Unpaid Dues (24 page)

Thor was always armed, Munch thought, then realized
that McManis was waiting for an out-loud answer. "Is there any
way I can get a copy of what you're reading from?"

"Sure. It's from a book of jury
instructions—what the judge reads when he instructs the jury. I
refer to this all the time when I want a succinct statement of law
without all the doublespeak. I'1l have my secretary make a copy for
you." He pressed a button on his phone.

Eighty bucks later, Munch returned to her car. Even
behind the familiar steering wheel, she felt no control. Every
short-haired man around her looked like a cop. She wondered for a
moment if Thor was in on the conspiracy Maybe he'd come to the
meeting as a plant and was wearing a wire, hoping to draw her into an
admission. It was crazy thinking and didn't pan out for a variety of
reasons. Shit, he had done much worse. He was up there in the
apartment. It was his knife, probably his idea. But what if he told
his version first, made some kind of deal with the cops? Did they
believe the first witness who came forth? Had she already lost the
race she didn't have enough sense to enter?

Back at work, the phone seemed to ring at twice its
normal volume. She prayed it wouldn't be Rico. She needed to come
clean with him or break it off. She practiced the scene in her head.
She pictured them sitting in a room, maybe her kitchen.

"I need to tell you about some things," she
would say. "I want to lay it all out for you. So you'll
understand about me, the things I know, the things I've seen and
heard and done."

She'd never told anyone the whole story beginning to
end. There had always been parts she'd kept to herself.

Even now, even in this
fantasy version, she knew she'd put a slant on it all. It was not
just the winners who wrote the history books, it was the survivors.

* * *

She'd explain to him how then, in 1975, the going
slang for heroin was boy, cocaine was referred to as girl. Thor gave
Munch a share of the coke and she made a trade with a dealer in
Inglewood, the girl for the boy She returned to Venice. Possessed of
more dope than she could use in a week, she drove to Main Street. She
was not by nature a hoarder; hoarding would indicate an expectation
of a future.

She found two hookers working, her friend Roxanne and
a black woman named Evie.

"
Take a break," she told them. "I've
brought a gift."

They spent a quarter to use the bathroom in the
Laundromat. The three whores huddled around the fixture so often
called the porcelain altar. It was fitting, as they were on their
knees in fervent adulation. The sink was broken, so they used the
water from the toilet tank to mix their dope. They planned to boil it
before they injected it into their bloodstream, so what was the big
deal? They giggled as they went through the preparation ritual, giddy
with anticipation.

Evie lifted her blouse and showed them her distended
belly hitting it with her fist in frustration.

"I don't know what's the matter with me,"
she said. "I've always had a flat stomach, and now this lump is
hard as a rock."

Munch glanced up briefly pretending to care, then
went back to preparing the dope.

Days later, the dope was all gone. She didn't look
for more. Instead, she drank. The whiskey gave her sharp pains in her
stomach, but those stopped after a week. It was like smoking.
Sometimes the only thing that cured a cough was lighting another
cigarette. She decided she needed time to think this through, time
out from dope and crazy violence. She was a legal adult, had been for
a year, and if she kept going along with Thor and them, it was going
to get worse. She wasn't afraid of dying, but she was afraid of life
in prison.

She left the Flats. There were no dramatic good-byes.
She just walked out the door one day and didn't come back. She heard
that Sleaze went to Texas for a while. Thor got busted for
shoplifting steak; the cow blood seeped through his white T-shirt and
gave him away Jane went back to New York because her father died.

And much more happened.

Bikers were killed in late-night crashes. Babies
drowned in bathtubs, while others were born missing fingers. Munch
moved in with some biker chicks who had a small wooden bungalow on
one of the canal streets. The house burned down while she wasn't
home, destroying all her worldly possessions. Deb and Boogie moved to
Oregon—took their dream of going to the country and made good on
it. Or so it seemed. Roxanne headed up to Alaska, where they were
building a pipeline, lured by the promise of adventure and easy cash.

At some point Sleaze returned to L.A. He straightened
up long enough to get a job driving for Sunshine Yellow Cab and began
hanging out with some square broad named Karen, who worked for the
phone company.

He's only with her to scam her,
Munch told herself. She doesn't remember who called who first. There
was always a magnetism between the two of them, an attraction of like
molecules. What began as a morning fix turned into a weeklong binge.
And then she and Sleaze were at it again, playing everyone around
them, including Karen, who Sleaze went to see on her lunch breaks,
wheedling twenties out of her while Munch waited in the front seat of
his cab, parked around the corner with the meter off.

But then Sleaze made a big mistake. He started giving
Karen tastes of dope. He had to, he said, or she'd cut him off.

It didn't take long before she was through at the
phone company standing on street corners, still looking like
someone's secretary But she'd learned the look. That bold stare at
the single men cruising Main Street. Karen, with her college
education and orthodontic-straightened teeth, was getting in those
cars, talking the talk, doing the deed, bringing the money back to
share with Sleaze. And then Sleaze told Munch they couldn't hang out
together anymore.

Munch said, I was about to tell you the same thing.
For some reason that she didn't understand, she made one more attempt
to find another way to live. She started spending time with a
mechanic named Al at Venice Cab Company fixing the high-mileage
sedans in the small hours of the night. She wasn't screwing Al. He
seemed to like her for some other reason.

Around that time, Al moved in with his girlfriend.
The landlord of his single apartment on Paloma Canal wouldn't give Al
his first month's rent back so Al told Munch she could stay there for
that month since it was already paid for. She stocked the small
refrigerator and got a glimpse of what life could be like. She found
peace hanging brake shoes, working until her knees felt locked open,
and she was too tired to do more than bathe and collapse into bed
with her hair still wet.

Wizard, who owned Venice Cab, gave her a
three-nights-a-week job and a little room at the back of the garage
when the month ran out on the single apartment.

The space Wizard let her use was once part of the
garage. It had a concrete floor, cinder-block walls, and a small
window that looked out to his vegetable garden. He had built an
interior wall with plywood to make this little harbor. The bed was a
mattress on a wooden workbench built from two~by-fours, four feet off
the ground. There was plenty of room for storage underneath. She
didn't come close to filling it. The bathroom was at the other end of
the shop, a toilet and a sink, and she made do.

She loved the night shift, loved it when the world
slowed down to a trickle of the infrequent lone driver. Bars were
closed, drunks passed out, druggies stayed indoors. At four in the
morning, an occasional trucker lumbered down Main Street. Delivery
tmcks came with dawn.

She started collecting wrenches and sockets, soon
outgrowing the lunch-box-size tackle box Wizard had given her. At his
encouragement, she saved her money and bought a five-drawer Craftsman
toolbox new at Sears. It was red with gray handles. She engraved her
name on the top and kept the key to the lock in her pocket.

She was really getting a handle on things, not
drinking until the end of the shift, and then just to take the edge
off the bennies.

Then, one day; she got that little urge, triggered by
any number of things. The smell of burning sulfur was enough to do
it, to give her that feeling in the back of her throat, to start the
clatter of demons in her head. She remembered thinking she'd get a
taste—just a taste—to fix a particularly nasty hangover. Once the
idea entered her brain, she could think of nothing else. Maybe she
could handle it this time, shoot a little smack without getting all
strung out again. Dope fiends even had a name for it: chipping.
Meaning occasional use. A now-and-then thing. If it had a name, it
must be possible, right? She didn't know then that one time was
already too many and a thousand was never enough.

She was out of touch with the life and had to search
all the old haunts until she found a dealer. By then her nose was
wide open. There was no question but that she would find it.

It was a dangerous combination: money in her pocket
and knowing who had the bag. Soon she was camping out in the alley
outside Donna Dumbcunt's little basement apartment, waiting for the
bitch to get back and open for business.

Munch didn't forget exactly she was just too busy
chasing the bag to go back to work. She let Wizard down one time too
many And then she was right back at it with one more sorrow to drown.

Too sick to turn tricks, she dragged herself back to
Flower George, telling herself that staying with her father was only
going to be a temporary arrangement. She would get out, she would
make it to the country and she would have that little house that was
all her own, her own kitchen to stock, a little plot of ground where
she'd grow vegetables, maybe even have some chickens, yeah, and a
milk cow.

Flower George took her to the Mexicans, living five,
six, ten to a flat, and waited outside smoking cigarettes while she
serviced the masses. Even then, at ten bucks a pop, there were those
who refused her. Somehow this hurt her feelings. What did it take,
she wondered, until nothing was left?

The Mexicans had pickup trucks and wore black cowboy
hats. There were decals of brovm horse heads on the rear windows of
their pickup trucks. Their jeans and boots smelled of manure.

She saw her face in the mirror, saw the dark black
sacks beneath her eyes, and realized to her horror that she'd done it
again, she'd gotten all strung out. She didn't want to be a slave to
grains of powder, to sloppy middle-aged fat men who tried to put
their mouth on hers no matter how many times she told them, "No
kissing."

She wanted a new town where nobody knew her, a job
fixing cars, maybe even a motorcycle if that wasn't too much to
dream.

And then the cops were on her again. She totaled two
cars while driving a borrowed truck and tried to flee the scene. They
found her syringes. They couldn't keep the revulsion from their
faces.

"You use these?" they asked.

In the cold harsh light of the booking room, she saw
how disgusting her works had to look to these people. The cotton
thread she'd used to tie the rubber to the plunger. The bent needle.
The old blackened spoon, licked clean too many times.

She went to jail, but only for a month.

Flower George wasn't waiting in the parking lot for
her when she got released.

She had to hitchhike back to Venice. Sleaze was back
in town, she heard. She didn't have the energy left to find him.

She never asked, but once someone mentioned that Thor
was in the joint. She waited for them to say for what, but the
specifics didn't come up, and she let the news wash past her.

She meant to get a place, but got no farther than the
mattress on the floor at Flower George's. One of the Mexicans gave
her a card to the free clinic after they'd had sex. Only half sex
really because the sores on his dick made it too painful to continue.
The card was written in both Spanish and English.

It read: You may have been infected.

She threw it away There were some things she didn't
want to know, but mostly she didn't care. What comes around, goes
around.

She saw Evie again. Evie, the hooker with the knot in
her belly

Evie said, "Guess what? You're never going to
believe it. You remember how big my stomach was getting? Turns out I
was pregnant. I didn't even know until I went to jail. How about
that?"

Munch acted mildly amused, imagining Evie's surprise.
She didn't think that would ever happen to her—the not knowing
part. She'd only been pregnant once, when she was seventeen. The
pregnancy was over before it barely begin, yet she knew the whole
time. Felt an excited flutter at the thought of a new life inside
her, started collecting baby stuff, had a crib and everything. It was
Sleaze John's baby she was sure of that. She couldn't believe how
much a miscarriage hurt. The hospital shot her up with Demerol and
after that she was on her own.

And then it was February 12, 1977, and she was on a
bar stool at the Venture Inn and some sad-eyed man was buying her
drinks. The man was Mace St. John and he was there to arrest her for
the murder of Flower George. By the grace of God and the programs of
Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, she hadn't had a drink
or a hit of dope since, and all it took was complete abstinence and
changing everything about herself. Simple. Not the same thing as easy
Sometimes she wondered if Sleaze had to die so she could live. If he
hadn't died, would he have eventually drawn her back into the life?
Did God toss a coin to make the choice? No, that wasn't right. God
didn't test people. He didn't have to. Life tested people.