EPILOGUE: DIE SCHULDEN
By: Aviva Rosenthal
Tags: Heroin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Las Vegas, Judaism, Nazis

One Wednesday that August you are having breakfast in a diner in Kingman, Arizona. You’d woken up with a yen for pancakes, could almost taste the butter melting into syrup, and want to pretend to be human again, hanging out with other good Americans and saying things like hot enough for you, maybe doing the crossword. So you risk it. Peggy Lee’s on the radio singing about paying your bills and curing your ills, and the sun is shining but it’s not anywhere near as hot as it’s going to be, and you open up the paper to find Lenny Bruce being led away in handcuffs with a cocky grin. The words are wrong, though.

‘Top that off for you?’

She has to repeat it twice before you figure out what she’s talking about. Say, no. Want to add ‘I’m fine,’ but are afraid you’ll never stop saying it, growing louder, echoing down a canyon, signifying nothing. This woman is too pretty to be a waitress. She shouldn’t be in pictures, though. No one should be in pictures, ever again.

You later find out that the Lenny-as-criminal shots that adorned every paper in the nation that morning were the Plan B, the merciful edition. In one of the few acts of decency of his life, Phil Spector had swooped in and nabbed the negatives of Lenny naked on the bathroom floor, needle still in his arm. They were going to flog that shit, flay his misery for the masses now that he could no longer cut them down to size, because nothing will ever, ever, ever be enough for them.

So you simply say no, and stand. She looks concerned. You say, do you have kids, and she nods. Hand her a hundred and say, do something nice with them today, okay?

Stumble from that diner, behind the wheel of the powder-blue Chevy Impala, drive away. It’s surprisingly reliable; you change the plates every two weeks, and no one ever remembers it. You’re briefly tempted to drive it off a cliff — the Grand Canyon is right there. You don’t.

Take the 66 to Vegas instead, 90 minutes away, a feature-length film of four-lane blacktop and scruffy mountains. Never did get around to the pancakes, so by the time you hand your keys to the Sands valet, you are faint with hunger and horror, already wanting to run from what you are about to embark on. Alone on a rowboat, in the middle of the ocean, you will row and row and row until your deltoids scream and your shoulders dislocate and your arms fall off. You will never get anywhere, but that’s okay, because an armless man can’t shoot up.

All that matters is that you start rowing, right now.

‘I need a man,’ you tell the bellhop as he shows you the room. He looks like a guy who can get things. ‘Someone large, and not open to suggestion. I can’t leave this room for a week.’

The bellhop nods, as if he gets this request every day. He may well. ‘How soon?’

I check my watch. ‘Four hours, tops.’

‘Money?’

I show him the money, give him a list of supplies. It’s not long. You can get anything from the front desk, but I want to minimize contact, because this is Vegas; you can get anything from the front desk. Take a long shower and flush every drug I have down the toilet. Two hours later, as I am putting stamps on a letter, there is a knock at the door, and Jerry Lee Lewis walks in. Not the man himself, of course; an alternate version, larger than life. An impersonator.

Jerry Lee can’t get arrested these days, even in Vegas, but turns out we miss him so much we’ll employ his doppelgänger. He’ll do. Hands me a bag, and I pull out the Pepto-Bismol, the saltines and ginger ale, the fresh pajamas. We’re going to need more sheets and towels.

Still time before the crash, so we order up lunch. I have pastrami with a side of slaw, Jerry Lee has the Cobb salad. Doesn’t break character once. We talk a little, mouths full. He looks like a man of few words, but turns out to be pretty garrulous — and from a farm just outside of Ferriday, so he sounds just like the Killer. Looks like him, too, possibly a cousin, same blond curls snaking across his brow. Not Jimmy Swaggart, no. Jerry Lee has a lot of cousins, all grit and grinning gall, music and hellfire. Must be nice. None of mine survived; I’m a genetic bottleneck.

Most of Ferriday is black. Whites are all related in various ways, mistrusting the unheimlich. You marry your cousin young, as God intended. It’s okay. Jerry Lee had been genuinely stumped by England’s horror over Myra; he’d been 15 when he married for love, 16 at the point of a shotgun. The rest of the South was puzzled too, but the Brits must know what they were doing, so we went with it. Overnight, he went from ten grand a night to $250 before the shows disappeared. Without them, he nearly disappeared too, his passion spiraling down into an abyss of fury and frustration. He was, perhaps, not a good man to piss off.

The Killer, to my knowledge, never actually killed anyone; he was just the fucking Angel of Death. People died around him at rates far greater than average. His older brother was killed by a drunk driver as a kid, then he pushed his cousin Frankie Jean off a cliff (she was fine, if pissed off). The nickname was for his mad piano skills — he taught himself at eight — and that time he tried to strangle a shop teacher with his own tie. His son Steve Allen drowned in the pool while Myra was on the phone. Wife four overdosed on methadone, then he shot his bass player in the chest — who didn’t die, or even quit, hey, these things happen — but his fifth wife did. Jerry Lee, Jr. overturned his car. Gone. By now everyone’s a little leery, so when Jerry Lee showed up at Graceland waving a Derringer, drunk, hollering of the devil and backstabbing hypocrisy, a shaken Elvis called the cops on him. A few months later the King was dead on the toilet, Lenny Bruce-style. Maybe we should stay away from Mr. Lewis, or drugs, or pools, or indoor plumbing.

I don’t think he’s ever going to die, either. Had you asked us in 1958 who’d be the first Sun Boy to bite the dust, we’d have said Jerry Lee, no question. That motherfucker’s burning it at both ends. 63 years later, he’s outlived them all. Still recording, and hasn’t mellowed out a bit, though the body count does seem to have dropped. How do I know these things? It’s like seeing a pattern in the corner of a crazy quilt; you know what the rest will look like, this chaotic sorrow. It’s never anything useful, that’d help me win the lottery or play the stock market. I just grasp certain folks, identify with them, and learn very little from their lives.

But his cousin is a different guy. Not fazed by much, and seems to regard the whole endeavor as pretty small potatoes. He does have one concern, though. Think about it, he tells me: what next? Otherwise there’s no point to this. And it’s gonna be bad.

I’ll be fine, I say confidently, though I’ve never done this before. I’ve been so meticulous about handling it all, risk versus reward. You minimize the danger, so you can keep surfing. Really, it won’t be that bad.

It’s that bad.

Vegas in August is the ideal rehab. However miserable you are, if you leave the room, you’re going to be more so: the rank smell of urine, bleach and stale cigarettes in the hall; the crazed clang and thunder of the casino; the gauntlet of the blinding garish lobby, followed by the sear of the Strip, baking any aspiration out of you with first breath. It’s a kiln out there: 111 degrees, zero percent humidity. I’ve never been to Vegas, and know no one here but my babysitter, who has taken up permanent residence with a six-pack in an armchair in front of the door. The only other way out is off the balcony. Chances are slim I’m going to score today; I can barely make it to the bathroom. After my bowels clear out, I stop trying, just puke into a bucket. Jerry Lee keeps pushing water and Tang: get some C into your system.

‘You know what you’re doing,’ I manage, after vomiting it up again.

‘Ahh,’ he waves me off. ‘DT’s. Everybody goes through this sooner or later.’

‘Will you sing me a song?’ I ask. Peggy Lee has been going hard in my head for three days now, ‘Who’s-a Gonna Pay the Check,’ and I’m ready for something else. He shakes his head, though.

‘We don’t have a piano.’

‘There’s a piano down in the lobby.’

‘Uh-huh. Nice try, buddy. I don’t mix business with pleasure.’

I laugh a little. My breath tastes like battery acid and underwear. ‘Which one is this?’

‘You know what I mean,’ he says, and I guess I do. I’ve been mixing business with pleasure for four years. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea, though I’m not sure I could’ve avoided any of this by staying broke my whole life. ‘You’re a Jew, huh?’ he asks.

I tense; it’s rarely a question you want to hear from a Southerner. The muscle spasms are nearly as bad as the nausea, and the fever dreams that savage my brain every time I pass out have left me with a full-body paranoia that never goes away. This isn’t going to end well, any of it.

‘How’d you know?’ I’ve always been so good at passing, no one suspects. Till I open my mouth.

He shakes his head, trying to articulate it. ‘All y’all got that look to you, like…’ and he mimes Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, just barely.

‘Oh,’ I nod. ‘Yeah, maybe. But yeah.’ I sit up to rub out a charley horse.

‘I never got it,’ he says. ‘Pentecostals know we’re going to hell, so we just whoop it up.’

‘Jews are already there, I think,’ I say, and he cackles.

‘That’s the dumbest shit I ever heard, man. You choose your life, every day. Sounds like an excuse to sit around feeling sorry for yourself and doing drugs.’ The charley horse is getting worse, left foot curling in on itself like that of a Chinese concubine.

‘No,’ I say honestly. ‘I’ve never felt sorry for myself. Just…sorry. This world is beyond me. I can’t fix it; I fix so I don’t care all the time. Otherwise I’d have gone under long ago.’ The foot starts to flex out again. ‘Pentecostal, huh? You handle snakes?’

‘I handle everything, brother, and that’s a guaranteed fact.’ He smiles: a sad, crooked little smile. Whatever he’s thinking, I want to take his mind off it.

‘Hey, wanna know something interesting?’

‘Sure.’

‘My brother goes to Caltech. He’s the smart one, hardheaded and practical, not like me. His big thing is aerospace — he always wanted to be an astronaut, it broke his heart when he hit six feet. They can’t get too big, those guys, and, uhh…’ Vertigo slaps my mind. ‘Where was I?’

‘Caltech.’

‘Right, right. So there’s this guy who teaches there, Feynman. Nuts, but he’s got some ideas that, the more I think about them, the more it seems like there might be something there. Does a lot of work with quantum physics, subatomic particles and how they interact with energy. Might even be energy at that level. No real difference, you know? But most of it is dark.’

‘Dark how? Like space?’

‘Like it’s just sitting there, emitting no radiation. Normal matter shines: you, me, a fish or a rock. The sun. But dark matter doesn’t. And he thinks it’s, like, 95% of the universe. It doesn’t leave a lot of light, or normalcy. That science can measure how bad it is now scares the shit out of me.’

‘So you shoot up.’

I laugh. ‘Yeah, pretty much. But I should take a shower. Eat, or I’m never gonna stop puking. Can you order up some sandwiches?’ Shivering again, I wrap myself in a blanket.

‘You need chicken soup.’

‘Why, cause I’m Jewish?’

’Cause you’re dehydrated. Potassium’s down to zero, and you need protein if you’re going to make it through. But you gotta start small.’ He pauses. ‘How come?’

‘How come what?’

‘Why’d you get into this, really? Don’t give me that dark matter shit. Decent guy, two brain cells to rub together. Don’t seem the type.’

Where to start? We’d have to go all the way back to the Big Bang. ‘My whole life, I couldn’t ever do the right thing. However careful I was, I’d fuck up. Then I killed my friend; it was an accident, but it was my fault. He needed me to protect him, and I wasn’t paying attention. And there was a girl, and she, ah, she…’ My throat closes up.

His face is a maze of warring expressions: tell me, don’t, there’s always a girl, this guy needs to get some food into him and keep it down or he’s gonna die. But not yet. While you’re able, get it out, before you shut down again. I can take it, and none of it will ever leave this room.

I spill my guts for a long time, and my confessor hears me out. He doesn’t turn me in, or offer platitudes, or in any way try to absolve me of my guilt. It was like giving birth, and when it was over I didn’t feel like a new man, just empty. I cried dumb dehydrated tears, drank some water and kept it down, and the fog I’d been wandering in for so long, growing denser and denser daily, began, very slightly, to lift. This was not a happy thing; there was a lot there I had no desire to see. And then I passed out.

In the dream, I’m walking through the halls of the hotel. I have to move very slowly, as my legs seem to have lost interest in moving at all. Also, Jerry Lee is following me, and he mustn’t know I’m trying to get away. Wisps of smoke begin to filter from under the doors, gathering into a miasma, swirling around my head. The hotel is on fire. I glance back. My guardian has turned into an anaconda, massive, slithering after me. I begin to run. One of the doors is slightly ajar, smoke-free. I will be safe here. Dart in, slam the door shut behind me, edge past the rumpled bed to check for a fire escape, when a hand shoots out and grabs my ankle; I scream, drop to my knees. Peer under the sham — and it’s Georgia, laughing hysterically as she tries to silence herself with her hand. Quick, quick, she gestures. They can’t find us. We have to be super quiet, okay? Ohh, I say. Oh, oh, oh, kissing her all over: the warm solid flesh, lips, teeth, ears, the soft honeysuckle incandescence of her hair. Oh, for God’s sake. I thought you were dead.

And then my eyes are open.

When people talk about rock bottom, they’re usually referring to something terrible they’ve done, a moral fuckup that forces them to face who they’ve become, the mess they’ve made of their lives. It almost always involves sex or their mother, rarely the death of a fellow addict. This is how well we’ve been trained: they were weak degenerates, they chose to inconvenience us this way. Not us, though. We’re gingerbread men; we can handle it. Run, run, fast as you can. When you do hit rock bottom, you have three choices: you can kill yourself, you can shrug it off and score — or you can get in that boat and start rowing like hell.

I’m not in a boat, though. I’m in a bed on the twentieth floor of the Sands at four o’clock in the morning, with a man who may well be Jerry Lee Lewis snoozing in front of the door. I’m too drained to cry, or get up, or fight him, even if I wanted to do any of those things.

I don’t. This is the abyss.

Eight miles down, pitch black, alone with the giant albino crabs, the tubeworms and stalagmite vents erupting volcanic steam from the bowels of the earth into the sub-zero water. No point in moving, if you have no idea what’s going on, or where you’re headed. I’ll just lie here, another lost haole, breathless-haa. Three days to go, then I can leave this room, go back to LA, hole up and shoot heroin till I die. Can’t say I didn’t give it the old college try.

A scrap of red neon light cons its way through the crack in the curtains, flashing on the wall like an alarm. Blink…blink…blink. It’s oddly calming, and I begin to breathe: ha, hana, ha, hana, ha. Ohana. I don’t want to die without seeing them again. Jerry Lee stirs as the sky starts to grey, clears his throat. Says nothing at all for a time, but I can feel him feeling me out. And then, to my surprise, he begins to sing. Up in the morning, out on the job, work like the devil for my pay…

He sings the whole thing, deep and rich, and by the time he’s done, that lucky old sun has cleared the horizon, its first rays peering through the curtain into the room. He gets to his feet. ‘All right, chump, wakey-wakey.’ Helps me into the bath, turns the water on. ‘Chapter Two.’

It’s been a long time since I took a bath; I’ve been sticking to showers since Georgia died. Hear him out there muttering into the phone, then more loudly: well, you better fucking find some, then. You gonna make me come down there?

I sink down, close my eyes, immersed. The drug of gradualism. I can do ten minutes now, close to the world record, but I’ve stopped timing. The trick is to outsmart the narks, nitrogen narcosis. Rapture of the deep is such an easy veil to float through, into death. Surface, scrub away the crust, wash my hair. Get out, dry off, brush my teeth at last. Meet my eyes in the mirror; I look like shit. Pale, skeletal; haggard circles under my eyes. Visible, for the first time in months. I may have just blown my cover. Don the white terrycloth robe. Last time I stayed at a hotel with fancy robes was Honolulu, with Fluke and Georgia. That night we killed Patsy Cline.

I come out and Jerry Lee’s changed the sheets, thrown open the curtains. There’s a knock at the door and a tray is wheeled in with two covered dishes. He’s so matter-of-fact about all this that I start to think, hey, I’m 23 years old. I could just stop being an asshole.

‘How the hell did you score chicken soup in Vegas? At six o’clock in the morning?’ It’s terrific, too. My appetite has come roaring back, and I don’t feel nauseous at all.

‘The Bugsy Siegel Special,’ he says, carefully drizzling a cross of syrup onto his waffles. He’s constructing some kind of weird sandwich involving fried eggs, mayonnaise, bacon and bananas. He unhinges his jaw to bite into the Dagwood monstrosity, as I try not to stare.

‘No, really.’

‘Told ’em you were a high roller.’

‘More of a roller in recovery. Holy, holy, hardy-har.’

My muscles are stiff and aching; I want to do some yoga, but feel shy about looking uncool in front of a man who’s watched me puke and shit my guts out for three days. I could go for a run. Okay, a walk. A short one, off a long pier. But he won’t let me leave; that was the deal.

He puts his sandwich down, sucks a tooth, considering me. ‘You really kill all those guys?’

‘Huh? Oh. Yeah.’

He chuckles. ‘Good for you. They needed to be gone.’

‘Zipped lips, man, I’m serious.’

He shakes his head. ‘You got it. Seems a shame, though. They oughtta give you a medal.’

‘The guys who brought ’em in? Used your tax dollars to set them up for life? Yeah, I don’t think they’ll be giving me any medals any time soon.’

‘Ain’t that a fucking thing.’ He pauses. ‘So? What’s next?’

I pick up a triangle of toast. ‘I’ve got an idea. A good one, I think, but I’ll have to go home for it.’

In that moment he looks so like Grandpa Joe my eyes burn. The way he’d always gaze at me, so proud and sorrowful, as I’d be heading straight for the brick wall with my hard little noggin full of inexhaustible hope. I do the yoga, in the end. He watches, curious, and even joins in on a few of the poses. My head is clearing, the plan taking shape; hope surging back, against all odds.

Thursday we go down to the pool, and Friday he declares me free to go. I pay up, we shake hands. ‘I shouldn’t take this, man. But I’ll be honest, I could use the money.’

‘No, you earned it. Should be more, but that’s all I’ve got. I may run out of gas on the way home.’

He laughs and hands me back a twenty. ‘Don’t get stuck in Baker.’

‘Hey, Baker’s not so bad. World’s tallest thermometer. My family used to be bakers, you know, back in Austria. It’s in the blood. I could always get into it again.’

He laughs, we part ways, and I clear out of Vegas as soon as the bill is settled. I have never liked Vegas, or even the idea of Vegas, and probably never will.