Highlife: A journey into the dark underbelly of Los Angeles

M A T T H E W S T O K O E

from High Life (Little House on the Bowery)
A few of days after Royston’s visit I realized I was bored. Booze tasted stale, my body felt soft and the pill-fog around my head was starting to bug me. The fugue of the last week and a half had burnt itself out and I was suddenly tired of lying around. Like some cathartic dawn the desire to be out in the world again threw its light over me. I wanted a more active distraction than TV. I wanted to participate in what I saw there.
I shaved, showered and dressed. Late night. Black sky powdered orange. Outside, tail lights would be streaking the roads with journeys far more exciting than those of the day—drug transportation, deals in the back seat, fucks to be tracked down in bars and clubs and nailed on the wet tiles beside pools in the hills, meetings to be kept or deliberately broken, steps to be taken towards success or someone else’s destruction. Ah, the L.A. night!
I stood on the steps out front of the flat and breathed it in. It smelt different. It was a different place to the city I’d known before Karen’s death. Without the daily grind of a job, without the headfuck detrition of worrying about accepted patterns of behavior, it had changed from impenetrable monolith to become again a place where anything might happen—a glittering arena of streetlights, headlights, lighted windows and neon.
The Prelude fired up first go—smooth function Nippon tech. I let it idle and thought about Karen.
Dead in a park shortly after an illegal kidney operation. The scar on her belly and all her organs removed. It wasn’t hard to come up with a scenario—Karen dumps her kidney, comes home and tells me about it, we fight and she splits, she gets back in touch with the doc, then something goes down and he wastes her. Seemed logical to me. The operation and the killing were close in time. The wounds might have been made by a surgeon. And who better to have a motive for such thorough body emptying than someone who wanted to obliterate all traces of an illegal operation?
I had a feeling I’d linked these thoughts for a reason, but right then I wasn’t sure what it was. So I rolled the windows down and hit the road and hoped the night air would blow them away.
For a short time I felt free. There was nothing to stop me driving forever if I wanted to—no alarm clock, no donut boss. My actions had so little impact on the world around me I felt outside time. What did it matter when I stopped, where I went, what I did? Without ties to one of the visual media industries I was irrelevant to the city.
North on Lincoln, east on Santa Monica, all the way to Hollywood and the drag.
Prime time, around twelve. Parallel with Hollywood Boulevard, a few streets south, the drag was hot. Its littered half mile of fake fronting and excessive wattage crawled with buyers and sellers like a radiant, maggot-riddled carcass. Porn theaters, fast-food joints, a couple of bars, hard-eyed men with rough skin and too many rings on their fingers. And hookers, hookers, hookers.
Cars rolled slowly, close to the curb, viewing the trade. Cunt, pussy, snatch… Hunted by all the types the city could throw up. College kids crammed six to a car, hanging out the windows, whistling and yelling and banging the door panels with the palms of their hands, bringing with them the only innocence the drag ever saw, out to get a friend laid, or find some slag-heap bitch who’d do a carload cut price. The pros, the regular customers, confident and relaxed, alone or with a buddy, calling the girls by name, cool in their negotiations, explicit in their demands. They were going to get what they paid for, sure as shit. And the guys who took it a whole lot more seriously. Always alone, windows shut, until the need got bad enough to force that final swoop up to a woman they’d already passed ten times that night. Hot in the car, sweaty, driving with a hardon, risking a job or a wife or the house or the kids, but unable to stop themselves. Sex as a drug, dirty and dangerous and built on fucked up psych foundations—shit hanging over from childhood. Sickos and sneaks, yeah, but they were the real face of drag consumption. Unlike the kids and the goodtimers whose laughing transactions did not cut beyond the flashy first layer of the whore animal, these desperate men were its bone and muscle. They were the truth of what went on here, the true counterparts of the whores. Pain slotting into pain.
The pimps in their cars. The junkies sitting hunched over untouched black coffees in tired diners whose toilet walls were smeared with carbon from the bottom of spoons and laced with the red feather-trails of flushed syringes. The odd old guys who always hang near pussy or drugs, feeding off a nerved voracity they mistake for excitement and youth. The liquor store owners with their shotguns—pilot fish around the shark—who prayed at the start of each night to just make it through one more alive. The Mexicans who slopped out and swept up in the porn shows and the fuck rooms, smoking roll-ups or small dark cigars in a snatched five minutes on the steps of a side entrance, leaning on their brooms, so tired they might never move again. The cops, few and far between, mirror shades even at night, thick forearms pale from long-term night duty, chewing gum. And cruising like all the rest.

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