11

I CONTINUED DRIVING EAST AWAY FROM BEVERLY HILLS, until we got to Western Avenue, then I turned south. It was still morning rush hour and the hot wind blew dust and palm branches and garbage around the streets. Amy was sullen and crouched against the rear door. Her feet were pulled up under my army coat and the only part of her body visible was her head. The dog was exhausted and moaning with each breath and noiselessly farting. Lethally. Cookie-wine farts.

I kept the windows down as we passed the nude mud-wrestling place and the porno shops, then crossed Santa Monica Boulevard. She hadn’t talked at all. Finally, I said, “Where am I taking you? Where do I drop you off?”

She didn’t answer.

“Amy,” I said, “my head’s coming off. Talk to me or get the fuck out of the car.”

“Pa-pa-pull over at the na-next corner, ba-by that store,” she said. “I’ll ga-get out tha-tha-tha-there.”

It was a mini-mart/liquor store. I turned in and parked in a lined spot away from the entrance, then shut off the motor.

She glared at me. “Wha-what you da-did ba-back there wa-was insane. It ska-scared the pa-pa-piss uh-out of ma-ma-ma-me.”

“I said I was sorry. I have no tolerance for self-righteousness.”

Then I had another thought. “And I hate people who wear cowboy hats.”

Amy got out of the car and came around to my driver’s door. She was smiling, saying goodbye. “Wa-Want ma-me to ga-get ya-ya-ya-ya-you ssssssomething for ya-your sta-sta-stomach before I ga-go?”

I couldn’t turn her down because I didn’t want to get out of the car unless I had to. With difficulty, I reached a shaking hand into my left pants’ pocket and worked a fistful of bills up into the light.

She was impatient and snatched the money. “La-let me da-do that,” she whispered, “ya-you’re a fa-fa-fa-fuckin’ ka-case.”

Quickly, she flattened the bills out, counted them, then gave me a total. I had two hundred and seventy dollars in twenties and tens, the last of my cash from New York, not counting the credit card. She handed the money back. “Wha-what do ya-you wa-want from inside?”

“More wine,” I said, “Mogen David,” handing her a twenty. “Two bottles, and aspirin. And Pepto for the stomach.”

“Ya-you think ya-you’ve ga-got a big da-dick, da-don’t ya-you? Sometimes ya-you act la-like you’re a ba-ba-big sha-shot?”

“I do?”

Ya-you think ya-your da-dick is ba-ba-bigger than Ta-Tom Sa-Sa-Sellnock’s?”

“Who’s Tom Sellnock?”

She smiled again. “Da-da-don’t worry Ba-Bruno, I na-knew you wa-were wha-wha-whacked-out and ca-crazy and wha-wha-wha-when I fa-first sa-saw ya-you. Ya-you have ca-crazy eyes.”

Hers were big. Light brown. They softened her face. “Wa-want ma-ma-me to sta-stay with ya-you today? Ha-ha-hang out? Wa-wa-we’ll ga-ga-get the wa-wine and ga-go to ya-your pa-pa-place.”

“I don’t have a place. I’ve only been back in L.A. for two days.”

“Fa-from where?”

“New York. New York City.”

I wa-was tha-there wa-once. Ah-I la-liked it.”

“My father died at Cedars last night. I was born here.”

“La-let’s ga-get a ra-room. A mah-mah-mah-motel. Ya-you’ve ga-got money.”

“How much will it cost for you.”

“Ah-ah-I’m ma-moving ta-ta-today and picking up ma-my st-stuff from fa-fa-fuckin’ Ma-Ma-MC-Ba-Beth’s ah-ah-apartment. Tha-tha-that’s it. I pa-promise. Ha-he’s ta-two blocks fa-fa-fa-from ha-here.”

We got one of the bottles of wine free because Amy knew the day manager behind the counter. We continued down Western Avenue to Romaine and turned east. After a block, we pulled over in front of a pre-Hollywood Twenties Craftsman House with stone pillars supporting the porch. It had heavy concrete steps and was set far back off the street, falling apart. Amy instructed, “Ta-take off your sh-sha-shirt and ga-give it to ma-me.” I did and she slipped the army jacket off her shoulders and pulled my buttoned shirt over her little body. When she stood on the sidewalk it came to just above her knees. Shoeless, she tiptoed up the walkway to the front door and let herself in the front door with a hide-a-key from behind a planter.

The heat made me shivver and I took a blast of the Mad Dog. I felt it go down and the bolt of cold relief exploded within me. I knew the throbbing would be relieved soon. So would the thinking.

While she was gone, I tried smoking a cigarette, but it made me retch, so I ate aspirin and had another drink and listened to the news on the radio. Rocco was asleep and motionless on the floor, yelping in his dreams. The news-guy said there were shootings in a beach city close by, and an automatic weapon had ended a dispute over a Christmas gift certificate at a shopping mall. It made me hope that Amy’s noise in the house wasn’t waking McBeth, who might be asleep in a bed next to a crack dealer named Bubba, with an unfavorable disposition toward honkies.

I looked up when I heard the screen door on the porch quietly slap shut. Amy tiptoed down the concrete steps carrying two large supermarket bags filled with clothes. She got to the car and set them on the hood, then leaned in through the window, “I’ve ga-got wa-one ma-more thing to da-do,”she whispered, jingling a set of car keys and pointing to a Toyota convertible parked in the driveway. “Tha-that’s McBeth’s ra-rented ka-car. He ma-made a ja-john ra-rent it for him and na-now he wa-won’t re-re-re-return it.”

I watched as she scampered over to the car. It was red and impressive. She chirped the alarm off, then got in and lifted the tails of my shirt around her naked hips, and squatted on the driver’s seat. She peed directly on the sheepskin upholstery.

When she was done, she got out and closed the door and chirped the alarm back on. Then she pranced back to the porch and shoved the keys through the mail slot in the door. Getting in the car beside me, she grabbed the Mad Dog bottle from between my legs and took a major slam. “Let’s ba-boogie,” she said.

The Starburst Motel is on La Brea Avenue near Sunset Boulevard. The marquee on top of the entrance in front advertises HBO-TV and kitchenettes, and there’s a man-made sign taped to the outside of the Manager’s Office window, “DAILY SPECIAL $29.95.” Amy wanted a room with a kitchen, so I pulled in front and stopped by the office. Since my shakes were gone, I knew I was okay to go inside to the guy by myself.

As it turned out, if we wanted a room with a kitchen and HBO, it was thirty-nine dollars a day, ten dollars more for the kitchen. He had two rooms like that, and pets were no problem. One had a window and one was around back. Both rooms had air conditioning and were available. I looked at both and told Amy what I’d seen. It was an important deal to her and she guaranteed me that I could fist-fuck her if we’d take the nice room, the one with the window. What decided it for me was that the room was near the ice machine, which I considered an important feature.

It was two bucks more for a reason the guy mumbled in Urdu or Farsi. I took it for forty-one and paid an additional ten dollars for a key deposit, and then some more for tax and an additional eight dollars pet deposit fee. Sixty-three bucks total, when he got done adding.

I took care of it up front by putting seven days in advance on the credit card which had cleared telephone approval. I did it because I was concerned that, any minute, the card would be cancelled and a new one reissued in my wife’s name only.

Later in the early afternoon, when we were moved in with all the food and stuff from the station wagon and the air conditioner was pumping away the Santa Ana heat, and we were part way down the jug of Mad Dog and my brain was still working good, I discovered that Amy didn’t stutter when she was drunk. As she put away more Mad Dog, her speech was less affected. Booze disconnected her stutterer.

She loved being able to talk, which, I now understood, was why she loved drinking. Without the stutter, there were books and buildings full of words that she wanted to say. They were sprayed in bunches around the motel room, like machine-gun fire in a James Bond movie.

I had to be told everything: her I.Q. was in the upper one-thirties. She was from Muncie, Indiana. She had received the fourth-best rating on the intelligence tests at her high school. (Celeste Depue edged her out for third by one point, but Celeste’s mother was a dyke gym teacher at a girls’ high school and Celeste was a twat that nobody liked, so not winning third prize wasn’t a big deal.)

More and more words gushed forth, like subway passengers pouring into the trains at rush hour. It had been twelve weeks since she’d quit tenth grade and driven with her boyfriend, a greedy crack dealer, to Hollywood from Muncie. His nickname was “Limp” because his right leg was two inches shorter than his left, a result of a motorcycle wreck when he was fourteen. After Limp dumped her, sticking her with two days back rent in a rooming house on Selma Avenue and never returning, she and an older girlfriend started giving blow jobs to men in cars on Sunset Boulevard, where she met McBeth who let her stay in a spare room on a mattress at his house for fifty dollars a day. Limp had a cousin named Debbie whom Amy had met once at IHOP on Sunset.

Every night, Amy tried to get by the restaurant to see if she could find Debbie and persuade her to get a message to Limp: She was sorry that he’d seen her talking to Boyd down the hall that one and only time, because it really had meant nothing, but it probably was the reason Limp left that night without telling her or ever saying goodbye.

We drank more and I listened. The syllables came like desperate boat people begging for attention. She seemed to be trying to use every word she knew before she passed out, or got too drunk to talk.

I learned about her barmaid mother and her older sister, who were both drunks. About her abortion. About all the sadness and brutality and stupidity that happens to people when they’re on the street and making it the best way they can—stories that I’d heard a hundred times in recovery programs or in hospital nuthouse lock-down wards. She talked and ate cookies, and we drank, while Rocco slept motionless at the end of the bed and I watched HBO with the sound off.

Amy’d read everything to make up for being homely and unable to communicate: History. Poetry. Fiction. Non-fiction. Crap. From Richard Nixon’s memoirs to Donald Trump to Og Mandino and Irving Wallace. Two or three books a week since she was ten years old. Her passions were penises and books.

She knew my guys too: Hubert Selby, Hemingway, Steinbeck, e. e. cummings, Eugene O’Neil. Her favorite writer was William Faulkner. When she was drinking, she talked like he wrote.

After most of the first bottle was gone, she became grateful and wanted to oblige my sexual needs, even though I didn’t really have any. She was highly-skilled as a cocksucker and began performing energetically on me for a couple of minutes, and then stopped because she realized that the sucking interfered with what she wanted to say about how good she was at giving head, so the blowjob turned into a handjob to enable her to continue speaking.

After a while, I talked about my wife’s credit card that was about to be cancelled, and she interrupted to explain to me how Limp would “work” his customers to help them get cash advances on their plastic beyond their credit card limit. She’d assisted him, and made several of the calls herself. She offered to do the same for me.

Amy used the room phone to make the call, saying that she was Mrs. Bruno Dante and explaining to a local bank manager which honored the card about how much short-term cash we needed, because we wanted to buy a rare Queen Ann table for our living room but we didn’t have the money until we could get back to New York and transfer funds. I thought she was overdoing it when she told the guy about our bad luck with food poisoning on our first trip to Los Angeles, and about how we preferred Universal Studios to Disneyland, because it had more live attractions for the kids.

He put her on hold and checked the payment history on the card, or whatever they do, then came back on the line and said okay. I got dressed and we drove down to the bank to pick up the twenty-five hundred in cash before it closed at 4:00 p.m.

Because we got the money, I kept on with the wine three more days and stayed in the room trying to stop my brain. I was beginning to realize that my father was dead. I kept the blinds closed and the TV tuned in to HBO and the other movie stations.

On the first afternoon, I tried to write a poem for the old man. It had been years. What came out was awful. No good. It had been too long. I stopped because the wine was a higher priority.

Amy was too young to drive, but by checking the phone book, we found a liquor store around on Sunset that would deliver food and booze right away if we tipped good. She took charge of that, and walking Rocco too.

Being in the room drinking Dog was all that I wanted to do. But on the second day, I began having time lapses again. Chunks of hours got lost, and I knew that the wine was turning on me again. But I was in too deep to back out. It got worse, and sleep became almost impossible, so I drank more wine.

If I did drift off, I would wake up in a few minutes, after having the same dream with the marching death squad in my brain—the same beaks of huge black birds on their faces.

Twelve or twenty hours passed. I was awake, but not awake.

Amy filled me in the next day. I had talked about death, and we had watched a Claude Rains’ movie. Also, I had called my ex-shrink in New York to say I was choking on my own gloom for the last time, but there had been no actual conversation because an answering service lady had picked up my call. Then Amy told me that we had walked to the newsstand, where I became a lunatic because I thought the guy had tried to shortchange me on a fifty dollar bill. I’d pulled down a rack full of magazines off the shelf and thrown them into the street. It all happened, but I recalled zip.

Amy had become afraid and made me call Fabrizio later that night. Me and Fab had had a half-hour conversation in which I had made an admission and an apology for bashing his Country Squire, then a promise to return the car. She said Fab and I had discussed the funeral the next day and that I’d promised my brother I’d be there.

My memory was a complete blank, but when it was light outside the next morning, Amy woke up and repeated to me all of what my end of the conversation had been and the other events that occurred. After the call, she made me stop the wine so I was able to take a shower. Then I drank several cold beers to prevent a slam.

In a while, conscious, I started seeing a thousand evil snakes with human legs eating away the backs of my eyes and I felt a hot, jagged, twenty-two caliber bullet hole drilled through my head from temple to temple. The hole was being flossed by a bicycle chain.

I puked for a long time, then took four aspirin and half a bottle of pink liquid for my gut. Amy force-fed me cold pizza and finally I slept okay for a few hours.

While I was getting dressed to go to the funeral, Amy wanted me to talk about my relationship with my father since she had no memory of her own dad. What did it feel like to have a father and then have him die? I said that the old man and I were never close—that we lived three thousand miles apart, but that the space between us was immeasurable. We were composed of different colors: me, green; him red or blue. We had not ever connected, and I’d been a big disappointment in his life. I said that I didn’t feel anything, but Amy inspected my eyes and said that what she saw in them was pain.

I left the motel in the Ford station wagon and followed Sunset Boulevard as it twisted and turned the whole distance to the Pacific Coast Highway. Then I headed north to Malibu. It was a slower way to go, but I didn’t feel solid enough to drive on the freeway. Amy stayed behind with Rocco and watched HBO movies.