Fashionably Late From Little Aleppo

“My father was a small surge of electricity. Not enough to kill you, but he could singe your fingers. He lived in an outlet in the dining room. We ate in the kitchen.”

“And I’d like a root beer float.”

Neither Big-Dicked Sheila nor Tiresias Richardson had expected the acid to come on as quite as fast and strong as it had, which was foolish on their part because it was Precarious Lee’s acid, and they were now having difficulty ordering drinks. LSD tends to make conversations with, say, the Archangel Michael much easier, but conversations with, say, the cashier at Burger King much tougher.

“I don’t understand whatever that was,” the bartender said to Sheila. He was a bantamweight ginger named Roscoe–just Roscoe–who was trying to break into the stunt performers’ union and writing a screenplay about Lewis & Clark’s expedition. He was having a rough go of finding the arc of the story. He had the three acts–Let’s Keep Going This Way; Oh, Here’s The Ocean; Welp, Better Head Home–but the beats were eluding him. Until its sale, or his entrenchment into the ranks of working stuntmen, he worked for a catering company to pay the rent. To pay the bills, he let weird men take pictures of his feet. It’s a rough business, the show business industry.

Roscoe looked up at Tiresias and said, “And I don’t have the ingredients for that.”

“We’re friends of the Buttermilks,” she answered.

“Okay, great.”

“So…it’s cool.”

“What?”

“It’s cool. Root beer float, sailor.”

“I can’t make you–”

“I told you: it’s cool. Two straws.”

Tiresias leaned towards Roscoe like a Vargas Girl, like the cheesecake on the nose of a B-29 headed for Berlin, jutting her head at him all angled coyly, and her hands spread with wide fingers down on the portable bar. The heels were helping her attitude, she felt. They were six-inch leopard print beauties. Neither Tiresias nor Sheila had ever heard of the company that made them–Hoggins Aviation & Byproducts–but both agreed that it didn’t pay to be a snob in a 24-hour shoe store in Hollywood. Tiresias had lost her shoes three or four felonies ago, and they almost pulled the Super Bee over on Sunset and bought a pair off a hooker’s feet, but then spotted the lit-up shop.

Sheila bought a pair of black boots to replace her yellow Converse hi-tops; she got the blood off the rubber toe cap, but droplets and splotches had soaked into the canvas sidewalls. The boots were made, the label said, of laather; flexing the material in her hands, Sheila thought that the misspelling may have been deliberate. Her pair of perfectly shabby Doc Martens was back in the Lincoln, and Precarious refused to go back to the car until dawn. Sheila argued with him; she loved those boots; it had taken a decade to get the tongues to loll just right.

“No, not until it’s light out.”

“Don’t make me wear these things.”

“I’m not making you do anything,” Precarious said. He was sitting down and trying on a pair of sneakers that looked exactly, but not precisely, like the sneakers he had been wearing. “If I was making you do something, I’d make you leave town.”

“We can’t. I wanna find out how this all ends.”

“What if it ends badly?”

“Nothing ends badly in Los Angeles, Lee-Lee.”

Sheila was quite literally the only human being on the planet, including his ex-wives and children, who Precarious would let call him “Lee-Lee,” and she was only allowed to once in a while. She was standing over him in her socks, and she bent over to kiss the top of his maroon ball cap. Precarious looked up at her, kindly, and said,

“That’s the dumbest shit you’ve said all night.”

She straightened back up and rummaged through her enormous purse.

“You have no sense of adventure.”

“I have a sense of self-preservation. We should book it for home.”

Sheila held out a pack of Juicy Fruit. Precarious took a stick, unwrapped the foil, slipped the gum in his mouth.

“The gum doesn’t change my opinion.”

“It wasn’t a bribe,” she said, chewing. “And we’re going to this party. Fucker set us up.”

“Which fucker?”

“One of ’em. What brand are those sneakers?”

The running shoes were gray, with red accents and tan soles. There was mesh involved. Other fabrics, possibly.

“None. No distinguishing markings whatsoever. And nothing on the box.”

“That’s very authentic.”

“Yeah, they fit.”

There was a cashier up front behind the desk. He was chubby, and reading a magazine about a very specific kind of fishing; the trio had been notified upon entrance that he would not be helping them, and he wasn’t checking in the back for anything.

Tiresias stalked out of the aisles to the front section where Sheila and Precarious were. Leopard-skin high heels.

“Well? These were the sleaziest ones in my size.”

“Ooh, I love ’em,” Sheila said.

“And they’re only kinda my size,” Tiresias grimaced. “Why must we suffer for our beauty?”

“You don’t have to. I look hot as fuck in comfortable shoes.”

“You look hot as fuck always.”

“Love you. Seriously, those are fabulous. You look like an off-duty stripper.”

“I look like an off-duty mud wrestler, sweetie. AAAAHahaha!”

She catwalked up and down the length of the shop. The woman was a master of high heelery. Tiresias had, as a child, been scolded en pointe by various balletmistresses, and sweated through years of dance lessons in jazz shoes, and attended many dance parties in towering platforms. She had once shot a commercial for Arrow Beer where she ran down a flight of steps in stilettos, full speed; she nailed it on the first take, then refused to sleep with the director, who made her do it 15 more times, and she didn’t break any of her ankles The trick, she thought, was keeping all your weight on your toes as if the heel wasn’t there at all. The other trick was not caring that your feet hurt. Sheila wouldn’t wear shoes she couldn’t run or fight in. The two of them had different childhoods.

Precarious had utterly no idea why women wore those damn things. Looked uncomfortable. Neither had he ever seen the sexual appeal, but Precarious had spent his entire working life surrounded by hippies; for at least a decade, every women he dated had been wearing barefoot when they met, and so maybe his tastes were a bit skewed.

“What are those?”

“The best I could find,” Sheila said about the boots. She was sat next to Precarious and lacing them up.

“Why didn’t you just get new Converse? I saw some over there.”

“Those aren’t Chuck Taylors. They’re Chick Tylers. Everything about them is…off.”

“Oh.”

“And they were damp. But, like, not the boxes. Just the shoes. I didn’t want any part of it.”

“You made the right call, sweetie.”

“We should take acid,” Tiresias said. “You have some, right?”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Precarious answered.

“It’s a party. I love going to parties on acid. Everyone’s faces go all wobbly and you get to say real stupid shit to people. C’mon, sweetie.”

“No.”

“Sugar pie.”

“No.”

“Daddy badger.”

“Badger?”

“Your mustache is thick like badger fur.”

“Yeah, okay. But we shouldn’t take acid.”

Sheila stood up next to Tiresias and they made Charlie’s Angels poses in the full-length mirror. Clompy jackboots, black leathers with the lace-up crotch, The Snug tee-shirt; leopard-print six-inch heels, straight-legged trousers cut to accentuate the tushee, white button-up not that was not very buttoned up.

Tiresias fussed with her cleavage and said,

“This bra is not the one for the job.”

“Fuck that. You look great.”

“I’m thinking no bra.”

“It’s a Hollywood party,” Sheila nodded.

“You’re saying no bra?”

“I’m saying that it’s a Hollywood party.”

“You’re right. Fuck it. I’m going to this shindig loosey-goosey. Maybe there’ll be producers there.”

Sheila took her by the elbow, and pivoted her from the mirror; looked her deep in the eyes.

“You do know that Pilot Season is over for you, right? This year, at least.”

Tiresias knew that she was 27 years old (29, if you asked her driver’s license) and that 27 was, in actress years, a billion. How long could she host the Late Movie as Draculette? Ten years? Twenty? That wasn’t a career, it was a sentence. Window was shutting for her, she thought.

But she was not a complete idiot, and–thinking of the murder they’d been framed for along with the murder they’d actually committed–saw the logic in skipping town.

“I’m just gonna count it as a success despite what actually happened.”

“Sweetie, you made more money in one day than most actresses in LA make in a year.”

“Yeah, but–you know–it wasn’t for acting.”

“No, fuck that,” Sheila said. “When we were with Lady Buttermilk? You acted your ass off. You reminded me of Isabella Rossellini.”

“I’m nothing like her.”

“No, like, your aura.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“We’ll come back next year, okay? We’ll find out if it’s okay to come back next year, and if it is, we’ll come back. And we’ll be much more organized.”

“I need to get more organized. What do you mean, ‘We’ll find out if it’s okay to come back?'”

“Dude, we fucked shit up hardcore here.”

“Hardcore,” Precarious added from his seat.

“That’s because we’re punk,” Tiresias said.

“We’re punk as fuck, yeah. But we assaulted a cop and stole from rich people.”

“What you’re saying is that we’re folk heroes?”

“Tell me you understand that we need to leave town.”

“After the party.”

“Right,” Sheila agreed. “After the party. And we get my car.”

“So it’s not urgent?”

“Escape should be sooner rather than later. But one of those Buttermilk assholes framed us for murder and I’m gonna find out what the fuck. I’m gonna find out what precisely the fuck. And the fuck is at that party, so we’re going and finding what the fuck.”

“You’re pissed.”

“I am. I’ve never been framed for murder before. It’s infuriating. What the fuck?”

“It wasn’t personal,” Tiresias said, rubbing Sheila’s arms.

“That makes it worse. I can name half-dozen people with valid reasons for framing me for murder. But this is just us being some disposable piece in a rich asshole’s plan. When someone you know frames you, it’s like they’re saying ‘You matter.'”

Tiresias hugged her, and said,

“You do matter.”

The hug became deeper.

“Tell Precarious we should take acid for the party.”

“She’s right,” Sheila said. “It just makes sense.”

It did not make sense to Precarious, but he recognized the logic as similar to that employed by his former organization. Why not floor it? You already grew your hair long and read the wrong books. He had read way too many of the wrong books: self-published malarkey about how various ethnicities were secretly aliens; rumorology (that is, the study of Sacred Gossip); far too many volumes involving ley lines and what they had to do with George Washington’s secret spy corps; experimental novels written in first through sixth person; but mostly nerdy sci-fi. Cheap, thick paperbacks with lurid covers and pre-yellowed page edges that would float around the band and road crew. The kind of science fiction where the author did a lot of research and didn’t want to waste anything, so there’s 14 pages on sword-smithing. You could learn something in between the fuck scenes in those books, Precarious always figured.

“Polytely,” he said.

“Wha?”

“Hah?”

“I think I’m saying it right. I only read it. It’s got to do with how you solve a problem with multiple goals that contradict with one another. Which is what we got. We wanna retreat and revenge at the same time. Ran into this kinda thing all the time in the Dead.”

Sheila sat down next to him and said,

“What did you usually do?”

“Well, the second thing we did varied, but generally the first response was to drop acid.”

She pecked Precarious on the cheek and leapt up; Tiresias did a move she liked to call the Boogaloo.

“Look how happy I am. I’m doing the Boogaloo,”she said.

“Tirry, you gotta stop saying that.”

The move was not the Boogaloo. It was a spastic mixture of the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. Tiresias just enjoyed saying “boogaloo.” The two women did their Charlie’s Angels poses into the mirror again.

“Come here,” Tiresias said. “You be Charlie.”

“Charlie was just a voice on the phone,” Precarious told her, not rising.

“Then get on up and make yourself manifest, Chuck.”

The flavor had run out of his Juicy Fruit–the gum is notoriously lossy in re: flavor tenacity–and he wanted a cigarette, so he spat the pink wad into a piece of tissue paper yoinked from a shoebox, cleared his throat, walked out the front door in the gray-with-red-accent sneakers he had not paid for, got into the 1971 Super Bee parked outside, started it up VRAAAAAM and then occupied himself with finding his smokes.

The chubby cashier put down his fishing magazine and stared at the two women.

“We’re paying for that gentleman’s shoes,” Sheila said.

They did, and their own, and joined Precarious in the car, where he had taken a dark-brown glass bottle from leather pouch with a familiarly skull-shaped logo burnt into both sides. Dropper. Back of the hand, back of the hand, back of the hand, salud, lick, lick, lick. VRAAAM the car and FFT PHWOO the cigarettes and west on Sunset once more, through the sloppy, weaving cars. It was after midnight in Los Angeles, and Angelenos believe in drunken driving. If God did not mean for us to drive drunk, then why did He create alcohol and cars? Furthermore, why would He put Santa Monica so far from Silverlake? It’s not like you can walk; that’s not a walk, that’s a migration. The bus is out of the question. Once were trolley cars that zipped and clanged and connected the L.A. Basin, but no longer. They made a movie about it, starred a cartoon rabbit. The boulevards are wide, but dangerous, and the best you can hope for is that whoever you hit is as plastered as you, and waves off any legal or financial entanglements in favor of getting moving before a cop drives by.

Tiresias did, indeed, go loosey-goosey. It came in handy soon when they arrived at the Buttermilk place to find the gate guarded by immense men; they had bulgy sports jackets and asked for names. Before Precarious could answer, Tiresias was across his lap and halfway out the window (and halfway out of her shirt). They were with Holiday Rhodes, she told him, the man’s much-needed management team. The immense man, who gave far less of a shit than his earpiece suggested, waved them through.

Sheila slipped the five hundreds back in her purse as Precarious eased the muscle car onto the grounds, then pitched her torso over the front bench seat. She kissed Tiresias on the cheek and said,

“I thought we were gonna have to bribe him.”

“Tits are nature’s Swiss Army Knife. Useful in almost any situation. AAAHahaha!”

“Not jogging.”

“Almost. I said almost. Nothing is without drawback. Are we packing?”

“I am. I don’t know about Precarious; I’ve never seen his dick.”

Tiresias headbutted the side of her skull, softly.

“We’re not,” Sheila said.

“No,” Precarious shook his head. “We’re not.”

“Both of you are?”

“Yes.”

“Yup.”

“And I don’t get a gun?”

“No.”

“Nope.”

She palmed the top of Sheila’s head and pushed her into the backseat.

“Why nooooot?”

“You’re whining,” Sheila said.

“It’s a choice. Telllll meeeee why I can’t have a guuuuuuun.”

“What did Polonius say? C’mon, Tirry, what did Polonius say?”

“Polonius, the reptile wholesaler on Merwin Street?”

“The other one.”

“He said Know thyself.”

Sheila popped back over the seat right behind Tiresias and nuzzled her cheek-to-cheek, rubbed her arms up-and-down.

“Right, sweetie. And I want you to answer me honestly because I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

“Do you really think you should get a gun?”

“Yes.”

“What happened when I took you shooting?”

“I cried because I was startled. Not because of the gunfire itself. My finger just jerked on the trigger and the noise was much louder than I expected.”

“And I’m not trying to invalidate your feelings here.”

“I am totally not getting that from you.”

“Good, good, good. But you did cry, and then you put the gun down, and then you left and walked home.”

“That was Little Aleppo Tiresias. This is Los Angeles Tiresias. I’m pistol-packing and hard-bitten.”

“That’s what you should do: if there’s trouble, bite someone hard.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“Absolutely not. Since when do you know Polonius the reptile guy?”

“I didn’t tell you ’cause I wanted it to be a surprise. Thinking about adding a snake to the act.”

Back home, Tiresias was the Horror Host for KSOS’ The Late Movie Show, or at least Draculette was. Monday through Friday, midnight crept up and there she was reclined along the spookiest couch anyone had ever seen, in a dress blacker than a cave and so tight that it precluded any activity more strenuous than telling dirty jokes. Far too much mascara. The wig. Never fangs, though. Tiresias tried them once and her cameraman–whose whooping and easy off-camera laugh stood in for the audience–found her vocal fumblings so hilarious that he pissed himself. As a comedienne, she was incredibly proud of herself, but her producer side recognized that sounding like she just had a stroke was not a sustainable bit.

The movie, the commercials, her. Five minutes each. Repeat until three AM. Hour a night, when you add it up. There was no money for writers, or other actors, or props. Tiresias found the skeleton who played her ex-husband, Fatty, in the studio building’s basement; it had been left there by Mortuary Mindy, a previous Horror Host; no one had ever looked into the bones’ provenance. The devil made regular appearances as a frog figurine painted black. A fan sent in a stuffed bat, so she hung it from the rafters and called it Count Fang. Sometimes she made prank phone calls. Rarely, she would discuss the films, and then it was mostly to apologize. She was forbidden to talk about the commercials.

“Ooh, that would be great. You’re not gonna become one of those snake people, are you?”

“That’s the thing keeping me from getting it.”

“No one who has a snake has one snake. They have, like, nine. And they’re gateway pets. First, it’s a snake, and then you’ve got a frilled lizard or a coatamundi in your apartment. Stick to cats and dogs.”

Precarious feathered the accelerator and asked,

“How is your cat?”

“I don’t have a cat,” she answered to her left, then swiveled her head to the right. “Why does everyone think I have a cat?

“You seem like you have a cat. Your aura,” Tiresias said as she checked her makeup in a handheld compact mirror.

“It’s a Sagittarius thing.”

“You blame everything on that.”

“Longest driveway I ever seen,” Precarious muttered.

The main house was lit up like a nuclear explosion on Christmas morning; the gables were spackled with color; the Corinthian columns blazed. Were it not for the solar panels and temperate weather, the house might have been in Devonshire overlooking the moors and the peasants. Great, swooping wings off the center structure–three floors? four?–with its isoceletic pediment making a frowning brow over the grand doors. Shallow steps leading up.

“Gimme two of those hundreds,” Precarious said. Sheila slipped the bills over his shoulder; he folded them, palmed them, pulled the car up next to the valet, shifted into Park, left the key in the ignition. Tiresias got out, slid the seat forward, yanked Sheila from the back. They primped themselves, groomed each other, checked for boogers.

“Just leave it right there,” the women heard Precarious telling the valet as they set off up the stairs. Sheila had her industrial-sized purse; Tiresias carried nothing, having locked the Halliburton briefcase (containing most of the money and all of the incriminating evidence) in the trunk of the Super Bee.

“I couldn’t feed a snake,” Sheila said.

“The intern will do it.”

“Then get the snake. Very sexy.”

“Natassja Kinski in that poster.”

“Hot. Do it.”

“The only problem is that the big ones are expensive. I could only afford, like, a gopher snake or something.”

“Is that a real animal,” Sheila asked, “or something you made up?”

“Real thing. They eat gophers.”

“Are they pretty?”

“If you’re really into the color ‘brownish,’ I guess.”

“How big?”

“Two, three feet.”

“Sweetie, you’ll look like you have a turd draped on you. It’s one step up from waving a handful of garter snakes at the camera. You need a snake like Alice Cooper’s.”

“I told you: they’re expensive.”

“You made six grand today. Buy the cool snake. Just don’t become a snake person.”

“Are turtles sexy?”

“No,” Sheila said.

“Scary?”

“Not in the slightest. Why?”

“I could get a great deal on a turtle.”

Polonius Humble ran the reptile shop back in Little Aleppo; he had named it Herpes despite friends’ protestations. They did not know his customer base. Bawdy bunch: the overlap between the reptile-owning and orgy-attending communities was heavy. He sold skinks and night lizards and tonguebacked igunanas. Snakes from adders to vipers. Itty-bitty turtles and giant, snappity beasts. He could get you a gila monster, but you needed to put down a deposit.

“You don’t buy turtles, sweetie. They live in ponds. You can just, like, pick one up.”

“Not the ones Polonius has. The man’s got the fanciest turtles you’ve ever seen. You think the butler is gonna recognize us?”

“We were here, like, six hours ago and haven’t changed clothes,” Sheila said.

“We have new shoes.”

“I still think he’ll know it’s us. The question is whether he goes to Lord or Lady Buttermilk when he sees us.”

“Hundred bucks on Lord.”

“No bet.”

The party had whipped loose from its moorings, and elegance had hidden in the back bedroom, cowering under the duvet; all the canapes were long gone. The good coke had come out, not that nine p.m. shit you had to share with your agent’s assistant. Several beautiful teens had been concussed. The music was loud, and by someone’s client. The hallways were staggering. The pool table had been desecrated. Emilio Estevez was fingering an Asian woman. Couples snuck off, sweaty scrums humped next to the pool. A hand, semi-greased, shot out for Sheila’s ankle. She leapt, dodged, swerved, smacked into Tiresias.

“Babadook!”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Sheel.”

“We know one. He’s a cop. You have a crush on him.”

“I do not. And Romeo’s not really a ghost; he’s just spiritual.”

Tiresias muttered that last bit. Her spine was spitting off sparks and etchysketch lines drew themselves between stars, shook away into nothing, the pool was breathing. From her left and a foot lower came Sheila:

“Holy shit.”

“You, too?”

“Drinks?”

“Something.”

Which is how they came to be standing in front of the portable bar on the back patio by the pool manned by a bantamweight named Roscoe–just Roscoe–asking for a root beer float and talking whatever nonsense Sheila was talking, and so engrossed in their dealings with said bartender that they didn’t notice the big guy with the crewcut and the broken nose staring at them from across the pool high in the Hollywood Hills, which are so very far from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.