I’m not sure how to start this story but it was quite a few years ago. I bleached my hair white, had my septum pierced, drove my Nova and barely had my license for a year. God, I fucking loved that car. I also loved liquor and met the female half of my soul. United under terrible circumstances we were inseperable from the day we met. I didn’t leave her house for a few days, she is always on my mind. Her name is incredibly Irish and she is half Mexican. She embodies Los Angeles to me, a sarcastic bitch hardened by grief and stupidity, the way bad luck glows around the last light in the bar. She loved sex and her mother. When those two worlds collided, I stepped in.
We were probably drunk, and very stoned while watching Nick @ Nite re-runs of Roseanne. This was not a ritual nor a habit, this was our childhood on televisions, hers twisted but realistic, mine a daydream in a box. Roseanne mentioned going to Vegas as a joke and we gave each other the eye. She booked the hotel over the internet and within a few hours we had loaded the trunk with various 70’s suitcases full of no good. Weed was still illegal in Nevada but that didn’t stop us from bringing an ounce. I wasn’t close to 21 but that didn’t stop us from bringing various poisonous delicious types of whiskey. She had some serious cash and I was the vehicle. Shit, I didn’t even make enough money a month compared to the chunk she had. It was blood money and she didn’t give a fuck.
The Nova had a huge rust spot on the drivers side by the pedals. I used to call it my Mexican air conditioning, a term only incredibly politically incorrect people would find funny but fuck man, I was broke and I had a classic ride so I didn’t care that the knobs didn’t work or that my car was eroding. As far as I was concerned, I was going to die in that car in some glorious burst of flames in tragic romantic cinematic glory.
I had also blown out my speakers in a few months so our sound system was a cd player full of batteries and Led Zeppelin. As we growled through the desert night, the heat of my 350 and blankets from Tijuana warming us, fighting the threat of a rising sun, we smoked copious amounts of weed and ashed our cigarettes through the holes under our feet. There was snow on the sandy mountains that were a ghoulish mix of resin and white coloured streaks. Was it regret we saw as we hurled ourselves to the horizon? Was it fear? Who knew what would happen once we crossed statelines. We didn’t care. We on a mission from God to get fucked up and sent back to hell where we belonged with the freaks and degenerates. Hell being Los Angeles, where our loved ones died and everybody just grew up and blew away.
By the time we reached our hotel the sun was beginning to peak in the morning sky. My tires screamed for miles around the deserted strip as the over zealous meathead valet peeled through the parking garage, probably coming all over my seats. We were too early to check in so we got coffee and dumped alcohol into it. We played nickel slots and by the time we were drunk we were yelling “YA SO MONEY BABY!” This would be the theme for the entire weekend.
She bought me a 14K cigarette case from the Bellagio, I watched her buy I Love Lucy pumps, we encouraged each other in our madness, she laughed at me while I was on the floor in the casinos professing my love for her. By the time the afternoon had passed, we were drooling savages, wasted on the gold and glitter of Old Vegas and new dreams.
Some fucking hick tried to pick me up while I busy swooping up the free drinks from jaded ex-hookers and single moms. With a cigarette I pointed to my partner in crime. He asked if we smoked pot, we laughed in his face. Show us what you got white boy. He was from Ohio or some shit. His hotel room was fucking luxurious and he pulled out a pack of Marlboros while we loaded up our pipes, purses fat with vouchers, porn fliers, lipgloss, whore shit.
We speak to each other through our looks half the time, she with her cocked eyebrow, me with a shit eating grin. We grew impatient as he unwrapped the bottom and our mouths dropped open when 20 joints fell out. We shouted in disbelief! This was after 9/11! How did you get that past security! The joker turned into a fool into a magician and we were California girls in Vegas smoking Ohio pot with a complete stranger.
So this is when things got weird.
Polite chit chat as the room grew thick with bud smoke, the sticky haze calming our restlessness and nerves. He wasn’t cute but he was nice. The jingle jangle of the slots and disappointment was calling us but we lingered. And then his fucking mom walked into the room drunk as a skunk, wirey white hair crazed from the debauchery. She stumbled and flirted simultaneously and I began to shrink back in horror. This beast could talk and before we knew it she was fondling her son’s chest before our very eyes, stripped down to a onesie longjohn god awful VISION of thermal and gravity. Her nipples pointed south and east, my eyes began to roll back into my head. We curtsied and backed out the room and ran down the halls, shrieking in delight, howling at the fucking sideshow we were participating in.
The day had turned into night or the night had turned into day. Time didn’t exist and never would beneath the ever glowing lights and empty promises of getting rich quick. We wanted to get sober so we started scheming on how to come across some coke in the so-called City of Sin. We flirted relentlessly and hustled our way into the hearts of the deadbeats, promising we weren’t cops or feds, but nobody trusted us. I wouldn’t blame them. We crawled into a cab and there was an angel behind the wheel. I forget his name now but he said he had “some shit” but it was out his house. Pay the cab fare, get the drugs for free. We were so loaded we didn’t think about it.
Forty minutes later in a sea of track houses, we walked into a chapter of a suburb shithole. His kids toys were laying around for christ’s sake, a depressed dog staring while we did lines of his kitchen table.
It wasn’t coke. “Some shit” was shit, meth ice glass, and it hit me like a punch in the face. My nose burned, my eyes bled, metal pupils and a wave of nausea. We were so fucked.
I was so high I started hallucinating. You ever seen an angel descend on yr worst nightmare? Shapes threatening to drag you away to the back alley dumpsters? It was evil in the truest form.
I don’t remember how but she wanted her face pierced. I’m sure this was after serious amounts of liquor and pot blazed. Nothing could calm me down, the drug had me by my balls and I was walking the line, the line I snorted off some motherfuckers table. Cocaine was gentle, meth is ruthless.
She bought Salvia and we smoked it out of a bong we made with a Sprite liter and a pen. Led Zeppelin blaring, the carpets began to melt and swirl as I held onto the bed for dear life. I became transfixed with the air conditioning and how it blew the curtains into bubbles and shapes. Then he was there. I became absolutely positive there was a gnome hiding in our room. I was sick, shuddering as my brain and nerves collided into psychosis only brought upon by hallucinogens. How can you help someone when you can’t see what they see?
A phoenix flew into the window and the devil was in the armoir. I held tight to my blankets but what was underneath my closed eyes was too much to try to sleep. The gold that wrapped my smokes was the yellow brick road and I was Dorothy, dumped on her ass by a tornado in a strange and magical universe with cruel shadows and never ending days.
How we got back to Los Angeles I don’t quite remember. I owed her a shit ton of money, my car thirsty for water and rest. We all needed to rest after 300 miles logged of swollen soaked bones, our safe return an impressive feat for we didn’t occupy a jail cell or kill each other.
Tired from the journey, we slept and tried to slipped into whatever normalcy we could find, for now, until we got the itch to split and the hunger for an insanity only suicide cases dream of.
