Outside Of Los Angeles

“Outside Of Los Angeles”

a story of deeds and thoughts remembered

by Paul Zies

Problem with running a bar in this town is that every so often you gotta deal with a body. No cops. No friends. Just you. Every time you start your car make sure every taillight, headlight, and turn signal is working before you pull away from the curb. Don’t speed. Don’t play the radio too loud. Stay off the fucking phone.

Start going camping. Get used to the route. Foothill Freeway, Angeles Crest, Pear Blossom Highway, whatever…make sure it’s out there. One hundred miles outside of Los Angeles, minimum. Get a shovel. No fucking wooden handles, they break. Spend the extra ten bucks on the fiberglass handle. Each time you go camping you dig a hole six feet long by three feet wide by six feet deep. Every time. Trust me, you try to get rid of something in the middle of the night, brother, you ain’t gonna want to be digging no fucking hole at crunch time. Cover the hole with a sheet of plywood and it’s there forever just waiting for when you need it.

You get one pound of weed, no more, no less. You sell that pound of weed off one eighth at a time. Sixty bucks an eighth, no more, no less. I don’t care if Asshole wants to buy a quarter ounce, it’s still going to be $120. I don’t care if Asshole wants to buy a quarter pound, it’s still going to be $1920. And I don’t care if Asshole wants to buy a pound, it’s still going to be $7680, no more, no less. You want to know why? Because ‘fuck you’, that’s why. Feel me? Good.

The second she told me the address was in Gardena I should have passed on the gig. It’s tough to say ‘no’ to a seasoned hooker though. She switched outfits right in front of me making sure to put her hand on my shoulder for support as she took off her panties. Yeah, she was a pro. The tits came out next, she could have told me we were gonna rob a bank then shoot the Pope and I would have been cool with it.

Drive ten maybe fifteen miles outside of Los Angeles and you’ll come across The City Of Vernon. There is a slaughterhouse out there for Farmer John Sausages. You can pick up a whole pig for cheap. Hang it up from a chain when you get home and go to work on it. Punch it in the ribs til you feel the bones snap. Stab it this way and that way and really fucking slash at it, only way you are gonna get some practice in before you put in work on the real deal.

Asshole over there with the sweatpants, that’s Ricky-Rick. Check out his right thigh- that’s a Smith & Wesson model 629 six-round .44 mag. Asshole doesn’t fuck around. Sure would be a bitch to get it out of his pocket in a hurry but my money says he’d probably just fire it right through the pants. Ricky-Rick has sold blow to everybody from Elvis to Scott Weiland. Asshole is old school but has no class. See that piece of shit 328i outside? Thing looks just like Ricky-Rick: black, dirty as fuck, and missing a few parts. His blow is shit, you’d be better off huffing paint.

My last piece was a chiropractor out in Woodland Hills. She had a thing running with an injury attorney that had set up a deal with his pharmacist neighbor in Panorama City. The show was pretty simple: minor car accident leads to a call to the lawyer, lawyer sends you to the chiropractor for three months to build up fees, chiropractor kicks you down to the pharmacist for drugs and more fees, pharmacist buys back the drugs for cheap and sells them again. Everybody wins until somebody gets greedy. Chiropractor wanted a bigger cut. She said she was putting in more physical labor than the other two with all of that pulling and twisting hocus-pocus. Greedy and pretty can work out a deal in trade ‘cause it’s still business. But if you’re greedy and ugly you’re gonna end up with a beating, at least that’s what the pharmacist agreed on. The fucking lawyer called me on the way to the tune-up and threw in an extra $10,000 to make it a permanent fix. Guy is a monster but he can win almost any case. I’ll get you his number. You never know.

Don’t ever let anybody know that you have a secret safe. The second they find out they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out how to rip you off. Asshole Hanlon, the big blonde pimp with the glass eye, he knew the GM at Altano’s and talked him into holding on to a large sum of cash in his secret floor safe he had installed inside the restaurant. Nobody but the GM and Hanlon knew about it- not even the owners. About a year after the GM started working there he put it in. Rented a jackhammer from Home Depot, dropped rebar and concrete in the ground and started filling it up. Should have kept his mouth shut but he liked banging hard-to-get-tail, Asshole Hanlon was his connection. Hanlon came in twice a month and ordered the calamari- legs only- and a Peroni. They had a corner booth back by the kitchen, he’d sit there flinging those fried spiders into his mouth one after the other and then guzzle the beer. When he was done he’d move the seat cushion out of the way and access the floor safe. In and out in twenty minutes. Twice a month for six years. Asshole never once paid for the squid or the suds. So he suddenly stops coming in. A month goes by, two months, then three- no word. Boom, the GM gets woken up with a phone call from the cops. You and I both know that if your phone rings after two a.m. there ain’t going to be good news dancing into your ear. Cops tell him that a crew of smalltime Assholes must have broken in. GM goes down to check it out and do a walk-thru with ‘em and finds both cash registers busted open but he ain’t worried ‘cause they were empty anyway. All the hard booze was there, most of the beer was there except for…wait for it…the fucking Peroni’s are all gone. The GM got the cops out of there and went right to the corner booth by the kitchen; nothing out of place. Maybe he was wrong about Hanlon? He moved the seat cushion and started crying. Empty Peroni bottle sitting in the secret safe…that’s it. All of it gone. Years of money scraped off the top of the weekly receipts. A couple kilos of blow. A couple kilos of China White, which you can’t get anywhere outside of downtown Los Angeles anymore. A flash drive with a video of the GM getting pegged by Debi Diamond. And about two pounds of junk gold chains and bracelets taken from the lost and found.

Anybody wearing one of these asks you to do something, you’d better do it. No questions, just do it. They call you on the phone, you pick up. Three in the morning or three in the afternoon, doesn’t matter. Dick in your hand, dick in your girl, or dead asleep you better jump if they tell you to. Never make them wait. These people are not your friends. They got no problem letting you out in the middle of the 101 freeway going 85. You’re deep in this shit now so stepping away is not an option. Don’t fuck up and you’ll do just fine.

If anything ever goes down, I’m talking big shit, do not touch a phone. You handle whatever needs to be said in person. Anybody from their side needs to get a hold of you they will pay you a visit. Texts, email, social media, line drawings…doesn’t matter, stay quiet.

The old guy rented a truck and had his asshole son-in-law meet him at the storage unit in Sun Valley before eight. Old guy must have been pushing seventy-five, asshole son-in-law was maybe forty-five. Only thing these two had in common was peeing while standing up.

Bakersfield 4:30 a.m., when there is only one watering hole for both the monsters and the beasts you can expect that this is the place where things will go wrong. 99 miles outside of Los Angeles you can get dead real quick. You can be forgotten even quicker.

Once Little Phil found out how easy it was to get his dick tugged on outside of Los Angeles he took every gig that sent him to points north, south, or east. His first run up to Kern County he got sidelined in Frazier Park, the Grapevine gets risky after November…too much snow. Can you fucking believe that? CHP shut it down and the assholes who didn’t get off the freeway stayed on the freeway for ten hours. Little Phil jumped off because he was scared, had nothing to do with being smart. He saw the cop lights ahead and figured they were looking for him and his Igloo rolling cooler full of weed, meth, and Mexican cigarettes.

There’s a Flying J’s truck stop and a Jack In The Box off of Frazier Mountain Road within a hundred yards of the freeway, after that it’s just woods, darkness, and snow. Both places were packed, Little Phil didn’t leave his Silverado. Too scared to lose what was in the cooler or too scared to meet up with the wrong dude in the restrooms. When your name is ‘Little’-anything I guess you’re scared a lot.

First hour he kept the radio playing. Second hour he turned it off so the battery wouldn’t die. Third hour it got cold. Fourth hour he got hungry. Fifth hour was too much for him so he sucked it up and ran inside. Just like he thought there were lots of tough guys but the threat was taken off by the number of holiday traveling families that were stranded as well. He was safe. Little Phil moved quick, he had close to twenty-five thousand worth of shit in his truck. He was intercepted by a pro on his way out the door. Big and boxy, Carhartt jacket, Dickies work pants, and UGG boots- for comfort. Probably a dyke but sexual preference got nothing to do with pulling on a dick for cash or trade. Started with the usual ‘let me sit in your truck with you, it’s freezing out here and my ride took off’ but as soon as she got in the Silverado with him she opened up the Carhartt and both tits spilled out into her lap. Little Phil pulled out his own cash, he knew better than to fuck with cargo that wasn’t his. She didn’t haggle, the truck was clean and so was Little Phil. She figured the longer she made it last the longer she could stay in the truck so she milked it- literally.

Everybody is crooked. Everybody.

Minority? Who the fuck are you kidding? We are the minority in this line of work. Shit is brutal out there and we are the ones getting shoved out. Keep your eyes on your money and plan on being out of this game in ten years, tops. I don’t get it so bad but for younger guys like you out on the street hauling the action around, you get reminded on a daily basis that at least three entire races of people hate you because you’re white. Guerro, honky, white boy, cracker…I’ve heard it all and it’s never said with a smile. As soon as someone decides to marginalize your identity based on your race, you can be damn sure they do not respect you at all. When they lose that mutual respect for you as a peer and look upon you as ‘less than’- that’s when you better pay attention because it gets real easy to kill something you have absolutely no respect for.

What’s an answer really gonna get you? People do shit, period. Does it really matter why? You can’t deal with reasons, you can only deal with the results of their decisions. Reasons are unknown and infinite.’I did it ‘cause I was mad, I did it ‘cause I didn’t care, I was jealous, I thought I hated you, I was fucked up, I don’t know why I did it’. Doesn’t matter. Never ask ‘why’ because all you’re gonna get is bullshit. You will never get the truth because it doesn’t exist. It’s all relative. Somebody comes up short on their weekly, you don’t ask why they’re short, you deal with them being short. They owe you $500 and they only pay you $400 you don’t ask where the $100 is, you take $100 out of them some how. That lets them know that you don’t care about the reason why it ain’t there ‘cause you’re gonna fucking get it anyway.

If you’ve been operating in this town for ten years then it’s safe to assume you’re dirty.

In this line of work if you ain’t fucking at least one person over each day then you ain’t doing your fucking job.

Everybody ends up taking a beating. Stock market, divorce, or just getting old- we all gonna get hurt.

This whole thing is temporary. You don’t own shit, it’s all a long-term rental. People, dogs, cars, and coupons all come and go. Nothing you can do about it so don’t fight it.

Talk shit, get hit- one of the basic tenets of this town. Never ceases to amaze me when folks find out the hard way that running their mouth comes with swift and devastating consequences. Other night this gal is pounding on the bar door about ten minutes after we closed. She’s going on about how her friend was assaulted in the street-not my problem- and how she needed ice- not my problem- and that she needed to call the police- now we got a problem. I sent Sully out with a bar towel full of ice to put on the girl’s head. He gets out there and finds out it wasn’t no girl pounding on the door, masculinity was not the strong suit of these poor unfortunates huddled around their friend on the ground. Boys Night Out ran into a  Guys Night Out and one of the Boys said something stupid to one of the Guys’ girlfriends and got punched in the face. The one who got hit was sobbing, sitting on the curb, and holding both hands over his face. You’d think he got hit by a bus the way he was carrying on. Sully gets him to let him take a look and couldn’t even tell which eye got hit. He gave him the ice and told them they were wasting their time calling the cops. They all watched Sully head back into the bar when one of them piped up ‘Aren’t you going to do anything about this?’ Sully just laughed and gave a shrug, ‘Yeah, I’m going home. Don’t talk shit and you won’t get hit’

Thinking it’s about time to hit the road and get outside of Los Angeles for a few days. Parker is just across the Colorado River in Arizona. Be there in four and a half hours if we leave right now. My brother Mike has a line on a rental right on the water. He runs a few direct mail companies and this realtor in Parker sends and receives orders that can’t go through California mail- there’s a way around everything. Place has a Walmart, a Safeway grocery store, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. All the comforts of home and an Indian Casino right on the water. A few days floating on the Colorado, watching bats take flight just after sundown, and letting the one hundred and ten degree heat suck the toxins right out of us will do us a world of good. There is no stress out there at all. Too hot for it. Yeah, we need to make it happen.

Hondo comes in one night saying he’s out. Normally I would’ve laughed it off and told him that I was out too but I could tell he was serious. The beard was gone for one thing and he was wearing his wedding ring. Yeah, the bitch had gotten to him. Sold him on the idea that a good honest job and a good honest living were honorable. Ain’t nothing honorable about eight bucks an hour- before taxes. I asked him what was he gonna do, go detail cars up in Ventura seven days a week? He gave me this song and dance about working for a freight company in Stockton and that it was solid- 401K and medical after six months. He was almost believing his own bullshit. I had him sit down at that stool right over there and put it to him like this, ‘Hondo, you like doing blow on Wednesdays and getting blown by black girls on Fridays. Ain’t a drug test out there that is gonna miss that and sooner or later your wife is gonna find out. You won’t be on that freight job long enough to get a pension and that ring won’t be on that finger after the second kid. Do yourself a favor and tell your old lady how it is and come back in tomorrow at nine ready to do some work. And for fuck’s sake grow that beard back, your nose really leaps off of your face without that mustache and your ears are fucking huge.’ The look of relief on Hondo’s face was incredible. Practically took my shoulder out of the socket shaking my hand so hard. Guys like us, we don’t do well outside of Los Angeles.

The worst drunk is a woman. I’d rather drag a grizzly bear outta here by the balls than deal with a pissed off lady-drunk. A dude gets out of line you can give him a look and he’ll get the message, try that on a gal with too many in her and see what happens. If that same dude still doesn’t get it you can walk up on him and tell him to get the fuck out, put your knee into his thigh, and even back-knuckle him in the nuts to get his attention- say your fucking prayers if you gotta single out a drunk woman at the bar. Nine times out of ten you can fishhook that same dude- if he still doesn’t shape up- and toss him right out into the alley; brother, I’d handle a live utility wire before even thinking about putting hands on a woman to get her out. If she’s with a guy you gotta take him aside and let him know that he’ll be getting it taken out of his ass if he doesn’t get her out of there. If she’s with a group of lady friends then you’re double-fucked. Expect a bottle to be thrown. Expect her to shatter her glass in your ice well . Expect her to go for your nuts and your eyes. But don’t expect her to leave quietly.

Two hundred and seventy-three miles outside of Los Angeles, that’s where they found Swami’s left hand. Caused a big stink because it was on an Indian reservation in a casino town just across the California state line in Arizona. A bum looking for beer cans  in the trash outside of a Walmart fished it out. Every bone was broken, some were crushed. ‘PANS’ was tattooed across the knuckles, ‘POTS’ was tattooed across his right hand- never found that one. It had been sawed off. Cops figured the right hand and the head got dumped somewhere in the desert or maybe in the Colorado River. Either way it didn’t matter, Swami was dead. No way it was done out there. One hundred and twenty degree heat, Swami would never head out that way willingly. Swami had a thing going with a dancer at Double’s in Irvine. He smoked one of those cigarettes soaked in PCP one night and took off one of her nipples with a pair of pliers. It’s my guess that pissed off Greek Steve. Makes sense, to me at least, with every bone crushed in his hands, Greek Steve was most likely sending a message out to all the LA hoods to keep their fucking hands off of the girls at Double’s. It’s tough to find big girls that are good looking and that will dance. You don’t ride dirty when you travel outside of LA, ain’t nobody out there to help you.

Time might get some assholes to forget but it doesn’t heal shit. It’s a manmade concept, you know, time. Can’t hold it, can’t store it, can’t feel it, and you can’t even see it. No, you fuck me over and I’m gonna hold on to that until I see you again.

Don’t get too old or too broke. Eggs, he was a little before your time, thought he could beat the meter and gave up on cigarettes, booze, and work. He bought a used electrician’s van and started livin’ out of it. Cut his teeth in Venice for about two months learning the ropes on where to park during the day, hanging out at the library, parking by the beach at night, and then having a shit’n’shower by the lifeguard towers. Two shitbirds roughed him up, typical for Venice, and took off a piece of his right ear. Eggs was only fifty, maybe fifty-five, he decided maybe Los Angeles was too risky for somebody trying to live forever. He called in all his favors, sold the mint Chevy El Camino he had in storage, and drove north out of Los Angeles. This was right before the earthquake in ‘93 so Oxnard,Ventura, and even Santa Boo Boo were still sleepy beach towns. Never heard from him while he was traveling. I would imagine Eggs sitting with the back doors open and looking out at the sun dipping into the Pacific. His bare feet covered with sand. Maybe a fucking bird sitting on a pole nearby. And him with that stupid smile on his face thinking he’d made it. I thought he might swing back through town after about three months on the road but no, he didn’t. All the sudden it had been six months. Then it was a year. Business picked up. Lots of blow moving through town. Lots of girls. Shit, I bought those two condos off of Sunset Plaza- things were really rolling. That’s when I got the call from the convalescent home out in Sylmar. Eggs had been in a hospital in Yucaipa and got booted to Sylmar when his insurance benefits ran out. First thing he said was needed a pack of smokes and a tall beer. I drove out there to see him. Eggs was in bad shape. I had to wheel him out back so he could smoke and provide cover while he drank. ‘I got a duffle bag by my bed. Blue one with a green stripe.’ He lit up another smoke before the first was even done. ‘When you leave tonight you take that with you.’ He downed the beer and got an attendant to wheel him back inside. I finished my smoke and found my way back to his room. He wasn’t anywhere to be found. I grabbed the duffle bag, wasn’t too heavy, slung it over my shoulder, and walked out to my car. I put the bag in the back seat and headed out. I must have driven about ten minutes and then I figured we were safe. ‘Nobody followed us. Can you unzip that thing yourself?’ Eggs popped right out of the bag. ‘Let me get another smoke. Do me one last solid and get me to the Amtrak in Simi Valley. Just put me on the train. I’ll get up to Grover Beach, I’ll be cool there, Chief.’ And that’s exactly what I did. He caught the Surfliner up to Grover Beach, just south of San Luis Obispo. Train lets you out about a hundred yards from the ocean. He must have weighed eighty pounds. Couldn’t have lasted more than a week in that condition. Bet Eggs went out looking at the ocean. His feet covered with sand. A fucking bird sitting on a pole nearby watching him die.

Cooking in volume is tough. Andres back there, he makes the best carne asada tacos in the world…at home. Tried to get him to replicate them here and it just didn’t work. Stay small, that’s the ticket. Try to get the job too big and some fucking tiny detail will find a way to fuck you. Don’t get greedy. A small job that succeeds is the  stepping stone to the next job.

You might get one fuck-up for free in Los Angeles, after that you’re on your own. Nobody wants to deal with a fucking amateur. Doesn’t matter who you know or how long you been running it on the street, you get the reputation as a fuck-up you’d better take your game outside of Los Angeles. Word travels a lot faster nowadays with the cellphones and social media. You shit on a deal in Pacoima and someone will hear about it in Redondo, guaranteed.

Penny stabbed a guy in the foot, right through his fucking shoe, for trying to steal his list of clean public restrooms. Asshole ended up losing a toe. That’s what you get for trying to fuck over Penny. He has been keeping that list for over fifteen years, updates it every month when he hits the rounds and makes his moves. I’ve only seen it a couple of times but his information is solid. He was short on an order once and bought himself forty-eight hours by giving me the location of two restrooms in Studio City and a park in West Hollywood. The park in WeHo even had a private shower suite with a steam bath option, I’m talking about a public restroom here. No graffiti, floors were spotless, and the toilet paper was even two-ply. The two spots in Studio City were even air conditioned.

I like to hear the way Jimmy talks about when he first moved  out here to Los Angeles. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a degenerate gambler that ain’t got a bank account or a permanent address but he sure can tell a story. The way he tells it there were strippers putting want ads in the paper for rocker boyfriends and nothing but good times went on from dusk till dawn. It was all blow, whiskey, and weed back then. The crank and H were only going down with the hardcore bikers, the torn down hookers, and the skin flick crowd in The Valley. AIDS wasn’t even on the radar then, everybody was fucking everybody, and they were doing it one after the other after the other. You didn’t even need money to take a girl out, all you had to do was set foot down on the Sunset Strip and within an hour you’d be in a club, then in a limo, then hitching a ride to Big Bear for a hot tub orgy, and then by 8 a.m. the next day you’d wake up on a deck off of Mulholland with a record contract. I don’t know if any of it actually happened for him. He shows me pictures sometimes and tries to tell me he’s this guy or that guy but none of them ever look like him at all. Shit, I don’t even know if his real name is Jimmy. Doesn’t fucking matter anyway, I like to hear him get lost in it for a moment.

That fucking nurse from Virginia. Dirty piss tests, phony pills, and pregnancy tests that were guaranteed to be positive- and that was just the beginning. She worked at a podiatrist’s office in Tarzana and started hooking us up with prescription pads on the regular. That fell to shit when the podiatrist was deported for running citizenship scams on wealthy pregnant Chinese tourists. Shelly…that was her name. She was getting fentanyl pills from Tijuana and selling them to the stunt guys in Burbank. That went south after two of’em overdosed. Shelly started coming in here a few times a week for Benevidez, the private investigator. She’d wear a wire and hit on some married guy until he gave up his number, Benevidez used her a lot. Shelly had great tits, phone numbers came pretty quick with those tits. She was nuts though, she’d get knocked up just to pull a scam with positive pregnancy tests and go get an abortion when the gig was over. She had a thing for piss too. I wouldn’t go calling her a dominatrix or nothing but she would make a buck or two taking a leak on a some of the teaching staff at the Valley Community College. You could also get her to take any drug out there so whoever you wanted to nail would test positive for weed, blow, crank, H, and even steroids. After Benevidez got popped for wiretapping and homemade grenades, Shelly ended up serving five months federal. Amazing that she can legally own one of those marijuana collectives after the conviction but she has three up in Oxnard.

Fat Matt’s got a place up in Cayucos now. Don’t see him much here anymore. Better watch your ass if he’s in town, probably means he’s looking for whoever sees him in their peripheral vision. That’s one bad dude, Fat Matt. He’s got Bud Winchell’s nose in a pickle jar filled with rubbing alcohol. Keeps it right by his gun safe. Bud was the guy to go to when limos were a thing, before the Armenians blew it. Now everyone gets around town with ride share. Bud Winchell sold limos, repaired limos, set prices for corporate limo accounts, and franchised limo services throughout Los Angeles. He got tickets to every game and front row seats to every show. Also moved a lot of weight for us. Girls too. Bud was good people until he wasn’t. Stupid shit always sinks the ship. Bud had too many girls, too many drugs, and too many enemies. Fat Matt picked up the note to reign him in. Used one of Bud’s own limos to ride down to Hermosa for the tune up. Bud was not happy for the visit, which is understandable, but he fucked up big time when he called Fat Matt a fat fuck. Nobody calls Fat Matt fat, it’s just not done. Fat Matt took a box cutter and sliced off Bud’s nose. That screwed up business for a minute or two but everybody got over it. Bud’s limos fell by the wayside, so did Bud. Fat Matt moved up to Cayucos. Weight still moves through us. Girls too.

Griffith Park is a great place for a hike. You can see the city from up there. Plenty of parking. They got the observatory. The zoo. Autry Museum with a bunch of cowboy and Native American exhibits. The Greek Theater is up there, I saw Johnny Cash up there once- I think. They got a public golf course up there. There’s a carousel for the kids. Travel Town with train rides. They have little ponies for the kids. You can even get free mulch on the back side by Forest Lawn Cemetery. Yeah, great place. The guy it’s named after sure is one of the original all time Assholes though. Griffith J Griffith, called himself a Colonel to make himself feel more important. Typical late 1800’s robber baron industrialist that used dirty money to pull dirtier deals. Bought up huge chunks of Los Angeles. Drank for a living and pulled a pension from oil. At some point he married a gal, at another point he shot her in the face in a second floor hotel room in Santa Monica. Bullet cost her an eye, she jumped out of the second story window and lived. Griffith only got two years in Folsom for it. Dirty money does that. After he got out nobody wanted to do business with him, at least not on the record. He shit out a bunch of money to the city to try and clear his name. Donated a bunch of land for the park. He was still an Asshole though. Died like one too, liver disease. Fucking drunk scumbag. Great park though.

I stay away from crowds on holiday weekends. No good comes from a monkey like me being stuck at a destination location. I hate drunks. Got no love for football fanatics. And I sure as shit don’t want to see another human being at any beach that I am willing to drive over an hour to get to. Thinking about taking the girls up to Morro Bay for a night. Stuff the idiot dog in the car and drive 220 miles north for a change of scenery. Folks behave in a more civilized manner up there in San Luis Obispo County. There is an In-N-Out Burger about every 20 miles or so just off the 101 freeway once you hit Thousand Oaks on your way out of Los Angeles. Last one is in Goleta just north of Santa Barbara, you’re on your own for road chow once you dogleg inland and go through farm country to about Santa Maria. There’s The Madonna Inn in SLO, depending on the season you can get one hell of a strawberry cake. Head up The Grade and there’s a real nice In-N-Out in Atascadero just off the San Anselmo exit. There’s a gun shop across the street and it’s only another twenty miles to Morro Bay from there. Lakota Pete has a tattoo shop about a mile south of Morro Road, Atascadoo Tattoo. He put a couple of names on me over the years. He got a tattoo of Chief Crazy Horse in the middle of his chest when he was in the Marine Corps, he has one of Sitting Bull on his right arm. Pete deployed to Kuwait in the first Gulf War. The fucking crazy thing is that he was called up by the Governor in ’92 during the LA Riots after the Rodney King verdict. He was one of 1,100 Marines that drove right up the 5 freeway in armored vehicles from Camp Pendleton. He was on a Sav-On Pharmacy rooftop staring through a rifle scope in the City Of Compton for a few days. Lakota Pete is good muscle to have in your phone contacts. Six foot four, two hundred and fifty pounds of trained killer. Damn fine job with a tattoo machine as well. If any of my girls ever think about getting any work I will definitely drive up to see Lakota Pete. Hopefully it’s during strawberry season.

A coyote was standing at the corner of Franklin and Kingsley just watching traffic this morning. I was leaving Jumbo’s after picking up rent and saw the coyote taking it all in. Made sense, Griffith Park is only two blocks north and it was trash day, all the cans were lining the street and overflowing with free lunch. Kind of bigger than the average Los Angeles coyote. This guy looked like he was a solid fifty pounds. Most of the time they’re all skin and bones and they look miserable. This guy was a real badass, didn’t look like he had a care in the world. A couple Assholes hit the horn as they passed him by to try and spook him but he didn’t budge. You could tell he was just thinking ‘Fuck you, this is my turf. I do what I want when I want.” Maybe my next tattoo will be a coyote? I’ll talk to Kennedy next week when I get back to Jumbo’s, I like her tattoos so I’ll find out who her artist is. Kennedy has a pretty big chest piece of a busted skull between her tits with octopus tentacles spilling out every which way circling her nipples and going over her shoulders. Whoever did that piece did one hell of a job. Jumbo’s used to be one of my favorite pickup spots, I was making time with one of the dancers. Never spent the night at her place, she had a rule that I had to be out be two a.m. That was twenty years ago. Guy at the zoo told me that a coyote’s lifespan in the wild is about eight years, in captivity they might make it to sixteen. Yeah, I’ll get that coyote tattooed on my chest and let that badass live forever.

Oldest couple I ever kicked out of the bathroom for screwing was in their sixties. I’ve never understood the compulsion to duck into the shitter to make sweet sweet love to that special gal. Get a room for fuck’s sake. Maybe head up to the roof and do it under the stars or go down the street a hundred yards and fuck in the tall hedge by the muffler shop. If I see a big girl giggling on her way into the bathroom I keep my eye on any dude following her ‘cause a big girl will rip a sink right off a wall in under a minute. I had one guy break an ankle when his foot went in the toilet and his body went the other way. I’ve lost stall doors to vigorous blowjobs. Can’t even tell you how many toilet seats have been pulled right off the bowl from some gal getting it from behind. Guess I’m a hopeless romantic.

Ned Temple came to me one day with a business proposition. He wanted 75 large to rent out a studio apartment at the top of La Brea right against the hill that had a jetliner view of east LA, downtown, Baldwin Hills, Palos Verdes, LAX, and the Pacific Ocean. He tried to convince me that businessmen would pay $700 a month to have access to it in case they needed to take a dump and have a shower while they were out and about. Ned couldn’t manage to figure out how to clean his own clothes so how was he gonna manage 75K and a studio apartment in the hills? No, I passed. Heard he hit up the rest of the alternative funding houses in the city for a solid month before going in with Ernesto Chelan. White dudes don’t borrow from cartel money, that’s a well known rule in LA. Not a guideline nor a suggestion- it’s a fucking rule. Ned being Ned fucked things up on the first day by renting out a suite at The Mark Twain on Wilcox. Only thing The Mark Twain had a view of was tranny hookers sucking dick in the parking lot of a body shop on an even shittier section of Wilcox in Hollywood. Chelan wanted his paper back, Ned didn’t return his calls, and in less than forty-eight hours after the deal was set Ned ended up in pieces along the El Monte freeway. Asshole Stevenson at the highway patrol said he was chained to the back of a truck and dragged from downtown til he came apart near El Monte. Cartel money does that. Brown don’t fuck around.

Stan’s fatal mistake was leaving Hawaii. I’m sure if he stayed and worked for his old man at his Waikiki t-shirt shop he probably would have ended up on the wrong end of a gun or a knife some day. The islands have a big fucking meth epidemic and an equally alarming AIDS transmission rate that nobody mentions in any of the brochures. Stan wasn’t bright, not at all, so there is no doubt he would have ended up getting killed over there too, but I guarantee that it would have been a less brutal death than what he got over here on the mainland. His folks migrated to Oahu from Korea in the 70′s. They had Stan late in life, they were in their mid-fifties when he came along in ‘93. He had an older brother that didn’t make it beyond nineteen. He was beaten to death in prison. Stan tried to prove himself as being some kind of badass but a 4′11″ Korean kid ain’t shit to a 250 pound born-and-raised Polynesian local. His ticket to the mainland was paid for in exchange for him swallowing twenty-eight condoms filled with ice- Hawaiian crank- and delivering them to Ernie Alvarez in Torrance. He kicked around Long Beach for a while and got tossed in jail for stupid shit: pissing in public, soliciting hookers, and selling single cigarettes. He started working as a food delivery driver at Raji’s down the street, that’s when I first seen him in here. Thought he was twelve, had to look at his ID a couple times before I got comfortable letting him get served in here. Bad drunk, every time he got a few in him he would go on and on about how he was the best marijuana grower in the state. Swore up and down that he started half the grow operations in Hawaii and Korea. ‘They all call me Dr. Greenthumb’. Imagine that, a highly sought after weed grower rolling in cash working as a delivery driver for a one-star Indian cuisine shit-hole in Hollywood. He started selling liquid THC to the dishwashers, one of them ended up having gallbladder issues. I had him 86′d after that. He showed up a week later with what he called an ‘apology gift’; seven pounds of crack cocaine. Asshole walked right in with it in his hands. I had Shep toss him out on his ass. Came back two weeks later with pictures on his cellphone of young girls he was pimping. I had Shep break his phone and toss him out on his ass again. I could tell he wasn’t going to get the message so I told Shep to notch his ears if he ever saw him again. Sure enough, a week later he came back again. Snuck in through the kitchen entrance. Shep dragged him out to the dumpsters and sliced the top edge of each ear off with a straight razor. That kept him off of the property. Andres, one of the dishwashers, started taking him down to Tijuana when he would go to visit his family each weekend. Stan was having sex with underaged hookers all weekend and uploading videos of the action online in pay-per-view pedophile websites. Wouldn’t you fucking know it, one of the underage girls was somehow-someway related to Ernie Alvarez in Torrance- the guy who brought Stan over from Hawaii. Ernie reached out to La Lucha with cash and they delivered Stan to his warehouse in under twenty-four hours. Ernie hired a video crew, put up a professional lighting package, and brought in five two-strikers from an affiliated gang in Folsom that despised child molesters. Ernie had the whole thing filmed, every minute of it. They broke out Stan’s teeth with a piece of rebar. They clipped all ten fingers off with a pair of Fiskars. They took turns raping Stan, all five of them went at least twice. Finally they took a sixty inch pinch point pry bar and hammered it up his ass until it came out of his chest.

Ten out of ten times a cockroach gets stepped on in this town, guaranteed. Those are some shitty odds- if you’re a cockroach. It’s about respect out here. People don’t respect you then they are definitely gonna shit on you every chance they get. You can’t talk yourself into some respect, you gotta earn it. You tell some dick that you’re gonna break his hand if a payment is late then you better break his fucking hand one second after it’s past due. Some dick makes you go to him then you put some of his blood on the floor when you leave. Any shitbird can be a badass, what you want to be is an absolute nightmare. Assholes love trying to test themselves on a badass, nobody in their right mind wants to get near a nightmare. Be fair, be consistent, but never show mercy. Our business is cut and dry, we run this shit. Nobody tells you what’s what, that’s your gig. You are the fucking boot coming down on the cockroaches on the street. The second you forget that then watch out, someone’s about to step on you.

Anybody asks you for money to produce a film, brother, save yourself some grief-  take them out back behind the dumpster and kick their teeth in. I rode that fuck-bus through Shit Town once, won’t ever do it again. I’ve known degenerate gamblers with more integrity than this breed of shitbird. Working in alternative finance has its pitfalls. Odds are that you’re gonna have to break a sweat more often than not collecting your weekly, that’s why the juice on the paper going out is higher than at your local credit union. These film guys don’t have the same understanding about how out-of-market paper works as your regular clientele does. The gamblers, restauranteurs, pimps, masseuses, and strip club managers all understand that being late is a costly misunderstanding that only happens once. Not the film shitbirds. They think that since they are making a movie that I’m gonna be starstruck and wag my tail like a mutt staring at a bone. Their mistake is thinking that Los Angeles lives and breathes because of the shitty film they’re trying to triple their money on. LA was a slaughterhouse long before it was a movie town. The Spaniards wiped out the indigenous population as they set up Jesus on the west coast. White America ran like hell at the Pacific and stomped the guts out of anyone in their way. Military and industry were king out here until they discovered oil. Yeah, this whole fucking town was an oil field, oil derricks pumping up and down as far as the eye could see. All that money from war, the railroad, shipping, oil, booze, drugs, whores, and murder has been regulated in the alternative market for a few hundred years before that shitbird took out paper with me. I should have known he was gonna be a hassle when he wanted me to read the script and meet the actors- all I care about is the weekly juice. I’m a business man, fame is for the weak and desperate. He had this young girl, a production assistant, come by with half of the first due. Shep broke her nose. Most people look down on hitting a woman. It serves a purpose in this industry. It sends a very clear message that fucking around is not accepted. But not to that shitbird. He ran. I put three guys on the trail. Took about a month to locate him in Ojai. They sat on him for ten days. Pulled two toenails off with a pair of pliers and he gave up his ATM pin. It took a frozen Coke bottle being jammed up his ass before he signed over his car. Shep found the little production assistant out in Burbank and drove her up to Ojai so she could break the shitbird’s nose- sort of Shep’s way of making things right with the girl. Shep and the girl went out for a little fine dining at The Ranch House while the three hitters went all out on the shitbird. They burned his balls with cigarettes and butane lighters until he cashed out his IRA’s online. They finally popped a few Cialis, bent him over the ottoman, and pounded away on him for three hours before he gave up where he had jewelry and cash stashed in a breaker switch box in a townhouse in Woodland Hills. When it was all said and done they had squeezed everything out of this shitbird. There was nothing left. He was ruined financially, physically, and mentally. I got my paper back, I got my juice, and I made sure that the word on the street was that you don’t fuck with me.

Big Ron came to us about three years ago. He’d been in the game for a while. He knew Hollywood, Orange County, and The Valley better than anyone. I ran into him the first time about twenty-five years ago when he was a teenager in the punk scene. He was stealing small-time shit so he could go to shows with his friends, fuck chicks, and shoot dope. Night I met him he had just overdosed. His friends dropped him off at a hospital and split. He got sober but that didn’t keep him out of the game. Instead of college he went in search of his street education. He worked on the hustle first. Got in with a guy who bought his suits three at a time for a hundred bucks on Hollywood Boulevard. Taught him how to sell copy machine toner over the phone. Big Ron liked the easy money, easy women, and gambling. He had a daughter with a card dealer at one of the Indian casinos when he was thirty. By the time he was forty he was selling weed all over Hollywood, running a few girls here and there, collecting on paper, running late night card games, and setting up grow houses for a motorcycle club in The Valley. One of the girls he was running talked him into shooting a porn, real violent stuff. Slapping her around, choking her out- he loved it. Ended up doing that for about two years along with the grow houses, selling counterfeit watches, and moving meth until he got flipped the morning after he got married. One of the little porn gals dared him to marry her so Ron being Ron caught a flight to Las Vegas, said he was going out for a burger at the new In-N-Out right there on the strip and then he was going to marry a porn star. They didn’t even make it to the bathroom on the plane to have sex, did it right there in 10A and 10B on the flight back to LA. Next morning, as his bride was taking her first dump as Mrs. Ron, the Feds busted down the front door. Ron was transported to the Federal jail in Lynwood, his new bride got a pass on the whole thing and divorced him thirty-two hours later. Ron spent three weeks inside, a lawyer in the program with him sprung him loose. Something about those three weeks got to Ron, he decided he had been sober long enough and grabbed a beer at El Compadre’s on Sunset. Four days later he was in the hospital on a ventilator, overdosed again. Three solid years of drinking after he got out of the hospital. He got kicked out of the collection game, can’t keep numbers straight and you can’t be trusted if you’re in the bag all the time. The motorcycle club wouldn’t use him any longer, they figured since he went in on a Federal beef and was out walking around that he must have given something up. He couldn’t move any more weed in Hollywood because they made it legal. He couldn’t even run any girls, he got too fat with the drinking. He was a mess. He became sort of a mascot at The Room in Hollywood. They gave him a job as a bouncer because of his reputation but he was too pickled to do anything about anything. He was living out of his truck for a while and then he had the heart attack. That’s when he came to work for me. He doesn’t take shit from anybody now. He’s all business. You see him heading your way you know you’ve fucked up.

I used to cut through a cemetery on my way home from school when I was a kid. I liked reading off the names and dates on the headstones. The ones that stood out to me were the ones where the person died on their birthday. Got to tell you, it made me get a little nervous on my birthdays for about ten years growing up. I thought maybe there was some kind of bad luck that fell upon us good people- then I started working in this business. Bad luck ain’t got nothing to do with it. Bad decisions are what put a birthday on your headstone. Trouble doesn’t go out and find you, it’s you that goes out and finds trouble. Assholes swallow, snort, shoot, and guzzle anything they can find to mark the passing of another year then they go out and drive too fast, fuck the wrong girl, or run their mouth to the wrong dude. What the fuck did you think was gonna happen? I’m telling you, they should teach a class in high school and devote an entire semester on how to not be an asshole. English literature is interesting but it won’t save your ass when you’re six-beers-in and asking total strangers to hook you up with an eight ball. Common sense shit, that’s what they should teach kids before they shove them out into the world.

Ruby looks pretty good, she must have been amazing thirty years ago. She can still get away with a low cut top and leather pants. Nobody ever asks her how old she is, kind of like not wanting to watch how sausage is made. She comes in about once a month, always alone. She likes to sit in the last seat against the wall at the back of the bar, it’s dark back there. If she comes in and someone is in that seat I get Shep to get’em up and put them at a nice table. She used to run a demolition derby track up in Saugus. It was a race track for about ten years before the Pomona Raceway took control of the action in Los Angeles County. Ruby kept it alive another fifteen years by having two demolition derbies a week. The front loop was for families but the back loop was where the hooligans went for action. Cotton candy, popcorn, burgers, and burritos were sold out front. All the blow, speed, and pussy was out back. Ruby wasn’t looking the other way, she ran it all. The ladies that she would have lunch with on Tuesdays would get thirty minutes of her time at the front loop and the men she liked to party with on Saturdays would get the rest of the evening. She was wild. And she knew how to really run a racket. All the cars had to be certified to run in the derby, she owned the garage that certified them. She had a percentage of the salvage yard. She took ten percent of all the concessions. She took ten percent of the blow, ten percent of the speed, and ten percent of the pussy. An engine block flew into the crowd one night and a local kid lost three-quarters of his head. Died on the way to the hospital. Ruby sold the property to a developer and moved into an architecturally important home just up the road above Runyon Canyon. The home is on a national registry so the outside has to remain as-is but Ruby had the inside remodeled to be able to accommodate twenty girls doing online camera shows.

Tim Wells ran a burlesque club, Leather Feather, on Cherokee and Hollywood. He had a five piece band, an emcee that hammered nails into his face and spat fire, and about twenty dancers on a rotating schedule. Dancers are trouble, bars are trouble, and you better believe it- Tim Wells was trouble. He owed money to half the shops in town. He knew better than to try taking out paper with me, I don’t leave my debts open-ended. His girls took home cash after every show, that’s the only way they would stick around. His girls had great names. Betty Boom, Rita Cheetah, and Helena Baskets to name a few. These girls had talent. They could dance, sing, and make your money disappear. One day too much money had disappeared and Tim went out looking for answers. He was a weasel but he wasn’t stupid, he would never leave a mark on his merchandise. His ace in the hole with each of his girls was a video. Every girl in his show was on video in a Nazi uniform taking it in the ass. Of course they didn’t do it willingly, he fucking drugged them up. About a week after signing each girl to his show he would take them to a sunset dinner up at Yamashiro’s above the Magic Castle off Franklin. Sushi, drinks, and a view their families back home would gush over on FaceBook. Plop, plop, right into the gal’s drink and an hour later he would have them back at his place hashing out the Fourth Reich. If a girl got out of line he would send her an email of her in action. That way if he asked a question  they would give an answer. These girls were teachers, paralegals, and librarians during the day so nobody wanted that video going out over the internet.  Ruth Le Scala was the only one who didn’t show for work that day. She even emptied out her locker, took the pictures off of the door and everything. Tim knew that as the one cock in the henhouse he had to make the punishment swift and severe if he wanted to keep the rest of the girls in line. They all gave up what they knew: phone numbers, hangouts, and boyfriends. Nothing panned out, Ruth was nowhere, she was in the wind. Her complete disappearance made it more than personal for him, it was an obsession. He created fake accounts on all the pervert sites to see if he could find her selling used panties or pictures online. He put ads up in Vegas, Reno, Austin, and Fairbanks to see if she was out there looking for dancing work. Six months of nothing and then a pawnshop in Lost Hills called him up about a watch. Told him a dude had just sold him a Baume and Mercier Capeland watch that turned out to be fake and used Tim Wells as the name on the ticket. Tim went 80 the whole way, got there in just under two hours. Only one bar in Lost Hills, Tim parked in back and made sure his piece was loaded. Walked right in through the store room and found Ruth in a gold sequined dress hosting a karaoke happy hour. He watched her for about an hour. she still had the moves. There’s an oil field off of the 5 on Highway 46, James Dean drove right through it about a half hour before he was turned into meat. Tim pulled into the oil field and drove until he could no longer see the Paso Robles Highway. Forty minutes later he had a hole dug deep and wide enough to make the world forget about a body. He opened the trunk, a fist full of broken fingers clawed at him. He pulled Ruth out, she hit the mud and marveled at the oil derrick pumping away above her. Tim gave her a hard stomp on the throat, she stayed down. Her right eye was swollen shut, a few tears rolled out of the left eye. She couldn’t speak, that last stomp did the trick. The sun had just fallen below the distant hills, purple, orange, and red filled the sky above the valley. The oil derrick rose and fell. He didn’t speak any words. They were there in total silence. One tit had spilled out of the sequined dress, it rose and fell a little slower with each moment. She knew it was over. He was just waiting for it to get dark. It’s tough to say if he was being kind by letting her watch the last of the light or if he was being a bastard by making her wait for it. Didn’t matter either way, she was dead meat.

Ernie Clark drives a truck for North Hollywood Ice. Ernie also moves stuff around town for me when I need him. Ernie does it for the cash most of the time and every now and again he’ll do it for a nice dinner with his old lady. You can rely on Ernie, he clocks in exactly five minutes before 7 every day and clocks out at 3 every afternoon. He answers his phone on the second ring every time. The best thing about Ernie is that he keeps his mouth shut. He’s not muscle, he’s not in collections- he’s a casual acquaintance that moves things from one point to another for me. Ain’t nothing casual about Ernie though. He has his own set a’rules. Trouble is that most people don’t know about his rules until they break’em. It’s gonna sound unreasonable but he burned down a Popeye’s Fried Chicken in Panorama City ‘cause they broke his rules. Again, his rules so I really got nothing to say concerning how right or wrong he was. He had ordered a quarter pound of Cajun popcorn shrimp, the combo with a drink, biscuit, and mashed potatoes. Ernie got it in his head that what they gave him was nowhere near a quarter pound of shrimp so he walked into the grocery store next door and weighed it- just the shrimp- and it wasn’t quite a quarter pound. That was it for Ernie. He didn’t take it up with the store manager, the damage was already done. He finished his run in Panorama City and clocked out in North Hollywood at exactly 3 in the afternoon. Ernie went home to his wife and rubbed her feet with peppermint lotion. They shared a beer and smoked a few cigarettes watching the sun go down. He put on some Slayer and screwed his wife, making sure to get the final moments on his cellphone so he could post it on the internet- his rules, not mine. He got his wife set up in the bath and then he headed back out to Panorama City. Popeye’s closes at ten so he showed up with five gallons of gas at 10:45. He watched for about ten minutes just to make sure it was fully involved. On the way home he picked up a pint of rocky road for his wife. You can bet that he clocked in exactly five minutes before seven the next morning because Ernie is dependable and he lives by his own set of rules.

Brian The Autograph King made a lot of enemies during his thirty-year career in this town. That sack of monkey shit would have made enemies anywhere. It’s only a matter of time for all of us but this guy made it his business to get fucked sooner than later. He knocked up some gal in Arizona when he was seventeen and split thinking that he could walk into a movie studio and make shit happen. He operated at the bottom of the barrel getting jobs as an extra so he could eat for free. Brian had no clue when it came to etiquette, he would walk right up to the lead actors and start asking them stupid shit like where they got there hair done or if they could recommend a financial advisor. People just getting out of jail are encouraged by parole officers to get jobs as extras. One day he pushed his luck too far by asking an actress for her number between takes and found himself being led out a side gate by studio security. He would’ve been fine if he’d kept his mouth shut but he was an asshole so he ended up landing on the sidewalk nose-first. Took him almost twenty minutes to get to his feet when that door came flying open again and he almost got taken out by a former Rams defensive end that was working on a cop show. The guy was immediately swarmed by people waving headshots asking for an autograph. The dude signed only one headshot before he jumped into a waiting car and Brian overheard someone saying they could get a hundred bucks for it. Boom, that scumbag was hooked. Wait around and get somebody to sign something and then sell it for a hundred bucks? Perfect gig for a pathetic looking fat fuck. So he started hanging out by the side gates of the studios after lunch. At four he’d head over to a couple of bars on Santa Monica that were popular with the big stars. Seven o’clock he’d move up to the Sunset Strip to catch the dinner crowd. Two in the morning he’d be waiting outside the clubs to catch the heavy partiers heading home. He built up a collection of autographs, things were going alright, and then one night he ran his mouth and everything changed. Brian was posted up at the rear exit of Chasen’s on Sunset. Rumor was that a couple of Academy Award winners were inside and Brian wanted a piece. He waited with the other scumbags and tried to shoulder his way in front when the couple came out the back door but he wasn’t fast enough to get an autograph. They were almost in their car when out of nowhere Brian calls one of them a cunt. Dude was not only an Academy Award winner but he was also a Marine in his younger days and he caught Brian in the temple with a spinning back fist. That bag of shit went right down on the pavement and not a soul in the entire city thought the Academy Award winner was out of line. Trouble was that the whole thing was caught on video. Brian put his dick in an attorney’s pocket and settled out of court. Then that became Brian’s scam- provoke someone into hitting him on camera and then settle out of court. He did alright for a year or two and then people got wise. He had to hire homeless and runaway kids to try to get autographs since people were on the lookout for him. Paid them maybe ten bucks a day. The crazy thing about autographs was that there really wasn’t a way to authenticate them at the time of sale unless you took them to an expert…Brian became that expert. He had actually built a reputation as the preeminent autograph collector and that’s when he started calling himself The Autograph King. More than half of the shit he sold was bogus but nobody doubted the authenticity. He got into trouble when he sold a fake Michael Jackson autograph to a Chinese collector. It was just like the old west, the Chinese collector put money on the street and made it clear that whoever could deliver Brian to him would receive one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Crews from Oakland, San Francisco, and San Diego descended on Los Angeles looking for him. He was good at getting gone, stayed that way for almost three months. Crips out of Oakland were the ones that found him in Arizona. The bag of shit was at a Sonic drive-in off the 8 in Yuma. He would have made it in one piece to face the Chinese collector if he hadn’t a started throwing “nigger” around. That got him shot right in the stomach, which was so big that when the .38 ripped through the abdominal wall the muscle kept tearing and his guts spilled right out onto the gas and brake pedals. The Crips took a minute to eat his burger, fries, and shake and then put two right into his face. Talk shit get hit, rings true even three hundred miles outside of Los Angeles.

Tan Stan comes through town about every quarter, stays for two weeks, puts in work, and moves on. Spends the rest of his time traveling through Central and South America. He’s been doing it that way for almost twenty-five years. He had to split town back then, Armenian Power was looking to put his nuts in a jar. He knew firsthand that Mexico was only tolerant of gringos and that if you stayed too long you ended up on the bad end of a blowtorch. He caught a cab to the international terminal at LAX and bought a ticket for the first flight leaving which just happened to be to Costa Rica. He got there and told some kid he wanted to hit a great surfing beach. Five hours on dirt roads and he ended up in Nosara. Tan Stan didn’t know any Spanish then and people in Nosara didn’t know much English so it took a good month of hand gestures to get him a place to stay, a decent surfboard, and to workout an understanding with the local whore house. Food, waves, and pussy all come relatively cheap down there so Tan Stan stayed. He gave it a few months and then came back through town to put in a little work. The Armenian situation had cooled down so Tan Stan could ride in a convertible again. He got a room at the Alta Cienega motel so he could walk across the street to the IHOP every morning. Two weeks and that’s it, he heads back out. He’s your guy for most any collection gig. He keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t fuck around on the price. He uses his hands to get everything done. He’s no asshole though, he keeps a few pieces in a safe deposit box at the Bank of America on Sunset near Fairfax. He keeps telling me I gotta head down there and see the beaches but I got beaches right here that I don’t have to drive down five hours of dirt road to see. All I gotta do is head fifty-seven miles north up the 101 to Ventura and they even have an In-N-Out there.

Every once in a while you gotta join the horde and play tourist out here. We got Disneyland, Universal Studios, and miles of beaches. Tough to spot some of us out there in the crowd full of plaid shorts and flip-flops, but we’re there. Lucky for me that old habits are tough to shake. I was down at the Santa Monica Pier with a dancer that flew in from Vegas for the week, she wanted to watch the sun go down into the Pacific. I knew my week would be spent hopping between the sheets and a 7-11 the way this gal was hitting every ice cream stand and snack bar along the pier. Didn’t bother me a bit, she was wearing a great dress and everything on her bounced around underneath it. We got to the end of the pier and took a seat on the edge of the continent, she was working on the last bit of a churro and I had my hand on her ass while the ocean drifted back and forth underneath our feet. A three hundred pound Hawaiian dude was playing Metallica on his ukulele, and then I smelled Happy John-John. In a city of almost ten million people I had only run across one person that liked to load a little bit of weed into a clove cigarette and that asshole was a no-good degenerate that sold stolen exotic cars and had beat us out of three hundred grand. Happy John-John was in the fucking wind, he was gone…and he was somewhere on that pier with me smoking a stupid fucking clove cigarette with a little bit of weed rolled into it. I took my hand off her ass. Three hundred grand was standing somewhere in front of me at the end of that pier and there wasn’t a fucking chance that it was ever gonna make it to dry land. Pete Dice was in Venice so he made it to the pier in under five minutes. Dono and Perry posted up at the beach, Pete was running bird dog, and I was searching the crowd for Happy John-John. White dude, chubby, weasel eyes…could be any one of the hundred or so assholes watching the sun fall below the horizon. Pete Dice is hard to miss. Six foot eight, covered in tattoos, and a surgical scar on the side of his shaved head. If you’re already on the run and you see someone like that scanning the crowd you know they’re probably there for you. Sure as shit I caught someone bolt in back. Pete did his job, flushed him right out in the open. I called up Dono and Perry, the three of them closed in on him. He didn’t fight it, he knew we had him. Happy had aged in the year since he dropped off the radar. Gained some weight, lost some hair, and what was left was going gray. Old men don’t run. There’s a little police department office at the entrance to the pier, Happy knew better than to even look in that direction. As soon as the boys walked Happy down to the beach to head towards the parking lot Pete looked back to me for the nod. The sun had gone down, only a few peach pastel streaks reached up from the ocean. The dancer in the great dress was starting to shiver. I took my coat off and put it around her shoulders and sent her into the arcade with ten bucks. The dark of night would happen soon, what needed to be done needed to happen quick before the street lights flicked on. This sunset would be Happy John-John’s last. I gave the nod. Pete turned and hit him right in the throat, legs went out and the boys scooped him up. Dono and Perry headed south out of the parking lot. Pete went north. I watched his car head up the PCH toward Malibu. He would probably take it all the way up beyond Point Mugu and cut over to the 101 in Oxnard. After that I really didn’t want to know. Pete had holes dug out in Ojai and some out in the farmlands outside of Santa Maria.

Mitch Wallace started out reading off minor league scores on KNBR in San Mateo. Sports fans tuning in at three in the morning were hard to come by but Mitch had a way of speaking that made him sound like your buddy so he moved on and up steadily in the market. He really blew up after a serendipitous accident in the KMPH FOX26  break room. The way he told it he was pouring himself a cup of coffee when all of the sudden Sandy Briscoe, the new meteorologist just transferred up from Los Angeles, walked in with her tits out asking if her nipple piercings were noticeable in her dress. Mitch spilled the cup and the entire pot of coffee on his tan sport coat. He had to go on air in two minutes and needed a new coat, the only thing that would fit him was an old burgundy blazer. People wrote in saying they really liked the burgundy blazer so he bought a few and made it his thing for the next three years in Fresno TV sports. Mitch got too gray around the ears and found himself on the wrong end of a thirty-day contract. A forced retirement put him behind the wheel of a Class B motorhome headed out of the Central Valley and up and down the west coast. Mitch liked the Central Coast of California the best. Monterey, Big Sur, San Simeon, Cambria, Cayucos, Morro Bay, and San Luis Obispo were where you could find him on any day of the week. He liked to hear the harbor seals in the morning and watch the sun dip into the Pacific Ocean at night. He picked up a gig calling community college softball games which led to a relationship with a former enforcer of ours that owned  a few vacation rentals. He became a handy man. He would drive from town to town along the coast calling ball games and fixing toilets. He crossed paths with Fat Matt in Cayucos, that’s how his name ended up on my radar. Mitch was installing a vent fan in a vacation rental, Fat Matt was putting a beating on a skip in the property next door. The skip got loose and ran into the vacation rental that Mitch was working on and the skip tried to get crazy with him so Mitch hit him right in the head with the battery-end of his screw gun. The skip went down and was out cold. Fat Matt knew immediately who Mitch was and they hit it off. Fat Matt got him to do some work on his bar and once he found out that Mitch moved regularly up and down the coast he started getting Mitch to take along a little weight here and there. Mitch was no degenerate he just never thought about saving any money, probably thought he’d be wearing that burgundy jacket on TV into his late sixties. Mitch took the money and kept his mouth shut. Fat Matt had him drive to Oakland to drop off cash, San Francisco to pick up dope, up to Pistol River in Oregon to fix toilets in an RV park brothel, and then all the way back to Los Angeles twice a year with a load of AR-15’s. Mitch was the perfect mule, an honest voice sliding out of an honest face with close-cropped gray hair and a polo shirt. He kept his Class B RV in tip-top shape, all the lights and turn signals checked twice a week, and he even bought a piece of property by the ocean just north of Morro Bay to park his rig on when he had a few days to rest.

The lady looked down and saw the tattoos on my hand and asked, “Have you asked the lord to forgive you of your sins?”
I smiled and said, “No ma’am, I’m not done sinning yet.”

Sit tight, I’ll write more in a little while. August 19, 2017