"Because I live here, asshole. Don't you ever look out the window when you drive?"
"I don't drive here." Marty studied the map for the street and discovered Buck was right. They were on the northern edge of Koreatown. It could be the safest stretch of his journey or the most dangerous, all because of another violent upheaval not so long ago.
In the early hours of the Rodney King riots, while news choppers hovered over the streets, scores of enraged blacks surged through Koreatown, looting, torching, and demolishing storefronts and mini-malls. It was an unstoppable tide of furious humanity and terrific TV.
Although the Koreans had nothing to do with the beating of Rodney or the acquittal of the officers involved, they were resented for opening their liquor stores, markets, and gas stations in black communities and not hiring blacks.
The besieged Koreans quickly armed themselves, gun-toting brigades patrolling the streets while others stood guard on the rooftops, cradling their carbines, watching and waiting for the invaders to return. But it was too late; the Koreans had already suffered nearly half the damage inflicted on the city during the riots.
Still, Marty was quick to see the series potential. Immediately after the riots, he developed a pilot entitled
LA Seoul
, about vigilante Koreans cleaning up the mean streets. It didn't make the schedule, despite a last minute attempt to rework it for the Olsen twins. Instead, the network bought
Cross-Eyed
, a show about a born-again private eye taking cases from God.
The Koreans certainly hadn't forgotten the riots and were probably back on the streets, armed against another incursion. Which meant the neighborhood might be safe from looters but teeming with trigger-happy vigilantes hostile to any strangers, even one who championed what could have been the first Korean cop show on primetime television.
Marty decided having Buck around might not be so bad after all, at least until he got to the Cahuenga Pass and was on his way into the valley. He folded up his map and stuck it in his inside jacket pocket.
"So, once we get to Hollywood, you'll be home," Marty said. "Right?"
"Yeah."
"And we go our separate ways."
"That's a cliché," Buck said. "Something that's been said so many fucking times it means shit."
"Yes, I know what a cliché is, thank you." It was going to be a long walk to Hollywood.
* * * * *
5:35 p.m. Tuesday
Marty and Buck were in a place where people worshipped wrought iron. It surrounded their properties, covered their windows, and barred their doors. It made them feel safe. Now, the wrought iron fences were all that was standing around their homes, which had crumbled like stale cake.
If only their homes had been made of wrought iron, Marty thought.
"The ones I hate are the pointy kind, the ones that seem to be going two different directions," Buck said. "Like they're trying to get the hell off her body or something."
"What are you talking about?"
"Breasts," Buck replied. "As in tits, jugs, and honkers."
"Thanks for the clarification."
"I changed the subject, like you asked. Try to keep up."
And as Buck prattled on, Marty shifted his attention to the ruins around them.
They passed a large apartment building, its outer walls stripped away so it looked like the set of
The Hollywood Squares
. Except instead of seeing celebrities sitting behind desks, answering stupid questions, Marty saw unmade beds and overturned chairs, fallen pictures in shattered frames, kitchens splattered with broken dishware and spilled food.
The Korean tenants were scavenging what they could, despite the strong possibility the building could collapse right on top of them. Four bloodied tenants struggled to heft a dented Kenmore dishwasher out of a ground floor apartment. Other tenants carefully carted out computers, stereo systems, and TVs, gathering it all on the sidewalk under the guard of family members.
It didn't matter that these goodies were useless to them now, that they wouldn't keep them alive, warm, and healthy for another day. What was important is what they'd once cost. A can of corn and the water it was packed with was only worth sixty-five cents, a dishwasher was worth three hundred dollars. At that price, who cared if the machine worked or if you'd live to use it again?
Yet even as Marty watched them, shaking his head with disdain, he found himself wondering if Beth managed to retrieve his laptop and their new TiVo. Before he could berate himself, they reached Western Avenue, which looked like it had been plowed up the center by an enormous hoe. Cars, buses and telephone poles were scattered everywhere, overturned by the uplifted roadway.
The street was filled with people, mostly Koreans, treating their wounds, embracing each other, or staring in dazed disbelief at the destruction. Marty hardly noticed; the scene had become the only familiar site in this transformed city, the new standard of normalcy. The only people who caught Marty's attention were the ones holding AK-47s, standing in front of their slumped storefronts and flattened mini-malls, just waiting for the looting hordes to arrive.
Marty looked over at Buck, worried that the Neanderthal psycho might do something. "Don't do anything stupid, Buck. Let's just walk through here as quietly and as inconspicuously as we can. We don't want trouble."
"What the fuck are you afraid I'm going to do?"
"I don't know, but these people are very nervous and the slightest thing might set them off."
"They don't look nervous to me."
"Then why are they holding automatic weapons?"
"So you'll be nervous," Buck waved to the nearest armed Korean. "Yang chow, amigo-san."
Marty averted his gaze and hurried along as fast as he could. He didn't want to be too close when the Korean gunned down Buck.
Koreatown was nothing like the one Marty remembered from LA Seoul, which was claustrophobic, humid, and dark, the air thick with incense and opium and dangerous men in Manchu jackets. Nor, much to Marty's surprise, was this Koreatown packaged for tourists yet, the entire country and culture synthesized into Disneyfied pagodas and imitation silk robes with catchy slogans.
The only thing Marty could see that set this bland retail strip apart from any other were the services offered—acupuncture, aromatherapy, Shiatsu massage?and the plethora of signs, all written in bright, red Korean calligraphy with English translations in tiny print underneath.
Shong Hack Dong's Permanent Make-up. Jang Soo Bakery. Myung Ga Massage. Yum Park Sa Ne Restaurant. Yeh's Tailor. Myong Dong Natural Herbs. Kentucky Fried Chicken.
That stopped Marty.
There, unscathed and resplendent amidst the destruction, the smiling caricature of Colonel Sanders smiled down at Marty from atop a sleek building comprised of metal cubes, aerodynamic fins, and steel vents. It looked like the Colonel just returned from outer space with an emergency bucket of extra crispy chicken.
"Good idea, Marty," Buck said. "I was feeling a little hungry myself."
"I don't think it's open."
"Don't worry, the maitre'd knows me." Buck headed for the restaurant.
That's when they heard the shriek of rubber against asphalt. Marty and Buck turned to see a truck, its tires spinning and smoking, pulling a set of chains attached to an ATM machine in the wall of a bank. The front of the truck bucked like a horse, its front tires lifting off the ground; then it landed hard and jumped forward, tearing the ATM out and dragging it a few feet before stopping in a cloud of stucco and loose cash.
Two Mexicans piled out of the truck, grabbed bags from the back of the bed, and started scooping up the cash while a third man watched, a shotgun in his arms.
Marty glanced at the Koreans. They weren't doing anything, even though they had the Mexican out-gunned a hundred to one. They were just standing there, watching. They didn't seem to care at all, which was a great relief to Marty, who didn't want to die in a shootout, but he was curious why they weren't interested.
Then he saw the Wells Fargo sign and understood. It wasn't their bank. Even so, Marty wanted to get going in case they changed their minds. He was about to tell Buck just that when the bounty hunter drew his gun and smiled.
"This will only take a minute," Buck started towards the men.
Marty grabbed him. "What the hell are you doing?"
But Marty already knew, because it was what the moment demanded, playing out just like those $800-a-weekend screenwriting courses and countless action movies said it should. It was the inevitable scene when the hero proves what a wild, dangerous man he is by stumbling into a hold-up, a hostage situation, a guy attempting suicide, or a creative combination of all three.
But this wasn't a movie.
"They're robbing a bank." Buck let his arm hang straight, hiding the weapon behind his leg. "That's a no-no."
"Who gives a shit?" Marty said. "We just had an earthquake. The city has been leveled. The money doesn't matter."
"It will."
Buck shook free of Marty and marched across the street towards the Mexican with the shotgun, who didn't seem to notice him.
Buck yelled: "Hey, Taco Bell!"
Now the Mexican did. He pointed the shotgun at Buck.
"Yeah, you," Buck kept coming. "You think you're slick?"
The self-anointed screenwriting gurus called this the defining moment, or more pompously, "the essential re-stating of the mythic-hero paradigm," and Marty hated it every time he saw it. The moment was false, formulaic, and creatively bankrupt. Yet, Marty demanded that writers give it to him in the first five minutes of the first episode of every cop show on his network. And if they argued with him about doing it, he fired them and brought in a writer who would. Now Marty was being forced by fate, or some cosmic guardian of the Writers Guild of America, to live the scene. Or die from it.
The two unarmed Mexicans stopping shoving cash into their bags and rose to their feet, shared a worried look, and faced Buck. They didn't know what to make of this guy. One of them said something threatening to him in Spanish.
"No habla bullshit, Dorrito," Buck continued to advance on the shooter, who shifted his weight nervously, looking to his friends for guidance and not getting any.
"Fuck off," the shooter told Buck. "Or I shoot."
Buck shook his head and turned to the two unarmed men. "Where'd you guys find this moron?" He motioned to the shooter, and they looked, which distracted them from seeing his gun as he passed by. "Taco Bell doesn't know shit and I can prove it."
The shooter raised his shotgun level with Buck's chest. "I blow your balls off you don't stop."
"Not with the safety on, dipshit."
The shooter glanced down at shotgun. In that instant of inattention, Buck jammed his gun into the man's groin with one hand and swatted the shotgun aside with the other.
Buck leaned into his face so their noses were almost touching. "If your friends don't sit the fuck down and do exactly what they're told, you'll be a Ken doll."
The shooter was either stupidly defiant or simply unfamiliar with what Barbie wanted from a man, because he didn't say a word. So Buck cocked the trigger and pushed the gun into him. "How about this? They sit or Taco Bell is gonna be Tinker Bell."
The point, if not the allusion, got through to the Shooter, who immediately told his friends to sit. They did.
Marty looked at the Koreans. They were smiling. The scene worked every time. It didn't make it any less stupid. Now that the situation seemed to be under control, Marty marched over to Buck and said: "Are you out of your fucking mind?"
"Stop whining and take away Taco Bell's shotgun."
Marty took it from the shooter's hand, examined it, then tossed it into the truck bed. "The safety wasn't on."
Buck grinned at the glowering Mexican. "Oops."
* * * * *
Buck was still grinning after he and Marty finished tying the three Mexicans to a telephone pole. It only made Marty angrier.
"You think it's funny, Buck? You could have gotten killed. And for what?"
"A big, fat paycheck." Buck stuck one of his business cards into in the shirt pocket of each of his prisoners. "When the cops show up, they'll know who caught these dipshits. And so will the bank. I should get a couple grand out of this. You know, this earthquake could be real good for my business."
"Do me a favor, Buck. Take the rest of the day off."
Marty walked away, weaving through the small crowd of Koreans who gathered to watch Buck at work. Buck tipped an imaginary hat at the smiling Koreans and joined Marty.
"What the fuck are you so angry about?"
"Because you could have started a shoot-out back there," Marty replied. "And if one of the Koreans got hit, they'd have started shooting too, and it would have been a bloodbath."
"Bullshit," Buck smiled and pointed an accusatory finger at Marty. "You were worried about me."
"I was afraid I'd get killed and wouldn't make it home to my wife."
"See? It's happening already. You're rooting for me. I told you I was a great fucking character," Buck clapped Marty on the back. "I'm even willing to consider a black sidekick, as long as it's not Arsenio Hall."
Years from now, this was the anecdote Marty would tell at parties or network events. How in the middle of the Big One, climbing through the ruins of LA to get back home, he was pursued by a crazy bounty hunter trying to pitch him a series.
Was that what the big stunt at the bank was all about? Part of the pitch? Whether it was or not, it would be when Marty told the story.
But the story would soon be coming to an end. It was a little after six. Another mile or two, they'd be in Hollywood. Buck would go home, disappearing from his life forever, and Marty would continue over the Cahuenga Pass, arriving in the San Fernando Valley just as night fell. The rest of the trip would be a straight shot down Ventura Boulevard to Calabasas.