“Hey, Dirk,” I say.
“Hey, dude.” He turns around.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Just thought I’d stop by, see how it’s hanging.” I hand him one of the Coronas. He twists the top off. I sit down next to him, pop mine open, throw my cap over at the bloody towel, below a poster of the Go-Go’s and a new stereo. A mound of damp bones stains the felt on a pool table, beneath it a bundle of wet jockey shorts spotted violet and black and red.
“Thanks, guy.” Dirk takes a swallow. “Hey”—he grins—“what’s brown and full of cobwebs?”
“Ethiopian’s ass**le,” I say.
“Right on.” We slap high five.
On the patio, a bag filled with flesh, heavy with blood, hangs from a wooden beam and moths flutter around it, and when it drips they scatter, then regroup. Beneath that someone has strung white Christmas lights around a large thorny tumbleweed. A blond bat flaps its wings, repositions itself in the rafters above the bag of flesh and the moths. “Who’s that?” I ask.
“That’s Andre.”
“Hey Andre.” I wave.
The bat squeaks a reply.
“Andre’s got a hangover,” Dirk yawns.
“Bummer.”
“It takes a long time to pull someone’s skull out of their mouth,” Dirk’s saying.
“Uh-huh.” I nod. “Can I have a seltzer?”
“Can you?”
“Nice toucan,” I say, noticing a comatose bird in a cage that hangs near the french doors that lead out to a veranda. “What’s its name?”
“Bok Choy,” Dirk says. “Hey, if you’re gonna get a seltzer, make me a mimosa, will you?”
“Jesus,” I whisper. “The things that toucan has seen.”
“The toucan doesn’t have a clue,” Dirk says.
Body bags lie out by the jacuzzi, lit candles surround the steaming water, a reminder of relatives who will not be as anguished as they should be, a test they will not pass.
I go back downstairs, get a seltzer, make Dirk a mimosa, then we hang out, watch the movie, drink some more beer, look through worn copies of GQ, Vanity Fair, True Life Atrocities, smoke some pot, and that’s around the time I can smell the blood, coming from the next room, so fresh it’s pulsing.
“I think I have the munchies,” I say. “I think I may go berserk.”
Dirk rewinds the movie and we start watching it again. But I can’t concentrate. Sean Penn keeps getting beat up and I get hungrier but don’t say anything and then the movie’s over and he turns the channel to HBO, where Bad Boys is on, so we start watching it again and we smoke some more pot and finally I have to stand up and walk around the room.
“Marsha’s with one of the Beach Boys,” Dirk says. “Walter called me.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I had dinner with Miranda at the Ivy the other night. Can you dig it?”
“Gnarly. I can dig it.” He shrugs. “I haven’t talked to Marsha since”—he stops, thinks about something, says, hesitantly—“since Roderick.” He switches the channel, then back again.
No one mentions Roderick a whole lot anymore. Last year, Marsha and Dirk were supposed to have dinner with Roderick at Chinois and when they stopped by his place in Brentwood, they found, at the bottom of Roderick’s empty swimming pool, a wooden stake (which was really a Wilson 5 baseball bat crudely whittled down) driven into the concrete near the drain, which had been all scratched up (Roderick prided himself on long, manicured claws), and gray-black sand and dust and chunks of ash were scattered in piles in one corner. Marsha and Dirk had taken the stake, which was slathered with Lawry’s garlic powder, and burned it in Roderick’s empty house, and no one has seen Roderick since.
“I’m sorry, man,” Dirk says. “It scares the shit out of me.”
“Aw, come on, dude, let’s not talk about that,” I say.
“Come on.”
“Righty-o, Professor.” Dirk does his Felix the Cat impersonation, slaps his Wayfarers on and smiles.
I’m walking around the room now, in the dark, shouts coming from the TV, moving toward the door, the smell rich and very thick, and I take another deep breath and it’s sweet too and definitely male. I’m hoping I’ll be offered some but I don’t want to act like a leech and I lean up against the wall and Dirk is talking about stealing pints from Cedars and I’m moving toward that door, stepping over the towel drenched with blood, trying casually to open it.