You would think Los Angeles would make a more dramatic entrance. New York you had to take a bridge to get to, or a tunnel; you had to disobey earth’s ground rules just to go in and see a show. Ever driven to Las Vegas? It’s around a corner. It’s just desert, desert, desert and then you bear left around some mountains and there she is in front of you shining like a pimp’s rings. Not Los Angeles. You just sorta realize you’ve been in her for twenty minutes.
“Like a loose asshole.”
“No asshole is that loose.”
“You’re a very sheltered person,” Big-Dicked Sheila said.
“From that? Okay. From assholes that loose, I am glad to have been sheltered. AAAAHahaha!”
Tiresias Richardson was in the passenger seat of the 1961 Lincoln Continental, and she was performing the ancient rite of drunks with access to car windows: she had her arm extended all the way, and she’d put her palm vertical and cup the wind in it, then flatten it into a wing and go SHWOOP SHWOOP up and down. At regular intervals, there was jazz handing. It was 72 degrees and sunny, because it was Los Angeles and that is the law. The top was down and her lazy curls flumpered around in the car’s slipstream.
Route 77 had exited into the parking lot of a bowling alley named Chicky Boom’s in Alhambra. From there, they took the 10 until they hit the 710, and then back on the 10. Neither woman noticed getting onto the 110, but they did and nothing looked familiar at all, so they took the 405 and man was that a mistake. About a half-hour later, Tiresias noticed Sheila squinting at the road signs.
“Are you too drunk to read the signs, or are you too blind?”
“I haven’t been too drunk to drive since I got my license.”
“Why won’t you wear your glasses?”
“They make me look too smart.”
“Yeah, but then you start talking and solve the problem. This! The 101! Go north!”
Convertibles the size of boxing rings do not swoop gracefully; it listed ten degrees as Sheila swerved across three lanes in the space of 100 feet. Tiresias did not whether she was too drunk to be frightened, or had just gotten used to Sheila’s driving. She would, Tiresias somehow knew, never be in a crash. Sheila didn’t get into accidents, she caused them.
They were on the 101 and the radio was still picking up KHAY from Little Aleppo. Lady Halberd was the deejay, and she was playing one of those lost British Invasion bands only she knew about: The Hammersmiths from Leeds, who were rougher than the London boys, and their big hit was “I’ll Teach You To Love Me,” which was far more a threat than a promise the way Paul Brears sang it. He died the following year. Had an idea for a song while he was in the tub. Fetched his guitar. Shouldn’t have plugged it in. When the tune was over, Lady Halberd told her listeners that she didn’t know Paul, but she did have a torrid affair with the Hammersmith’s bass player, Dicky Figgs, after he had joined that new wave group called Starbust 21. We were both so skinny, and so were our ties, she said. According to Lady Halberd, she was no more than two sexual steps from anyone in the music industry. None of her stories could ever be independently confirmed, and some conflicted with others, but they were still good stories. She wasn’t under oath or anything, everyone figured.
“Why is this still coming in?”
“Wally explained it to me. The car and Little Aleppo are quantumly entangled. It’s spooky. Tangled and spooky.”
“So, you didn’t understand what he said?”
“No. So, I went to Madame Cazee.”
“What’d she say?”
“It’s magick.”
“Okay.”
“She knows a lot about cars.”
“Hollywood! One mile!” Tiresias yelled out and jabbed her finger towards the sign. The off-ramp was on the right, and the Continental was in the left lane so Sheila spun the wheel and EEEEEEE across all the three lanes. Tiresias slid the length of the bench seat into her, and as she unsmushed herself said,
“One mile! We have a mile!”
“But now we’re here. We’re ready. We can fucking pounce on our prey.”
“Sweetie, we need to drink less while we’re here. I don’t know any cops here at all.”
“We’ll meet some, I’m sure.”
“Sheel.”
“Sure, sure. Drink less. Are you talking about in the car or at all times?”
“At all times, I think.”
“You’re a goddamned Nazi whore.”
“Sheel.”
“I can live without beer if I have every other form of alcohol.”
“We were already quitting beer. It’s Los Angeles. We’re on diets.”
“I hate this fucking place so much.”
They got off the 101 onto Santa Monica Boulevard, down by Western. Taco joints and laundromats and palm trees sprouting from the sidewalks at even intervals, their roots covered by metal grates to protect them from the local arboreal black market. Trees are expensive, and you don’t need a great big machine if you have three guys on meth, so the city guards her trees jealously. A group of postal workers, all women, had chased a man into a phone booth, the glass jobby that Superman used to hang out in, on the corner of St. Andrews.
“You think he was sticking his dick out through the mail slot?”
“No, you’d just close the flap real hard for that. Unless you were into the dick,” Sheila said.
“Is this how you meet men?”
“Yeah. I yell into their mail slots ‘Show me your dicks!’ and then I make my choice. Yeah. That’s how I meet men.”
The female postal workers breached the phone booth, and then the man.
“I guess we’ll never know what happened,” Tiresias said.
“Another Hollywood mystery.”
The sidewalks were wide and unused; there were so few pedestrians that someone had written a song about the fact. Packs of feral child stars swarmed bums and tourists, chowed down. They chittered at each other in their private language and kept the teeth as totems. Smelly fatties in superhero costumes. Crust punks leaned up against storefronts; they were accompanied by crust dogs. Scientologists, too. (The Church of Scientology had not taken hold in Little Aleppo. Members had been dispatched to the Main Drag to administer personality tests, but all of them were quickly poached by local cults. After a couple dozen folks from the Sea Org disappeared, the CoS stopped sending people.)
“What’s the address?”
“I dunno. Something something Santa Monica Boulevard. What’s the difference between a boulevard and an avenue?”
“Of where we’re staying.”
“Is it a legal thing?”
“What?”
“The difference between–”
“Tirry, where are we staying?”
“I figured we’d find a place. But we should do that soon. I gotta take a shit the size of a couch.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I might need two or three toilets. What?”
The Continental, which had been doing 30 in the lane nearest the concrete median, was now idling at the curb.
“You made no arrangements at all?”
Tiresias was a firm believer in living in the moment, which was why she was so often late with her rent. She had also been reading a self-help book titled The Wish, which was like The Secret, except you just wished for stuff. And she was bone lazy. Tiresias was admirably tidy, which you would think a trait associated with preparation and detail-orientedness, but it actually worked to her disadvantage as she would obsessively dispose of scraps of paper, and she wrote things down on scraps of paper. There’s a lot of daydreaming. Basically: the worst person in the world to put in charge of an adventure.
There was something Tiresias could look at that was not Sheila’s face, she was sure of it. No clouds, fuck, and all the homeless had been eaten. No coyotes, either, and she had been promised coyotes. Bring me my damn coyotes, she thought, and belched an alto note, and when she looked right: it was two floors, and the roof was aquamarine and the walls were white and the doors to the room were orange. An el-shape around a pool with chairs no one wanted to steal. Four rooms in the little part of the el, and ten on the long axis. There is a catwalk along the second floor. Big window, door, big window, door, big window, door, and so on. 28 in total.
One room was available, at least; the neon sign in the office window read NO VACANCY, but the first word was dark. Usually, lights are turned on to welcome guests, but not the NO VACANCY sign. The office window took up the whole wall that fronted onto Santa Monica, and there was a man in there. He was behind the front desk and in front of hideous wallpaper. Above the office window was white stucco with the motel’s name in ten-foot high loopy aquamarine script.
Tiresias turned back to Sheila, smiled her big smile–the one she saves for emergencies–and waved her arm at the building.
“Gotcha.”
The motel was named The Tahitian.
“You really thought I didn’t have a place for us to stay?”
You hear a lot of lies cutting hair, and Sheila had gotten good at spotting them. Sometimes, it was the little things: a detail left out, or too many; a trailed-off sentence; twitchy eyeballs. Other times, it was completely fucking obvious and, quite frankly, maybe even a little insulting.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“Where’s the lie? There’s no lie. How can there be a lie when we’re in Los Angeles? It’s The Tahitian.”
Sheila was still not having it.
“The Tahitian! Like the movie theater.”
Nothing.
“From back home! I do a show there on Saturday night. You’re fucking the owner. Sound system’s alive. The Tahitian!”
“Yeah.”
“You pull the car around while I go in the office and obtain the room that I reserved.”
“That you reserved.”
“Ages ago. I can hardly remember it was so long ago. OkayyouparkthecarandI’lltakecareofthereserv–” and Tiresias was out of the Lincoln and hopping across the sidewalk trying to get her sneakers on. She waved back at Sheila, who had already driven off to find the parking lot. Her knuckles were white on the wheel and she was thinking about Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, and whom Sheila was indeed fucking; Tiresias wasn’t lying about that. They hadn’t been going out long, but this was already the second time she had snuck out of the neighborhood on Gussy without saying goodbye. Sheila had never been in a stable relationship, but she was pretty sure they included no fleeing whatsoever. It may be the kind of personal flaw that one saw a professional about, Sheila thought, and made a mental note to call Madame Cazee and get a recommendation for an Angeleno psychic.
Tiresias was taller than the man behind the front desk. Cash register, guest register. He smelled like whiskey that needed a shower.
“Firenze.”
“Venezia.”
“What?”
“I thought we were listing Italian cities.”
“My name. Firenze.”
“Just the one name?”
“Yes.”
“That’s so wild. My friend I’m with is a one-namer, too. I mean, she’s got a title, but I don’t know if that counts.”
“Were you the ones for Room 114?” he said portentously.
“My, you said that portentously.”
“I do not consort with adverbs.”
“Good advice for writing and for life.”
Tiresias tried out her “Ain’t I cheeky?” smile, which worked all of the time. Firenze collapsed behind the desk, got to his feet, both pretended he hadn’t.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re the ones for Room 114.”
The key was attached to a plastic palm tree with the motel’s name and phone number written on it.
“Your tab’s covered.”
She was a better actress than she gave herself credit for, so she didn’t say “What the fuck are you talking about?” Instead, she said,
“As it should be.”
Firenze rotated the guest register, and pointed to a spot along the left margin; there was a coffee mug full of pens.
“Sign, please.”
Big loopy DOROTHY GISH in blue ink. Tiresias drew a heart over the “I” in Gish, smiled, recapped the pen, back in the mug, key in the pocket, Firenze went down again. Out the side door that led to the pool and the rooms. There was quite a bit to process about that encounter, she thought. Had she actually made the reservation? If so, she had now had the problem of blackouts to worry about in addition to inscrutable conversations with innkeepers. That someone else, unknown to her, was footing the bill also struck her as irregular. If Tiresias had ever seen The Manchurian Candidate, she would have thought of the scene with Angela Lansbury on the train, but she hadn’t and so she didn’t. Also, she was a Little Aleppo girl and that kind of interaction with a business owner was perfectly normal there. The fact that she wasn’t in Little Aleppo didn’t occur to her. And Sheila–who was already cranky–would no doubt ask a billion questions that she couldn’t answer, and she truly, truly needed to take a shit.
Sheila stood on the diving board in her leather pants. She looked like an album cover.
Tiresias waved the key around over her head.
“Told ya!”
“I have a billion questions.”
“And I have to take a shit, so let’s hit the room that I reserved and that we now possess. 114!”
Sheila hopped down and picked her purse (which was more properly a satchel) off a lounge chair and joined Tiresias. Last room on longer side of the first floor. Right next to the parking lot and the stairwell. The door required a little bit of shoulder. Burnt umber, and mustard yellow, and too much maroon. Blackout curtains for the front window. Black velvet painting of Eliot Gould over the bed. Teevee with rabbit ears. Bathroom was in the back, and before Sheila could say…
“There’s one fucking bed?”
…Tiresias was in the bathroom and Sheila threw herself on the queen-sized without taking off her shoes, and FFT POP she lit a Camel without checking to see if there was an ashtray in the room and FWOO called out something to Tiresias that was quickly forgotten as Sheila lit nine or ten more matches and dug in her purse for incense and lit that, too, and there was name-calling for a little bit.
Ten minutes later, Sheila had her shoes off and so did Tiresias; both were sitting on the bed with their backs against the wall–there was no headboard–and each had a can of Arrow that had gone warm hours ago. They were quitting beer as part of their Los Angeles diet, but there were still eight or nine left in the case and throwing them away would be wasteful.
A casual knock on the door. A man in casual slacks. Sport coat, checked. Bald head, roughly planet-sized. Tiresias did not invite him in, and he did not enter, just looked in at Sheila, then back to Tiresias.
“Not what I expected.”
“We’re full of surprises! AAAAHahaha!”
“Mr. Buttermilk wants this done quickly.”
“Then that’s what Mr. Buttermilk gets.”
The man handed over a briefcase. Halliburton Zero. It was gunmetal gray and looked like it should be handcuffed to a guy in an unremarkable suit. Sheila peered around Tiresias’ ass; she had no idea what was going on, but she always wanted a briefcase like that.
“Everything you need is in there.”
“Awesome, possum.”
He left, and she shut the door and started to say something but Sheila leapt to her knees on the bed and put her finger out and whispered-shouted, “Shut the fuck up,” and they were both quiet and still until they heard a car in the parking lot start up and drive off.
“Gimme,” Sheila said. Tiresias handed it over, and then sat on the bed next to her. POP POP the locks open and now the case; the top stays up with no prop, well-balanced, and Sheila catalogs the Zero’s contents.
Several 8×10 black-and-white photos. Snappy-looking blonde, early 30’s. In an evening gown, a soft-lit promo pic, riding a horse, another on a horse, fucking the stable boy, fucking a different stable boy, fucking both stable boys.
Sheet of paper with an address on it. Typed.
Sheet of paper with a map to a large house. Drawn.
Sheet of paper with a phone number. Hand-written.
Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 revolver. Unloaded.
Box of ammo. Full.
$5,000 in manila envelope. Hundreds.
“Huh,” Tiresias said as Sheila gently placed everything back in the briefcase and closed the lid. She turned to her friend and did not punch her dead in the face, and Sheila is still to this day proud of that. She did–calmly and with love–place her hands on her friend’s upper arms, and squeeze as hard as she could.
“Your improv training is going to get us killed.”
“Ow.”
Sheila had been sitting, and she scrambled up to her knees so the two women were eye-to-eye, and also for better leverage on Tiresias’ arms.
“You just ‘Yes, and-ed’ us into a hit. We’re hitmen now because your first instinct when confronted with bullshit is to agree with it and make it bullshittier. So we’re hitmen now.”
“Hitpeople.”
“Are you talking about gender politics right now, Tir?”
“A little.”
Sheila nodded, and then shook the fuck out of Tiresias.
“We need to focus, Tir.”
“Vodka?”
Sheila nodded, and thought about shaking her some more–desperately wanted to–but let her go. Tiresias fetched a half-empty liter of Lubyanka from the tiny fridge under the teevee. There was a screenplay in there when they first opened the door; it had potential, but the second act was a mess.
“Glasses or bottle?”
“Bottle.”
She passed it over and Sheila took a long tug, and then another, and handed it back to Tiresias, who drank and then said,
“We’re supposed to kill the lady, right?”
“What?”
“Not the horse.”
“We don’t kill the horse.”
“I mean, I don’t want to kill the lady, but I’m absolutely not killing the horse.”
“I will fucking shake you again, bitch.”
“This is not all my fault. Numerous points along the way, you could have stopped me.”
Sheila fumbled for her cigarettes, a handful fell onto the maroon comforter. She grabbed one; Tiresias did, too. The ashtray was in between them–they were both sitting cross-legged–and it had the motel’s name in glamorous script that matched the building’s facade, and under that was written The South Pacific, east of the Pacific. In Sheila’s mind, she had already stolen it, and then something crossed her mind; she leapt up and snatched the ashtray off the mattress, dumped its contents towards the garbage bin, grabbed her purse and the briefcase and Tiresias’ backpack and the room key and her keys, and then yanked the larger woman off the bed and out the door.
“Why are we fleeing?”
“Because the real hitmen could be here any second.”
Now Tiresias did not need to be yanked along and began running towards the Continental, but realized that running looked suspicious (and both of them had left their shoes in the room) so she downshifted into a stiff-hipped trot like those race-walking weirdos from the Olympics. The car had power locks that sprang up and she slid in the passenger seat, barely getting the massive door closed as Sheila punched it out of the parking lot.
“We forgot the vodka.”
“We’ll get more,” Sheila said.
“And our shoes.”
“Also available for purchase.”
“What do we do?”
“I dunno. I need to think.”
“We’ll find a bar.”
They were headed west on Santa Monica Boulevard–towards Hollywood, towards Beverly Hills, towards Venice, towards the ocean–in a 1961 Lincoln Continental. After just a few blocks, Sheila pulled over and they put the top down. Hitmen be damned, it was a top-down kinda day in a top-down kinda city. There was a briefcase on the seat in between the two women, and they were headed west on Santa Monica so very far away from their homes in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.
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