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(FROM ROOM 17B, THE DEVILLE MOTEL, EAST LA)
© 2004 Tony O'Neill
Editor's Note: This story contains graphic realism. You decide if that's a good or bad thing before sharing this with the kiddies...
Afternoon sunlight diffused thru’ the trees of Macarthur Park; walking with a girl, long since
dead of drugs, watching the ducks in the lake and wondering if I could catch one of them and
dash out its brains against a rock and the thought makes me laugh out loud.
“What’s so funny?” she snaps.
“Nothin’. Everything. I don’t know.”
It’s a beautiful day. It’s always a beautiful day in Los Angeles – you stop noticing after a
while, the monotony of perfection. I am intensely aware of my own discomfort, the ache in my
bones, and we sit on a bench next to a sleeping wine head. An empty crack vial glints; trodden
underfoot and shattered, like stardust. My teeth are falling out and I’m tired… I used to be a
pretty motherfucker once but no one could call me pretty now. Hollow-cheeked and pale, black
eyes like dying stars. I am a collapsed star, already dead millennia ago but my image remains. I
will continue to haunt this neighbourhood, this park, this bench until the news of my demise
reaches across the divide of space…
“You’re thinking again,” she says, “You think too much.”
“Maybe you don’t think enough.” I tell her.
Suzie is an Alvarado Street whore who has lived with me for the past 6 months in room 17B of
the Deville Motel in East LA. I met her in The Gold Room on Sunset, drinking a tall bourbon and
soda and turning tricks in the bathroom for 20 dollars a go. She had once been pretty no doubt,
long before I met her. You can see it sometimes in her worn out face… traces remain of blue,
wide eyes, smooth white skin, full lips… but now these features have gone, crumpled into a 2
decade-premature hardness. Too many drugs, OD’s, beatings, bad scenes… her body is a
patchwork of track marks, a Frankenstein’s monster of bad shots, abscess, collapsed veins, scar
tissue and reformatory tattoos. The value of her pussy has declined with her aesthetic appeal…
When I met her she was a 20-dollar trick, now her pussy isn’t worth enough to get us both
straight. She has to work harder for less money and it’s only the fact that she won’t turn anyone
or any act down that has kept her in business. The real money goes to the younger girls with
better looks, fewer years, smaller habits. Suzie was old, fucked up, desperate and bitter just like
me. She delighted in trying to make me feel bad every time I fixed dope she had earned.
“I was gangbanged for that balloon. 4 drunk-assed labourers, passing around a bottle of
Wild Turkey. One after the other, in their truck. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! They laughed at me
and threw a dollar on me when the last one was zipping up. You know what they said? ‘Here’s
your tip, bitch’. Then they high fived each other and told me get out of their goddamned truck.”
She’d say it as if I was supposed to thank her or some shit like that. I’d just look, shrug and
dig for a vein. We all godda suffer for this, Suzie wasn’t nothing special. It’s a dope habit, I’d tell
her, not a party dress. It ain’t meant to be pretty. Deal with it.
I made 40 dollars selling my food stamps on Alvarado. Suzie had 30 in crumpled up fives.
We waited for Macho, the connection, to see what we could get from him. I was stinking and
covered in sweat from standing in the sun hawking the stamps and watching for patrol cars. The
pigs didn’t need an excuse to stop me anymore, they knew me as a thief and a dope fiend and
had often decided to stop and beat the shit out of me because there was nothing better to do at
the time. My wake up shot for the day barely got me on my feet and out of the door, and by the
time I had the stamps and was hawking to the old Spanish women who bought them for half price
I was sweating like the junk pig I am. On top of that, having to circle the block and duck into dark
bars every time the pigs crawled down the street started making me crazy with sickness and
exhaustion. In a bar called ‘One For The Road’ the old barkeep saw me slide in and hover by
the pinball machine and yelled “Hey!”
“Hey…” I threw back distracted, peering out into the blinding sunlight as the prowl car went
past, white pig faces leering out obscenely at the bustle of the neighbourhood.
“Do I godda come over there? Either buy a drink or get the fuck out. I don’t need you
bringing the heat in here, pal.”
It was a bad day in East Hollywood to be this sick dope fiend, I can tell you. So when Macho
saunters up late as usual, smelling of tequila sweat, I am sick and irritable. Suzie has been on
my goddamned last nerve since waking in the morning. She had her money left over from last
nights whoring and stayed in bed while I went out to work. When I returned with the money from
Alvarado she was awake and pissed off, cursing me for taking too much of the heroin we had left,
throwing the spoon at me as I walked into the room.
“OH HELLO MOTHER FUCKER” she screamed as –clank!- the spoon bounced off of the
door as it opened, “Nice and fucking high from shooting my shit this morning huh? I double
boiled these fucking cottons and I’m still sick as shit. Selfish prick!”
Then she launched herself at me and tried to claw my face so I punched her in the fucking
gut as hard as I could.
“I made 40 dollars cunt” I told her as she lay gasping on the floor all doubled over and
gagging still cursing me with ragged breaths, “And I didn’t take more than my fair share. That
fucking oil burner of a habit is why you can’t get well anymore. Try and claw my face one more
time, cunt, and I swear they’ll find you in a fucking garbage dumpster. Now get dressed, we’re
meeting Macho in 10.”
“Wachooneed?” asks Macho, his big brown cheeks puffed up like a gerbil with balloons of
dope and coke. I thrust the 70 bucks at him and am about to say “Chiva” when Suzie chips in
with “I want some coke…”
“Aw Jesus Suzie not again…” I start.
“I godda work, I want some coke, man. “
“No, no fucking coke Suzie. “
It is three o’clock and I know that if we get coke we will start to shoot it almost as soon as we
get back to the motel room. All of our kidding ourselves about saving it until later will be gone,
and with 70 dollars and a junk habit the most we will be able to get is a half. Suzie gets crazy on
coke, I get crazy on coke. We will sit around shooting the coke in that sweatbox of an apartment
until it is all gone (no more than half an hour I should imagine) and then the jones will kick in like
a great black wind. First off we will shoot all of the dope to try and straighten ourselves out.
When that doesn’t work we will have to hustle more money. Suzie will be a coked out, bleeding
twitching mess and the tricks will stay away from her. I will be too nervous and wired to effectively
steal anything without copping a bust. The fear and the need will give way to depression and by
the end of the night we will be broke and screwed. It is pattern which repeats itself at least three
times a week and which we both seem to be incapable of breaking.
“30 dollars of that money is mine asshole” she hisses, “And I want some fucking coke.”
Macho spits out 2 balloons, one white one black and splits. On the way back to the motel I
tell Suzie, “Listen we ain’t doing this shit as soon as we get back. You godda whore and I godda
steal. Lets get straight and get some work done before we get into this shit.” The streets seem
smaller on the way back to 17B. It seems like the city is shrinking, contracting around us.
Midnight… wired and freaked out wandering the streets trying to get credit for heroin, coke
crack anything and failing… Suzie is gone, another blazing argument after the coke was gone
and I started going insane and beating her mercilessly…
“Get the fuck away from me” hisses one of the crack dealers near the Pico-Union corner,
“Nothing doing homie”. A chasm of drug – need opens in my soul and I start back towards
Alvarado in a state of despair.
Stopping by One For The Road I hear the sounds of grunts and cheers emanating from
within. Stood in the dark street I can see Suzie on the bar, skirt hitched up, flat on her back while
a drunk white labourer thrusts into her with a malevolent look on his face. I walk in and the yells
from within take on the volume and brutality of a Roman arena as I see the rest of them queued
up behind the labourer semi hard cocks in their hands waiting their turn as the barkeep looks on
impassively. I walk in and the walls of the bar dissolve around us and Suzie looks up at me with a
peaceful look on her face.
“Look baby” she tells me, stretching out her arm and opening a fist fill of dirty 5 and ten-dollar
bills, “Look what I’ve gotten…”
Around us the music swells, those big syrupy strings like some dumb movie like Gone With
The Wind or Brief Encounter and the colours are saturated and unreal here and I am wearing a
1930’s suit catching sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar, hair slicked back like Clarke
Gable and Suzie says…”It’s a happy ending baby, the Hollywood Dream…” as the guy comes
into her yelling “Fucking… whore!” with each thrust.
“Goddamn” I say in disbelief, “A happy ending. Who’d a thought it?”
The next trick jams himself into her as the music reaches a crescendo and the screen fades
to black.
he was the keyboard player in a number of bands. He moved to Los Angeles at the tender
age of 18 where he became a part-time writer, B-movie extra and hustler as well as a
full-time heroin addict, crack fiend and speed freak. In his first stint in rehab he started
writing about life in the East Hollywood street drug scene and got published in a local East
LA arts magazine called 213. Five years on he is off of hard drugs and still writing, having
finished a book called 'Alavardo and 6th Blues' based on his experiences which he
hopes to get published one day.
Tony currently lives in the UK again, and has nothing much to show for the previous 6
years except some missing teeth, track marks and a few tattoos he barely remembers
getting. He is still playing music.
His favourite writers are William S Burroughs, Donald Goines, Charles Bukowski and the
Fantes - John and Dan. Oh, and
Dito Montiel.
