Low Life (2 page)

The elevator stopped on the seventeenth floor and picked up two women.

He turned to the brushed-steel corner of the elevator and closed his eyes. They stung and he pinched them tighter. His chest felt cramped somehow. He tilted his head up toward the fluorescent
lights in the ceiling and the black cover of his eyelids went red.

‘. . . and then Vince says, “What do I care who you sleep with?”’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘I know, right?’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told him I slept with his brother.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. Vince’s brother smells like a dumpster. I just wanted to see how he’d react.’

‘And?’

On the fifteenth floor several others joined the party – and on the twelfth and eleventh.

By the time he reached the lobby Simon felt sweaty and hot and slightly sick; the elevator was packed with people.

He rushed out of it, pushing past several slowpokes – hearing a ‘Hey, buddy’ and an ‘Asshole’ as he did so – and swiftly made his way through the
marble-floored lobby to the non-recycled air and daylight of the outside world. He was breathing hard. He felt stupid for panicking over a crowded elevator, but he didn’t know how not to
panic over it. Yet twenty floors was a lot of walking. So he simply took the elevator and felt sick four times a day – once in the morning; twice at lunchtime, once down and once up; and once
when the day was over.

He blinked in the noontime light, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints. Robert and Chris were both standing in front of the building, smoking cigarettes.

Robert was tall and thin, wore suits that hung on his bony body like trash bags, and had a ponytail hanging off the back of his head that looked like a horse’s tail. He had a weak chin and
a large forehead, which in an earlier age might have marked him as some sort of degenerate, and surprisingly small and delicate hands for a man his height.

Chris was about five three, a stringy little Texan with teeth like rotting fence posts and thin blond hair combed straight down onto his forehead. His face seemed somehow too large for the head
it had been slapped onto, big eyes like a lemur, and a wide fish mouth. The muscles behind the flesh often twitched for no apparent reason, especially when he got on a rant, which was
frequently.

Simon had no idea how old either of them was – maybe thirty-five, maybe forty.

Robert looked at his watch. ‘You finally give up and start taking the stairs?’

Simon smiled a smile that felt forced and false. His eyes felt dull in his head.

Even though he considered Robert and Chris his friends – his only friends, really – he did not know how to react to them. He felt lost in the world of human interaction. He thought
that after thirty-four years of life he sometimes knew what was expected of him in social situations – he had learned the correct reactions through trial and error – but it never felt
natural. It felt like a performance. He was supposed to smile so he smiled. He was supposed to laugh at a joke so he laughed. He was supposed to talk to his friends about television programs so he
watched television in order to have something to talk about. But he felt apart from it – separated from it by some invisible membrane, stuck outside even himself, in some no-place, watching
himself interact with the world from a distance – unable to join in, even while he appeared to be doing so.

They headed to a place called Wally’s on Broadway and grabbed a table. Robert and Chris ordered their lunches. Simon sat and waited for their sandwiches to arrive before unpacking his own.
When he first began eating his lunches here with Robert and Chris – four months ago, three months after he started working in the same building with them, though it felt like he’d been
working here forever: every day was the same and they seemed to stack infinitely into his past like a line of dominoes – there was some trouble with the manager. This was a restaurant, not a
park. He couldn’t just bring his own food in here and spread out. But since then they’d worked it out, and the manager let it slide.

When Babette brought out Simon’s daily 7-Up, she smiled and said hello. Simon returned the smile, pulled the paper sleeve off the top of his straw, and took a draw. It was cold and
sweet and helped to settle his stomach.

He fell into his car, the work day over. The car was a gray 1987 Volvo. The paint was peeling from the hood where the heat of the engine had cooked it and from the trunk where
several different owners had set the gas cap when refilling the tank. He started the engine, thumbed the button on the left of the transmission’s handle, and dragged it down to drive. He
pulled out into the slow flow of traffic, edging in with his right fender – this was a oneway street – forcing the car behind him either to stop or hit him. Take your pick, pal. In five
minutes he was back on Wilshire and heading toward home. But then he drove right past the Filboyd Apartments and past the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated forty years
earlier, and onward. The Ambassador was under construction, being turned into a school, its history knocked away with the walls, goodbye Cocoanut Grove, hello detention, and there was nothing left
of it but its steel skeleton surrounded by great pits of earth and a chain-link fence. Los Angeles was a city that perpetually razed its own past. History was for people who hadn’t yet made
it here. This was the edge of the new world and it would remain so. You couldn’t go any further, and who would want to? Just ignore the slums and the dirt and the poor and try not to trip
over any broken dreams while walking down Hollywood Boulevard.

In another few miles he reached his destination. The front of the place simply read

and though he had never seen an actual book inside, there were certainly plenty of magazines.

He parked his car on a side street just off Wilshire, checked the meter, found that whoever had parked there last had left him twenty-three minutes of free parking, added a quarter’s worth
of time, and then walked along the cracked sidewalk toward the arcade.

The metal gate which acted as a front door was locked. It was always locked. Simon pressed a button on the wall to his right and heard a bell chime inside. He looked up at the camera mounted
above the door. A moment later, a buzzing sound. Simon pulled on the door. It opened.

The place was humid and smelled of ocean salt and rotting undersea vegetation or – more likely – of something that resembled those combined odors; it was fifteen miles to the nearest
beach in Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel spun slowly and bikinied women lay on brightly colored towels, and the only seabirds this far inland were gulls hanging out behind the seafood restaurant
on Fourth and Vermont, picking through the shrimp shells and lobster tails left in its dumpster.

At the counter – behind which stood a bored-looking fellow in a burgundy tracksuit, who was flipping through a wrestling magazine – Simon exchanged a twenty-dollar bill for twenty
one-dollar bills, and then made his way through the front room, where rows of magazine covers displayed various fetishes – close-ups of well-manicured feet with red and blue polished
toenails; the tiny breasts, puffy nipples and bald vaginas of women pretending to be prepubescent girls; submissive women whose waists were cinched by corsets and whose asses were welted red by
thorough canings; nurses wielding enema nozzles; pig-tailed women in diapers tonguing pacifiers – and then through a doorway and up a single step into the back room above whose door was a
sign which labeled it the

A few lonesome middle-aged men with glistening black eyes were hanging around outside the booths, apparently looking to find someone with whom to share some of their time inside
before heading home to their wives (Simon saw several wedding bands). He avoided eye contact, not wanting to give anyone the wrong idea, and made his way to a booth with a green light glowing above
it. The booths with red lights above them were occupied, their doors locked, and the faint sounds of videotaped sex issued from the cracks beneath their doors.

There was a television built into one of the walls inside the booth, and to its right a slot for collecting dollar bills. On the wall opposite the television, a built-in wood bench. On the floor
beside it, a trash can half-filled with wadded-up kleenexes and paper towels and fast-food napkins. The stench of rotting ectoplasm was overwhelming.

Simon put a dollar bill into the slot beside the television, and the screen came aglow, filling the small room with sickly light.

The television displayed six channels of pornography, which came in six distinct flavors. Simon chose channel three – a woman in a black leather mask was flogging a completely nude man,
who was on hands and knees on a cracked concrete floor in some anonymous warehouse (probably a warehouse just over the hill in Sherman Oaks or Encino). She called him terrible names while she beat
him.

Simon did not sit down, but his knees felt shaky.

When he got back to the Filboyd Apartments he could not find parking on Wilshire, so he turned left onto a side street lined with apartment buildings and drove north toward
Sixth. Near the end of the block, beneath a broken streetlamp – all of the lamps were out on this block, while across Sixth they were turning on in the dim evening light – he found a
spot he could barely squeeze his car into, and proceeded to do so, his right front fender poking only slightly into a red zone. A fire plug jutted from a brown patch of grass about ten feet
away.

He stepped from the Volvo, slammed the door shut, put his key into the scratched-up keyhole, and gave it a turn from twelve to three. There was a satisfying resistance, and then all four doors
locked simultaneously with a chorus of thwacks. He turned away from the car and started south toward home, stuffing keys into his pocket.

Both the sun and the moon were visible as they changed shifts, the moon high and the sun sinking below the horizon. The clouds looked like pulled cotton. The nearest stars – or perhaps
they were planets – poked through the darkening sky like flashlights in a distant wood.

A few steps from his car he stopped to light a cigarette. After getting it lighted, he flipped the cap over the silver Zippo, snuffing the flame, and stuck it warm into his pants pocket. He
could feel the heat of it against his thigh. He took a drag and felt the smoke swirling within his lungs, heavy and hot and somehow comforting. He exhaled through his nostrils. His father –
adoptive: Simon didn’t know who his birth parents were, though in his youth he had often made up different stories about them, and about why they dumped him off at an Austin, Texas, police
station when he was only three months old – used to smoke Camel Filters and often exhaled through his nostrils. When he was a small boy he thought it was the coolest thing in the world, how
someone could take smoke into his mouth and exhale it through his nose. It seemed like it must be some kind of magic.

He continued walking south. He made it only seven steps before something terrible happened.

It began with someone saying, ‘You got the time?’ But not to him. The voice came from across the street. Simon looked over there and saw a tall guy with a neck tattoo standing only a
couple of feet from an old man wearing a moth-eaten yellow cardigan.

‘Let me see,’ the old man said. He had a German accent, his voice thin and reedy.

He pushed back the left sleeve of his cardigan, revealing a silver watch which glistened in what was left of the light. He squinted at the numbers, pulling his head away from his own
outstretched arm, apparently far-sighted and without his glasses.

‘I think it’s about—’

Two other men stepped out of the shadows of a brick apartment building – one with a Dodgers cap on his head, the other’s bald pate slick as a polished bowling ball – grabbed
the old man’s arms from behind and started pounding at his kidneys. He cried out once or twice, but then his breath must have been gone because after that all he managed were sad little
grunts. His legs gave, knees buckling, but the other men held him up and continued to punch at him for a while, his feet dragging on the concrete beneath him as he was punched and jostled, making
quiet scuffling sounds like whispers. Then they emptied his pockets of a billfold, removed his watch, and let him crumple to the sidewalk, let him simply fold on top of himself. The guy with the
neck tattoo gave him three more kicks to the gut, and then said to one of the others, ‘Get his shoes. I can wear ’em to church.’

‘Get ’em yourself if you want ’em. They’re not my size.’

The guy with the neck tattoo cursed, ‘Lazy bastard,’ and then pulled the shoes off the old man’s feet, revealing plaid yellow socks that matched the cardigan.

‘Hey,’ Simon said, after snapping out of his stunned silence. ‘What are you guys doing?’

But they weren’t doing anything. They’d finished.

‘You want some too?’ the bald one said.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Forget about him,’ said the one with the neck tattoo.

‘It can be a two-for-one night.’

‘No. Fuck him. I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco.’

‘You lucked out this time, fucker!’

They turned and walked away from there. Simon stood motionless a moment or two longer – wanting to make sure they weren’t going to return – and then jogged across the street to
where the old man lay motionless.

He knelt down – cigarette dangling from his dry lips, smoke wafting into his eyes, making them water – and felt for a pulse. He felt nothing. If ever a pulse had been there, it was
in the wind now. The old man was dead.

When he reached Wilshire he found a pay phone, a small metal box set against a brick wall, and called the police. He did not want to call from his home telephone because he did not want the
police to show up and question him for hours about something that had lasted thirty seconds. He told the woman who answered that he had witnessed a mugging. Three men had accosted an old man with a
German accent. He told her where it had happened and described the three men as well as he could given the distance and the dim light. He told her that the old man was dead. When the woman asked
him his name he simply hung up and walked away.