Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [46]
But those were extreme examples of the “periodical.” His standard operating procedure was simply to walk west on Wilshire until he hit the beach, with beer stops on the way to detox himself and prepare for what he considered the long but necessary nightmare of sober life. So I drove west on Wilshire myself, as slowly as possible in the middle lane. I got all the way to Brentwood before I spotted him sitting on a bus bench at Wilshire and Bar-rington, drinking out of a paper bag with a straw. I pulled up, opened the passenger door and called to my friend. He got in.
“You had me worried,” I said. “I came by your place a few nights ago and you were passed out on the hard stuff.” I turned around the corner and parked in the lot of a small market. I checked Walter out: the pudgy frame and brilliant light blue eyes looked indent, but the face had the gauntness and fear that sets in when he has been sober a few days. “What are you drinking?” I asked.
Walter pulled the brown bag off of his libation. To my surprise it was Vernor’s Ginger Ale. “If you can do it, I can do it, you fascist motherfucker,” he said, punching me in the arm jokingly. “Cold turkey, unless I get the shakes. Then it’s the old tried-and-true twenty-four-hour beer detox.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. Dope or A.A. There are advantages to both. The dope advantages are obvious: you fly. The disadvantages are the resultant paranoia of prolonged use and the illegality. I’m not cut out for jail. No science fiction, no T.V., and they make you work. The A.A. advantages are that you get healthy physically through abstinence, you meet people who might be potentially valuable business contacts, and you probably get laid.” It was perhaps the fiftieth time I had heard this routine, but I didn’t tell Walter that. He was close to the edge.
“There’s another alternative,” I said, “You can come and stay with me. We can fly up to San Francisco, go to the opera, hike in Golden Gate Park. I’ll see that you eat and make fucking-A sure you don’t drink.”
“I’ll consider it, but it probably won’t work. Aesthetically, we are polar opposites. You cannot see the profundity of television, while I am mentally evaluating it and its effect for a magnum opus that will shake the conscience of the free world. I will be spoken of in the same breath as Kant and Nietzsche, guys who, of course, you have never read. You are the man of action and limited thought, the pragmatic diamond-in-the-rough intellect who rips off dumb niggers for their Cadillacs, sold to them by the fascist vampire. The karmic consequences will one day become obvious: you are going to get royally fucked in the ass. I, on the other hand, am the man of pure thought. A thinking machine. But I run on fuel, like any good machine. And that fuel is alcohol. It’s Catch-22, my good friend. So what are we to do?”
“I don’t know, in the long run. Right now, though, we can make the Topanga run. Do you want to?”
“Let’s do it. It’s been a long time.”
The Topanga run had been a mainstay of our relationship since the time I got my first car. It consists of Wilshire west to Pacific Coast Highway, P.C.H. north to the Topanga Canyon turn-in, Topanga Canyon Road through to the Valley, and the Ventura and Hollywood freeways back to L.A. It takes about an hour and a half, and during these rides Walter and I have enjoyed some of our finest conversations and closest rapport. So I pulled a U-turn on Barrington and turned right on Wilshire, headed for the beach. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Walter sip his ginger ale and peruse the passing scene.
When we were a few blocks from the ocean, he started to shout in frustration. “Shit fuck, rat’s ass, motherfucker!! Shit fuck!!”
I locked over and his hands were shaking, tremors that seemed to start in his fingertips and work all the way up to his shoulders, where he braced his back to contain them. “Five minutes, Walter,” I said. “Hold on. Beer?”
“Fuck beer. Vodka. Kiddielands. I’m dehydrated.”
Kiddielands meant a 7–11 Store. I remembered one on 15th and Santa Monica and jammed a left hand