Seeing Red, page 19
The prostitute pulled her sweater over her head. Her corner was by the House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard, and Jack always thought there was a terrific joke in that somewhere. The first thing she looked at while she stripped was the fleshtone plastic and metal ornamentation of his right leg.
Traveling light. M-16 on rapid-fire, clips in his shirt, rifle grenades taped across his thighs. Across from him his counterpart, Teller, eased parallel through the elephant grass. They were upfront to flush snipers; the patrol's point man was fifty yards behind them, sauntering down the dead center of the trail because the antipersonnel mines were slyly salted into the borders of the path, where careful soldiers might tread. They all knew the tricks. The patrol was called George for George of the Jungle. Jack and Teller were George's big mavericks. Teller collected VC ears and sometimes their balls. The crumping sound of sixty-millimeter mortar-fire was starting to deafen them. Time to play cautious.
She snubbed an unfiltered Lucky Strike. "They almost took a packet of your shot, lover." Wings of flab curved over her kidneys. Her ass looked a yard wide.
"No," he said, rehearsed. "They didn't. And yes, it all still works." He waited naked on the bed. Exposed.
"Talkers are always comedians." When she went down on him, he saw that the roots of her neon blonde hair were brown.
Ears pricking. Seeing that stupid bastard Teller. Seeing what he cannot. Forgetting his craving for a smoke and using up three more panic seconds ripping loose a rifle grenade and locking it into the muzzle. No time. Wanting to scream they're right above you stupid asshole! No time. Stock to shoulder, finger to trigger, the weapon butts and the tree thirty yards over mushrooms into an orange blossom of fire and screaming Cong. Teller's mouth drops like a stag-party patsy's. Surprise. He sprays the tree uselessly with slugs. The whole goddamn jungle jumps alive with the nasty, spattering racket of automatic-weapons fire like a crazy typewriter noise or water dripped into a pan of hot bacon grease. Not like movie gunfire. The flaming tree lights up the entire perimeter. He is exposed. Has to buy five seconds, has to retreat to better cover while the rest of George charges to bring peace. Backing gingerly through the fronds, onto the trail. Making one step blind because he's watching Teller's head leave his body. It spins.
Flat, sour bile coated his throat. The whore had too much mileage on her and was unappetizing with her duds off. He felt unaroused and ill. With a fatalistic devotion to duty she worked to excite him reflexively, to make his own body betray him. It became boring, repetitious, like a grindhouse stroke flick. He felt cold lying there, watching thin smoke from the ashtray unreel toward the ceiling.
Nothing happens until he lifts his foot, then the mine pops beneath him, smacking air concussively through his head. He doesn't feel the rifle grenade taped to his thigh explode. No details; just a stab of heat and bright light. The dispensary lights hurt his eyes more when he awakes, four days later, thinking George must have finished what Teller started.
She pushed off him immediately and left her sweat on one of his bathroom towels.
"Have a nice day," he said to the empty room, watching daylight fade across his barracks-neat arrangement of serviceable furniture, of homemade bookshelves and desk. He clicked on his TV remote, a P-box project he'd tinkered together two months ago, and browsed the free program guide he habitually picked up every Wednesday at the Mayfair Market. Automatically, for a giggle, he thumbed back to the Community Classifieds.
BEACHED MANATEE SHELLEY WINTERS uses the grand canyon for a toilet! signed, THE SCUMBAG.
If you wanted a good barometer of Hollywood's blue-collar weirdness, you turned to the Community Classifieds, suitably on the inside back page of the TV schedule and printed on pulp stock so cheap that your reading fingers were black by the time you got to the good stuff. For those too illiterate to make the letter column of the L.A. Times, too straight to ever consider undergrounds (now facetiously termed the "alternative press," Jack thought with contempt—another sellout), too normal and mundane to ever air their petty beefs anywhere but a playroom or a bar with a constantly burbling TV set, the Community Classifieds were a steam valve and cheap thrill all rolled into a single weekly page of lunacy. Any local nonentity could phone in a three-line "ad" or editorial comment for free. The paper always had too many to run. The week-to-week progressions offered by the column's stalwarts—people who appeared regularly, flexing their journalistic squatter's right to trade barbs from behind obnoxious pseudonyms—were more entertaining than any diversion offered by the cursed tube of plenty.
COME BACK TO THE FIVE & DIME . . . ZARATHUSTRA: Nonwhite athletically inclined punk-oriented animal lovers (handicapped O.K.) desired For (proto) fringe vidiocy for selective foreign audience. Flat Fee. Working name director. No amateurs or freaks who answer ads like this. 685-8299.
DOES ANYBODY OUT THERE HAVE ONE of those rubber chicken enema bags so popular in the 1950s? Hah, thought so. DR. SLEAZE.
HOUSE NOISE CASSETTES keep your canaries company while you're not at home. $7.95 ea. 747-4414 eves.
FRUSTRATED MILITARY, used athletes, and adventurous college boys call Sid. 556-4348.
Jack's eyes skimmed past two familiar words, then backtracked for the whole message.
THE OMICRON THEATRE should pay US money to attend such a moth-eaten, seat-sprung, paint-peeling, roach-infested garbage dump! Flake off and die, hippie scum! D.W.E., South La Brea.
When he rose to pull a beer from his tiny refrigerator, he rechecked his shirt pocket, forgetting his temporarily unlovely aroma. The free pass was still there, and that decided him for the evening, His car, a 1972 Comet with the pedals displaced to the left, was still undergoing a mileage checkup in the shop, but that did not put the Omicron out of his range. He could still walk, by God.
The Omicron reminded Jack of a kid's bedroom. To an adult, a non-initiate, it sure looked like a trash heap—but there was a comforting order inside for those who cared to delve past the superficial. It would never appeal to the Rolls Royce trade, yet was not as bad as the kung-fu sleaze pits of downtown L.A., which looked razed by Mongols. The Omicron was in essence a "normal" theatre stripped down for combat; its patrons, exemplars of the no-frills class.
Jack assumed the seats were veterans of less fortunate film emporiums long demolished. The heavy draperies, colorless with dust and age, had been hanging around since 1930. The concrete floor had been scoured clean of carpeting long ago and remained unpainted—two-dollar customers spilled an awful lot of crap. During intermissions the auditorium lit up from behind; two emergency floods on battery banks comprised the sole interior illumination. They were mounted high on the corners of the projection booth, like devil horns, and when they clicked on, they threw long shadows from the heads of the audience all the way to the foot of the disused stage in a silhouette mimic of a churchyard's listing headstones. When those lights clicked off, you'd better be sitting, Jack knew, because here there were no niceties like usher bulbs on every other row, or twinkling blue "landing lights" on the aisle like he'd seen at the Vogue Theatre. Even the EXIT signs on each side of the screen were long dysfunctional.
And if the snack bar had been a restaurant, Jack would have found a Grade C certification ditched behind the clotted Coke machine. He suspected the roaches flatbacking it, feet-up in the yellow light of the candy counter's display pane, were victims of the popcorn.
The Omicron was practically Jack's only acknowledged watering hole. Like him, it was tatty in patches, and looked broken down, but he could pass its portals and trade nods of recognition with the dude he had met at the magic shoppe, and that was important. He was a regular here, an initiate, and he appreciated that the caretakers of this dump, unquote, took pains where they counted—with the programming and the quality of the projection.
Oh yeah—and admission was still two American bucks.
Jack's terrific feeling of renewed well-being evacuated through his bowels and good knee when he plunked down his free pass and looked directly up to meet the varnished jade green eyes of the new Omicron employee.
From the third row he could barely see the screen. The crash-and-bash din of the gangster movies could not etch his concentration even in the theatre dark. The tarpaulined shapes in the orchestra pit became ominous, the auditorium, an ambush waiting to happen. He slouched in his seat. His mind chased logic chains like a lab rat on the scent of good, putrid Limburger cheese. None of the available conclusions eased his shock by a mote.
He had shuffled dumbly through the lobby, knowing that to meet the gaze of the candy counter employee, the dude, would now be to let the fear engulf him to the upper lip. Those flat, glassy stares, unwavering, unblinking, like the appraisal of a puff adder, came out of a tray in the Hollywood Magic Shoppe.
The Cong—a supernatural hive intelligence, they could blank a grunt's brain, make themselves invisible. Twelve-year old commandos were kicking President Johnson's butt by proxy. The fear. It could ambush you in the dark.
(On the screen, Bruce Dern, twelve years younger, indulges a sadistic little flash of ultraviolence. Homosexual rape.)
The Omicron staff. Not shell-shocked orts from the dead age of the flower child. Just dead. Fragile, with their mushroom-pale, coolly bleached skin and their fixed, shellacked eyes. Stinking of aftershaves, colognes, patchouli, any heavy oil or preservative base of alcohol. Moving, like
The baby palm lizard he found at the base of a tree. The roiling chaos of maggots revealed when he flipped it over. The legless grubs filling the stomach cavity; their mad dining was what made the lizard appear to be moving. Its flesh remained as an envelope, papery and stiff, a lizard shape to hide the fact of entrails long consumed. Its eyes were gone.
Crazy.
Motive, you dumb gimp! yelled his mind. Motive! The why of a flea-trap cinema overseen by ambulatory dead people, or whatever the hell they were. Certainly not to derail the world and the American Way.
(Robert De Niro, having spent an hour of screen time evacuating his skull with airplane glue, is discovered amid the marsh reeds, his spike in the dirt, a rubber lanyard still making his dead biceps bulge.)
A snap decision in the dark. Jack knew he had to investigate, to resolve. It was what he had always done.
He found temporary satisfaction in the glow bouncing back from the movie screen. One row back and five seats over, a black guy swaddled in a stinking fatigue jacket snored gutturally and no one told him to shut up or get out. In some of the wing chairs, the ones affording an uncomfortably slanted view of the screen, more wineheads dozed unchallenged, their feet on the chair backs. The others this far forward (guys with dates generally holed up further back in the auditorium) seemed totally narcotized by the film. The date duos, the monster-movie preppies, and the good citizens would scurry out during the end credits, while the snoozing derelicts and street dregs of Tinseltown waited to be ushered out under duress. For a couple of bucks over the flat rate for Night Train, a spongehead could blow an entire day sleeping out of the weather and sucking up racy moving pictures. Where did one find zombie fodder? Just haunting the Hollywood streets like gray wraiths, filthy blankets rolled under one arm, with hollow eyes and vacant stares, hanging out long after the sideshow freaks and hookers and male hustlers vacated Hollywood and Sunset and Santa Monica in the predawn. One more bag lady, one more shopping cart loon or religious burnout or sooty panhandler would never be missed.
Intermission came, and with it a few more truths. He slouched down when the auditorium floods blinked on, actually recoiling from the light because he did not wish to be singled out. The decision to stay after closing had already been made. During the second feature he must have touched the pistol in the pocket of his pea coat a hundred times, to ensure it still existed. He packed it around with him almost all the time now.
If trouble leaped out of the trees tonight, it was reasonable to allow that he could win a physical contest against the Omicron's scraggly human cinders, even with a missing leg. Their bones must be like communion wafers now, he thought, his hand seeking the gun unconsciously again.
It was a luxuriously heavy .45 automatic, Marine field issue, and his practice had been to pack it whenever he traveled on foot. Lately it lived in the pocket of the pea coat. The sucker ate an eight-round clip and an extra slug was already in the chamber. It had proven a ready deterrent to muggers, muggers at least marginally human. Provided his thesis was true, even artillery like the monster .45 could not kill someone already dead . . . but it sure as hell was capable of blowing off arms and legs and heads at medium range, and they could not chase you if they didn't have legs.
Provided he could retreat efficiently without one, himself.
He considered odds, and his chances, as the second feature, Bonnie and Clyde, began to unspool.
During one of its chaotic shootouts (Gene Hackman was about to get iced by the feds), Jack switched seats, edging closer to the wall of curtain on the left side of the auditorium. So long as he was not in the firing line between the watchers and the luminous rectangle of screen, he would never be noticed. He knew how to walk in the dark, even theatre dark, even leaning on his damned cane and humping his surrogate leg along. When he reached the fringe of the farthest row of seats, he began to edge toward the nearest EXIT light. The suffocatingly musty curtains unleashed an abandoned-library smell, and his nose tried to sneeze. He held.
In one more minute the early leavers would hurry out. He avoided the stair railing leading to the push-bar exit and angled himself behind the screen. A reversed light closeup of a face thirty feet high confronted him. The boxy, flat-black speaker apparatus, its horizontal planes steeped in brown dust, directed its salvo away from him and out through the million tiny perforations in the screen. Out toward—
He felt a mad, directional itch skittering from his hairline, around one eye, over his nose. Stifling his cry of reaction, he slapped away the cockroach before it could hide in his mouth. Yeah, the curtains were probably alive with the goddamned things. He thought of them congregating in the trough of the filthy Coke machine after closing, leaving their egg cases in the drains or mating in the cigarette butts and piss filling the john's two urinals. Did roaches mate or were they, what did you call it, parthenogenetic? Hermaphroditic? He hated the damn things the way he hated breaking spider webs with his face, the way he hated the monster leeches and vampire mosquitoes he'd met across the ocean. Or rats.
Above him, the screen lit up with an end-credit roll. Backward. He hunkered down and thought about rats for a minute.
The grunge theatre in Chicago is a sleaze pit, cold as a corpse locker, in the bosom of the annual blizzards. Jack and two fellow renegades from Basic are celebrating their first ever weekend passes by touring the Windy City. Their passes are thirty-five hours old; now they are in attendance at a triple bill of skinflicks aimed at the midnight-to-dawn beat-off crowd. The theatre is in the middle of a burned-out DMZ called Division Street. Swindler, grandly polluted on a fifth of George Dickel's finest eighty-proofpaint remover, re-dubs Chicago the Shitty City, tittering at the rhyme. Ford, equally blitzed, elaborates by christening Chi-town the Puckered Red Asshole of the Universe. Jack's laugh goes cheesy and sour. He pulls his boots from tile floor because he has spotted the rats, quietly feeding on the discarded candy boxes and popcorn tubs. During the middle feature, a cowlike naked blonde "accidentally" sets fire to her bed with a smoldering reefer, a special effect that must have taken away half the movie's $1.98 budget. She and her studs—a doo-wop trio of muscle-brained Latino buggerers, greaseballs all—flee the frame as an obvious line of hand-held gas-jet fire sweeps along the bottom of the picture. Swindler hoots and applauds. Jack hears the squealing and realizes it is not part of the sound track. What must be dozens of urban rats have been surprised by the sudden flood of light behind the movie screen. Unpleasant. The rodent army retreats to the darkness, emerging to mingle with the paying customers. Jack watches a soft drink cup manipulate itself patiently across the cold stone floor. Ford spies it and stops giggling. Jack rises to get out. Ford follows. Then Swindler.
Could there be rats in the Omicron? California mice? A voice in Jack's head told him he was obfuscating. Rats were nothing for him to worry about tonight.
The house floods snapped on and the patrons herded noisily out. Jack waited, secreted behind the hanging curtains, weight at ease on his fake leg.
The EXIT door crashed shut—sheet metal hitting a wood jamb and rattling a loose push bar—and did not open again. For sixty seconds he breathed shallowly, listening. Then he inched forward until he could see the auditorium under the glare of the floods.
There were perhaps ten derelicts out there, still snoring. Maintenance movements and sounds echoed toward Jack from the lobby area, then somebody—the new guy, the one with the bottle green eyes—moved down the aisles, waking the bums up. Excuse me excuse me you have to leave now. Jack watched his progress; the same speech for each sleeper. They grunted. Some got the speech twice before reluctantly shuffling out. One nodded and resumed sleeping—the black guy in the fatigue coat. The Omicron employee moved to the next customer. Like shabby, ragtag Conestogas lurching west, they dragged themselves out, all except Fatigue Coat, who had been sitting behind Jack, and to whom the new employee gradually circled back.
Behind Jack, the curtains rustled, moving themselves. Drifts of thin dust sifted down. It might have been the vacuum effect of the front doors closing.
He looked out. The Omicron ticket-taker stood mute vigil over Fatigue Coat, watching him sleep. Watching with fixed eyes whose jade green pupils never expanded or contracted. Watching with the head-cocked attitude and characterless gaze of a praying mantis surveying the struggle of a future meal. The other one, the dude, joined them, dressed exactly as Jack had seen him in the Hollywood Magic Shoppe. He had a baseball bat.
