I can't remember clearly, but I think there was a car, then a train, then another car, then a boat, a train, a car, a plane, until it all blended together into a single blurry forward motion. I may have been in a limo at some point, but that would have been later in the trip, and by then those little bottles of liquor all begin to look and taste the same, and you only distinguish between brown and clear. There was an astounding amount of booze, and there may or may not have been a helicopter involved.
Regardless, when I woke up what could have been the next morning, or quite possibly the next week, I was in a cheap motel in Las Vegas with a woman who looked like she could suck the titanium off a golf club. She might have been a hooker, she might have been the woman behind the counter in the rental office, but God, she was ugly, and I would have eaten off my own arm to get away from her, so I dropped twenty bucks on the bedside table and took off into the blistering heat of Nevada summer.
What I did the rest of the afternoon is inconsequential, which is just as well because between the liquor and the coke I scored from one of the shiftier residents in town, I don't remember much. But that night, oh that night when the sun went down and the dizzying neon lights of Vegas went up, it was my kind of town, Baby. The craps tables were hot, and my wrist was not, so I blew ten Big Ones alongside my new buddies, a group of Japanese businessmen who were there less for the gambling and more for the American women.
So, I took those boys down to one of the hotter titty bars I knew, where if you threw in an extra hundred bucks or so, the girls would take your slacks off before they gave you a lap dance, if you know what I mean. I didn't understand a word of what those little bastards were saying, but between the Hot Sake and Naked American Girls, I knew they were having one hell of a good time.
For some reason, about halfway into--God only knows--my hundredth or so drink of the night, I decided I was no longer having a good time. One more shake of a g-stringed ass, one more naked tit, one more dollar shoved into one more unmentionable, it didn't make a difference, not even if I dropped another ten thousand at the tables. One more drink and I would fly away, one more line of the good stuff and my head would explode. I was charging fast and headfirst down my intended path of self-destruction, and I hated myself. Self-destruction had turned out to be masturbation without the pleasure at the end.
So I got up from my table where my new friends were shouting in Japanese at a stripper named Mary Quite Contrary and stumbled off through the darkness of the club. My head was spinning, my synapses firing in every direction, my brain trying to make my body fall down. I remember falling halfway across some fat guy's table, knocking over his drinks, and hearing "Fucking asshole," and I responded with "Fuck you, fatty," knowing he wouldn't do anything about it. He stood up to me, but when I didn't back down, he mumbled something like "Coked up motherfucker," and then sat down again.
In all honesty, I wanted to fight him; I wanted him to whoop the Living Shit out of me. There's nothing like getting knocked around by a couple of greasy ham fists you don't stand a chance against to make you feel alive. But he was just like most of the self-proclaimed tough guys I'd met in the bars and the casinos and the flop-houses: all talk, but pussies deep down, because in the end, they all had something to live for, and anyone with something to live for will instinctively avoid pain.
I invited the pain, that bitch, I invited her into my life with open arms.
I was outside catching a much-needed whiff of fresh air, wishing I could get the noise and stink of the city out of my head. It was impossible for me to stand still, it was cold, I was shaking, I was full of booze and drugs, I could only pace and wish the shit would pass through my system quickly. I hadn't actually slept in months; only passed into fits of alcoholic unconsciousness. My rest would come in blackouts or it wouldn't come at all, but who needed energy when you could get it in a bottle of pills? I was in brutal need of sleep, real sleep, natural sleep, if there ever was such a thing.
I felt sick for a moment, and goddamn it, if I didn't think I was going to puke right there in front of the club like the rest of the drunks. But I was no regular drunk, I was an exceptional drunk, and I'd kept my liquor down under the direst of circumstances. When it passed, I was cold. It gets cold in the desert at night, but this was different, like an icicle driven right through the top of my head to the base of my spine. Christ, it hurt, but that was good. I was still alive, I hadn't destroyed myself yet.
I don't know what compelled me to turn around, but it was like I knew she was there. How long she'd actually been there watching me was the big question, and why. But when I turned, there she was, standing in darkness by the club, and I could see her eyes, those piercing gray eyes cutting through the night, locked on me. When she stepped out of the shadows, those eyes shifted, from gray to blue, then back again. I don't know how they did that, but they did. It was cool in a terrifying kind of way, or terrifying in a cool kind of way.
Gorgeous, head to toe. Long, straight raven black hair, pale skin, almost too pale, but she didn't seem sick or weak, she looked quite healthy, as a matter of fact. The long, black coat she wore looked to be entirely silk, or some other material that slipped through the air like a breeze as she moved. Her every movement, even something as simple as walking, was graceful and deliberate.
"Can I help you?" I asked her a little more impatiently than I intended.
"I can help you," she said quietly, with the slightest hint of some kind of accent, the tone of her voice almost too perfect to be human. It was light and sultry, the kind of voice you imagine on all those quit-smoking self-hypnosis tapes, except better.
"I'm a little fucked up right now," I said, "and I blew all my money at the tables..."
"Money?"
"Yeah, money, you know, the green stuff, dead presidents? I don't even have enough in my pocket for a hand job, so scram."
Then those lips, those luscious crimson lips, they smiled at me. They turned up in the most righteous grin I'd ever seen, and the cold surged back through my body again. I knew she wasn't a hooker, I don't know why I said what I said. There was no way she was a hooker, and if she was, she was some special new breed of hooker created in a lab solely for the purpose of breaking men's hearts, emptying their bank accounts and draining their souls.
She tilted her head a bit and that smile seemed to be frozen on her face, that smile that was sending through me...what was it? Fear? God no, it couldn't be fear, because in my state of mind, I feared no one, not the cops, not the bouncers in the clubs, or even the fucking fatty whose drinks I knocked over. I didn't fear pain and I didn't fear death. I feared nothing or no one except this gorgeous young girl in black whose smile was making me tremble.
"What's your name?" I heard myself ask.
"Victoria." Her accent, what the hell was it? Some kind of western-European thing, but fuck it, there were like three thousand countries over there, and they all had their own languages.
"Victoria, Victoria..." I said absently.
Silence. The smile had faded, replaced by the intense stare of those gray eyes, the eyes that were staring straight through me, deep down into the little place where I kept my soul. They burned away at the defenses I'd developed over the years all throughout my being so that no one would be able to get to the real me. But here was this girl, who appeared out of the darkness, and I could tell she could see straight through my bullshit, all of my precious, precious bullshit.
"Victoria?"
"Yes?"
"How can you help me?"
