Eddie Cain looks at the Sunset Ridge and thinks it would have been better if the pills had finished him off.
Or maybe they had. This desert-blasted strip mall floats in the void like a way station on the road to hell. Red neon stains the night; spotlights hang on the corners of the roof drawing lines of blot across the night. The parking lot swarms with pickup trucks, beaters, and bikes. Blown-speaker cock rock rises in the night. This sense of latent violence like the taste of storm in a summer wind. You work enough bars and late-night clubs and you get to know the scent.
The Sunset Ridge squats between Barstow and the army base on a piece of road that used to be called America’s Highway, back when being America’s anything sounded like a good thing to be. But now it is the year 2000; the American Century has bled out. Maybe once the six storefronts of the Sunset Ridge had been ice cream parlors and souvenir shops. Now the strip mall is a post-apocalyptic pleasure island: a bar, a strip club, a sex shop, a liquor store, a smoke shop, a tattoo parlor. Death Valley motherfuckers move door-to-door in lurid riot. Soldiers on liberty from Fort Carson weave between desert-scrawny men with meth-glittered eyes, lone-wolf bikers in filthy cuts, women with low-slung shirts and knifelike smiles. Shitkickers and baby killers in uneasy truce. Everyone dappled with sun damage and ink and scars. A place where life leaves a mark.
Eddie thinks on how the people in LA look so untouched, so moisturized and plucked and micro-derma-whateverthefucked into an ageless sheen. LA people paint over the rot like an open-casket corpse.
“Don’t he look natural?” Eddie says to himself. He doesn’t need a mirror to see the eye bags, the gut, the purple cobwebs on his nose. He knows which pile of bodies he belongs in. Out here among the nakedly damned.
Eddie’s throat is still stomach-acid-sizzled from the botched attempt two nights ago. Every bit of him is poisoned or pained. Eddie thinks he should get back on the bus, go anywhere else. Maybe down into Mexico where they will sell him enough pills to do the job right.
He hears the crunch of tires, feels the puff of wind at his back as the bus rolls away. You have to hand it to life: It has killer timing.
He lights a smoke. It doesn’t help his aching throat. But his life these days is about balancing the poisons just right. He knows what else he needs to get someplace close to even. He takes his suitcase by the handle, follows the smell of spilled beer into the Stepchild Lounge.
Sometimes, Eddie will think later, you just know. Sometimes it’s easy. It could almost make you think existence isn’t just one big avalanche of tumbling daisy-chained clusterfucks, almost make you think there was a driver behind the wheel.
He’s never been in the Stepchild before; he’s been in this bar a thousand times. After enough time on the road, all the clubs and bars blur together the way hotel rooms do. Chuckle huts, with their red curtains and fake-brick backdrops and two-drink minimums. Rock clubs plastered in band stickers and old flyers. And then there are bar-bars.
The Shady Lady is a bar-bar. There’s a stage, but not so you’d notice. A bar-bar stage is just a two-foot riser crammed into a corner of the main room, tight enough that someone onstage could almost rest their drink on top of the jukebox. Two-top tables jumble in a cluster between the stage and the bar. On the other side of the room: the pool table with felt faded to the color of Kermit the Frog’s hide.
Eddie bellies up. He sees her. She is redheaded, her skin more freckle than white. She has the tense shoulders of someone who is never quite alone, even when they’re by themselves. She gives him the little smile she must give every customer. Eddie sees that one twisted tooth on the bottom row, and something seismic shifts in his skull.
Sometimes you just know.
She pushes two beers in front of a sun-stained couple, each with eyes like they’re plotting the other’s murder. She turns to Eddie, this flash of a secret smile, like she knows Eddie can see the joke.
“What can I get you?” she asks.
“Drunk.”
She laughs like she needs it. Eddie likes that. It’s the one thing he knows he can give someone.
“Jäger,” he says, sitting down on a stool. “And a beer.”
“A little old for Jäger, aren’t you?” she asks as she pours.
“Jäger tastes better when it comes back up,” he says.
“Well, that’s a utilitarian point of view.”
“Liquor is a utility. Liquor is for getting you drunk,” Eddie says. “It’s there to do a job, you know? People like to dress booze up like getting tanked isn’t the point. I don’t think people get that way about crystal meth. ‘This batch Billy Joe made just doesn’t have that tangy, fishgut bouquet. Think he went light on the battery acid this time.’”
She laughs again. He likes it again.
“You’re Eddie Cain,” she says as she pops the cap off his Red Dog.
He picks up the bottle. “I used to be, anyway.”
She puts out her hand. Her fingernails chewed up, the skin around the cuticles torn by worrying teeth. He does this awkward beer shuffle so he can take hers in his. Her hand is cold from digging in the ice chest. He wants to hold it, warm it. But he lets go. He takes a drink. He needs it.
“I used to be Amanda,” she says. “Now I’m Mouse.”
He doesn’t have to ask why. The shape of her nose, the way her ears are tilted—but more than anything it’s that way her shoulders are, like a hawk might come from the sky at any moment.
“I like Mouse.”
“You mind if I ask you something?”
“Do your worst.”
“Why’s a big-time comedian like you coming out to work at the Sunset Ridge for three whole months? The hottest three whole months at that.”
Eddie thinks about bullshitting her. Then he remembers when he used to not bullshit people. So he says, “I tried to kill myself a few nights back.”
Her eyes do this little thing. And it tells him it’s okay—he could tell her the whole rotten story and she could handle it. That he could tell her anything. Something in him flutters like a baby bird discovering its wings.
“But I fucked it up. And so I woke up, sans toe tag. Woke up because my phone was ringing. And it was the guy who runs this place—”
“Terry? Or Driscoll?”
“Terry. I don’t know a Driscoll.”
“Lucky you.”
“So Terry calls me, rises me from the dead sort of, and he offers me a job I should have laughed at. Would have, any other day. A goddamn Death Valley residency? But I figured it was either try to cack myself again or come out here. I figured this has to be better than dying.”
She says, “Let’s check back on that in a week or two.”
It’s his turn to laugh.
She opens another beer. Eddie hadn’t noticed that he’d finished the one in his hand. He swaps them out, takes a long drink. Watches her go fetch refills for the murder-suicide couple.
This voice cuts through the barroom din. “Eddie goddamn Cain.”
Some people, you look at them and remember we’re all made of meat. The man standing next to Eddie is all ham hocks, sweat, and fur.
“Damn glad to have you, buddy. Terry Pritchett. Buddy, I’m a fan. I’m a fan. Hell’s bells, I can’t even believe I got you down here.”
Terry swallows Eddie’s hand with both of his; Eddie thinks about a farmer helping a cow give birth, up to the elbow in her. He keeps the laugh off his face.
“Yeah, me either.”
“Thought you’d be here a little earlier. Maybe talked a little big to some of our regulars. You ready to go on right now, keep me from looking like a sucker?”
These little piggy eyes—but Eddie knows pigs are smarter than you think.
“Now?”
“Aren’t nothing to it but to do it.”
Two nights ago, Eddie swore he’d never go onstage again.
He says, “Yeah.”
Terry yells something as he heads for the stage. The house lights shift. These too-bright stage lights turn Terry’s sweat into laminate.
“All right, folks, welcome to the Stepchild. Good to see you all. We’ve got a real hell of a treat for you tonight. You’ve seen him on Letterman, on Comedy Central, all that good shit. So I took myself a flyer and called him up and asked him if he’d like to spend some time down here on our patch of God’s country. And thus is the power and the glory of the Stepchild Lounge that he said, Just try and stop me. And so here he is. Gonna be our MC for a little while. Give a big Death Valley welcome to one of the bad boys of comedy: Mr. Eddie Cain.”
The crowd claps, louder than he expected. He likes it more than he would admit.
He takes his beer with him. He hears Mouse say, “Go get ’em.”
See Eddie Cain at 16, his face greasy as a wheel of cheese in the sun. A mullet shades his neck. Trucker speed and teenage angst burn toxic in his eyes. Don’t judge him too harshly. You ever try to be 16 and sane in Cowfuck, West Texas?
See how he fidgets at the back of the class. Eddie has a monkey in his mind. He was born with the monkey already in his skull, like a fetus who absorbed his twin and now has little fingernails in his medulla. When Eddie was a little kid, the monkey and him ran free. He drew crayon pictures of dogs shitting rainbows, sang songs about farts, made up rhymes that made his sister cry. Then they sent his punk ass off to kindergarten. School made him build a cage for the monkey. He sat at his desk; the monkey banged on the bars until Eddie had to spring the little fucker. The monkey lets him say the weird things in his head, say them just right so he’ll get big laughs. Eddie doesn’t like much, but he likes getting laughs.
“You’ll never have a successful career if you can’t learn to control yourself,” some vice principal tells him after Eddie has been kicked out of sophomore social studies for the sixth time.
Career. The word looms like a movie monster rising over Tokyo. It means something like selling furniture at the store his dad manages—taking on the job that turned dad the gray-pink of week-old hamburger. And all they want in exchange for that room-temperature life is for Eddie to kill the monkey.
Eddie drops out of high school. He gets a job at a gas station. It sucks. Stealing booze and drinking it slow over the course of a shift helps. Writing jokes in a notebook helps more. All the money he doesn’t spend on drugs, he spends on vinyl. Carlin, Pryor, Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, Lenny Bruce. He hits his first open mic when he is 17. See Eddie wiping stage-fright puke off a cheap suit in the bathroom of a Houston comedy club. See Eddie onstage, too much swagger, too many dick jokes. See the mic vibrate in his hand.
See Eddie bomb. See Eddie eat shit and die night after night after night. Watch Eddie figure it out. Eddie gets laughs. Sometimes it feels like laughter is the only thing that is real. A crowd can’t fake laughter—real tearing-streaming guffaws of laughter—any more than a man can fake a money shot.
Eddie gets a job as an open mic host when he is 18. He gets stage time. He meets road-dog comics. He learns about setups, punch lines, segues, building a killer closer. He learns that the truth is always funnier than bullshit. He builds a solid 20 minutes. He does his first tour. It goes okay. Him and the monkey hatch a plan.
Watch Eddie unpack in a Hollywood apartment. He thinks it will be like living in a Guns N’ Roses video. Later, he’ll think that it’s a good thing you can’t smell a Guns N’ Roses video. He learns the secret ways of Los Angeles. He learns to take Fountain. He learns that Koreans have more hangover cures than anybody in the world. He scrambles for stage time. He does three-show nights, driving down Sunset from the Comedy Store to the Laugh Factory and then shooting down Crescent Heights to the Melrose Improv. He does gigs down in Irvine, in Brea, at the Ice House in Pasadena. He starts headlining. He works the same stages Pryor and Kinison worked. He does coke off the same greenroom tables that Pryor and Kinison did.
Coke makes Eddie rant. Booze makes him funnier. Booze lets the monkey run free. The monkey digs deep into his head. The monkey brings out his pain and flings it like poo.
Eddie goes on the road. He stays in comedy condos or in no-tell motels off the highway. The monkey climbs out of Eddie’s skull and Eddie climbs on its back. Eddie learns what to feed it, how to care for it. Eddie gets a manager. He gets fans. The strangers, the weirdos—people who feel like aliens lost on this planet. These are Eddie’s people.
Watch Eddie kill. Something that happens to a crowd, something beyond laughter. This thing you can do with just words and your mind. You can pin people to their chairs, convulse them, show them that place where their minds and bodies are chained. Words and timing can unseam a person. Words can destroy them. For a while, anyway. Which is all that people want. To be killed for just a little while.
Eddie cuts a record. He opens for a grunge band on tour. He gets a half hour on Comedy Central. Life keeps moving all the same. Dad dies. Mom never will—after the blast, it’ll be her and the cockroaches duking it out.
Other comics get sucked into the sitcom world. They get hundred-dollar haircuts. They do commercials. They tell Eddie that if he could get his shit together, he could appeal to a wider audience. Go Hollywood. Millions of viewers. Millions of dollars.
Eddie tells them, “In the land of the shit eaters, the man with no taste is king.”
Watch Eddie lose friends.
Watch Eddie lose it altogether.
You have it, and then you lose it. It’s just the way it goes. Cancer is life taken to its logical end. You have it, and then you lose it. His coke intake goes up with his income. Coke ruins his gigs. He doesn’t riff, he rails. He comes off like a Bill Hicks/Jesus combo platter. Hold the laughs. Eddie harangues the audience. The monkey turns on him. The monkey turns its energy into a critique of Eddie: You had it and you lost it.
Eddie feels like a man watching a glass fall from his hands, too fast for him to catch it. Just watching it tumble to the ground, knowing it will shatter. Eddie knows where this all leads. He knows Lenny Bruce went out a junkie reading court transcripts onstage. Lenny died onstage long before the OD.
See Eddie die onstage. This montage of a night, edited into smash cuts by blackouts and blurred vision. Cut to Eddie screaming at a woman in a jelly-dong headdress, a bachelorette who’d dared to talk during his set. This hatred buried deep inside him getting loose and splashing over the audience. Eddie gets vile at the woman. Nobody laughs but a few evil men. Cut to Eddie walking offstage in ghastly silence. Cut to Eddie driving home with one eye shut to kill the blur. The note already scribbled on a Comedy Store bar napkin—all he has left to say: Fuck this shit. Cut to Eddie doing suicide math. Gulping pills and whiskey. A feeling like being dropped down a hole that has no bottom. Smash to black.
Only the math is wrong. He wakes up surprised. His phone ringing: Terry Pritchett from Death Valley, with a pitch that would have been insulting if Eddie hadn’t just risen up from the grave like Hangover Jesus.
Death fucking Valley. You have to hand it to life: It knows how to land a joke.
Now, two nights later, standing on the Stepchild’s stage, Eddie checks out the crowd. They look like people clinging to the side of Earth so that the spinning doesn’t fling them into space.
His people.
He says, “So, vegetarians say that eating meat is wrong.”
Somebody boos.
“Hey, I don’t care. Eat what you want; I’m not a cop. Don’t eat meat because it’s wrong. Okay. It sure as hell is. Meat is murder. But every vegetarian I ever met eats fake meat, right? Veggie burgers, soy dogs. That’s some sicko shit, isn’t it? If eating meat is evil, isn’t eating fake meat like getting your girlfriend to dress like a twelve-year-old before you fuck her? ‘What’s for dinner tonight, honey?’ ‘A little serial-killer roleplay.’ Maybe it’s not murder, but I don’t know if I’d put it on a bumper sticker.”
The crowd laughs. If feels good.
Mouse laughs.
That feels better.
Eddie settles into life in Terry Pritchett’s pirate kingdom. He moves into an awful comedy condo above the bar. He hosts dog-shit open mic nights; he does sets; he introduces the bands that come around. Desert rock. Acid country. Gutter punks. This singer-songwriter with messiah eyes and hash-mark scars on her arms. Eddie watches from a stool. He drinks. He talks to Mouse. He tries to make her laugh.
The Sunset Ridge goes all night. The vibe is electric. The vibe is slam-dancing as the ship goes down. Locals and nomads and soldiers move through the strip mall with faces like they’re strapped into a rollercoaster: all hell yes or fuck no or oh shit I’m gonna ralph.
Eddie learns this island nation’s economy. The strip club sells lap dances and mixers. The liquor store sells booze and cold beer and local-made beef jerky. The sex store sells porno mags and ball gags and wraparound Sallies. The bar sells hockey-puck burgers and curly fries and shots served in plastic cups. The smoke shop sells bongs and paraphernalia and plastic bottles of trucker speed.
Commerce taints the air. The strip club smells like baby oil and rosewater. The liquor store smells like dust and the little brown cigars Pops Crenshaw smokes behind the counter. The bar smells like spilled beer and old fryer oil. The sex shop smells like disinfectants and bad times. The smoke store smells like incense and cat piss. The tattoo parlor smells like unwashed men.
Eddie learns about the second economy of the Sunset Ridge. Below the surface, another world. This one run by Terry’s brother, Driscoll. All muscles and veins and shaved skull. Blue lightning inked on his arm. In his smile the promise of violence. In his eyes a history of violence done.
Under Driscoll’s hand, the liquor store sells untaxed cigarettes at a heavy discount. The smoke shop sells crank and coke. The strip club sells hand jobs and quick humps in the VIP room—cost to be negotiated, 50% to the house. The sex shop has a locked closet in the back, opened for special customers only, full of old video tapes and CD-ROMs. These discs with no titles, or titles scrawled with markers across their top: Playtime, School’s Out, L’il Rascals. The tattoo parlor is the hangout for Driscoll and his crew. As far as Eddie can tell, the crew isn’t anything so ambitious as a gang—they don’t all wear a patch or matched tattoos—but Eddie thinks of them as a gang anyway. It’s shorter than redneck dirtbag scumfucks, anyway.
The cops are in on it all, of course. Cops work for the powers that be, whatever those powers are. Sheriff Vernon, shorter than Eddie and skinny on top, likes late nights at the Boom-Boom Room. His deputies walk out of the liquor stores double-fisting cartons of smokes.
A week into his stay, Eddie drinks at the bar after a rock show. Curly Romero, some sort of midlevel badass up from Hangtree, came in for the show with a crowd of hardcase men. He wears all denim, wears a 10-inch knife on a belt scabbard. The postshow playlist is all slow, churning fuzzed-out guitars. Love songs to Satan. Curly has his hands all over one of the girls from the strip club. Her name is Sunshine. She is brown-haired and beautiful. She is drunk or something better than drunk. She runs her fake nails across Curly’s chest, down his arms. Eddie sees Driscoll in the corner, at a table with his brother. His eyes on Sunshine’s mating ritual. Gripping a beer bottle like it’s the world’s neck in his hands, and now he has his chance.
Mouse puts another Red Dog in front of Eddie. Tension radiates.
“You okay?”
Her head gives this nuh-uh shake. Her lips pursed tight like she’s stopping the words from coming out.
He says, “There’s like a dozen of those guys. Driscoll would have to be stupid to start anything.”
“It’s not stupid that scares me. It’s crazy. And he’s sure as hell crazy.”
When it happens, it happens so fast. Driscoll walks over to Curly’s table.
“Get out of here, Sunshine.”
“I’m off the clock.”
“Bitch, I said move.”
The men at the tables around them shift postures. Instincts shaped by countless booze-and-bloodstained nights.
“Hey, carnal,” Curly said. “Don’t disrespect the lady, here.”
“I’m not your carnal, Pancho.”
“You want to leave?” Eddie whispers to Mouse.
She shushes him. She does not move.
Driscoll picks a bottle off the table and swings it into Curly’s face. This sudden nebula of blood and beer and flecks of glass. There are screams. This dry sound out of Mouse that is worse.
Sunshine runs for the parking lot. So do the people at the bar. Eddie can’t move. He can’t believe his eyes. Blood like a curtain drops down Curly’s face. Driscoll kicks Curly out of his chair. Curly’s guys rise as one. Terry comes from the office with a shotgun in his hands. The crew freezes. A shotgun at this range would turn them into red oatmeal.
Driscoll goes to work. He has on heavy boots with steel tips. He knows how to use them. How to stomp with the heel and kick with the toe.
Eddie and Mouse and the others watch it all. When he is done, Driscoll looks around the room. His face misted red. His eyes cold as a fished-out corpse. But there is something else underneath. Something buried so deep. But Eddie sees it. And he does not forget.
Life continues after the stomping. Sunshine splits town—not even stopping by to pick up her last check. Curly’s friends find a new place to drink. Curly probably learns a new way to chew.
Eddie knows it’s not the last blood he’ll see. He can feel the danger of this place—water swelling behind a creaking levy. He knows that anything could happen here. That sooner or later, it will. Out in the desert, where nobody cares.
But still, Eddie likes this place. He likes this bacchanal on the dark side of the moon. The dry heat and cheap beer. These people looking for something that could dull the ache. And Mouse most of all.
One night, Eddie walks to the park bench out back with a notebook and a six-pack. Among the rattlesnake warning signs. Lizards on rocks. Quail run from the shade of one bush to the next, little puffball babies trailing like cartoon clouds of dust. The sunset glows, a river of fire carving the earth from the sky. Eddie starts writing. It comes out slow; it comes out bad. But it comes.
One night about a month after he gets here, he comes onstage to see every table filled. This tingle in his limbs, like coming in from the cold.
He runs a few old bits. Gets the crowd going. He breaks out his new material.
He tells them about the cargo cults. How back in World War II, the Pacific theater, the Americans jumped island to island, rock to rock. And there were people living on these islands. These natives just sort of stepped aside and let the marines take over. Maybe they’d heard a thing or two about what the Americans did to the last group of brown-skinned people living on useful land.
Anyway, the marines would march around with their rifles, and they’d talk to the ships on their headphones, and then they’d get resupplies parachuted in. Boxes of cargo would fall from the sky.
And the native folks saw the cargo come down. Holy shit. Cigarettes and chocolate from the sky. The thing about America is that it makes you fat and kills you, but it’s a fuck of a lot of fun along the way. Chocolate and cigarettes from the sky. So, time passed and America dabbled in a little nuclear holocaust and presto-chango, the war ended. The marines left all these little islands, and the natives’ chocolate and cigarettes ran out. Anybody who has ever smoked their last smoke after the gas station closes knows what a shitburger that is. So the islanders got together, and they talked it out. Hey, remember how the marines marched around with these long sticks on their arms? And they’d worn these hard shells on their ears, right? And then chocolate and cigarettes fell from the sky. Well, I think we can all agree that one plus one is two, isn’t it? So the natives built themselves some rifles made of bamboo, and earphones out of coconuts, and they marched around in formation, ten-hupping, saluting, and all that shit. Hup, hup, hup. And then they waited. They marched. And they waited. They marched. And they waited for chocolate and cigarettes to fall from the sky.
Pretty funny, right? They call them cargo cults. All these grass-skirt assholes with coconuts on their heads marching around waiting for chocolate and cigarettes to rain down from heaven. But hold up a minute. You think you’re better than them? You think you’ve never put on coconut headphones or marched around with a fake rifle on your arm? Maybe you joined the army, bombed some of those brown people we love to bomb so much. Because hey, they built cheap homes for those World War II marines so surely they’ll give you the same deal, right? Hup, hup, hup. Maybe you went to college because you thought there’d be a future on the other side. Hup, hup, hup. Work hard and you’ll be the boss someday. Hup, hup, hup. Never mind that your boss comes in late and got the job because he’s somebody’s nephew. Keep marching. Hup, hup, hup. The chocolate and cigarettes are gonna get here any day. A house, a job, one point five kids, and then that terrible dark knot at the heart of you will just untie itself. You’ll be happy as a family at the end of an ad. Hup, hup, hup. The American dream is a Norman Rockwell picture painted on the side of a cliff, Roadrunner-style, and they’re telling you to run into it, face-first at full speed. Hup, hup, hup. Splat. Keep marching, fuckos. Any day now. They shouldn’t have called those guys on the islands “cargo cults.” They should have called them “Americans.”
Eddie walks off the stage while they’re still laughing. Mouse has his shot and beer waiting.
“You killed,” she says. Her eyes are shining.
It is everything.
The next night, the Stepchild has a band. The bass player gives Eddie some shrooms. He eats them straight, chased with a Red Dog. He walks out into the desert as the stars pierce the sky, the first tingles fluttering through his brain.
The desert comes alive at night, freed from the cruelty of the sun. He watches a roadrunner go. It runs like a never-ending plane crash, falling and catching itself, falling and catching itself over and over. Like something from one of those motivational posters. If feels like the start of a bit. He doesn’t have any paper to write it down. Maybe he can piss himself a note in the desert sand. But he doesn’t know how good his dickwriting is. Shroom laughs come out in gusts.
Mouse stands with one of her skinny cigarettes in her hands. The lights from the back of the strip mall halo around her. She smiles at him, curious.
“What’s the joke?”
He holds out his arms like everything. He knows he’s got the face of a maniac.
“I’m glad to see you,” he says.
“I’m glad to see you too. Looks like you’re feeling no pain.”
He wants to tell her it’s like the world is glazed with something slick, something frictionless. That there are oceans of light behind everything if only we had eyes to see. He tries to tell her but it comes out wrong.
She says, “I’m glad you’re having a good time.”
He looks at her. He thinks about how a person is made of warm blood and dreams. He takes her hands.
“There’s all these things I want to tell you,” he says. “But it just sounds like bullshit in my head. And I don’t want to bullshit you.”
“Let’s go inside,” she says. “Let’s get you something to drink.”
“I don’t know if I can handle the bar right now.”
“Then we’ll go to my place.”
Her place is a mess but it smells good. She makes them drinks. He flops on the couch. All these posters and pictures of planets and stars. Bookshelves filled with cracked-spine paperbacks. She kills the overhead light. She sits down next to him. Their legs touching. Their eyes meet.
“I don’t really fuck anymore,” he tells her. “Shit. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I want to fuck you,” he told her. “But it won’t be good if I do.”
She says, “Hey Eddie. Shut up for once.”
He does, for once. And they hold each other in the dark. Catching warmth between them. He thinks about how babies must be lured into this world. A child who isn’t held will look at this world and find it wanting. It will waste away; it will pick the void over this cold world. Unless somebody holds it. Every single one of us is coaxed into this world with the promise of being held. He thinks about how often that promise is broken. And how many other things get broken because of it.
“Fucking mushrooms,” Eddie says.
She kisses him. Her mouth is warm. She holds his head so gently. No one has touched him like this in a long time. He holds her to him. He tries to give back as much as he takes. The trick of two people holding hands midair, each of them somehow stopping the other from falling into the void.
Somehow it works.
After a while she falls asleep on him. His arm goes numb. Her hair tickles his face. She farts in the night. These things that usually make him want to slip away in the dark.
But now he doesn’t want to run. For the first time in a long time he doesn’t want to run.
Two weeks later, the bill comes due.
This biker gang comes through on a run. Bikers swirl and stumble. The bikers bite holes in the sides of beer cans, latch on to the foaming wound. Pickup trucks driven by hangers-on and women fill the lot, their beds full of half-wild dogs.
Eddie does a full set in front of the bikers. He points to a woman up front wearing nothing but a denim vest with PROPERTY OF GATOR stitched into the back.
“Man, no woman ever wanted to put my name on the back of her jacket,” he tells them. “They won’t even put my name in their phonebook. I’m in there as ‘the one who likes his asshole fingered.’”
The bikers laugh. The bikers howl. One of their dogs walks through the front door of the bar with a mummified woman’s arm in its mouth.
Desert soil is a vampire. The sand sucks water from a body and leaves it little more than paper and bone. That’s what Sunshine is like when the dogs dig her up.
One of the other dancers identifies her. Nobody had thought much when she left. Not too many girls put in their two weeks’ at the Boom-Boom Room. They come, they go. Sometimes they come back, a little older and a little rougher, a little more dead-eyed and a little sadder, back to a place that’s a steady sort of crazy. And she’d had reason to leave. Not that anybody talks about that.
The news says her skull was dented in. Nobody at the Sunset Ridge says the other part out loud. The last time anybody had seen her. That night at the bar when Curly got stomped. Nobody talks about who did the stomping.
Eddie finds Mouse in his bed, at his place above the bar. Clutching his pillow like a stuffed animal.
Before he can say anything, she says, “You know he killed her. And you know nothing is going to happen.”
So he doesn’t say anything at all. Because she is right.
Mouse tells him about Sunshine. How she’d come in early to drink tall vodka tonics before her shift at the Boom-Boom Room. Mouse would give her a whole lime’s worth of slices, and Sunshine would squeeze the dried-out wedges into her drink. Like scurvy was her biggest fear. Sunshine would fill the jukebox with terrible angsty rock from the ’80s, and she’d drink her sour drink and she’d talk to Mouse.
People talked to Mouse easy. People spilled things to Mouse. Eddie got it. He spilled things to Mouse too.
Sunshine had told Mouse about how things work at the Boom-Boom Room. How Driscoll turns the girls out slow. How he buys single-serving bottles of mouthwash in bulk. How girls come out of the VIP room with sad eyes and hands full of cash and head straight for the dressing room. How after a Friday night the little trash can would be brimmed up with empty one-shot bottles of Scope.
She told Mouse about how Driscoll had found the dancer’s lines. Some don’t mind sucking a little cock for money. Driscoll gets them to sell pussy too. The ones who don’t mind doing that get sent out for unchaperoned all-nighters. Batchelor parties. Gang bangs. Driscoll likes to find a woman’s boundary, no matter where it is, and push her past it. Make her do the one thing she’d swore she’d never do.
Mouse tells Eddie how Sunshine lived with a burning building in her heart. That all she looked for was a dangling ladder to grab on to, pull her to safety from the fire of herself. And maybe that’s all Curly was. The best ladder she could find. And when she’d tried to grab it, Driscoll went berserk. Only nobody knew just how berserk he’d gone. Until the dogs found her.
She ends it with, “So what do we do?”
“We don’t do anything.”
“We can’t just do nothing, can we?”
“Sure we can. People get away with murder all the time,” he said. “Life goes on.”
“Not Sunshine’s.”
“So what, you want to go talk to Sheriff Vernon? You can find him at the Boom-Boom Saturday nights. You know what he is, Mouse.”
“I know exactly what he is,” she says in a swallowed voice. She will not look at him.
Eddie says, “You know the score. The people who run things can kill whoever the fuck they want. Whether it’s the government or the gangs, it’s the same fucking thing. As above, so below.”
“You talk about how you’ll say anything onstage. But you won’t say anything about this.”
“Maybe I don’t want to live, but I don’t want to die in the desert either.”
Mouse starts crying. Weeping like it’s her own soul that’s been killed. Eddie wants to hold her but it feels so wrong, so fake. Here he is again. A big talker onstage, a total fucking coward the whole rest of his life. He chickens out again. He goes out to the couch and lies down. He can hear her crying, late into the night. Eddie closes his eyes and pretends to sleep, even though there is no one watching. A lie told for no one but the liar himself.
So what Mouse does for Sunshine, she does alone. And Eddie will never know what it is that she does. How hard she pushes. Exactly what kind of hero she is.
He only knows how it ends. Because he is the one who finds her. After hours, walking in the little alley for the dumpsters behind the Sunset Ridge. This little crumpled shape in neon light and shadow.
Blue neon light makes the blood look black. It spreads like an evil halo around her head. She is on the ground next to the Stepchild’s dumpsters. Her head is cracked open. Her neck is wrong. It is all wrong. Her eyeballs are too wide, made black with heavy, airless blood.
Those chewed fingernails. The fingers gone slack.
He leans against the wall. He slides down. He knocks over a box of bottles. Crows take off. Rats scramble. Coyotes sing their scared little songs in the dark.
Mouse does nothing. She is dead.
The Boom-Boom Room is empty. The janitor stands on the stage, mopping. Eddie walks into Driscoll’s office. There is a shotgun in the corner. There is a dirty G-string on the floor. The desk is a mess, a junkyard sprawl of papers, spit cups, bent paper clips, piles of cash, coffee cups, a water bottle with duct tape wrapped around it—Driscoll uses them for spit cups. The desk doesn’t have a bare inch on it . . . except for one big patch to the right on the phone.
Where the Maglite sits. The big metal flashlight Driscoll uses on the knees of customers who touch the girls without paying first.
Eddie can see Mouse’s image superimposed over everyplace he looks. Like her body is painted on the backs of his eyes.
Eddie picks up the shotgun. He racks it like he’s seen in action movies. The sound makes his balls hum. This feeling washing over him.
“Well, look at what the dogs dragged in.”
Eddie turns to Driscoll in the doorway. His hands are red and raw, like he’d scrubbed them in hot water. He is shirtless. Muscles and ink. A faded blue thunderbolt on his arm.
Eddie raises the shotgun.
“Hey there, funnyman,” Driscoll says. “Hey there, smartmouth. How you fixed? Feelin’ okay?”
Eddie doesn’t realize he was moving backwards until his ass bumps the wall.
“Got yourself a scattergun,” Driscoll said. “It’s loaded. You don’t know much about firearms, am I right? Naw, all you got is your smart mouth, isn’t that so?”
Driscoll walks across the room. He takes the barrel of the shotgun and lifts it up. He lifts it up so the barrel sits under his chin.
Every weak man tells himself that there is a monster inside him. The weakest men feel it the deepest. That all it would take is the right murdered woman to let the killer inside him run free.
It is not so.
Eddie lets go of the shotgun. Driscoll tosses it back into the corner.
“Go on out of here,” Driscoll says. “Go get yourself drunk. Morning will come same as it always does.”
Eddie leaves. He walks past the flashing red and blue lights of the cop cars. He walks to his room. He falls down onto the bed. Something close to him smells like her. His pillow. He throws it to the floor.
He lays there for a long time. After a while he gets up and finds the bottle.
Eddie gets drunk.
Eddie gets drunk and falls down. Eddie gets drunk and passes out in the desert, waking up blistered and swollen, one big burn. Eddie drinks until he drowns but he still sees her blood shining black in the neon night. Sees his worthless face reflected.
Sheriff Vernon sits across from Eddie in the back of the Stepchild.
“So you’re that stand-up comedian. I hear you’re a funny feller.”
“Yeah, you could have come by and caught my show, but I don’t work the VIP section of the Boom-Boom Room.”
The sheriff’s face twitches—the script in his head getting tossed out.
“I don’t need any lip, son.”
“And I don’t need any sweet talk before you slip it in. You want to know what I know? Here’s what I know. Driscoll Pritchett killed Mouse. And Sunshine too. I’ve seen him kick the shit out of a guy, and of course he whores out the girls at the Boom-Boom Room. But you know that already. But maybe you don’t know that he killed Mouse. Mouse he killed because she stood up to him. Nobody else ever does.”
Vernon leans back. Taking a far view of Eddie.
“That’s what you know?”
“I know something else too.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not going to do anything about it.”
“Now, hold on a second, there.”
“Pritchett’s too valuable. The whole family pays you off. Don’t blame you. You’re a victim of the system, isn’t that right? Who knows what would happen to you if you started to give a shit about the whoring or the crank. Or the child porn they sell out of Randy’s.”
“You know what, you’re not so funny. I heard you were real funny.”
“Yeah? And I heard you were a cop. And guess what? That’s exactly what you are. Have fun at your next payoff.”
Eddie buys pills from the smoke shop. Double fistfuls of downers and pain pills. No margin for error this time. He knows he won’t see Mouse again. But he’ll be with her just the same. He sets himself a table. He puts on a CD Mouse left at his place. Sugary pop music, the kind he hates. Only now he can hear the pain at the heart of it. Why couldn’t he hear it before? He takes a drink. He takes his first fistful of pills.
He lets them drop back to the table. These little pitter-pats. They should sound like cannons.
He can’t do this. Not yet.
There are two people who needed to pay for Mouse.
Eddie is just one of them.
The house is packed. Eddie has told Terry a producer is coming to check him out—he needs a crowd. Terry put out the word on two-for-one Wild Turkey shots.
Sheriff Vernon and two of his boys post up in the back of the Stepchild. Eddie has also told Terry a little extra security would add to the Hollywood vibe.
Terry has grabbed the center-front table for him and Driscoll. Just like Eddie knew he would.
See Eddie in his best suit. Scared like a first-time open miker. Scared as he’s ever been. Onstage next to the mic is a stool with five Jäger shots on it. Call it a last request.
See Eddie take the stage. Watch him take shot number one. Watch him go to work. Call it the comedy of violence. He talks about how we’re not having babies anymore. How the whole world is a greased-up sex god with no genitals. Sex isn’t for fucking anymore. Sex is a goddamn jingle these days. We dress little kids up like hookers and let them shake their little moneymakers at the cameras. We have women in bikinis selling fucking hamburgers . . .
Eddie makes that disgusting crunching sound when someone bites into an advertising cheeseburger. That sound the moneymen think you want to hear. The one like she’s eating it bones and all. Eddie puts the mic up to his lips so it catches every crunch and squirt. The crowd goes uuuuuugh.
Eddie talks about how the moment birth control becomes available, the birth rate drops. Wealthy White Americans, their population is shrinking. The Hitler huggers think this is a bad thing. The planet disagrees. That Bible these suckers love says take the earth and subdue it. Take the earth. And subdue it. I’d say it’s subdued, wouldn’t you? I’d say the planet is crying uncle loud as it can. We are the champions, my friends. We reached the top of the shit pile. We built all the buildings, razed all the forests, ate all the animals that taste good. And then we took all the animals who don’t taste good and dressed them up in stupid outfits and took pictures of them. Because nothing can escape our grasp. Maybe we won’t slaughter you and eat you, little buddy, but damned if we’re gonna let you feel good about yourself. You crawled out of the muck, made it through 30 million years of extinctions and evolutions—and now we’re gonna dress you in a little sailor suit just for laughs. You even wonder if an animal has dignity, dress up a cat like a little princess. You can watch the dignity leak out of them. Cats feel shame.
Why don’t you?
Why don’t you?
Why do we do it? Why do we have to pull everything down to our level? Because people are animals that hold on to our pain. Everybody’s got pain, because basically existence sucks. Everybody’s got pain they’ve got to deal with, and you’ve got to find someplace to put it all. Most people take their pain and shove it onto someone weaker than themselves. Moms slapping their kids, bosses forcing their secretaries to tongue their balls, jocks yanking the underwear up the crack of some wuss kid’s ass. People pushing pain around, that’s 80% of what’s wrong with people. But some of us, we take our pain and we cut new holes in ourselves and we jam the pain inside. Saviors of the goddamn race.
“This,” Eddie says as he lifts the next shot, “is as noble as I fucking get.”
He takes the shot. That little convulsion inside him, as he convinces his body to drink the thing it knows is poison.
Eddie has the crowd. He’s killing. It’s time. Fear stampedes out of the corral for a moment. He almost doesn’t push ahead, almost loses his timing. He looks down at Driscoll. Those killer eyes, that smug smile that says I’ve seen you at your weakest.
And I’ve seen you too, Driscoll.
Eddie tells them about weak men and their dead-woman fantasies. How they’re just waiting for the sacrifice that will turn them into a man. How we see it all the time in the movies. In these stories, dead women are like spinach for Popeye. A man watches these movies, sees how tough the guys are. And knows he’s got a tough guy in him too. If only . . . honey, why don’t you take a walk down that dark alley sometime? Maybe if that street gang got ahold of you, I’d learn to feel like a man. And the worst part is, ladies, that if it happened to you—your man still wouldn’t do shit. Because that isn’t really how you build a killer.
Eddie gets to the edge of the stage. Face to face with Driscoll.
“You want to turn a man into a killer, you don’t touch his woman. You touch him. Isn’t that right, sir?”
The crowd laughed. They whooped. Driscoll keeps his poker face. He stares at Eddie with killer’s eyes. Fear chemicals burning in Eddie’s brain. He does not think. He lets the monkey do the talking.
“Like take this thick-neck motherfucker right here. All shaved down and hard and veiny. Eating your protein, aren’t you? What’s going on, man, that made you dedicate your life to looking as much as possible like a big veiny dick?”
Driscoll’s eyes play these little movies of Eddie getting ripped apart by bare hands. Eddie won’t let himself watch them. He won’t let himself stop.
“You’re a big tough guy,” Eddie says. “Know why people get like that? Usually ’cause someone beat the shit out of them as a kid. But to get real tough and crazy, like Mr. Penis here? I’m thinking someone at the family reunion likes to touch butthole.”
The crowd ooooooohs. Driscoll grips his bottle of beer.
“All these muscles. That mean, mean mug. We’re supposed to see a great big scary guy. I see a little kid with an asshole blown out like an old gym sock.”
Sheriff Vernon stops leaning against the back wall. Some sort of instinct kicking in way too late.
Eddie asks Driscoll, “How’s your gag reflex? A little broken down, is it? I bet you could take three feet of garden hose. Come on, tough, guy. Tell the truth: When you fart it sounds like a cough, doesn’t it?”
Eddie makes the noise. This soft little wheeze. The crowd goes wild.
“A weak man sees a guy like this and thinks, maybe that could be me someday. He doesn’t see that it already is.”
He tells Driscoll, “It’s not about the killer inside of me. It’s about the punk inside of you.”
Driscoll grips the table. He turns purple. He looks like a boil ready for the lance. And the monkey has the lance. Eddie gets down. Speaks quiet into the mic.
“I bet there’s a sound you hear that just scares the shit out of you. Am I right? Keys jingling down the hall. A beer bottle opening up. Memories of Daddy’s getting liquored up, about to take little Driscoll to the dance. Maybe it’s not a sight. Maybe it’s a smell. One whiff of baby oil and big bad Driscoll’s just a weak little boy in the shadows hoping and praying that Uncle Roger don’t come down the hall. Everybody else sees a thug, a monster, but not me. You’re a little kid with big muscles and piss in his pants. You’re a goddamn joke.”
Driscoll pulls out his pistol and shoots Eddie twice in the chest.
Gunshots have great timing. Action movies have you conditioned to think a bullet will blast you across the room. But that isn’t how it goes. At first you feel nothing but impact, just a ghost punch to the chest. And your brain has just enough time to think, Jeez, I thought that would hurt more—and that’s the moment the pain chooses to come crashing down onto you.
These are the kinds of thoughts you don’t think you’ll have when you’re shot. But getting shot is just like everything else in life: There’s always something strangely familiar, something secretly comforting to it, like everything in the world is exactly how it’s supposed to be.
Eddie drops to his knees. Making himself stay up just a little longer. Eddie feels his chest. His fingers slip into the bullet hole. Blood comes out fast. He wants it to come out faster. If he lives, it’s only attempted murder. Driscoll might see the light of day again. Eddie can’t have that. He makes himself stay up just a little longer. Just long enough to see it happen.
The crowd turns into a mosh pit. Shoving and screaming and running into each other. Driscoll turns his gun around. The cops with their own guns raised. Everybody screaming. Driscoll screams something. The cops opened fire. Driscoll’s skull spits out his brains like it doesn’t like the taste of them.
Even better.
One half of what he owed Mouse, paid up.
The other half is coming fast. The big fade-out starting at the edges of his eyes.
Eddie feels like he’s been dunked in a bucket of cold water. He falls onto his back. He opens his eyes.
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Eddie’s eyes are filled with a bright and shining light. It fills up his vision.
A tunnel of light.
A tunnel of light.
Eddie’s been wrong. Wrong about everything. And he only learns it at the end. Falling face-first into the tunnel of light, falling but rising too, ready to dissolve himself in the light, in God’s love. Of all the fucking things, God’s love.
Then Eddie turns his head a little. The tunnel of light doesn’t move with him. He sees red brick and wires. Eddie is still on the stage. He’s staring up into one of the too-bright stage lights. No tunnel of light. No God’s love. Just a light above the stage.
Perfect.
Eddie opens his mouth. His grin is red and wet. The noise comes out of him in pink bubbles.
Eddie dies laughing. 
Jordan Harper is the author of She Rides Shotgun, The Last King of California, Everybody Knows, and A Violent Masterpiece. He is the winner of an Edgar Award and an Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.
Illustration: Sam Hadley
