he knows that if he doesn’t get away, he’s going to die too.

The first step is to retake the reins of his habit, be a man about it. Without too much suffering he manages to taper off to two hits a day. What eventually derails him is some punk at the bar who knew Maryrose saying something stupid about “that’s what happens when an angel dances with the devil” and then, later, a photo he happens upon while scrolling through the pictures on his phone. It’s Maryrose the day before she OD’d, looking like a ghost already. And he’s the one who did that to her. She was just chipping when they met, and trying to keep up with him is what got her hooked. It’s not a new realization, but this time it hurts enough to serve as a reason for backsliding into a three-day bender that hollows out his head and scrapes his bones clean of flesh. Oh, baby, he thinks when he finally pops to the surface on a bright fall morning when the tree shadows look like claws grabbing at the sidewalk, I can’t come meet you there ever again .

HE AND MARYROSE tried to kick together after a bad balloon of what was supposed to be tar burned going in and made them both vomit their souls into the kitchen sink. This even after they’d been warned not to buy from that dealer by someone whose brother had ended up in the hospital just from smoking the stuff. If they were so strung out they’d risk shooting rat poison, it was time to quit. They threw some clothes into a suitcase, gassed up Campbell’s Toyota, and headed out into the desert. Traffic on the freeway inched along, and the city stretched on forever. They stopped for lunch at Del Taco, but neither of them could eat. Then the army of windmills near Palm Springs freaked Maryrose out, the relentless turning of their giant blades suggesting an inexorability that was at odds with her lace-winged fantasy of bucking her fate. They checked into a desiccated motel on the shore of the Salton Sea. Even though the thermometer outside the office read 100 degrees, Maryrose wanted to walk down to the beach. It was covered with fish bones and scavenging gulls and had a stench that stuck in their throats. Back in the room they turned the noisy air conditioner to high and shivered under the thin blanket, unable to decide if they were hot or cold. Maryrose clutched her cramping stomach and kicked her feet. “My legs,” she moaned. “My legs.” She sat up, lay down, and sat up again. Gritting his teeth against his own agony, Campbell limped into the bathroom and drew her a glass of water. She drank it down but immediately vomited onto the linoleum next to the bed. Campbell placed his hand on her burning forehead and tried to mumbo jumbo some of her pain into him. He finally passed out for a while, waking near dawn.