Point Doom Read online

  A day or so later, when we talked again, I discovered that Kassandra was having trouble with her newest live-in boyfriend. When I began to dig for answers in the conversation she finally let me know that Cedric, after a few drinks in the evening, enjoyed slapping her around a bit. So, one morning before breakfast, after an all-nighter at some downtown clubs, I motored out to the Hamptons by limo to deal with Cedric the asshole one-on-one.

  That pre-oatmeal visit and the assault and B&E charge that came with it resulted in a permanent restraining order. The charges were eventually dropped, thanks to Kassandra, but I had to do a ninety-day recovery bit at the Croodmoor nuthouse.

  JACK KEROUAC ONCE wrote that “the only people for me are the mad ones . . . who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

  That’s crap, but thanks, Jack. For the last few years in New York I’d tried to be one of Jack’s people. In my spare time I wrote a book of poems and, before he died, I had even worked with my dad, Jimmy Fiorella, and coauthored a couple of screenplays, but eventually I discovered the truth about Kerouac, that crap, and those people: most of them wind up in the bughouse or with a mouthful of broken teeth and a jar of Xanax. Or worse. They wind up OD’d and dead.

  In therapy at my nut ward, my shrink told me that I’d been suffering from a form of PTSD (with headaches) since I killed those people as a private detective. According to him that incident is when the wheels began coming off in my life.

  NOW I LIVE with my mother and attend AA and make every effort not to punch people. The PTSD headaches are still there. The dreams too. It’s almost always the same dream with two or three different versions: No. 1: I see the wounds but the bodies have no faces. No. 2: I’m buying cigarettes or at a market somewhere and I pull a bloody hand out of my pocket instead of my wallet. In the hand is my gun. No. 3: I’m holding my gun with blood all over me. There are two dead girls there but they are smiling and talking to each other.

  Mom, who is now eighty-one, and her caretaker-companion, Coco, and their half-dozen cats occupy two of the six bedrooms in the house on Cliffside Drive in Malibu. Coco is a tall, strong woman. She’s only seventy or so. She used to be Mom’s neighbor until her husband died of colon cancer. The chemo treatments and other medical expenses lasted for two years and cost the couple every dime they had—their house on Point Dume, their restaurant, everything. After her husband’s death, Coco was tits up—about to be homeless. Mom called her and made her the companion-caretaker offer and when Coco’s house foreclosed she became Mom’s full-time live-in companion.

  Because Jimmy Fiorella had left a $1 million life insurance policy, Mom was now more than okay financially. She’s been obsessed with astrology for years and never fails to let me know what new-shit planetary aspects are infecting my life.

  My bedroom is the small one at the other end of the house.

  MY NEW AA sponsor, Southbay Bill, says that I am what in AA they call a WILL NOT. A “will-not,” as in, “will not completely give himself to this simple program.” And in my last evaluation from my free biweekly state-supplied therapist in Santa Monica (who terminated our sessions, she said, because of my anger issues and my use of profanity), I was told that I should be back on medication, but I refuse to take any of that crap for the headaches or anything else because it doesn’t help and it makes my brain stupid. And Southbay Bill has told me that he won’t sponsor me unless I’m one hundred percent straight and off everything.

  Two weeks ago I got my driver’s license back after a long suspension for my last arrest and DUI in California. My license is restricted but I am now allowed to drive to and from my AA meetings and work—except, of course, that I have no job. Old Moms gives me fifty bucks a week for gas that I put in the tank of her oil-guzzling red Honda shitbox that fires on only three cylinders and emits a cloud of black smoke everywhere it goes.

  A few days ago, when I began driving again, Mom and Coco were concerned that I might get drunk again and wreck the car, and on Mom’s attorney’s advice, she signed the title of her farting old Honda over to me.

  CLAUDE AND MEGGIE are now holding hands in the row in front of me as the room continues filling up. The girls in the baseball caps are still giggling. Claude has finished gobbling down his chocolate doughnuts and is now scratching his goatee while scanning the room for the movie stars he knows. I can’t help but notice that Meggie is wearing pink thonged panties that come two inches above the top of her jeans in back as she sits in front of me. Frilly panties. Very exceptional.

  A couple of minutes later face-lift Albert stands at the podium to begin the meeting. “Hi,” he says, “My name is Albert and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi Albert,” the room chimes back.

  The former classroom is full now. There is only one open seat in my section—the seat next to me—and here comes a tall, fiftyish-looking woman in high heels and designer workout gear down the aisle. She stops at my row. Scary-looking bitch. All yoga muscle with perfect makeup. But the wrinkled skin on her hands and the liver spots are a dead giveaway that fifty is realistically sixty-five. Maybe older. The pulled face can’t hide what she really is.

  I have to stand to let the Glenn Close look-alike squeeze by me. But when I do, somehow the butt of my Charter Arms .44 snub-nose—a remnant of my New York City days—gets hooked on the backrest of my metal chair. The prick then tumbles out, clatters onto the seat, and falls to the floor.

  I pick the gun up and tuck it back into the rear of my jeans, then sit down again.

  Looking up I see that a dozen pairs of eyes are on me. The three girls in the baseball caps gawk but Claude’s expression is one of alarm. He grabs Meggie (in the pink thong) by the arm. “Vee must mooff from ere,” Claude hisses loudly, still glaring in my direction, “to anozer zeat.”

  Meggie snatches up her tote bag, then turns back to me. “That’s pretty scary shit, JD,” she hisses. “A fucking gun at an AA meeting.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, “shit happens. Have a nice day.”

  The two of them walk to the back of the full room and stand near the coffee table for the rest of the meeting.

  THESE DAYS I attribute my black moods and my unpleasant evaluation of all humanity to my long absence from alcohol. Sleeping at night has become impossible because of the off-and-on headaches and the dreams of blood and massacres, so I mostly busy myself by surfing porn sites, reading every book I can get my hands on, and then nodding off when I can. But I am usually awake until the sun comes up.

  Since the age of twelve I have been into different forms of martial arts. Lately I’ve continued to work out and have walked the local beaches for hours. I have drunk coffee at every Malibu café within fifteen miles and “talked” recovery until I feel the onset of rectal cancer. I am unwillingly familiar with every snot-filled hard-luck story of every celebrity tabloid knucklehead at every AA meeting.

  I am not a “winner” in sobriety. I do not kid myself. I now understand that booze is the great equalizer. I am the same as everybody else at the Malibu meetings—in the same fix. Beneath the cologne and Botox they are all holding on to their ass for dear life, just like me. They sit in these meetings in their sunglasses and Malibu Colony tans and whine about their canceled TV series or getting shafted in their divorce. Their kids hate them and are in jail or have wound up in rehab themselves. These people have what everyone in America thinks they want. If money and fame could fix it, they’d all be fixed. But they’re not. Not by a long shot. They suck air and shit once a day like everybody else. We’re all the same. Nowhere.

  AT MOM’S HOUSE that afternoon, with nothing to do, and no interest in visiting the sex chat rooms, I sat down at Jimmy Fiorella’s old typewriter and began to type. The idea of writing something on Pop’s antique machine had suddenly appealed to me and I decided to write like he had written. Before computers. So I began typing.


  An hour later I looked at the clock. I had written two new poems.

  Lighting a cigarette I leaned back and read what was in the machine and now on the desk in front of me. It wasn’t very good but I decided not to throw out the page.

  TWO

  The car sales job interview I got came through an AA pal, Bob O’Rourke, who everyone calls Woody. Woody had been selling used iron at a Toyota dealership in Santa Monica and, after six months, was the top guy on the totals board, making six to seven grand a month. I’d met Woody and his annoying big-toothed smile at the Malibu AA meetings. What we had in common was that we were both sober and drove old red Hondas.

  Woody was five years off booze. Older than me. Probably close to fifty. What in AA they call a winner. He didn’t live anywhere near Point Dume but drove the twenty-two miles from Santa Monica two days a week to attend the meetings and network with movie people. He’s written three Mafia-themed screenplays and is a starstruck screenwriter-wannabe after twenty years in the car business in Massachusetts. One bleak East Coast morning he dumped his condo, packed up his Honda, and rumbled west to chase his L.A. fame fantasy.

  When we’d first met and he found out my last name, he was immediately up my ass because of my father’s after-death literary fame. (Two of Jimmy Fiorella’s forty-year-old novels had been republished and become successful.)

  Woody liked to pump me with questions about writing screenplays with my dad. His idea was that we were both sober and had a lot in common because of our screenplay work, and should be friends.

  At first I kept trying to blow off the association, and in the beginning I even tried avoiding him. The guy was way too friendly for my taste—way too slick and well-spoken and recovered for me. But in AA, dodging someone is tough to do if you attend the same meetings.

  What finally made us closer was when I saw for myself that Woody was a for-real badass, an authentic tough guy. Behind his Turtle-Waxed salesman’s grin and his Hollywood chitchat and perpetual cheeriness was the real deal. That, I liked.

  And Woody was also a hope-to-die ladies’ man, one of those guys who, just by walking into a room, attracts women. Whether it was by his looks or personal style, I could never figure out. The guy was just good with women. Real good. He was usually dating two at a time.

  Our friendship began for real at the Point Dume meeting two months before. Some guy—some Hollywood stalker knucklehead with stainless-steel piercings up and down both ears, and tattooed arms—had tracked his skinny model ex-girlfriend to the noon meeting. Tanya was tall and humorless, a way-too-beautiful dazed-looking ex-crackhead and Victoria’s Secret model who sipped one coffee after another through the hollowed stir-sticks off the tables.

  When I first saw her, a couple of weeks before, she made a sort of half-assed move on Woody at the coffee counter, what in AA they call the Thirteenth Step. And, like I said, Woody’s a charmer, so he blew her off in a nice way.

  Now she was standing outside before the meeting, making chitchat with her girlfriend, when the ex, a guy who used to be in some famous rock band, comes up and starts a rant about her not returning his calls and how she’d ruined his life and fucked him over and how he was here to show her that she should be careful who she is dissing.

  The yelling and the back-and-forth soon got intense. Woody and me and another guy named Manny, a pal of Woody’s, who also sold cars, were drinking our coffees at our seats, just inside the AA room, waiting for the start of the meeting, when the ex grabs Miss Skinny and she begins pushing back and yelling.

  The three of us step outside for a look-see. Captain Tattoo now has Skinny in a sort-of headlock and is screaming at her. She is attempting to fight him off by grabbing at his hair, with no success.

  Enough becomes enough when we see the ex slide his hand into his jacket pocket, apparently for something sharp or with bullets in it. I did not see this part but Woody did, and for a change he wasn’t smiling. The asshole turns on him, snarling that he should mind his own business, then gives Woody a shove. Mistake no. 1. A second later what was in the guy’s pocket is now in his hand: a sharpened box-cutter shank. Mistake no. 2: Woody uses two or three nice moves, five seconds pass, and Tattoo is on the concrete, holding his nose.

  From then on me and Woody were better pals. Later that day, we are drinking more coffee after the AA meeting with Manny at the Dume Café, and to my great annoyance, Woody offers me a fifty-fifty split if I’ll help him rewrite his latest Mafia screenplay so he can send it to his newest agent. I try to be cheerful. I even try to change the subject, but finally I have to tell him flatly that the idea is a loser and out of the question.

  After that, thankfully, the conversation was dropped. To move on to something that does not piss me off, I ask Woody how he got the nickname Woody.

  “Well,” he says, “years ago I used to play semipro baseball in Florida. I was a decent outfielder and I could usually hit home plate on one bounce from dead center field. I had a pretty strong arm.”

  “Hey,” Manny says, “you must’ve been a helluva hitter, too, to pick up a nickname like Woody.”

  “I batted .204 in my first season,” says Woody.

  “Okay,” I say, looking at Manny, who’s also confused and shaking his head, “we don’t get it. Were they making fun of you because of your lousy hitting? Was calling you Woody some kind of a put-down?”

  “It wasn’t my batting average they were talking about. The first week I was with the team, after practice, one day I was getting out of the shower. One of the guys saw my johnson, and the name got tagged on me.”

  “So you’re hung like a bull elephant,” says Manny. “Is that it?”

  Woody shakes his head. “Let’s just say that some of us are more gifted than others.”

  “Great,” I say. “And the fact that you’ve got women crawling all over you makes it even worse—a brutal curse, no kidding.”

  “Pal,” Woody says, shaking his head, “it’s a fifty–fifty deal. A poosh. I’ll just say this: It never kept me sober. In fact I’ve been in more than one jackpot because of women. Like today, only worse. As they say around AA, I was born with a bad picker.”

  THREE

  The job interview at the used-car lot was with Owen (Max) Maxwell, the used-car manager at Len Sherman Toyota. Max was Woody’s current boss and Woody had put in a good word for me.

  That morning, after waking up again with my head pounding and the sweats from another nightmare about blood and dead people, I’d showered and dressed in my only pair of slacks with a shirt and tie. It took me almost ninety minutes in rush-hour traffic to drive from Point Dume to the dealership in Santa Monica.

  I arrived early for the interview and parked down the block. I own a fake, blue Handicapped placard, so I zipped into a fifteen-minute meter space, reached up behind my sun visor, and pulled it down, then hung the thing on the rearview mirror. A month before, I’d borrowed Mom’s legal handicapped placard one day from where it hung from her Escalade’s rearview mirror, then had it color photocopied. I’d then trimmed it down with a scissors and glued both sides of the thing back together. A perfect forgery. So now I enjoyed the privilege of parking for free at Santa Monica meters and outside businesses, or in the blue Handicapped zones.

  While I waited to go into the job interview I performed my daily ritual of calling my sponsor, Southbay Bill, on my cell. Bill has a reputation for being strict about having his sponsees call him every day. Bill goes to at least six AA meetings a week and has for twenty-five years or more. He’s a pretty chatty guy and dispenses a lot of AA snot advice. Conversely, I am not a loquacious person and had I known about Bill in advance I wouldn’t have hooked up with him. I’d seen him at a few Santa Monica meetings and everyone apparently considered him a pretty seasoned, easygoing cat. But when he started sponsoring me I discovered a problem that wouldn’t go away: Bill is a goose-stepping blabbermouth AA robot.

  “Hey
Bill,” I say into my cell phone, “I’m getting ready to go for that car sales job interview.”

  “Good,” says Bill, “remember, tell the truth. And take God in there with you, and no smartass comments.”

  “Good advice. Thanks.”

  “And try a little humility, JD. You just might have good results.”

  “Okay, I’ll remember that.”

  “Call me when it’s over,” Bills barks. “I’ve got someone on the other line. I gotta go. Let me know how the interview went.”

  I’d gotten lucky. No lengthy AA sermon today. “Okay Bill,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

  THE USED-CAR SHOWROOM was a large, one-story glassed-in rectangle with three spiffy, freshly detailed cars on the floor and brochure stands everywhere. There were half a dozen partitioned cubicles for the salespeople. Each of these was just large enough to contain a desk with a computer and two opposing chairs. I asked where Max’s office was and was told by one of the salesmen, who didn’t look up, that it was in the corner. Its windows looked out on the showroom and the big car lot beyond.

  Max was tall with wavy gray hair and looked more like a golf pro than a car man. He was in his midfifties and wore an expensive sports jacket and pressed slacks. He had a couple of rings on each hand and a fancy, thick gold watch with little dials on the sides.

  “Hiya,” he said, pumping my hand, a habit that appeared to be universal among used-car salesmen throughout Los Angeles. “Have a seat, James. It’s James, right?”

  “Right. James Fiorella Jr. But I go by JD.”

  Max tucked himself into a big brown leather office chair. His eyeglasses, which had been sunglasses when he came into the room, were now losing their tint. I hated glasses that did that. I handed Max my typed-out résumé.