Josh Stallings
Beautiful, Naked and Dead
CHAPTER 1
There is nothing quite like the cold taste of gun oil on a stainless steel barrel to bring your life into focus.
I was six years old the first time I honestly considered suicide, not as some cry for help, touchy huggy bullshit. No, for me death was a gift, an escape. Like those vests divers wear that fill with air from a CO2 cartridge and pull them to the surface. At night while the Monster roared through the thin walls of our bungalow, I would pull that thought up and let it comfort me like a warm blanket.
As an adult I have found that a barrel in your mouth forces you to pause, take a moment, ask that all important question. How did my life get this fucked? If I don’t need anyone, why am I so lonely? At least I like to think it was that deep, fact was I had a bone numbing hangover, a throbbing head and a fur covered tongue. The gun was on my dresser and if I had any aspirin they were all the way in the bathroom.
Thumbing back the hammer of my snub nose Smith amp; Wesson.38, it clicked into place. Three pounds of pressure on the trigger would drop the hammer onto the primer, igniting the 4.5 grains of smokeless gunpowder. The resulting explosion would drive 158 grains of lead at 1085 feet per second out of the barrel, plowing up through my pallet, through my brain and out the back of my skull. Sure, it seems like a lot of complex engineering just to end one life, but it was the simplest thing I could come up with at the time. Idiot. All I had to do was hang around long enough and people would line up to do the job for me.
Outside, the warm southern California sun was baking the sidewalk, kids laughed and shrieked as they ran through a sprinkler. Down the street a Mexican radio station was playing some brass-driven ranchero music. Happy, happy LA.
Running my tongue along the gun barrel I could feel the ridges of the front sight.
Was this the day I had the nerve to pull the trigger?
Blame it on the fifteen large I owed Vinnie Bag Of Doughnuts on a string of nags that came in third place.
How about that bloodless whore Jen. Blame her. I owed the heartless bitch five grand in back alimony. An old man in the joint once told me, “You meet a pretty girl, you just want to eat her up, you marry her and son you’ll wish you had.” To prove him right, Jen had to sic the D.A. on my deadbeat ass so what little green I made was attached. The cherry on top of this little shit cake is my dealer cut me off for passing a bad check for a jar of whites. Hell, what kind of dealer takes checks anyway?
Was it debt that had me sucking on my.38?
I doubt it. I was born broke and would go to my grave broke, only a moron would expect the years in between to be any different. Fact was, my life sucked the big salami. I was just bone tired of trying to pretend I cared what happened to me.
Gripping the trigger, I started to squeeze. Three pounds of pressure and adios mi vida loca…
At two plus pounds, the phone rang. Odds were it was just more bad news. But what the fuck, I could always kill myself later. Or have a beer, or go bowling or what ever it is people do when they are not killing themselves.
“Speak.” I said into the receiver.
“Mo?… Are you busy?” It was Kelly, the day waitress at Club Xtasy, a titty bar I bounce at whenever my cash runs low, which has been full time for the last two years. She was also maybe my only real friend.
“Not with anything that can’t wait.”
“You know you said if I needed help, well…”
“Baby doll, what’s up?”
“It’s complicated. You’re the only one in the whole wide world I trust, you know that, right, Mo?” Kelly was a sweet breath of fresh air in a world that stank of stale smoke and yesterday’s beer. She had the looks to be a stripper but not the strength of character, so they let her keep her clothes on and serve slop to the swine we call customers. Even over the phone I could see her winding her brown curly hair around her finger, it was a thing she did when she was searching for the right words. “They want… She um… My sister… well…I’m not who you think I am ok Mo…” Panic made her normal scatter of speech into a flow of meaningless noise.
“Who’s the ‘they’, Kell?”
“They, them — you know… It’s complicated. Don’t hate me Mo, please. It’s just… I… this… Things you know? Things go wrong and we can’t always fix it. But I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just she… “
“Slow the train down girl, you left me at the last station.”
“Ok, it’s, well they, people do things, stuff happens and then, you know, not what you plan but there it is and I need your help or it’s all…” her thoughts were a runaway truck, her brakes had failed and she was in free fall.
“Where are you Kell? Are you at home?” I asked.
“I’m at the club…Mo… It’s Monday… But they um…You can’t hide from them…Why bother right?”
“Pour yourself a drink, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” I hung up the phone. Sitting up too quickly, the room tilted and sent my stomach lurching. Gripping the watery remains of last night’s nightcap I gulped it down to quiet my nerves. Suicide would have to wait at least until Kelly could tell me what the hell was going on. Something about her brought out the big brother in me. Maybe it was her Indiana farm girl innocence, or what passed for innocence in my jaded world. This is something the straight world would never understand, we all live with our own set of scales. This girl Piper, she’s twenty-nine and that makes her old, past retirement in stripper years. And Kelly didn’t take off her top for bucks or give men hand jobs in the back room and that made her innocent. It’s all relative. She was the only girl in my life with whom I didn’t trade sex for favors. With the other girls it was always give and take. The lap dance for the ride home on my Norton. Convincing a boyfriend to move on for a hand job. Forty-three, rode hard and put up wet too many nights, my life had been many things but never easy and it showed. I had scars from my missing great toe, to the fifteen stitches in the back of my skull. The flesh real estate in between wasn’t much better. I knew the only way a pretty girl would want me was in trade. I didn’t mind. It was just the way it was. But Kelly was different. She never offered sex and if she had I wouldn’t have accepted. When I was with her I felt almost normal, like I had a shot at becoming a good man. A man has to have one pure relationship in his life, and for me she was it. So when she reached out to me, I really didn’t have any choice at all.
I set the shower to scald, hoping to burn the stink from my body and cobwebs from my brain. Who the fuck was I fooling, Moses the great white knight, savior of the naked working girls. I could barely keep my body vertical. I let the water run cold before I stepped out.
Searching the pile, I found a less than disgusting pair of jeans and tee-shirt. Laundry was one more thing on my to-do list, right after “find a reason to live” and “go grocery shopping.” Slipping the revolver into my coat pocket, I headed out the door.
It only took three stomps to get the Norton to kick over. It was a black ’76 Commando, from the gold lettering on the gas tank to the flawless chrome, it was the only thing I owned that wasn’t fucked up. The reason Jen hadn’t taken it in the divorce was I think she hoped I’d kill myself on it before the life insurance ran out. Pulling out onto Avenue 52, I turned at York by the panaderia, the sweet smell of new bread wafting over me, reminding me I hadn’t eaten a good meal in the last day and a half. One thing about riding a bike, you get to know a town by its smells. Highland Park was fresh bread, sizzling meat and chilies from the taco trucks, it smelled warm and hot and sweet all at the same time. It was one of those transitional areas in Los Angeles. Transitional, sales speak for we got gangs but they’re pussies. We got biker bars and artists’ lofts. It’s one recession away from the ghetto and one Starbucks away from good times. Eighty percent of the residents are dark skinned and most of the signs in the shop windows are in Spanish. Whichever enlightened citizens passed the proposition making English the official language of California forgot to tell Highland Park. Hell, bigots and political whores can pass any law they want. Down here we speak how we want, using the words we have to communicate what needs to be said, even the cops speak Spanish in East LA.