Chicago Skyline
by Jake La Botz
Ritchie ran in, gacked to the gills, and hid behind the clothes dangling from a chain in the corner of my ten-by-twelve room.
“Lock it, bro. She’s out there,” he whispered in a cartoony voice meant to conceal his own.
If the damn lock worked, Ritchie wouldn’t’ve been in my room in the first place.
I knew Ritchie less by his in-person antics and more by the blood squirts he left in the shared bathroom at the end of our hall. I had the shits a lot back then—no doubt from all the Yang’s Golden Eggroll—and often had to pound and holler multiple times before he’d come off a nod, a coke binge, or a combo of the two, and unlock the door. Why junkies have to decorate bathroom ceilings with the pink refuse water from their syringes, I can’t say, but they do, and he did every time he was in there.
I have to admit, part of me looked forward to seeing Ritchie’s needle compositions each day. For one thing, they gave a sense of human intimacy at a time in my life when there was absolutely none. What’s more, when I stared into them, they brought visions, images I’d been holding at bay with cheap beer, pushing them out of my skull and onto the fourth-floor bathroom’s ceiling—“the Sistine latrine,” as I called it. More often than not, it was the Chicago skyline that emerged from the squiggly streams, with the lake stretching out to the left as if viewed from the North Side, from Uptown. I’d sit there, peeping through a tiny hole in my fist, like a telescope, zeroing in on some way-up-there floor in The Hancock or Sears Tower, reducing every image to an emotionally-manageable size. It was different each time, but the people and situations, the things I’d forgotten or tried to forget, emerged plain as day, like I was right up against the skyscraper windows, spying it all.
There was a freedom—not all the way free, but bathroom free—sitting there, watching my past play out in Ritchie’s blood squirts. In those moments, I was a cave-dwelling Buddhist or a desert mystic, nearing the final breakthrough, edging toward peace with eternity and my place in it. But occasionally, when my nuts were fuller than usual or I had encountered someone alluring in the hall, I’d get shaken out of my monk-moment by feminine curves coming through Ritchie’s red designs. When that happened, inevitably, my fist telescope dropped from eye level to crotch level, converted into a meat wrench, and twisted my knob until my own biofluid design spunked into the small, shared space. I felt filthy afterward—every single time—wondering if jacking to another man’s bloodstains made me gay or just some kind of degenerate. Then again, there was nothing inside one’s mind that could compare with the filth of The Union Hotel’s fourth-floor bathroom. It had to be met on its own terms once in a while.
Since moving into the SRO three months earlier, me and Ritchie had never more than yelled through the bathroom door or chin-jutted in the hall, so I was surprised when he came bursting in that afternoon. It’s not like I was doing much, drinking, pretend-songwriting, wondering how to meet-a-nice-woman-in-a place-like-that, but it felt like a major interruption just the same.
“Ritchie!” Rhonda yelled.
Her voice was powerful, piercing—an opera singer nearing a glass-breaking decibel. It definitely shattered the glass-like equilibrium I’d been maintaining through beer drinking that morning.
As Rhonda’s voice trailed off, Ritchie came out from behind my clothes curtain and sat in one of the two folding chairs I’d inherited from the previous tenant. Part of me knew what was coming next, that I had already agreed to it by offering him refuge, inadvertent though it may have been. He spit a tight, red balloon out of his mouth, glistening as if polished for a photoshoot, and dropped it on the desk-I-used-for-a-table.
“I gotcha, bro,” he said, snatching a stainless steel spoon out of my fried rice leftovers, motioning for me to hand him a glass of water.
As he snapped the balloon open with long, yellow teeth, Ritchie gave me the once over, determining, I suppose, what my remittance should be for concealing him. No doubt my full pupils and alcoholic cheeks let him know I wasn’t in the bag. Yet somehow, he understood I was a veteran.
“Better not be holding out, Richard!” Rhonda hollered from the opposite end of the hall.
Seeing that Ritchie was about to drop the contents of the balloon, the whole sticky, black ball, into my now t-shirt-cleaned fried rice spoon, I grabbed his hand. I wasn’t about to share needles with Ritchie, a chili pimp who stayed loaded day and night by the efforts of his old lady Rhonda, who, according to my hotel neighbors, turned tricks in the backrooms and bathrooms of downtown strip joints when she was offstage. Ritchie, who left highly-used syringes stashed not only in our shared bathroom, but in every common area of the hotel. Ritchie, who just as soon as he finished cooking solid into liquid would be searching for a viable vein within the ulcerated craters of his arms, legs, feet, and hands. I’d known plenty of guys like Ritchie back home, and whatever diseases were circulating through his walking corpse, I sure as hell didn’t want them.
“You can smoke it,” he said, flicking a dismissive chunk at me.
I gave it the nose test. Strong and vinegary, like I could get high just from sniffing it.
When he registered, Ritchie’s voice and eyelids went down an octave.
“How’d you end up here, showbiz?” He moaned, motioning at the guitar standing in the corner of my room.
Setting the chunk in front of me, I explained, unironically, that I had moved to L.A. not seeking fame, but to get clean.
“No one moves to L.A. to kick heroin,” Ritchie chuckled, stashing his rusty rig under the milkcrates-I-used-for-a-bookcase.
It worked for nearly three months. It worked until Ritchie showed up with a big sticky ball of black tar. I’d never seen anything like it. The brown powder we copped in Chicago was like sawdust by comparison. The thing was, in Chicago, I had all the connects. All my friends were fiends. My enemies too. Even my landlord was a junkie. It was like living in heroin hell. No matter how much I wanted to quit, every person, place, and thing in Chi-town pointed back to a bag of brown. The cheapest and most effective way out of my dilemma, same as always, was the Greyhound. But I had to go farther than DeKalb, Detroit, Cincinnati, Nashville—the close-enough-to-get-home-in-a-day towns. I boarded a western-bound bus at Clark and Randolph with nothing other than my guitar and a fifth of Early Times. For four miserable days, I sweated, puked, and shat it out. I didn’t make any friends, that’s for sure.
“7th Street, Los Angeles. End of the line,” the bus driver shouted at the disembarking point.
The Union Hotel was just far enough off skid row to keep me from feeling like I’d sunk to the bottom, like I was “one of them.” But the main reason I picked the place was for the bar downstairs. The Union Tap was popular with hipster types who liked to live a little dangerously. My music was a sure fit.
After playing a few songs for Mario, the Union’s manager or owner—I never figured out which—we came to a deal. I’d play the Tap once a week in exchange for a small rent-free room on the fourth floor. He tossed me a brass key dangling from a diamond-shaped fob. 403 it said.
“I saw you run in the building, asshole!”
Ritchie lumbered toward my door and put his ear to it. He waggled something in his mouth while listening for Rhonda’s exact location.
“Fuckin’ baby tooth, ” he said.
“If yer in that bitch’s room downstairs, I will go upside your head, Ritchie!”
“Big one’s just behind it. Hurts like hell,” Ritchie groaned, cracking the door and slipping out of my room.
“You’re such a scumbag, you,” Rhonda yelled from the stairwell.
“Aww babe. I gotcher taste right here, babe…”
As the couple disappeared into their room to duel it out with blunt needles, I got down to eye level with the dope chunk on my desk. It seemed an autonomous being. A creature that had chosen to live with me. A someone who must be paid proper respect, given proper consideration. As such, I poured the dregs of my second-to-last beer into a shotglass and set it near the chunk, grabbing the last can from the mini-fridge for myself. We were old friends having a drink, that’s all.
Our conversation was pretty one-sided. I mean, the chunk just wouldn’t shut up.
Downing my beer, I considered that the situation was not at all my own creation. I hadn’t invited Ritchie in. I hadn’t asked him to share his balloon. It wasn’t one bit my fault that a strong-scented chunk of black tar heroin was now inhabiting 403. Therefore, I reasonably concluded, investigating further should be no problem.
Of course, I’d seen people smoke it—which had always seemed like a waste to me—but I wasn’t about to retrieve Ritchie’s dirty needle from under my milk crates. Anyway, shooting drugs would’ve meant defeat, straight back to heroin hell. Smoking, on the other hand, seemed morally ambiguous. Just a little toke. A smoky treat. Poof. No big deal.
I dumped my hardening fried rice out of its tin tray and wiped it clean, smoothing the aluminum and creasing it slightly in the middle. With great care, I dismembered a piece of the chunk and plopped it onto the aluminum. Rolling the tray’s paper lid into a tube, I flicked my lighter and sucked in the sweet and sour smoke rising from the skag sizzle—tastier than any Yang’s takeout, that’s for sure.
Though I went from zero to zombie in about a minute, I smoked another piece and then another. When it was nearly gone, I turned up a bluesy mixtape on my boombox and got down to eye level with the last crumb. I wanted to not-want-it, to leave it there like the last bite on a weight-watcher’s plate. But I did want it. More than anything.
Dropping the wee nugget on the tin tray, I noticed it looked like a little black tooth. A rotten baby canine. By the next day, I could feel the adult one poking at my gums. It’d been hiding in my jaw all along.
Ritchie and Rhonda came around regularly, but separately, after that, using my place as a hideout, a dope-cheater’s den. Why me, why my room, I never figured out, but my payment was always the same. A little chunk. A kiddy bump by their standards. A free ride on a petting zoo donkey. Though I doubt the visits meant much to Ritchie or Rhonda, all my hopes and fears were bound up in the arrival and departure of those sticky little gifts. L.A.’s funny like that. A person’s greatest dreams or worst nightmares can float right up to their door. They did to room 403 at The Union Hotel, that’s for sure.
A few weeks into the routine, Ritchie came hollering and banging, not at all the usual covert operation. Rhonda, it seemed, had been busted tricking and he didn’t have cash to bail her out or to score either. Hearing the news, I was shaken too. I’d been hoping, praying really, one of them would get me high that day. Ritchie, knowing I had nothing, didn’t bother to ask. Instead, he laid out a scheme for boosting merchandise from Mad Kaplan’s, an electronics store just down the block. Ritchie’s master plan was that I’d go in wearing a loose-fitting jacket while he kept an eye out. When I laughed at that, he produced a bottle of Barbie-pink nail polish and said we could use it to cover electronic barcodes at Best Buy. Only problem, he whispered, was they knew him there too, so once again I’d have to do the lifting.
Ritchie lisped when he whispered, which was endearing, like we were school kids pretending to be criminals. Still, I wasn’t about to be his sidekick in anything, let alone theft. And yet there was a serious problem posed by the overall situation: what was I gonna do about the wolf-sized fang pushing through my gums?
Ritchie, discovering I wasn’t “a down bro”, threatened no more freebies, cursed me to hell, and stormed off, presumably to bust car windows or snatch purses.
I paced 403, pissed at Ritchie and Rhonda, pissed at the world. My only recourse was to visit Sheila downstairs at the Tap. She was always good for a six-pack. There was a new guy working the bar when I walked in. A hard-on named Joel from Boston or someplace. I mentioned that I played the Friday afterwork slot, “Unhappy Hour” as my set was known. He said he’d caught my act, didn’t like it much. I didn’t bother asking for the beer.
Back in 403, I sat staring at my old, off-brand guitar. It was in even worse shape than me. The body was cracked from where I’d dropped it, kicked it, and—more than once—used it to defend myself. The action was so high you could’ve shot arrows with it. All in all, the thing was too worthless to pawn, though, believe me, I had tried. In the entire world, I was probably the only person who could strangle anything remotely musical out of that beater. But don’t feel sorry for the guitar. It had cracked me as much as I had cracked it. From years of chording its baseball bat neck, my hands had become as warped as it was. Manipulating that beast of a box was about all my mitts were good for anymore. It was a dysfunctional relationship, no doubt about it. Me and that guitar needed each other in the worst way, but more than anything, we needed to get out of 403 and make some money.
The problem was, since arriving in Los Angeles, I’d developed a sort of social anxiety. More specifically, a fear of seeing people. If I looked at anyone more than a moment—particularly without the nullifying effects of booze and drugs—I saw things. Terrible things. The longer I stared, the more a person’s ugliest physical traits and worst personality flaws came popping out—creepy caricatures that called my own foulest features to the fore as well. As such, I rarely left 403, keeping all interactions with people and reflective glass down to a minimum when I absolutely had to walk out that door. But with no drugs, no beer, no money and with Friday, gig day, four days away, there was no choice. Scrounging pennies from every pocket corner, I grabbed the guitar, walked six blocks to Sunset Blvd. and caught a Hollywood-bound bus.
Passing a western-themed strip mall called Gower Gulch—the first Hollywoodesque structure I’d seen since boarding—I pulled the cord and hopped off. My plan, as always, was to walk into a bar, ask for the boss, and play them a few songs. If they weren’t willing to pay, offer to play for drinks and tips. But like I said, looking at people was a nightmare. On the other hand, there’s nothing like desperation to make one malleable to the unwanted.
A half hour into my meandering, I found a little joint on Hollywood Blvd. called Jack’s Sugar Shack. It was near-empty, which suited me. Inside, I approached the bartender and started my spiel. Before I got a sentence deep, he slid to the opposite end of the bar and began fiddling with the register. Not to be put off, I followed the nonchalant bottle jockey, making sure he could hear me above the jukebox. But not only did he not acknowledge me, no one else in the room did either. Tough crowd, I thought, swinging my guitar back out the door.
Remaining malleable, I hit up other local drinking establishments— Bar Deluxe, Boardner’s, The White Horse. Oddly, it was the same each time. The bartenders, bosses—or whoever I encountered—weren’t antagonistic. They didn’t throw me out or yell. They just plain ignored me.
Stopping at a bus bench near Sunset and La Brea, I sat and stewed on my invisibility. Maybe it’s just Hollywood, I thought. The place itself. A town full of people desperately trying to be discovered. Obviously, I could relate to the desperate part. My entire adult life had been nothing more than a series of desperate moves, mostly related to getting loaded or getting clean. Sure, I had music. But it was only an extension of the desperation—a way to score booze, drugs, Chinese takeout, occasional sex. If I’d ever had hopes or dreams related to music, they were buried in some foggy, back-of-the-brain place. Ambition, life goals—a plan bigger than basic survival—those parts of me were either dead or had never been born at all. The more I reflected on it, the more I realized what a total and utter failure I’d become. Not just at regular guy things, but as a junkie too. I mean, even Ritchie, whose soul had long been lost to the numina of narcotics, was more goal-oriented than I was. More than once, he’d blabbed about his former life as a champion surfer. A title, he insisted, that he’d reclaim one sunny day.
A sudden, terrible thought came over me: What if I was nothing more than an electrical impulse, a magnetic pull toward drug-induced oblivion?
In my mind, I saw Ritchie flipping a chunk of tar at me, snickering his whiny, half-laugh, saying, “No one moves to L.A. to kick dope.” The scene replayed again and again until it became a maddening, two-second loop.
Ha ha, no one. Ha ha, no one. Ha ha…
An approaching bus caught my attention just then. I jumped in the street, desperately trying to flag it down. But the driver didn’t stop. Or even honk. He just stared straight ahead, soaring past. Panicking, I scanned the intersection for the nearest human. Anyone who could verify my existence.
In the near distance, a man wearing too many clothes and talking to himself was walking my way. Dismissing him as too crazy to query on the serious subject of animateness, my eyes darted around the landscape, searching for a more reliable candidate. There were none to be had. As the jabbering man approached, he became quieter. Then, when he was right upon me, he set his bags down, looked me dead in the eye, and shouted,
“No, you don’t, not today!”
I don’t know how else to say it—time stopped. In that moment, there was no one on earth but the two of us. We were like honeymoon lovers or mortal enemies. An explosion of tears threatened to burst from him or from me, I couldn’t tell which. And then quite abruptly, in a high, feminine voice, the man started to titter and then to giggle. Soon it became a big, roaring laugh. A laugh not at me, but for me. And for the first time in a long time, I laughed too.
As the one-man chorus gathered his burden of bags and shuffled away, I began to relax, to move on from my meltdown. Something in me had shifted. I wasn’t suddenly brimming-with-ambition, but I was ready, at least, to land a gig.
Renewing my search, I passed a joint I’d already cruised several times that afternoon. Its seediness was guaranteed by the fact that it sat in a strip mall between a peepshow and a liquor store with several wine drunks populating its curb. But it was the name of the place that had kept me from entering all day: The Blowhole.
Opening the door, a wash of red, like Ritchie’s blood dripping from the fourth-floor bathroom, came over me. As my eyes adjusted, the bar’s decor—lavic stalagmites, bamboo furniture, and images of oceanic geysers—made it clear The Blowhole wasn’t the gay hook-up spot I’d made it out to be.
A petite blonde setting up bottles introduced herself as Mina. I was the only other person in the bar, so it was clear she was talking to me. It was a new place, she said, had only been open a month. Before I could respond, she asked if I was going to play some guitar for her. I popped the latches and got to it.
Mina sat attentively while I started an upbeat number. At the end, childlike anticipation shined through her smile and applause. I played another and then another. It was my usual repertoire—Delta Blues, Hillbilly, Rock and Roll. Everything but the originals. Those seemed too sad for a place like that, for a perky type like Mina. A few songs later, Mina poured a multi-liquored concoction into a tall glass, dropped a toy umbrella in it, and pushed it in front of me. She asked if I could start that night.
I was good and drunk on fruity cocktails by the time The Blowholians—Mina’s term—filed in. They were a mix of Hollywood types: fashionable scenesters, shiny actors, and scantily-clad strippers from a nearby nudey place called The Last Veil. Sitting there, sucking my red straw, I was nervous as hell. Music was the only thing I’d ever been any good at—that and getting wasted—but it had always been difficult for me to play to a full house.
When Mina gave the sign, I downed my drink and ambled to the little stage at the far corner of the bar. Plugging into the house amp, I took a seat and began moaning into Mina’s old-timey mic. I choked lyrics and muffled notes through the first tunes, hoping to go unnoticed. It didn’t work.
The deep pain in me, the things I could never face head-on, the things I’d kept down for years with booze, drugs, sex—whatever was at hand—always came out in the music. It sure did that night. I scrunched my eyes against the applause, keeping out faces best I could—especially my own raccoon-eyed mug coming at me from the wide bar mirror across from the stage.
At the end of my set, Mina said it had gone “marvelously,” handed over two one-hundred-dollar bills, and asked me to return the following Monday. I requested smaller denominations, knowing those bills would be dangerous where I was going.
On the eastbound Sunset bus, I tried to find some resolve, telling myself it was still possible to head straight to 403. But Fifth Street, “The Nickel”, as skid row’s drug zone was known, was more or less on the way to The Union. I made sure it was more.
Passing scores of momentarily-lit ghost faces—flick-a-Bic crackheads—I came to a strip between Main and Spring where a few late-night skag dealers were still doing business. My mouth watered as I watched smacked-out skeletons holding their balance in the middle of a nod—stumbling forward, knees buckling—like mimes walking down the steep steps to hell.
Leaning against a wall of The Rosslyn Hotel—simultaneously the most decrepit and grand SRO I’d ever seen—a Black dude wearing an apple cap and sharp-creased jeans was doling out dope like he didn’t have a care in the world. I flashed my cash. He spit out a mouthful of brightly colored balloons. Ten-dollar bags. Six for fifty.
“Name’s Virgil,” he said as I turned to leave. “Always gonna do you right.”
With Ritchie and Rhonda gone, I decided to take over as the fourth-floor john’s needle-artist-in-residence. Of course, I could’ve fixed in 403, but the bathroom had a stronger lock, a deadbolt. When it clicked behind me, I got busy cooking tar chunks into black soup—I was a hungry, working man after all. After slamming, I added my own bloody backwash to Ritchie’s mural. But no skyline appeared in my squirts. No Hancock or Sears Tower. Just dribby, pink squiggles on a cracked ceiling.
When the last of the soup disappeared into me, the rusty rig slipped from my hand, hitting the linoleum with a ticklish plink. It was a funny, faraway sound. Maybe the funniest thing I’d ever heard. The funnier it became, the heavier my eyelids grew. As they drooped and finally fell shut, a choked laugh slobbered from my mouth. Nothing, not one little thing, could bother me behind those doors.
Jake La Botz's fiction has appeared in Mojo Journal, The MacGuffin, and Exacting Clam. His music and acting have been featured in film and television, including True Detective, Ghost World, Rambo (yes, Rambo). His debut collection of short fiction is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press. Oh, and he's probably playing at a bar near you. More at www.jakelabotz.com
by Jake La Botz
Ritchie ran in, gacked to the gills, and hid behind the clothes dangling from a chain in the corner of my ten-by-twelve room.
“Lock it, bro. She’s out there,” he whispered in a cartoony voice meant to conceal his own.
If the damn lock worked, Ritchie wouldn’t’ve been in my room in the first place.
I knew Ritchie less by his in-person antics and more by the blood squirts he left in the shared bathroom at the end of our hall. I had the shits a lot back then—no doubt from all the Yang’s Golden Eggroll—and often had to pound and holler multiple times before he’d come off a nod, a coke binge, or a combo of the two, and unlock the door. Why junkies have to decorate bathroom ceilings with the pink refuse water from their syringes, I can’t say, but they do, and he did every time he was in there.
I have to admit, part of me looked forward to seeing Ritchie’s needle compositions each day. For one thing, they gave a sense of human intimacy at a time in my life when there was absolutely none. What’s more, when I stared into them, they brought visions, images I’d been holding at bay with cheap beer, pushing them out of my skull and onto the fourth-floor bathroom’s ceiling—“the Sistine latrine,” as I called it. More often than not, it was the Chicago skyline that emerged from the squiggly streams, with the lake stretching out to the left as if viewed from the North Side, from Uptown. I’d sit there, peeping through a tiny hole in my fist, like a telescope, zeroing in on some way-up-there floor in The Hancock or Sears Tower, reducing every image to an emotionally-manageable size. It was different each time, but the people and situations, the things I’d forgotten or tried to forget, emerged plain as day, like I was right up against the skyscraper windows, spying it all.
There was a freedom—not all the way free, but bathroom free—sitting there, watching my past play out in Ritchie’s blood squirts. In those moments, I was a cave-dwelling Buddhist or a desert mystic, nearing the final breakthrough, edging toward peace with eternity and my place in it. But occasionally, when my nuts were fuller than usual or I had encountered someone alluring in the hall, I’d get shaken out of my monk-moment by feminine curves coming through Ritchie’s red designs. When that happened, inevitably, my fist telescope dropped from eye level to crotch level, converted into a meat wrench, and twisted my knob until my own biofluid design spunked into the small, shared space. I felt filthy afterward—every single time—wondering if jacking to another man’s bloodstains made me gay or just some kind of degenerate. Then again, there was nothing inside one’s mind that could compare with the filth of The Union Hotel’s fourth-floor bathroom. It had to be met on its own terms once in a while.
Since moving into the SRO three months earlier, me and Ritchie had never more than yelled through the bathroom door or chin-jutted in the hall, so I was surprised when he came bursting in that afternoon. It’s not like I was doing much, drinking, pretend-songwriting, wondering how to meet-a-nice-woman-in-a place-like-that, but it felt like a major interruption just the same.
“Ritchie!” Rhonda yelled.
Her voice was powerful, piercing—an opera singer nearing a glass-breaking decibel. It definitely shattered the glass-like equilibrium I’d been maintaining through beer drinking that morning.
As Rhonda’s voice trailed off, Ritchie came out from behind my clothes curtain and sat in one of the two folding chairs I’d inherited from the previous tenant. Part of me knew what was coming next, that I had already agreed to it by offering him refuge, inadvertent though it may have been. He spit a tight, red balloon out of his mouth, glistening as if polished for a photoshoot, and dropped it on the desk-I-used-for-a-table.
“I gotcha, bro,” he said, snatching a stainless steel spoon out of my fried rice leftovers, motioning for me to hand him a glass of water.
As he snapped the balloon open with long, yellow teeth, Ritchie gave me the once over, determining, I suppose, what my remittance should be for concealing him. No doubt my full pupils and alcoholic cheeks let him know I wasn’t in the bag. Yet somehow, he understood I was a veteran.
“Better not be holding out, Richard!” Rhonda hollered from the opposite end of the hall.
Seeing that Ritchie was about to drop the contents of the balloon, the whole sticky, black ball, into my now t-shirt-cleaned fried rice spoon, I grabbed his hand. I wasn’t about to share needles with Ritchie, a chili pimp who stayed loaded day and night by the efforts of his old lady Rhonda, who, according to my hotel neighbors, turned tricks in the backrooms and bathrooms of downtown strip joints when she was offstage. Ritchie, who left highly-used syringes stashed not only in our shared bathroom, but in every common area of the hotel. Ritchie, who just as soon as he finished cooking solid into liquid would be searching for a viable vein within the ulcerated craters of his arms, legs, feet, and hands. I’d known plenty of guys like Ritchie back home, and whatever diseases were circulating through his walking corpse, I sure as hell didn’t want them.
“You can smoke it,” he said, flicking a dismissive chunk at me.
I gave it the nose test. Strong and vinegary, like I could get high just from sniffing it.
When he registered, Ritchie’s voice and eyelids went down an octave.
“How’d you end up here, showbiz?” He moaned, motioning at the guitar standing in the corner of my room.
Setting the chunk in front of me, I explained, unironically, that I had moved to L.A. not seeking fame, but to get clean.
“No one moves to L.A. to kick heroin,” Ritchie chuckled, stashing his rusty rig under the milkcrates-I-used-for-a-bookcase.
It worked for nearly three months. It worked until Ritchie showed up with a big sticky ball of black tar. I’d never seen anything like it. The brown powder we copped in Chicago was like sawdust by comparison. The thing was, in Chicago, I had all the connects. All my friends were fiends. My enemies too. Even my landlord was a junkie. It was like living in heroin hell. No matter how much I wanted to quit, every person, place, and thing in Chi-town pointed back to a bag of brown. The cheapest and most effective way out of my dilemma, same as always, was the Greyhound. But I had to go farther than DeKalb, Detroit, Cincinnati, Nashville—the close-enough-to-get-home-in-a-day towns. I boarded a western-bound bus at Clark and Randolph with nothing other than my guitar and a fifth of Early Times. For four miserable days, I sweated, puked, and shat it out. I didn’t make any friends, that’s for sure.
“7th Street, Los Angeles. End of the line,” the bus driver shouted at the disembarking point.
The Union Hotel was just far enough off skid row to keep me from feeling like I’d sunk to the bottom, like I was “one of them.” But the main reason I picked the place was for the bar downstairs. The Union Tap was popular with hipster types who liked to live a little dangerously. My music was a sure fit.
After playing a few songs for Mario, the Union’s manager or owner—I never figured out which—we came to a deal. I’d play the Tap once a week in exchange for a small rent-free room on the fourth floor. He tossed me a brass key dangling from a diamond-shaped fob. 403 it said.
“I saw you run in the building, asshole!”
Ritchie lumbered toward my door and put his ear to it. He waggled something in his mouth while listening for Rhonda’s exact location.
“Fuckin’ baby tooth, ” he said.
“If yer in that bitch’s room downstairs, I will go upside your head, Ritchie!”
“Big one’s just behind it. Hurts like hell,” Ritchie groaned, cracking the door and slipping out of my room.
“You’re such a scumbag, you,” Rhonda yelled from the stairwell.
“Aww babe. I gotcher taste right here, babe…”
As the couple disappeared into their room to duel it out with blunt needles, I got down to eye level with the dope chunk on my desk. It seemed an autonomous being. A creature that had chosen to live with me. A someone who must be paid proper respect, given proper consideration. As such, I poured the dregs of my second-to-last beer into a shotglass and set it near the chunk, grabbing the last can from the mini-fridge for myself. We were old friends having a drink, that’s all.
Our conversation was pretty one-sided. I mean, the chunk just wouldn’t shut up.
Downing my beer, I considered that the situation was not at all my own creation. I hadn’t invited Ritchie in. I hadn’t asked him to share his balloon. It wasn’t one bit my fault that a strong-scented chunk of black tar heroin was now inhabiting 403. Therefore, I reasonably concluded, investigating further should be no problem.
Of course, I’d seen people smoke it—which had always seemed like a waste to me—but I wasn’t about to retrieve Ritchie’s dirty needle from under my milk crates. Anyway, shooting drugs would’ve meant defeat, straight back to heroin hell. Smoking, on the other hand, seemed morally ambiguous. Just a little toke. A smoky treat. Poof. No big deal.
I dumped my hardening fried rice out of its tin tray and wiped it clean, smoothing the aluminum and creasing it slightly in the middle. With great care, I dismembered a piece of the chunk and plopped it onto the aluminum. Rolling the tray’s paper lid into a tube, I flicked my lighter and sucked in the sweet and sour smoke rising from the skag sizzle—tastier than any Yang’s takeout, that’s for sure.
Though I went from zero to zombie in about a minute, I smoked another piece and then another. When it was nearly gone, I turned up a bluesy mixtape on my boombox and got down to eye level with the last crumb. I wanted to not-want-it, to leave it there like the last bite on a weight-watcher’s plate. But I did want it. More than anything.
Dropping the wee nugget on the tin tray, I noticed it looked like a little black tooth. A rotten baby canine. By the next day, I could feel the adult one poking at my gums. It’d been hiding in my jaw all along.
Ritchie and Rhonda came around regularly, but separately, after that, using my place as a hideout, a dope-cheater’s den. Why me, why my room, I never figured out, but my payment was always the same. A little chunk. A kiddy bump by their standards. A free ride on a petting zoo donkey. Though I doubt the visits meant much to Ritchie or Rhonda, all my hopes and fears were bound up in the arrival and departure of those sticky little gifts. L.A.’s funny like that. A person’s greatest dreams or worst nightmares can float right up to their door. They did to room 403 at The Union Hotel, that’s for sure.
A few weeks into the routine, Ritchie came hollering and banging, not at all the usual covert operation. Rhonda, it seemed, had been busted tricking and he didn’t have cash to bail her out or to score either. Hearing the news, I was shaken too. I’d been hoping, praying really, one of them would get me high that day. Ritchie, knowing I had nothing, didn’t bother to ask. Instead, he laid out a scheme for boosting merchandise from Mad Kaplan’s, an electronics store just down the block. Ritchie’s master plan was that I’d go in wearing a loose-fitting jacket while he kept an eye out. When I laughed at that, he produced a bottle of Barbie-pink nail polish and said we could use it to cover electronic barcodes at Best Buy. Only problem, he whispered, was they knew him there too, so once again I’d have to do the lifting.
Ritchie lisped when he whispered, which was endearing, like we were school kids pretending to be criminals. Still, I wasn’t about to be his sidekick in anything, let alone theft. And yet there was a serious problem posed by the overall situation: what was I gonna do about the wolf-sized fang pushing through my gums?
Ritchie, discovering I wasn’t “a down bro”, threatened no more freebies, cursed me to hell, and stormed off, presumably to bust car windows or snatch purses.
I paced 403, pissed at Ritchie and Rhonda, pissed at the world. My only recourse was to visit Sheila downstairs at the Tap. She was always good for a six-pack. There was a new guy working the bar when I walked in. A hard-on named Joel from Boston or someplace. I mentioned that I played the Friday afterwork slot, “Unhappy Hour” as my set was known. He said he’d caught my act, didn’t like it much. I didn’t bother asking for the beer.
Back in 403, I sat staring at my old, off-brand guitar. It was in even worse shape than me. The body was cracked from where I’d dropped it, kicked it, and—more than once—used it to defend myself. The action was so high you could’ve shot arrows with it. All in all, the thing was too worthless to pawn, though, believe me, I had tried. In the entire world, I was probably the only person who could strangle anything remotely musical out of that beater. But don’t feel sorry for the guitar. It had cracked me as much as I had cracked it. From years of chording its baseball bat neck, my hands had become as warped as it was. Manipulating that beast of a box was about all my mitts were good for anymore. It was a dysfunctional relationship, no doubt about it. Me and that guitar needed each other in the worst way, but more than anything, we needed to get out of 403 and make some money.
The problem was, since arriving in Los Angeles, I’d developed a sort of social anxiety. More specifically, a fear of seeing people. If I looked at anyone more than a moment—particularly without the nullifying effects of booze and drugs—I saw things. Terrible things. The longer I stared, the more a person’s ugliest physical traits and worst personality flaws came popping out—creepy caricatures that called my own foulest features to the fore as well. As such, I rarely left 403, keeping all interactions with people and reflective glass down to a minimum when I absolutely had to walk out that door. But with no drugs, no beer, no money and with Friday, gig day, four days away, there was no choice. Scrounging pennies from every pocket corner, I grabbed the guitar, walked six blocks to Sunset Blvd. and caught a Hollywood-bound bus.
Passing a western-themed strip mall called Gower Gulch—the first Hollywoodesque structure I’d seen since boarding—I pulled the cord and hopped off. My plan, as always, was to walk into a bar, ask for the boss, and play them a few songs. If they weren’t willing to pay, offer to play for drinks and tips. But like I said, looking at people was a nightmare. On the other hand, there’s nothing like desperation to make one malleable to the unwanted.
A half hour into my meandering, I found a little joint on Hollywood Blvd. called Jack’s Sugar Shack. It was near-empty, which suited me. Inside, I approached the bartender and started my spiel. Before I got a sentence deep, he slid to the opposite end of the bar and began fiddling with the register. Not to be put off, I followed the nonchalant bottle jockey, making sure he could hear me above the jukebox. But not only did he not acknowledge me, no one else in the room did either. Tough crowd, I thought, swinging my guitar back out the door.
Remaining malleable, I hit up other local drinking establishments— Bar Deluxe, Boardner’s, The White Horse. Oddly, it was the same each time. The bartenders, bosses—or whoever I encountered—weren’t antagonistic. They didn’t throw me out or yell. They just plain ignored me.
Stopping at a bus bench near Sunset and La Brea, I sat and stewed on my invisibility. Maybe it’s just Hollywood, I thought. The place itself. A town full of people desperately trying to be discovered. Obviously, I could relate to the desperate part. My entire adult life had been nothing more than a series of desperate moves, mostly related to getting loaded or getting clean. Sure, I had music. But it was only an extension of the desperation—a way to score booze, drugs, Chinese takeout, occasional sex. If I’d ever had hopes or dreams related to music, they were buried in some foggy, back-of-the-brain place. Ambition, life goals—a plan bigger than basic survival—those parts of me were either dead or had never been born at all. The more I reflected on it, the more I realized what a total and utter failure I’d become. Not just at regular guy things, but as a junkie too. I mean, even Ritchie, whose soul had long been lost to the numina of narcotics, was more goal-oriented than I was. More than once, he’d blabbed about his former life as a champion surfer. A title, he insisted, that he’d reclaim one sunny day.
A sudden, terrible thought came over me: What if I was nothing more than an electrical impulse, a magnetic pull toward drug-induced oblivion?
In my mind, I saw Ritchie flipping a chunk of tar at me, snickering his whiny, half-laugh, saying, “No one moves to L.A. to kick dope.” The scene replayed again and again until it became a maddening, two-second loop.
Ha ha, no one. Ha ha, no one. Ha ha…
An approaching bus caught my attention just then. I jumped in the street, desperately trying to flag it down. But the driver didn’t stop. Or even honk. He just stared straight ahead, soaring past. Panicking, I scanned the intersection for the nearest human. Anyone who could verify my existence.
In the near distance, a man wearing too many clothes and talking to himself was walking my way. Dismissing him as too crazy to query on the serious subject of animateness, my eyes darted around the landscape, searching for a more reliable candidate. There were none to be had. As the jabbering man approached, he became quieter. Then, when he was right upon me, he set his bags down, looked me dead in the eye, and shouted,
“No, you don’t, not today!”
I don’t know how else to say it—time stopped. In that moment, there was no one on earth but the two of us. We were like honeymoon lovers or mortal enemies. An explosion of tears threatened to burst from him or from me, I couldn’t tell which. And then quite abruptly, in a high, feminine voice, the man started to titter and then to giggle. Soon it became a big, roaring laugh. A laugh not at me, but for me. And for the first time in a long time, I laughed too.
As the one-man chorus gathered his burden of bags and shuffled away, I began to relax, to move on from my meltdown. Something in me had shifted. I wasn’t suddenly brimming-with-ambition, but I was ready, at least, to land a gig.
Renewing my search, I passed a joint I’d already cruised several times that afternoon. Its seediness was guaranteed by the fact that it sat in a strip mall between a peepshow and a liquor store with several wine drunks populating its curb. But it was the name of the place that had kept me from entering all day: The Blowhole.
Opening the door, a wash of red, like Ritchie’s blood dripping from the fourth-floor bathroom, came over me. As my eyes adjusted, the bar’s decor—lavic stalagmites, bamboo furniture, and images of oceanic geysers—made it clear The Blowhole wasn’t the gay hook-up spot I’d made it out to be.
A petite blonde setting up bottles introduced herself as Mina. I was the only other person in the bar, so it was clear she was talking to me. It was a new place, she said, had only been open a month. Before I could respond, she asked if I was going to play some guitar for her. I popped the latches and got to it.
Mina sat attentively while I started an upbeat number. At the end, childlike anticipation shined through her smile and applause. I played another and then another. It was my usual repertoire—Delta Blues, Hillbilly, Rock and Roll. Everything but the originals. Those seemed too sad for a place like that, for a perky type like Mina. A few songs later, Mina poured a multi-liquored concoction into a tall glass, dropped a toy umbrella in it, and pushed it in front of me. She asked if I could start that night.
I was good and drunk on fruity cocktails by the time The Blowholians—Mina’s term—filed in. They were a mix of Hollywood types: fashionable scenesters, shiny actors, and scantily-clad strippers from a nearby nudey place called The Last Veil. Sitting there, sucking my red straw, I was nervous as hell. Music was the only thing I’d ever been any good at—that and getting wasted—but it had always been difficult for me to play to a full house.
When Mina gave the sign, I downed my drink and ambled to the little stage at the far corner of the bar. Plugging into the house amp, I took a seat and began moaning into Mina’s old-timey mic. I choked lyrics and muffled notes through the first tunes, hoping to go unnoticed. It didn’t work.
The deep pain in me, the things I could never face head-on, the things I’d kept down for years with booze, drugs, sex—whatever was at hand—always came out in the music. It sure did that night. I scrunched my eyes against the applause, keeping out faces best I could—especially my own raccoon-eyed mug coming at me from the wide bar mirror across from the stage.
At the end of my set, Mina said it had gone “marvelously,” handed over two one-hundred-dollar bills, and asked me to return the following Monday. I requested smaller denominations, knowing those bills would be dangerous where I was going.
On the eastbound Sunset bus, I tried to find some resolve, telling myself it was still possible to head straight to 403. But Fifth Street, “The Nickel”, as skid row’s drug zone was known, was more or less on the way to The Union. I made sure it was more.
Passing scores of momentarily-lit ghost faces—flick-a-Bic crackheads—I came to a strip between Main and Spring where a few late-night skag dealers were still doing business. My mouth watered as I watched smacked-out skeletons holding their balance in the middle of a nod—stumbling forward, knees buckling—like mimes walking down the steep steps to hell.
Leaning against a wall of The Rosslyn Hotel—simultaneously the most decrepit and grand SRO I’d ever seen—a Black dude wearing an apple cap and sharp-creased jeans was doling out dope like he didn’t have a care in the world. I flashed my cash. He spit out a mouthful of brightly colored balloons. Ten-dollar bags. Six for fifty.
“Name’s Virgil,” he said as I turned to leave. “Always gonna do you right.”
With Ritchie and Rhonda gone, I decided to take over as the fourth-floor john’s needle-artist-in-residence. Of course, I could’ve fixed in 403, but the bathroom had a stronger lock, a deadbolt. When it clicked behind me, I got busy cooking tar chunks into black soup—I was a hungry, working man after all. After slamming, I added my own bloody backwash to Ritchie’s mural. But no skyline appeared in my squirts. No Hancock or Sears Tower. Just dribby, pink squiggles on a cracked ceiling.
When the last of the soup disappeared into me, the rusty rig slipped from my hand, hitting the linoleum with a ticklish plink. It was a funny, faraway sound. Maybe the funniest thing I’d ever heard. The funnier it became, the heavier my eyelids grew. As they drooped and finally fell shut, a choked laugh slobbered from my mouth. Nothing, not one little thing, could bother me behind those doors.
Jake La Botz's fiction has appeared in Mojo Journal, The MacGuffin, and Exacting Clam. His music and acting have been featured in film and television, including True Detective, Ghost World, Rambo (yes, Rambo). His debut collection of short fiction is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press. Oh, and he's probably playing at a bar near you. More at www.jakelabotz.com