AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 65

“Who is it!” the voice barked.

“Phil.”

“Come in.”

Phil opened the door to Eric’s private study, and there the guy was with his pants down and his limp dick in his left hand, giving himself an injection with his right hand.  Instant erection.  Papaverine and phenotolamine.  A three-hour hard.

The desk lamp was the only lamp on in the dark, richly upholstered and wood-paneled room.  The sickly-sweet smog lay heavy in the air.  The pasta basica cigarette hung from Eric’s lips, as he talked and stabbed his dick with the needle and squeezed down the syringe; talked of moving Courty onto the yacht.  Not his halfpint Witch Wave, but his father’s 162-foot Lowlander.

Phil wanted to grab the cigarette from the guy’s face and stomp it out, but he made no move.  He did not even sit down in one of the chairs or the soft leather couch.

Phil looked at the once impeccably handsome face.  The savage scar from the edge of his left eye, dug deep and long, back into his scalp, closed with ugly flesh-colored stitches.  His right cheek: four red torn strips of flesh down the side.  He looked like he had fought a wildcat, and lost.  It was going to take three-stage plastic surgery, and the man would never again be the flawlessly handsome young god.

The mark of Cain?  No, the man had the mark of Courty on his face.  What with interest and deposits, Courtney Foulke Ryan’s savings account at Bank of America had accrued from a respectable $957,002.55 to a keep-B-of-A-out-of-bankruptcy $25,962,905.86.  But Courty took exception to runaway taxis that wouldn’t take her where she wanted to go, wouldn’t stop, and that puffed sleepy-time gas in her face.  She was not favorably impressed with waking up in strange sumptuous surroundings, and she definitely did not care for servants who would bring her anything except a telephone, who would let her go anywhere except out of the penthouse.  Courty had poetically expressed her displeasure by trying to stab out Eric’s left eye with her dinner fork.

Eric looked badly in other ways, this evening.  His hair was greasy and unkempt, his eyes yellow and red, and the skin around his eyes was peeling off in tiny dry flakes.  Facial dandruff.  His lips were dry and cracked too.

Philip said, “She knows you’re the one who fucked her up and made the movie of her on the boat.  She’s known all along.”  It got no visible reaction out of Eric.  The man just went on silently stabbing his dick.  “She knew you fucked her up on that boat, and she didn’t tell anyone.”

Reaction.  Phil watched the face contort, while Eric still had his dick in his hand, still had the sharp needle inserted in his dick; his whole body bent forward.  Tears dripped from Eric’s eyes.  The words sobbed out of him: “I love her so much!”  He pulled the needle out of his limp dick and threw the syringe on his desk.  “I’ve got to reach her!  I’ve got to reach her!”  Now he was clenching his fist.  And the fist was shaking with uncontrollable jitters.  Eric reached for the glass of water, but knocked it over.  “Fuck,” he cried, without any emphasis at all except tears, as he watched it roll off the back side of his desk and dink on the carpeting.  He took a sobbing swig directly from the iced jug.  He almost knocked the jug over, setting it down.

“If you love her so much, why the hell did you do all that to her?!”

“You don’t understand, you don’t understand,” Eric cried.

Eric’s cigarette fell out of his mouth onto the carpeting.  Slowly . . . slowly . . . Eric bent down and picked it up, and put it back in the contorting mouth on his wounded crying face.  “I will reach her!” he sobbed.

The drugs did their dirt.  The penis enlarged and stiffened into a straight-up bone-hard erection.  The erection vastly improved Eric’s spirits.  Eric breathed deeply, wiped the shiny tears from his face, and tried to smile.  “This is all temporary,” he said.  “She’ll come around to my way of thinking.  Positive and negative reinforcement, that’s the ticket.  She’s going to love living with me.  You’ll see.”

“Maybe the game is up, man.  She knows you did those things to her.  You’re not going to get her to like you by waving money in her face.”

“Phil, you don’t know shit about women.”  Eric Des Barres pulled up his underwear and pants.  The roaring hard-on required some wrestling and three additional belt notches.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I do know.  You’re time is running out.  You’d better convince her pretty quick.  You can’t keep all this a secret forever.”

“Can’t I?” Eric taunted.

Phil plodded ahead.  “No.  You can’t.”

“You don’t know shit, Phil.”

“People are going to talk.  People are already talking.  She’s not some anonymous babe.  She’s Courty!  She’s more famous now than Nina Lindsay ever was.  Remember Twiggy?  Remember Marilyn Monroe?  Courty is about as famous as a woman can get.  World-wide, about 45 million girls have Courty-cuts.  I mean, do you know any young girls who don’t have lopsided hair?  Name me one.  I tell ya, you’re taking a terrible chance, man!”

“You don’t know shit.”

Phil found himself wondering if he should quit now, cut loose and run.  The madness was escalating.  There had to be limits.  The old man’s money couldn’t shield his son from everything.  And getting through to the guy’s brain was just getting harder and harder.

Eric stubbed out the cocaine ciggy, and pulled a new one from his silver case, filtered, professionally rolled by machine.  Eric Des Barres couldn’t be bothered with roaches.

Phil stepped forward and tried to knock the cigarette out of his hands, but Eric stepped back fast and wild, and warned, “Stop it!”  It was a snarl.  Eric stabbed a finger down at a button on his desk.

Phil realized that he had frightened the guy.  He held his palms up and lowered his face in a gesture of submission.  “Des Barres, I wish you’d quit smoking that shit.  Honest to God, man, it’s almost as bad as doing crack dusted with PCP.  I’m serious, man, you might as well spacebase.  There’s stuff in there——”

“Shut the fuck up!” Eric yelled.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.  This is the cleanest and the safest way to smoke coke.  I don’t know why you keep throwing that crap at me!  What are you trying to prove?  That you know more than I do?  You Don’t!  You don’t know shit about drugs, Phil.  You don’t know shit about shit!  You’re just fucking pissed ’cause you didn’t have the balls to fuck her!  You didn’t fuck her, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.  But obviously, you’re going to.”

Aragon and Marty, two of Eric’s big killer/bodyguards burst into the room without knocking.  Aragon first, his hand inside his coat ready to pull his gun on command.

Eric smiled triumphantly.  “Stay close, Aragon.  Come on in and stick around.”

“OK, boss.”

Marty backed out into the hail.  The big Mexican closed the door, and stood leaning against it, watching Philip.

It was so stupid.  A bodyguard to protect him from his bodyguard?  “I’m on your side, man,” Phil said.  “I’m not going to attack you.  I’m just trying to talk to you.”

Eric lit up, and inhaled deeply, savoring the instant high, grinning like a paranoid thief.

That was the problem: How do you talk to the guy?  Who’s gonna tell John Lennon that his new album is shit?  No, Howard Hughes, you can’t save your urine in little bottles!

Walter Pudge, the big idiot, was running a King Kong con on Des Barres.  And he’d done it so slick, there was no way to get past the fuzzballs in Eric’s ears.

Pasta basica was the impure intermediate extraction from the coca leaves.  Anywhere from 40% to 85% cocaine, the paste had toxic impurities in it.  It was dirt cheap; you could get a kilo of it for less than two grand.  Des Barres was paying Pudge $16,000 a kilo for it.  Phil tried to tell him that he was getting ripped off, but the guy just had no ears.  Des Barres thought that it was purer than straight cocaine because it was closer to the leaf.  That was like those musicians in the movie who thought their amplifiers were better because the knobs went up to 11!  Yeah, OK, hundreds of thousands of Peruvians did smoke the Spinal-Tap crap.  So what?  They were third-world losers anyway, who probably couldn’t afford better.  For Eric Des Barres, one of the richest dudes around, to smoke the stupid shit . . . the mind boggled.  It was like smoking crack and sniffing airplane glue at the same time.  It was even messing up his voice.  Eric used to have a deep strong voice, now his shredded vocal cords sounded like a busted saxophone.

But Philip didn’t push it.  His salary was $200,000 a year, and his own cocaine habit cost him damn near half.

Eric cut loose with a king-size cough, and he was suddenly gasping, breathing fast short mini-breaths.  The cigarette went flying onto the carpet.  Eric had the desk drawer open in one second, and the little green oxygen bottle cranked on, the next second.  By the third second he had the mask over his face.  He coughed into it.  Philip could see the dark colored phlegm sticking to the inside of the translucent mask, dripping down it slowly.

“Fuck,” Eric said weakly.  He breathed the pure oxygen like a ragged, wasted old man, continuing to choke back coughs.

“You OK, boss?” Aragon asked.

Phil didn’t tell him that he should stop smoking the shit.  Phil didn’t tell him that he should see a doctor.  Pointless.  Phil watched the cigarette burning a black strip in the tan carpeting six inches from Phil’s left shoe.  He let it burn.

After a minute, Eric cranked off the gas, put away the mask, and popped six yellow pills that Phil knew were Valiums.  He took another swig off the jug.  He lit up another cocaine ciggy, forgetting about the one on the floor.

“Remind me to put Courty on a diet,” Eric said.  “She’s getting fat.”

Phil couldn’t believe that Eric had said that, so his response took a second.  “She’s pregnant!”

Eric couldn’t believe that Phil had said that, so his response took a second.  “What?  No!”

Phil couldn’t believe etc.  “It’s been reported in all the media.”

“Oh.  I just look at the pictures.  Are you sure?  Morgan didn’t report that.”

“Bring in your own doctor, if you don’t believe me.  Hell, all you have to do is look at her to know she’s pregnant!”  Fat.  Jesus Christ.

“An abortion,” Eric decided thoughtfully, in a cloud of smoke.  “It’s the only way.  Well!  I feel like fucking!”

The telephone rang.  It was the private line——no, more private than that.  Exactly one person knew this telephone number.  Exactly the person who was at this moment chained to the bed in his gameroom.

But it offered a minor diversion.  Eric opened the leather case that enclosed the phone and picked up the receiver.  “You have the wrong number.”  It pleased him to be able to say this with certainty.

“Let me talk to Courty,” the man’s voice demanded.

The smile slipped from Eric’s face.  Then, he found himself laughing.  It was hilarious.  “Let me guess: your name is Byron Reed.”  He chuckled some more.

“Let me guess,” the telephone voice said, “you’re Eric Barres.”

“Des Barres,” Eric snapped.

“Are you going to let me talk to her or not?”

Eric took another puff of cocaine smoke, and smiled, formulating a reply.  The words were exquisitely beautiful.  Eric thought he was taking a quite proper and appropriate one second or so to frame his answer into a rhetoric of precision, so he was surprised when Reed interrupted him, after 4.5 seconds of objective time, before he could say the first syllable.

“Let me talk to her now, over the phone, or I’ll come and talk to her in person.”

Eric’s mind loafed on the crest of bussed-out; and for two whole real-time seconds (that now seemed like an exploded half-minute) he was amused by the pun: he had a stiff, and he was talking to a stiff.  But the minor amusement faded, disappointingly flat and dry and weak, a barren dustbowl of unfulfilled ecstasy.  He sucked hard on the cigarette.  Cocaine used to be such a pure-bred joy.  The first time he had freebased, it had been an awesome Swiss-Army-knife gusto.  He had the whole world by the balls!  But recapturing the early supercharged thrills was always just fractionally out of reach, one snort away, one smoke short.  Perhaps he should just go ahead and get his head hard-wired for millivoltage directly into his pleasure center.  Except that the two guys Eric knew who had the “wirehead” implants were now damn near autistic vegetables.  Life was so wearisome.  What price pleasure?  You win: you lose.  You lose: you lose.  What a monumental bore.  Eric was suddenly bored, and talking to a bore; and the pun was the lowest form of humor, no fizz at all.  “Fuck off,” Eric abruptly told Reed, hanging up.

“Was that Byron Reed?” Phil asked.

Eric puffed.

“I’m worried about that guy,” Phil went on.  “He could be dangerous.”

But Eric couldn’t be bothered with further thoughts of Byron Reed, the walking dead man.  “Already taken care of.   Who wants to do a sandwich with me?”  He smiled easily at Phil, taunting him.

Aragon, the big Mexican, smiled also.

COURTNEY, Chapter 66
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47