Loser's Town

Loser’s
Town

Daniel Depp

PENGUIN CANADA

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Copyright © Daniel Depp, 2009

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN: 978-0-14-317101-0

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Author’s Note

They are not They.

He, She or It is not You.

Any resemblance in this book
to people living or deceased
is purely coincidental and will
merely be taken by the author
as a tribute to his genius.

To John

in memory of
the flying Scaramanga Brothers.

‘I came out to Los Angeles in the 30s, during the Depression, because there was work here. LA is a loser’s town. It always has been. You can make it here when you can’t make it anywhere else.’

Robert Mitchum

 

 

‘It’s all very well going around thinking you’re a cowboy, until you run into somebody who thinks he’s an indian.’

Kinky Friedman

One

As the van turned off Laurel Canyon and up onto Wonderland, Potts said to Squiers, ‘How many dead bodies have you seen?’

Squiers thought for a minute, his face squinted as if thought were painful to him. Potts figured it probably was. Finally Squiers said, ‘You mean, like, in a funeral home or just laying around?’

This sort of thing never failed to drive Potts crazy. You ask him a simple question and he takes three fucking days and then gives you a stupid answer. This is why he hated working with him.

‘Jesus, yeah, okay, just fucking laying around. Not your fucking grannie in her coffin.’

This sent Squiers into another round of thought and facial manipulation. I could go out for a freaking cup of coffee while he’s thinking, Potts said to himself. Potts wanted to hit him with something. Instead he bit his
lip and turned his head to watch the houses they passed.

The elderly van trudged up the steep, winding street that seemed to go on forever. Squiers drove, as always, because Squiers liked driving and Potts didn’t. In Potts’ opinion, you had to be an idiot or a maniac to enjoy driving in Los Angeles. Squiers qualified as both. Potts read somewhere that there were more than ten million people in LA, people who spent literally half their lives on the roads. In some places twelve lanes of traffic going eighty miles an hour, bumper to bumper, within inches of each other. Careening along in several tons of glass and metal, your knuckles white on the wheel. You go too slow they run over your ass. You go too fast you can’t stop in time when some old fart brakes at a senile hallucination, standing a lane of a hundred cars on its nose. You got no choice but to do whatever everybody else is doing, no matter how stupid. Mainly you just do it and try not to think about the mathematical impossibility of it all; the sheer, mindless optimism that any of this could function for longer than fifteen seconds without getting you killed or mangled. On the other hand, every fifteen seconds somebody actually
was
getting killed or mangled on an LA freeway, so it was perfectly sane to stress about it. You had to have a fucking death wish to drive in LA.

What Potts hated mainly, though, was that you were forced to pretend people knew what they were doing when they clearly didn’t. You look out the window at the faces
hurtling past and they give you no reason for hope. Whizzing past goes a collection of drunks, hormonal teenagers, housewives fighting with their kids, hypertense execs screaming into cellphones, the ancient, the half-blind, the losers with no reason to keep living, the sleep-deprived but amphetamine-amped truck drivers swinging a gazillion-tonned rig of toilet supplies. Faces out of some goddamned horror movie. One false move and everybody dies. You had to lie to yourself in order to function. This is what got to Potts. Potts was no optimist. You spend five years in a Texas prison and it changes your view of what people are like. Jesus, so many fucking psychos loose in the world it’s a wonder we manage to wake in our beds alive, much less navigate a fucking superhighway. Then you were forced to shove all this aside, cram it into some little cupboard in your brain and shut it away, whenever you walked out the fucking door in the morning. You had to make yourself forget everything you knew about life, everything you knew to be true, and pretend that people were somehow Good and not the collection of thieves and madmen and basic shits you knew them to be. This is what drove Potts crazy. It was exhausting, this burden of self-deception. The goddamn weight of it made him tired all the time.

Potts looked over at Squiers, who stared straight ahead over the wheel, brow creased, mimicking the act of human thought. Squiers was huge, pale and dumb, Potts’ exact opposite, and Potts almost admired him. Potts hated being
around him, of course, and felt the world would clearly be a much safer place if Squiers happened to get run over by a train. Squiers was slow and plodding and whatever happened in his head bore no resemblance to what happened in Potts’. Squiers never worried, never got nervous or frightened, could fall asleep standing up like a goddamn Holstein. Never questioned anything, never contributed an answer, never argued. He’d either do something or he wouldn’t, and you could never be sure which way it would go, since there appeared to be no thought process behind it. Squiers was maybe the happiest person Potts had ever met. There were no conflicts in his life. You give Squiers a nice blood-soaked chainsaw movie or a pile of cheap porno mags and Squiers was as content as a child. Meanwhile Potts had a bad stomach and couldn’t remember a time when the sky wasn’t fixing to collapse on him. Potts had to envy him a little, while still hating his psychotic guts. Richie called them Mutt and Jeff, made jokes about their each being one half of the perfect employee, though utter fuck-ups individually. Potts didn’t like Richie very much either, though Richie paid well and ex-cons couldn’t be too choosy.

The van climbed up and up, out of this world and into the next, past fancy-ass places costing millions of bucks but still had their asses on stilts hanging a hundred feet over a goddamn canyon. For that kind of money you’d think you could get a backyard. Potts couldn’t imagine life without a backyard, you had to have a backyard.
Someplace you could go out and drink a beer and barbecue a goddamn hamburger. Even the little shitpile he rented out in Redlands had a fucking backyard. The truth was, though, the whole Hollywood Hills scene was bullshit. For a couple of million bucks you got a dinky house with no yard at all and its ass hanging over a goddamn abyss. Well yeah, that was fucking Hollywood all over, wasn’t it? The whole goddamn place was a con. Movie stars my ass. A bunch of suckers. Give me a house with a backyard anytime.

‘A hundred and twenty-three,’ said Squiers.

Potts looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Dead bodies I seen.’

‘You lying sack of shit. A hundred and twenty-three? What kind of number is that? You a fucking guard at Auschwitz or something? Jesus.’

‘No, no kidding. I saw a plane crash once. A hundred and fucking twenty-three people perished.’

Squiers saying that word, perished, really irritated the hell out of Potts. He was lying, he’d heard it somewhere on the news, and the newscaster had said perished. Squiers didn’t even know what it meant, where the hell would he get off using a word like that. Potts decided to nail him on it.

‘You saw a plane crash.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘You actually saw it crash.’

‘No, I didn’t actually see it, like, hit the ground. But I
come along right after it did, when all the fire trucks were there and shit.’

‘And you saw the bodies?’

‘What?’

‘You saw the bodies, right? A hundred and twenty-three fucking bodies, thrown all over the ground. And you counted them, right? One, two, three, a hundred and twenty-three?’

‘Well, no, shit, I didn’t actually see the bodies, but they were there. A hundred and twenty-three people on that plane and they all perished.’