Heroin Chronicles (13 page)

I jerked my head back and the point of the knife slipped and cut me under my chin. Blood dripped onto my white shirt. I felt the wetness run down my chest.

Jojo put his face into my hair and inhaled. He whispered, “I'm gonna fuck you, white bitch … but first you gonna suck my dick. I gonna fuck your tight ass … You like my dick, you gonna like me fucking your ass … ain't you?”

I held my breath as he talked. His teeth were stained and crooked. He pressed my hand on his crotch, which felt limp. His heart was thumping so hard, he was racing. There was no way he was going to get a hard-on. Sweat ran down the side of his face.

“Come on, touch it, touch it …” He opened his zipper. I looked straight at him and yanked on his soft sweaty dick. Way too much coke.

He leaned into me and rammed his tongue into my mouth, slobbering all over my face. His tongue searching my mouth, I tried not to gag, and left my body. Then, suddenly, as though remembering what he was meant to be doing, he got up with his pants still open and screamed, “Give me the fucking dope! I know you got dope, bitch.” He looked in my eyes. “We can party together … I can get some rock … Yo, you like to smoke?”

My good God, was he serious? This had gone from a possible assault/rape/robbery to a fucking date. I knew my only way out of there was to stay calm and pretend I liked him.

“Yes, I like to smoke, of course I do … Papi.” I giggled flirtatiously. I tossed my hair back and stuck my tits out. “Here's the dope, Papi.” I wanted to hold onto as much as possible. Nothing hurt worse than losing drugs. I passed him the two bundles stashed in my right boot. Maybe the dope would mellow him out a bit and he'd let us go.

He put the knife down, tore open a bag, and snorted it. Then another. Robbing us was like shooting dead fish in a barrel. What were we going to do? Yell for help? I just wanted to get the hell out of this place immediately.

I looked at Marilyn, who was standing wide-eyed and nervous. We heard Tito shouting from the back room, talking in English and half Spanish. D was asking Tito where he kept his money.

It got louder. Marilyn pleaded with Jojo to let us go. Jojo grabbed the knife that he had placed on the table and stormed into the back room, knocking over a kitchen chair.

I glanced at Marilyn, then the door, then Marilyn. Those few seconds seemed to tick in slow motion. Can we make it out of the door and down the street without them catching us?

We both leaped up and darted toward the front door, which had all sorts of bolts and locks on it. I slid the deadbolt, and pulled the door. It didn't open. I was never so terrified, my fingers trembled, Marilyn was banging me on my shoulder. I felt I was in one of those nightmares where I'm trying to run from someone, and my feet are stuck in quicksand.

“Come on … Mama, come on … hurry,” she whispered.

“What the fuck do you think I'm doing?” I fumbled with two other locks, just yanking at them all. It opened! We both tripped over each other racing down the hall. Marilyn was practically on my back. I grabbed the staircase banister and flew, and I mean
flew
, down three stairs at a time … when we heard an extremely loud
POP
… from upstairs. Marilyn screamed. The gun? I couldn't believe it … I was running on the basic human reflex to save my life. Were they coming after us?

“Oh nooo … Dios mio … Dios mio!” Marilyn started yelling as we ran down the hall to the front door.

“Shut up, shush,” I said. Two kids were sitting on the front stoop. We jumped through them onto the hot sidewalk that we had been on just twenty minutes ago.

The blistering sun, never-ending heat. I squinted my eyes to the blinding light. Marilyn says to
walk calmly
,
like nothing's unusual
. Whatever that means. We slowed down to a fast walk.

“What the hell … You know, that must have been D who fired that shot. I hope Tito's okay.”

My mind was racing. I had to get some water. The thought of Jojo's tongue in my mouth makes me want to gag. I turned around to see if anyone was following us. The street's desolate, apart from an old woman rummaging through a garbage can.

We coulda got killed. I felt ill. We stopped at the corner of Avenue C to catch our breath. Two cops cars flew over potholes past us. I felt their speed as they smashed through still air.

They must be going to Tito's. Someone in the building called in the gunshot.

We stood at the light, waiting to cross. Marilyn turned around.

“They didn't stop at the building,” she said as we crossed the street.

“What do you mean?” I looked around to see both cop cars turning onto Avenue D.

“No one cares,” Marilyn said.

“You think anyone saw us? You think we should go to the cops?” I asked nervously.

Marilyn smiled. “Cops? Hell, no one goes to the cops.” I amuse her with my naiveté. She shook her head, laughing at my panic. “We weren't there, we saw nothing … Whatever,” she grinned.

I felt for the three fat bundles in my bra, and smiled back at her.

Yeah, whatever
…

M
ICHAEL
A
LBO
is a Los Angeles–based author and journalist who has written about crime, music, and popular culture. He is a regular contributor to the
LA Weekly
and the
Los Angeles Times
. His work has also appeared in the
Chicago Tribune, Premiere
magazine,
Men's Edge
magazine, and
Sonic Boomers
music magazine. From 1993–2003, he served as the editor of
Hustler Erotic Video Guide
, which he describes as “a half-assed, porn-world version of
People
magazine.”

baby, i need to see a man about a duck

by michael albo

H
aving the habit is an exercise in living undercover, and all afternoon my cover's been blown apart by degrees.

It was coming down evening on a hot and smoggy September day, and I wheeled a dusty white Ford Ranger pickup truck with bald tires and no air-conditioning through moderate traffic on the southbound 605 freeway. The asphalt was tinged blood-red by a sinking sun. This section of freeway carved through a surreal, heat-blasted moonscape of an alluvial fan near the confluence of the nearly dry San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers. I was on my way back home from Johnny Gato's ranchita in Irwindale, and I carried just enough drugs to warrant a solid felony charge. The big, white, pissed-off, gimp-legged Long Island duck that I had secured in a cardboard box was escaping its makeshift cell and it was going to be one fucked-up situation if—or, more likely, when—it broke free in the tight confines of that cab. The white head and yellow beak had already crowned. I regretted passing up Johnny Gato's offer to seal the box with duct tape and I regretted even more the decision to let the duck, that I named Quacky, ride up front.

Four hours earlier, I hadn't seen any of this developing. I was a world away in Beverly Hills with a real-life porn slut.

She called herself Eve Eden. “My real name's Eve,” she drawled in that insincere way hustlers have when they're laying down the whore con, “and I used to work at this strip club back home called the Garden of Eden, so I use that for my last name.” “Back home” was some dismal, bug-infested, malarial Alabama swamp, but Eve had left that all behind to make her sinuous way through the big city as a freshly minted adult-movie starlet. After two weeks in the neon-lit, subterranean depths of Greater Los Angeles, she had come around to realize that she was a lot farther from home than she could ever measure by miles. Attractive enough, but not beautiful, she wore heavy bangs and a pink eye patch to cover the results of girlhood run-in with the business end of a pellet gun. “My brother was huntin' squirrels and he accidentally shot me,” she explained. “If I hold a strong magnet to my eye, I can feel the pellet move. It's trippy. It's still in there.” She lifted the patch and flashed a milky orb tinted by a smear of blue that was no doubt thankful for all the things it had never seen. She said it was an embarrassment to her. “The kids at school called me Cyclops … or Blinky,” she said. She wasn't the kind of girl who got many eye-to-eye gazes these days, not since she bought herself a pair of ridiculously enhanced breasts that jutted from her chest like a pair of twin defense missiles and were sheathed in a tight, glittery pink tube top that read,
PORN WHORE
. The pastel pink of her outfit, the patch, the matching pink-frost lipstick and nail polish, and her overly dyed and fried blond hair made her look like a serving of carnival cotton candy that had lost a few bites before being tossed on the midway for the ants that crawled in the dust.

We sat at a table in the sun-splintered dining room of Mary Kate's, a precious and overly fussy Beverly Hills parody of a workingman's chop house on Wilshire Boulevard. She drew the attention from an early lunch crowd of bankers, business squares, and locals with money. It wasn't her clothes or overt whorishness that pulled eyes, but her absolutely white-trash table manners. She was loud, and she was mightily impressed by the complimentary sourdough. “Oh … my … GOD! This is the best bread I ever ate!” she crowed. She used a steak knife to slather a crusty piece with an ungodly amount of pale yellow churned cream and suggestively licked the blade clean. She was fascinated by my order of spaghetti all'aglio e olio. “I've never had THAT! Is that what real Eye-talians eat? Can I try some?” I handed her a fork and tablespoon so she could do the proper noodle-twirl like a civilized girl, but she reached past me with a bare hand and grabbed a big, oily handful, leaned her head back, and dropped it down her gullet like a fledgling eating worms. “That IS good!” she smiled through oil-slicked lips. In another setting, it might have been sexy.

The last thing a dope fiend needs or wants is attention. A steady stream of misdirection needs to flow to present yourself as close to normal to the always-watching world around you. I had three simple tricks: I kept a job, I wore a business suit, and I drank. The current job was running a pornographic magazine from an office in an imposing black-glass tower in the heart of Beverly Hills for a limping, moon-faced Greek millionaire. He trundled along with the aid of an ebony cane with a silver and gold lion's head for the handle. The eyes were set with diamonds. He didn't actually need the prop, but told me once that it conferred “power and respect” upon him from underlings like me. I didn't argue. He signed my checks and as long as the copy got in on time and sales didn't fall, I remained an employed and productive member of society. The job also provided an excuse to use the company expense account to entertain feature subjects like Eve, who had just shot a centerfold layout for us. Right now, though, she was turning into a lunchroom liability. Even though I was dressed in my somber navy suit, blue oxford shirt, and mirror-shined black wingtips, the other diners had shifted some of their attention from Eve onto me … as if I was supposed to do something about her behavior. And this is why I drank: Americans are a lot more likely to forgive a drunk than they are a dope fiend, and, usually, social mistakes can be glossed over by the simple statement, “I've had a little too much.”

Until now, I'd done just fine topping off my daily doses of tar with Wild Turkey 101 served over ice or Bombay Sapphire martinis, both generally backed by freebase cocaine, a stash of which I always kept hidden above a ceiling tile in my office. Today, however, was different. When I ordered a very dry martini and the starch-shirted, whey-faced waiter brought it to our table, I gagged at the poisonous bloom of raw alcohol on my tongue. Eve, her mouth still smeared with butter and oil, and who initially declined my offer of a cocktail, said, “Give me that!” before downing the glass in one gulp. Well, it was supposed to be a thank-you lunch for doing her shoot for far below her day rate … as long as she was assured of being the cover girl.

“May I bring something else, sir?” whispered the waiter.

“Uh, yeah. Can you have the bartender make me a double piña colada? But make sure that he puts it in a regular tumbler and leaves off the fruit salad and paper umbrella,” I said with a lot of shame. It's not a very masculine drink.

“Absolutely, sir.”

“I'll have another martini,” chimed Eve, then added with cartoonish lasciviousness, “and make it
diiiirrrty
this time.”

She hadn't bothered to wipe her mouth and continued to help herself to my plate of spaghetti with her bare hand and it was driving me to distraction. When the waiter came back with our drinks, I gulped the frothy kiddie-cocktail so fast it gave me a headache. I registered that pineapple and coconut completely masked the taste of the rum. I also noted that my morning dose was wearing off and I'd better do something quick to maintain my equilibrium. I excused myself and made my way into the single-occupancy restroom.

Once the door was securely locked and I was alone in that tomb of green marble, black porcelain, and mirrored walls, I fished around in the pocket of my jacket and came up with a carefully folded square of tinfoil, a brass Zippo lighter, and an antique pill box that held a little black blob of tar heroin the size of three match heads. I unfolded the foil and creased it into a V and put the dope on it before I melted it just enough to make sure it stuck to the shiny surface. I took the straw that I had surreptitiously slipped from my piña colada and put it between my teeth. I held the foil under my chin with one hand and, with the other, I struck the Zippo to bring the flame under the foil. I heard a comforting hiss as the dope liquefied and burst into a cloud of smoke that boiled up the crease. I sucked through the straw. This ballet, from the time I locked the door, took about a minute. I held in the acrid smoke as long as I could and then exhaled, pleased to see that almost nothing escaped my lungs.