Dotted all around the ragged purple-brown horizon were clusters of buildings, signs of human habitation everywhere. To the far right, Sarah could just about make out the HOLLYWOOD sign. In the foreground were the streets of West Hollywood, mostly residential areas of small bungalows and low-rise apartment buildings, along with the trendy shopping streets like Melrose and La Brea.
As she scanned the view, inhibited by the damn neck brace, Sarah had an odd, disembodied feeling, as if she were slipping into a dream. It was as if the hotel wasn’t there, and she was suspended in mid-air over Hollywood. Her senses felt enhanced, as they had sometimes when she was stoned. But her mind was clear. She knew what was happening. Had known since she remembered Mitch calling her “Little Star.”
Somehow, the terror of the chase or the car accident itself had jogged her memory and released a flood of information.
Sarah turned away from the window, feeling a little dizzy, and paced the room. God, she was tired; she hoped they caught the stalker soon. They were close; she could sense it in Arvo’s manner, in the way he had hurried off after bringing her to the room, like a hound on the fox’s scent. It was the thrill of the chase, the whiff of blood. She wanted her life back. All of it.
She helped herself to a gin and tonic from the minibar and sat down on the sofa. She didn’t really want a drink, but she felt restless. It was something to do, and it might help take the edge off her nerves now the sedative had worn off. She thumbed through The New Yorker but couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. There was nothing on TV, either, except soap operas.
As soon as she tasted the gin, she thought of the tour. Gin and tonic had been Sarah’s drink then, and the taste brought back memories. So did hotel rooms. They acted on her the way the “madeleine” did on Proust.
Sometimes on tour, she would sit up all night with the band playing poker, smoking, drinking, maybe listening to late-night radio stations in Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New Orleans or Phoenix. She couldn’t remember the places, just the one composite hotel room, the pills, the joints, the drunkenness and the hallucinatory quality of it alclass="underline" someone fucking in the bathtub while one of the sound tekkies puked down the toilet; someone, maybe Gary or the lead guitarist, whatsisname, going crazy and trashing the room.
Now she had the memories back, they didn’t matter. She knew now that she hadn’t really lost her memory in the first place, hadn’t blocked out incidents. The whole thing had been exactly like her memories of it. That was it. There was no more. The entire experience had been a blur; it was vague. That was exactly the quality that life had possessed above all others at that time: a kind of hallucinatory, jump-frame vagueness. What seemed blurred now had been blurred then. In fact, things were perhaps a little clearer now than they ever had been at the time.
It had been a long walk on the wild side for her — more of a stagger, really — and if she had slept with a few people she shouldn’t have, so what? Chalk it up to experience. After all, she hadn’t caught any diseases, and she had come through.
She also remembered the incident that had finally driven her to run away from the tour madness and into a different kind of madness of her own, the incident she had begun to tell Arvo about in hospital. Thank God she had stopped herself in time.
It had been a very hot day and the band was staying at a hotel in Anaheim. They were supposed to be playing at the stadium there the next night. Gary needed some designer-drug cocktail or other, and Mitch had found a guy who lived over in the trailer park across the road. Someone who dealt a little.
So, they had gone over. Gary, herself, Mitch and his brother. Inside, the trailer was hot and stuffy. One of the windows was open an inch, but it didn’t help much. Someone had stuck yellow plastic daisy and sunflower appliqués on the walls beside the crude drawings of cocks and cunts, the kind of thing she’d once seen in a gents toilet in Bognor Regis one drunken night long ago.
Sarah was sitting in a battered armchair, she remembered, the kind with the seat so worn and low that it’s difficult to get out of easily, especially if you’re as spaced as she was. There was a fat woman at a table by the door silently removing her bright red nail polish, head bent so she showed at least three chins. She was wearing shorts and a black tank top that strained at its seams over her bulk. The acrid smell of acetone infused the hot, stale air.
The man from whom Gary was buying the drugs was skinny and wore only a pair of garish Hawaiian shorts. He had no hairs on his chest and a tattoo of an anchor on his upper right arm. His teeth were bad, like a speed freak’s; his long hair was greasy, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. He smoked one joint after another. The other man in the trailer looked like a biker to Sarah, with a full beard, beer gut, black T-shirt and torn, oil-stained jeans. The smell of oil and grease formed an undertone to the nail polish remover and marijuana smoke. Like the woman, he too remained silent.
The only ones doing the talking were Gary and the skinny guy. Sarah remembered wanting to leave, but she was so out of it, and so deep in the armchair, that she couldn’t muster the energy.
Seven of them in there, then. And the dog. A bowlegged, mean-eyed, ugly pit bull with a black-and-white snout. It looked like the dog equivalent of a shark, Sarah thought — single-minded, merciless, vicious — and it scared her the way it kept coming over to her and sniffing. She asked the biker to tell it to go away but he ignored her. So did the skinny guy and the fat woman too. They all snorted a sample of the designer drug. All except Sarah, who had just about had it by then, and Mitch’s brother, who never touched drugs.
Everyone got more bright-eyed and excited. God knew what was in the cocktail, but they either seemed to find every word a priceless witticism or every sentence a pronouncement of the most profound importance. It was all getting to seem very silly to Sarah, who was coming down fast now, and she was trying to work up the energy to get out of the damn armchair.
But the dog wouldn’t leave her alone. It kept sticking its snout in her crotch, pushing hard up against her. She kept shoving it away but it just glared at her and came back for more. She was wearing a short skirt, and the position she was stuck in, the dog could get its nose under the hem, right between her thighs and rub against her panties.
Getting scared now, she smacked it hard on the snout one time and it snarled at her. The others noticed then, distracted out of their drugged haze for a moment. Then the skinny guy pointed, said “Look,” and they all started to laugh. Sarah couldn’t see because of her position, so she twisted sideways and saw that the dog had an enormous erection.
She told them she didn’t think it was funny and tried to get out of the chair again. But the dog stopped her. This time it put its forepaws up on her breasts and tried to straddle her. This brought howls of laughter from the skinny guy and the fat woman. Even the biker grinned. “Hung like a horse, that dog,” he said.
Then, before Sarah knew what was happening, the dog was sniffing and rubbing around her thighs with its snout, great hard-on down between its back legs, and the mingled smells of motor oil and marijuana smoke and acetone were stifling her, the heat making her skin burn and her heart pound. Christ, she was coming down so fast it was leaving skid-marks on her brain.
Someone tried to pull her out of the armchair. He got her almost all the way out, then she felt dizzy, slipped out of his grasp and slumped over to one side, hanging over the chair arm. She could feel the dog nudging her and sniffing between her legs from behind now and someone said something about doggie-style and she felt a hand pull at her panties.