The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 22: The Job
I know this is a book and everything and I’m supposed to do all of this with language and not any other artforms and I definitely shouldn’t use the work of other artists who haven’t consented to it, but as this chapter plays out I want you to picture it set to the song Polyethylene Parts 1 & 2 by Radiohead.
What is that you say? My taste in music dates me. Well, first, fuck off. Second, remember this thing is set in 2004. And third, like that isn’t going to happen to you as well. Like it hasn’t already happened to you. And despite what every advertisement tells you, it’s better to be the man or woman who grows up and is dated by their references than to be the fool who tries to remain young forever.
Okay. Start the music. Now.
Fingers was snoring. Man, was he snoring. That man is to snoring what Michelangelo is to sculpture or David Humphrey is to hair. He was on the couch as usual and I was on my slightly wonky cot as usual. I could sense an object moving in front of my not sleepy but closed eyes. I opened them and saw Angel’s bare knee. She was standing over me, looking down.
“I can’t sleep,” she said softly.
“Neither can I.”
Angel climbed into the cot with a comfortable intimacy (and great care so as not to tip us both over), she rested her head on my chest. Then she looked up with trembling eyes. “It’s not too late. We can still leave and get away from them. We can get away from all of this.”
I looked down into those eyes and ran my fingers through her hair. We held the look on each other. “No,” I finally said softly but firmly.
She looked away from me and I looked away from her. We both stared into space for the longest time. Then I heard Angel’s voice again, even softer than the first time she spoke, even softer than my response, almost too quietly for a human’s ear, “I don’t want to have to watch you die.”
We still didn’t look at each other. I kept staring into space. I saw a scorched road in the middle of the city, sun beating down on the pavement heat rippling up into the air. I saw 2 men dressed in black coats appearing like wraiths on that pavement. They were walking towards an apartment building. Thankfully, it wasn’t mine. It was a slightly nicer building. They swooped up the stairwell without touching the ground, moving with purpose. They moved like Fingers moved when we first met Toledo; quickly, with drive, without seeming to move at all. They reached an apartment door, number 301. They didn’t knock, kicking it in, off its hinges.
Louie, dressed in a robe, eating a bowl of cereal and watching cartoons, was caught mid-bite, spoon hovering at his chin. Harry Maxwell pointed his dagger-like right index finger at Louie whose mouth was agape.
“You set us up.”
“What?” Milk and cornflakes fell from the spoon.
“You set us up.”
Tommy Maxwell stood guard at the broken door as Harry put his hands on Louie, knocking the spoon and bowl to the floor. He grabbed Louie by the frayed lapels of his robe and pulled him close, noses almost touching, “you set us up. There were cameras in the flat. Cameras! They were waiting for us!”
Louie may have shit himself at this point, I’m not sure. He started babbling, babbling, babbling. Harry kept after him, noses now touching.
“Who have you told about us! Who knows about us! Who knows about us!”
Louie’s entire living room vibrated, his entire apartment vibrated, his entire apartment building vibrated, all of Los Angeles shook.
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Angel went to work that night walking those same scorched Los Angeles streets. She was back on duty, protecting her corners, bringing in money for her new family. It was light out late during this time of year and Angel was out earlier than her usual hours because now she had a family to go home to. Angel didn’t have to wait long under the washed-out Southern California sun for her first customer of the night. It was a Toyota Corolla. There was a soft, rounded man inside. Angel leaned in and looked the man over like she normally did, assessing the situation.
Unlike other women on a typical night out, she wasn’t judging his attractiveness, she was judging him for safety, for reliability, for stability, trying to determine whether he was psychotic or not, whether he was there for brief sexual gratification or if he was there to inflict damage he couldn’t inflict in a normal relationship.
Sometimes, she didn’t have any choice in who she said yes to. When she was low on money she would take greater risks, going against her intuition, but the sad truth is that intuition didn’t matter as much as she wanted it to. The truth is Angel couldn’t tell; despite all of her hard-learned experience, all of her knowledge of men and how they behave, how they can behave, deep down she knew none of the external traits she was now closely inspecting would tell her everything she needed to know, would tell her who was the one that would put a bruise to her face, would tell her who would force themselves on her in the most brutal way, would tell her who was the one who was going to bury her in the ground.
Toyota Corolla was timid. Angel bent herself through the usual exertions, enjoying his softness, the same softness other women probably didn’t like, that probably cost him dates; for her, in her profession, such softness can be a relief from the razor-sharp hardness of the bodies and the personalities that regularly visit her.
Angel left the motel room after one hour exactly and was back on her corner in another 15 minutes. Tonight was 3, she told herself, 3 johns would be enough to make it through the night, to stay on course financially for the month. The second guy pulled up in a gleaming silver SUV. It had been washed recently and had a large back to it. Large backs are bad. But she wasn’t going to get into the car with him and she had decided she was going to do 3 tonight. He was skinny with an open face. Sharp elbows, she thought, as they went over the preliminaries.
He got to the motel room the same time she did. They entered together. He didn’t wait. Although, he was skinny and shorter than the average man, he was still bigger and stronger than Angel and he used that comparative size and strength on her. In Angel’s experience, you could tell early, very early, in the first minute or 2 or 3 in the room, how it was going to go. Maybe that’s why she didn’t bolt on me when she had the chance, she already knew what I wanted from the encounter, I had told her more with my actions and inactions than I had even known, and she was willing to see her curiosity out.
Silver SUV was no exception to this rule, he was clear in the first minutes as well, but what he wanted wasn’t as benign as an open-hearted conversation. Pain needed to be inflicted. Not the type of pain in a BDSM relationship that pinched and marked flesh as roles are played, but greater pain, psychic pain; hurt.
Whether it was because Silver SUV had been hurt in his life, in his childhood, in his adolescence or adulthood, whether there were tangible reasons for why he hated women (and perhaps all other human beings) or whether it was because he was simply born that way, Angel didn’t care as extra hard thrusts and pulls and hits came at her vulnerable body.
Rage filled the man’s eyes as indicators of unwanted pain were frantically sent to Angel’s cortex from different inflicted parts of her skin and tissue. Angel looked away, to the red figures on the clock radio, willing them to tick by faster, willing them to take her life away from this or to take her life away.
She didn’t know what was worse, what this man was doing to her body and her sexual organs or that she was in no position to stop him from doing it. But survival is like a virus, she wanted to survive no matter what he did to her. She didn’t want his face to be the last thing she ever sees. She accepted the pain because she had to accept it to survive, because she saw no other choice. Sex, some people call what they were doing sex. But it wasn’t sex to her. It wasn’t making love, it wasn’t even fucking; she knew those things existed somewhere in the world, maybe she would get to experience them again if she survived. But now it was just surviving, of looking at those red numbers, letting the red wash over her like waves, like covers a child hides under in their bed at night from the scary monsters in their closet. Who the hell needs fictional scary monsters in this goddamned world? There are plenty of monsters. We don’t need to invent any.
Angel vomited in the back alley like she did sometimes after a particularly nasty job. A cigarette. She desperately needed a cigarette, her safety blanket. She pulled a pack from her purse, hands trembling, pulled one of the last cigarettes from the pack, hands trembling, and tried to light it with her plastic Bic liter, hands still trembling. Her Parkinsonian fingers wouldn’t work properly, they flicked the lighter once, twice, I need that fucking cigarette, the third time the flame engaged. She inhaled the nicotine, the tar, all of the other bad things that will kill her if she lives into retirement age, suddenly calmed again, hands now steady, all of those years, all of the pain gone. She was back on duty. One more john for the night. One more john and she can go home.
-----
The Pacific sun had faded past its purple sunset and now there was just flat even dusky light pierced by the potholes of street lights as they all lit up at once like a string of bulbs on a Christmas tree when they are first plugged in. If I get someone soon, she thought, I will be home by 10, this would be the first time in a very long time Angel would have finished a night of work so early, not since her very first days on the job, when she was too scared to stay out late into the abyssian darkness of the night with these strange men (and a few women) had she finished so many so early.
She was looking forward to the comfort of home, of sleeping in her bed with her annoying frustrating dysfunctional family all around her in her tiny apartment. She absent-mindedly smiled as she thought of the 2 of us and our stupid board games and our silly optimistic ways of thinking. It was surprisingly nice to have people to go home to. After so many years alone, it was nice to not be so alone.
A black luxury car that wasn’t a Mercedes or BMW pulled up to her corner. It had tinted windows. Angel hated tinted windows. And Los Angeles was the tinted window capitol of the world. Sometimes, it seemed like half the cars in L.A. had tinted windows. Weren’t there laws against this? Well, if there were laws against it they definitely weren’t being enforced, not on the streets where Angel walked. Not in the decade this story takes place in. The police probably had other things to worry about besides pulling over drivers with illegally tinted windows. Like busting prostitutes. They always seemed to have time to do that. This was another reason Angel hated tinted windows. The unfairness. Tinted windows caused people to get into car accidents, caused people to get injured and die, all she did was fuck people for a living, why did society hate her more than tinted windows.
The car idled at the corner. Angel debated whether she should keep walking. She could pretend that she was only a blazingly inappropriately dressed woman ready for a normal night out on the town and keep walking past the idling car and down the street like she was looking for some friends. But she had put the number at 3 tonight and she was nothing if not responsible, surprisingly conservative in temperament and her adherence to schedule compared to her peers (part of this no doubt was due to the fact that she was no longer addicted to one drug or another, but much of it was her natural constitution as well, she always thought she would have made a good accountant in another life, or maybe a bookkeeper in a dry goods firm). Tinted Windows would have to do.
She approached warily, peering in as best she could. She knew how to handle this, she reassured herself, with cops, non-cops, she knew what to say and what not to say to get out of a bad situation. The window rolled down. It was a young guy. He looked safe, if a little twitchy. And he was rather good-looking, not a necessity but not a bad way to end the night either. This was going to be easy.
Angel leaned in to the window. “Hi, Cowboy.”
The young man didn’t say anything. He looked over her right shoulder.
Odd, why is he looking behind me, Angel wondered, as her brain started to make instinctive calculations that only took a second. But a second was too long. She could feel the presence of someone behind her. He was standing too close. Hairs rose all over her body. Get out of there. She stood up, removing her face from the window. Get out. Now. Her muscles, tendons engaged like a sprinter at the sound of the starting pistol, whipping her shoulder away from the car to turn her body in the other direction.
Only her body didn’t turn, her shoulder didn’t whip. Her muscles moved but her body stayed in place. His hands were on her. They were strong hands, vices that clamped her down, making her immobile, frozen. She wasn’t getting loose from those hands. The man knew what he was doing and was strong enough to stop a woman from escaping no matter how much she kicked and screamed, he was strong enough to stop most men from escaping no matter how much they tried to run.
“Hello, luv,” Harry Maxwell said to Angel as she futilely struggled. “Let’s go for a ride.”
The back door of the car opened and he threw her in and followed her inside. The door closed and the black Audi with tinted windows drove off into the black night sky.