Everybody Smokes in Hell

HOLLYWOOD was what the sign said. Said it in giant white letters. Said it big as every dream of every dreamer who ever came Tinseltowning. Said it for all the world to see, when anyone could see it at all through the blanket of smog that kept the city of Los Angeles bundled up tight. Hollywoodland was what the sign used to say. Not anymore. A bunch of decades ago the "land" part, having fallen into a state of disrepair, crumbled up and tumbled down the hills, the Hollywood Hills, with all its palatial Hollywood Hills houses. The three-million-, five-million-, as-many-million-dollars-as-you-want-to-spend houses of the movie stars and the movie stars' wives and the movie stars' mistresses and the movie stars' personal trainers who fucked the mistresses while the movie stars were out making movies about a guy who loves his family. Drop down some more and you come to Los Feliz with its smaller, but still kinda big and still very nice houses that were more for the middle class, if you consider middle class a family that rakes in two fifty to half a mil a year. It was LA middle class anyway. And keep dropping down the hills, down, down, like you were taking the express to purgatory's basement, you hit Hollywood. Dirt, soot, traffic. The homeless. That's what you see without even looking hard. The rest is just Mexicans cruising in their low riders, crackheads passed out in the street -- maybe passed out, maybe just dead -- and an urban rainbow of gang-ready kids. And, of course, there was the occasional movie studio. It was night. The movie studios were closed. The cruising Mexicans and the gang kids were in full effect. Hollywood belonged to them. And then there was the white guy. Not just white like you call your average pink-fleshed guy white. This one was dead -pale white. Hold-him-up-to-the-light-and-see-his-kidneys white. Too white for most twenty-something in a land of beach and sun. Shaggy hair -- dirty and tangled like a ball of yarn used to clean floors -- hung from his head, obscuring his face. He moved in a hophead/dope-fiend slow dance, a drug/booze mix his unseen partner, and therefore went just-another-junkie unnoticed as he swooned and swayed his way across the parking lot into the 24/7 Mart past the counter. The counter is where the clerk, a black guy sporting an official multicolor 24/7 Mart top, rang up an old Russian Jewess who, along with her husband, had survived the massacre at Zagrodski by the SS Einsatzgruppen to one day come to America, to California, to Silver Lake, where her husband got shanked to death over fifteen bucks and change one night when he was walking the dog. The clerk behind the counter didn't know any of this. Didn't care. Couldn't even pronounce Einsatzgruppen. What he cared about right then was the pair of thirteen-year-olds trying to snatch a copy of Penthouse from behind the counter -- not particularly because they wanted to see chicks in the buff, they peeped naked chicks on cable for free, but because it was more of a challenge to steal shit from behind the counter than from anywhere else in the store -- as he rang up the old Russian woman who he didn't like because she was always whining about something, not knowing about Zagrodski or her husband or that she had every reason in the world to whine because the world had not once ever done anything right by her. He swatted at the two young boys. The clerk swatted at them with his hand and sent them scattering, sent them running past Emilio and Carmen, who were huddled by the dairRidley, John is the author of 'Everybody Smokes in Hell' with ISBN 9780375401435 and ISBN 0375401431.