Sweet Nothing (12 page)

They dragged themselves out to the car as soon as the sun bubbled red on the horizon and turned back toward L.A. Tony was still up from the night before. He sold them some shit, and they fixed right then and there, marveling at how fine they suddenly felt. They never discussed the trip as a failure, only joked about what fools they'd been for thinking they could go cold turkey. Vague plans were floated to try to kick again in a month or so, this time with some Xanax or Klonopin to help with the withdrawals, but they always found some reason to put it off.

AWW, DAMN, HERE
they come up the drive: Doc's agent, Doc's manager, and Doc's little brother, to serve as muscle. “Shoot me up quick,” Doc demands, thrusting out his arm. Campbell ignores him, more worried about gathering his belongings before he gets the bum's rush. He's hurrying up the stairs when they come through the door. Doc yells at them to keep the fuck away and let him be, but Campbell can hear in his voice that he's ready to get off the roller coaster. Doc's brother busts in on Campbell as he's stuffing his clothes into his backpack. “If you're not out of here in two minutes, I'm calling the cops,” the brother says. When Campbell walks past him, he shoves Campbell toward the stairs, almost knocking him down. “Touch me again, and I'll sue,” Campbell says. “You're not suing anybody, you fucking loser,” the brother scoffs. Doc is sitting on the sofa between his manager and his agent. He's crying like a scared little boy, and his manager is stroking his hair and telling him everything will be fine. His brother stays on Campbell's tail all the way out to the driveway. Campbell hops into his car and wills it to start on the first try. The rear window shatters as he reaches the street, making him flinch and slam on the brakes. Doc's brother drops the other rock he's holding and dares Campbell to make something of it. That very evening Campbell trades the fancy sunglasses for fifty dollars' worth of junk.

MARYROSE DIES ON
Wednesday, and a year—a year!—later Campbell marks the anniversary by returning to Echo Park, which he's been avoiding since her passing. He's a month sober, going to meetings, but struggles every day. Martin quit too, Tony's in jail, and Doc did a very public stint in rehab and emerged a hero. Campbell tosses some potato chips to the ducks, but not one of them has the energy to climb out of the water and waddle up the bank to get them. It's the third day of a heat wave, and the sun is showing everyone who's boss. Grass crumbles underfoot, palms hiss overhead, and the forsaken stand in the shadows of telephone poles, waiting for buses that are always late.

Maryrose claimed that the first time she did dope was the first time in her life she felt normal. “Why do you think it's called a fix?” she said. Campbell didn't argue; he just liked to see her smile. They'd come down to this bench, eat
paletas,
and make up songs about the people passing by. She'd laugh herself silly crooning about a fat kid kicking a soccer ball, then collapse breathless into his arms. And that's when
he
felt normal for the first time. But who's going to believe that? Who even wants to hear it? Better to keep those memories to himself, to guard them like a treasure against time, the goddamn drip, drip, drip of days that would wash them away.

IF I HAD MONEY,
I'd go to Mexico. Not Tijuana or Ensenada, but farther down,
real
Mexico. Get my ass out of L.A. There was this guy in the army, Marcos, who was from a little town on the coast called Mazunte. He said you could live pretty good there for practically nothing. Tacos were fifty cents, beers a buck.

“How do they feel about black folks?” I asked him.

“They don't care about anything but the color of your money,” he said.

I already know how to speak enough Spanish to get by, how to ask for things and order food.
Por favor
and
muchas gracias
. The numbers to a hundred.

THE CHINESE FAMILY
across the hall are always cooking in their room. I told Papa-san to cut it out, but he just stood there nodding and smiling with his little boy and little girl wrapped around his legs. The next day I saw Mama-san coming up the stairs with another bag of groceries, and this morning the whole floor smells like deep-fried fish heads again. I'm not an unreasonable man. I ignore that there are four of them living in a room meant for two, and I put up with the kids playing in the hall when I'm trying to sleep, but I'm not going to let them torch the building.

I pull on some pants and head downstairs. The elevator is broken, so it's four flights on foot. The elevator's always broken, or the toilet, or the sink. Roaches like you wouldn't believe too. The hotel was built in 1928, and nobody's done anything to it since. Why should they? There's just a bunch of poor people living here, Chinamen and wetbacks, dope fiends and drunks. Hell, I'm sure the men with the money are on their knees every night praying this heap falls down so they can collect on the insurance and put up something new.

The first person I see when I hit the lobby—the first person who sees
me
—is Alan. I call him Youngblood. He's the boy who sweeps the floors and hoses off the sidewalk.

“Hey, B, morning, B,” he says, bouncing off the couch and coming at me. “Gimme a dollar, man. I'm hungry as a motherfucker.”

I raise my hand to shut him up, walk right past him. I don't have time for his hustle today.

“They're cooking up there again,” I say to the man at the desk, yell at him through the bulletproof glass. He's Chinese too, and every month so are more of the tenants. I know what's going on, don't think I don't.

“Okay, I talk to them,” the man says, barely looking up from his phone.

“It's a safety hazard,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he says.

“Yeah, yeah, okay to you,” I say. “Next time I'm calling the fire department.”

Youngblood is waiting for me when I finish. He's so skinny he uses one hand to hold up his jeans when he walks. Got lint in his hair, boogers in the corners of his eyes, and he smells like he hasn't bathed in a week. That's what dope'll do to you.

“Come on, B, slide me a dollar, and I'll give you this,” he says.

He holds out his hand. There's a little silver disk in his palm, smaller than a dime.

“What is it?” I say.

“It's a battery, for a watch.”

“And what am I supposed to do with it?”

“Come on, B, be cool.”

Right then the front door opens, and three dudes come gliding in, the light so bright behind them they look like they're stepping out of the sun. I know two of them: J Bone, who stays down the hall from me, and his homeboy Dallas. A couple of grown-up crack babies, crazy as hell. The third one, the tall, good-looking kid in the suit and shiny shoes, is a stranger. He has an air about him like he doesn't belong down here, like he ought to be pulling that suitcase through an airport in Vegas or Miami. He moves and laughs like a high roller, a player, the kind of brother you feel good just standing next to.

He and his boys walk across the lobby, goofing on one another. When they get to the stairs, the player stops and says, “You mean I got to carry my shit up four floors?”

“I'll get it for you,” J Bone says. “No problem.”

The Chinaman at the desk buzzes them through the gate, and up they go, their boisterousness lingering for a minute like a pretty girl's perfume.

“Who was that?” I say, mostly to myself.

“That's J Bone's cousin,” Youngblood says. “Fresh outta County.”

No, it's not. It's trouble. Come looking for me again.

THE OLD MAN
asks if I know anything about computers. He's sitting in his office in back, jabbing at the keys of the laptop his son bought him to use for inventory but that the old man mainly plays solitaire on. He picks the thing up and sets it down hard on his desk as if trying to smack some sense into it.

“Everything's stuck,” he says.

“Can't help you there, boss,” I say. “I was out of school before they started teaching that stuff.”

I'm up front in the showroom. I've been the security guard here for six years now, ten to six, Tuesday through Saturday. Just me and the old man, day after day, killing time in the smallest jewelry store in the district, where he's lucky to buzz in ten customers a week. If I was eighty-two years old and had his money, I wouldn't be running out my string here, but his wife's dead, and his friends have moved away, and the world keeps changing so fast that I guess this is all he has left to anchor him, his trade, the last thing he knows by heart.

I get up out of my chair—he doesn't care if I sit when nobody's in the store—and tuck in my uniform. Every so often I like to stretch my legs with a stroll around the showroom. The old man keeps the display cases looking nice, dusts the rings and bracelets and watches every day, wipes down the glass. I test him now and then by leaving a thumbprint somewhere, and it's always gone the next morning.

Another game I play to pass the time, I'll watch the people walking by outside and bet myself whether the next one'll be black or Mexican, a man or a woman, wearing a hat or not, things like that. Or I'll lean my chair back as far as it'll go, see how long I can balance on the rear legs. The old man doesn't like that one, always yells, “Stop fidgeting. You make me nervous.” And I've also learned to kind of sleep with my eyes open and my head up, half in this world, half in the other.

I walk over to the door and look outside. It's a hot day, and folks are keeping to the shade where they can. Some are waiting for a bus across the street, in front of the music store that blasts that
oom pah pah oom pah pah
all day long. Next to that's a McDonald's, then a bridal shop, then a big jewelry store with signs in the windows saying
Compramos Oro, We Buy Gold.

A kid ducks into our doorway to get out of the sun. He's yelling into his phone in Spanish and doesn't see me standing on the other side of the glass, close enough I can count the pimples on his chin.

“¿Por qué?”
he says. That's “Why?” or sometimes “Because.”
“¿Por qué?
¿
Por qué?”

When he feels my eyes on him, he flinches, startled. I chuckle as he moves out to the curb. He glances over his shoulder a couple times like I'm something he's still not sure of.

 “Is it too cold in here?” the old man shouts.

He's short already, but hunched over like he is these days, he's practically a midget. Got about ten hairs left on his head, all white, ears as big as a goddamn monkey's, and those kind of thick glasses that make your eyes look like they belong to someone else.

“You want me to dial it down?” I say.

“What about you? Are you cold?” he says.

“Don't worry about me,” I say.

Irving Mandelbaum. I call him Mr. M or boss. He's taken to using a cane lately, if he's going any distance, and I had to call 911 a while back when I found him facedown on the office floor. It was just a fainting spell, but I still worry.

“Five degrees, then,” he says. “If you don't mind.”

I adjust the thermostat and return to my chair. When I'm sure Mr. M is in the office, I rock back and get myself balanced. My world record is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

I'VE BEEN LIVING
in the hotel awhile now. Before that it was someplace worse, over on Fifth. Someplace where you had crackheads and hypes puking in the hallways and OD'ing in the bathrooms we shared. Someplace where you had women knocking on your door at all hours, asking could they suck your dick for five dollars. It was barely better than being on the street, which is where I ended up after my release from Lancaster. Hell, it was barely better than Lancaster.

A Mexican died in the room next to mine while I was living there. I was the one who found him, and how I figured it out was the smell. I was doing janitorial work in those days, getting home at dawn and sleeping all morning, or trying to, anyway. At first the odor was just a tickle in my nostrils, but then I started to taste something in the air that made me gag if I breathed too deeply. I didn't think anything of it because it was the middle of summer and there was no air-conditioning and half the time the showers were broken. To put it plainly, everybody stunk in that place. I went out and bought a couple of rose-scented deodorizers and set them next to my bed.

A couple of days later I was walking to my room when something strange on the floor in front of 316 caught my eye. I bent down for a closer look and one second later almost fell over trying to get up again. What it was was three fat maggots, all swole up like overcooked rice. I got back down on my hands and knees and pressed my cheek to the floor to see under the door, and more maggots wriggled on the carpet inside the room, dancing around the dead man they'd sprung from.

Nobody would tell me how the guy died, but they said it was so hot in the room during the time he lay in there that he exploded. It took a special crew in white coveralls and rebreathers almost a week to clean up the mess, and even then the smell never quite went away. It was one of the happiest days of my life when I moved from there.

J BONE'S COUSIN,
the player from the lobby, is laughing at me. I'm not trying to be funny, but the man is high, so everything makes him laugh. His name is Leon.

It's 6:30 in the evening outside. In here, with tinfoil covering the windows, it might as well be midnight. I suspect time isn't the main thing on the minds of Leon and Bone and the two girls passing a blunt on the bed. They've been at it for hours already and seem to be planning on keeping the party going way past what's wise.

The door to Bone's room was wide open when I walked by after work, still wearing my uniform. I heard music playing, saw people sitting around.

“Who that, McGruff the Crime Dog?” Leon called out.

Some places it's okay to keep going when you hear something like that. Not here. Here, if you give a man an inch on you, he'll most definitely take a mile. So I went back.

“What was that?” I said, serious but smiling, not weighting it one way or the other.

“Naw, man, naw,” Leon said. “I's just fucking with you. Come on in and have a beer.”

All I wanted was to get home and watch
Jeopardy!,
but I couldn't say no now, now that Leon had backed down. I had to have at least one drink. One of the girls handed me a Natural Light, and Leon joked that I better not let anybody see me with it while I was in uniform.

“That's cops, man, not guards,” I said, and that's what got him laughing.

“You know what, though,” he says. “Most cops be getting high as motherfuckers.”

Everybody nods and murmurs, “That's right, that's right.”

“I mean, who got the best dope?” he continues. “Cops' girlfriends, right?”

He's wearing the same suit he had on the other day, the shirt unbuttoned and the jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He's got the gift of always looking more relaxed than any man has a right to, and that relaxes other people. And then he strikes.

“So what you guarding?” he asks me.

“A little jewelry store on Hill,” I say.

“You got a gun?” he says.

“Don't need one,” I say. “It's pretty quiet.”

I don't tell him I'm not allowed to carry because of my record. We aren't friends yet. Some of these youngsters, first thing out of their mouths is their crimes and their times. They've got no shame at all.

“What you gonna do if some motherfucker comes in waving a gat, wanting to take the place down?” Leon says.

I sip my beer and shrug. “Ain't my store,” I say. “I'll be ducking and covering.”

“Listen at him,” Leon hoots. “Ducking and covering. My man be ducking and covering.”

The smoke hanging in the air is starting to get to me. The music pulses in my fingertips, and my grin turns goofy. I'm looking right at the girls now, not even trying to be sly about it. The little one's titty is about to fall out of her blouse.

Leon's voice comes to me from a long way off. “I like you, man,” he says. “You all right.”

Satan's a sweet talker. I shake the fog from my head and down the rest of my beer. If you're a weak man, you better at least be smart enough to know when to walk away. I thank them for the drink, then hurry to my room. With the TV up loud, I can't hear the music, and pretty soon it gets back to being just like any other night.

EXCEPT THAT I
dream about those girls. Dreams like I haven't dreamed in years. Wild dreams. Teenage dreams. And when I wake up humping nothing but the sheets, the disappointment almost does me in.

The darkness is a dead weight on my chest, and the hot air is like trying to breathe tar. My mind spins itself stupid, names ringing out, faces flying past. The little girl who'd lift her dress for us when we were eight or nine and show us what she got. My junior high and high-school finger bangs and fumble fucks. Monique Carter and Shawnita Weber and that one that didn't wear panties because she didn't like how they looked under her skirt. Sharon, the mother of one of my kids, and Queenie, the mother of the other. All the whores I was with when I was stationed in Germany and all the whores I've been with since.