Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (10 page)

"Is that like a wallet?"

He shook his head. "The way you carry money, no one's
ever going to take you seriously."

"People take money seriously-they don't seem to care
how it's folded."

"You're wrong," Doc said. He lit a cigarette, took a deep
drag. Then a second. Then he put the cigarette out. He turned
to me. "If anyone asks, you are my assistant."

"Who's asking here?"

"Inside. There should only be Sandra, my friend. But if
someone is here ... family, friend, whatever. I am a medical
professional Sandra called for an opinion and you are my assistant. Got it?"

I nodded, looked down at my torn jeans and Chuck Taylors held together with electrical tape on the right toe, and
thought, Yeah, medical assistant.

"Great," Doc said. "Let's do this."

The place looked like the Brady Bunch house. Midcentury
modern blighted by a 1970s renovation and then left to domestic ghost town since. Doc's friend Sandra met us at the
front door. She wore blue scrubs, with one of those infantilizing tops that nurses and hospital workers all wear these days.
The shirt was loitered with Cookie Monsters and Ernies and
Berts and some Muppet I didn't recognize that I figured might
be Elmo. I shifted my carry bag to my other hand.

"He's asleep," Sandra said quickly, and before I knew it
we were in the house, the quiet suburbia of Tustin a whisper
of lawn sprinklers and muffled TVs behind the closed door.

Doc introduced me and we shook hands. Sandra wore a
stethoscope draped over her shoulders the way people do in
movies. I wondered when they stopped wearing them with
the earpieces around their neck, the way they did when I
was a kid and my mom was an ER nurse. I used to spend the
midnight-to-7 a.m. shift with her on nights she couldn't get our neighbor Doris to watch me and my sister.

The house smelled like the ERs of my childhood-the
vague mix of cleaning fluids and urine and medicine and latex
and rubbing alcohol. The latex and alcohol gave me the start
of a hard-on and I thought about Amber and her latex nurse
outfit. Doc grabbed two lollipops out of Sandra's pocket and
gave me one.

"Sandra and I have some business to attend to."

She gestured upstairs. They headed up, with Doc telling
me to wait for them.

"Is there a bathroom down here?" I asked.

Sandra told me to go into the living room and keep going
to the right and back.

Which would have been fine, except the living room was
where her patient happened to be. I was alone in a room with
a dying stranger. The poor bastard. I walked into the room
slowly, afraid to startle the guy. There was a stairwell to my
right, where Doc had followed Sandra upstairs to wherever
they were now, their talk muffled behind walls and hard to
distinguish under the gentle drone of an oxygen machine.

As I walked forward, the main floor opened to a kitchen
on the left and a huge sunken living room to the right. He
was on a hospital-type bed in the middle of the room, facing
away from me and toward a big-screen TV that was tuned to
some talking heads, but the sound was muted. The oxygen
machine droned on, interrupted by the beeps and peeps of a
series of diagnostic indicators reading out numbers that were
completely meaningless to me.

The man was on his back, his head turned painfully to the
side. A tube ran into his mouth. He was motionless, except
for a mindless chewing of the tube. His eyes were open, but
he didn't seem to register that I was there. His catheter bag seemed dangerously full and I made a mental note to mention
that to Sandra when she came back down. It looked like it was
going to spill onto the floor.

I walked by, careful not to step on any of the various wires
and tubes on my way to the bathroom.

I closed the door behind me and searched the medicine
cabinet. This, too, was mostly a time capsule from 1972. There
was a container of Alberto V05 hair treatment. A glass bottle
of Listerine. A jar of Brylcreem. There didn't seem to be much
of anything worth taking, or anything from this century, aside
from a bottle with two Xanax that I emptied on the spot. I
took a couple of deep breaths and felt the candy Doc had
given me in my pocket. I took it out, realizing it was a fentanyl
lollipop.

It was supposed to be cherry, but it was really just some
odd vaguely red flavor. I licked it for about ten seconds before
chewing it to pieces, sliding it down my throat, and waiting
for whatever relief it might offer. I sat on the closed toilet lid
and read through a series of forgettable New Yorker cartoons.
I closed my eyes and let the back of my head rest on the cool
tile and waited for the drugs to unclench me. Soon, soon, soon,
I told myself. I tried to take deep breaths, and before long I
found myself breathing in synch with the oxygen apparatus
out in the other room. I opened my eyes. The bathroom was
small and dusty. The tub was filled with cobwebs. There was
a door that led to a side yard and, out of habit, I made sure
it was locked. I took some more breaths and waited for the
drugs to have some effect. I left the bathroom, hoping that
Doc and Sharon would have returned to save me from being
alone with the dying man.

This is where drugs and straight people's image of drugs
tend to part ways: in rooms where life and death are at cen ter stage. This guy, mind-numbed and clearly on his way out,
probably would have cut a deal with whatever he believed in
just to get a few more days of life-of a life like mine. That's
just fact. It's not to make me think-think about how wrong
what I'm doing is, think about the various paths we follow
in life, think about what a stupid man I am for allowing this
blessing of life to drift so far away from me. It simply IS.

My life was shit and I'd been there before. All my yesterdays and all my tomorrows were lining up the same-that's
what drugs do to you. They give you this illusion of control.
I'd been through it enough to know it was fake. Any decent
track record of clean time fucks your relapses. It's hard to see
them as anything but the worst idea you've grabbed onto in
quite a while.

The guy on the bed would have cut any deal with any
devil in the world to trade places with me. The sick thing, and
I knew it was sick, was part of me would have traded with him
for that steady morphine drip, quietly escorting me out of this
life and into something quiet and peaceful, maybe.

He had no chance. I had, depending on the studies you
read, probably about a 2 to 3 percent chance to clean up if it
was court-ordered, maybe a double-digit chance if I went in
myself. I was the walking dead, but that was a lot better than
him there in his living room, mindlessly chomping on the sad,
gummed tube.

I could still hear Doc and Sandra upstairs-they seemed
to maybe be fucking, or at least in a conversational intimacy
that suggested fucking. This brought my loneliness crashing
down. I hate being left by myself in rooms, being alone where
I don't know anyone. But it could have been worse-at least
the dying guy couldn't talk. And this was a true blessing-he
couldn't move those wet, sad eyes of his to focus on me. If, for a second, I thought he could see me going through his meds,
going through what was left of his life so I could get high, I
think one of the last things he might have seen was me killing
myself. At least I hope it would have been.

On a tray next to the bed was a box that looked like it had
scripts in it. Score. They were fentanyl patches. The box had
been opened, but there were several others under the bed. I
grabbed five boxes. I tried several times to carry a sixth, but I
dropped them all when I added one more, so I went with five
and brought them back to my carrying bag.

Like so much crap in America, the packaging was obscene
and unnecessary. The boxes held six patches each. I tore open
the boxes, trying to be quiet, as I wasn't sure if this was part of
the deal with Sandra or not, and neatly stacked the patches
until I had thirty of them ready for my bag. I would have taken
more-would have taken every single one I could find-but I
didn't want to fuck up our connection for the future. I'd love
to be able to say I was thinking about the dying guy-and it
does happen, the groundswell of a decent human surfacing
in me from time to time, often enough to not seem like a
miracle-but the truth is, in that moment, I'd forgotten about
him and his need for his own painkillers. He didn't exist to
me.

I chewed another of the fentanyl lollipops I found. They
seemed pretty useless. I wondered if they'd put this guy on
Oxy or anything good, pillwise, before they had him on the
patches and the pops.

Inside the kitchen, next to the coffee cups, I discovered a
cabinet filled with bottles of pills. The usual useless suspectsAdvil, Tylenol, gaggles of vitamins, and, scattered inside the
cabinet, the snake-oil desperation of shark's fin and whale
cartilage and shit like that. I pocketed a bottle with about ten ten-milligram Vicodin and kept scrambling through the
cabinet until I found something worthwhile in a near-full jar
of eighty-milligram OxyContin. I felt myself smile. I took two
of the eighty-milligram tablets, crushing one and allowing the
other to slide down my throat and release itself over time.

There was nothing else of value in the cabinet. I swapped
the contents of the Advil and OxyContin bottles and kept the
Advil in my pocket.

Back in the living room, I looked closely in the guy's eyes.
Nothing registered. He was alive-that's what the machines
seemed to be saying-but there wasn't much going on. I wondered, again, if I could cut him to get that vial out. I supposed
I could-people could do all sorts of things they didn't want
to do in life. Just not think about it, and get it done. It didn't
have to be any more complicated than cutting into a steak, so
long as you turned your brain off.

I sat on the couch and looked through a TV Guide. I had
no idea about any of the celebrities or shows-that's another
thing dope does. The outside world of news and talk just goes
away. You can't tell anyone a single current event, even if
they offer you a million dollars. The world fades and recedes.
I glanced around. There was an antique musket over the fireplace. Everything about the house felt old. Murder mysteries
piled up by the end table. This guy, or maybe Sandra, really
liked mysteries. There had to be a hundred new hardcovers in
that room alone. There was Luna's great Penthouse CD open
on the stereo-so, evidence of someone not old too. I suspected the CD was in the machine and I really wanted to hear it,
but I didn't want to do anything wrong, so I didn't hit play.

I listened more to what Doc and Sandra might be doing.
If they were fucking, they were being fairly quiet about it. I
fingered the fentanyl patches in my pocket. I wanted to ask Doc how much longer we'd have to wait. I was starting to get
nervous. We'd been there for twenty-five minutes and I had
no idea if this guy ever had visitors and, if he did, when they
might be coming by.

In any event, all this was Doc's call. I was just along for
the ride. I went back into the bathroom, still feeling vaguely
sick. Not dope sick anymore-the fentanyl and OxyContin
had trickled some help into my blood and brain-but sick
from the familiar nerves of being somewhere I didn't belong.
The fear of being caught pressed on me like a vice. The fear of
having to cut that guy open to get the morphine vial. But if I
had to do it, I would.

I started running the bath. When the water first came out,
it was rust brown, and then slowly started to clear. The fentanyl patches work better if you're warm. I put one on my right
arm and one each on my right and left thigh. I took some deep
breaths and made the temperature as hot as I could stand it
and lowered myself in. Then I took two more eighty-milligram
OxyContin.

Twenty minutes later I was nodding off. It felt so good, a warm
waking dream, that I was worried I might be close to overdosing. I felt this incredible warmth inside me-it was like my
heart was a glowing road flare and my bones were hollowedout bird bones. Balsa wood. I could have weighed ten pounds,
the way I felt. Behind closed eyes I had firework displays blasting in slow motion. My head rolled from one side to the other
and it didn't seem connected by anything thicker than dental
floss.

I heard the voices out in the living room. Yelling. A man's
voice I didn't recognize.

"I said, who the fuck is this?" he screamed.

I heard Sandra's voice. "He's a doctor I'm consulting,
Rick."

And I thought, Rick? Who the hell is Rick?

Rick yelled, "Consulting? Is that what the fuck you were
doing? Consulting?"

She started to talk again, but the man named Rick said,
"Get the fuck downstairs-do you understand?"

I stood on legs that could barely hold me up and banged
into the towel rack and knew instantly the noise was too
loud-Rick had to hear it even over his yelling. My bag was
in there with me, along with twenty-seven patches and the
bottle of OxyContin I'd taken and my clothes. I had a few lollipops. I thought about Doc, but didn't figure I could help him
any. It was one of those situations where my presence could
only add to the trouble.

Behind that door. Rick. Doc. Sandra. The dying man, helpless to do anything about the anger that swirled around him.

And what would adding me do to the situation? It couldn't
make it better.

I got dressed as quietly and as quickly as I could, without
drying off. My clothes stuck to me and I held my arm out to
the wall to keep myself upright. I double-checked my bag and
made sure I had all the drugs.

The guy kicked the door in as I was trying to reach for it.

"And who the fuck is this wet fucking junkie?"

I closed my eyes for a moment.

"Back in the fucking room, junkie." Rick had a gun.