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ALWYN MARTIN
Pete's Van
We are well
advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,
whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all
too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
– Joan Didion
I am
not a woman you would look at now and imagine with a half-pound
of heroin shoved in her panties, driving a Hungarian drug
dealer’s minivan as she pulled away from the Mexican supplier at
a McDonald’s in Koreatown. It hasn’t been that way for a
while. These days, I drive a minivan of my own, filled with
children and soccer gear, water bottles and grocery receipts.
My hair is expensive blonde; not the out-of-the-box red from
those days of living in Hollywood motel rooms when the cops were
looking for me. My bras are not too big now, since I eat. I
have a husband who is a lawyer. There is a pool, and a garden,
and we concern ourselves with the school board and recycling.
I’m
done with the van. It has proven its point. Many factors led
me to choose one in the first place, even against the protests
of my other stylish friends, who could not imagine me wanting to
drive such a piece of machinery. I didn’t care. Maybe I wanted
it because it was new and clean, average and unassuming. These
are things that I am not.
The
Hungarian dealer’s minivan was the first I ever drove. Even
with my home-dyed hair, I still looked more polished and
sophisticated than the rotund, bearded, menacing character that
spoke with a thick accent and smelled of rarely-laundered
polyester blend clothing. When I became indebted to him, I
acquired the job of Driver, which I gratefully accepted, as the
unspoken alternative seemed to be Cock Sucker (at the very
minimum). I do not make a good whore, and he probably sensed
that I would be more trouble than I was worth in this area, what
with all the crying that would most likely take place.
He
acquired the maroon, American-made vehicle from some suburban
junkie in the Valley who owed him money, and decided that it
would be the perfect cover for a guy like him. Pete was his
name, and he had been in and out of jail since he came to the
U.S. as a young man. He was in his 50’s at the time I knew him
— a soulless, frightening product of streets and incarceration,
practically illiterate, foul-mouthed, suspicious, crafty and
connected to the small-time underworld. His previous vehicle
was a small camper that he drove around L.A., making deliveries
with two dogs: a Greyhound named “Iggy” and a Chinese Hairless
named “Poo Poo Pee Pee”. Very inconspicuous.
Pete
needed a new image, and he liked the fact that I looked honest
and innocent. Even after having been up for a couple of days on
a blow run, I could still walk into any situation feeling
confident, speak articulately, and calmly handle the business at
hand. I was a music business child, the product of private
school who learned Latin coupled with fielding advances from
inebriated record executives at my father’s parties. There had
been poor, dark times, too. It all came in handy.
The
arrangement was that I would drive Pete around to wherever he
needed to go. Most days, it was a matter of making the rounds
amongst his customers. Some were functioning addicts with
“normal” lives, while others were pathetic and shriveled dope
fiends who did nothing but get high and scheme their next
fixes. Pete grew impatient with the fiends, as they always
seemed to want more than they really needed. He never did
drugs, but he understood that there was a difference between
doing just enough to keep someone from getting dope sick and
doing so much that they were gowed to the bone. Gowed equaled
greed.
“Lee-dee-ya,” Pete would say, drawing out my name like an exhale
of smoke from his generic-brand cigarettes, “Thee greedy ones
are what you need to look out for. Pathetic peegs. They
deserve it when they end up OD’ing.”
There was a particular client, Ramona, a stripper from Los Feliz,
who always wanted more than she needed. She worked for one of
those clubs in East Hollywood, in what is now called “Thai Town”
(a city council’s attempt to mask sleaziness with cultural
value). At the time, all I knew about East Hollywood, I read
from Charles Bukowski, who had managed to make being a
degenerate alcoholic seem appealing to a nice girl from the
Valley. It seemed a fitting (if not cliché) setting for taking
off one’s clothing in front of an audience equally mixed with
the pathetic and dangerous. I would try to appear robotic
when I entered the place, so as not to attract human attention.
“You
need to go get Ramona at eleven,” Pete would say every night,
predictably, as if it were a new request. He'd usually catch me
in the middle of examining the inside of my nose for fresh
sores, or trying to apply more concealer to my increasingly
darkened undereye circles, knowing that my early-evening break
would soon be over. Pete and I lived together, moving around to
different cheap motels in Hollywood. We never stayed longer than
four or five days; we always paid cash. I didn’t ask him why we
kept moving, but assumed that he knew better than I did about
these things.
Having me with him, minivan and all, was just as useful when
checking into the motels as it was when parked outside an
apartment building on St. Andrews Street, waiting for Pete to
complete a deal. People saw me – well-dressed, good posture,
nice manners – and assumed that I wasn’t smoking heroin and
snorting half a gram of cocaine off the chipped, yellowing
bathroom vanities in their motel rooms.
“No
problem,” I’d say cheerfully in response to his orders, grateful
for the time I’d get to spend alone, driving the van, high off
the new bag he’d give me each night. “You know I always get the
money from her.”
Ramona was usually into Pete for a week’s worth of product that
she’d already consumed.
“I
know you geet the money," he'd say to me. "That’s why I send
you. She can’t pull that stripper sheet on you, like she tries
with me. And her blow jobs are bad, anyway.”
“It’s not that she doesn’t try to manipulate me, Pete, but
trying to play that game with me is like trying to beat…” I
paused, searching for a sports analogy that he would understand.
“ Well…ummm…it just doesn’t work on me.
Although I’d never stripped, my manipulation skills were equally
as honed, the result of one parent being an alcoholic and the
other emotionally unstable. I was amused by these tactics when
directed at men for the purpose of opening up their wallets, but
easily annoyed by attempts to ply my own will.
Pete
got a kick out of my past, or what I let him know about it.
“You went to nice schools, but that’s not what makes you
smart." He’d grin, stroking his beard and raising an eyebrow
like a philosophy professor. “A girl like you, she has to be a
good faker to stay alive.”
He
could be wise like this occasionally.
“What will you do when I go back to grad school?” I would ask
him.
His
laugh sounded evil sometimes. Like now. “How you gonna get the
money for school? You spend it all on the brown and white
before I can pay you!” He’d pat my hand with a sweaty, callused
paw. “Eets no good, Lee-dee-ya. I know a guy in Eagle Rock
that owes me, and soon I will take his house.” For a moment he’d
seem like a kind person. “We can live there and then you can
kick.”
I'd smile
weakly. “I told you, when Brad and I get back together I am
moving back in with him. Once I get clean, I can go home.”
“He has another
girl now. She’s not a dope fiend.” The fleeting kindness was
gone.
Everything was
gone. Brad asked me to move out not long after my brother died.
Shortly afterward, a poorly timed incident involving painkillers
and vodka resulted in me leading the conga line at a wedding
reception, a wedding to which I’d been uninvited by my
stepmother (the bride) and my father (the groom).
I decided that I
should be there anyway and, after sneaking in and asking the
band to play the theme from The Godfather, began passing
out “favors” to the bride’s Italian relatives from Brooklyn:
cigars, plastic pinkie rings, and small cans of hairspray. I
carried the items in a shopping bag from Saks and would reach
into it and toss them to the crowd, as if I were Rip Taylor
scattering confetti.
The only guests
I actually coaxed into following me in the conga line were a
middle-aged hooker in a revealing dress (the date of my
accountant uncle) and a seven-year-old boy. To this day, I
maintain that the party was just getting started, before I was
abruptly escorted away by a couple of stoic meathead cousins in
ill-fitting suits and too much Hugo Boss cologne. Then came the
cops, and criminal charges filed by my own father and the Hotel
Bel Air.
When
Brad came to pick me up from jail the next morning, he was
driving my car. The back seat and trunk were packed with all my
clothes and books. Wedged in between the driver’s seat and the
stick shift was the orchid I’d been tending for months. It was
a species that smelled like chocolate, intoxicatingly sensual
and exotic. That morning, with my mascara-streaked cheeks and
foul breath, its scent struck me in the gut as Brad unlocked the
car door.
I
vomited at his feet.
He
drove me to our regular coffee shop, gave me $100, and told me
that he hoped I’d get help real soon. When he walked inside the
restaurant, I saw him slide into a booth with a girl we knew
from our AA meetings. She was clean for eight or nine years, as
I recall, and wore an expression of sympathy. Even from the
distance of the parking lot, I could tell she was hiding a
self-satisfied grin of victory.
When
the money ran out, I sold my designer clothes for more. I was
reaching the last of it when I met Pete. The model/actress
friend upon whose couch I’d been sleeping had been cut off from
her coke dealer and been given Pete’s number by a busboy at the
restaurant where she waitressed. We were both going through a
couple of grams a day each, so the new contact was a godsend.
Within a month, I had sold my car and blown through those funds,
which gave birth to the Driver arrangement with Pete. He fed me
and kept me safe. He also introduced me to the tarry brown
stuff that would help me come down when I was too wired.
I
sucked back tears from his last statement and lit a cigarette,
though I really wanted to smoke more junk.
“When you leave to geet Ramona tonight, you weel drop me at
Tracy’s house,” Pete grunted, satisfied that he’d crushed any
hopes I still entertained of returning to my old life.
“Again? She needs more? We were just there this morning.”
Tracy wanted my job and was willing to fuck him, too. Sometimes
we used her place to cut and package the stuff.
Pete
got a look on his face that scared me, though I wouldn’t show it
– the way you have to do it in jail. “You got a problem with
this? She is making me dinner and likes to play with Iggy and
Poo-Poo Pee-Pee, not like some people who just want to get high
and drive all night going god knows where.”
I
tried to calm him. “If we get that house in Eagle Rock, I can
cook for you every night. And I’ll walk the dogs, too.”
He
snorted. It was silent in the car that night when I drove him
to Tracy’s.
“I
veel call you ven I am done,” he said when he got out of the
van. “Ramona owes me two hundred. Make her buy you something to
eat, too. You are too skinny. It’s making you ugly.”
He
let the dogs out, slammed the door and walked toward the duplex,
where Tracy was waiting outside wearing a flowered dress with
her boobs pushed up. She bent down and squealed as the dogs
rushed up to lick her face, then looked up and waved at me as I
pulled away. I could be replaced by the end of the night.
Ramona was not on the floor of the club when I arrived. The
manager, a middle-aged Chinese woman with dragon-lady nails and
hair extensions, eyed me suspiciously from the end of the bar.
She said something to one of the nearby security goons while her
gaze followed my movements around the club as I searched for
Ramona, making my way toward the dressing room.
The
goon met me at the door. “She’s getting her shit packed. Got
fired tonight. Rita found out she’s tipping off vice, but one
of the guys owes the owner so he made a call.”
I didn’t flinch.
“Did she make any money tonight?”
He stared
straight ahead. “You’d best just help her get out of here.
She’s done dancing and tricking in L.A. Nobody’s gonna touch
her, especially not that skanky ass.”
I found her
sitting on the floor of the dressing room, frantically searching
for something in a wastebasket. She was wearing a thong and a
tank top, and I could see her cellulite clearly in the
unforgiving fluorescent light. The only other person in the
room was a half-wasted Mexican girl who aimed intently for her
eyelashes with a mascara wand.
“C’mon, Ramona.
We’ve got to go. Now.”
Ramona looked
up, terrified and weeping. For an instant I glimpsed what both
of us must have looked like before all this, before we had to
pretend it wasn’t this bad.
“I can’t find my
rig and my pouch. They fucking threw it away! Or they hid it!
I’m gonna be sick soon, Lydia. I’m gonna be sick.”
“It’s okay,
honey,” I consoled in a whisper. “We just have to leave. I have
some in the car.”
“But you don’t
shoot. I need my rig!”
“We’ll find you
one. I need you to be strong right now and GET UP. Neither one
of us can afford for anything more to go wrong, get it?” I
helped her off the floor.
There was a fake
silk cheetah-print robe hanging from one of the chairs. The
Mexican girl glanced over as I picked it up and draped it around
Ramona. I shot her a look that made her go back to her make-up,
then flung Ramona’s stuffed duffle bag over my shoulder while my
other arm shepherded her out the door.
Once in the car,
Ramona started begging for heroin. I reached inside my bra and
slipped her a wad of foil. “Get in the back of the van while I
drive and put some clothes on. There’s an Exxon station with a
good bathroom on Western. I’ll stop there and you can have five
minutes. Then we’ll go eat.”
While I waited
for her at the gas station, I thought about going back to the
motel and packing my own bags, but realized that I didn’t own
that much anymore. I imagined Pete getting lasagna and a
blowjob from the Tracy in the flowered dress. I could see her
driving this van the very next day while I was dope sick and
alone.
Ramona got back
in the car, slightly more relaxed but not as loaded as
expected. She handed me back the wad of foil, as well as the
lighter and straw I’d given her. I refused.
“Don’t you wanna
go in?” she asked.
I just shook my
head, pulling out of the parking lot. “I think I am finally
hungry.”
“I didn’t make
any money tonight, Lydia.”
“I know,
Ramona.”
“Pete’s gonna
cut me off.”
“Probably.”
We drove for a
long time that night, passing restaurants but not stopping.
Every time I’d slow down, thinking that something seemed
appealing, I’d look inside and see sad people. Their eyes were
as vacant as mine, and I couldn’t look at them. Ramona seemed
content to just ride along, not caring that we weren’t talking
or hadn’t stopped.
After what might
have been a couple of hours, she said, “Do you miss your old
life? Pete told me about it. The rich parents, the school,
your boyfriend.”
I waited a long
time to answer, then I drove into a coffee shop parking lot and
turned off the car. “No, I don’t miss my old life. I miss the
one that I know exists, though.”
She seemed to
understand, and smiled a little. “Is this where you want to
eat?”
I nodded and
handed her the keys to the van. “Yeah. I’m ready to eat. Take
care of yourself, Ramona.”
“Do you want
some company?”
“No thanks,
hon. They know me well here. I won’t be alone.”
As I watched her
turn left onto La Brea, I hoped she’d pull over eventually, just
long enough to find the panties I’d left in the back seat. I
pictured her discovering the package that had been duct taped to
the crotch. If she was the least bit clever, it could buy her
some temporary freedom.
I was looking
forward to pancakes and coffee.
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