The Neptune Mission

Chapter 1 – The Neptune Mission

Carson got off the bus and had to look at the faces, the bodies of homeless and addicts stacked in front of the shelter. He was better than they, he thought. But he was forced to admit that even he was one of them now. He’d gambled away the title to his house on a poker and whore binge in Reno. He not only lost his home, but his job, his wife and his kids. When he pleaded for mercy, his son Scully threatened to shoot him – just before the cops hauled him away and the judge in night court slapped him with a restraining order. If it was mercy he wanted, his wife Beth told him, he could take his case to the taxpayers of California. After 18 years of marriage her pity was exhausted. He could go to hell. Carson might have thanked Beth for the long years of her sacrifice. Instead, he told her to fuck off. After 18 years, old habits remained stubborn.

            Carson’s new neighbors lay sprawled on the sidewalk in a disfigured tableau of unwashed angels with badly clipped wings. The tormented city block was drenched in a vapor of urine heated by the bitter sunlight shooting down from over the L.A. River. He walked past a battery of outstretched hands, toothless curses, disconnected soliloquies, and racist-tinged threats. He was accosted by vulgar propositions for sex from women whose gender could only be discerned by the leathery breasts that hung exposed, withered and neglected from carelessly buttoned shirts. It was nice to know he could get laid, thought Carson, if he only had a quarter.

Carson was destitute. He was also conflicted about the need to alter his strategies, the ones he’d always used to get what he wanted. He knew he had some problems – card games and a weakness for young things who talked dirty, to name two – but he was no juicer, pill mill or spiker, like the flotsam hung out to dry on the sidewalk before him. He had his mind and he had a plan. He was here, he persuaded himself, to find Giambone – not for any other reason. This was purely a business call being paid to an old friend. As long as there was the prospect of another card game, there was hope. Giambone was his meal ticket. If he had to, Carson was determined to wade through all the shit parked downtown just to find him. And there was no denying now that he was in it up to his knees. All the turds of the universe were squirming in the heat. Most had taken on a vaguely human shape.

            Carson hadn’t seen his friend in five years. Not since Giambone’s girlfriend kicked him out of her house. Carson did what he could to help him out then. It seemed the glow of celebrity had grown dim. In the end, Giambone’s catastrophic flaws always snuffed the erotic combustion that came from having a hugely famous rock star as a brother. And like Carson’s wife, Giambone’s woman lacked compassion. Giambone was shocked to learn she’d lost her taste for a penis that was chronically flaccid from years of alcohol abuse. Or so he said. The fact that Giambone was strenuously, even philosophically opposed to human labor contributed to his forced exile. His lack of shelter became a more or less permanent condition. His luck with women over the years had finally run out. Even with his genetic proximity to a superstar celebrity, he found himself getting less and less in the way of feminine secretions, unless it was saliva propelled with malice from beneath their acrid tongues.

Misshapen though he was by booze, and a lifetime immersed in esoteric, crackpot ideas of the occult, Giambone had always been an easy charmer. And Carson was working on a hunch. If he could find him, some sexual cache might still be found in the sauced remains of his old friend. Giambone had never shrunk from trading upon the blood status conferred by his brother Jack’s stardom. But it was currency he hardly used for more than a drink, a stupid job, or female attention. Carson even doubted it could be tendered very far now. He knew that any residue of Giambone’s charisma would only succeed with the incredibly naïve – those cooing, green souls freshly hatched in the world; young, doe-eyed darlings who wouldn’t comprehend that the bloated face of Giambone’s former good looks should be taken as a firm caveat. If they ever figured out that Giambone rarely profited monetarily from his brother’s fame, his aura of celebrity would blacken like industrial soot on the fronds of sunny palms. Giambone was so emotionally fucked up he couldn’t profit. He neither cared nor knew how. Nevertheless, Carson was staking himself on what little ability the 45-year-old Giambone still had left in him to attract the young, the dumb and the starstruck – about three quarters of the female population of Hollywood. His old buddy was the only collateral he had left to get back in the game.

            Neptune’s Mission was downtown on Main Street at Third. It was the same building that had housed the old Neptune movie theater built in the 1920’s. Since then it had undergone a number of transformations, first as a flophouse for indigent sailors, then a wholesale warehouse for cheap bridal gowns favored by pregnant Mexican 16-year-olds; after that, a 24-hour porn theater. In its penultimate incarnation, before its resurrection as a Christian homeless shelter, it served as an illegal forum for bare-knuckle boxing matches and cock fights popular with undocumented Central Americans. Carson got the address from an acquaintance, someone who heard that Giambone was staying there. And it was there that Carson now stood, poised to join the ranks of the notorious, infamous, and forgotten of L.A.; the lost souls who called the Neptune their home, for reasons either sordid or suspect.

            All the doors to the mission were shut and locked. A sign stated that they would reopen at 6 P.M. Carson turned from the main door and looked toward the street. He had no money and nothing but time. He thought about walking to a better part of town to wait it out. He tried the door once more. From his right he noticed a short and skinny man approaching him, walking in an odd and jerky gait. The man was dressed in greasy pleated slacks and a stained Hawaiian shirt.

            “Ain’t nobody home. Even so, they wouldn’t open for you, not if you was dyin’. And you don’t look like you’re dyin’; not yet.”

            Carson felt a repugnant sensation erupt in his cheek muscles and envelop his head. He steeled himself for this encounter. Carson’s losses – his miscalculations and his plain bad luck – were the reason he was now forced to deal with such cretins. He hated himself for losing so big. But his self-hatred was generous enough to include others in its embrace, and this little man, this exemplar of walking human bile, was an easy target of contempt. Like Carson, the man was white – not a prodigious color in that part of town. Normally, a common skin pigment might offer some benefit in a neighborhood where Carson needed as much help as he could get. Yet Carson was certain that this man would make a dubious ally even under the best of conditions. Their racial similarity just made it easier for Carson to detect the disturbing nuances of the stranger’s veteran pathology. He was a specimen from the lowest rung of depredation in that steep hierarchy of scammers and losers.

            “Run along, sport,” said Carson. “I’m not interested in what you got.”

            “It may be that you got what I need.”

            “I said get lost, man.”

Carson walked away. The little man was undeterred and followed Carson down the street.

            “Look it, dude,” he said, trailing a few feet behind Carson, “I know kin. I know a brother when I see him. You got that hungry look. You and me can help each other out, brother. I can see you’re in it for the long haul.”

            Carson stopped and turned toward the little man. He looked him up and down. He was not one to provoke a fistfight but he knew he had to make a threat. The little man looked up at Carson. The sun, directly over Carson’s head, caused the little man to squint. His face was gray and his hair long and thin. He smiled feebly. His teeth were brown and rotting. He was coiled tight and wiry from years of living on the street. He wiped his arm across his mouth and chuckled nervously.

            “If you don’t stop following me,” said Carson in a low and deliberate voice, “I’m going to fuck you up.”

            “Whoa, dude. Whatever. Okay,” replied the little man, raising his hands with his palms out toward Carson.

He backed up a couple of steps.

“I just thought, you know, maybe you were lookin’ for some help.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Carson assumed the little man was trying to sell him drugs.

            “I can see that now, brother. My mistake. I usually can spot ‘em, but I was wrong. Maybe I can help you out anyway. You know, with the lay of the land, so to speak. It’s pretty clear you don’t know your way around. I need a favor and I might be able to help you out.”

            “I don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re lookin’ for,” said Carson.

He could see the little man was harmless, just working it like everyone else. Carson was in no mood to make any friends downtown, but he realized he had to cut people in if he were to make any progress.

            “I’m lookin’ for someone,” he told the man.

            “I know a lot of people around here. Maybe I know him. Or is it a woman? You gotta runaway daughter?”

            “It’s not a woman. It’s a friend. Take a look and tell me if you know him.”

Carson pulled a photograph from his shirt pocket. The photo was ten years old. It showed Carson and Giambone together. Their arms were buddied up and cigars hung easy from their mouths. The picture was taken at a bachelor party for their friend Ely Crowley. Crowley went on to marry two more times, until his last wife shot him. She got off on self-defense and Crowley was still in jail with a bullet lodged in his pelvis. Carson and Giambone seemed happy in the picture. Their lives were less complicated back then. They were just getting acquainted with their appetites in those days. The stakes weren’t as high.

            “Yeah, I know this guy.”

            “You do,” asked Carson, surprised but skeptical.

            “Sure. What the fuck’s his name? Garibaldi. Ghiradelli or some shit. I don’t remember. Everyone calls him the Philosopher. What the hell are you, a cop?”

            “I’m a friend.”

            “Right. That’s what you said.”

            “Can you tell me where he is? Have you seen him around lately?”

            “Depends.”

            “Depends on what.”

            “What you’re willin’ to trade. Simple.”

            “I got nothin’ to trade, man.” Carson was getting angry. “I’m just askin’ for some simple information.”

            “And I’ll give you some simple advice: do me and I’ll do you.”

            “Go fuck yourself. I’ll find him on my own.”

Carson turned and walked away.

“Faggot,” he mouthed to himself.

            The little man in the Hawaiian shirt followed behind him, just out of reach of a quick punch.

            “Man, no one down here is gonna tell you shit unless you pay. You start flashin’ photos around like that and you can count on people goin’ numb in the lips real fast. Word’ll get around you’re the poh-lice. Unless you got money, dude, you’re dead in the water here, or DOA at County General. I’m talkin’ a simple arrangement, man. I can tell you where this dude is right now. Just hear me out. What I’m asking won’t take more than 15 minutes of your time.”

            Carson stopped. He’d listen. All he had to do was walk if he didn’t like the proposition.

            “I don’t wanna suck your dick, if that’s what you think,” said the little man.

            “What is it?”

            “I need a steady hand, man; someone to hit me.”

            “What?”

Carson turned away. This is what it was now. This is what he was. He’d been an athlete. Some of his high school records still stood. He had ambition. A degree in liberal arts and an MBA. His father, although a bastard, had been a judge. And here was Carson – negotiating with a junkie to save his life. He used to pretend that what had happened to him over the years wasn't a big deal. It was just a little thing he could tuck away when it came time to be a husband, a father, a productive and successful salesman of telecommunications systems. His life, the part he controlled and the part that controlled him, were so prosaic that all one had to do was sit in front of the TV any afternoon and see it revealed, hear it being confessed, acknowledge that he wasn’t alone; that all across the country there were people like him who were carrying around a germ that was increasingly strengthened by the prevailing culture. The culture nurtured it and condemned it at the same time. It celebrated the cult of attainment, of acquisition, of unto thine ownself first. Then it deplored the casualties who were too weak to resist what was trumpeted around the clock, day after day, relentlessly pursuing one, badgering one until submission was rendered and the competing claims of victimization and blame fought over the corpse of the person who was no longer a person but an aggregate of conditioned nerve responses. A blob, an organism that fed and disgorged, fed and disgorged, without thought, without reflection, like a rat in a Skinner box.

At first, no one could see it, not even his wife.

            “Oh, man,” said the little man, shaking his head in disbelief. “Man, I was way wrong about you. But that’s okay. Let me see your hands.”

            “What?”

            “C’mon. Stick out your hands like this.”

            Carson thought about the payoff, the pot. He thought about being flush again. So he extended his arms with his palms downward, like the little man showed him.

            “Good. You’ll be fine. No shakes. You ever used a needle? No. What the fuck am I thinkin’? Course not. You’re not the type to let go, not completely.”

            “Let’s get on with it, Bud. I don’t got all day.”

            “Right. Gotta get back to the office. Okay. This is the deal. I need to stay alive, just like you. For me to stay alive, I have to take my medicine. I need someone with steady hands. I don’t trust no one else. Not down here. My walkin’ buddies…one’s dead, the other’s in jail. I don’t know what your problem is, and I don’t care. It’s big, but you don’t shake, and that’s what I need. All you gotta do is point, jab and shoot. Just like I tell you. It’ll be over in no time. Then I’ll tell you where you can find your friend. My name’s Mickey. Whaddya say?”

            Carson stared at Mickey. He was sure this runt needed little incentive to roll and kill him if the circumstances were favorable, if it meant he could squeeze out another day snorting at the earth’s crust like a wild dingo on a phantom scent. Carson knew he was taking a risk by going back to some cockroach hive with this guy, using the opportunity to fleece Carson for less than the shoes on his feet. But maybe this Mickey character was telling the truth when he said he knew Giambone. He’d almost got the name right. And if anyone on the street might be known as the Philosopher, it was Giambone, with all his mad quackery about reincarnation; about Kundalani this and chakra that. He was no different, really, from half the population of Santa Monica. But down here, where talk was cheap and ran foul and free, and salvation from misery ran as good a game as any, Carson knew his old friend was in an excellent position to assemble a number of hangers-on, parlaying his dim notoriety to stoke the side of his ego needing to be needed, to be counted as an authority, a teacher of arcane knowledge, or simply to bask in the second-hand glow that emanated from his sad role as brother, just the brother, of a famous rock star. People made careers out of that sort of thing. Giambone did, too, in his own way, except he lacked any real business sense, and he was too lazy. Being a self-described mystic was a good excuse to do nothing. And booze offered a wonderful mystical state of mind. Just like heroin. Everybody on skid row was a mystic of sorts, the lazy, failed sort, craving for release, seeking it as cheaply as possible, not above killing or thieving to attain that condition where the whole world was seen as one harmonious organism, a beautiful, beatific thing, until the sun that traveled across the desert woke them from their concrete lotus pads and they had to compete for bread with stray dogs in a dumpster to keep them going until their next out-of-body experience. These wanderers, these urban nomads in their cardboard box caravansaries and shopping basket flotillas, they were not American mystics. They weren’t even true Americans. The American mystic, like successful mystics everywhere, through every epoch of recorded history, understands the implicit relationship between manipulating matter and enlightened thought. If everything is infused with the Creator, if all is the handiwork of God, then He can be found as easily in commerce as through prayer. Carson knew that the sensation of winning several thousand dollars in a poker game made him feel like the world was a beautiful place – as much as a real estate developer felt at a groundbreaking ceremony, a Baptist on the receiving end of a fiery sermon, a dervish launched from a terpsichorean whirl, an ecstasy eater at a techno Bacchanalia, or a soccer lout at Liverpool football match. Man finds himself in a material world. He works with what’s at hand. He works to keep suffering at bay. He pursues happiness, which is the absence of pain, freedom from oppression, which is the absence of pain. Carson had a firm conviction that as an American he was infused, as if from birth, with the ideal, the necessity, the righteous compatibility of money and transcendence. He was assured of it every time he looked at a dollar bill and saw the eye of the Supreme Being at the apogee of the triangle. The founding fathers were mystics. Every true American was a mystic pragmatist. God and money in America were inextricably married, and rightly so. This was the genius of America, the key to its success. This was the legacy of the Enlightenment. This was the culmination of the long exodus from a slave-holding papistry begun five hundred years ago. If any god existed, then materialism, scientific and otherwise, was the recognition of its impersonal presence amongst us. We were all sacred and all profane at the same time. And without the question of morality, our activities, our mundane activities, were sacred also. But the skid row inhabitants were Anti-American. They wanted God without entering the commonweal to find Him. That was their sin, and that was why Carson held them in contempt. They wanted the easy way out. There was no easy way. God, the transcendent experience, or whatever name it took, could only be found through long-term dedication to a thriving economy, an America where money was in constant circulation. The junkies and the drunks understood this on a basic level, enough to survive until their next transitory, chemical-induced tete a tete with Big Bwanah Don Yahweh. But they couldn’t apply the principle on a long-term and consistent basis in their lives.

And so this Mickey was right about one thing – anyone who knew Giambone or his whereabouts wasn’t about to let on without some form of compensation, at least enough to get himself a little closer to his next mystic experience. And right now, Carson had little to trade on. He would have to barter for their knowledge. He decided to enter his first transaction with nothing to wager but his flesh and a few ideas he’d picked up along the way.