Meat Cart Rally: Part I
by Matthew Lyons
Starting on Oscar Night 1960, Swifty Lazar, Hollywood super-agent and hyper-degenerate, started throwing these banger movie star orgies at his place just off of Mulholland Drive. All the greats would be there, depending on who was nominated that year—Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Doris Day, Katharine and Audrey Hepburn, John Ford, hell, even Elizabeth Taylor would be there for a little while, getting serviced by a small team of tuxedo-clad migrant workers. Every goddamn year.
That’s why nobody ever saw Lazar at the old school Academy Awards—he was too busy getting blown by a drugged-out, sixty year-old Greta Garbo in the bathroom of that mansion on Mulholland to attend some bullshit press party.
The thing about Lazar’s parties was that someone would always end up hurt, overdosed, or otherwise incapacitated. And every year, the mayhem would be worse than the last. Way some of the rumors go, that first year wasn’t anything worse than someone who looked a lot like Mickey Rooney taking one too many painkillers and shitting himself to sleep on Lazar’s front lawn.
But then again, despite everything that followed, reputations still matter in this town, and agents still run damage control so their clients look slightly better than they actually are. That’s how the press never really gets any wind of it. At least, not in any kind of official capacity. Thanks largely to favors owed here, debts collected there, bribes arranged elsewhere, no hint of the yearly Oscar Night anarchy ever makes the newspapers or the six o’clock broadcasts. With the right kind of money and the right kinds of drugs, even the paparazzi in this town can be bought off.
After all, the tabloids would’ve loved to know why Marilyn Monroe bombed barbiturates like they were popcorn.
Then again, you try staying sober after getting date-raped by a pair of last year’s Oscar winners. Of course, they didn’t call it “date rape” back then. They called it “having a situation.” So a year or so after having her “situation,” Norma Jeane Baker choked down a grab-bag of pills, chased it with a fifth of rye whiskey, laid down on her bed, and sobbed herself to death.
Five years later, Lauren Bacall, in a drunken outburst, shot Jerry Lewis in the leg with a handgun borrowed from her husband, leaving Lewis with a faint but noticeable limp from then on. The limp can be spotted in any of Lewis’ work after 1965, that is, if you know what you’re looking for.
By the mid-1980’s, the Brat Pack had basically taken over administrative duties from Lazar, and though by the time of his death they had fallen out of the limelight, they still ran it as jail or rehab or psychotherapy allowed. After Lazar died in 1993, the tradition just continued, spiraling out from the original semi-controlled environment of Mulholland, growing to encompass almost the entire city of Los Angeles.
I hear these old war stories, cautionary tales and campfire caveats from the old timers every year. Every goddamn year, just like clockwork, on the day of the Oscars, no matter how many times I’ve seen it for myself. Remember this, Drake. Don’t forget that, Drake. One more thing, Drake.
Like I’d somehow forgotten. Like any of that’s supposed to somehow explain why I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked city ambulance in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre (the theater’s management insists that it’s technically not called that anymore, but what the fuck do they know) at sunset, wolfing down a poor imitation of a Philly cheese steak, chasing it with a cocktail of Diet Coke, cheap speed and chained Luckies, waiting for the crackle-hiss of radio squawk to tell me where to point the bus.
The smokes, the cheap speed and sandwich I can explain.
Outside the bus, fat tourists in jean shorts and souvenir t-shirts mill around in the dwindling sunlight, snapping photos with the tired-looking hobos dressed up as Superman and John Wayne. In an hour, the Strip’s gonna be dead silent. The tourists will have retreated to their plywood rooms at the HoJo’s, and the walking punchlines will have retreated into their corner store pints of bathtub gin. Even the Strip’s tube-topped, plastic-heeled all-stars will have fallen back to all the roach motels littering Sunset, seeking safety or maybe the lucky ten dollar trick.
Tomorrow, it’ll all start again, bright and early.
But tonight, anyone with half a brain not living their life in front of a Pelco lens stays inside and watches TV.
I swallow a bite of cheese steak prematurely, giving my throat a sudden, choking shock of pain that lingers even after I feel the steak finally squeeze through to my stomach. I knock back three little red pills with “978-I” printed on them and wash them down with a gulp of coke that doesn’t smooth over the ache in my esophagus. Ignoring the ragged burn of the cola, I crumple the sandwich’s butcher paper wrapper in my hands and toss it out the driver’s side window, letting my eyelids drift shut. I pull my sunglasses on over my closed eyes, attempting to cut the orange-white sunset glowing through my eyelids, blindly switching on the radio to whatever’s on.
From the back of the ambulance, I hear Schaffer rustling around, double checking our supplies and so forth, just so we’re two hundred percent prepared for tonight. Coming from a guy who keeps a spare hypo of adrenaline in his jacket pocket “just in case,” I shouldn’t be surprised.
I pretend not to notice him, but just so he knows exactly how much I’m ignoring his banging around the bus like a sullen child who lost his balloon, I turn the radio up.
I know Schaffer doesn’t want a repeat of last year, but I keep telling him that the odds of us getting stuck dealing with a heroin-crazed octogenarian actor two years in a row are next to nothing.
Not like that stops him from wasting the sunset in the back of the ambulance, checking and double-checking the drawers for syringes, sedatives, painkillers and every other drug known to man, not to mention essentials like scalpels, gauze, splints, scissors, O2 tanks, safety pins, aluminum foil, defibrillators, and heavy duty scissors. Then he checks the small silver attaché tucked in a corner of the bus. I crane my neck around to watch him as subtly as I can, and when he starts on his third time around the cabin, I reach over and snake his untouched sandwich off the dashboard.
Paramedics in this town didn’t used to have to carry guns.
But then again, paramedics in this town didn’t used to work on commission, either. The times, they are a’changing.
It all started back who knows when, when some scumball agent paid off a couple of ambulance drivers to keep their client’s gruesome mistakes out of the papers. So they told their friends, and they told their friends, and they told their friends. Soon enough, everyone was looking to get paid that little bit extra for their discretion. Hospitals set up private slush funds, financed by agents and managers and promotional companies all over the city, and started bidding on the clients’ safety and privacy. With percentage points outlined and everybody getting paid, life carried on as normal. Well, normal-ish.
The first job I ever worked as a Los Angeles city paramedic, I got a nine-millimeter handgun stuck in my face for my troubles. Here I was, fresh-faced, just out of the training program with a head full of medical facts and a hope that I could help people in this wasteland, and my new life starts off with me kissing the barrel of a Beretta machine pistol held by some psychopath I’ve never even seen before. Some psychopath wearing a blue jumpsuit with “LAPD13” decaled on the back of it. LAPD13. Los Angeles Paramedic Division 13. I had just been hired on to LAPD7, I was twenty three years old, with no clue what I did to make this man point a gun at me.
The call was routine.
Or, at the very least, as routine as I figured Los Angeles got. Turns out some local sports star had gotten himself in a bit of a jam after banging a whole speedball into his tear ducts and deciding to go for a nice pleasure cruise around downtown LA in his brand new Escalade. Here’s how things started going real wrong: halfway through the night, he starts running a little too close to empty for his tastes, so he decides to spike another chem-cocktail in through his tear ducts. At a stop light. He manages to insert the needle without blinding himself and somehow gets the plunger about halfway down before the speedball changes gears on him and shreds his lachrymal apparatus, liquefying it into nothing more substantial than a brackish pink foam. That starts spraying out of his eyes in thick, bloody spurts.
Naturally this causes something of a freakout. Sports star stamps on the gas, lets go of the wheel to try and claw the hypo out of his eye socket, and crashes his Escalade through the front of a 7-Eleven. The 7-Eleven manager, a nice older Korean gentleman, promptly dials 9-1-1 and I was dispatched, along with my partner, a veteran LA paramedic named Mallory, to take care of things.
We arrived on the scene before anybody else, and being the good newbie I was, I followed Mallory’s lead. He’d been an LA paramedic for something like since the beginning of time, and he knew how everything worked.
Mallory climbed out of the bus and I followed him like a bright-eyed puppy, just happy to be led somewhere interesting. We made our way though the chaos of the destroyed corner store, using our feet to sweep aside broken glass and jagged shards of cement. I kept my eyes wide for anyone else that might be hurt, other than the driver of the smashed-up Escalade, naturally, but everyone else in the shop seemed to be safely cowering behind the check-out counter. I offered them a halfhearted wave and when they didn’t return the gesture, I tried my best to put my game face back on as Mallory tried the driver’s side door. Thankfully, the SUV’s doors weren’t wedged shut, so we managed to get the sports star onto our gurney without any trouble—that is, if you don’t count having to maneuver around the bloody hypodermic needle sticking out of his deflated eye without screaming or vomiting “trouble.”
So as we turned around to wheel the sports star through the rubble and back to the ambulance, imagine my surprise when, instead of police cars and fire trucks, I saw another ambulance pull up alongside ours. Except when the other paramedics climbed out of their ambulance, they didn’t offer to help – they didn’t say anything.
And they were carrying guns.
Looking forward to part II…