Rambuncto lived up to his name. Short, chunky, a guy who worked out his hands. He was the beast plus the beast, a thought stopper. Rambuncto had fewer tattoos than me, but Rambuncto’s tats were of a mouse whose tail had come stuck in a mouse trap. Then that mouse had tattoos: a cartoonish skull and crossbones with Xs for eyes. A dead mouse. Rambuncto emphasized this tat by flexing his left forearm. If he had witchcraft tattoos I would have been less cautious. For this was the type of guy whose adrenaline drive was hooked up to random acts of violence—he would fuck you up just because he was excited and two hours later realize he’d been jailed for the incident.
Brooklyn introduced us and Rambuncto ignored me and grunted. This is the kind of guy if I was alone with him on a desert island, I would put him down in his sleep and then I would sleep much more soundly.
I said “Hi”—but in a non-assertive way so as not to draw extraneous attention from the mouse in the mouse trap—I assumed it was this part of his iconography he identified with.
Rambuncto’s boys, Cujo and Kepler, mumbled some “hi”s and did not make any move to bump fists but stood just inside the front door and played master to our dogs, petting them and letting them jump up on them.
Charisma’s grammy and little girl Wendy sat watching TV.
Rambuncto, Cujo, Kepler all ignored everyone but Brooklyn. Brooklyn was all over Rambuncto, wrapping her thigh around his leg. She whispered in his ear but it came out a hiss: “Want? To? Go upstairs? With me and we can fuck?”
Rambuncto pushed her off—Brooklyn slipped to the floor. “Let’s go upstairs,” ‘Buncto said, and Charisma led us all upstairs, past the bathroom on the second floor and up the tiny switchback stairway to the attic. We all spread out here, the six of us, Rambuncto and his boys on the folded futon couch and Brooklyn, Charisma, and I sitting on the floor.
“We got this,” Charisma said, throwing out bag #1.
Rambuncto leaned forward.
Brooklyn got my California ID and cut off a line. She indicated the mirror to Rambuncto. Rambuncto knelt next to it, leaned his face in, refused the straw Brooklyn gave him, and snorted it though one nostril, cleaning the surface of the mirror.
Kepler and Cujo went next. Then Charisma, Brooklyn, and me.
I held my knees and rocked in the chair thus created.
Rambuncto said, “I bet this is crap compared to what you got in California.”
I looked over Rambuncto, seeing his face chiseled with lines of hate (giving and receiving) and I thought of him in jail, making it through that shit day by day like anyone else would.
“Actually—and I haven’t done much coke in California or anywhere else—but this is at least as good as what I had in CA.”
“You’re shitting me,” Rambuncto said.
“No way. This is among the best coke I ever had. I’d guess you’d think coke from Hollywood would be better than Ohio, but..not so in my limited experience. Have another line.”
“You first,” Rambuncto said.
“Ok.” I went to the mirror and knelt beside it. Grabbed my straw—you can do coke with a rolled up $100 bill but aside from the celebratory aspect of the high-dollar currency, most regular coke people use straws—one for each person so as to avoid infection. Sniffft it up!!
“Now you,” I said—and Rambuncto’s two friends who were guys and my two friends who were girls watched me take a line then Rambuncto take a line and there was a sense of approval that settled across the room.
“Charisma says you go to film school.”
“Yeah. It’s a one-year program. An intensive program. You have classes for 12 hours a day and on top of that, you make movies. Like: assignment movies. Like: make a movie about someone who loses something then finds it..stuff like that.”
“I bet it’s expensive.”
“Well..yeah. I got my dad to help me borrow the money. The idea is that after school I’ll be able to get a job in the film industry. But I doubt that’ll happen.”
“Why not?” Rambuncto said.
“I guess..because there’s not a lot of jobs compared to how many people move to LA and try to get jobs doing film.”
“How do you know Charisma?” he said.
I watched a crack form from somewhere behind Rambuncto’s head and rise along the wall, cross over via the ceiling, and drop down between the windows at the front of the house, whose shades had been drawn.
“Charisma I have known since high school.”
“Yeah,” Charisma said. “Matt was into photography. I liked his pictures.”
Rambuncto’s eyes followed from Charisma to me. I think he was trying to figure out which one of us had fucked her first.
“I bet you know a lot of movie stars,” Rambuncto said.
“No, I don’t know any.”
“I bet you see them around.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw Kevin Bacon. He was answering questions at this Q&A after a movie premier that he was in.”
“What movie?”
“Where the Truth Lies,” I say. “You prob’ly never saw that one. Also: Robert De Niro, Sandra Oh, I saw Clint Eastwood once, Heath Ledger—he was ordering whisky at a bar I was sitting at..I think that’s it.”
Snifff! Sniff sniff sniff!!
“I guess..you know a lot of high class people out there?”
“No. Not really. I mean: Hollywood. If you’ve never been there all you know is what some TV announcer says: Welcome to beautiful Burbank California. Brought to you from a studio in sunny Hollywood, CA! But when you go out there Hollywood is just a neighborhood—kind of a bad one. Billboards. Expensive-ass apartments. Homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. A guy from my school got stabbed in the neck while he was waiting in line at Burger King and he wasn’t getting robbed—this guy stabbed him just for fun.”
“Did it kill him?”
“No. But he is paralyzed on the right side.”
“Damn.”
“I know, man. I know. Shit is harsh.”
“Shit ain’t near that harsh around here.”
“You’re serious. This is actually a pretty nice, rural neighborhood in LA. If there ever was a neighborhood like this in LA. More cost, more crime. It’s really a good example of the world. Everything’s fucked. I mean: everywhere, everything is fucked.”
“How expensive is your place?”
“It’s 950 a week. Twice what I’ve ever paid for a place here in Dayton. Do you believe that shit?” I asked.
Rambuncto and I went on like this a while. We all did multiple lines—rails—and for every one we got higher and higher and more and more tense. You would think that the tension between Rambuncto and me would have lessened—it did not. Every time he leaned forward, I thought he was coming off the couch headed straight for me, attacking me for my seeming relative privilege, my ability to attend film school, my first rights to Charisma’s vagina even when he was clearly with Brooklyn right now.
I imagined the two of them fucking. Thought of Rambuncto naked. His face close to Charisma’s, sweating, pushing her shoulders back on a wooden floor somewhere. Charisma’s response? That was hardest for me to imagine—not because the picture was hard to come up with, but due to the picture being painful for me to fill in: It was the picture of Charisma screaming her passion at top volume, loud enough for neighbors to hear, and this being the same treatment she gave me.
To think that Charisma’s noises were not even hardly for me, that they were just the general noises she gave to everyone—that’s what hurt the most. To know that I wasn’t the one making her cum..but that it was any guy who made her feel that way..even Rambuncto, this fellow human male who would never amount to nothing. That was part of the idea. The next part was that I—for all my slight advantages over Rambuncto—was ultimately no different than him.
How many times had I escaped jail? For drunk driving. For possession of illegal drugs. For any of these offenses, I was no different—and Rambuncto knew it. I lay on the floor looking up at the ceiling cracks. Thought (as I often do during these trips) of staying. Of what that would be like. What if my coke weekend short-circuited into a secret life lived in Dayton? Into my disappearing into an East Dayton house, just like this, and I would work at the 7-Eleven and do cocaine every day of my life, ignore the potential of becoming a filmmaker. Maybe write. Escape the trap of seeking status, just live and die with as little psychological imprint as possible. What if this coke weekend became a coke life? What if? What if? What if?