Snow White’s Coffee Shop down Hollywood Boulevard. I ordered four eggs, easy, wheat toast, white toast, hash browns, tomato juice, orange juice, coffee, iced tea, a side of bacon, an English muffin, slice of ham, and a glass of water. I’m staring at a mound of food that I ordered because I could pronounce the menu but couldn’t eat. Might as well have put it in my ear. My stomach was a thousand miles away.
Stared at my food. A crumpled T-shirt that smelled of gasoline and shoe polish from the floor of my car—when did I grab this?—and I used it to stop the blood but my nose insisted on flooding black-red all over the shirt Natalie gave me and my jeans and my eggs. Luminous red Rorschach drops on the white paper napkin—two dogs fighting, a bug trapped in a jar. I tried to stop the bleeding, but my nerves were shrapnel and I did another blast in the toilet stall of the bathroom just to even out, inhaled the sweet dust through my smoking septum, microbits of glass slicing their way through my sinuses. Rinsed my face in the sink. Tried to keep my nose covered but my left hand was cramping worse and worse and worse and it was hard to hold the cloth in place and I’m not even caring about hiding my mutant fingers and I thought I should eat. I should really try to eat.
Sir, I’m going to ask you to leave or I’m calling the police.
Hollywood Boulevard.
Lost my car again.
Pulled my coat tight and tried to sleep.
Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie Natalie.
FOURTEEN
The sun cut through my eyes, woke me like a slow hammer from the scant rest I salvaged from the night. Fingers and feet were cold, stiff, couldn’t feel them, had to force movement. Sat up, hurt from the wood slats, back resting against ARE YOU PAYING TOO MUCH FOR AUTO INSURANCE? Red block letters screamed the question against yellow. A black-and-white head shot, confidence beaming from the superhero jaw and walrus moustache, promised to save me hundreds of dollars.
A Korean woman on the bus bench near my feet. She probably didn’t want to sit anywhere near me, but was too old to stand. Aluminum cane, plastic grocery bag, clutch purse and RTD pass. I needed water, needed to rinse the cotton out of my mouth. Needed to find my car, fix the ignition, and needed to get home. My brain said Natalie left, and I didn’t care anymore.
My head felt like it was packed full of sand. My bones hurt. It hurt to stand up, hurt to stand still and it hurt to walk, but I had to. I needed juice, water, fluid. My wallet was gone, I had less than two dollars in my pockets and, without ID, that made me a vagrant. I started down the block, foraging through my memory for my car and my wallet and my bag as Hollywood Boulevard was waking up—street kids moving alone or in clusters, trash pickup, maintenance workers with high-pressure hoses blasting the previous night’s biohazards from the Walk of Fame.
A shop window caught my reflection and my own face startled me. A head of shiny, rust-colored hair, skin stretched over my skull and ten years added to my face over the course of the night. The window reflected another window and I saw my other reflection, just as bad, staph pocking the forehead, picking at it with my left hand.
My left hand had five fingers and I wasn’t scratching my forehead and I wasn’t that sick and I turned around. There I was, or a kid who looked just like me, same hair, same skin, same face, same height with an army surplus jacket and jeans that he’d probably worn for a year or two straight. Whether he saw his own face or mine but didn’t notice, I couldn’t be sure, but he walked, face watching the ground in a second-nature scan for spare anything that might have hit the sidewalk to his good fortune. He had junkie-fidgets—sneezing, wiping his nose and trembling—and they’d get worse before they got better.
People do what I do, they call it the Zombie Method. You find someone who’s a marginal someone, someone who’s physically similar to you within reason, has good credit or at least manageable debt and a clean legal record. Someone whose days are short-numbered, someone nobody gives a damn about, and you buy that someone’s name and history.
Runaway Junkie Double worked his way down the block, parked on a bus bench with a girl, maybe fifteen, sporting a mohawk, and another kid, really big kid, wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt that was too small for him, and I could smell them all from a distance. They knew each other, knew the same soup kitchens, rescue missions, sympathetic Samaritans and drive-by tricks and they probably shared the same freeway underpass or squatters’ hovel or youth shelter.
He looked so much like me it was spooky. Minus one digit. I doubted he had any credit history at all to worry about, but his jail record was going to be ten times mine or more. That alone was enough to keep me walking, but he verged on being my clone, and I couldn’t waste that.
Bigman in the Sabbath shirt caught me staring, tapped the other two and they looked my way. The girl shouted c’mere. I turned and walked. I was in no shape to talk to them, needed to come back when I was clean, rested, and with cash. Kept walking, hoping Bigman wasn’t following me.
I stopped at a corner deli, tried to buy some juice with the last of my change but I was eight cents short, so I left the bottle on the counter and walked out with another tucked under my coat. Outside, a white Taurus sat parked in a fifteen-minute zone with a ticket flapping beneath the windshield wiper. That’s a good car if you want to be unnoticed, the least likely to be pulled over and nonexistent on police profile lists, and I’d already passed it when I remembered, fog in my head starting to clear, go back and crawl underneath. Spare key in a magnetic box, I climbed into the driver’s seat and the severed key slid out of the ignition on my first attempt with a ballpoint pen, now that my hands weren’t quaking from a bloodstream full of blow.
———
“Stove!”
Strange word to hear called out, but I heard it again, Stove! shouted like a name. I recognized Bigman from my post-coke jag. He wore a Goodwill dumpster denim jacket and a dog collar, black trousers cuffed over blood-colored Docs, sat with a dogpack gaggle of other street kids at the nether edge of a strip mall off Sycamore, a block from Hollywood Boulevard. I was dressed in a black suit with an open collar and wore shoes that would have cost me two months’ rent (thanks, Natalie) and stepping up to a homeless group of runaway panhandler teenage street hustlers. Me, dressed the way I was, approaching these kids, I knew it wouldn’t look right if a patrol car spotted me. But I want to see my double again.
The dog pack of runaways whistled, stared as I walked toward them.
“Look at him.”
“Shit, you score or what?”
“Check out Stove.”
“Hold up,” Bigman said to the group, and they went quiet. He squinted at me in the parking lot light.
“You ain’t Steve,” he said. “You his brother? Didn’t know he had a brother. Twins or what?”
Let the question slide, let them infer an answer, find Steve.
“Why do you call him ‘Stove?’”
“The fuck you care?” said Bigman. The ringleader.
Did acquiescent but firm.
“Because it’s important that I find him.” I took out a pack of smokes, tapped one loose and pulled it out with my teeth. Kept my left hand in my pocket, held the pack out to Bigman and he pulled out three at once, tucked one into his mouth, one behind his ear and the other in his pocket.
There are predators, prey and mollusks. And there are scavengers. After jail taught me how to stop fighting, it taught me the pecking order of groups, how to spot them, play them or disrupt them and with what currency.
Bigman squinted at me with the cigarette hanging from his lips, said, Light? and I had control now because he asked for something. I tossed the pack to a kid at Bigman’s knee, little guy, shaky, with a TSOL shirt.
“Take one, give one to your buddies. The rest are his,” I pointed to Bigman, “whenever he asks for one. Understand?”
“Says who?”
>
“I do, fuckhead.” Bigman thumped the kid’s ribs with the toe of his boot.
My lighter made a high chrome snap like a sliding gun chamber. Tossed it to another kid, said, “He needs a light.” Then I stepped closer, voice lower, “Any of your friends know where to find Steve?”
They shook their heads.
“Then let’s just you and I talk.”
“Fuck off,” Bigman said to group, and they did.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Not now. He’s off doing shit. We need money. I’ll see him at the place.”
“Where’s that?”
“No way.”
“Right.” I handed him another pack of smokes. Held a folded twenty on top, more cash than he’d seen in a long time.
“Tell him to find me here tomorrow night. Nine o’clock. I’ve got good news for him.”
———
I figured I had a strong chance of wasting my time. In twenty-four hours he could be on the nod, trying to score, in jail or in a dumpster. But Steve was waiting, probably had been since eight. Didn’t own a watch and didn’t need to tell time.
He was exactly my height, with my same hair color and eyes but much lighter, which made him really thin, with one digit fewer on his hands and I guessed less than a year to live. It’s a strange thing to be looking at your own face from a distance, covered in staph with the teeth falling out and a snotslick upper lip. It was my face, minus a few years plus a hundred more bad ones. He’d had to get used to things I didn’t even want to imagine—ways of sleeping or finding places to sleep, finding food or making money—and for a second I wondered if at the rate I was going, I wouldn’t have to do the same. My cash flow spikes and plummets like a heart attack EKG, I have no next of kin and don’t know if my next godsplitter is going to knock out my remaining grip on reality for good.
I was half a block down and I watched him pace, flashed my brights when he was facing me. Don’t know what Bigman told him, but he’ll know it’s me. He stopped outside my car, junkie-hustler caution mixing with hope. I opened the passenger door so that the dome light flooded my face, let him see me and wonder.
“Get in.”
He looked at me, knew this wouldn’t be his usual ride, but hope won out over caution and he climbed inside.
“There’s smokes.” I pointed to the dashboard, fresh pack, and he jumped, ravenous. “Keep ’em.”
I punched the dashboard lighter, said, “What else do you need?”
“What else you got?” He looked like me, but he had the voice of a teenager.
“Why do they call you Stove?”
Pause, like he was repeating the question in his head, had to say it. I could see his lips move, silent before he said anything out loud.
“It’s like Steve, only slower. Stove. I’m slow.”
“What’s your last name?”
“How ’bout money!” Loud, flip-switch tense, fight or flight. He had nothing to lose and obviously shifted gears quicker than most but didn’t know he was doing it, and that made him dangerous. I needed the edge here, so I had to hope he bought my approach.
“You need to lower your voice, Steve.”
“I need to do shit. Maybe you’ll just let me out.”
“Maybe, Steve-only-slower, you’ll stop to figure why a guy who looks exactly like you only wearing an expensive suit wants to talk to you. Maybe you’ll get something out of this. Maybe you’ll be cool.”
I didn’t know where I was going with this pitch, but it didn’t matter. Blood-red cherry light hit my rear-view, bathed the inside of the car, and the static megaphone voice behind me said Pull over to the curb and turn off your engine.
Steve did not take this well, panic shuddering and murmuring fuck, fuck, fuck, oh fuck.
I drove, slowly, looking to stop without double parking or blocking a driveway, which isn’t easy in the middle of Hollywood, and that bought me time. Wanted to stop Steve’s panic, slap him but I couldn’t, cops would see that. I gripped his leg, hard.
“Be cool, Steve.”
“I’m going to jail. I can’t do it. I’m going to jail.”
“Breathe, Steve. Now shut up, just nod yes or no. Quick. You got a warrant?”
Yes.
“More than one?”
“I think.”
“Just nod, Steve.”
Yes.
“You high right now?”
No.
“Don’t bullshit me. They’ll know.”
Yes.
“Tell me. Say it.”
“Crank.”
Pull over and turn your engine off.
I stopped, finally, hoped I had at least fifteen seconds while they were on their two-way.
“Look at me.” Steve did, his pupils bloated.
“You holding?”
No.
“Anything. Set of works, razor, knife. Anything.”
No.
“Got any ID on you?”
Yes.
“What?”
“Rescue Mission card. Got my name on it.”
“Give it to me.”
Fumbled in his pocket, I knew they could see that. We’d parked, and the cops were running my plates. They were clean. They’d probably seen me pick him up.
“Steve, can you remember ‘Macintyre?’”
“Who?”
“The name. Can you remember it? ‘Macintyre.’ Think, mac and a car tire. Mac and tire. Say it.”
“Mac and tire.” He handed me his Rescue Mission ID card. Steven Edwards.
“They ask, your last name’s Macintyre.”
The wrong time to be passing anything between you and a passenger is when the flashlight hits your window, which is precisely when Steve was handing me his card. Steve knew this, but all the cop saw was me handing over a pack of smokes, one tapped loose from the top. Steve looked surprised.
“Take it,” I said, firm.
Cop said, “Sir, please place your hands on the steering wheel.”
I took out a smoke for myself, closed the pack and tossed it back onto the dash. Cup, clip, palm, switch—Steven Edwards’s Rescue Mission ID tucked behind the foil and nobody saw a thing.
Light in my face, turned to show him my eyes. Another cop on the passenger side, his own light on Steve, and the two lights crossed back and forth in my front seat, once, twice, both cops scanning me and Steve-only-slower, Prince and Pauper.
“Would you step out onto the curb, please?”
I unbuckled my seat belt, said, “Steve, it’s cool. I’ll have you at Grandpa Macintyre’s as soon as we’re done.”
Outside, the drill began.
“License, please.” Not a traffic stop, they didn’t ask for insurance or registration. Which meant they did indeed see me pick him up. They think I’m a john.
“Something funny?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you had anything to drink this evening, Paul?”
“No, sir.” True. I wasn’t taking any chances.
“You haven’t had anything to drink tonight, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“What about earlier?”
“I worked all day. I haven’t had a drink since yesterday.”
“Where do you work?”
“Messenger service.”
He was my height, his voice measured, doing what he was paid to do. If Steve didn’t blow it, I had no problem. He handed my license to his partner who took it to the squad car for the check. Paul Macintyre was clean. I wasn’t worried.
He gave me the standard field test, Place your feet together and look straight ahead, now follow my finger. Held his index finger at the far edge of my field of sight, kept it there, waited for my eyes to strain, break their hold. I’m surprised when he unwraps a breathalyzer.
“Now, Paul, I want you to watch what I’m doing, see that I’m breaking the plastic in front of you, so this is a fresh test.”
I’d just palmed a card and stuck it into a pack of s
mokes right under his flashlight, so telling me to watch what he’s doing meant nothing. But he refused to believe I hadn’t been drinking, until I blew a 0.0.
“So, Paul, if you’re not drinking, what are you doing out here?”
“Been looking for my brother,” I said. “Trying to get him cleaned up, get him some dinner, see if I can convince him to let me take him back to our mother and father.”
“That’s your brother?” He’d seen us side by side, but asked nonetheless.
“Yes, that’s my brother.” Obsequious, jail-house etiquette in overdrive. The word sir coming out of my mouth made me sick. One more time I’d had to kowtow to some asshole who could wreck my life. And this one because I thought I could score a set of new papers.
I heard the other cop’s voice, then Steve’s, stuttering with adrenaline-fear.
“Has your brother been drinking?”
“I think so.”
“Anything else?”
“I’m sure he’s stoned, sir. I don’t know on what. It’s taken me a while to find him.”
“What’s your brother’s name?”
“Steve.”
“You two twins?”
“No, we just look alike. People can’t tell us apart, sometimes.”
His partner returned, handed me my license with an all clear nod to the cop talking to me, then said, “The other one’s got no ID, but said his name was Steve Mac-and-tire.”
Stupid dumbass junkie panic punk.
“Yeah, that’s how he learned to remember his name when he was little. He’s—” pause, one, two, three “—not very bright. Lots of problems as a kid. Like I said, he’s probably stoned right now.”