Down and Out on Murder Mile Read Online Free Page A

Girls and Judge Judy, curled into agonized balls in opposite corners of the room, masturbating and crying to pass the time.
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    Airports rank alongside the post-OD ride in an ambulance, pumped full of the Narcan that has ripped you from the mouth of endless white light and deposited you into that instant, chemically induced cold turkey so severe they had to strap you down to the gurney. Airports rank alongside the East LA crack house where, at seven in the morning when the money and the rock haverun out, you sat twitching with a bunch of coke-crazed lunatics, terrified to exit into the unforgiving LA sunlight and figure out just what the fuck you are gonna do now, hopelessly combing the filthy carpet for a rock of crack you are convinced you must have dropped earlier in the session.
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    I find airports THAT awful.
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    It’s the brightness and the sterility of them. The way everyone looks so fucking STRAIGHT and HEALTHY, like they have never so much as experienced a minute as awful and degenerate as your last year has been. The insinuating way the airport security staff talks to you and look at you: like they KNOW you’re up to something. It’s almost like they think they are doing you a favor by letting you travel to another country. The unspoken question of “Why should we let a scumbag like YOU cross international borders?”
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    That edge of twitchy paranoia is increased a thousandfold when you feel as raw and as fucked up as I felt that day, preparing to return to London from Los Angeles. Out of options, we had decided to flee to England’s friendlier climes. At least there we could receive treatment for our addiction. In the United States we were thrown to the lions: even the “free” methadone clinic on Hollywood Boulevard expected its clients to show up with twelve dollars a day, for each dose of methadone. When heroin is only seven dollars a bag downtown, and the clinic won’t even provide enough methadone to keep you out of withdrawal…well, you can do the math. Susan’smother was eager to see us leave the United States, even paid for our plane tickets. Susan and I were convinced the airport cops were gonna pounce on us before we even made it to the plane.
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    â€œThere the bastards are!” they’d yell. “Trying to skip the country!”
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    They’d hold us down and read the litany of crimes: my being in the country illegally for over a year. Possession and use of controlled substances. Thousands of dollars in bounced checks, ripped bank accounts, unpaid rent. The $15,000 stolen from Susan’s old job. Maybe they’d even show up with every heroin and crack dealer we still owed money to in LA, for a bit of summary street justice. That bill alone had to amount to tens of thousands of dollars—double, triple the amount worth killing us for. Holy fuck, the sweat was running off me as I handed my passport over. Dripping from my nose. Soaking through my shirt and onto the crumpled suit I wore in an attempt to look inconspicuous. Only the suit was red sharkskin and had dark bloodspots on the trousers from shooting up. I don’t think it had ever been cleaned since I bought it, high on crack, a year ago. I was the most conspicuous person in the airport, almost comically noticeable.
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    â€œYou have nothing on you,” I told myself. “Calm the fuck down.”
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    â€œBut wait,” my paranoia piped up. “You packed in a hurry. What if you left something in your clothes by mistake? A balloon? A rock? An old syringe?And do you really trust that junkie bitch? What if she slipped something in YOUR luggage? She’s done dumber things! They have sniffer dogs…X-rays…. They’ll bust you before you can get out. You’ll never leave this fucking city. It WANTS you. In a crack house or in a prison cell; doesn’t matter: it’ll HAVE you.”
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    I bought a book waiting for our flight to be