Hollywood Babylon

Devan Sagliani

October 2005

"David Lee Roth has the best cocaine," she said, her eyes at half mast, with the strings of dirty black yarn growing out of her head, in place of where her hair should have been, stuck to the inky mascara chunks congealed on her monster-sized, plastic eyelashes like a bad case of instant karma; "but he doesn’t share it unless he thinks you’ll fuck him."

"I’d fuck him," Sandra replied lazily, the drawl of the syllables lethargic and hollow now that her buzz was kicking in. A thin sheen of heroin sweat covered her exposed skin, giving her a preternatural glimmer. Her small breasts and huge, pink nipples juxtaposed awkwardly against salient and angular hipbones that just screamed sex to whoever was listening, from a hundred-story megaphone ten miles wide.

"I’d suck his cock..."

She was standing there smoking, adorned only by a pair of full bottom panties covered in cartoon strawberries, like the kind you might shoplift one day from a Target department store, if you were a mentally deranged, dead-broke junkie whore who got her rocks off by having overweight Mexican security guards chase you down the streets of Hollywood and holler at you in broken English until they collapsed panting and dry heaving in the dead weeds growing out of the cracks in the pavement. The day she stole them she actually had the nerve to walk back over to her hapless pursuer and pat him on the head, cooing a gentle string of dirty suggestions into his ear before laughing and skipping away. He clutched his chest, his face screwed up, and tried desperately to tune her out, but she had gotten inside of his head. She had won.

She always won. That was part of her trip, never losing, in spite of the fact that society classified her as a loser.

Drew could be equally psychotic. It was no mistake that these girls were best friends; they had drank each other’s blood under a full harvest moon when they were sixteen and had been hand fastened in a bacchanal orgy of lesbian sex and cheap wine, which is not something you easily forget. Since then they’d given up on pagan rituals and white Wicca, but not the trysts.

They claimed it kept them connected, telepathically speaking.

"...and lick his filthy, dirty, old, rock star asshole..."

Sandra got on her knees in front of me as if to suggest a demonstration was in order and I tried not to flinch. She was the Queen of punk-rock-points (PRP’s) and run-on sentences. She was our fucking idol, all of us, and she knew it, which only made her little tirades worse when she got wound up. You would have thought it was her idea to blow up the Beverly Center in the first place, but it wasn’t; it was something Drew slipped in my ear one night like a tiny poisonous insect, letting it crawl through my brain killing everything it touched along the way, until I thought I had come up with it on my own.

Sandra had tennis bracelets covering both of her wrists that she had made one of the local poseur kids buy for her at a Hot Topic store and bring back.

Puppy dog slaves to the High Queen Whore, that’s what she called them.

Sexless alter boys pumped up out of their fragile little minds on hormones and Sex Pistols was more like it.

The bracelets were made out of black felt with bright white skull logos sewn into it, like something you might buy from a Día de los Muertos festival on Olvera Street. They were trendy and stupid and totally unlike Sandra, but they covered the scars and kept her from having to explain one more time how she didn’t know why she kept cutting herself but that she was pretty damn fucking sure it wasn’t a fucking cry for help.

7 punk-rock-points for excessive expletives, especially in a single sentence, that’s just part of the game we play, the one where I don’t ever get to go home again.

She had on guy’s tube socks with bad elastic, their dingy gray ringed on top by two bands of color, cherry and lime Slurpee to be precise, and unlaced low-top Converse shoes; a dirty shade of faded black.

Her fingernail polish was chipping off, Urban Decay – Frostbite, showing glimpses of the pristine original nail beneath the purple paint. She wrapped her small arms and tiny hands around my waist as she spoke but she didn’t acknowledge me.

I tried to keep from getting an erection.

I wasn’t shocked that she’d fuck DLR.

Nothing she could have come up with back then would have surprised me.

She was always saying shit like that, and not just to get a rise all the time.

She’d actually do it if it came down to it, just to prove a point, to who the fuck I don’t know.v

5 PRP’s for added profanity, straight to me and my soon to be high score.

"...and let his friends masturbate on my tits, bukakke-style..."

She was desperate to prove that nothing mattered, and that one action was just as pointless as another, and that beyond the fear and the terror and the horror of existence was just this meaninglessness that pervaded everything, and eventually it wore you thin until you surrendered to it or you went insane and suffered some great self-immolation.

"...and shove Jujubees up my ass..."

She absentmindedly played with her clit through her underwear while she talked.

I’m pretty sure I was rock hard by this point, but I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to figure out that all I could think of was her getting my shaft wet by licking me then stuffing me into the back of her soft throat while Drew watched.

Nothing mattered, true, but I could hear the blood pumping in my veins like an unseen symphony cueing up for a crescendo.

We were playing at being nihilists.

You have to understand that this is not entirely my fault.

I was born to fail them. It’s just in my nature, that’s all.

Sandra was born to be a fuck puppet, genetically predestined to swallow random lovely strangers DNA like it was a deliciously flavored lysergic, (she liked LSD-25), and while they moved on to fabulous lives she could never imagine knowing, she never tried to tag along for the ride.

One action was just as pointless as another she used to say.

She provided excellent service, according to the web reviews chronicling her "encounters," as they liked to call them online.

She gave the GF-fucking-E: The "girlfriend" experience, which basically means that, if you want her to, she pretends that you really fucking matter, like someone would if they were dating you, instead of just being a cum receptacle for the rich and the spoiled and the lonely.

5 points for inserted swear word.

She was a wonderfully eccentric note in the texture of the upwardly mobile professionals sexual landscape, exotic and memorable, like sampling rare cuisine; a Suicide Girl escort or a pose-able punk rock Barbie blow-up doll in the flesh. Most of her clients dressed in Armani and left prepaid Amex cards on the dresser that she checked via cellphone or sometimes via wireless plug-in modem on her Toshiba portable before providing manual release.

She gave the big happy ending.

The toll free number for checking the total amount registered on an American Express Gift Card in America is 1-877-796-4678. Operators are standing by twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to answer your calls. Giving Sandra these cards meant that she couldn’t be traced by purchase. Sandra was a bit paranoid, even for a beautiful and intelligent junkie whore. Cash is also untraceable, as far as I know, but she didn’t like carrying it on her and she refused to get a bank account.

She was our fucking idol, seriously, and we dutifully listened to everything she had to say.

She used to make me laugh so hard that had I been drinking milk it might have shot out of my nose and for that I think she is absolutely priceless. She also bought me oatmeal raisin cookies after a security guard beat me up once in front of Turner Liquor for mouthing off to him, and that made me decide that I would love her no matter what she said or did until at least the last day of my life. She and Drew were both prepared to be by my side on that day. I just never knew how literally they meant it, or what they were honestly expecting of me.

Everything has a purpose that it is destined to fail at or betray. There is no other way this could have turned out.

"...while whistling Dixie with my cunt lips if he asked..."

Beyond the fear and the terror and the horror of existence was just this meaninglessness that pervaded everything she would say, like a personal mantra. We had seen it, come to believe in its resounding power, come to accept it.

It became the ultimate truth.

Most of her clients did not know that she was a junkie because they never looked close enough to the ink dripping down her otherwise porcelain flesh to see the tracks in the middle of the art. There was usually a puncture wound in the small hollow of her tiny right arm that she tried uselessly to cover with cheap Joe Blasco foundation, if you cared to look for it.

"...at least for the coke."

"Don’t be fucking ridiculous," Drew replied, her lips pulling into an abrasive and sexy sneer. She was brushing one of her frazzled, black licorice dreadlocks out of her face, away from her mascara, and snapping a bowl from a dirty blond bubbler she had stolen from the Lion’s Den head shop in Canoga Park. She lifted a lot of their merchandise before they went under.

"David Lee Roth is a fucking dinosaur. He looks like a cross between David Lee Roth and a fucking Muppet now." She held then hit in as she spoke, croaking the words out before exhaling a long plume of green and blue smoke that circulated in the small, depressingly windowless, pink room we had taken over.

The building was abandoned, in the middle of Hollywood, on the boulevard no less, not ten blocks from the Scientologist’s Celebrity Center where Tom-fucking-Cruise went.

5 points.

The only way to get in was through a second story window that was boarded up with cheap plywood, but first you had to climb up the side of a fence and onto a ledge, then swing yourself across by holding onto a pole.

We slid the board back and crawled in to find office after office of abandoned desks, like a ghost world left intact or a museum whose sole theme was the working conditions prevalent in the late 20th century during the height of Capitalism.

Feel free to insert your very own ‘Office Space’ joke here. We sure did.

We nicknamed the building Hollywood Babylon Manor and overnight it became our center for anarchist operations. I took to scrawling it onto windows with a Sharpie, on benches, in wet cement...pretty much everywhere I could.

Hollywood Babylon.

We decided to strip down to our underwear because it was the middle of summer and the heat was just totally fucking overwhelming and there was no way to cool off. It wasn’t that big of a deal, since Drew and I had been fucking since the first hour we met (in the back bathroom of a Subway on Melrose) and Sandra was technically a call girl.

Drew immediately took another hit.

"I like the Muppets," Sandra taunted. "Especially the one with the big long nose. I always thought he had something special to offer me. Imagine the possibilities."

"Sicko," Drew said, choking on a fat hit that quickly filled the room as she let it out. "Now you’re talking like some kind of a freaky plushophile. You’re not going system on us, are you?"

She was talking about Crass.

She was talking about furries.

She was talking but I stopped listening when I saw her eyes, and then her lips were just moving but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to them.

Her eyes were the color of cyanide flavored pop rocks, washed down with fizzy cherry Coke.

In my head a single thought kept repeating itself over and over like one of those insipid and banal sitcom commercials that follows you from station to station on the radio in Los Angeles.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

Her eyes were like two glossy candy suckers, the kind where the flavor never matched the color.

Sandra began to pretend to fellate me, her mouth opened wide, her shiny lipstick inches from my groin. I took a dollar out of my pocket and threw it at her. She acted shocked and thrilled by a whole one dollar bill just for her.

Drew laughed at us.

Her pupils were blown wide open, like bad politics mixed with pop culture at two in the morning when all you can think about is that you’re out of money and speed and you know you don’t really want to come down gracefully after all.

It played over and over in my mind, like a song hook, until the words became an unwanted, chalky Valentine candy heart with the inscription worn off the face, rolling around in an empty container, unpicked and unwanted.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

"What about Gene Simmons?"

"What about him?" Sandra let go of my ass with a squeeze and turned back to Drew, who was taking off her clothes.

"Would you fuck Gene Simmons for cocaine?"

"Don’t be disgusting," she said, making an exaggerated face that suggested she might throw up.

"Why not? Why is David Lee Roth okay but Gene Simmons isn’t? What if he had a ton of great snow?"

"I may be a professional sex worker, but that man is a pig."

"I thought you were a nihilist?"

"Call me Annie-fucking-Nihil, baby."

Add 5 points.

"I thought nothing mattered to you?"

"I’d fuck Sammy Haggar before I would let that greasy Dago lick my fuck with his possessed Satanic cow tongue."

Drew slid off her bra and shook her freed breasts.

"That feels soooo much better."

"So, since tomorrow we might all die trying to prove a retarded point about the uselessness of consumer culture, what do you want to do on your last day on earth?" Sandra asked, suppressing a giggle.

Drew smiled, her eyes coming up from Sandra’s beautiful face to meet mine.

"Let’s have sex, all of us...let’s fuck and fuck until we can’t fuck anymore and then lay around twitching until we fall asleep and the sun comes up."

10-fucking-PRPs to Drew for having the balls to say what we were all thinking, no doubt.

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