Then she must have attacked him, done something against him. He retaliated. She screamed and he dragged her to the brush. I walked back to the car, got the pint and had the last hit. Then I walked over and looked at the guy. I bent over him. He looked asleep. I could see him breathing. He wasn’t dead. Fine. He could still be a corporate lawyer. Then I walked over to their car, opened the door, got in. There was a bag on the floor. I looked in there. It was a bottle of expensive wine, only a bit of it gone. My life was renewed. I went back to Robert’s car, leaned against it and sucked at the wine.
After a while Robert came along. He stood there looking at me.
“It was great,” he said, “she loved it. I fucked her, then I made her suck me off, then I sodomized her. She loved it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Yeah, she did.”
“Let’s get out of here—”
“She’s waiting for you, Hank. She wants more.”
“Cut the crap. You haven’t killed her, have you?”
“No, she’s just laying out there waiting for more, her legs spread.”
“Let’s go.”
The big kid was still stretched out. We got into Robert’s car and started back toward town. Everything was still quiet and dark, except for the gentle hum of the motor. It might have been as if nothing had happened. The trees acted as if everything were the same, and the asphalt road acted as if nothing had ever happened—only the moon seemed to know—and there was a covering over Robert now, like a slime, it climbed all over him, into his eyes, his ears, his mouth; it was under his armpits, it was between his toes, it seeped and crawled him and it had nothing to do with morals, with right or wrong; it was something else, something very ugly and unexplainable covered him.
“See you found a bottle,” he said.
“Yeah. I got lucky.”
“Even if you didn’t have the guts to fuck that bitch you shoulda jacked-off over her body.”
“Yeah, I guess I missed my chance.”
We were getting back into town, into the poor section. Robert reached somewhere and then tossed a stack of bills into my lap.
“Your half. That kid was loaded.”
“Thanks, you’re very honest.”
“Got to be. We got a good thing going.”
I gave him my address. Like a good thug, he knew the city, he got me right there. We pulled in front of the room-inghouse. The whole neighborhood had been asleep for at least five hours.
“Listen,” he said, “the night’s not over. I’d like you to meet my mom.”
“I’m sure she’s great, Robert, but I just want to go in and get some rest.”
I got on out. Then Robert was off in his car.
I got the key out, opened the front door, then walked up the stairway and at the first turn I saw the framed painting of Jesus. He looked pained, like a young guy whose girl had just left him to run off with the dope dealer.
I got into my room, pissed in the sink, got out of my clothes except for the undershirt, got into the unmade bed with all that money and my wine bottle. I had never seen that much money. I bunched the pillow up and sat there in the dark sucking on the wine bottle.
Things went by, things went by fast, things went by so fast that they never took form.
A mouse came out, it clambered up the hot plate, then ran up the handle of my coffeepot, hung there halfway on the handle and looked at me. I could see it in the lightening dark, the lightning dark. It looked at me and I looked at the mouse and it didn’t like me there in its room. Then, in a tick, it was gone.
I was alone again, I always felt better being alone. When you’re alone, the only problem is yourself. It’s nicer that way. You stay out of trouble. I was really a nice guy. I knew that.
I finished off the wine bottle, threw it to the floor, un-bunched the pillow, rolled on my belly and, ass-up to the demented ceiling, I slept.
Let’s begin by saying this is a work of fiction and then let’s go on from there. I first met Steve Cosmos in Paris, at least that’s the name he was going under then and the name I remember best. Cristina and I were in Paris because the editors had dragged my ass over there to do interviews for the press. Also, I was writing a screenplay for Jean Sasoon, the French director, and we were staying at his Paris apartment along with his wife, the actress of some fame, who simply went under the name of Barbette. All the whole thing meant was much eating and drinking, drinking and eating, and drinking and drinking. I didn’t understand it but I didn’t care.
Anyhow, Jean Sasoon loved to talk about Steve Cosmos. Sasoon loved freaks and Cosmos was a freak, and I was a freak, that’s why I was around.
So, this night who walks in but Cosmos himself, one of the ten most wanted men on the Continent. Mostly he did things to banks and gambling casinos, but he had many little sidelines.
We shook hands.
“Aha!” he said. “I saw you on TV and you got drunk and gave those shits what they had coming.”
“I understand you take from the shits what you got coming,” I said.
Cosmos laughed. “Oh, yes, it’s an almost continuous thing.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Cristina.
Cosmos looked. “Ah, what a charming girl! Are you with Chinaski?”
“No, he’s with me.”
Sasoon had gone to the kitchen where he was preparing something.
“Ah!” said Sasoon, a quite culinary “Ah,” as if he had devised some magic and delicate blending of cookery. Cosmos, being French, ran into the kitchen to view and taste the moment, perhaps add something to it?
Cristina and I glanced at each other. We had met the great man. I refilled our wineglasses.
Cosmos had a gentle style and grace, you could see that right off. Strange white-blond hair, very straight back, a pink boy’s face, a face full of pranks and laughter. His eyes were very large and round.
Then Barbette came in from somewhere. She saw Cosmos and started right in on him vocally. She kept on and on. A concerned tirade. Cosmos gave small answers, acted astonished, smiled, laughed. My French is worse than my German and I have almost no German, but what it was, she was telling him:
“You were seen in a bank today. I have a source. What were you doing in the bank?”
“Walking around.”
“Don’t you know your posters are out everywhere? They are looking for you!”
“But I was there and they couldn’t see me.”
“Why don’t you hide low? Why do you stick your butt in their faces? You’re a fool! What are you trying to do? Do you think you’re God? For a man who has been around as much as you, you have the brain of a grasshopper, of a snail! Do you think I would enjoy you in jail?”
“No, neither of us.”
“Then why are you such a fool? Why—”
Barbette went on and on.
Cosmos bent his head to the right, stuck his left thumb into his left ear and let his tongue loll out. The message was clear: All existence was stupid and it really didn’t matter what any of us did.
Barbette got it, laughed. The lecture was over. Everybody was back to speaking English.
Sasoon turned from his steaming and delicious pots.
“The guy, the other night, he lost all his money at roulette because he played honest and he came out onto the grounds drunk and fell full-length into the lake in his tuxedo, came up dripping mud and slime!”
“Ah!” said Cosmos, “what an ending, yet I’m still here.”
After eating we really got into the wine, fine French wine, it really rolled on down and in, you can drink it forever. Corks were pulled and pulled, cigars lit.
Cosmos kept repeating, quite seriously, through a smile:
“I have no interest in the police. They only have an interest in me.”
I heard from Cristina later that I was the fool: putting my arms about the shoulders of Cosmos and Sasoon, saying over and over and over:
“You guys are my buddies! I really like you guys! You guys are
my buddies! We all got class!”
What Cristina meant about the fool part was the repetition: they had to keep hearing it. But it’s difficult in this life to ever meet exceptional men, and along with the good French wine this put me out of balance.
I do remember other portions. Cosmos had a trick to pull elsewhere. We all managed to get into Sasoon’s car and we drove small dark streets under Cosmos’ direction. Finally, along a tall row of hedges Cosmos said, “Stop here.”
He stepped out.
“Now leave.”
As we drove off, some of us looked back. Cosmos had pulled the neck of his trenchcoat upwards, and as he walked off he looked over his shoulder as if there was something there following him. He was right: it always was.
It was about a year later when we saw Cosmos again. I had finished the screenplay and Sasoon came to America to try to hustle up a backer. A producer. He rented a house on the beachfront down at Venice. Don’t get lost. I’m speaking about Sasoon: he rents the house. Rented the house. (I hate fucking with tenses, it makes me tense.)
All right. Sasoon had Cosmos with him. They had purchased two expensive motorcycles and two old, long, cheap, gas-eating cars which they considered “class,” or as they put it: “great buys.” Here in L.A., we might refer to them as “Mexican Specials,” which is not racist, only accurate. I’ve driven any number of Mexican Specials but never by choice, and I don’t believe the American-Mexicans do either.
The house was next to a house next to an oil well. The house had 12 separate rooms, each with its own bed, and next to each room was another room with a shower and toilet. This was good for Sasoon, a ladies’ man, and he often stocked up with four or five women in each room but he never did fill all 12, although one night he got up to 11. His excellence with the ladies backfired when he was looking for producers because he usually ended up in bed with the producers’ wives and this pissed them to no good end.
I met many famous people in that house: producers, actors, directors. The problem with the famous when you meet them is that they don’t seem to be very much. They just stand around and sit around with their shoes on and usually don’t do or say much. In fact, they appear to be dull. (I usually take my shoes off.)
I wasn’t much luckier with the producers than Sasoon was. He had pointed one out to me who was interested in producing my screenplay. I was with Cristina one night and I was leaning against the bar at Musso’s and this producer, let’s call him Medicino, well, Medicino saw me at the bar and left his table and walked up and said, “Hello, Chinaski.”
“Oh, Mr. Medicino.”
He got into it. He was going to produce a movie. It was about a writer from the ’60s, now dead. I couldn’t read this writer. No knock against this writer: I can’t read any of the writers. This is all right, it’s the way it is with me. Then the bad part came: he told me what he was going to title the movie.
“Wait,” I said, “you’re not joking: you’re really going to call this thing The Heart’s Boomerang?”
“Yes, I like that title.”
“Listen, you use that title and I’ve got to equate you with some guy in a circle-jerk singing ‘God Bless America.’”
I was stunned: Mr. Medicino whirled and walked back to his table without a word. No fuckin’ sense o’ humor.
“Well,” said Cristina, “there goes your screenplay.”
“Let’s ask the orchestra to stand,” I said, and nodded the barkeep over for refills.
Cosmos, down at Venice, was more cheerful. We shook hands and grinned upon meeting again.
“I hear you go to the racetrack,” he said.
“Every day. Sometimes at night, too. On a good day I’ll listen to some Mahler and play eighteen races.”
“You going tomorrow?”
“If I’m alive, of course” . . .
The next day he was there.
“You play the daily double?” he asked.
“No.”
“The pick-six?”
“No.”
“Exactas?”
“No.”
“What do you bet?”
“Straight win.”
“No place, no show?”
“Straight win only.”
“You can’t win any money that way,” Cosmos said.
I didn’t answer.
Cosmos didn’t win the double. He showed me his losing tickets after the race, almost proudly. He had studied the racing form intently but there was no pattern to his betting: 6-2, 4-7, 7-3, 8-9, 10-4, 8-3. Each was a $10 ticket. He was $60 out.
“You see what happened?” he asked.
“What?”
“The eight horse broke down in the first race and the nine broke down in the second, I had a broken-leg daily double.”
“The eight and the nine probably would have lost even if they hadn’t broken down.”
“I had a broken-leg daily double,” he repeated as if he hadn’t heard me.
After each race it was the same. He showed me a handful of losing tickets but he always had some excuse. Well, at least he had money to shit away from somewhere.
In the eighth race I had two-win on a long shot. It was a little long-shot play I had devised after studying volumes of race results from tracks in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
“I have no respect for you for betting a horse like that,” Cosmos said.
“What the hell, it paid seventy-six dollars.”
“It was a stupid bet,” he said.
That night Sasoon phoned me.
“Steve said he had a broken-leg daily double.”
“He had that,” I said.
“Cosmos wants to talk to you.”
“Put him on.”
“Ank,” he said, “I feel the pain . . . Life is for nothing.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“When I win, I feel nothing, when I lose, I feel the pain. What good is winning? Winning is no good.”
He was right, of course, and he was wrong, too.
Cosmos was at the track everyday. He was the worst horseplayer I ever saw. Instinctively he landed upon the shortest-priced stiff, race after race. One day I pulled in close to $600. Steve asked for a $200 loan. I laid it on him.
I didn’t see him the next day or the next. That Friday I couldn’t make the races, had to have a wisdom-tooth extracted. The dentist gave me a bottle of painkilling pills.
“Only take these if you are in agony,” he said.
The agony didn’t arrive. I took a handful of the pills, drank a six-pack of beer and drove out to the night harness races.
I was standing in line and I looked over in the next line and there was a fellow who resembled Steve Cosmos, only he had a ragged-looking beard, really scraggly, and he was dressed in floppy, greasy clothing. Cosmos always dressed neatly and cleanly. I looked at the eyes of the fellow. The eyes looked faded. Not the right eyes. This guy was just a second-rate Cosmos. I looked away and forgot about it.
A couple of races later I was checking my program and the line of asses of the hookers along the bar when I felt a hand upon my wallet and I whirled and there was the second-rate Cosmos only it was the real one under all that, and he said, “Ank, I saw you looking at me . . .”
He pulled out two hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me.
“Now that I’ve reestablished my credit, you ought to be good for $400 next time.”
“How’d you get lucky?” I asked.
“The woman I’m in love with—”
“Who’s that?”
“The lady with the spinning head.”
He meant the roulette wheel. (See: Las Vegas).
Things got bad down on Venice Beach. The screenplay kept crawling back kicked in the ass. The standard comment was, “Nobody is interested in the life of a barfly.” They were right, of course. Even the barfly hardly cared. People wanted a loser who became a winner. Or a winner who became a loser. But a loser who stayed a loser? That was too much like themselves. They weren’t int
erested in themselves.
The fine motorcycles went first. Then Sasoon started renting out the rooms. But Sasoon was into leather and all that and he was often absentminded and sometimes he left one of the girls all bound up and gagged upon the fireplace (his sacrificial Altar of Doom) and with an icepick or pliers or a tong lying nearby, and this shocked some of the roomers who wandered about the place and they moved out. Worse, the hardy ones who remained stopped paying their rent. Next, the Mexican Specials went, and next, I heard Sasoon and Cosmos were gone, they were back in Paris. I got the postcard from Sasoon:
“. . . going to try the screenplay on the French . . . Barbette has landed a leading role in major stage production . . . will send more news soon . . .”
And a line from Cosmos:
“Life is for nothing.”
Three or four weeks later I got a letter from Sasoon who was in Paris:
“Hank,
They got Steve. He’s in this ancient prison in Paris, one of the oldest around, a former torture chamber, full of rats. He’s very depressed, very. He’s gambled away much of his wine rations for the future. You should write him. What he did to get in there was so stupid he won’t even tell me about it.
I’m still going around with your screenplay. There has been some interest but nothing definite. But this screenplay is going to make it someday, one way or another, I’ll see to that.
Barbette sends her love to you and to Cristina, too.
Jean Sasoon”
Then I heard from Cosmos:
“Well, Ank, the police got me and it was so dumb the way I got caught that I’m ashamed to tell, and won’t. My life is over. I will never get out of here. I think of you out there going to the track everyday and I only wish I were standing next to you tearing up my tickets. I will never see you again. Life is ridiculous, it’s all a waste. There are a few fine fellows in here but there’s nothing we can do, or very little. Well, this is it for me. I never believed it would end like this. There are so many charges against me. I can’t believe I did all those things. My lawyer said for me to expect at least ten years, and if I do get ten, I’m lucky. You call that luck? My life is over. Even a butterfly is better off than I . . .