At First Sight

Chapter 12

I may have had too much to drink on the plane. AT least my flight attendant, a smartly turned-out fruit cup named Denny with minty breath and plucked eyebrows, thought so. He cut me off somewhere over Denver. Back in the pre-9/11, dot-com wizard days, I would have given this prissy asshole some primo grief, but since the World Trade Center went down, flying has become a contact sport with bomb-sniffing dogs and cavity searches. These days, if you even get out of your seat too fast, your fellow passengers will knock you into a bulkhead, and the crew will take you off the plane in handcuffs.

So I cut Denny some slack and sat there nursing the last one, trying hard not to think about Chandler and the rented Taurus and what a gross, horrible thing I'd done.

Of course, it was a little like being in the desert and saying you weren't going to think about water. Once you say it, that's all you can think about. So I played tag with my thoughts, a terrible game of mental "gotcha," where my conscience, or memory, or whatever it was, kept catching up to me, and each time it did, I had to readdress a new menu of negative terms that described me. Check, please.

But of course I couldn't leave… couldn't get off the plane until it landed. Worse still, I couldn't bear my own company. I wanted to get away from myself. If it could have helped, I would have asked Denny to move me to a new seat.

L. A. was hot, smoggy, and ugly. I say this as one who loves this fast, transient, slightly glitzy city. Normally L. A. is my kind of place. An hour from skiing or the beach, enough fun and glitter to keep you endlessly diverted. Booty, in short-shorts, whizzing by on Rollerblades almost everywhere you looked. A town designed for insincerity and bullshit. My town. But today it all looked different. As I deplaned, everything felt different, darker and less interesting.

Then I did something I swear you wouldn't believe. I stopped at an airport book stand and bought a copy of Hustler, a skin magazine with pictures of naked hookers in high heels doing squats and editorials so simplistic it's like they were written in crayon. I took it to my car, which was parked in the big lot across from American Airlines, and drove until I found a liquor store on Century Boulevard. There are plenty on that boulevard of broken windows. I stopped at the first one I saw and bought a bottle of blended scotch, took it to the car, and had a few stiff ones right out of the bottle. Then I opened my April edition of Hustler and had a handkerchief date with myself right there in the front seat.

Why I did this is anybody's guess… some three-hundreddollar-an-hour Beverly Hills shrink would probably say I was trying to confirm my sense of self, or that sex, even self-administered, is a subconcious confirmation of life… a validation of my existence. Or maybe I just needed to get my mind off of what I'd done for a few minutes. At any rate, there I was, parked behind the liquor store, looking at shaved pussies, working on a dishonorable discharge.

The problem here is, I couldn't really get hard, which is generally not a problem for me at all. I'm a charter member of the diamond-cutters club. But all I had going here was a modified flounder. I finally did a soft ejaculation and closed the magazine, zipped up, and began looking around to see if I'd been spotted. Then lethargy and despair descended. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the old Chick started heckling me. What's the problem, CB? Can't get a good chubby anymore? The question began to haunt me. Doubts about my own sexuality hovered and I began to wonder if killing Chandler had somehow altered me, taken the pump out of my python.

A friend of mine once boiled man's existence down to one short sentence. "You know what life is all about, Chick?" he asked. "The cars, the houses, the great clothes, the rings and watches… Know why guys need all that stuff?"

"Status?" I answered. We'd been drinking in the men's bar at the Jonathan Club, where he was a member.

"No, not status."

"What, then? What's it all about?" I grinned drunkenly, thinking he was about to give me some funny punch line.

"It's about getting laid:' He saluted me with his drink and continued. "Boil it all down and that's all it is. You go out and buy a sexy car or a big pinky diamond. Why? So your brother-in-law will think you're hot shit? No way. All that stuff, everything we do, everything we buy-it's all just about getting laid. Take that outta the equation and life becomes a zero-sum experience?'

It's strange that such monumental truth, such soul-defining wisdom, would be learned in a bar. But I swear, I've held everything I've ever experienced up to that simple equation, and it's bulletproof.

.

No exceptions.

Follow the bouncing ball.

Why did I buy the house in the six hundred block of Elm? Answer: So people would know I had money.

Yeah, but what people, Chick? Ugly people? Old people? Male-type people?

Well, no, not exactly.

So why would I spend three million I don't have, on a house I can't afford… put myself into a hole, and cause myself endless sleepless nights? Why do that if I'm not trying to impress the guys I play golf with? Who was I trying to impress?

Yeah, Chick, who?

Well, the house was a great investment. Property values in that neighborhood are…

You're lying. Who did you buy it for? Not for Evelyn. She was already married to you. So who? Let's hear it Chick. Stop hedging.

Well… I guess I wanted other girls to know I had it.

Yeah, but what girls, Chick? We talkin' porkers here?

No, not porkers. Pretty girls. California beauties. Great-looking west side squid. I bought it so pretty girls would look at me and smile and wish I wasn't married so they could sleep with me. They'd covet what I had and find me desirable, because if you want the absolute truth, I don't find myself all that desirable. I think I'm a loser with nothing I really care about, so I need those things to help prop up my self-esteem-my self-image. My unspoken message is, Take a ride on the Chick Best Express. Maybe once you see everything I have, you'll spread 'em and let me deliver a load.

So that was the whole enchilada. Boil it down and, just like my friend said, everything we do or buy is just about getting laid. So it followed then that I'd killed Chandler Ellis because I wanted to sleep with Paige. Because of that fantasy, I'd committed a murder.

But what if God gets so angry he takes the starch outta my monkey?

What if, from now on, because of psychological stress or guilt, or some other Freudian malady, I'm cursed to limp-dick my way through the rest of my life?

What if I can't get it up anymore?

I took another deep swig of scotch.

"You've gotta stop drinking so much:" some ghost from my past whispered in my subconscious. Grandma, my father… the long gone dot-corn wizard… somebody.

I pulled out of the liquor-store parking lot into a brown smoggy day.

You see what I was doing here, don't you?

I was determined to punish myself. Determined to make myself pay a price for what I had done. Losing my hard-on was just about the worst thing that could happen-the worst thing that I could imagine. But back then, twelve hours after I killed Chandler, I thought it was just temporary, a stress-related anomaly. Back then, I still thought I had something to live for. Back then, I was just getting started. It was only the first day of my slow drive through hell.