Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) (9 page)

"Really?"

"It can sure as hell seem that way when you work the
ER."

"I can't talk to you at all, man."

"C'mon," he said, "I'm trying to help. When was the last
... penetration?"

"Weeks ago."

"Okay," he said. "And this blood?"

"The last few days."

"Today?"

I nodded.

"Well, it's not that," he said. "Are you shitting blood? Or
is there blood in your stool?"

"What's the difference?"

"Color."

"What?"

"It's an issue. What color is the blood?"

"Red," I replied. "Blood colored."

Doc nodded. He put in a CD-Jonathan Richman and
the Modern Lovers' Rockin' and Romance. He cracked the window and lit an American Spirit, then offered me one.

I shook my head. I had quit smoking almost ten years before. One of the hardest things I ever did. Doc had quit for
years and only recently started again since his divorce. I really
would have liked one then, but I held out. "Shit causes cancer, dude."

"Media hype," Doc said. "And red isn't the only color
blood can be. Especially on the inside."

"So is red good?"

"Nothing is good," Doc said. "No blood in your shit is
good. That's our goal. Our vision. An America with no
blood in our shit. That's the ticket I'm running on. The noblood-in-your-ass ticket."

"Red is less bad?"

"That is true," he said. "Red is much less bad. If the blood
in your stool is a greasy-looking dark red, almost black, that is
a major and immediate concern."

,,And this?"

He shrugged. "Probably nothing. How many Vicodin a
day are you taking?"

I was, until a week ago, taking about thirty, but I was stealing, when I could, from Doc's stash, when he had a stash, so
I went with a low estimate. Our supply had run out five days
ago and I'd halved my intake from twenty, to ten, to five, to
only three the day before. My eyes felt like sandpaper and the
suffocating heat in my head made every pump of my heart
throb painfully all over my body. Like every nerve ending
burned with Fourth of July sparklers. "Ten to twenty if I can.
Less, lately."

"That's probably it right there," he said.

Jonathan was singing about his jeans and how they were
a-fraying as I looked out the window at the blur of objects
racing by.

I knew I couldn't continue on the way I was going. My
short-range plan involved the morphine and, after that, a
meeting with this guy Leroy Marcus about some pot he wanted
me to sell. The morphine was supposed to be my last for a
while-the plan was to use it and slowly wean myself off, taking Vicodin when I had to, in order to detox as painlessly as
possible and start clean. Go back to meetings. Be humble and
start over. I'd done it before. I could do it again.

I had, at that point, quit various opiates somewhere between thirty and fifty times in my life. Which meant thirty to
fifty intentional detoxes. Withdrawals that made you sorry for
ever being born-which sometimes seemed the point of the whole thing. The self-loathing burning hot enough to make
the sorrows you suffered from withdrawal seem something like
justice for the liar and cheat you'd allowed yourself to become.
The twisted core of wrongness at your center everywhere you
went was something that made suffering seem valid and just,
in some way.

"I can't drop all five hundred on the morphine," I said.

"You have to."

"I can't. I need at least a couple hundred for tonight."

Doc said, "You got a game?"

I shook my head. "You know Leroy Marcus?"

"That'roid rage guy?"

Leroy had an earned reputation as a guy you didn't want to
fuck with. He'd been a boxer and had ended up recently with
an ultimate fighting obsession. Leroy liked violence-seemed
to like getting hurt as much as he liked hurting people, which
made dealing with him an uneasy proposition at best. Someone who's not afraid of getting hurt, someone who actually
welcomes the pain and raw savagery of the fight, is not someone you want to face off with. My dad told me when I was a
kid, you never throw a punch unless you're willing to kill the
guy-because he might be willing to kill you. Leroy probably
got the same lesson somewhere along the line. But he threw
punches and I didn't.

"That's him," I said.

"What the fuck do you have going with that beast?"

"A pot deal," I said. "I need at least two hundred to sell
some medical-quality shit he has."

"You smoking pot?"

I shook my head. "Pot's dollar signs to me. I'm trying to
make some money."

"Pot's legal now, dude."

"Not legal," I said.

"More or less. Any fuck off the street can get a script for
it. How you going to make money?"

"Buying a couple hundred off him and selling it to a buddy
in Long Beach for about double. Quick cash. No risk."

"You can't trust Leroy. There's plenty of risk just walking
in his door."

That was true enough. "I need money," I said.

Doc smoked the end of his cigarette and rubbed it out on
the outside of his door-the side of his car was streaked with
the ends of his butts. He'd pinch out the tobacco and let the
filters pile up at his feet.

"We're scoring morphine-a real fucking drug-in Tustin," he said.

"Are we?"

"We are."

I felt the sickness overcoming me. "We better be."

"My point is," Doc said, "we'll get enough to make some
money off it, if you want."

I had tried over the years to make money with heroin,
with Dilaudid, with OxyContin, and a variety of other opiates. All I ever did was end up doing them all, either fast or
slowly. But they never made it, for me, from intent to deal to
ever actually dealing.

Doc said, "What if we spend your whole five hundred
bucks on the painkillers?"

"Then I'll do them."

He looked hard at me.

I said, "I'll do half of them."

"Right, but what if you let me tuck a couple hundred aside
and deal that."

"For both of us?"

"Of course for both of us, man," he said. "Who you going
to trust to make a buck? Me, or Leroy Marcus?"

Neither of you, I thought. Leroy's a brutal beast of a businessman and you're a dope fiend. But given the choice, I answered
honestly. "I'd rather be in business with you."

Doc merged off 22 onto 55 South, where it splits going to
Riverside one way and Orange County the other, and we were
headed toward Tustin, just a few miles away. We seemed to
have reached some tacit agreement about the extra two hundred and the profit on the deal.

"So, tell me about your connection," I said.

"She's a hospice worker with a terminal case."

"And?"

"She's a diverter. She's helping us out."

Diverter is the medical term, and the narc term, for a medical professional who diverts pain meds from the people who
need them. The language of distance and euphemism. They're
thieves, and people like me and Doc pay them to steal from
people in pain. I try not to have any more illusions about what
I do. I used to be able to lie about it-to others, to myself. But
after seven years clean, it's hard to see this as anything but a
hideous failure for me as a human being. My next drug possession case puts me at what's known at the SAP pits, SAP being short for Substance Abuse Program. I can't do this much
longer-one way or the other.

"How terminal?" I asked him.

"What?"

"How terminal a case?"

"There aren't degrees of terminal," Doc said. "Trust me,
I'm a doctor."

"I mean how close to dead is this person?" I don't know
why it mattered to me, but it did. As if the closer to dead they were, the less I'd be ripping them off, somehow.

"Close enough to be designated terminal and have 24/7
hospice care," Doc said. "That's usually pretty late in the
game."

I nodded.

Doc said, "And it usually means a lot of pain meds."

The drug talk, along with my system being weaned off
meds the last few days, started to make me feel cravings that
hurt. But they were cravings with hope-that tingle when
you're close to the drugs, in both time and distance. "Any
chance for Dilaudids?"

Doc shrugged as we reached the two Santa Ana/Tustin
exits for 17th Street. The second exit heads south toward
Tustin, and we took that one. "Hard to say," Doc said, lighting
another cigarette. "Pain-management theory these days shies
away from Dilaudids. But we should get plenty of morphine."

When I still shot up, which I hadn't done in this last slip
from sobriety, so it had been over seven years before, Dilaudids were like gold. Generally, they're about five to eight times
more powerful than morphine, and you don't need to cook
them-you can do what's known as a cold shake. Which is
pretty much what it sounds like. You put a pill in some distilled water and shake it until it dissolves, and you're ready to
put it in the cotton and up the syringe and go.

"Listen," Doc said, "there's something difficult we might
have to do."

"Difficult how?"

"It's a relatively new procedure. I haven't asked Sandra if
he's on it or not, but this guy may have a permanent morphine
vial implanted near the base of his spine."

"Lucky bastard," I said, and I sort of meant it.

"It's the wave of the future. Going to hurt people like you and me. Pills and shit like that are going the way of the horseless carriage."

"I don't follow."

"All drugs are going to be time-released," Doc said. "Soon,
they're won't be any pills to steal."

"You said there'd be morphine at this place, right?"

"Right," Doc said. "But, worst case scenario, you are going
to have to cut the vial out of this guy."

"I thought cancer patients had IV drips and patches and
stuff."

"They do, but in addition to that, depending on how far
gone he is, he might have this semipermanent vial."

"Why do I have to cut it out?"

"Well, no one's saying for sure it's there."

"If it's there, why the fuck am I doing the cutting?"

Doc shrugged. "Because I don't want to."

And that was that-his connection, his call. "But he may
not have one of these, right?"

"He may, he may not. But you might want to wish he
does-concentrated morphine drip."

"I'm not cutting open some poor fuck who's about to die,"
I said.

"Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that. I was just warning you about some of the potential difficulties."

I shook my head and looked at the faces of the other people driving out on the freeway. I wondered what they were
talking about. What they were thinking they might have to do
in the next half hour and how sick they made themselves.

As we got off the freeway, I realized how tense I was, realized I hadn't been taking regular breaths, realized I'd actually
been holding my breath. I tried to take in a few deep breaths
while Doc swung across four lanes of 17th Street.

"Be careful," I warned.

"It's important to blend in," Doc said. "Cops pull over
people like you and me when they're doing the speed limit.
People drive like maniacs here. So should we, if we want
to be left alone." Someone honked and Doc gave them the
finger.

I turned around and looked at the WELCOME TO TUSTIN sign behind us ... This side was for the people just leaving Tustin and it read: Work Where You Must But Live and Shop
in Tustin!

"Ah, yes," Doc said. "Rustln' in Tustin."

"You from here?"

"That I am. And a more dull town, you'd be hard pressed
to find."

"Good punk scene here," I said. "Wasn't there?" I was
from the East Coast and most of my knowledge of the West
Coast scene had come from fanzines like Forced Exposure and
Flipside.

"True," Doc replied. "The old Safari Sam's in Huntington
Beach saved our lives. But before that it was strip malls and
before that it was orange groves." He pointed out the window
at the strip malls, banks, and yogurt shops that tumored all over
state roads from here to Florida and back. "Thirty-five years
ago, when I was a kid, this was ten miles of orange groves."

A Vons slid by on our right. I took nervous breaths and
felt my heart beat like a rabbit's in my chest. A church with
a high-peaked roof stood on our left with an announcement
out front: WHY DO THEY WANT US DEAD? What the Bible
says sbout Islam.

Doc said, "Almost there."

I nodded and made several more attempts at a deep
breath.

He took a left on Mauve and a sign reading NOT A
THROUGH STREET greeted its as we headed down to the
second-to-last house on the right. There was a Toyota in the
driveway and we pulled up next to it, blocking one of the garage
sides. I pointed, said, "What if someone needs to get out?"

Doc shook his head. "No one needs to get out. Look. This
is a call I only get a couple times a year-the situation has to
be perfect. We are going into this house and we are going to
score, okay?"

"O "
Y•

"Like I said, this is rare. The patient is alone, they probably don't have much family, they may have none. My connection pretty much has the run of the place. It's like an opiate candy store in there and we are here to clean them out,
understand?"

It was starting to sound too good, but it also had a momentum that I couldn't pull against. Plus, I needed to get high
pretty soon or I'd be a wreck. I wasn't in a position to argue.

"Give me the money," Doc said.

I reached into my front pocket, took out a rolled wad of
moist bills, and gave them to him.

Doc said, "Dude, you carry your money like a ten-year-old."

ry
"Sor "

"You have to stop apologizing for everything too."

"Uhm ... sorry?"

He counted out the bills and folded and rearranged
them.

"Tell you what. After we make a few bucks here-will you
use a fucking proper billfold if I buy you one?"