“We can’t fuck. I’m on my period.”
“Fine.”
“I can give you a blowjob, if you’d like.”
I nodded assent, and she unzipped my jeans, and lowered her head to my lap.
After I had come, she got up and ran into the kitchen. I heard her spitting into the sink, and the sound of running water: I remember wondering why she did it, if she hated the taste that much. Then she returned and we sat next to each other on the couch.
“Susan’s upstairs, asleep,” said Tink. “She’s all I live for. Would you like to see her?”
“I don’t mind.”
We went upstairs. Tink led me into a darkened bedroom. There were child-scrawl pictures all over the walls—wax-crayoned drawings of winged fairies and little palaces—and a small fair-haired girl was asleep in the bed.
“She’s very beautiful,” said Tink, and kissed me. Her lips were still slightly sticky. “She takes after her father.”
We went downstairs. We had nothing else to say, nothing else to do. Tink turned on the main light. For the first time, I noticed tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, incongruous on her perfect Barbie doll face.
“I love you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Would you like a ride back?”
“If you don’t mind leaving Susan alone . . . ? ”
She shrugged, and I pulled her to me for the last time. At night Los Angles is all lights. And shadows.
A blank, here, in my mind. I simply don’t remember what happened next. She must have driven me back to the place where I was staying—how else would I have gotten there? I do not even remember kissing her good-bye. Perhaps I simply waited on the sidewalk and watched her drive away.
Perhaps.
I do know, however, that once I reached the place I was staying, I just stood there, unable to go inside, to wash, and then to sleep, unwilling to do anything else.
I was not hungry. I did not want alcohol. I did not want to read or talk. I was scared of walking too far, in case I became lost, bedeviled by the repeating motifs of Los Angeles, spun around and sucked in so I could never find my way home again. Central Los Angeles sometimes seems to me to be nothing more than a pattern, like a set of repeating blocks: a gas station, a few homes, a mini-mall (doughnuts, photo developers, Laundromats, fast foods), and repeat until hypnotized; and the tiny changes in the mini-malls and the houses only serve to reinforce the structure.
I thought of Tink’s lips. Then I fumbled in a pocket of my jacket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
I lit one, inhaled, blew blue smoke into the warm night air.
There was a stunted palm tree growing outside the place I was staying, and I resolved to walk for a way, keeping the tree in sight, to smoke my cigarette, perhaps even to think; but I felt too drained to think. I felt very sexless, and very alone.
A block or so down the road there was a bench, and when I reached it I sat down. I threw the stub of the cigarette onto the pavement, hard, and watched it shower orange sparks.
Someone said, “I’ll buy a cigarette off you, pal. Here.”
A hand in front of my face, holding a quarter. I looked up.
He did not look old, although I would not have been prepared to say how old he was. Late thirties, perhaps. Mid-forties. He wore a long, shabby coat, colorless under the yellow streetlamps, and his eyes were dark.
“Here. A quarter. That’s a good price.”
I shook my head, pulled out the packet of Marlboros, offered him one. “Keep your money. It’s free. Have it.”
He took the cigarette. I passed him a book of matches (it advertised a telephone sex line; I remember that), and he lit the cigarette. He offered me the matches back, and I shook my head. “Keep them. I always wind up accumulating books of matches in America.”
“Uh-huh.” He sat next to me and smoked his cigarette. When he had smoked it halfway down, he tapped the lighted end off on the concrete, stubbed out the glow, and placed the butt of the cigarette behind his ear.
“I don’t smoke much,” he said. “Seems a pity to waste it, though.”
A car careened down the road, veering from one side to the other. There were four young men in the car; the two in the front were both pulling at the wheel and laughing. The windows were wound down, and I could hear their laughter, and the two in the backseat (“Gaary, you asshole! What the fuck are you onnn, mannnn?”), and the pulsing beat of a rock song. Not a song I recognized. The car looped around a corner, out of sight.
Soon the sounds were gone, too.
“I owe you,” said the man on the bench.
“Sorry?”
“I owe you something. For the cigarette. And the matches. You wouldn’t take the money. I owe you.”
I shrugged, embarrassed. “Really, it’s just a cigarette. I figure, if I give people cigarettes, then if ever I’m out, maybe people will give me cigarettes.” I laughed, to show I didn’t really mean it, although I did. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Mm. You want to hear a story? True story? Stories always used to be good payment. These days . . .”—he shrugged—“. . . not so much.”
I sat back on the bench, and the night was warm, and I looked at my watch: it was almost one in the morning. In England a freezing new day would already have begun: a workday would be starting for those who could beat the snow and get into work; another handful of old people, and those without homes, would have died, in the night, from the cold.
“Sure,” I said to the man. “Sure. Tell me a story.”
He coughed, grinned white teeth—a flash in the darkness—and he began.
“First thing I remember was the
