“They didn’t let him in because he’s a heroin addict,” Rip calls out.
“What bullshit,” Trent says.
“You didn’t know that?” Rip laughs.
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“He practically eats it raw,” Rip says, turning the volume on the television down. “He used to be normal.”
“Oh shit, Rip,” I call out. “What does normal mean to you?”
“No, I mean really normal.”
“Shit, I never knew that about Larry,” Atiff says.
“You’re so full of shit,” Trent calls out to the bedroom.
“Oh, Trent, suck my dick,” Rip yells.
“Take it out,” Trent calls out, laughing, walking back to the bedroom. “Hey, who made the reservations at Morton’s?”
Déjà vu passes through me and I open a GQ, faces from my sisters’ walls come back to me. The music is loud and the songs sound like they’re being sung by a little girl and the drum machine is too noisy, and insistent. The little girl voices sing out, “I don’t know where to go/I don’t know what to do/I don’t know where to go/I don’t know what to do/Tell me. Tell me …”
“Did you make the reservations?” Trent calls again.
“You have any meth?” Chris calls back to Trent.
“No,” Trent calls back. “Who made the reservations?”
“Yes, I made them,” Rip shouts. “Now shut up.”
“Do any of you guys have any meth?” Chris asks.
“Meth?” Atiff asks.
“Look, we don’t have any meth,” I tell him.
The music stops.
“You gotta hear this next song,” Trent says, pulling on a shirt.
Chris ignores him and picks up the phone in the kitchen. He dials and then asks whoever’s on the other end if they have any meth. Chris pauses and hangs up, looking dejected.
“Some guy propositioned me today,” Rip is saying, walking into the living room. “He just came up to me in Flip and offered me six hundred dollars to go to Laguna with him for the weekend.”
“I’m sure you’re not the only guy he approached,” Trent says, coming out into the living room and opening the door that leads out to the jacuzzi. He bends down and feels the water. “Chris, do you have any cigarettes?”
“Yeah, in my room, on the bed stand,” Chris says, dialing another number.
I stare back at the poster and wonder if I should do the coke I have in my pocket now, before we go to Morton’s, or when we get there. Trent comes out of Chris’s room and wants to know who’s lying on the floor of Chris’s room, sleeping.
“Oh, that’s Alan, I think. He’s been there for like two days.”
“Oh, that’s great,” Trent says. “Just great.”
“Just leave him alone. He has mono or something.”
“Let’s just go,” Trent says.
Rip goes to the bathroom first and Atiff and I stand up.
Chris hangs up the phone.
“Are you going to be here when I get back?” Trent asks him.
“No. Gotta go over to the Colony. Look for some meth.”
My dreams start out calmly. I’ll be younger and walking home from school and the day will be overcast, clouds gray and white and some of them purple. Then it’ll start to rain and I’ll begin to run. After running through all this falling water for what seems to be a really long time, I’ll suddenly trip into mud and fall flat on the ground and because the earth’s so wet, I start to sink, and the mud fills my mouth and I start to swallow it and then it goes up through my nose and finally into my eyes, and I don’t wake up until I’m completely underground.
It begins to rain in L. A. I read about the houses falling, slipping down the hills in the middle of the night and I stay up all night, usually wired on coke, until early morning to make sure nothing happens to our house. Then I go out into the damp, humid morning and get the paper, read the film section and try to ignore the rain.
Nothing much happens during the days it rains. One of my sisters buys a fish and puts it in the jacuzzi and the heat and chlorine kill it. I get these strange phone calls. Someone calls, usually late at night, and on my number, and when I answer the phone, the person on the other end doesn’t say anything for three minutes. I keep count. Then I’ll hear a sigh and the person hangs up. The street lights on Sunset get short-circuited, so a yellow light will be flashing at an intersection and then a green one will blink on for a couple of seconds, followed by the yellow and then the red and green lights will start to shine at the same time.