Hollywood Station

TWO

IT HAD ALWAYS seemed to Farley Ramsdale that the blue mailboxes, even the ones on some of the seedier corners of Hollywood, were much more treasure-laden and easier to work than the resident boxes by most of the upmarket condos and apartments. And he especially liked the ones outside the post office because they got really full between closing time and 10 P.M., the hour he found most propitious. People felt so confident about a post office location that they dropped a bonanza in them, sometimes even cash.

The hour of 10 P.M. was midday for Farley, who’d been named by a mother who just loved actor Farley Granger, the old Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train being one of her favorites. In that movie Farley Granger is a professional tennis player, and even though Farley Ramsdale’s mother had signed him up for private lessons when he was in middle school, tennis had bored him silly. It was a drag. School was a drag. Work was a drag. Crystal meth was definitely not a drag.

At the age of seventeen years and two months, Farley Ramsdale had gone from being a beads ’n’ seeds pothead to a tweaker. The first time he smoked crystal he fell in love, everlasting love. But even though it was far cheaper than cocaine, it still cost enough to keep Farley hopping well into the night, visiting blue mailboxes on the streets of Hollywood.

The first thing Farley had to do that afternoon was pay a visit to a hardware store and buy some more mousetraps. Not that Farley worried about mice-they were scampering around his rooming house most of the time. Well, it wasn’t a rooming house exactly, he’d be the first to admit. It was an old white-stucco bungalow just off Gower Street, the family home deeded to him by his mother before her death fifteen years ago, when Farley was an eighteen-year-old at Hollywood High School discovering the joys of meth.

He’d managed to forge and cash her pension checks for ten months after her death before a county social worker caught up with him, the meddling bitch. Because he was still a teenager and an orphan, he easily plea-bargained down to a probationary sentence with a promise to pay restitution, which he never paid, and he began calling the two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow a rooming house when he started renting space to other tweakers who came and went, usually within a few weeks.

No, he didn’t give a shit about mice. Farley needed ice. Nice clear, icy-looking crystal from Hawaii, not the dirty white crap they sold around town. Ice, not mice, that’s what he worried about during every waking hour.

While browsing through the hardware store, Farley saw a red-vested employee watching him when he passed the counter where the drill bits, knives, and smaller items were on display. As if he was going to shoplift the shitty merchandise in this place. When he passed a bathroom display and saw his reflection in the mirror, now in the merciless light of afternoon, it startled him. The speed bumps on his face were swollen and angry, a telltale sign of a speed freak, as his kind used to be known. Like all tweakers he craved candy and sweets. His teeth were getting dark and two molars were hurting. And his hair! He had forgotten to comb his fucking hair and it was a whirling tangle with that burnt-straw look, hinting at incipient malnutrition, marking him even more as a longtime crystal-smoking tweaker.

He turned toward the employee, an East Asian guy younger than Farley and fit-looking. Probably a fucking martial arts expert, he thought. The way Korea Town was growing, and with a Thai restaurant on every goddamn street and Filipinos emptying bedpans in the free clinics, pretty soon all those canine-eating, dog-breath motherfuckers would be running City Hall too.

But come to think of it, that might be an improvement over the chili-dipping Mexican asshole who was now the mayor, convincing Farley that L.A. would soon be ninety percent Mexican instead of nearly half. So why not give the slopes and greasers knives and guns and let them waste each other? That’s what Farley thought should happen. And if the south end niggers ever started moving to Hollywood, he was selling the house and relocating to the high desert, where there were so many meth labs he didn’t think the cops could possibly hassle him very much.

Since he couldn’t shake that slit-eyed asshole watching him, Farley decided to stop browsing and headed for the shelf containing the mousetraps and rat poison, whereupon the Asian employee walked up to him and said, “Can I help you, sir?”

Farley said, “Do I look like I need help?”

The Asian looked him over, at his Eminem T-shirt and oily jeans, and said in slightly accented English, “If you have rats, the spring-loaded rattraps are what you want. Those glue traps are excellent for mice, but some larger rodents can pull free of the glue pads.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have rats in my house,” Farley said. “Do you? Or does somebody eat them along with any stray terriers that wander in the yard?”

The unsmiling Asian employee took a deliberate step toward Farley, who yelped, “Touch me and I’ll sue you and this whole fucking hardware chain!” before turning and scuttling away to the shelf display of cleaning solutions, where he grabbed five cans of Easy-Off.

When he got to the checkout counter, he grumbled to a frightened teenage cashier that there weren’t enough English-speaking Americans left in all of L.A. to gang-fuck Courtney Love so that she’d even notice it.

Farley left the store and had to walk back to the house, since his piece-of-shit white Corolla had a flat tire and he needed some quick cash to replace it. When he got to the house, he unlocked the dead bolt on the front door and entered, hoping that his one nonpaying tenant was not at home. She was a shockingly thin woman several years older than Farley, although it was hard to tell, with oily black hair plastered to her scalp and tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. She was a penniless, homeless tweaker whom Farley had christened Olive Oyl after the character in Popeye.

He dumped his purchases on the rusty chrome kitchen table, wanting to catch an hour of shut-eye, knowing that an hour was about all he could hope for before his eyes snapped open. Like all tweakers, he was sometimes awake for days, and he’d tinker with that banged-up Jap car or maybe play video games until he crashed right there in the living room, his hand still on the controls that allowed him to shoot down a dozen video cops who were trying to stop his video surrogate from stealing a video Mercedes.

No such luck. Just as he fell across the unmade bed, he heard Olive Oyl clumping into the house from the back door. Jesus, she walked heavy for a stick of a woman. Riverdance was quieter. He wondered if she had hep C by now. Or Christ! Maybe AIDS? He’d never shared a needle on the rare occasions when he’d skin-popped ice, but she’d probably done it. He vowed to quit boning her and only let her blow him when he was totally desperate.

Then he heard that tremulous little voice. “Farley, you home?”

“I’m home,” he said. “And I need to catch some z’s, Olive. Take a walk for a while, okay?”

“We working tonight, Farley?” She entered the bedroom.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Want a knobber?” she asked. “Help you to sleep.”

Jesus, her speed bumps were worse than his. They looked like she scratched them with a garden tool. And her grille showed three gaps in front. When the hell had she lost the third tooth? How come he hadn’t noticed before? Now she was skinnier than Mick Jagger and sort of looked like him except older.

“No, I don’t want a knobber,” he said. “Just go play video games or something.”

“I think I got a shot at some extra work, Farley,” she said. “I met this guy at Pablo’s Tacos. He does casting for extras. He said he was looking for someone my type. He gave me his card and said to call next Monday. Isn’t that cool?”

“That’s so chill, Olive,” he said. “What is it, Night of the Living Dead, Part Two?”

Unfazed, Olive said, “Awesome, ain’t it? Me, in a movie? Of course it might just be a TV show or something.”

“Totally awesome,” he said, closing his eyes, trying to unwire his circuits.

“Of course he might just be some Hollywood Casanova wanting in my pants,” Olive said with a gap-toothed grin.

“You’re perfectly safe with Hollywood Casanovas,” Farley mumbled. “You got nothing to spank. Now get the fuck outta here.”

When she was gone he actually succeeded in falling asleep, and he dreamed of basketball games in the gym at Hollywood High School and boning that cheerleader who had always dissed and avoided him.

Trombone Teddy had a decent day panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard that afternoon. Nothing like the old days, when he still had a horn, when he’d stand out there on the boulevard and play cool licks like Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, jamming as good as any of the black jazzmen he’d played with in the nightclub down on Washington and La Brea forty years ago, when cool jazz was king.

In those days the black audiences were always the best and treated him like he was one of them. And in fact he had gotten his share of chocolate cooz in those days, before pot and bennies and alcohol beat him down, before he hocked his trombone a hundred times and finally had to sell it. The horn had gotten him enough money to keep in scotch for oh, maybe a week or so if he remembered right. And no trash booze for Teddy. He drank Jack then, all that liquid gold sliding down his throat and warming his belly.

He remembered those old days like it was this afternoon. It was yesterday he couldn’t recall sometimes. Nowadays he drank anything he could get, but oh, how he remembered the Jack and the jazz, and those sweet mommas whispering in his ear and taking him home to feed him gumbo. That’s when life was sweet. Forty years and a million drinks ago.

While Trombone Teddy yawned and scratched and knew it was time to leave the sleeping bag that was home in the portico of a derelict office building east of the old Hollywood Cemetery, time to hit the streets for some nighttime panhandling, Farley Ramsdale woke from his fitful hour of sleep after a nightmare he couldn’t remember.

Farley yelled, “Olive!” No response. Was that dumb bitch sleeping again? It burned his ass how she could be such a strung-out crystal fiend and still sleep as much as she did. Maybe she was shooting smack in her twat or someplace else he’d never look and the heroin was smoothing out all the ice she smoked? Could that be it? He’d have to watch her better.

“Olive!” he yelled again. “Where the fuck are you?”

Then he heard her sleepy voice coming from the living room. “Farley, I’m right here.” She’d been asleep, all right.

“Well, move your skinny ass and rig some mail traps. We got work to do tonight.”

“Okay, Farley,” she yelled, sounding more alert then.

By the time Farley had taken a leak and splashed water on his face and brushed most of the tangles out of his hair and cursed Olive for not washing the towels in the bathroom, she had finished with the traps.

When he entered the kitchen, she was frying some cheese sandwiches in the skillet and had poured two glasses of orange juice. The mousetraps were now rigged to lengths of string four feet long. He picked up each trap and tested it.

“They okay, Farley?”

“Yeah, they’re okay.”

He sat at the table knowing he had to drink the juice and eat the sandwich, though he didn’t want either. That was one good thing about letting Olive Oyl stay in his house. When he looked at her, he knew he had to take better care of himself. She looked sixty years old but swore she was forty-one, and he believed her. She had the IQ of a schnauzer or a U.S. congressman and was too scared to lie, even though he hadn’t laid a hand on her in anger. Not yet, anyway.

“Did you borrow Sam’s Pinto like I told you?” he asked when she put the cheese sandwich in front of him.

“Yes, Farley. It’s out front.”

“Gas in it?”

“I don’t have no money, Farley.”

He shook his head and forced himself to bite into the sandwich, chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. Dying for a candy bar.

“Did you make a couple auxiliary traps just in case?”

“A couple what?”

“Additional different fucking traps. With duct tape?”

“Oh yes.”

Olive went to the little back porch leading to the yard and got the traps from the top of the washer, where she’d put them. She brought them in and placed them on the drain board. Twelve-inch strips of duct tape, sticky side out with strings threaded through holes cut in the tape.

“Olive, don’t put the sticky side down on the fucking wet drain board,” he said, thinking that choking down the rest of the sandwich would take great willpower. “You’ll lose some of the stickiness. Ain’t that fucking obvious?”

“Okay, Farley,” she said, looping the strings around knobs on the cupboard doors and hanging them there.

Jesus, he had to dump this broad. She was dumber than any white woman he’d ever met with the exception of his aunt Agnes, who was a certifiable re-tard. Too much crystal had turned Olive’s brain to coleslaw.

“Eat your sandwich and let’s go to work,” he said.

Trombone Teddy had to go to work too. After sundown he was heading west from his sleeping bag, thinking if he could panhandle enough on the boulevard tonight he was definitely going to buy some new socks. He was getting a blister on his left foot.

He was still eight blocks from tall cotton, that part of the boulevard where all those tourists as well as locals flock on balmy nights when the Santa Anas blow in, making people’s allergies act up but making some people antsy and hungry for action, when he spotted a man and woman standing by a blue mailbox half a block ahead of him at the corner of Gower Street. The corner was south of the boulevard on a street that was a mix of businesses, apartments, and houses.

It was dark tonight and extra smoggy, so there wasn’t any starlight, and the smog-shrouded moon was low, but Teddy could make them out, leaning over the mailbox, the man doing something and the woman acting like a lookout or something. Teddy walked closer, huddling in the shadows of a two-story office building where he could see them better. He may have lost part of his hearing and maybe his chops on the trombone, and he’d lost his sex drive for sure, but he’d always had good vision. He could see what they were doing. Tweakers, he thought. Stealing mail.

Teddy was right, of course. Farley had dropped the mousetrap into the mailbox and was fishing it around by the string, trying to catch some letters on the glue pad. He had something that felt like a thick envelope. He fished it up slowly, very slowly, but it was heavy and he didn’t have enough of it stuck to the pad, so it fell free.

“Goddamnit, Olive!”

“What’d I do, Farley?” she asked, running a few steps toward him from her lookout position on the corner.

He couldn’t think of what to say she’d done wrong, but he always yelled at her for something when life fucked him over, which was most of the time, so he said, “You ain’t watching the streets. You’re standing here talking is what.”

“That’s because you said ‘Goddamnit, Olive,’” she explained. “So that’s why I -”

“Get back to the fucking corner!” he said, dropping the mousetrap into the blue mailbox.

Try as he might, he couldn’t hook the glue trap onto the thick envelope, but after giving up on it, he did manage to sweep up several letters and even a fairly heavy ten-by-twelve-inch envelope that was nearly as thick as the one he couldn’t catch. He tried the duct tape, but it didn’t work any better than the mousetrap.

He squeezed the large envelope and said, “Looks like a movie script. Like we need a goddamn movie script.”

“What, Farley?” Olive said, running over to him again.

“You can have this one, Olive,” Farley said, handing her the envelope. “You’re the future movie star around here.”

Farley tucked the mail under Olive’s baggy shirt and inside her jeans in case the cops stopped them. He knew the cops would bust him right along with her but he figured he’d have a better shot at a plea bargain if they didn’t actually find any evidence on his person. He was pretty sure that Olive wouldn’t snitch him off and would go ahead and take the rap. Especially if he promised that her bed in the house would be there when she got out. Where else did she have to go?

They walked right past one of the old homeless Hollywood street people when they rounded the corner by the car. He scared the shit out of Farley when he stepped out of the shadows and said, “Got any spare change, Mister?”

Farley reached into his pocket, took out an empty hand and said to Teddy, “April Fool, shitbag. Now get the fuck outta my face.”

Teddy watched them walk to an old blue Pinto, open the doors, and get in. He watched the guy turn on the lights and start the engine. He stared at the license plate for a minute and said the number aloud. Then he repeated it. He knew he could remember it long enough to borrow a pencil from somebody and write it down. The next time a cop rousted him for being drunk in public or panhandling or pissing in somebody’s storefront, maybe he could use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.