The Front of the Freeway (7 page)

Tony’s stare narrows as he tilts his head. Maybe he’s wondering what I’m going to do about it. Or maybe he’s wondering why I said “we.” But I’m in just as deep as he is now, and if I know that, then Tony knows it, too.

“A lot of people you don’t know put up a lot of walls around you, JT. You happy where you’re at? You want out? I swear, you’re not going to move an inch as long as you’re playing by their rules. I can show you out, but everything they told you about what’s allowed and what’s right and what’s wrong, forget it. It’s the chain around your neck. We’re not playing by their rules anymore, JT. They’re the only thing holding us back, and if you want out, you’re going to have to break all of them.”

This isn’t a game anymore. This isn’t just weed and nickels and dimes. Tony’s preaching now, but he’s forgetting something.

“We didn’t just rob them, Tony. This isn’t about dealing right now. He’s dead. It’s on us.”

“Look, you want to get to the top of the food chain, you can’t play nice with the other big fish all the time. Here look at this.” He’s drilling the point of his slender, boney finger into a black-and-white portrait of Darwin’s face on the cover. “These are the only rules, JT. This is the only real law. Survival of the fittest. You get it? That’s it. We’re animals, JT, just like everything else. You, me, everyone; we’re not above it. These are the only rules anyone lives by. You pick your place in this world, no one else. You can be king of this fucking jungle, but you’re going to have to stand up and take it.”

I was right; this isn’t about selling drugs. This isn’t even about money anymore. Tony wants out, and he’s dragging me out with him. But why me? Maybe he knew I’d follow him, because I’m from where he’s from. Or maybe he’s been talking to himself for too long, and he just needed someone to hear him scream. But Tony’s breathing out his revolution again and, somehow, I’m breathing it in just fine.

“No more bodies, Tony. I’m serious, I’m not going to kill people.” Tony smiles for the first time since Baby Gap and leans over the glass table, pulling Darwin and the Ziploc pouch to him.

“Alright man,” he grins. “No more bodies.” You can hardly see the old man’s face through the broken green mesh of crumbled leaves Tony’s rolling into a white paper stem on the book cover. And everything’s calmer now, in Tony’s little world, in Tony’s mind, in the middle of all his madness.

“What are we going to do about the car?” Tony pinches the gnarled white paper to his lips and breaths deep. Squinting as he holds his breath, he leans back into the thick black leather and lets the fog roll out of his mouth, wrapping up around his head in smooth, sinister vines. And then he laughs.

“Let’s smoke it.”

“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”

—Robert Frost

Los Angeles is a desert. Under all the lights and concrete, it’s just five hundred miles of heat and brush cracked by the Los Angeles River, a sliver of water trickling out of the Simi Hills that couldn’t fill a bathtub. And if an Irish engineer hadn’t stolen the water from the Owens Valley and brought it to L.A. in the Aqueduct, it’d still be five hundred miles of sand and sun and lizards. But he did; he sucked the Owens Lake dry and drenched L.A. in it. The Owens farmers were so mad they tried to blow the whole thing up. Fifteen times. But he got the water here, the Irishman, and he made himself a lot of money doing it, too. This is his legacy, this whole empire. This is his city. He just had to rob Owens blind to build it.

That’s where we took Tony’s red-painted hearse. Well, that’s where he took it, anyway. I followed him up the 5 North for an hour and a half in a sleek grey Mercedes he borrowed from some lawyer that thought he was a valet. Then, we turned off the freeway, through a mile of smooth dirt roads cut into an ocean of dark green tomato vines, and to the edge of the little concrete valley, running from one end of the midnight horizon to the other. That’s where we’re sitting now, on the edge of the gravel canyon, next to an empty box of Sam Adams, staring into the dark filth bubbling up through the black current.

“Here’s one.”

I throw back the last sudsy mouthful from a slender glass bottle and hand it to Tony next to me on the ledge. He puts his beer down in the grass and takes the empty bottle, holding it between his knees while reaching for a red tin gasoline can beside him. He fills half the bottle back up with the thin yellow fluid like egg yolks and adds another quarter of water and dish soap from his kitchen.

“Rag.”

That’s my job, soaking torn white rags in a plastic bucket of lighter fluid. I pull the slick, dripping cloth out of the thin translucent sludge and pass it to the bartender. Tony jams it into the bottleneck, pushing the saturated strip halfway into the bottle with two pointed fingers, leaving the other half hanging out of the top like a wet flag. He sets it behind him in line with three more dripping brown cocktails and hands me the last full beer.

“I got a job for you, Julian, if you want it.” For all his words, for all his talking, I’ve never had a conversation with Tony. I couldn’t tell you where he’s from, or where he wants to go, or anything except what he wants me to do or how he wants me to do it. He’s all loud jokes and quiet business, or some absurd place in between. But I guess that’s how he makes a living, and I always take the bait.

“What, you mean you’re not coming?”

“No, man, this one’s for you. Well, me—sort of.” Tony takes a short pull and swallows the last foamy breath from his bottle, then presses it between his knees and grabs the gas. “There’s a guy I want you to meet—Cesar. I’ve never met him, but from what I heard he’s got his fingers in every pocket from Redlands to TJ. He’s not a smalltime guy, you know?” Half yellow slime, quarter soapy water. The suds and glass remind me of Romeo’s kitchen, and my stomach winces. Last week I was scrubbing dishes; now I’m washing blood off my hands. With a nauseating shiver, the suddenness of the whole strange and sinister plunge washes over me, but now Tony has another mission, and there’s no slowing down, not now. “Anyway, I was talking to Martín last week, and I guess Cesar wants his fingers in L.A., too, and he wants someone to help him do it. Martín mentioned my name, and he wants to meet me, you get it?” So he heard about us. I wonder if this is what a promotion feels like, and for a second there’s this uncomfortable warmth in my chest. Maybe that’s something Tony taught me, too, having some pride in your work.

“So, what, we’re buying from him now?”

“No, you’re going to buy from him now. He’s never met me. He doesn’t know what I look like, and Martín didn’t tell him much more. For all he knows, you are me. So I want you to meet him, see what he’s got for you. This is your thing now.” Tony puts the little glass flag in line behind him, and wipes the lighter fluid off his hands in the grass. Maybe I should know better than to expect anything good from one of Tony’s surprises, but this is different. For the first time, this isn’t about Tony. This is about me.

“What, don’t you want it?”

“I don’t need it. I’ve got my business, JT, but you, you’re just getting started. This small time shit, selling sacks, it’s good and all, but if you really want to do this, at some point you’re going have to get out of the garden. Now come on, help me push this bitch.”

Tony pushes himself out of the grass and walks to the open driver’s side door behind him. He pitches the empty red can into the back seat, and it clatters against four more full metal canisters. Five inside, five in the trunk, four under the hood. The last one’s behind me, the icing on the metal flambé.
Out of the garden.
This isn’t about me. This isn’t even about weed anymore.

“You want me selling coke now.”

“No, I want you making money now. This is where the real money is—this is your ticket out. The weed, that’s pennies, man. And Romeo’s, that’s not a job, it’s just the cover you need to sneak out the back door. You know how much a gram goes for? How about a hundred of them? Shoot, this is Hollywood, every other waitress is a model on a coke diet.” Tony snuffs an imaginary line off his pointer finger and smiles at me expectantly. Maybe that’s it. Maybe Tony doesn’t need someone to talk to. He needs an audience. I force a smirk and grab the heavy red can behind me, a gallon of gas sloshing against the ribbed metal frame inside. The top snaps off with a soft pop, and I hang the bottle over the dark grey hood. A current bursts from the white plastic nozzle and falls heavily to the car, breaking on the flat aluminum hood, pelting the wide front window with a thousand thick, shimmering beads. Immediately the gas bites at my nose, and I can taste the fumes like a toxic cloud, but I walk the canister around the car, drenching it in the slick, translucent slime. Tony’s flicking a small metal lighter open, close, open, close, eyes stuck to the sweat-damped vehicle. After two passes I toss the empty can into the driver’s seat. The transmission’s set to neutral, and the dripping grey nose peers cautiously over the ledge of the long gravel coffin. I walk to the back and press my hands against the smooth, greased bumper, digging my feet in the torn grass. A two-ton metal box stuffed with fourteen gallons of gas and a pint of blood rolls slowly in the dirt, but Tony kicks the taillight and, with a heavy metallic sigh, the four-door ship sinks into the concrete valley. The bow bounces off the rough channel floor with a crash and sags into the aqueduct flat, groaning to a halt ten feet from the thick vein of water cut into the middle of the track, and Tony hands me the first mixed cocktail.

“Light?” Tony flips open the silver Zippo and strikes it against the end of the damp cloth dripping from the mouth of the bottle. After a second, a thin wisp of smoke meekly pulsing from the tail of the wilted rag explodes into a brilliant orange flame, climbing hungrily up the wet and hanging cloth.

“Maybe we should say something,” I offer, “like some last words.” Tony picks another brown bomb out of the dirt and pinches his eyebrows at me thoughtfully.

“What, like a funeral?”

“No, not like a funeral. Maybe like a toast.” Tony turns his eyes to the dark metal frame resting in the shaded valley and scratches his neck. After a second, he smiles, and turns two creased eyes back to me.

“Alright then, to what?” I want to say something clever about business, or something respectful for the cop, or anything about where the hell this is all going. But I don’t say all that.

“Strippers and coke.” Tony coughs a laugh and softly clinks the top of his drink against mine. The flame hanging from my bottle bites into the soft, saturated rag dripping from his, spreading smoothly towards a pair of slender glass necks.

“To the customers,” he agrees, dropping his hand almost to the ground behind him and hurling the little glass grenade high into the blackened sky. The bottle flutters across the dark canvas, a little flashing sun arching back to earth, and explodes across the tail of the waiting car, a wide ring of fire and glass spitting out across metal and water and concrete. I wind up too, careful to keep the waving flame off my hand, and launch the bottle into the ravine, soap and gas splashing over the blazing funeral pyre. And it feels good, pelting the aqueduct and Tony’s scrap-metal carriage with these little glass grenades, because it all feels like the start of something new, something different. Something to get ahead. Sure, maybe Tony’s a little psychotic, calling his own pitches while bombing his blood-stained car, but he’s the L.A. Moses, and I believe him when he says we’re getting out of here together. We watch the gas tanks catch flame in the ditch, erupting one after another like thunder claps, spitting fireballs and incinerating the tires and the roof and the frame, but I’m already thinking about new cars and comfortable living. And Tony’s going to take me there.

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

—Charles Darwin

Even as militia from the thirteen colonies prepared to resist the British offensive, the colonists sensed the weight of colonial oppression leaving their shoulders…

The Harvard meth-head is at it again. I can hear him from the porch, hypnotizing my father from across a dark living room, filling my house in monotonous rhetoric with the dreary ghosts of the most important things that will never affect my life.
There, there,
he says,
sit down and hold tight. The world is going by much too fast.
He should be in there, my father, comfortably soaking up every mundane image, his life ending in tidy, 45-minute chunks, plus commercials, one episode at a time.

But not today.

The TV’s on, of course, the only light in the dark room, glowing like a mechanical sun in the shadows, painting the walls white, blue, red, white with every frantic flash of color. But my father’s not in front of it like usual—no beer, no pasta, no self-pitying monologues or dry fatherly lectures. Tonight he’s pressed to the wall in the back of the room, one hand balled to a fist at his side, the other gripping a phone against his ear, all of him demonically flashing white, blue, red, white perfectly in time with the flickering walls.

“Twenty-four years, Andrew, and all you have to say to me is you’re sorry?” He’s shouting now, beating the back of his fist against the hard plaster wall. I can see a wide patch of blood glistening on his knuckles, swollen and deformed in the meager pulsing light, three perfectly round holes punched out of the wall next to him. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I’m going to die on this fucking beat!”

White, blue, red, white.

I’ve heard my father yell before, but there’s blood in his voice now, bursting with something sinister and sad and enormous. The Jack Daniels stands tall on the counter behind him, an empty glass ghost looming in the black of the kitchen, and me in the middle of it all, frozen in the tense and boiling darkness.

“I think you know exactly what you can do with my badge, you son of a bitch!” The phone goes first, ricocheting off the refrigerator, bursting into a cloud of plastic and batteries. Then he grabs the Jack, hurling it across the room with the full force of his body. The bottle shatters against the rigid living room wall, exploding into a million crystal shards, gleaming and glinting over the slick tile floor. He paces for a second, desperately pulling his palms across his tired, sagging forehead, a groan dying in the back of his throat, and finally slumps to the floor, burying his face in his warped and bloodied hands. I hurry across the room and kneel beside him, gripping his shoulders and staring into the shadowed hollow of his covered face.