Low Life Read Free Page A

dumpster.
    At the counter – behind which stood a bored-looking fellow in a burgundy tracksuit, who was flipping through a wrestling magazine – Simon exchanged a twenty-dollar bill for twenty
one-dollar bills, and then made his way through the front room, where rows of magazine covers displayed various fetishes – close-ups of well-manicured feet with red and blue polished
toenails; the tiny breasts, puffy nipples and bald vaginas of women pretending to be prepubescent girls; submissive women whose waists were cinched by corsets and whose asses were welted red by
thorough canings; nurses wielding enema nozzles; pig-tailed women in diapers tonguing pacifiers – and then through a doorway and up a single step into the back room above whose door was a
sign which labeled it the
    VIDEO ARCADE
    A few lonesome middle-aged men with glistening black eyes were hanging around outside the booths, apparently looking to find someone with whom to share some of their time inside
before heading home to their wives (Simon saw several wedding bands). He avoided eye contact, not wanting to give anyone the wrong idea, and made his way to a booth with a green light glowing above
it. The booths with red lights above them were occupied, their doors locked, and the faint sounds of videotaped sex issued from the cracks beneath their doors.
    There was a television built into one of the walls inside the booth, and to its right a slot for collecting dollar bills. On the wall opposite the television, a built-in wood bench. On the floor
beside it, a trash can half-filled with wadded-up kleenexes and paper towels and fast-food napkins. The stench of rotting ectoplasm was overwhelming.
    Simon put a dollar bill into the slot beside the television, and the screen came aglow, filling the small room with sickly light.
    The television displayed six channels of pornography, which came in six distinct flavors. Simon chose channel three – a woman in a black leather mask was flogging a completely nude man,
who was on hands and knees on a cracked concrete floor in some anonymous warehouse (probably a warehouse just over the hill in Sherman Oaks or Encino). She called him terrible names while she beat
him.
    Simon did not sit down, but his knees felt shaky.
    When he got back to the Filboyd Apartments he could not find parking on Wilshire, so he turned left onto a side street lined with apartment buildings and drove north toward
Sixth. Near the end of the block, beneath a broken streetlamp – all of the lamps were out on this block, while across Sixth they were turning on in the dim evening light – he found a
spot he could barely squeeze his car into, and proceeded to do so, his right front fender poking only slightly into a red zone. A fire plug jutted from a brown patch of grass about ten feet
away.
    He stepped from the Volvo, slammed the door shut, put his key into the scratched-up keyhole, and gave it a turn from twelve to three. There was a satisfying resistance, and then all four doors
locked simultaneously with a chorus of thwacks. He turned away from the car and started south toward home, stuffing keys into his pocket.
    Both the sun and the moon were visible as they changed shifts, the moon high and the sun sinking below the horizon. The clouds looked like pulled cotton. The nearest stars – or perhaps
they were planets – poked through the darkening sky like flashlights in a distant wood.
    A few steps from his car he stopped to light a cigarette. After getting it lighted, he flipped the cap over the silver Zippo, snuffing the flame, and stuck it warm into his pants pocket. He
could feel the heat of it against his thigh. He took a drag and felt the smoke swirling within his lungs, heavy and hot and somehow comforting. He exhaled through his nostrils. His father –
adoptive: Simon didn’t know who his birth parents were, though in his youth he had often made up different stories about them, and about why they dumped him off at an