One of the dragons, a six-foot-tall black queen in full drag with a blond wig, short red sheath, three-inch yellow spikes, red plastic bracelets, and yellow ear loops, spotted Farley and Olive and approached them, saying, “You holding any crystal tonight?” The dragon had scored from Farley on a few occasions when he was dealing crack.
“No, I need some,” Farley said.
The dragon was about to return to the corner to hustle tricks in passing cars, when a very tall teenage crackhead, also African American, with his baseball cap on sideways, wearing a numbered jersey and baggy knee-length jams and high-top black sneakers, looking goofy enough to be shooting hoops for a living in the NBA, approached the dragon and said, “Hey, Momma, where can I get me some? I needs it bad, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Uh-huh,” the dragon said. “I know what you’re sayin’, doodle-bug.”
“Well, whatchoo gonna do about it, Momma? I got somethin’ to trade, know what I’m sayin’?”
“And what is that?”
He took several rocks wrapped in plastic from his pocket and said, “This’ll take you on a trip to paradise, know what I’m sayin’?”
Pointing to the computer center, the dragon said, “Go in there and sell it, then. Get some United States legal tender and come back and we’ll talk.”
“I come back and show you tender, I make you do more than talk. I make you scream, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Uh-huh,” said the dragon, and when the kid went strutting into the cybercafé, the dragon said to Farley and Olive, “Don’t see too many black folk around Hollywood these days ’cept for jive-ass cracked-out niggers like that, come up here from south L.A. to hustle and steal. Jist havin’ them around is bad for my bidness. Fuck things up for everyone.” Then the dragon grinned and added, “Know what I’m sayin’?”
“If we get any crystal tonight, we’ll share with you,” Olive said to the drag queen. “I remember when you shared with us.”
Farley shot Olive his shut-the-fuck-up look, and the dragon caught it. “That’s okay, honey, your old man needs tweak a lot more than I do, from the looks of him.”
Before Olive, which Farley referred to as B.O., he used to do lots of business here. He’d steal a car stereo and sell it at the cybercafé on a rented computer. The money was wired on eBay to the Western Union office, where Farley would pick it up and cash it. Then he was back to the cybercafé to buy his glass. It was hard for him to imagine life away from this place.
They entered and Farley began looking for someone he could work. He saw a dude he’d been arrested with in a drug sweep a few years back, sitting at one of the computers by the door. Farley stood behind the guy for a minute to see if the guy had it going.
The e-mail message said, “Need tickets to Tina Turner concert. And want to sit in 8th row. Have teenager with me.”
“That’s a fucking cop,” Farley said to the tweaker, who jumped and spun around on his chair. “Dude, you are doing e-mail with a fucking cop.” He couldn’t remember the tweaker’s name.
“Yo, Farley,” the tweaker said. “What makes you think?”
“Every fucking cop on the planet knows Tina Turner is code for tweak. And eighth row? Dude, think about it. What else could it be but an eight ball, right? And teenager means teener, very fucking obviously. So you’re either dealing with the stupidest tweaker in cyberspace or a fucking narc. He’s using dopey code that nobody uses anymore ’cause anybody can figure it out.”
“Maybe you’re right,” the tweaker said. “Thanks, man.”
“So if I just did you a favor, how about doing me one?”
“I got no ice to share and no cash to loan, Farley. Catch you later.”
“Ungrateful, simpleminded motherfucker,” Farley said to Olive when he rejoined her. “When we got busted down at Pablo’s Tacos two years ago and taken to Hollywood Station in handcuffs, we had to drop our pants and bend over and spread. And crystal went flying out his ass. He told the cop it didn’t belong to him. Said he was just holding it for some parolee who pulled a knife and made him put the ice in his ass when the cops surrounded the taco joint.”
“Did you see it happen?” Olive asked.
“What?”
“The parolee with the knife, making him put the crystal up there! God, I’ll bet your friend was scared!”
Farley Ramsdale was speechless at times like this and thought that she’d be better off dead. Except that she was so stupendously stupid she actually seemed to enjoy living. Maybe that’s the way to cope with life, Farley thought. Get as brain-cooked as Olive and just enjoy the ride as long as it lasts.
When he looked at her, she smiled at him, showing her gums, and a tiny bubble popped out from the left gap in her grille when she said, “I think there’s a little bit of pot left at home. And we could boost you some candy and a bottle of vodka from the liquor store on Melrose. The old Persian man that works nights is almost blind, they say.”
“Persian is a fucking cat, Olive,” Farley said. “He’s an Iranian. They’re everywhere, like cockroaches. This is Iran-geles, California, for chrissake!”
“We’ll get by, Farley. You should eat something. And you should not get discouraged, and try to always remember that tomorrow’s another day.”
“Jesus Christ,” Farley said, staring at her. “Gone with the Fucking Wind!”
“What, Farley?”
Farley, who, like most tweakers, stayed up for days watching movie after movie on the tube, said, “You’re what woulda happened to Scarlett O’Hara in later life if she’d smoked a chuck wagon load of Maui ice. She’d have turned into you! ‘Tomorrow is another fucking day’!”
Olive didn’t know what in the world he was raving about. He needed to go to bed whether he could sleep or not. It had been a terrible day for him. “Come on, Farley,” she said. “Let’s go home and I’ll make you a delicious toasted cheese sandwich. With mayonnaise on it!”
Nobody on the beach or in the whole state of California was madder than Jetsam that early morning of June 1. That’s what he said to Flotsam when he met him at Malibu and unloaded his log from the Bronco and stopped to stare at the ocean. Both were wearing black wet suits.
The sky was a glare of gold rising up, and smudges of gray scudded low over the horizon. Looking away, Jetsam stared at the smog lying low in wispy veils, and at the bruised, glowering clouds that were curdling down onto all the fucking places where people lived in despair. Jetsam turned and looked out to sea, to the hopeful horizon glistening like an endless ribbon of silver, and for a long moment he didn’t speak.
“What’s wrong, dude?” Flotsam asked.
“I got stung Thursday night, bro!” Jetsam said.
“Stung?”
“A fucking IA sting! If you’da been on duty, you’da got stung with me. I was working with B.M. Driscoll. Poor fucker might as well set fire to homies and shoot dogs. He’s always in trouble.”
“What happened?”
“You know that IA sting they did down in Southeast-when was it, last year? Year before? The one where they put the gun in the fucking phone booth?”
“I sorta remember the gist of it,” Flotsam said while Jetsam waxed the old ten-foot board as he talked.
“On that one, the fucking incompetents working the sting detail at IA leave a gun by a phone booth with one of their undercover guys standing nearby. They put out some kinda phony call to get a patrol unit there. Deal is, a patrol unit they’re interested in is gonna come by, see the dude, do an FI, and see the gun there in plain view. The patrol unit’s gonna ask what he knows about the gun and the dude’s gonna say, ‘Who, me?’ like the brothers always say down there. Then IA, who’s watching from ambush, hope the coppers are gonna arrest the brother and claim he was carrying the gun. And if they’re real lucky, maybe slap the brother around after he mouths off to them. And if they hit the jackpot, call him a nigger, which of course will get them a death row sentence and a lethal injection. And then maybe they can have a party for a job well done. But not that time. It goes sideways.”