The Front of the Freeway (10 page)

A trap door opens under my ribs, and all the tense, writhing chemicals caught in my chest flood into my arms and legs, a cold shudder of relief crawling over my skin. He’s not dead, not just yet, but he needs an ambulance fast. I tear my cell phone out from my pocket and press 9-1-1 to the chime of three indifferent tones, then set the phone to “speaker” and lay it on his chest. An ambulance won’t be here for at least fifteen minutes—they never are in this neighborhood—and he’ll need help faster than that. I’ve seen him chase too many meat balls with vodka to worry about the empty bottle next to him, or the others in the kitchen, but the pills—

“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

I scramble across the tile on my hands and feet, arching over his body like a long spider crawling towards the bathtub. A hundred pills, tiny, cobalt disks, indigo freckles dotted across the cold white cheek of the bathroom floor. How many did he take?

“Uh, suicide, I think. Attempted suicide.” Suicide. It sounds awful coming off my tongue, like a poison or an insect. Too much hissing in three syllables. I squeeze in between the toilet and his legs and start brushing Ambien back into the bottle, a short, white canteen in a labeled blue shirt. “There’s an empty bottle and a lot of sleeping pills.”

“OK, sir, where are you?” So many pills, two handfuls of sky blue pebbles dripping into the container like drops of water, rapping on the bottom of the plastic shell like raindrops. The case fills quickly, the pitch of clattering sapphires growing higher and higher until they settle almost silently on top of one another just below the wide, round neck of the bottle. The idiot.

“I’m sorry, false alarm.” I snap the phone shut on his chest and lean back against the low bathtub wall, mopping a warm trail of trickling sweat from my forehead, my heart still throbbing loudly in my chest. A fifth of vodka, some tequila, a few beers. Nothing he can’t handle, but enough to knock him out cold on the bathroom floor before he could find his way into the sleeping pills. The bottle’s full again. He couldn’t have swallowed more than one or two if they made it to his lips at all. I twist the stubborn, childproof cap back on, a miracle he got it off in the first place, and jab his sagging shoulder with the toe of my shoe. “You’re going to feel so fucking stupid when you wake up.” He doesn’t say anything.

I sit with him in cold light of the bathroom for a few minutes, legs draped across his, staring at the broken plastic scale on the floor beside his head. He must have landed on it coming down, because now I can see the rusted springs and gears jutting from its decayed, exposed skeleton. After a few quiet minutes staring across the room, I hook my arms under his and pull him to bed, his long legs dragging heavily across the coarse, grey carpet. I roll him on his side and set a trash can on the floor by his head, then put out a glass of tap water and a roll of crackers on the nightstand beside him. What else should a son do? Hit him, scream at him? Hold his hand until he wakes up? I’ve wiped enough fermented spit from his chin over the years to nurse a cataleptic body, and I don’t see a reason to treat this any differently. He’ll be too embarrassed to try it again, I think. My father’s a lot of things, but persistent isn’t one of them. Then again, I never would have pegged him for suicidal, either, so in a half-hour I’ve emptied every knife, blade, fork, scissors, letter opener, saw, and sharp edge I can find into a slick black trash bag. I throw the alcohol from the kitchen and the pills from the bathroom in as well, a perfect Seattle cocktail, and drag the clinking, jingling, bulging black mass of plastic, glass, and metal to the SUV. How many twenty-one-year-olds have to do this, I wonder, take out their parents’ trash? Is it selfish to ask? I lock up the front door and start to put the house back together, closing drawers and wiping down counters, Romeo’s nervous habits. He’ll be OK, but he needs something. A hobby, a date, a new job, a new start—anything, really. Anything to wake up for, anything to throw a wrench in the workings of his steady, systematic implosion.

I flip the kitchen light off and head for my room, pausing to pick up one last scrap of paper from the tile floor. My father’s epitaph. His memoir, his last words scratched across notebook paper like claw marks.
I’m sorry.
And that would have been it, I’m sorry, a gurgled apology as he drowned himself in vodka and medication between the toilet and the bathtub. With a quick tug, I tear the paper from end to end, then fold the scraps over and tear them again, shredding the letter into a palmful of striped, greyish confetti that explodes next to the oven like a dud and drifts gently down into the trash. Maybe he’ll be lucky. Maybe he’ll wake up and forget the whole thing.

“A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.”

—Niccolo Machiavelli

“There’s my boy!” Tony reaches out and slaps hands with me on the front porch, his voice brimming with excitement. I’m using the front door this time, and there are no blood-coated cars in the garage that I know of. I walk through the cramped entrance, and the screen door bangs hard against the thin metal frame behind me, Tony chirping about Cesar on his way to the living room in front. “Twenty-five a kilo? That’s not bad man. I don’t know how you got that motherfucker to go twenty-five for a fucking kilo. And then you walk up the stairs on him? Shit…my boy!” Tony’s mansion is draped in a stucco blanket, hidden behind the bars on the windows and all the touches of normalcy, perfectly camouflaged in an ocean of affordable living. The luxury, the excess, it’s all on the inside, hanging neatly on the walls in black metal frames or installed in the kitchen in shiny metal appliances. It’s probably the only inconspicuous thing about Tony, but it’s perfectly impermanent, too. At any time he can pack up and take his mansion with him, and Tony never struck me as the type to stay in one spot for too long. Dad would hate him.

And Dad—my practical, stone-faced father. His world’s hidden, too, but it’s a much darker place, much more private. A shadowy living room where he can sit and watch a lifetime of safe decisions fall out from under him. They won’t support him anymore, so now what? Part of me wants to give him a gun and a beanie and drop him off at Sarah’s Baby Barn, but all of me knows he’d never go for it. He’s Moses falling down Mount Sinai with a death grip on two stone anchors, and he won’t let them go, not for anything, no matter how far down the mountain he rolls.

I take a seat at Tony’s bar, two jet-black stools squatting next to a smooth grey marble counter bordering the kitchen. Tony slides a stout green Heineken down the counter and breaks the top off of his own, pausing for a single short sip. All of a sudden the beer looks like a vile of poison in my hand, and I’ve lost my thirst.

“So what’s your plan then, JT?”

“Call Cesar next week. I figure I’ll meet him at Griffith Park somewhere. It’s open, it’s private. If I start pushing all this late next week, start selling grams, I’ll have your seventy-five in a month, plus whatever.” Tony sets the beer down and smiles, beaming like a proud parent, or someone who just taught their dog a new trick.

“That’s good, man. I know you’re good for it. But I mean, what’s
your
plan? You’re on the other side of it now. How’s it feel to be out of the kitchen? What do you want to do?” My plan. My plan had always been Tony’s plan, or Romeo’s before that, or my father’s even before. But for the first time in my life, I’m not following anyone else’s plan at all. No roadmap, no rules. It feels incredible.

“I don’t know. Work, I guess. New business, you know how it is.” I push the sweat-damped green bottle back across the bar and shift on the stool, the corner of Tony’s barrel digging into my lower back, a rough metal edge chafing a small, raw circle onto the bridge of my spine. “Here, Tony, I almost forgot.” With a sharp clatter I drop the pistol on the counter and slide it to him, the barrel spinning in slow, lingering circles around the trigger. Tony presses a slender, skeletal finger onto the top of the grip to stop the rotation and tucks the pistol in the back of his pants, smiling at me all along.

“Come on, man. I got one more thing I want to show you.” Tony heads out from around the bar to a narrow, squared hallway at the far end of the living room, setting his beer on the low glass table next to Darwin as he passes. I throw Chuck a wink and disappear into the white plaster tunnel behind my grinning guide. Jackson Pollock blood splatters line the walls, red-and-orange bursts framed and hung every few feet on the naked white canvas, a thousand crimson webs strung between straight black edges. First a right, then a left. Then another black door on another white wall, and a shallow grey staircase plunging a few steps into the garage. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

The garage is dark, a quiet black room gashed by three long beams of light cutting through the glass windows at the top of the garage door and flooding across the dusty concrete. At first I can’t see a thing through the suffocating blackness, but as my eyes fix to the dark, dim forms begin to materialize in the striped shadows. A squat wooden crate in the middle of the floor—and then two, no, three more behind it. Wood and cardboard boxes line the room, dipping in and out of the dark, cut and chopped by the long blades of light, all surrounded by stacks of unmistakable, plastic-wrapped bricks of chalky, white snow.

This is Cesar’s.

My lips fall open in shock, but suddenly, before I breathe a word, the flat, jolting sole of Tony’s shoe slams hard against my back and knocks me down onto the stairs. My knee cracks against the corner of a concrete block as my shoulder smashes into the cold cement floor, a sharp pain swelling in my back below my ribs. Instinctively, I flip over and shuffle back on my hands, staring up in bewilderment at Tony’s looming silhouette, a perfectly black shadow emerging from the blinding whiteness of the hallway. Slowly, he extends his arm straight at me through the dark, and staring at me from the end of his curled hand is the hollow, empty eye of his pistol. Tony coolly moves down the stairs into the garage, his steps slapping quietly against the cement, and I push myself back until my head knocks hard against the straight rough edge of a wooden crate.

“Tony, what the fuck are you doing?” Tony laughs gently into the dark, a brooding, sinister echo filling the stale, empty air. Two bands of light gouge his arm like long white fangs, and the third cuts his face in two, a deadened, black eye hovering in the light above the frame of a shadowed jaw.

“Tony, where
are
we? Tony, what are we
doing
?” he mocks, tracing slow, bloody figure-eights across my chest with the point of his pistol from across the room. “Just tying up some loose ends, JT. You know how it is.” I move to sit up but my hand slips in a patch of loose powder and my arm collapses to the cement. On every side, a stack of soft white bricks lines a wall of straight wooden boxes, row after row of brown and white towers falling into the dark, all dusted with a thin film of chalk. Tony didn’t move seventy pounds of cocaine in a night by himself. He had help. He planned for this.

“You set me up.”

“You made it too easy, man. I’m sorry it had to happen like this. I didn’t plan it this way, not from the beginning. But I couldn’t pass this up.” He’s right, I made this all very easy. I told him all about Cesar’s and the basement, about the waiting shipment and the thin security. It wouldn’t take much for Tony to put a bullet in Omar’s massive sneering head and empty the shipment into the back of a truck. If Cesar’s still alive, he won’t rest until Tony pays for this. But when they find my body, he’ll think that Tony already has.

“So now what? You’re going to leave another body in your house and wait for the cops to find me? You’ll be running for the rest of your life.”

“My house?” Tony edges towards me across the light streaked floor, moving in and out of bars of light and shadow. “No, the paintings and the books, those are mine, but the house? An old woman lives here alone. Well, she did, anyway. But by the time they find she’s not here anymore, they’ll find you, too, dead in the garage with a couple grams of blow and the gun that killed that cop. And me? Well, I was never even here. I’m a ghost.” A cashier, a friend; a guide. And now a phantom. With my body, Tony vanishes, too. His ties to Cesar, a witness to murder, they’re all wrapped and buried in a tidy wood box, and Tony, he’ll disappear as quietly as he arrived, without even a whisper.

“You can’t do this forever,” I splutter, embarrassed at the desperation in my voice even as it echoes around the concrete coffin. “You know that, don’t you? You can’t rob the whole fucking world!”

“The hell I can’t!” he explodes, a sudden, vicious reflex shattering the still and heavy quiet. “I take whatever I want, whenever the fuck I want it! And why not? That’s the difference between you and me, Julian. You could never let go. There’s something there, weighing you down, holding you back, always. Your rules, your conscience, your God—whatever it is, I don’t have it. I’m free.” Tony’s no savior. He’s not even a smoking gun pointed in the right direction. He’s a businessman, before all else, and if what he touches doesn’t turn to gold, then it’s blood. Of course this is where it was all going to end, it had to, and I’m here, staring right back into the black and hollow eye of everything he taught me. “What happened to us, JT?”

“I don’t know, Tony, why don’t you put the gun down, and we’ll talk about it.”

“No, I mean to us, our species. We used to be animals—what happened to us? Corporations, government, mechanized living. We’re not animals, anymore, we’re hardly even human. We’re robots, we’re slaves—maybe we’re something worse.” Tony’s last sermon. We’ll end like we started, my spectral guide preaching into the dark. But there’s something missing this time, some gaping hollowness at the heart of his nihilism, and for the first time his whole lurid orchestra sounds out of tune.

“You’re right, Tony, we’re not animals anymore. But we’re supposed to be better than animals. I don’t need God or a judge to be human, but I need to be better than you. Better than all this. You belong in a fucking cage.”

I had to thank Tony. If not for him, I would have stayed in Romeo’s kitchen, washing and drying Romeo’s shit, dying like my father, comfortably inside the lines. Tony had to rip the cover from my eyes and tear me out from under everything I knew, but I’m not going to follow him any deeper into his madness, not anymore. And besides, he’s forgetting something.