Seeing Red, page 23
Gash wanted to name it. Rude wanted to eat it. Jocko shunned the sidewalk trade and perched on the stone wall near the pay parking lot. He uncapped his bigmouth silver marker and began to scrawl on the pumpkin, making feedback noises to himself.
Eye Man sucked hard on his teeth, trying to clean them with the rough side of his tongue. His mouth tasted foul and his teeth were scummy. For a while he submerged himself in the pursuit of spare change. He learned, long ago, the art of asking for a berserk amount: "Hey—spare sixty-three cents?" That was good, usually, for a quarter. The Boulevard median had bumped to nearly eighty cents. One black dude Eye Man normally saw hanging near Frederick's of Hollywood had the dick to ask for a buck fifty. Same army trenchcoat (just like Eye Man's), same bedroll. Nobby said the guy had once been a studio attorney; now he was a vagabond who jogged every day around the track field at Hollywood High and slept, so Nobby claimed, on the roof of the gymnasium. Chaka said she'd seen the guy in the laundromat at La Brea and Sunset, relating the story of how he could have been the Black Valentino to a woman with too much time on three dryers and hot mousetrap paranoia dancing in her eyes.
Your given name always changed when you hit Hollywood. That was why the names emblazoned upon the sidewalk stars meant nothing
to Eye Man. You couldn't tell who any of those people might have been. Strongheart had taken his name from a Vine Street star; nobody knew or cared who the fuck Strongheart might have been ... but the name had been resuscitated, and that was all that mattered.
Where the fuck was Sid Vicious' star? Jello's? Wendy 0's? Nothing on the Walk of Stars related to Eye Man's reality.
Fuck it. He was surly and pissed by the time he had meandered down to Hollywood and Highland. He had one crumpled dollar in his
pocket, plus a dime. He thought of bumming a cigarette from a PMS.
They could spare the smokes, but talking to them was like letting some yuppie limpdick try to cornhole you. Punks with Money Suck. You
could peg them at a glance. They were too well turned out; too much chrome and real leather. Eye Man had actually seen one wearing a watch amid the studbands and bike chains and custom-torn boutique hides.
Backed up sheeplike at the crosswalk, tourists gawked. Eye Man squeezed his infected earlobe hard. The most recent piercing had not
gone cleanly. He heard an amplified th-pow! inside his head, and pus squirted onto his fingers. He continued squeezing until he got blood, to rinse it out. The pain cleared his head while the pedestrians cut him some breathing room. He briefly felt the old power of the streets surging back into him.
"Hey, Eye Man." It was Jocko's guttural rasp. "Num-num-numnum-num! His snaky tongue licked wetness from Eye Man's throat. The citizens were thoroughly grossed out. Both punks giggled.
"Wanna catch a flick?" Both were team experts at cinema infiltration. It was absurdly simple. You staked out the alley exit of, say, the Omicron Theatre, and when that door opened, you ittied in and layed low behind the movie screen until the next feature commenced. If a lot of moviegoers streamed out, you simply walked in backward, right through them. It worked almost without fail.
"Naah." Jocko hefted his prize. "Check my punkin. Punkin, right?"
Jocko's signature graffito adorned the pumpkin's furrowed face. On the forehead, in shiny silver, was written POWER CHALLENGE. Behind, NEW ASSAULT, plus the circled A for anarchy. Lines braided and twined. It actually lent the pumpkin a basic sort of Impressionist grimace, the scrunched visage of a fat man with burst hemorrhoids trying to pinch out a drop shipment. There was as much logic to the artwork as there was schematic to the pigment splotches on Jocko's face.
"Know what makes punkins scary?"
Eye Man found himself cheering up. The street was still theirs, where it mattered.
"I'll show you. C'mon. Others'!! follow."
They loped east, enduring no shit from no body. A tall, satanic homeboy wearing a black duster smirked in passing, as though he knew what was going down. Jocko perched his pumpkin on one shoulder for display; the Incredible Two-Headed Punk. Street weenies goggled. Pig-eyed, scrub-shorn grunts on leave, come to shit all over Hollywood, barely noticed them. Fat-assed visitors with their squawking brats and plaid and cellulite and cameras clogged the walking pace. They think we look weird, thought Eye Man. None of them looked stiff; none of the women, fuckworthy. They were the missionary-position missionaries of America. They were doughy and dissipate. A trio of PMSs dealt some sort of stupid power sign; Jocko snarled and gave them the finger. He wanted to smash in their faces. He ached to battering-ram each thunderthighed heifer right in the bunghole, to rip out each dinky pud and cram it into each slackjawed face; then to take a grand diarrhetic shit over the whole massacre.
"We fucking live here," was all he said.
What's a football field wide, Cal Worthington's wet dream, ten lanes across, and never slows to less than sixty on an afternoon unspoiled by gridlock? The Hollywood Freeway, that's what. Jocko loved to park between the bus-stop benches and the wire mesh so he could stare down on all that traffic. It made him think of coursing fresh blood, of sharklike forward motion that never stopped, ever. To stop was death.
Vehicles piled through the underpass, some of them shearing away to snag the Gower offramp at Sunset. The divider below was thin, and battered by a million sideswipes. Flares, oilslicks, skidmarks, car droppings—all of it was ground fine by the stampede rush and absorbed into the street. The tarmac was always uniform; nothing altered its surface for long.
Eye Man took in speeding rooftops in enameled avocado, canary, crimson, wedding-gown white, and said, "There's no place left to go if you die here."
Jocko slapped on his annoyed look. "What?" His eyes timed the hurrying cars.
"It's all machines. Footprints in cement. Little metal records, pressed into the sidewalk. You can piss in John Wayne's footprints. You can pry the records and TV sets and film cameras out of the stars on the sidewalk. Nothing lasts here. Nothing has anyplace to go."
Jocko hocked and spit a phlegmwad through the chainlink. The wet white comet arced into the stream of cars. Consecration. "Don't let that shit eat at you, man."
Eye Man turned. "What happens, Jocko, if you fucking die here, and you're not a fucking star? Who'll give a fuck?"
That made Jocko smile as though he'd figured out something big. His smile was never a fun thing to witness. "Youuu walk the streeeets... 1I It was a lyric Eye Man had forgotten. "Get it?" They had arrived at the middle of the Boulevard overpass.
Eye Man thought Jocko was running on autopilot again.
"Look." Jocko pointed at the graffiti-besmirched retaining wall that ran below the fence. "We are everywhere."
The wall resembled the side of an ancient Bronx subway car—layer upon layer of spray paint and indelible packing ink. It swooped and wove and changed color; it seemed to move if you just glanced. A broad swatch in three colors read STONER'S EVIL: fat letters, outlined and shadowed, blue shading to matte white. The labor of hours, here on the overpass, far more fascinating and intricate than the constipated "art" Los Angeles had commissioned for its freeway web. The municipal murals were already vanishing under new coats of graffiti. ROLLER-BLADE WARRIORS.
Eye Man kept looking at STONE1'S EVIL. This had to have taken hours. Had nobody seen this being painted? Then it occurred to him that despite all the defacement he had wrought; personally, in ten years, you never really saw urban graffiti being implemented. It was just there. It was always just there. And it was always changing.
"Ygor, zee secret panel!" Jocko set down his pumpkin to pry back a head-high slit in the chainlink. He saw Eye Man about to ask what the fuck, and overrode with, "Just watch. We're gonna change everybody's day."
Eye Man played guardian of the sacred pumpkin while Jocko squirmed through the fence. The metal plaits were rusted, nearly fingerthick, much stouter stuff than basic hurricane fencing. Supposedly you could run a semi into its embrace and not sweat about breaking on through to the other side. Jocko behaved as though the slit had always been there and he had always known about it—another fringe benefit of constantly being tuned into a station no one else could hear.
"Hey, Jocko, don't you think -"
Jocko twined his fingers in the diamonds of mesh and yawed into space, chains dangling. He shouted hey you fuckin' aaaassholles but the
flood of cars barreling onward below was too tight to notice him. He reeled back and extended his free hand through the gap in the fence. "Gimme." He meant the pumpkin.
"Jocko. Hey. Let's just book on outta here, huh?" Eye Man could see what Jocko could not: a metro LAPD unit awaiting the green signal at the offramp.
Jocko flared lividly. "Gimme the goddamn punkin, Eye Man, or I rip your fuckin' eyes out and stuff them up Gash's twat! Now!"
He knew Jocko well enough to know he'd have to rumble to keep the pumpkin. Then he thought, Fuck it. What the hell did they owe the civil order of Hollywood Boulevard? To stop now would be pussy. To stop was death. He handed over Jocko's prize and cocked his head in the direction of future threat. "Cops."
"Just gimme." The sickly yellow eyes acknowledged the warning, but Jocko swung back out, heedlessly, acting like a blood in a big hurry to finish a job. He began screaming at the traffic, dangling the pumpkin by its stalk, a deadly bomb waiting to hit a windshield and change everybody's day.
Now the drivers below paid attention. Some signaled, trying to veer from the target lane, the center northbound. Others just sped up, scooting into the dark safety of the overpass, avoiding another fleeting urban danger until another day.
Red, yellow, funeral black, mauve. They zipped past. Orange. The police car's yellow blinker was going like an impatiently tapping foot. Eye Man spotted an elderly Oriental gent halfway across the overpass on their side. The old man's eyes grew questioning beneath his hatbrirn. He was leaning precariously on a crooked walking stick, and his cautious pace faltered as he contemplated the potential harassment in his path. His narrow eyes collected the sight of Jocko, hanging one-handed, brandishing the pumpkin. He stopped where he was.
Eye Man felt the compression velocity of major shit backing up the pipe. The situation was already beyond control. He gave it a try anyway, reaching forward and up to ensnare Jocko's jacket, just as the police car turned toward them.
Jocko shrieked at Eye Man, then bellowed toward the cars, olive drab, cherry lacquer, sky cyan blue, metallic flake emerald. Blood flushed his face; pink mottling red. The streets were theirs, Jocko screeched, and they were everywhere, and a pumpkin was scary because it could fucking kill you. Eye Man got a firmer fistful of Jocko's jacket. It was an old Levi's coat minus sleeves, the rib seams split-latticed with several hundred safety pins. A downward-pointing triangle of dull green leather was stitched across the back like a shield, bordered in hex studs. Jocko's preferred bands were markered in—Minor Threat, Legion of Parasites, D.R.I.—and a wornout Asexuals sticker was pasted near his left kidney. Eye Man recalled each detail of the back of Jocko's jacket very well; when he tried to haul Jocko in, the poorly sewn leather tore loose and Jocko fell, pumpkin and all, still howling about how we fucking live here.
A loud, incoherent bray escaped Eye Man, his vision filling with the swatch of green leather as though it was ectoplasm. His lunge through the rent in the fence was determined, but ultimately lame. Jocko fell. Eye Man watched everything change, for everybody.
The pumpkin splattered the back gate of a tow truck, seeds and stringers and orange goo spraying for yards in every direction. The truck locked brakes and got bashed in the ass by a ghetto Caddy. White, blue, corroded gold. Orange and silver and more orange.
Jocko hit the blank pavement in cruciform and a Datsun longbed stewed to a sideways halt on top of him. It got broad-sided by a limousine late for an LAX pickup. Skidding radials slopped crimson graffiti across two entire lanes.
A Toyota Tercel with cardboard dealer tags kissed the limo's left passenger door at forty. A muscle Mustang spun out to evade and flipped against the concrete barricade, scattering chrome and bright sparks. It slid back into the exit lane on its side, tinted windows spider-webbing, steel grinding and twisting. After a bowling-pin pause it fell over to compact its roof and blow out the glass all around. A staved-in grille was scabbed with racing stripe by whirling fiberglass shrapnel. Surgical blue-gray meets candy-apple scarlet. A summer hail of safety glass flew in diamond cubes.
Spilled gasoline mingled with Jocko's blood. It was the color of pumpkin juice.
The overlapping symphony of collision merged into a nonstop fifteen-second wash of ugliness, sandblasting Eye Mail's ears. Only the woop-woop of the police siren pierced the while noise blast of wreckage. Eye Man saw Chaka and Rude and Lindabelle standing behind the Oriental gent, mouths unhinged, eyes overexposed and blank. The carnage had stuffed them all to bursting. Rude exploded and began yelling at the old man.
"An ambulance! Call an ambulance, you old fuck, Jocko's fucking hurt, what the fuck is wrong with you, CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE!"
The old man recoiled, lost his footing, and stumbled, falling on his ass like a paper sack full of fragile vegetables. His eyes had gone so wide that his epicanthic folds seemed about to split. Eye Man imagined the slits tearing, the eyes brimming with blood. He saw fear in them, and panic, and incomprehension, but no blood.
Red.
The police flashers stabbed into Eye Man's brain. He reacted much as Rude had—bracing the first available adult and shouting about ambulances that Jocko no longer needed. The reply Eye Man got was a baton, introducing itself to his temple, and when he woke up
:.:
he was staring at Rude, thinking. Oh, jesus, he looks like he got the lungs kicked right outta him.
Somebody in the bullpen had ejaculated in Eye Man's unconsciously open mouth. He coughed up semisolid gunk and probed with his tongue. Through some miracle his teeth were all present, though scummier than ever.
When he could move, he leaned against Rude on a lower bunk. When he could stand, he rinsed out his mouth in the push-button sink above the gang toilet.
"You look like Franken-fucking-stein," he said when he saw Rude's gashed forehead.
"Car door. They bounced my skull off the hood a coupla times when they were patting me down. You got a helluva black eye, man. It goes all the way back to your fuckin' ear."
He touched, winced. "I can't see out of it."
Rude almost sniggered, but it obviously hurt. "Hm. Eye Man."
He was terrified at what irregularity his gingerly feeling fingers might trip over next. His upper lip was split and warm with new blood. He saw himself falling and striking the curbing. His face protested the strain of speech. He said something too mushy to decode.
Rude said, "Huh?"
Eye Man swallowed and tried again. "I said, he couldn't understand
You*"
"Who?"
"That old Chinese fart. You were yelling at him and he was scared green because he couldn't understand what you were saying. I don't think he could speak English." Eye Man's speech was lisping, with overlong pauses; a hard fight not to hurt.
"Cops thought I was assaulting him. Fuck. Stupid old fuck. This is America, goddamnit, why the fuck can't he fuckin' speak English?" "We speak it. We live here."
"We don't live fuckin' anywhere since we got kicked outta the Mecca. We got the Boulevard; that's it."
"S'what I mean."
Rude coughed and cushioned his head with his hands. "Chaka was talking about moving back in with her parents. They posted fuckin' xeroxes of her yearbook picture, can you believe that? Our lost widdle girl. Doesn't look nothing like her."
"It's not her," said Eye Man. "Did she leave?"
"Don't fuckin' ask ine, Holmes, I got to this fuckin' bridal suite the same time you did."
"Uh. Which reminds me. Which one of these scumbags needs broken bones in his life?" Eye Man could still taste the semen, sitting at the back of his throat like tartar sauce. Together he and Rude surveyed the bullpen's catch of the day: semiconscious drunks, overripe derelicts, Santa Monica vags and butt buddies, two or three iron-pumping chicanos and blacks, broadcasting bad. A groid with whitehead pustules all over his face grinned at them. Later that night, once he fell asleep under one of the bunks, Rude and Eye Man pounded the shit out of him, ramming his grin into the steel toilet rim until most of his teeth were out. Eye Man kicked him in the balls until blood soaked the crotch of his pants. Next morning, everyone swore the son of a bitch slipped and fell on his way to take a dump.
A month later, after the narrative got straightened out for everybody, Eye Man had forgotten the groid. The memory was always blotted out by the image of Jocko's blood, staining the ioi forever.
Hallowe'en made Eye Man feel suicidal. Jocko's distorted grin lived in every jack-o'-lantern. He could smell Jocko's blood in every pumpkin pie.
Past jail, fury rode in often and senselessly. Fuck the Dead Kennedys; Eye Man wanted to break a face. Dying young was a bottom line of the punk credo, but this was just too goddamn stupid. Anger and confusion went from bubble to boil, and tiny things, stupid things like rage, began to oscillate.
Eye Man aimed a pointless swing at Rude and Rude broke his nose. He would see Rude one more time in his life.
Sitting in the waiting room of Citizens' Medical Group, holding a wad of toilet tissue to his blood-caked nostrils, Eye Man told Lindahelle to write his name on the medical history form as Isadore Armitage.
Lindabelle was the only one who saw fit to help him. She sheltered him from the contemptuous stares of citizens and stole away the bite of ostracism. At the doctor's, they talked. They were not people of words, and words came painfully, aural witness to the erosion and decay that had rent their unity and stolen their strength.
Kicked out of their Mecca, they were dinosaurs, disaffiliates in Yuppieland. Adaptation was the remaining option. The antibodies were too lethal, and they were too weak. Jocko was no longer around to infuse them with psychotic pep talk and rowdy vinegar.
Four weeks after Eye Man's nose was treated, Lindabelle was humping the seven-to-three shift at Donut Stop. Isadore—Izzy—decided he had logged enough hours sleeping on bare floors and living on starch. He took on Exxon by the tiger tail. He larded his spiky flattop with Lindabelle's styling mousse and raked it straight back. Thus was he qualified for the idiot work of collecting petrodollars through bulletproof Plexiglas and hosing down the lot after midnight. He jumped to a graveyard stocking shift at the Mayfair Market. The pay was shit but the food came free. For this, he had to wear a knit tie. By pooling their incomes, he and Lindabelle could swing renting half of a stuccoed duplex, in a courtyard that had stood right on the border to West Hollywood since the early forties. West Hollywood was now a city with its own mayor. Two useful features of the apartment were walls and a ceiling. It also had hazardously antiquated wiring, more coats of paint on a single door than Izzy thought possible, baby roaches, and the best bathroom either of them had used regularly in nine years. All over Hollywood, houses were being demolished as a part of a bogus "rezoning" project, which meant that local politicos had been heavily buttered and blown. Sprouting from the wreckage were buildings that Izzy thought resembled cellblocks, even down to the uniformed lobby guards—flashy, incredibly shoddy, prohibitively expensive. They ganged up on the stubborn homes that remained and intimidated them into rubble, until the shoulder-to-shoulder cheeseboxes formed concrete canyons, their walls ten feet from the next building. Like Beachwood Drive.
Eye Man sucked hard on his teeth, trying to clean them with the rough side of his tongue. His mouth tasted foul and his teeth were scummy. For a while he submerged himself in the pursuit of spare change. He learned, long ago, the art of asking for a berserk amount: "Hey—spare sixty-three cents?" That was good, usually, for a quarter. The Boulevard median had bumped to nearly eighty cents. One black dude Eye Man normally saw hanging near Frederick's of Hollywood had the dick to ask for a buck fifty. Same army trenchcoat (just like Eye Man's), same bedroll. Nobby said the guy had once been a studio attorney; now he was a vagabond who jogged every day around the track field at Hollywood High and slept, so Nobby claimed, on the roof of the gymnasium. Chaka said she'd seen the guy in the laundromat at La Brea and Sunset, relating the story of how he could have been the Black Valentino to a woman with too much time on three dryers and hot mousetrap paranoia dancing in her eyes.
Your given name always changed when you hit Hollywood. That was why the names emblazoned upon the sidewalk stars meant nothing
to Eye Man. You couldn't tell who any of those people might have been. Strongheart had taken his name from a Vine Street star; nobody knew or cared who the fuck Strongheart might have been ... but the name had been resuscitated, and that was all that mattered.
Where the fuck was Sid Vicious' star? Jello's? Wendy 0's? Nothing on the Walk of Stars related to Eye Man's reality.
Fuck it. He was surly and pissed by the time he had meandered down to Hollywood and Highland. He had one crumpled dollar in his
pocket, plus a dime. He thought of bumming a cigarette from a PMS.
They could spare the smokes, but talking to them was like letting some yuppie limpdick try to cornhole you. Punks with Money Suck. You
could peg them at a glance. They were too well turned out; too much chrome and real leather. Eye Man had actually seen one wearing a watch amid the studbands and bike chains and custom-torn boutique hides.
Backed up sheeplike at the crosswalk, tourists gawked. Eye Man squeezed his infected earlobe hard. The most recent piercing had not
gone cleanly. He heard an amplified th-pow! inside his head, and pus squirted onto his fingers. He continued squeezing until he got blood, to rinse it out. The pain cleared his head while the pedestrians cut him some breathing room. He briefly felt the old power of the streets surging back into him.
"Hey, Eye Man." It was Jocko's guttural rasp. "Num-num-numnum-num! His snaky tongue licked wetness from Eye Man's throat. The citizens were thoroughly grossed out. Both punks giggled.
"Wanna catch a flick?" Both were team experts at cinema infiltration. It was absurdly simple. You staked out the alley exit of, say, the Omicron Theatre, and when that door opened, you ittied in and layed low behind the movie screen until the next feature commenced. If a lot of moviegoers streamed out, you simply walked in backward, right through them. It worked almost without fail.
"Naah." Jocko hefted his prize. "Check my punkin. Punkin, right?"
Jocko's signature graffito adorned the pumpkin's furrowed face. On the forehead, in shiny silver, was written POWER CHALLENGE. Behind, NEW ASSAULT, plus the circled A for anarchy. Lines braided and twined. It actually lent the pumpkin a basic sort of Impressionist grimace, the scrunched visage of a fat man with burst hemorrhoids trying to pinch out a drop shipment. There was as much logic to the artwork as there was schematic to the pigment splotches on Jocko's face.
"Know what makes punkins scary?"
Eye Man found himself cheering up. The street was still theirs, where it mattered.
"I'll show you. C'mon. Others'!! follow."
They loped east, enduring no shit from no body. A tall, satanic homeboy wearing a black duster smirked in passing, as though he knew what was going down. Jocko perched his pumpkin on one shoulder for display; the Incredible Two-Headed Punk. Street weenies goggled. Pig-eyed, scrub-shorn grunts on leave, come to shit all over Hollywood, barely noticed them. Fat-assed visitors with their squawking brats and plaid and cellulite and cameras clogged the walking pace. They think we look weird, thought Eye Man. None of them looked stiff; none of the women, fuckworthy. They were the missionary-position missionaries of America. They were doughy and dissipate. A trio of PMSs dealt some sort of stupid power sign; Jocko snarled and gave them the finger. He wanted to smash in their faces. He ached to battering-ram each thunderthighed heifer right in the bunghole, to rip out each dinky pud and cram it into each slackjawed face; then to take a grand diarrhetic shit over the whole massacre.
"We fucking live here," was all he said.
What's a football field wide, Cal Worthington's wet dream, ten lanes across, and never slows to less than sixty on an afternoon unspoiled by gridlock? The Hollywood Freeway, that's what. Jocko loved to park between the bus-stop benches and the wire mesh so he could stare down on all that traffic. It made him think of coursing fresh blood, of sharklike forward motion that never stopped, ever. To stop was death.
Vehicles piled through the underpass, some of them shearing away to snag the Gower offramp at Sunset. The divider below was thin, and battered by a million sideswipes. Flares, oilslicks, skidmarks, car droppings—all of it was ground fine by the stampede rush and absorbed into the street. The tarmac was always uniform; nothing altered its surface for long.
Eye Man took in speeding rooftops in enameled avocado, canary, crimson, wedding-gown white, and said, "There's no place left to go if you die here."
Jocko slapped on his annoyed look. "What?" His eyes timed the hurrying cars.
"It's all machines. Footprints in cement. Little metal records, pressed into the sidewalk. You can piss in John Wayne's footprints. You can pry the records and TV sets and film cameras out of the stars on the sidewalk. Nothing lasts here. Nothing has anyplace to go."
Jocko hocked and spit a phlegmwad through the chainlink. The wet white comet arced into the stream of cars. Consecration. "Don't let that shit eat at you, man."
Eye Man turned. "What happens, Jocko, if you fucking die here, and you're not a fucking star? Who'll give a fuck?"
That made Jocko smile as though he'd figured out something big. His smile was never a fun thing to witness. "Youuu walk the streeeets... 1I It was a lyric Eye Man had forgotten. "Get it?" They had arrived at the middle of the Boulevard overpass.
Eye Man thought Jocko was running on autopilot again.
"Look." Jocko pointed at the graffiti-besmirched retaining wall that ran below the fence. "We are everywhere."
The wall resembled the side of an ancient Bronx subway car—layer upon layer of spray paint and indelible packing ink. It swooped and wove and changed color; it seemed to move if you just glanced. A broad swatch in three colors read STONER'S EVIL: fat letters, outlined and shadowed, blue shading to matte white. The labor of hours, here on the overpass, far more fascinating and intricate than the constipated "art" Los Angeles had commissioned for its freeway web. The municipal murals were already vanishing under new coats of graffiti. ROLLER-BLADE WARRIORS.
Eye Man kept looking at STONE1'S EVIL. This had to have taken hours. Had nobody seen this being painted? Then it occurred to him that despite all the defacement he had wrought; personally, in ten years, you never really saw urban graffiti being implemented. It was just there. It was always just there. And it was always changing.
"Ygor, zee secret panel!" Jocko set down his pumpkin to pry back a head-high slit in the chainlink. He saw Eye Man about to ask what the fuck, and overrode with, "Just watch. We're gonna change everybody's day."
Eye Man played guardian of the sacred pumpkin while Jocko squirmed through the fence. The metal plaits were rusted, nearly fingerthick, much stouter stuff than basic hurricane fencing. Supposedly you could run a semi into its embrace and not sweat about breaking on through to the other side. Jocko behaved as though the slit had always been there and he had always known about it—another fringe benefit of constantly being tuned into a station no one else could hear.
"Hey, Jocko, don't you think -"
Jocko twined his fingers in the diamonds of mesh and yawed into space, chains dangling. He shouted hey you fuckin' aaaassholles but the
flood of cars barreling onward below was too tight to notice him. He reeled back and extended his free hand through the gap in the fence. "Gimme." He meant the pumpkin.
"Jocko. Hey. Let's just book on outta here, huh?" Eye Man could see what Jocko could not: a metro LAPD unit awaiting the green signal at the offramp.
Jocko flared lividly. "Gimme the goddamn punkin, Eye Man, or I rip your fuckin' eyes out and stuff them up Gash's twat! Now!"
He knew Jocko well enough to know he'd have to rumble to keep the pumpkin. Then he thought, Fuck it. What the hell did they owe the civil order of Hollywood Boulevard? To stop now would be pussy. To stop was death. He handed over Jocko's prize and cocked his head in the direction of future threat. "Cops."
"Just gimme." The sickly yellow eyes acknowledged the warning, but Jocko swung back out, heedlessly, acting like a blood in a big hurry to finish a job. He began screaming at the traffic, dangling the pumpkin by its stalk, a deadly bomb waiting to hit a windshield and change everybody's day.
Now the drivers below paid attention. Some signaled, trying to veer from the target lane, the center northbound. Others just sped up, scooting into the dark safety of the overpass, avoiding another fleeting urban danger until another day.
Red, yellow, funeral black, mauve. They zipped past. Orange. The police car's yellow blinker was going like an impatiently tapping foot. Eye Man spotted an elderly Oriental gent halfway across the overpass on their side. The old man's eyes grew questioning beneath his hatbrirn. He was leaning precariously on a crooked walking stick, and his cautious pace faltered as he contemplated the potential harassment in his path. His narrow eyes collected the sight of Jocko, hanging one-handed, brandishing the pumpkin. He stopped where he was.
Eye Man felt the compression velocity of major shit backing up the pipe. The situation was already beyond control. He gave it a try anyway, reaching forward and up to ensnare Jocko's jacket, just as the police car turned toward them.
Jocko shrieked at Eye Man, then bellowed toward the cars, olive drab, cherry lacquer, sky cyan blue, metallic flake emerald. Blood flushed his face; pink mottling red. The streets were theirs, Jocko screeched, and they were everywhere, and a pumpkin was scary because it could fucking kill you. Eye Man got a firmer fistful of Jocko's jacket. It was an old Levi's coat minus sleeves, the rib seams split-latticed with several hundred safety pins. A downward-pointing triangle of dull green leather was stitched across the back like a shield, bordered in hex studs. Jocko's preferred bands were markered in—Minor Threat, Legion of Parasites, D.R.I.—and a wornout Asexuals sticker was pasted near his left kidney. Eye Man recalled each detail of the back of Jocko's jacket very well; when he tried to haul Jocko in, the poorly sewn leather tore loose and Jocko fell, pumpkin and all, still howling about how we fucking live here.
A loud, incoherent bray escaped Eye Man, his vision filling with the swatch of green leather as though it was ectoplasm. His lunge through the rent in the fence was determined, but ultimately lame. Jocko fell. Eye Man watched everything change, for everybody.
The pumpkin splattered the back gate of a tow truck, seeds and stringers and orange goo spraying for yards in every direction. The truck locked brakes and got bashed in the ass by a ghetto Caddy. White, blue, corroded gold. Orange and silver and more orange.
Jocko hit the blank pavement in cruciform and a Datsun longbed stewed to a sideways halt on top of him. It got broad-sided by a limousine late for an LAX pickup. Skidding radials slopped crimson graffiti across two entire lanes.
A Toyota Tercel with cardboard dealer tags kissed the limo's left passenger door at forty. A muscle Mustang spun out to evade and flipped against the concrete barricade, scattering chrome and bright sparks. It slid back into the exit lane on its side, tinted windows spider-webbing, steel grinding and twisting. After a bowling-pin pause it fell over to compact its roof and blow out the glass all around. A staved-in grille was scabbed with racing stripe by whirling fiberglass shrapnel. Surgical blue-gray meets candy-apple scarlet. A summer hail of safety glass flew in diamond cubes.
Spilled gasoline mingled with Jocko's blood. It was the color of pumpkin juice.
The overlapping symphony of collision merged into a nonstop fifteen-second wash of ugliness, sandblasting Eye Mail's ears. Only the woop-woop of the police siren pierced the while noise blast of wreckage. Eye Man saw Chaka and Rude and Lindabelle standing behind the Oriental gent, mouths unhinged, eyes overexposed and blank. The carnage had stuffed them all to bursting. Rude exploded and began yelling at the old man.
"An ambulance! Call an ambulance, you old fuck, Jocko's fucking hurt, what the fuck is wrong with you, CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE!"
The old man recoiled, lost his footing, and stumbled, falling on his ass like a paper sack full of fragile vegetables. His eyes had gone so wide that his epicanthic folds seemed about to split. Eye Man imagined the slits tearing, the eyes brimming with blood. He saw fear in them, and panic, and incomprehension, but no blood.
Red.
The police flashers stabbed into Eye Man's brain. He reacted much as Rude had—bracing the first available adult and shouting about ambulances that Jocko no longer needed. The reply Eye Man got was a baton, introducing itself to his temple, and when he woke up
:.:
he was staring at Rude, thinking. Oh, jesus, he looks like he got the lungs kicked right outta him.
Somebody in the bullpen had ejaculated in Eye Man's unconsciously open mouth. He coughed up semisolid gunk and probed with his tongue. Through some miracle his teeth were all present, though scummier than ever.
When he could move, he leaned against Rude on a lower bunk. When he could stand, he rinsed out his mouth in the push-button sink above the gang toilet.
"You look like Franken-fucking-stein," he said when he saw Rude's gashed forehead.
"Car door. They bounced my skull off the hood a coupla times when they were patting me down. You got a helluva black eye, man. It goes all the way back to your fuckin' ear."
He touched, winced. "I can't see out of it."
Rude almost sniggered, but it obviously hurt. "Hm. Eye Man."
He was terrified at what irregularity his gingerly feeling fingers might trip over next. His upper lip was split and warm with new blood. He saw himself falling and striking the curbing. His face protested the strain of speech. He said something too mushy to decode.
Rude said, "Huh?"
Eye Man swallowed and tried again. "I said, he couldn't understand
You*"
"Who?"
"That old Chinese fart. You were yelling at him and he was scared green because he couldn't understand what you were saying. I don't think he could speak English." Eye Man's speech was lisping, with overlong pauses; a hard fight not to hurt.
"Cops thought I was assaulting him. Fuck. Stupid old fuck. This is America, goddamnit, why the fuck can't he fuckin' speak English?" "We speak it. We live here."
"We don't live fuckin' anywhere since we got kicked outta the Mecca. We got the Boulevard; that's it."
"S'what I mean."
Rude coughed and cushioned his head with his hands. "Chaka was talking about moving back in with her parents. They posted fuckin' xeroxes of her yearbook picture, can you believe that? Our lost widdle girl. Doesn't look nothing like her."
"It's not her," said Eye Man. "Did she leave?"
"Don't fuckin' ask ine, Holmes, I got to this fuckin' bridal suite the same time you did."
"Uh. Which reminds me. Which one of these scumbags needs broken bones in his life?" Eye Man could still taste the semen, sitting at the back of his throat like tartar sauce. Together he and Rude surveyed the bullpen's catch of the day: semiconscious drunks, overripe derelicts, Santa Monica vags and butt buddies, two or three iron-pumping chicanos and blacks, broadcasting bad. A groid with whitehead pustules all over his face grinned at them. Later that night, once he fell asleep under one of the bunks, Rude and Eye Man pounded the shit out of him, ramming his grin into the steel toilet rim until most of his teeth were out. Eye Man kicked him in the balls until blood soaked the crotch of his pants. Next morning, everyone swore the son of a bitch slipped and fell on his way to take a dump.
A month later, after the narrative got straightened out for everybody, Eye Man had forgotten the groid. The memory was always blotted out by the image of Jocko's blood, staining the ioi forever.
Hallowe'en made Eye Man feel suicidal. Jocko's distorted grin lived in every jack-o'-lantern. He could smell Jocko's blood in every pumpkin pie.
Past jail, fury rode in often and senselessly. Fuck the Dead Kennedys; Eye Man wanted to break a face. Dying young was a bottom line of the punk credo, but this was just too goddamn stupid. Anger and confusion went from bubble to boil, and tiny things, stupid things like rage, began to oscillate.
Eye Man aimed a pointless swing at Rude and Rude broke his nose. He would see Rude one more time in his life.
Sitting in the waiting room of Citizens' Medical Group, holding a wad of toilet tissue to his blood-caked nostrils, Eye Man told Lindahelle to write his name on the medical history form as Isadore Armitage.
Lindabelle was the only one who saw fit to help him. She sheltered him from the contemptuous stares of citizens and stole away the bite of ostracism. At the doctor's, they talked. They were not people of words, and words came painfully, aural witness to the erosion and decay that had rent their unity and stolen their strength.
Kicked out of their Mecca, they were dinosaurs, disaffiliates in Yuppieland. Adaptation was the remaining option. The antibodies were too lethal, and they were too weak. Jocko was no longer around to infuse them with psychotic pep talk and rowdy vinegar.
Four weeks after Eye Man's nose was treated, Lindabelle was humping the seven-to-three shift at Donut Stop. Isadore—Izzy—decided he had logged enough hours sleeping on bare floors and living on starch. He took on Exxon by the tiger tail. He larded his spiky flattop with Lindabelle's styling mousse and raked it straight back. Thus was he qualified for the idiot work of collecting petrodollars through bulletproof Plexiglas and hosing down the lot after midnight. He jumped to a graveyard stocking shift at the Mayfair Market. The pay was shit but the food came free. For this, he had to wear a knit tie. By pooling their incomes, he and Lindabelle could swing renting half of a stuccoed duplex, in a courtyard that had stood right on the border to West Hollywood since the early forties. West Hollywood was now a city with its own mayor. Two useful features of the apartment were walls and a ceiling. It also had hazardously antiquated wiring, more coats of paint on a single door than Izzy thought possible, baby roaches, and the best bathroom either of them had used regularly in nine years. All over Hollywood, houses were being demolished as a part of a bogus "rezoning" project, which meant that local politicos had been heavily buttered and blown. Sprouting from the wreckage were buildings that Izzy thought resembled cellblocks, even down to the uniformed lobby guards—flashy, incredibly shoddy, prohibitively expensive. They ganged up on the stubborn homes that remained and intimidated them into rubble, until the shoulder-to-shoulder cheeseboxes formed concrete canyons, their walls ten feet from the next building. Like Beachwood Drive.
