Chapter Three Cigarette packs and cellophane wrappers, created a landfill out of the apartment floorspace, along with empty beer bottles with labels partially removed. The kind of removal you do when you're half-assed drunk, and start peeling them off half-assed. The kitchen sink was full of greying orange peels, turnng into fuzzy grey mold similar in texture to northern exposure moss in a woodland. The record player spun Mexican records with grooves filled with mexican music, guitars and accordians for a Germanic beerhall sound on thick Tejano disc'd label'd vinyl. Strange, how they are in Texas, Mickey thought, and stranger yet when they bring Texas along with them to California.
"Hog tie me, boy," when Ray saw Tommie at the door. "Shit, c'mon in, sit, have a drink, have sumthin' you prick. Howthehellyoubin?"
He was as excited as a dog in heat around French poodle poontang. "This here is Mikey, or Mickey, I forgot which, but he just got in town, and we had a kind of, ah, ah..o run in! Yeah, literally, ran into each other," Tommie told the tanked up Ray. Tommie and Ray, along with Dutchess, who you'll meet coming out of the bedroom in a moment would loom prominently in Mickey's L.A. days. Days that were electric and flashing, resembling lighted marqee signs with some of the bulbs burnt out, but you never noticed the dead ones.
Ray had a bottle of pills, a Mason jar full in fact, the amount and kinds that truck drivers keep next to them on runs from Dayton to Cheyenne, or Memphis to Denver. Yellow ones, and blue ones, and green ones, bennies and little dexies he downed by the handful and passed around like M&M's, and they didn't stand a chance of melting in your hands, but could melt the mind after 72 hours straight running on an empty tank of mental fumes. Taking these and smoking a joint only accelerated the high to a plateau, where you could catch your breath before the next leg of the climb up chemical Everest with out breathing tanks or yaks or a trusted Sherpa. A couple of days later, no food in your belly from not eating, your stomache would sucker punch you from the inside and throwing up bile was inevitable. Then you run out of gas, come to a halt and sometimes forget your own name and who you are.
Dutchess, remember her? She made her grand entrance. All six-foot-two of her, a real Redwoodesque beauty. She held her own, giving the aura of the debutante at the southern belle ball, as she exited from the bedroom, into the living room. Strikingly beautiful in a neo-Beat California way, black capri's, straight black hair, (you know that West Virginia coal mine kind of black), cut short, Keely Smith-ish, framed by pure white alabaster skin, as white as those statues found in ancient Greece are white. Her eyes? Yes, two of them, no more, no less, and black-purplish piercing pools to drown a man alive in, let alone a mere boy of 16. She focused on Mickey, her smile that of a fortune teller who knows the future, because she controls it, and therefore, can't be wrong.
Struck dumb and blind, in almost biblical fashion, he couldn't talk. Gaze, is all he could do. Her commanding presence was always felt by everyone who knew her, and those who didn't but would soon. "Well, hello. I thought I heard a new voice in here. Hi, Tommie, what's up?" she said with the words flowing from her as a mist from a beautiful waterfall deep in Africa. "Not much, Dutchess, just brought Mickey here to meet everyone. He's ok, too. Gave me a yelling at and has some balls, so thought I'd bring him around to meet everyone," Tommie said. The apartment belonged to Dutchess. She always had a place, and Ray had been until recently, the male of choice living there. She changed men/boys on a regular basis, as she had Tommie earlier in the year. She was 23 and robbing the cradle of street-brat-boys was her hobby. It kept her juiced. Even if you weren't the chosen fresh food of the moment, and nothing but leftovers, you were allowed to come over and hang-out with Dutchess. Tommie was the past...Ray was the recent close enough present...and Dutchess calculated, Mickey was the very near future.
She looked him over, up and down, then smiled, hungrily, flashing pearl and oyster teeth, her black hair and eyes contrasting her smile, framing her artwork face, a black and white desert O'Keefe. "Seen, LA yet? Probably not too much," she answered for him. She lit up a joint, and passed it to Mickey, who already had smoked three of them and had two of the bennies Ray passed around so Mickey was feeling no pain, and the higher he got, Dutchess became Aphrodite inside Dutchess' flesh, and it made Mickey flesh hungry just looking at her. "C'mon. Let's ot the Strip," she said, and grabbed his hand as she stood up and pulled him up with her.
She put a finger to her lips, shush like, hush-hush, and reached in her jeans to pull out a little pill. Christ, how many different pills do these people have anyway? This one was purple in color, and she held it in her fingers, a high priestess consecrating a holy sacrament, body and blood of Christ and he knew what to do, and stuck his tongue out without prodding, a very catholic dominus vabiscum move as she placed the holy communion on his tongue for him to swallow. Soon...he would be the chemical incarnation of the Sandoz pharmaceutical Christ incarnate..It was the chemical beginning of a long strange trip to paraphrase a song.
Sandoz labs in Switzerland had developed LSD early in the century as a blood coagulant, but instead it turned out to be a key to the inner and outer soul. Mickeys first trip on acid was in the whirlwind of Hollywood with Dutchess. They left the apartment around 8 that night, leaving Tommie and Ray talking non-stop all sped up on speed. Guitars mostly, how to make them, tuning them, stringing them, and even which wood to use in their creation...for hours on end, ad nauseum. Dutchess and Mickey held hands and within 20 minutes Mickeys ankles began to tingle and laugh. The city lights became crystaline, defined, a nebula of giant and dwarf stars. LA had a feel, a smell, more of a scent really, and a spirit. Odd, Mickey thought. He didn't figure that cities had souls. Honolulu for example, had a daytime soul as it was a daytime town. Detroit had three souls as the autoplants worked three shifts with juxtaposed 8 hour days, staggered. LA, on the other hand was definitely a night time town. The Sunset Strip trip was beginning to open like the peeled back top of a can of sardines in mustard sauce. The town that used to belong to Mickey Cohen and the Black Dahlia was post-beat-pre-hip and as the colors seemed to blend together, it was all a Dick Tracy yellow viewed on an empty screen of a console tv without a cathode.
Everyone on the street knew Dutchess. In addition to scoring and selling pot and acid (which was ot that common yet, but give it time), she also sold speed, mescaline, peyote and anything else she could get her hands on, include motorbikes and motorcycles and scooters. The bikes and scooters were boosted from various rental companies, changed out and sold. She had one herself in the back of the apartment that tomorrow would take Dutchess and Mickey along the coast road to Malibu. (He would eventually use one of these street bikes as a dirt bike in the oil field hills above the city which would end in the destruction of the bike and a broken wrist for it's human rider.
The cacophony of music, voices, traffic, laughter and radio's was a tonic. It was so vibrant, and as the acid continued it's ascent, it was the last piano note of Day in the Life on Sgt. Pepper, it went on for days. Mickey walked holding hands with Dutchess, and he could watch himself walking with her from a third story window in an invisible building he had never been in before. Music and radio's, pop music, pop charts, pop goes the American culture had been denied him for over a year since he left Detroit. Mostly island music, uke's and jukes, now, Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Dylan, all rotating in vinyl, blaring from apartments, bars and radios. Hell, Mickey didn't even have a drivers license yet and wouldn't own a car until 1971...a Dodge Dart at that, two tone, with a heater that wouldn't turn off, a broken windshield wiper and a hood that popped open on the Lodge Freeway as he headed home from the used car lot and the hapless hood, had to be tied down with his belt. The radio was excellent however and well worth the money he spent.
The Strip had bikers, and biker bars. Dutchess knew them all, including Wiley and his "old lady" he kept on a leash with collar around her neck. He'd walk her down the street, into bars, into stores, and she would faithfully follow her "master". Word on the street is that Dutchess and Ginger had a thing going before she met Wiley, and that Dutchess kept her on leash too. The acid was now painting brush strokes in front of Mickey. Words lost meaning, and Dutchess' skin took on a sabatier effect, turning her into black and white with not enough pixels, the very same as looking at the color comics in the newspaper with a magnifying glass and seeing each individual tree in the forest. Words spelled themselves out audibly, big black block letters, dangling from participles that dangled themselves from multi-colored hangmen's nooses.
Footsteps were liquid as each step sunk him lower into the ground, quicksand surrounded by killer ants in the amazon and decaying dinosaurs beneath the tar pits. Dutchess held his hand tighter as this was his first time, and LDS airlines did have an awesome stewardess in Dutchess. Fasten your seatbelt and extinquish all cigarettes. Hold on tight as you fly the friendly skies of blue smiles for miles. The street was bouncing up and down, keeping time with the heartbeat of the street. It was alive, by Gawd, alive and well, well, Mickey just beamed a smile that seemed to eminate from behind him, a robots raygun of a grin, the shit-eating grin, as Lenny Bruce called it.
Dutchess took him into a small club, with a small band playing small songs to smaller crowds. A coffee house filled with dark walls, candles on tables in big yellow glass holders with netting around them, the flames dancing a flamenco with flaming torches and jugglers and mimes in the wings waiting for their turn. Dutchess made the rounds of the round tables. Her customers paying cash money for plastic bags of weed and those delicious purple pills. She must have cleared $200 in that club alone in less than a half an hour, and took Mickey to a few more clubs to repeat the procedure. In all that night she made over $400 and bought Mickey dinner, a bottle of wine, headed back to the apartment where Ray and Tommie knew the score and had left earlier.
"Well, how are we doing, Mikey?" He knew when he heard her mispronounce his name that it was intentional and that is what she wanted to call him. He just smiled, speechless and laughed. She led him to her bed, removed his clothing along with her own and became his muse off and on for the next 12 months. He was completely enraptured and enthralled by her. He was now the Duke to the Dutchess of the Duchy. He couldn't fall asleep that night, as he was re-born, chemically and spiritually. The back alleys of childhood in Detroit were clear in memory. Those damn invisible pirates, weren't all that invisible afterall! They did exist, and thier plummage was more colorful now then ever before. Dazzling swashbucklers with big sashes and buckles to swash about.
In bed they did it. A couple of times with the older Dutchess leading the charge into her valley where rode the 600. Mickey was now Mikey, and he had taken his first acid trip and would never be the same again. Too bad it's a round trip chemical ticket...one way would be fine. It was almost morning, and would be one of those LA mornings, orange and hazy, eyes to burn, and it got into your throat making cigarettes taste like shit. The smog was a stiffling shroud of freeway death, of exhaust, of industry, of poisons yet unknown along with the unknown source of it. It was a cloud in a shroud that fill the windpipe and plug it as though it were old lead plumbing pipes with too much silt and sludge built up backing up everything in it's u-jointed path. He drifted off to sleep after a cigarette he couldn't taste...like a cigarette should...and when he awakened, Dutchess was already in the kitchen fixing coffee, toast, scrambled eggs, and a big platter of Canadian bacon. She was stark naked standing there smiling with a wooden spoon in one hand and joint in the other, the acid still in his system, he was about to have breakfast with the acid Aphrodite, the Sandoz Queen of the Amazons, he a lilliputian.
She handed the joint to the naked Mikey, and put some grass in the scrambled eggs along with garlic salt, pepper, and a chopped onion. He took a puff, and grabbed the cup of coffee and dexedrine she handed him and took it, swallowing it down, the breakfast of champions, and Tim Leary would be on the Wheaties box.
Once the breakfast was finished, and kicked into high gear, the duke and his dutchess got dressed and mounted m'lady's two-wheeled steed sitting in a back corner of the apartment complex. A swift kick, a rev, and they were off to the coast, and later to the fleabag motel to pick up Mikey's things. Dutchess had made a decision to move the boy in with her, and he had no intention of fighting her on it. She was hypnotic, and controlled the sideshow.
There was something about riding through the wide sidestreets of L.A. heading for the coast highway. There were the smells of exotic flora, the royalty of the palms, streets as wide as the Panama Canal and those speed bumps as large as the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The traffic on La Cienaga was another story. It moved slowly, but had the thickness of coagulated blood in a battlefield wound, or maybe it was the grass omelet and acid amulet he had for breakfast where he could break, fast, away, as a way, to know where. The words didn't fit in the puzzle so he just watched the traffic, cars, trucks, people, whiz by in slo-mo. The bungalows lined the streets, everything was a faux set movie lot. Unreal, but pleasant at the same time. Lombards and Gables, Bogie's and Bacalls, all ran out to greet the royal carriage and wave from the porches. "Welcome to L.A. kid. We'll eat ya alive."