Hell's Half Acre (12 page)

The vodka is gone, I say.

Jack and ginger then, she says.

The crushed pulp of limes. My eyes water. I consider opening the drawer to my left but don’t. I mix the drinks like a robot. Jude is watching me in the vanity mirror.

You have a nice body, she says. For a junkie.

I stare back at her, wary. Thank you.

It’s not hairy, she says. And it’s almost perfectly symmetrical.

I regard myself in the mirror and decide that I am malnourished and freakishly pale, considering that I spent the last few years living on the edge of my imaginary desert. I’m no ghost but three days in this room and I have started to fade rapidly, to disappear. Jude is brown as deerskin.

Fuck it.

I move out of her line of sight, then open the drawer to my left. There is a brief, contemplative silence. I turn on the cold water tap and hope that Jude will think I am brushing my teeth, that she will not register the sound of an otherwise intelligent man snorting a bump of cheap brown heroin that may or may not be poison. Jude has forbidden me to touch it because yesterday, when she was taking an endless bubble bath I got restless and snorted too much of it. Jude came out of the bathroom with a towel around her head and found me nodding and drooling and grunting like a monkey that can’t decide where he wants to lie down and die and soon I was feverish and hallucinating and spewing a grim yellow substance from my mouth and ass.

The heroin has turned me into jelly. I carefully give Jude her drink, then float backwards into a chair and spill my own drink all over myself. It feels nice, actually.

Bananafish, I say. Let’s go fishing for bananafish.

Jude sips her drink, staring at me. Her eyes are sharp as nails and I can feel them poking through to the back of my head.

You opened the drawer, she says.

Oh that’s true.

She stands on the bed, naked and very tall. I peer up at her from my sunken position, Jack and ginger pooling in my bellybutton. She drains her glass and I watch as her face shrinks through the bottom
of it. I’m sure I have a stupid expression on my face but there’s nothing I can do about it and now Jude throws the glass over my head. She throws it sidearm like a shortstop and it curves slowly past my line of sight to crash into the wall.

I told you to stay out of that drawer for a while.

Ummm.

Jude pulls on underpants, staring at me. She takes a big black gun from beneath her pillow, one I had not known was there. Looks to be a Glock 37, a serious fucking weapon. I wonder how many guns she’s got hidden around this room like deadly Easter eggs and now that I think about it, I’ve lost track of that Walther she gave me the other day. I’ve a bad habit of misplacing weapons when I’m high. Jude checks the clip, glances down the sight at me. I’m fairly confident that she won’t shoot me because our relationship has evolved. Now she hops on the bed and bounces up and down, rising like a dead leaf caught in a warm updraft. The room has low gravity.

You need to get dressed, she says.

Why?

Because we have a meeting.

I don’t understand.

A meeting, she says. It’s when two or more humans sit down together and talk.

Oh, I say. That sounds horrible.

Too bad, she says. It’s been three days and Miller is getting clinical. I told him we would meet him for cocktails at six.

What does he want?

What do you think he wants? To discuss the film.

I shake my head, violently. Fuck that, I say.

Please, she says. Pull yourself together.

No, I say. Not gonna do it.

I want her to stop bouncing and I’m about to say so when she springs across the gap between bed and chair and lands in my lap. Jude is very light on her feet and somehow I don’t start hemorrhaging upon impact. Now she sinks her teeth into my nose and my peripheral vision disappears.

Get dressed, she says.

Yes. Why not.

A walk sounds fine. The legs are functioning like never before. Brilliant glowing hole where my face used to be but that’s no trouble. Personal supernova. I rumble around the room, negotiating with my clothes. Black jeans and black T shirt and brown leather jacket. Feeling colorful, yes. I dress myself without difficulty and I’m confident it’s a pretty rapid process but when I finish lacing my boots, Jude is smoking maybe her ninth cigarette and gazing at me with disgust. I see that she is wearing a much more complicated outfit than mine. Pale silver boots that buckle up to the knees and a black skirt with steel zippers up the sides, a transparent orange shirt and some kind of black nylon vest that looks to be painted on. She has applied immaculate lipstick and she still holds that gun, I notice.

On your feet, she says.

She takes my outstretched hand and drags me over to the vanity area. Taps the mirror with a short blunt fingernail. The mirror ripples like water but does not break.

Look, she says.

I look in the mirror and I see what she sees. My hair is dirty but not so short and frightening now that I have stopped cutting it myself. I could use a shave, but none of my clothes are inside out. Probably I have looked worse in the past, a lot worse. Jude looks great, though. She looks like she should be with some other guy, someone
much younger and cooler and altogether more hygienic than me.

You’re staring, she says.

I like to look at you.

Jude hands me a pink CD jewel case that previously held a mysterious software called Darkstar. Jude has a slick new laptop and lately she likes to disappear online when I become dull or impotent. I was sure she would spend most of her time hitting porn sites but was somehow not surprised to learn that she is in fact a compulsive day trader. Jude has changed since I saw her last. She has become infinitely more competent and dangerous than even before. There are two fat lines of coke chopped onto the pink plastic case. I reach for a red cocktail straw and snort them without hesitation.

Phineas has a dubious policy about cocaine: When it’s offered him, he tends to do a lot of it.

I rub a little into my teeth and suddenly I look much better in the mirror.

I’m a handsome motherfucker, I say.

Jude opens the drawer that contains the stash of bad heroin. She removes the foil lump and shows it to me. Her left eyebrow goes up.

Are you paying attention?

I nod and follow her into the bathroom and watch as she flushes the little package down the toilet without comment.

There’s still plenty of cocaine, I say.

Jude turns. You’re not that handsome.

I smile provocatively at her, then turn and vomit into the sink.

I
NTERNAL DISTORTION, OVERLOAD
. Too many conflicting desires and anxieties and I walk five blocks without thinking about where I’m going.

Flesh, perhaps. Inexpensive flesh.

Jude was pretty irritated about the vomiting. She said some very nasty things that I’m sure she didn’t mean, then went to meet Miller without me. I took a couple of Vicodin and went to sleep.

That was yesterday.

I woke up the next morning and she hadn’t come back. I took a bath and called room service for some breakfast. I needed a drink and thought solid food would be an interesting plot twist but I found the bacon too crunchy and alarming and the Western omelet downright objectionable. I drank the bloody mary and went back to sleep. There was no sign of Jude when I woke up and I formed the theory that she was busy fucking Miller to death and taking her sweet time about it.

I want to lose myself for a while. I want the anonymous touch of a whore. The streets are fuzzy. The hiss of traffic on wet blacktop sounds like analog, like vinyl. I’m angry and not sure why. I vaguely remember telling Jude that I don’t get jealous but now I’m thinking that was a lie. The swirl of cigarette smoke and ruined voices around the corner. I come upon two women with thick, muscled shoulders and narrow hips, heavy thighs. Terrible mouths and the bodies of men. I ask them to point me in the direction of the Tenderloin and they commence to hoot and holler. They ask me what I’m looking for.

Gratification, sympathy. False intimacy.

I don’t know, I say. Maybe a massage.

Honey, says one. I know just what you need.

Lord yes, says the other. Four hands better than one. You come along with Sorrow and me and we gonna take care of you. You think you gone to heaven.

Sorrow? I say.

That’s right, says the first one. My name is Sorrow and this my sister, Milky Way.

Temptation.

I am briefly tempted by the horror of another rented room. The sour sheets. The stink of boiled skin, the heavy perfume. The flicker of dying light. The panic and grind of Latin pop music. The raw, foreign hands of two transvestites with such unlikely names.

Invasion, humiliation.

I could easily lose myself, I think.

No, thanks. I’m looking for a regular girl.

Oh, honey. Now that’s rude.

I believe you want to apologize, sucker.

I’m sorry. I’m looking for a different girl.

Uh huh. You sorry as can be.

What kind of girl?

I don’t know. Foreign.

They laugh and screech like mad chickens and Milky Way finally tells me to go fuck myself.

Jude and I are two people, not one. Funny but I have to remind myself of that sometimes. The velvet warms and binds but I don’t really know her. I don’t know what’s in her heart. I am safe with her for one day, two. The cocoon is temporary and what do I want. Obliteration. The ability to fly.

I tell myself to shut up, to keep walking. I have four hundred dollars. Enough to take me back to Flagstaff, to a mattress on the floor. Dishwater skin and bourbon in a jelly jar and a window with an unbroken view of the sky. The edge of the desert. I can listen to public radio and daydream about Atlantis and I can satisfy my physical hunger with my own two hands. I can destroy myself, if necessary. I stop in the middle of the street and look down at my open hands. The little finger of my left hand has twice been broken, and is now crooked. Otherwise they are ordinary hands with but one visible scar between them. Twenty-nine stitches on the palm of my right hand that effectively wiped out my life line. I tell people that it happened in a knife fight but the truth is that I was the only one involved. The wail of a car horn and someone yells at me to get the Christ out of the road.

I keep walking, keep walking.

This is the wrong way.

I am moving slowly uphill and I have a feeling that the Tenderloin
should be down from here. I should be moving in a downward spiral. But perhaps this is metaphorical thinking. Or would that be irony, symbolism. These things are vaguely defined in our culture. This is San Francisco and eventually I will find whatever it is I’m looking for.

The Paradise Spa on Hemlock, a nasty little alley off Van Ness. Tanning and oriental massage. The very same establishment recommended me by young Jeremy. The sign is barely visible from the street and I might have easily walked by it. Blue neon, pale and wispy. Tucked in along a doughnut shop, a Vietnamese grocery. The Paradise Spa is open until midnight. Because you never know. You never know when you might suffer a pinched nerve, or when you might want to do a little maintenance on that tan. I wonder if they even have tanning beds.

The front door needs a coat of paint.

Open it and step inside and I’m facing a steel mesh door, locked. Dark red curtain behind it. To the right of the door is a small black sign with white lettering that tells me a half hour massage is fifty dollars. A whole hour is very economical at eighty dollars. Tanning is twenty bucks for twenty minutes but who gives a shit. To the left of the door is a buzzer. Press it with my thumb, briefly.

The red curtain is pulled aside and the face of a troll appears, shriveled and brown as a peach pit with black eyes bright. The eyes study me a long moment. Troll apparently decides I am neither cop nor psycho because the door is unlocked.

Come, she says.

Troll takes me by the wrist with little claw, pulls me inside.

Come. You ever be here before?

No.

You want half hour?

I want to be agreeable. Yes, I say. The half hour.

Come.

Warm, soft light. Japanese prints on the walls of the hallway. The furniture is cheap, simple. The kind of shit you find in a Holiday Inn. Troll leads me down the hall past several closed doors, her sandals flapping softly on tile floor. I hear whispers.

Then grunting, man or pig.

Pulse quickening now. Troll shows me to a tiny room with bed and chair. The bed is covered with white towels. On the wall above the bed is a shelf with yellow lamp and radio, a box of tissues, and various oils and lotions. The radio is tuned to soft jazz, elevator-style. Troll holds out her hand, impatient. The money, yes. Fumble in pockets and produce fifty dollars.

You need shower, she says.

What?

Take shower. You wash.

No. I’m clean.

Troll makes a nasty smacking sound with her leather tongue, stares at me. I stare back at her, hoping she doesn’t insist on the shower. I feel relatively cozy in the confines of this room and I just want her to close the door, to go away. I don’t like this idea of a shower at all. I would be vulnerable, paranoid under bright lights. I would be slippery and exposed and I don’t want my asshole inspected.

I don’t want a shower.

Troll stares at me and I decide she wants an explanation.

I’m afraid someone will steal my shoes.

Troll frowns and sighs. Undress, she says. Lie on bed.

The door closes behind her and I sit down in the chair. Unlace my
boots with fingers numb, unresponsive. Wonder how it is that my hands fall asleep in my pockets. I flex them a few times. Touch left thumb to throat and find my pulse is racing. I shove the boots and socks under the chair and out of sight. Pull off the rest of my clothes and try to fold them but I’m incompetent and finally heap them on the chair. I stand naked beside the bed a moment, staring at the radio. The soft jazz is maddening and I flick at the tuning knob until I find Patsy Cline and stop. I turn around in a manic circle because country stations are tricky. Patsy may be followed by Kenny Rogers or worse. I tell myself to lie down. There’s a laminated notice on the wall above the radio that lists the house rules of Paradise Spa, with a lot of misplaced apostrophes and inappropriate italics. The thing is framed, like a diploma. Translation: no alcohol, no illegal drugs, no weapons, no violence. No solicitation and no sexual acts of any kind because the Paradise is a wholesome place.