I drove my ’99 Saturn on the roads above L.A. toward Reid Hamilton’s new house. I navigated the curves, expecting a coyote to leap out into the headlights’ beam. The house came into view. Here was a work by a disciple of Richard Neutra, or for all I knew by Neutra himself, a sleek gray rectangle jutting from the side of a hill. The windows of the east wall offered such a sweeping view of the Valley that anyone with binoculars could watch youths get shot in Compton, pivot, and watch rich people dine outdoors in Glendale. It was easy to imagine Reid standing there like a king viewing his domain. In the vast rectangular spaces of the house, your fancies could take flight, unfettered by any trifling concerns. I wanted to like Reid, I thought so much of what people whispered about the rich was unfair, but above all I needed to believe in his generosity.
Jimmy Cavanagh, an employee of Reid’s, greeted me at the door and guided me through the outer rooms and into the suite where Reid sat at an oak desk, bare save for a Dell computer, a phone, and a pile of folders. At that moment, Reid looked depleted, as if he’d spent the last three hours arguing with his ex-wife. There was an excellent reason: he had been. But he rose, grinned, and shook hands.
“Al Duchamp, ambitious young director.”
I grinned nervously.
“Do you think we’re going to have riots over the Jermaine Wilson business?” he asked.
Jermaine Wilson was a parolee who’d tried to carjack a Porsche driven by two UCLA football players on a freeway. The athletes had thwarted the attempt, tackled Wilson as he tried to run away, and beat Wilson with his own gun, hard enough to cause bleeding on the parolee’s brain. Unfortunately, as was often the case nowadays, a witness with a handheld recorder caught most of the incident.
“If there’s an acquittal, I expect we will. You know, there’s always this presumption—”
“So tell me,” Reid cut me off, “what makes you different from a thousand other kids who go around to my studio with conceit dripping out of their ears, looking for handouts?”
“Ah, well, not every kid who picks up a camera is a director. I have the formal training and a wide knowledge of film and I feel quite justified in calling myself an auteur.”
“Well, after you sat down with me and my colleagues at the studio last week, they were quite ready to forget about you and bring in the next of the fifty auteurs. But I saw a highly serious and driven young man, not unlike myself once—”
Though Reid Hamilton was not a man you interrupted, there came a bellow from one of the adjoining rooms. Out of politeness, I kept my eyes on from the executive, so I hardly saw a short man burst out of that room with his pants around his ankles and a huge erection in pursuit of a crying young woman with red hair—a maid or assistant who’d messed up badly in her attentions to him. But I noticed one thing. The short man’s penis was a diseased yellow-brown. They both passed into a room on the far side of where Reid and I were talking. Fortunately, they did not make a left into the room I’d admired on my approach, where windows comprised three of the four walls.
“—and I thought, ‘What’s the point of meeting you people, of having a studio, if we never take a dare,’” Reid finished.
“Bitch! Stick your ‘employees’ bill of rights in your cunt!’” came from the south room, along with more sobs from the redhead.
“Is something wrong, Al?” Reid asked.
“Oh no. No. I just didn’t know Dave Ware was here.”
“Dave’s a private guest. Would you please observe some etiquette?”
“I’m deeply sorry.”
Leaning forward, Reid put both elbows on the smooth desk.
“So, the new project! Don’t think I’d ever ask you this if I weren’t truly interested. How’s it progressing?”
We talked about the casting and the script. Reid hinted that he might be willing to help. Naturally, I wanted a commitment, but Reid changed the topic. He talked about the opening of a new annex of one of the art museums, beckoning me follow him into yet another room of the house, where he opened a closet with a rack supporting more suits than I thought a man could need in his lifetime.
On the following evening, down in Hollywood, I slid my cell phone back into a front pocket of my trousers and stood outside a bar Reid and his friends frequented. I felt as if I were on a film set in a desert and overcome with the futility of it. On occasion, one of the grinning tourists from Middle America moving in clusters of four or five on the boulevard turned, noticed the man with the unruly mop of dark hair and the stubble, and whispered something to a friend or a sister or brother. I did my best to ignore them.
Now four young men came out of the bar and huddled in conversation by the curb. At the same time, a few more young people came up the street to meet them, then four turned into eight. One of them, a kid with choppy brown hair in a t-shirt and jeans, noticed me loitering by the entrance to the bar, came up, pointed a finger.
“You’re not here for the meet-up, are you?”
I paused, then shook my head. The kid returned to the cluster by the curb. Within minutes, a van pulled up and they climbed into the back and were gone. I knew where they were going. Nearby, in Glendale, there was a tavern that hosted extreme fighting matches two nights a week. Reid paid part of the overhead and got part of the take. Sick of feeling like an exhibit in a freak show, I merged into the crowds moving west toward Highland Avenue. I wrestled with my options, finally spent the night getting ripped at a comedy club.
But the next evening, I returned to that house where Reid took trouble to make me cozy, setting up an annex to his study while putting an assistant at my beck and call. In the annex, I had the use of a desk and a Dell computer. Reid had proposed that I maintain a database on the film, with folders for notes about the cast or ideas for scenes. On the desktop, I could not help noticing, were a number of folders and files unrelated to the movie. When I felt confident that Reid was off doing something, I explored a few of these.
One of the files contained a letter. “I’m sick of it, Ellen. These are not complex negotiations for world peace.” Another file held records of a few of his meetings with investors of his hedge fund. In yet another file, I found, to my astonishment, lists of names of people who’d asked for reservations at events at the tavern. I saw that these were not Christian names, but acronyms mixed with numbers: TimGert71, RayLop83, DZ113, JayC99. In my mind, I matched some of these acronyms to employees I’d heard Reid mention by their first name, or to shareholders whose names appeared in full in that file I’d opened before. In haste, I exited the file, looked around the annex and down the hall, popped a disc in the Dimension 9100, and began to view footage from the set.
A woman screamed. It was like an audition for a Halloween sequel. I got up and walked out of the annex, through Reid’s study, into the room with a view of the valley. Nobody was there, so I turned, retreated to the study, and stood there feeling like a character in a Pierre Louÿs novel who, contrary to what his senses tell him, briefly fancies a house to be empty. An awful idea occurred to me. Perhaps Reid had the computer wired in such a way that anyone who snooped unwittingly initiated a psychological game. No, Reid Hamilton couldn’t be that sick, could he?
I turned and walked through the door leading north, away from the front entrance, toward rooms I had yet to see. I moved through a corridor so nondescript it could as easily be on a spaceship as in the basement of a warehouse, then opened a door leading to a room where the skin of a grizzly, spread across the floor, seemed to terrify the other elements into hugging their corners. On either side of the room were hot orange chairs. Adding a further incongruity was a Steinway piano against the west wall, beneath a row of Noh masks from Japan, the grinning visages of demons. I tried to imagine John Lennon at the piano, crooning “Imagine,” but this place didn’t want John Lennon. Before I could pursue these musings, my eyes alighted on two figures on chairs by the north wall. They were the pretty redhead I’d seen the other night and Dave Ware. The girl’s face was in her hands, her sobs recalled a firing squad’s target waiting for the coup de grace. On a night table between the chairs was a white powder and a bill curved at either end, as if it had just come unfurled. I said “Pardon me,” and retreated to the study, where the millionaire host was still absent. I returned to the room commanding a view of the valley, where to my surprise I was not alone.
The guy who lay smoking in a black deck chair near the south end of the house was a man older than Reid, with graying hair and a physique that was too slight to be fat but wasn’t quite thin either. Perhaps this was an investor in the hedge fund, or a resident chef. As soon as I took a seat in the center of the room, the man offered a cigarette. I shook my head. I stared at him for a length of time politeness could never allow until at last, at last, I realized I was face to face with Reid Hamilton, that this was how Reid looked after hours of divorce proceedings.
“You can practically see my desert home from here,” Reid said.
I nodded.
“I don’t see either place lasting five minutes in an earthquake.”
“Oh, no. I’d call a private helicopter to spirit us straight off the roof,” Reid replied.
“Forgive me, I’m exhausted. Or it may be my French blood. I say what I mean even if it means the guillotine.”
“What’s your name?” Reid asked between drags on his cigarette.
“Al.”
“I knew that. Short for Albert?”
“Guess again.”
“Allan?”
“I could have lived with that.”
“Alfred?”
“Nope.”
“Alvin?”
“God, no.”
“Alfonse?”
I got a chuckle out of that one.
“Alfie—”
“Alois,” I told him, rolling the syllables as long as I could.
Reid smoked, gazing out the window at the lights on the freeways where cops pursued sociopaths deeper into the ruby-tinged dark.
“Why are you sitting around here tonight, Reid?”
“Ah, well, I was supposed to meet a partner face to face tonight, but he says he’s unavoidably detained. It’s quite unlike him, he’s usually the most punctual fellow.”
“I suppose Dave Ware is here tonight for the same reason.”
“You suppose correctly.”
“Er . . . how should I say this? Dave’s demeanor is a little different from that of your other associates.”
Reid chuckled.
“You don’t say, Alois.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Dave Ware is a former associate director of the second largest pension fund in the state.”
“Oh, I had no idea.”
“No, I’m sure you didn’t. Nor would you be likely to deduce that he still commands a great deal of influence when it comes to where the pension chooses to invest the staggering amounts of capital that it manages.”
I had nothing to add on that score, either.
“What’s more, Alois, if you poked your head out of your bohemian world just long enough to read the financial news for once, you might have some inkling of pending changes in the status of those who advise pension funds on such matters. The state may no longer require them to register as lobbyists—such a requirement is a formality of quite recent vintage in any event, as you’d know if you paid any attention.”
“So if there’s one man in the world Reid Hamilton doesn’t want to piss off—”
Reid dropped his cigarette into a tray and began to beat the flats of his hands together sarcastically. I strained my ears to listen for any noises from the depths of the house, but silence reigned in the vast night, interspersed with the commands of a cop yelling at some idiot.
Later the same week I sat in the room of the house looking out over the valley, sipping a glass of merlot, which I’d graciously accepted from the redhead I’d seen crying on a chair next to Dave Ware. I waited for Reid to free himself from yet another meeting out there in the night and come home. Based on my brief talks with Christine, I had a notion that she kept more informed about events in the world than her job required. The growers of Veneto had picked the grapes for this wine at just the right moment, when they had reached maturity and their flavor was neither too acidic nor too light, I thought. I sipped my wine, gazing out at the lights of the city with longing and envy.
A pang of guilt struck me, for I should have been forging ahead with work, justifying Reid’s faith in me. Abruptly I set the glass down on the black nightstand beside his chair, rose, and returned to the annex, where Jimmy had arranged my folders and papers with impeccable taste beside the Dell. It took nothing away from Reid’s generosity that he had other people using this space. Jimmy was coming in here from time to time to update a few of the databases on the desktop. So Reid hadn’t totally forgotten about them. After a look around, I once again caved in to the temptation to check out certain files. I began clicking on them, heard noises in one of the rooms nearby, and reached fast for the button that would turn off the monitor. It proved a false alarm, no one was coming, but I felt my heart thump inside my neglected physique like a hamster trying to fight its way out of a fifth-grade science project. Slowly I got up, leaned against the table to orient myself, panting. It occurred to me to wonder just how I’d come to be in this room in a house jutting from the top of a hill.
Mr. Hamilton gets to feel like one of the Medicis, lavishing his fortune on an aspiring artist.
I’d wager he’s going to lose patience pretty damn fast.
Reid would be getting home soon. I knew I must become his liaison with the intelligentsia, cultivated, assured. I composed myself, walked back through the study, and into the room with the grand view. The wine was exactly where I’d left it. I drained the glass. One more glass, and the outlines of the world would blur. Where, oh where was Christine? I set out to wander the halls again. I was lucky. Just as I passed into the hall between the study and the room with the view, whom I should run into but Christine, holding aloft a tray with nine empty glasses on it. Beneath the glasses were a few $20 bills. When she saw me, Christine froze, then she appeared to be straining her ears a bit. I realized there were feet clumping along toward us from the depths of the house.
“Sir, perhaps you could avail yourself of the scenic room for the time being?” she asked, tears forming at the base of each of her eyes. She put me in mind of an animal on a farm that kids have been stoning and kicking and teasing.
Reluctantly, I retreated to the room with windows at the front of the house. I sat in the same chair as before, rotating the wine glass in my fingers. Far beyond the windows, out there in the night, people refused to shed the attitude of Billy Wilder’s most famous character: I am big, it’s the pictures that got small. They had the vanity of Norma Desmond without having ever been stars.
To my surprise, Christine strolled into the room, calm, composed, and asked whether there was anything she could get me. Mr. Hamilton would be home before long, she promised. I groped for an answer, looked through the window at the lights in millions of windows whose occupants might be watching what happened in this room right now. I weighed letting Christine know how lovely I found her. At that moment, Dave Ware burst into the room and approached Christine, whose deep lucid eyes pleaded with me to leave. But after all that wine, I felt lightheaded enough to want to witness what might happen now. Jimmy followed Dave into the room. To Dave, it was as if neither I nor Jimmy nor anyone else existed. He fell on Christine, groping for her breasts, large and supple under the folds of her white button-down shirt, then the curve of her belly, her lower back. Dave noticed a dimple at the base of the girl’s neck and began to plant his lips there and suck. The girl began wailing.
“Oh cut it out! Please, sir! PLEASE!”
Dave sucked, and sucked, and sucked, like an anteater. The girl cried and begged. The businessman ignored her, kept right at it.
Though I longed to yell at him to back off and leave the girl alone, once again, I could not help thinking about my tenuous relationship with the owner of the house and the future of my beloved project. Still Dave sucked like a baby. Jimmy stood there as ineffectually as a B-movie character in the face of a zombie horde.
“Please sir, please, there are many diversions awaiting you in the living room . . .”
Dave grunted like a pig that has landed on all fours in a forbidden trough. His hands moved up and down her arms as if trying to smooth out wrinkles. Christine was weeping, but I saw now that she was doing something else too. She was reaching, groping. If I was not mistaken, Christine was sliding her hand down into her pocket. I started. What was in there—a key chain? A whistle? A can of mace? A Glock 9mm?
With a singleness of purpose I could barely credit, what with the thin man fondling her breasts, kissing, sucking on the flesh around her neck, Christine withdrew a cell phone. She began pressing buttons, slowly, deliberately, with the fingers of her one free hand. Contrary to what I thought, she did not initiate a call. No, she was pressing buttons in a pattern, studying characters on the screen. Dave reached for the buckle of his belt and dropped his pants, then he began reaching down, down, and began to turn Christine around, when she looked up and announced:
“I’m afraid—I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, sir.”
Dave was speechless.
“I’m afraid”—she sniffled—“I’ve just gotten the latest on the state assembly, sir.”
Dave gaped.
So the state assembly had just put the matter to a vote, and placement agents would have to register as lobbyists, or so it looked. And they were really going to enforce the rules. This development made certain people irrelevant, if not a downright pain in the ass. Dave could not steer investors without suspicion anymore, no, he’d be quite naked in his motives. But this was just the beginning of Dave’s troubles. Christine knew as well as anyone that Dave here had gone one better than Alan Hevesi, New York’s ex-comptroller, she knew that Dave had been accepting lavish gifts from Reid for months now in return for guiding certain people with respect to their investments.
Dave was a statue as Christine peeled herself away. If you breathed on him, he’d keel backward with a dead look in his blue-grey slits.
I fled both of them, made my way back to the annex, sat down at the Dell, and resumed my explorations. Now I had the presence of mind to exit any files instantly should I hear anyone approach. Although I couldn’t care less about most of the random content on this desktop, I found I was curious, in a way I hadn’t quite been before, about these people who’d gone out to the tavern. In a way, it still seemed almost magnanimous of Reid to offer such a diversion to his employees and friends. My eyes pored over the blinking characters on the screen, the acronyms, the numbers, as my mind made connections, guesses, surmises, extrapolations, deductions. Already some of the names were growing as familiar to me as the actual names of the people they represented. Still my eyes roamed, and roamed, as I kept my ears fixed on any and all noises beyond the annex.
Then I stopped and said aloud: “Who is Philo823?”
It was Jimmy Cavanagh who brought the news to Reid. Jimmy had always seemed the most loyal of his younger employees. He’d become a liaison between Reid and the people involved with the indie film directed by me. I’d even given Jimmy a role. Jimmy played a two-bit police informant who tries to betray Steve Rawls’s character, only to end up on the wrong side of a .45. Jimmy had only one halfway memorable line, “If you pull that trigger, you’ll deliver yourself to a hell you can scarcely imagine,” and he spoke it flatly, as if ordering takeout over the phone.
Reid languished in a deck chair by the pool of his other house, the one at the eastern end of the valley, the house where guests had mingled gaily not long ago, admiring the sleek contours of a building crafted by Neutra’s disciple, in awe of his wealth and his marriage to a lady named Sarah. Now they were going to nail him over Dave Ware, the short, insecure man who’d maneuvered himself into his good graces by offering to steer the chief investors of two of the largest pension funds in the country toward Reid’s hedge fund.
Reid looked out over the valley, at the mountains and cacti and ocotillo plants with their stalks reaching upward like the fingers of a man bent in desperate prayer. A cloud of dust plumed up behind a vehicle just barely visible on the horizon to the west. Recognizing the limousine from his place in the hills above L.A., Reid steeled himself for Jimmy’s nasal voice. Soon Jimmy faced his boss. He told Reid about Philo823, the undercover cop, thanks to whom everyone knew what went on at the tavern, everyone knew who’d been pouring money into the illegal diversions. It hadn’t surprised the captain who led the raid that so many of the people involved lived in places like Los Feliz, Echo Park, and Mid-Wilshire. This wasn’t the only reason Reid was about to go to jail. Christine had testified about Dave Ware.
Reid’s eyes were inscrutable behind his shades. Jimmy stood there watching. They were two men near the base of majestic mountains in the silence of an infinite valley.
“Thank you. You can go, Jimmy.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before they could arrest Reid, a grand jury voted not to indict the athletes who beat Jermaine Wilson on camera. The riots began immediately. Reid came quickly to my film set in his limo. Jimmy and I climbed into the limo behind Reid and the driver, an aging man named Tom Hendrie, who swung the vehicle away from the park. Reid wanted to go to his place in the hills above Hollywood, grab a few things, seal the place up carefully, and head out to the house in the desert of Riverside County until this was over.
The limo moved west on Sunset in the direction of the hills. We didn’t get far before a large rock smashed into the windshield, nearly making the driver shit his pants. Whoever had hurled it was a shape flitting among dozens of other bodies in frenetic motion on the south side of the street. Reflexively, Tom pressed his foot down on the brake.
“Please, Tom, keep driving,” said Jimmy, his voice quavering. The crowds beyond his window were wild. Over on the north side of the street, things were equally chaotic. When I committed the mistake of making eye contact with a fellow through the passenger’s side window, the man began threatening me and calling me a cunt. The people on the streets in this area were not a mob, like the one advancing up Normandie and parallel streets and spilling out onto side streets, looting and burning, they were just people out from under the state’s authority for the first time, desperate and terrified, unable to pursue thoughts for more than a second or two.
A man kicked a bottle from the curb and it shot out into the street, exploding at the limo’s left front hubcap. More projectiles dented the hull and cracked the windows, as Tom strained to see down the boulevard. All he could make out was a thickening cluster of bodies.
“We’re turning this bitch around,” Tom declared. He swung the front of the limo into the other lane, backed up to gain room to turn, inched the vehicle forward, backed up again. All around, people yelled or jeered in mock outrage. I gaped out the window like a kid. Upon making eye contact with me, a woman in a sweater and a denim skirt pulled the sweater up over her bare chest, grinning as I gawked at her ripe nipples, her breasts as smooth and soft as water balloons. People rushed past on either side of her, obscuring my view, yet I kept gaping as if drugged out. Now someone was urinating on the side of the limo, but Tom could not back up. Then when he hit the gas, the wheels gained just enough traction to creep forward a bit, so he wasted not a second before spinning the wheel and thrusting the stick back to reverse. The limo edged backward, clipping the end of a mangled red Nissan on the north side of the street, before Tom jerked the stick again, causing the vehicle to surge out into the eastbound lane.
“A couple of clicks from here, down on Melrose near Larchmont, is a warehouse. The owner’s friends with my father,” Tom said.
He swung the vehicle right onto La Cienega, floored the gas all the way down to Melrose, made a left, drove for a few blocks, eased on the brake. Without turning off the engine, Tom got out, dashed up to the fence enclosing the yard of the long warehouse, and talked urgently through the fence to a forty-seven-year-old man with thin gray hair, in overalls, leaning against the exterior. The man disappeared for a moment, then the two parts of the fence began to slide apart.
I stood at the front of the building, unscrewed the lens cap on the camera, and shared my ideas with everyone. Before me were Reid Hamilton, Jimmy Cavanagh, Tom Hendrie, and two women who worked together at a Safeway on Sunset and who’d gotten parts in my indie film. Though they were both on the set earlier, they’d made their way here separately. Their names were Alice Kern and Mary Dobbs. Alice was thirty-eight and plump, Mary young and fresh like an early-career Meg Tilly. Then there was Pete Mullen, the warehouse’s manager, who’d let us in. When I mentioned the film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Mary noted my disdain for Robert Mitchum. I explained I wasn’t talking about the 1978 version, but the one from 1946 with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, for which Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay. We put a cast together for the opening scenes, with Reid as Marlowe, Mary as Carmen Sternwood, Pete as the ancient General Sternwood. Jimmy landed a role as the book dealer, Arthur Geiger. That left Alice to play Lauren Bacall’s role, the elder of the two Sternwood sisters, Mrs. Vivian Rutledge. Only Mary was the age for her role. Though we could hardly replicate the conditions of the greenhouse at the beginning of the classic film, we managed to arrange tables and chairs pretty much the way Howard Hawks’s set designers had done.
Reid did an adequate job of projecting a tough, dryly witty demeanor, and no one doubted that Reid enjoyed Mary’s repeated attempts to sit in his lap while he stood.
“How do you like your bourbon, Mr. Marlowe?” asked Pete.
“In a glass,” Reid said tartly, his lips curving in an oval rather as if someone had socked him there, causing lasting damage. On his first try, it sounded almost like “In a glashh.”
He got gradually better as scene followed scene.
“Lady, this is a gun, and I want the money,” the gangster punk told Vivian Rutledge as she walked out of a casino with a purse full of bills.
Marlowe crept up right behind the punk and smashed him over the head. Then he returned the purse and gazed into the eyes of the beautiful dame he’d rescued, a gal who’d grown expert throughout her life at keeping secrets from prying strangers.
Reid found himself admiring Marlowe’s toughness. Marlowe’s career was the culmination of a process initiated when a frontier society riddled with outlaws, clans, dynastic and border disputes crept westward. Texas could not have endured without its rangers, nor what became Arizona, nor California, when the pink faces of the settlers reached the coast.
Everyone was ravenous. There was nothing left to eat in the warehouse. I volunteered to make a dash up to a gutted Chinese takeout up the street. To my astonishment, Reid offered to come, provided he got to bring Pete’s Sig Sauer handgun. Here was a truly selfless rich man.
We waited for dark. Pete unbolted the door to the warehouse, then pressed a button to part the doors in the fence, allowing the millionaire and me to steal out into the landscape of fires and screams. As we slipped out, we noticed what had become of the limo in the yard. Rioters had smashed the windows, shredded the tires, made off with the hubcaps, siphoned all the gas from tank whose plastic cap dangled. We dashed westward, myself leading the way, clutching a flashlight, Reid following with the weapon in his damp right palm. We could hear alarms in the distance. On either side of the street were strip malls and retail stores with their top floors ablaze, but the sirens that Reid and I heard out in the hazy distances never seemed to get nearer. Reid ransacked his vocabulary for terms to convey the scope of what was around us. When Reid finally made an effort, I told him that etymologically, “inferno” has nothing to do with “fire.”
“So . . . The Towering Inferno—”
“—is an oxymoron. ‘Inferno’ means ‘lowest.’”
“Thanks, Al, I’ll, uh, remember that next time.”
As we crossed the next street, I noticed blazes and crowds of people filling the space a couple of blocks to our north. My palms were moist now as I cursed myself for having been between workouts for years of my life at a time. I began to say something to Reid and that was when the space in front of me creased and folded as I heard a noise like air being sucked through a cylinder. A bullet had passed three feet in front of my unruly hair. I galloped to the far side of the street and the shelter of the outdoor loggia of a navy blue two-story building. When I turned around again, Reid was behind me.
We crossed two more blocks in the direction of the ocean, until we reached the block right before the intersection of North Arden and Melrose. Here was a curious scene indeed. On the north edge of the pedestrian path sat a black girl, maybe eight, with beads in her hair, a white t-shirt, and a pair of striped pants. She had no one looking after her, and she was crying, wiping her eyes with her tiny hands. Up ahead, on a bench at the bus stop, sat an obese white man with a thick beard, wearing a baggy red shirt and jeans. I wanted to know what the man was doing, sitting here in the midst of a riot.
“I’m afraid some freakin’ yahoo’s gonna blow my head off if I try to go home,” was all the man volunteered.
“Are you hungry? We’re going on a food run up the street here,” I said.
The man shook his head. As peculiar as he appeared, I recalled that a few of the casualties in ’92 were people gunned down by nervous defenders. I guessed now there was even less discernment or reluctance to pull the trigger. We continued westward, crossing North Rossmore, until we stood at the entrance to the takeout. On the south side of the street, we spotted a few clusters of teens, walking casually in the other direction, not looking aggressive. I dared to hope they wouldn’t waste their energies on just the two of us. The windows lay in thousands of fragments on the concrete out in front, and someone or something had knocked the door nearly out of its frame, leaving it dangling crazily over the pavement, held in place by a pivot near the ground. We strained our eyes but couldn’t make out anyone inside.
“All right, Al. You just run inside and see what you can find. I’ll stand guard.”
I trembled. It was awfully dark in there, and surely we weren’t the first people to find the place. But if no one stood guard outside, it could without warning become a deathtrap.
“Wait a minute, Al. Here,” Reid said, extending a couple of bills, which he expected me to leave on the counter. I ignored this gesture, turned, stole into the takeout. Little did either of us know that more clusters of teens, angry and armed, were moving east on Melrose and north on Rossmore toward the intersection.
As Reid stood scanning the street, east to west and back again, I walked back outside, looking flustered.
“Jesus, Reid, we shouldn’t be filching things. This is so nuts.”
Again Reid held the bills out. Reeling from the absurdity, I accepted them, walked back inside. The four booths were empty and there was no one behind the counter. There was glass all over the floor, most of it from the busted overheads. As I advanced into the kitchen, I felt like kicking myself for expecting there to be chickens on hooks and Cokes in the fridge, waiting for me to come help myself. The kitchen was as bare as if a Manchu army had just eaten. As I studied the rusty, reeking black pots and the spits looking greasier than a ’50s hipster’s hair, the adage that if you ever saw how they actually prepare fast food, you’d never eat it again, took on new meaning. But there had to be something edible in here. As the beam from the flashlight danced around the kitchen, and a cacophony of gunfire once again came from somewhere in the night, I realized that I would have to walk down the steps leading from an alcove to the basement. So I descended into the forbidding space, keeping the beam directly in front of me or jerking it to one side or the other as if to pre-empt anyone who might think of leaping out at me. My crotch was damp. The walls of the basement were peeling white paint on stone, and piles of boxes stood in rows much like in the warehouse. I paused, listened to my panting in the darkness, to the noises out there. I’d been concerned about my weight for many months, and here I was under indescribable stress. I pulled open the top of one of the cardboard boxes. Inside were dozens of the tiny packs they give you with your order, containing plastic utensils, duck and soy sauce, fortune cookies.
I thought I heard Reid call out my name. I strained my ears. I stood there panting in the dark within dark. About thirty seconds went by without a sound from up above. I stuffed my pockets with these packs before the beam alighted, quite by accident, on the face of a fat Chinese chef with blood caked at either end of a huge gash across his throat. The man lay slumped on the ground between the boxes ten feet away, with a look of shock on his pouty features, his tongue lolling as if it wanted to crawl free from his mouth where blood and spittle had congealed. I wanted to dash right up the stairs, but forced myself to open another box. Here were packs of wonton sticks. Then I heard Reid upstairs, shrieking.
“Al! Get your ass up here now!”
I bounded up the stairs and outside, pausing only to slide the bills Reid had given me under the edge of the register at the counter. Outside, a knot of teens was forming across the street. Only now did I realize what an idiot I’d brought along. Reid was so nervous he was dancing a jig like a man waiting for hours to use an outhouse, waving the pistol. If Reid had played it cool, the teens might have done likewise. Now they were wondering why this fellow was so uppity and antsy at their presence. But the teens saw the gun. They stood grinning, jeering, and making threats as I grabbed Reid’s arm and both of us began running eastward, taking the blocks in seven to eight seconds each.
Five hours later, I woke up on the grimy floor of the warehouse. Outside there was still darkness tinged with fires and pierced by cries and gunfire. As my hands flailed around in the dingy space, I realized that someone had taken my fortune cookies. Naturally I couldn’t lie on them, so I’d had to put them beside me, and in the last few hours, someone, Alice I presumed, had tiptoed up and done it. I ambled over to where she lay bundled into a corner at the front and to the left of the entrance to the place. Her eyes were shut. I reached down and shook her left shoulder vigorously until she peeled her lids apart.
“Vivian Rutledge has a bit of explaining to do,” I told her.
She stared at me, as if she didn’t get it at all.
“My cookies. I want every single one of them back right now.”
“I didn’t take your cookies, Mister Duchamp. It’s not very becoming of you to accuse me without gathering evidence first. For the record, I don’t think anyone but you and Reid even knew you brought back anything from that silly expedition.”
“Well, I honestly thought Reid was going to handle the debriefing.”
“No, he just went around talking about how you almost got him killed.”
I glanced around the front of the warehouse. Mary, Jimmy, and Tom were fast asleep, but Reid and Pete sat at the table in the dingy little kitchen, talking. Feeling anger rise in me, I strode over toward the open door of the kitchen and asked to have a word with the millionaire. He emerged from the kitchen, looking at me as if I’d committed a breach of etiquette by not scheduling our meeting through someone. When I made my demand, his features shifted so abruptly, into a look of such contempt, that I might have been an SEC investigator asking him about insider trading.
“Oh, please. You know I don’t even eat that crap, mister.”
“You’re the only one who knew I had them.”
Reid removed the Sig Sauer from the back of his waistband and pointed it at me. The man was disgraced and all around us in this city people were dying horribly the streets and he was angry. I took a step back. His eyes narrowed. The barrel of the weapon gleamed under the gaudy lamplight. I took another step. I looked around desperately for someone who could talk to him. I ran off, through rows of crates, until I found an isolated place at the back of the warehouse, in the moonlight.
In the morning, Alice told us she’d been listening through a grille as a couple of rioters discussed their plans to burn down the warehouse. We had to leave immediately. We wouldn’t all be leaving. Tom, the limo driver, had committed suicide during the night. I followed the others out of the warehouse, past the chain fence, and onto Melrose. Even in our desperation to get away, we couldn’t help marveling at the cloud of dark smoke fed by plumes from many points in the city, at the street littered with glass and scored by tire marks. As we took off up the street, away from the gravel lot around the warehouse, we noted the remains of the limo which looked even worse than when Reid and I had gone out. Rioters had bashed the windows, raked the limo with keys and pipes, made off with the battery, the radio, the hubcaps and CV boots. The remains were a fossil of a bourgeois age. The Saab Mary had parked out here was gone. We began hurrying westward on Melrose in the direction of Vine. From that intersection, we figured it would be a straight shot to barriers manned by the National Guard. The benches were bare, the streets strewn with glass, blood, ash from the many gutted buildings and vehicles. Jimmy had taken the gun from Reid. Every time someone took notice of the little party hurrying toward Vine, Jimmy flashed the pistol. When we crossed North Arden, I couldn’t help noticing that the takeout Reid and I had visited the night before was smoking, the characters of its plastic sign melted together. In all likelihood, they’d never identify the corpse I’d seen in the basement. Just one more block, and we would be at the corner of Vine. Think of it! Vine Street!
But Jimmy had made a terrible miscalculation. As we turned north onto Vine, we looked back and noticed a crowd of young men on North Rossmore, a short distance below Melrose, laughing and joking in the shade of a palm tree. When they noticed the party advancing up Vine, about ten of them set off in pursuit.
“Come on, you guys, move. Run!” Jimmy urged. Reid, Mary, and I were moving fairly quickly, while Pete lumbered, and Alice did the equivalent of doggie-paddling in an Olympic swim. More rioters began to fan out toward the middle of the street. A bottle exploded at Alice’s feet. She screamed and nearly tripped but kept running. I was sweating. As we neared the intersection of Vine and Waring, I had a vision of columns of thugs moving in from either direction on Waring, blocking the route. Behind us, there came yelling, then a loud sound like a ball peen hammer striking metal.
“Arrgghhh!” cried Pete, dropping first to his knees, with a stain spreading on his chest, looking absurdly like a rose on a waiter’s tuxedo, then collapsing face down on the sidewalk.
“Come on! We can’t stop!” Jimmy said.
“Forget him!” Reid concurred.
We kept running, Alice shrieking as a bullet whizzed past her head, but the party’s pace was dropping markedly. When we reached the corner of Gregory Avenue, Jimmy abruptly turned right and raced off in the direction of a parking lot. The rest of us were stunned but kept racing toward Willoughby. In whatever time remained to Reid, Alice, and Mary on earth, they would think that Jimmy Cavanagh had broken away to divert the thugs and save their lives. In reality, we were diverting a few of the thugs from Jimmy, who had decided, quite reasonably, that the others were too slow and there was no need to throw his life away. He could hide out in a parking lot, plus he had the gun.
When Reid, Mary, Alice, and I made it up to Willoughby Avenue, we saw to our shock that another crowd of rioters was ambling toward the intersection from the east. The four of us stood there on the corner, gasping, cursing, crying, sweating, panting. Then, from the general direction in which Jimmy had bolted, we heard a cacophony of gunfire, but the last shot did not sound like ones from a Sig Sauer did.
Areas west of here were unsafe. At their current pace, the rioters moving west on Willoughby would reach the corner in about thirty seconds. It seemed the only thing was to keep going up Vine, but the pace of the little party had dwindled and dwindled, to the point where Jimmy’s decision seemed rational.
“Why are you looking at me, Reid?” I said.
Reid, so accustomed to people around him knowing what they were supposed to do and doing it, said nothing. Alice cried, despairing of the return of her tough persona, while Mary stood there with her eyes shut, praying. I stood there breathing in the sun, the air. As the rioters raced nearer in both directions with bright, eager eyes, I wondered if Reid Hamilton had it in him to beg.
Then we noticed the bus. It sped eastward along Willoughby, even though the letters in the screen at the top read “Florence.” We were a long way from Florence Avenue. The bus shot right out to the intersection, then the driver slammed on the brakes at the corner where the four terrified people were. The door at the front slid open.
“You sure done set a nice trap for yourself,” the driver said. In the space behind him were a young black woman with an apparatus of bandages and braces around her head. Slumped in the seats behind her, or sitting upright and looking anxiously out the windows, were a few students, a pair of grimy auto shop workers, a businessman nearly drowning in his own sweat, a bag lady, and Salvadoran laborers. They’d all climbed onto the bus in the last 10 minutes as it worked its way east from La Brea. The driver, Anthony Blair, had split away from his route down on Florence and driven the distance from Florence all the way up to Melrose, then cruised around looking for people. When the bus reached North Cahuenga and Melrose, he saw the little party turn north onto Vine, but could not get to us because of the rioters and burning vehicles in the street. So he’d driven up Cahuenga to Willoughby and waited.
As soon as Mary, Alice, Reid, and I were seated safely behind him, Anthony slammed on the gas and spun the steering wheel left, turning the bus north onto Vine, drove straight up to Santa Monica, and then he turned east, driving until we were well past the National Guard outpost at Santa Monica and Wilton. The soldiers waved the bus through, and it came to a halt at the corner of Santa Monica and Western. Here were scores of National Guardsmen with M-16s and hand grenades.
The bus’s doors flew open. People filed off. When Reid held out a wad of bills, Anthony shook his head without making eye contact. Reid exclaimed, “Damn it, man, I’ve been trying for days to get rid of this money!” Upon reaching the street, the disgraced rich man knelt down to kiss the pavement in front of all the reporters and everybody.
I wondered aloud what Reid meant by his remark. Alice had a ready explanation.
“You’ve seen and heard some things, Al. Reid stood to get a tax write-off from his philanthropy, but now it’s not convenient for you to be alive. After Jimmy took the gun away from Reid last night, Reid offered us that money to find you, wherever you were amid all those crates, and kill you while you were sleeping. He told us we could blame it on the rioters, Al. He said he was going to shoot you when you were out on the street but you just happened to run into that fat man and that little black girl and he couldn’t do it in front of them. It was really dark inside that takeout place and he was afraid to follow you in there, but when those black kids gathered across the street, he offered them the money. They laughed at him and he grew terrified they were going to rush him and take the money. That’s when he called to you. Reid figured there’d be another opportunity but it just never came. He’s still pretty upset.”
The others regarded me without visible emotion. Reid walked nonchalantly toward a cluster of soldiers. I nodded and thanked Alice for the information.
Michael Washburn is a Brooklyn-based writer and journalist. His fiction has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Rosebud, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Concho River Review, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Stand, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Weirdbook, Hellfire Crossroads, and Weird Fiction Review. Michael’s story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction prize.
Michael’s books include The Uprooted and Other Stories (2018), When We’re Grownups (2019) and Stranger, Stranger (2020).
