BEG, BORROW, OR DEAL III

The true story of a LA cocaine dealer’s night on the town.

Read the first installment of DG Allin’s adventures in Los Angeles cocaine sales here.

You ever notice that everybody that’s any good at writing is dead? That’s because writers today are a bunch of college pussies fucking around in a coffee shop. How they going to die like that?

I tell you how I’m going to die: taking my hand off the throttle while racing a squad of Korean homeboys to answer a phone call from some fucking drug addict who could have just texted.

“Speak up, I’m riding a motorcycle.”

All I can hear over the detonations of the Triumph deathtrap between my knees is Ritchie Dagger screaming “fuck you…Australians… fuckstain fuck …at Jewel’s.”

What seems like random cursing is an elaborate code I have worked out with Mr. Dagger so he won’t use incriminating speech on the phone. The worse the insult the more money is involved. What Ritchie is saying, in laymens terms, is that he is with a band from Australia at a club called “Jewels Catch One.” Enough said. It is well known that Aussies will buy all drugs at any price as soon as they get off the plane.

So, I make a left on Vermont and head to Jewel’s because, dear reader, I sell cocaine in order to support this filthy writing habit. But I don’t swim the styx for nothing. I do it to bring you grains of deaths dirt, bleached by passage, eighty dollars a gram. My story is not that different than some. If I’m one in a million that means there are at least twelve people just like me in the greater Los Angeles area. If you look closely you’ll see the dirty dozen of us splitting lanes down Sunset Boulevard on fast bikes, providing the antidote for the dearth of modern urban life.

Mid way down Pico, traffic clumps in front of my destination. Jewel’s Catch One is the kind of place that can only exist between neighborhoods. I park the bike. And, being careful to turn my back to the line at Jewel’s, I take ten gram bags from the trick oil stash can under my seat, remove the .38 hammerless from my leather jacket, place it under the motorcycle seat and lock it down.

Jewels was the epicenter of black gay disco culture in Los Angeles for forty years. But it’s been gentrified by Morrissey mexicans, ancient 25-year-old skaters, and handfuls of black kids dressed like Easter baskets. Muscle punk dudes with long hair and denim jackets crab away from me when I approach the line, reading me for a cop.

I’m met at the door by a girl with pink hair who uses her clipboard to rush me past the security goons. Pink hair is wearing a Dead Kennedy’s shirt with the swastikas exed out . The red light in the hallway cancels the exes, so she’s just a blonde wearing swastikas.

“I’m afraid the Early Worms have been overserved.” Pink hair tells me even though we both know you can’t over serve an Australian.

I almost told her about the swastikas and the trick of the light but I’m interrupted by the sound of Ritchie Dagger screaming insults at someone in the green room. I know it’s Ritchie Dagger because he hasn’t taken a night off in eight years and the hasp of his voice has worn a groove in my brain.

Picture Ritchie Dagger: a black pinoy version of a gay Spiccoli. Torn jeans, a tiger stripe camo jacket, checkered slip on vans discretely doing cocaine off a house key and screaming, “Thank god, this faggot finally arrived.” Ritchie dagger is so excited he’s waving his checkered shoe at me while he beg threatens me that “I owe him” and “fuck me.”

“These guys can’t play, dude, without some shit,” Dagger knows that I know he loves skinny punk rock boys whose morals slip away after five or twelve beers. And tonight, he’s got a whole passel of them huddled in the corner, scrawled over with inarticulate tattoes, baby drunk, cursing doggerel, “Oo izit? Zis is the wan wif the charley?”

“But we’re a little funny right now.” Ritchie dagger rubs his fingers together to indicate money, “lana,” because Ritchie Dagger is also, somehow, Mexican. “They get paid after they play.”

Ritchie regards the single bag I hand him as the meager offering it is meant to be. “I mean… without a lot of shit. Dude, there’s four of them.”

The Australians try to greet me, the dirtiest one offers a drink from a bottle of fireball. “You’se a feckin led-gend, mite,” while the others reiterate “a feckin legend.”

A deal is made for an eight ball, though what I hand Ritchie Dagger is nowhere near an eighth, he’ll never know, unless Aussies have managed to install a scale in their noses. Of course, I give Ritchie Dagger credit. He’ll make them pay me back, not just because I have a reputation for party violence, but because me and Ritchie Dagger need each other.

The phone makes the noise of a one-armed bandit paying off, a special ring I have for choice clients. Text message “come by in half hour :)” The message is from Shiba Maertin. You may remember Shiba as a spooky kid from a Spielberg movie, or the sitcom with the black dad and a white dad. Either way, you wouldn’t recognize her now.

Evidence suggests that there is a Post Dramatic Success Disorder and, further, that drugs are the only viable coping mechanism for the horrors of modern stardom. Child stars are an anomaly that don’t exist outside of Los Angeles. But, god help you, you’ll bump into one sooner or later if you’re insane and love drugs as much as they do.

I leave Jewels post haste and get on the bike without bothering to hide my felonies again. As I kick the Triumph to life the Easter basket kids jump like they’ve been shot. The Triumph is louder than bombs going off, which is the only safety feature on the thing. I slip back into traffic to rattle the brains of suckers stuck in their cars. Sure, people try to run me over because they are watching porn on their phones. But I am unafraid because two things I never do is die or pay taxes.

Helicopters, news and police, converge in the night above where Sunset meets the 101. So, I take Fountain instead. The earbuds under my helmet ring. As I feel around to answer a Prius swerves across the dotted line. I flash the high beams. The car swerves further, then slows to ten miles an hour forcing me to grab brakes hard enough the back wheel skids out. I have to put my foot down to keep from dropping the bike.

“Say it quick because I’m about to die.”

I pull up next to the Prius and stuck my middle finger in the window. The Prius lady, busy facetiming, horrified at being attacked, holds her phone out and commands me to “Do that again, asshole!” And I do. Her friend on the phone is outraged, too.

So, when the light changes she tries to run me over, but I twist my wrist to shoot up the middle of stopped traffic, leaving the her locked in the rage cage. This type of shit happens every night. To ride a motorcycle is to take that line between what you are and what you are not, and charge right up the middle of it between a bunch of distracted, drunk, high people. To constantly commit suicide in this fashion is a reaffirmation of life. Doing it on drugs to deliver drugs is reaffirmation of Van Halen.

I don’t need Siri to tell me how to get to Shiba Maerten’s house because shit rolls uphill in Los Angeles. I can see Shiba’s stilted glass pied a terre on the ridge above me. An obvious landmark, not as private as someone constantly stalked by paparazzi might desire, but years of attention has institutionalized Shiba Maerten so she needs to live in a Panapticon.

I swoop around the block, checking for paparazzi, until I’m sure it’s clear. You got to be careful about being a “caregiver” in Hollywood. I know the guy that sold Kurt Cobain his last shot. To this day he wears a hood to get around because people accost him in the street and put needles in his vegan wraps, shit like that.

I dismount the bike and sneak from shadow to shadow until I find the security gate open. Once inside the privacy fence of Shiba’s compound I make my way up the stairs cut into the steep front lawn as Stevie Nicks sings, “Gold Dust Woman put your kingdom up for sale” from hidden speakers. The stairs are flanked with iceplant, driftwood, antique green glass buoys, cold drippy candle remnants, wreaths of cigarette butts jammed in an ashtray under the porch, empty wine bottles and several red cups rolling around in the evening breeze. The lights of the house above cut the fog rolling in from the west. I take the stairs.

The light dazzles me when the stairs end abruptly at Shiba’s front door. The curtains have been thrown back so I can see inside. Ms. Maertin has placed an antique leaded mirror on the dresser outside of her bathroom door, so the reflection angles into the shower. As there’s nowhere else to look, I happen to see Shiba’s pink taffy nipples frescoed behind the roiling steam as she rubs herself all over with one of those loofah sponges, the kind with the weird nubs all over it.

I’m struck flat footed, dumb, frozen in place. A gentle breeze nearly blows me back down the stairs. My movement makes Shiba turn the shower off. Busted. Now what? I go through all the modern pervert shaming horrors that await me: ousted on twitter as a peeping tom, falling so low that I won’t even be able to sell drugs anymore.

But it’s a game. Shiba shines her famous tits on mortals, rendering them into pillars of quivering salt. I’m supposed to knock on the door. I don’t have enough class, so, I light a cigarette and fiddle with the phone. But there’s nothing in the phone good as Shiba Maertin tits when she flounces out of the shower, pale skin flushed from that hot, hot steam.

Shiba traces her body with a downy white towel, slowly, making sure to dry the places that I preferred she leave wet. I drool so hard my cigarette hisses out. Shiba dries the small divot behind her knee.

Finally, I’m able to knock on the door, with three unimpeachable raps, like a cop. Shiba jumps in a dumbshow of surprise which might have passed in a child’s acting class. She skips to her closet, puts a white silk robe, then comes to the door, smiling, pushing wet hair out of her eyes.

“Oh my bad… hate to interrupt your… bath.” I’m nervous, confused, short of breath.

“Shower. Oh no, it’s fine, darling, I called you, you know,” Shiba says in her precious British accent, drying behind her ears, braille of goosebumps around her nipples. “Do come in,” she coos, brushing her hair back with a big red comb. I flop on the shabby chic couch and try to page through French Vogue nonchalantly as I place three bags of white powder between us. In my opinion Shiba’s interior decorator was a little too on the nose with the vintage Serge Gainsbourg movie posters and a huge lava lamp goobing away on an honest to god mirror table.

“Is this any good?” she asks. Hyperventilation has me unsure of what she means, but I murmur in assent, “Yes. Good,” as Shiba throws a handful of cash at me.

“How’s the writing coming?” Shiba says around the hair tie in her mouth, as she piles shimmering blonde hair on her head. Usually I answer, “not so good if I’m still selling drugs,” but it would be the wrong thing to say now. So, I tell her about how my agent has big big things in the works. How the movies I wrote are still getting thumbs up and the book deal, too. Not to mention the magazine bullshit. She nods knowingly as she takes a lighter and rocks it back and forth, pulverizing the cocaine in the bag.

“Writers are so cool,” Shiba lies, “Will you write something for me one day?”

“We’d have to talk to my agent,” is the nicest way I can think of to say no.

Shiba removes the hair tie from her mouth and wraps her hair away in a neat little bun.

“Does he get you good work?”

You can tell a lot about someone by how wack up their dust. Shiba stretches a gram in one continuous line across a mirror table, about a foot long, because she’s been down since the age of twelve.

“The only job he’s ever gotten or given anybody was at the CAA circle jerk.” Shiba laughs at the memory of CAA circle jerks, then, bends to do the rail. As she ducks in front of me the silk of her kimono lifts to exposes the bottom of her ass cheeks. She steers her little glass straw to follow the last grains of cocaine, leaning further, so the petals of her labia peek from the alabaster of her thighs. I know it seems that this type of shit happens all the time to a guy like me. But the reality is that cocaine is usually less about sex and more about crapping.

Shiba turns and hands me the straw,

“Want some?”

I stammered that I had my own, and I’d hate to take any of hers. Shiba waves the glass straw at me.

“I insist.”

And so I did, I bowed to the powder, inhaled the dust. It slapped me like a rogue wave of cold shorebreak. I choked and sputtered. When I returned to sentience I was armed with the clarity of hard drugs which divined that Shiba was hitting on me.

“Is that all you are going to do, love?”

Shiba let the robe fall. Whoops. And then I took something else from her, too.

Later, as we lay on the overstuffed bed, by the window above the pulsing grids of the city below, watching helicopters spin on needled spotlights, eruptions of red brakes bleeding out from the blue siren pulsing under the marine layer, Shiba demanded, “Isn’t it beautiful?

I’ve stood on the hill people’s balconies, I’ve pissed in their hot tubs, and listened to them, every one, ask the same thing, voice sotto. I almost told it to Shiba straight this one time, “No. It’s not beautiful. All that glitters isn’t glitter. It’s traffic, a baitball, a barrier. It’s the many hearted beast that drove you insane.”

But I notice she’s busy combing the hate paste out of her mink bed spread and decide to let her live the dream a little longer. You can’t tell people like Shiba nothing, anyhow.

The phone in my leather jacket rattles on the floor, insistent enough I have an excuse to pull my pants up and put my shirt on. Shiba watches me for clues about how normal people walk, talk, and put their pants on.

My phone blossoms through all the hydra headed orifices of my identity: Calls, texts, facebooks, instagrams — all of them messages from an old army buddy we’ll call PTSD Lee. Evidently, the local VA are pretty lax in getting PTSD Lee his meds. Not the smartest thing to do to a halfwit freak just back from scraping up people that have been run over by tanks, but such is the state of the Veterans Administration.

So, I put on the full face helmet to walk out. I managed to navigate the front yard ziggaurat until I tripped over the Tibetan prayer flags. Top heavy with the helmet I pitched headlong into the iceplant. My leather jacket, boots and grabbling hands could find no purchase on the shifting slope, so, I rode the avalanche of debris over the security fence and into the road below.

The helmet kept me from breaking my skull. I was dazed enough to pry my helmet off and assess the damage. When I did, I heard the insect click of camera shutters eating my soul. I consoled myself, “Cameras don’t make that noise anymore do they?” as I approached my bike from the dark side of the street.

I watched for a minute. Was that someone walking away from my motorcycle? Whoever I saw had either stopped moving completely because he was aware of me, or there was nobody there. I tried to be still, but the phone vibrated in my pocket. I took my eyes off the street to read another message from Lee. “Where you at?”As a writer I hate it when people, or even Jarheads, end sentences with prepositions. As a drug dealer, I hate people texting more than once. It took the same amount of time it took to text “shut up” for the figure in the shadows to be gone. Quick inspection of the motorcycle revealed that all the brake cables were still connected, indicating that it wasn’t her boyfriend in the shadows. I roll started the bike down the hill to get the fuck out of there.

My helmet was ringing soon as soon as I popped the clutch to strike the engine.

“What?” I scream into the helmet.

“Hey are you almost here?” asks PTSD Lee for eighteenth time in as many minutes.

“Don’t call me anymore you fuck. You’re burning my battery up.”

I scan the parking lot of the CVS. A squad of southsiders posted around a bunch of blacked out Hondas. I can’t help but notice Lee pacing under the street light. The jerkiness of his actions, the emo haircut, the extreme weight gain; all of it suggested a man off his meds. A school shooter.

“There you are, you fucking slacker!” Lee shouts across the parking lot as soon as I get the engine turned off. As I got closer I see Lee’s eyes are charged red and his face was shining in the harsh sodium glare. Had he been crying? I didn’t want to know.

“Give me the homie price!” Lee demands, shining forty dollars on me. It was already the dumbest drug deal I have ever made and all I did was pull up next to Lee. The homeboys turned to watch us out of the sides of their heads, which is when a gangster is definitely looking at you. No time to act chicken shit, I took a bag of cocaine of my pocket and scooped a quarter of it into my nose with my motorcycle key, letting copious amounts fall onto my jacket and shirt.

“Duuuuuuuude!” I did it again then handed Lee what was left of the bag.

“Half a gram. That’s what 40 bucks gets you, squiddo.” I unlocked the motorcycle seat to put the .38 between us, just in case the southsiders were desperate enough to misread insanity for weakness. Lee doesn’t care about guns because he’s outraged at what I just did to his bag.

“You suuuuuck.” He waves the bag, checking for weight, while I take the money. I try to make small talk while Lee snorts at the dust dropped on my jacket.

“We need to go for a run. You look like Chris Farley.”

“That’s what my mom says.” Lee is so wacked out he’s talking like Donald Duck. I forgot he was living at his moms.

What I’ve come to realize is that Freud didn’t do anything but give people cocaine and then let them talk it out. Before Freud it was called “confession,” but the healing magic of the church faded with the pederasty, and therapists just give out pills these days. So, in lieu of proper psychoanalytic therapy, the drug dealer arrives. It’s a bad place to put a predator like me, in need of material for book, but such is the state of modern mental health.

Lee pours the bag on the back of his hand and horks. His frame shakes up and he’s gagging like a cat on a hairball. “Dude, I think I shit my pants.”

Lee stops, turns and sticks his hand down his ass crack. The gangsters peel out, leaving before they get blamed for our bullshit. Lee remains situationally unaware of this. I’m thinking is this how he acted in Iraq? No wonder we’ve been winning.

“I did. I shit my pants. Look.” Lee tries to show me, but there’s one thing I hate and it’s shit. So, without further doo doo I start up the bike and charge away, back into the stream.

I saw Lee a week later, walking around downtown, struck dumb, open faced and hatless, jammed up like a voodoo doll. Though we passed three feet from one another he failed to recognize me. Guys like Lee happen. It’s always been this way in America. Boy comes back from the war, parties at mom’s house, strangling cats and burning bums, until he gets picked up for DUI, suicide, Oxys. Why would Uncle Sugar pay for therapy when jail is free?

My agent calls from the SoHo house, of course. Soho House preys on the same exclusionary principle as Country Clubs did before they let the sheenies in. I head over there because he’s my agent and he’s got me coming and going.

They’ve padded the cold black marble of Soho House with antique explorer bric-a-brac, lacrosse sticks and leather hippos, so it looks like Abercrombie and Fitch on the Death Star. Whatever sucker paid to host you in as a guest has to, contractually, tell you about how “exclusive” the place is. But you look around and go, “Yeah exclusively assholes.”

I passed the requisite brace of fey boys who linger around the bar, unsure of where to put their hands since Kevin Spacey got busted. Peppered in among the industry mossbacks are starlets, the beauty and vulgarity of which are varied as species of lily. Then the table full of hirsute writers, drunk of course, agreeing too loudly that maybe they “shouldn’t talk to Warner Brothers.” Finally, the agents, huddled together on the smoking porch, close enough that one grenade would take them all out.

“Hey do you guys know where I can find Harvey Wine stain?” I ask the suits. Junior agents can still laugh. It’s hard to tell with the older ones as Botox cancels signs of joy.

“Not funny, bro. A lot of people around here are starving because he can’t come in here anymore.” Says my agent hunched over his favorite lobster BLT.

“You want half of this?” he asks, “Thirty fucking dollars and I can’t eat half of it.”

“Nice to see you, too, Daniel.”

I pick up his sandwich, wrap it a napkin and put it my pocket. Then by sleight of hand, I hand him his five grams of cocaine ration as he slips me 400 dollars in cash.

“How much do you make off me?” he asks.

“You’re supposed to make me money, asshole.” I whispered.

“Not my money though.”

My agent wacks the bag once with the back of a soup spoon then digs a key in the bag.

“Tell you what, either get worse coke, or get better at writing.” he quips, swerving the key to miss his nose. He drops a chunk of coke so big it makes ripples in the puddle of Grey Goose sloshed at his feet. He drops cocaine down his shirt like some people buy Prada, to indicate he’s wealthy enough to throw it away, exactly what he does with writing.

I take a fake phone call, which is interrupted by a real phone call. The agents knew the trick too well. “Did you just try to take a fake phone call then a real call came in?” they screamed, laughing their asses off, “You got to turn the ringer off, dumbass!”

I put Ritchie Dagger on speakerphone, “What up, fag fuck. Meet me you fucking fuckstain or ill fuck your corpse, you ass sucking clown, dickwad. Shitbreath. Highland park.” The agents are impressed. “How’d you get Mamet to call you back?”

Back on the street the angry floes of party chasers on Sunset are driving big and taking up two lanes. At this time of night a man on a motorcycle’s life is particularly cheap. I’m relieved to be leaving Hollywood . Siri guides me back to the humanity of the east side where the Early Worms have whiffed away the ninth I sold them.

The Australians, sotted drunk and mostly naked, have turned some poor hipster’s Air BnB into a what appears to be a gulag for uneducated children who have gotten ahold of a tattoo gun. Dagger and I search them roughly, running their pockets, kicking through their gear.

“Where is it? You fucking bogun trash.” The Australians protest the shakedown. “White ah facking mint, mate…“ Their protests mean nothing. There’s nothing to say. They asked for drugs and where’s the money? This is America, goddammit.

Lo and behold, we find three hundred dollars when we skin the dirty one out of his socks. Then Ritchie gets another two hundred out of a guitar case.

This time I give them a little more, not that they will have any concept of volume until it is gone. I leave before they make me drink from the herpetic bottle of Jim Beam which materialized after they were fleeced by Dagger.

My journey goes into the night until I come out the other side. I live when it is dark when these people, and indeed, Southern California looks its best. I turn my wrist. The big bike leaps. The roads where I live are empty at five in the morning, due to gang activity, unpatrolled for minor crimes.

The sky is purpling toward dawn as I pick through the rubble of the night’s bills, uncrumpling twenties and grooming them to face the same way, while I try to chew through fifteen dollars of lobster BLT. I stack the bills against rent, food, and the cost of entertaining women. Nothing is set aside for the future. I’m always surprised and a little pissed when I live to my next court date.

I retreat to the blackout curtains and air conditioning unit in my bed room, which makes the hellish vindaloo of Southern California summer a memory I never have to have. But the phone rattles once more in my pocket, because at the end of the day there is no end of the day, if you know the right people, it can go on forever.

It’s Paulie, my connection. Paulie wants to meet. It’s not like I can say no.

Read the first installment of DG Allin’s adventures in Los Angeles cocaine sales here.