See? Even dead she makes me a better whatever-the-hell it is I am. A less stupid person. A more considerate monster.
I step out of a shadow and onto Venice Beach. Alice is under my arm in a brown plastic box. There are bonfires fifty yards down the sand. A boom box pumps out something that, at this distance, is just beats and the buzz of overloaded speakers. People cop drugs on the street behind me. Couples grope and sweat in the dark.
I knew a drug dealer from Marin County. A hippie, but the kind who slept with a .45 under his pillow. When he got into organic pot farming, he stopped using the toilet. He'd shit on a black plastic tarp behind his house, staked out in the sun, so his droppings would dry out and he could use them to fertilize his plants. He told me that he got the idea from a friend who made sun dried tomatoes.
He did the fertilizer experiment for a year. Collected each dried-out nugget after a month in the sun. He told me that at the end of that year, everything he dropped on the tarp fit inside one shoe box.
I don't know why I think of that, except that the only person I ever loved now fits into something about the same size as that dead hippie dealer's shit box.
There's a crescent moon out. Does that mean it's a good night to let Alice go or a bad one? If I was better at magic than murder, I'm sure I'd know.
The water is cold and calm. Low tide. I have to walk out a good ten or twenty yards to feel the waves on my legs, boots sinking into the wet sand all the way out. I wade into the sluggish waves until I'm in waist deep.
Pop the top of Alice's plastic sarcophagus. Her ashes are in a plastic bag, like something you'd put your lunch in. I hold out the bag so that the bottom is about an inch underwater. Pull the black knife and slit the side.
The waves lap at the bag, washing out her ashes. Alice floats on the surface of the ocean, a white cloud spreading out in all directions. When the bag is empty, I drop it and the box into the water. I wade out, following the ash cloud as it's drawn away with the tide.
I want to follow her all the way out, over my head, and keep on going. But she wouldn't like that, either.
I stop when the water is up to my chest and watch Alice spread out into the black Pacific. Scoop up a handful of her ashes, but they wash away when the water runs between my fingers. That damn song is stuck in my head again.;Try not to sing too many sad songs for yourself. The universe already hates you. Self-pity isn't going to help."
Whenever the hammer has come down in my life, I've always wondered what my father would do. Then I usually do the opposite, but I still always think of him first. But now I'm seeing my mother's face instead of my father's. And I'm thinking about Alice. And Candy. And Allegra breathing fire into Parker's eyes. And Vidocq, who isn't a father, but who makes being a man easier than any of the men in my family.
I flick my cigarette butt at a rat that's stalking a couple of pigeons in the parking lot.
"You know what I'm thinking right now?"
Kinski is silent for a minute.
"That you really want a drink."
"Yeah, but that's too easy. I always want a drink. Guess again."
"You're back wondering if I'm crazy or not and leaning toward crazy."
I nod and take few steps in the direction of the Mercedes.
"Actually, I'm not. I'm leaning toward I don't give a goddam. I'm sick of Heaven and Hell and angels and nephilim and all the rest of it. I knew what I was doing there. And no one told me that I'm not who I am. Be a fallen archangel if you want, but leave me out of it. I don't want to be part of your soap opera. I don't want to be mythological."
I start back for the Mercedes, but it looks ridiculous to me now. A brain dead cross between a giant grasshopper and a Cubist Corvette. I walk past the car and into the shadow of a lampost at the corner of the lot. Kinski watches me go. As I slip into the Room of Thirteen Doors, for just a second, some annoying part of my brain whispers, "You know that thing that you're doing right now, going from a parking lot to the center of the universe and out again? That's pretty seriously mythological."
THERE'S ONLY ONE problem with L.A.
It exists.
L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will.
New York has short con cannibals and sewer gators. Chicago is all snowbound yetis and the ghosts of a million angry steers with horns like jackhammers. Texas is crisscrossed with ghost railroads that kidnap demon-possessed Lolitas to play strip Russian roulette with six shells in the chamber.
L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.
There are more surveillance cameras and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam from going completely Hiroshima.
God, I love this town.
I NEED FOOD. I need booze. I need to smoke a cigarette outside a bar where you can hear people dry humping in the alley behind the Dumpster.
I walk from Max Overdrive to the Bamboo House of Dolls, sucking down stage-six smog-alert air and lingering over a sunset as bloody as the fall of the Roman Empire.