Pain Killers (30 page)

“Cathy, honey, when’s the last time you went to sleep?”

“I don’t know. Is it today?”

“Help me get her out of here,” Tina said.

I danced with the stars through the obstacle course of shit and piss bowls and knocked-over bottles. “Maybe we should come back in hazmat suits.”

“Too late,” Tina said, “I’ve already breathed the fumes.”

“Me too. The sick part is I like it.” I took one of the girl’s arms, and Tina took the other. “That’s the beauty of drugs,” I said. “Who needs Mengele when you can turn your own body into a biohazard?”

It did not cheer me up that Cathy was our best hope.

Suddenly we heard a scream, and Tina left me holding Cathy to hopscotch across the room and open a closet door. Inside was a Chinese girl with a bowl haircut, naked, chewing her lips and smoking speed.

Seeing her, Cathy came to life, eyes wide with jangled reverence. “Lee-Lee! We thought you were in heaven!”

Lee-Lee clamped her hands over her ears, then waved them in front of her, batting away the flying things we’d let in with the light. She was frantic to explain but could only string words together with difficulty. The corners of her mouth were caked in white paste. When she managed to speak, tiny speed feathers puffed out of her mouth. “Bitch!…My feet are like…
the Devil!…
You stole my candy cane!”

“Cathy, make sense or shut up,” Tina said, offering her hand to the Chinese girl. “Lee-Lee, come on.”

The naked girl hid the pipe behind her back like a five-year-old. I watched Tina gently unclench her fingers and remove it. She threw the pipe to me and I nearly dropped the thing. It was still hot.

“That’s my candy cane!” Cathy shrieked, blowing out more whites. “God is like…
You better
…”

“That’s okay, sweetie. Manny will hold your candy cane,” Tina said. “He’ll make sure nobody takes it.”

I grabbed a pink halter from a pile in the closet and wrapped it around the scorching glass. Lee-Lee stared like she was waiting for the commercial to be over. Tina excavated a pair of moderately stained Juicy sweats. Tina helped Cathy put them on over her three-day panties, talking softly as she tugged them up. “Lee-Lee, how long have you been in here?”

“In where, Mami?”

She spoke like she was on TV in her head. Tina shot me a glance that said
You can’t save them all.
I tossed her a dingy wife beater. She maneuvered Cathy into it while I dug up a pair of flip-flops and a shiny blue jacket with CHRISTIAN FUN GIRLS fake-graffiti’d across the Jesus-in-a-crown-of-thongs logo across the back. Marked with a little TM in a circle.

“So the reverend has his own clothing line?”

“Everybody has a clothing line,” Tina said. “Why not a religious pimp?”

Tina sat sideways in her Prius, holding hands with Cathy, who vibrated in the backseat. I drove aimlessly down Van Nuys Boulevard while my ex tried her patented tactic of compassion and slaps to try to get the girl talking. She was still trying after half an hour.

“Remember the German doctor, honey?”
Slap
.
“Cathy!” Slap.
“Sweetheart, you really need to pay attention.”

“Fuck!” I interrupted. “It’s already six o’clock.”

“Manny, please. Just drive.”

“Yeah,
Manny-pants.
Just
drive.
” Finally inspired to speak, Cathy lapsed into a bad Marilyn. “The hair doctor,” she giggled.

Tina laughed along with her. “You mean he asked you to call him ‘Herr Doctor’?”

“Unh-huh. He’s the
hair
doctor.”

“What color was his hair?”

“I dyed it blond.”

“He lived close, right?”

“Reseda.”

“You remember the address?”

“On Seaview. I remember. Seaview Apartments.”

Time was passing. “I’m sure there’s only a few hundred of those.”

“She’ll remember,” Tina snapped. “Just go.”

“Maybe we should give her a Valium,” I suggested. Now I wished I
had
stolen Dinah’s Valiums. I kept seeing her wrong-way face in the windshield instead of the traffic of Van Nuys Boulevard. The last flashback, I had to hit the brakes to keep from rear-ending a Hummer. Then something thumped on the back of my seat. I whipped around and saw Cathy banging her face off the upholstery.

Tina tried to grab her. “Cathy! Sweetie, stop that!”

The light changed and I had to watch the road again. Suddenly Cathy screamed, her voice charged with passion.
“My vagina is a gift from Jesus!”

I nearly swerved into a bus.

“One of the reverend’s slogans,” Tina said.

Cathy had begun to sway in the backseat like a human metronome. The swaying got faster and faster, until Tina reached under the seat and pulled out a short dog of Old Mr. Boston. Cherry brandy. “I keep it for colds,” she said before taking Cathy’s face in her capable hands. “Come on, honey.”

Cathy sank backward after a blast of brandy. She coughed some up and gagged. Then she swallowed and let out a long sigh, like she’d remembered how to breathe again.

“Yum,” she mumbled, just south of a slur. “I took the virginity pledge four years ago, after Laura Bush came to our high school and opened her white first lady Bible to First Thessalonians four:three to four. ‘God wants you to be holy, so he shall keep thy female chalice free of sin and foulness.’ That’s why I remember the hair doctor’s address. ’Cause it was four-three-four-four.”

It made sense to her. Which is all that mattered.

The rest of the drive, Tina slapped and cherry-brandied Cathy. She cooed her down off the methedrine ledge, dialed her crank-fed psychosis back to simple mania. Cathy relaxed. She got chatty and let us in on Christian escort tips. I wanted to know if her clients were born again or disciples of Satan. “What kind of man wants to defile a nice Christian girl?”

“
Defile?
That’s what you would do,” Tina said, though she didn’t sound mad about it.

The day got dark. Dusk showed up and left. Traffic crawled. The night was a slow drive through drying concrete. We watched a blue-haired matron in a white Eldorado apply depilatory to her lip while her husband, whose eyebrows barely topped the steering wheel, snuck hateful glances at her.

“Marriage,” snorted Tina. “And yet, I look at them and I’m jealous.”

This set Cathy off again. “Marriage is why I save my maidenhood,” she recited. “‘Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to a lifetime of purity. I promise sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter into biblical matrimony.’” She took another taste of Old Mr. Boston and snorted. “Like, that
sounds
nice, okay? But, like, all the girls at Reverend D’s talk about is Jesus and sex. Sometimes—I shouldn’t even say this—we talk about sex
with
Jesus. Well, think about it! We
are
saving ourselves for capital-H Him, right? We say it’s for our future husband—
Oh goodie, a beefy UPS man with butt acne!
—but we hold on to the secret desire. Like, sometimes at night, I think about Jesus, in a tank top, with bulging muscles. He has long golden hair like in the Bible pictures. Fabio hair.”

Cathy’s story didn’t add up, but I didn’t press her. Lots of stories don’t add up. Or else they add up but the math is wrong. Especially when there’s a lot of bathtub stimulant sprinkled in.

We passed a minivan that reopened my San Quentin minivan wounds. I caught Cathy’s eye in the rearview. “I don’t mean to be crude. But about the chastity thing? Is it true? You do everything with tricks except—”

“I don’t call them tricks. I call them love partners.”

“That’s what I meant,” I lied. “So you do everything with your love partners including…”

“Anal?” She tossed her hair sideways and hugged her knees. “Why don’t you just come out and say it, doofus?” She suddenly rolled the window down and stuck her head out of it. “Anal!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
“Anal anal anal anal!”
Until Tina grabbed her by the arm and slapped her.

Cathy sat back and began talking normally again, as if the smack and “anal” hollering were just what she needed to relax. “You think born-again guys don’t like the back door? Well let me tell you, most of them are mouches—half-man, half-couch. Like, anal makes them feel all
gangster.
”

Talking about it got her metronomey again. Her vibrating made me dizzy. Tina pulled her close and held her. When she stroked her hair, Cathy regressed instantly. “I need to sleep or do more, Mommy.”

“Then you go to sleep, honey. Just lie down and let it happen.” Tina spelled words on her forehead with her finger. “You’re going to be f-i-n-e.”

Cathy pouted, then tipped sideways, apparently unconscious, mouth agape and snoring gently.

“Nice work,” I said to Tina.

“I used to have to say that to myself,” she said.

A second later Cathy bolted upright, ripped open the door and tried to fling herself out at a crosswalk.

“Anal!” This time she wasn’t screaming so much as wailing. “Anal, anal, anal!”

Tina managed to reel her in quickly. Either nobody’d heard the outburst or nobody thought it was that odd.

I kept my hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead. “For Christ’s sake, Tina, either flag down a cop and ask him to arrest us, or put a lid on her.”

“Hey, be glad I put her in a seat belt. Besides, nobody cares.”

Tina sat back and closed her eyes. She was more tired than I was, and I’d been too tired to notice. “It’s YouTube,” she said wearily. “People are hard to shock because so much that’s supposed to be shocking is staged. And the really shocking stuff nobody looks at.”

She rolled her head sideways on the headrest and sighed. “I’m sorry I blabbed. I have to tell you something. The reverend did come on to me.”

I pounded the steering wheel. “I knew it!”

“No, listen,” she said. “I told him there was nothing he had that you didn’t have bigger and better. After that, I never had a problem. I just do the work. The reverend’s not a bad guy for a pimp. It’s okay till I find a less fucked-up gig.”

“You went to Yale,” I said.

“I know, baby. I also went to my dealer’s house. And then I married him.”

“The ghost of Marvin rears its ugly head.”

“I’m just saying.” Tina gave Cathy’s hair an idle stroke. “I know I’m not great at making a living. I’m not the only person in the world with that problem. You take these gigs to survive and be an artist, then the gigs get big and the art gets small.”

“And here we are,” I said, “four-three-four-four.”

A chain slung between two posts held up the graffitied announcement: RENTING NOW—BACHELORS AVAILABLE!!!

“It’s all about those three exclamation points,” I said as Tina eased Cathy sideways on the seat. “They really convey the excitement that any bachelor would feel about moving in.”

The place was identical to thousands all over the Valley: two stories of painted-over cinder block, sky-blue washed to rancid mayonnaise by sunlight and acid rain, swimming pool visible through glass double doors in front.

High on the faded wall, in a carefree 1970s come-on-in-and-live-the-dream California swirl, was the name the original owners had seen fit to give the building. Sea View Apartments. The Pacific was seventeen miles away, which was still a lot closer than it was to Buffalo.

“Smart place to hide,” said Tina, locking the door on Cathy after we stepped out of the car. We hadn’t gone two steps when the reverend’s voice blared behind us.
“Man washes a bitch’s feet, that’s a man ain’t afraid to act like somethin’ LESS’n a man….”

I ran back and banged on the passenger window. Tina beeped the doors unlocked but Cathy, holding one of the reverend’s CD boxes, hunched over the CD player as if trying to drink the words.
“…Jesus act like a foot-washing little puss, ’cause he know, he SO MUCH A MAN ain’t nobody gonna call his ass out. Jesus was bad enough to be a BITCH!”

“You babysit her,” I said. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

I walked into the grubby lobby, if you could call it that, and studied the names on the directory. It was the old-fashioned kind in a glass case, with plastic white letters pressed onto a black plush background. “What name…What name?” I glanced back at Tina. She appeared to be speaking into the window and banging the roof, I guessed for emphasis. I was glad I could keep an eye on her, thanks to the parking space I was lucky enough to grab by a fire hydrant.

Reading down the directory, I spotted
Ullman—5A.
And pressed his buzzer. I pressed again and heard a squall of babies over which a thick Latino accent tried to communicate.
“Quien es?”

“Is Dr. Ullman there?”

“Nadie en casa!”

Nobody home. Perfect. He might have said something else, but the babies drowned him out. I could imagine no circumstance in which Josef Mengele would let Latino babies crawl on his floor. Sweeping a pile of Thai takeout menus off the windowsill, I saw a dozen letters scattered about unclaimed. Not many people would use this entrance. Anybody visiting or living there would park underneath, take the elevator up. In most parts of the Valley, walking was suspicious. I leafed through the abandoned mail.

Near the bottom of the pile, there were three letters rolled in a rubber band. Addressed to Fritz Ullman. The name was visible in a transparent window, across which someone—maybe someone busy with an apartment full of screaming children—had scrawled MUVED. All three letters were mailed from L.A. Small Animal Rescue Shelter. I memorized the address before I put the envelopes in my back pocket, in case someone stole my pants.

I ran back to the car in time to grab Cathy, who’d managed to jump out. She was weaving on the sidewalk, reciting in violent singsong, “Yea though I walk through the condo of meth.”

Seconds before I snatched her, Cathy danced into the street and hiked up her T-shirt, flashing her rashy, malnourished tits and screaming at passing cars,
“Who wants Christmas?”
I had to hold my hand up like a traffic cop and snatch her, then pin her to the passenger door until traffic thinned enough to open it. Misreading the gesture, Cathy screamed, “Rape!” and started whipping her head from side to side, making a scene. Tina banged on the window.
Open the door!
But I couldn’t—cars were shooting by so close behind me the door handles grazed my jacket.