Angels on Sunset Boulevard Read online

  “Hooking up,” he said, tying a rubber cord around his forearm, and tightening it.

  “I can see that. You don’t need that shit. Who got it for you? Sutton?”

  “Baby, you don’t even know what I need,” Johnny sang softly.

  “You don’t even know what’s in there.”

  “Whatever it is, it works for me. Are you sure you don’t want any?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  Taj shook her head. TAP—The Angels’ Practice. It wasn’t just a website. Or more specifically, the website was only the beginning. It was also a movement, a phenomenon, and a drug. Nobody knew what was in the drug, but its effects were astonishing—otherworldly, like taking heroin, ecstasy, and acid all at once. Not only did you feel fantastic, but all your senses shifted, and your mind opened to another plane. It was all-natural, organic; most of the ingredients were sold at Whole Foods, except for that one variable, of course—the angel factor—and no one was sure what it was. Some kind of plant that they were growing down south? Some kind of new hybrid from the rain forest? It didn’t matter. All the kids knew was that it made them feel good. The beauty of it was that it wasn’t even illegal. It was something in the water; the mixture was what made it potent. But no one was quite sure how.

  Best of all there were no consequences. At least none that anybody could see. There was no crash, no afterburn, no need to cut it with alcohol to soften the harsh landing when the high faded. After taking TAP, you were just like you were before, only more peaceful. It wasn’t even supposed to be addictive. But tell that to Johnny.

  “Good luck tonight,” Taj said, watching him sink the needle into his arm and his face relax as TAP hit his bloodstream. He was mainlining now. Most people just drank it—TAP mixed with Kool-Aid was the beverage of choice for most. “I’ll be outside, watching.”

  He nodded dreamily, already lost in his own universe, barely even acknowledging her presence.

  Taj found her seat in front of the stage, off to the side. Sutton was already seated in his usual place, where he could survey the stage and the crowd at the same time. He was alone; the girl he had been with was gone. She’d left a mark on his neck, though, an ugly purple hickey that he hadn’t bothered to cover up. He offered her a glass of beer. “To Johnny.”

  “To Johnny,” she replied, accepting it.

  The chanting of the crowd grew impatient, and the TV reporters gathered behind them were muttering complaints underneath their breath. Taj could hear them talking about their kids, wondering when they would be allowed to go home; the show was going to be too late to make the eleven o’clock news anyway; it would have to be saved for the morning program.

  “Can you feel it?” Sutton asked, wagging his eyebrows. “The coming of the supernova?”

  “The death of a star?” Taj asked skeptically.

  “Technically, yes,” Sutton grimaced. “But what happens before a star dies? It goes supernova—releasing an incredible explosion of energy and light into the universe. An explosion so powerful it resonates throughout the entire galaxy.”

  Taj grunted. Sutton could be so trig sometimes, what they called cuckoo. But even trigs could be useful. She and Johnny had trusted Sutton, had let him and his ideas into their lives. Taj wondered if that had been wise of them—but it was too late now, wasn’t it? It was too late to back out. Too late to pop the genie back into the lamp. Too late to ask for those three wishes back from the traveling monkey.

  She sat back and watched the stage. This was everything they had dreamed about, this night, the record sales, the attention of the entire world. This was what Johnny had been working for ever since he was an eight-year-old kid strumming his first Fender Stratocaster with its flamed finish and vintage tube amp.

  The houselights dimmed. The curtain parted. Taj leaned forward in her chair, her breath caught in her throat. Good luck, Johnny …

  Johnny Silver stood at the microphone, his guitar in hand, his shiny platinum hair so bright it dazzled the eyes, his beautiful face solemn as he struck a chord.

  “This is for you, Taj,” he said gruffly into the mic. He strummed the first chord, and there was an explosion of light, a white light that blinded the audience and shot out from the middle of the stage where Johnny was standing.

  The crowd gasped. And clapped and cheered. “Awesome effects, man!” “That was off the chain!” “It looked so … real!” “Woo-hoo! What a way to start the show!”

  Then the smoke cleared.

  All that was left was the microphone stand.

  Johnny and his guitar were nowhere to be found.

  The band stood in shock. They scratched their heads, glancing behind their instruments with puzzled expressions on their faces.

  There was a murmur from the crowd. An annoyed grumbling that was threatening to turn into anarchy. They had waited three frigging hours already. The manager came out onto the stage and waved his hands to silence the crowd. “Folks, I’m sure there’s an explanation for this. We ask for your patience.”

  What the hell? What are they playing at? Taj wondered. What’s going on? Where the fuck was Johnny? Was this part of the act?

  Several long minutes ticked by. And finally the manager came back out to the front of the stage and said the words that would change Taj’s life forever.

  “Johnny’s gone. He’s disappeared.”

  The ensuing uproar was enough to cause a riot on Sunset Boulevard, where thousands had gathered on the streets and had witnessed the moment live on the giant video screens. No show. Johnny was gone. He wasn’t going to play. Johnny Silver had left the building.

  “I told you,” Sutton said dreamily as he sipped his drink and chaos erupted all around them as ticket holders demanded their money back and started throwing chairs and tables to the ground.

  “Supernova.”

  Disappearance

  “Disappear Here”

  —BRET EASTON ELLIS, LESS THAN ZERO

  Taj

  TAJ’S PARENTS WERE MUSICIANS—DAD PLAYED THE cello, Mom sang opera. They died in a car accident when Taj was four years old, on the way to a show. She didn’t remember much about them, although Mama Fay tried her best to fill in the details, recounting stories of her mother’s passionate performances and her father’s rigorous practices. When Taj asked what they were like, Mama Fay responded with stock answers—that her mother was pretty and smart, her father dashing and handsome.

  But Taj preferred to imagine that her mother was a diva, demanding and pretentious, waltzing around making declarations while waving her hands in the air, and that her father was a lady-killer who’d made women swoon with his virtuoso cello playing. That they were a fun, exciting, and dangerous couple, instead of the ordinarily pleasant-looking people in the pictures she had left. It was just too sad otherwise. Missing them was such a huge part of her life she hardly even noticed it anymore.

  She’d been raised by her uncle, a drag queen who performed nightly at a cabaret in West Hollywood aptly named Don’t Tell Mama! They lived in a small bungalow in the Hollywood Flats, next door to a methadone clinic and across the street from a needle-exchange center. Although that might change soon, as prices were skyrocketing all over L.A., and their ranch house with its chain-link fence and rusty Pinto on blocks in the driveway had heaved itself past the half-million-dollar mark.

  Taj stuffed her gear in her backpack and hollered across the room to let Mama Fay know she was leaving.

  Mama Fay’s stiletto bedroom slippers—pink satin with pom-poms—clacked delicately down the wood floor. Her silk housecoat barely concealed the evening’s costume: Lurex short shorts, spangly corset, fishnet thigh-high stockings. “You’re off, baby doll?” Mama Fay asked, stirring her martini with her pinkie finger. “All right, be careful, okay? Be home by the time I get up. Else you know I’ll worry.”

  That was the extent of Mama Fay’s parenting. Mama Fay routinely got up by three o’clock in the afternoon, usually with a killer hangover. Taj knew Mama Fay meant well,
but the actual raising of a child had been almost comically difficult for her. Taj had survived a peripatetic childhood, dragged around the globe as her uncle chased down cabaret gigs. She was always the kid in school who never had the right supplies, who was always borrowing pens and paper from her classmates, whose parent had forgotten to sign the field-trip release form.

  In a way, it had been liberating. After they’d finally settled back in Los Angeles when she was eleven years old, Taj had been allowed to roam the city streets without supervision. She knew every back alley and shortcut and the best place to get Baja fish tacos (on Whittier Boulevard).

  “Bye,” Taj said, giving her uncle a peck on the stubbly cheek that no amount of foundation could hide. She had to be at the station in an hour, and it was going to take that long to get to the Westside, if she was lucky.

  It was a week after Johnny’s disappearance at the Viper Room, and she hadn’t heard a word from him since then. Not one e-mail, not one text message, not one phone call. Sure, they had been arguing for a long time now about the way everything was going down; Taj wasn’t even sure if he still considered her his girlfriend. In the end maybe to him she’d just been one of the many girls who were always around. God forbid he thought of her as a groupie.

  Sutton was inscrutable and vowed that he was just as shocked as she was at Johnny’s sudden disappearance. Taj didn’t know what to think. Maybe Johnny had just wanted to take some time off, to lay low while the hype died down. Except—and that was the weird thing about it—his disappearance only made his fame grow larger, more mythical. If anything, more people were drawn to TAP and his music than ever before. He had the most friends on the site; she wondered who was keeping up his page. Her page was out of control. People were convinced she knew where Johnny was. Johnny’s numbers even beat out the Internet centerfold (the most downloaded girl on TAP)!

  He hadn’t wanted to sell out, that’s what the kids were saying. He was too cool for it all. He didn’t want to be part of it. Yeah. Johnny Silver was never going to play Saturday Night Live or stumble onstage at the Grammys or read cue cards at the fucking MTV Awards. No way. He was an artist. The real thing.

  The show had been broadcast on loop on the twenty-four-hour news channels for days. Taj was so sick of watching that white light shine and engulf Johnny. What was that? Some sort of trick. It had to be. The label had decided to release the album anyway, and it had shot to number one immediately, hovering above the real bands as well as the made-up ones whose provenance could be traced to reality shows.

  Wherever he was, Taj hoped he was safe.

  She made her way from their street to Santa Monica Boulevard. There was an old song from the eighties that went, “Nobody walks in L.A.” Taj smiled to herself as she thought, Nobody rides the bus, either. She joined her fellow passengers at the stop: elderly couples, Mexican housekeepers, poor teenagers like herself who didn’t have parents to provide shiny black Audis on their sixteenth birthdays. A lumbering Metro pulled up to the curb, and Taj followed the dismal procession. She found a seat in the back and settled in for the long journey.

  She leaned her head on the windowpane and watched as a speeding BMW suddenly came to an abrupt stop at the light, tapping the fender of the Porsche in front of it. The two cars pulled to the side, and their owners climbed out of their expensive sports cars to check the damage. Just a tap, just a little nick. The two drivers shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders, climbed back inside their cars, and drove away. If she owned a car like that, Taj thought, she would be a lot more careful driving it.

  Taj hooked her knees against the seat in front of her and took out her journal, scribbling as the bus ambled past the neon lights of West Hollywood, past the triple-X porno theaters and the twee rainbow flag-waving coffee shops and the brightly lit Hustler emporium. She and Johnny had been thrown out of the porno palace once for being underage. They had laughed at the fur handcuffs and the plastic sex toys, snickered at the video of Tommy and Pam that was playing overhead.

  She looked out the window. The bus was taking them through Beverly Hills proper, and Taj marveled at how the streets suddenly became much wider—as if the city began to exhale right on the boulevard. She stared at rows and rows of gated mansions hidden behind two-story hedges. Beverly Hills was like a fairy tale, filled with castles and servants and princesses who drove Mercedes-Benz chariots. She smiled at the thought of Johnny joking that once he made it big, they would get the biggest house on the block. And not one of those suburban McMansions on Cribs either.

  But Taj would never want to live there. What was Beverly Hills anyway but the glorified kingdom of cosmetic dentists and plastic surgeons and retired Republican donors? It was no place for her and Johnny. Not that there was a “her and Johnny” anymore.

  Finally the bus deposited her on the outskirts of campus in Westwood. She unhooked the straps that held her board to her backpack, kicked it to the sidewalk, and glided down the stone footpaths toward the music building. The first week of January all the college kids were still on semester break, and the place was blank and desolate, atypically gloomy for Los Angeles.

  Taj had taken over Johnny’s show. Johnny Silver’s Manic Hour became so much more popular than the college kid’s he was filling in for that he got the gig full-time.

  When he’d signed to the label, he hadn’t wanted to give up his show. But his popularity took off and who better to take the slot than Johnny’s girlfriend? So she’d volunteered to take it over, to keep house while they waited for Johnny to return. The job was easy enough, even though it was a pain to get to.

  The college radio station was located in the basement of the music building in three small shabby rooms: an office and two broadcasting studios. There was a ground-level window that attracted the random curious onlooker and a nightly check by the campus police to make sure the kids weren’t using the space to hook up or throw parties.

  Stacks of CDs were lined up neatly on shelves, and there were several crates of old vinyl records. Two CD players, a turntable, and a computer filled with MP3s were hooked up to the system. The crew at the station was in the middle of transferring all the music to digital files, and soon being a DJ would be just as simple as putting an iTunes list together.

  Taj settled into the rickety leather office chair, put on the Bose headphones, clicked on the computer screen, and played Johnny’s signature opening: “Hallelujah,” by Jeff Buckley. “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord …”

  As the song came to a warbling close, she whispered into the microphone, “This is Taj Holder in for Johnny Silver. This one is for Johnny, wherever you are …”

  As usual ever since Johnny had vanished, as soon as she finished, the phone lines lit up and the computer screen began popping with a dozen IM messages.

  His fans.

  celestialgdess: where he at taj? lighting a candle for johnny …

  dingorider: peace&luv forever … Johnny silver rules!

  sadboy22: 7 days and counting … miss u Johnny …

  She let the songs play automatically from his list; she knew what they wanted, those kids waiting in the dark for their songs. Johnny’s show didn’t play at parties up in the Palisades, or for kids cruising Sunset—it was for the ones like Taj was once. Those who were stuck at home with headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the world, feeling like the only one who understood was a voice on the radio …

  Taj logged in to TAP and started reading the latest Johnny Silver sightings. The night at the Viper, Taj had been sure it was just some kind of joke—Johnny having a tantrum and refusing to play the biggest show of his career. But it just didn’t seem funny anymore.

  She’d harassed Sutton, as well as Johnny’s publicist and the folks from his record company, but none of them had a clue as to his whereabouts. TAP was full of rumors—Johnny had fled to rehab in South America. Or had joined a monastery in Tibet. Or was living in a commune in Utah, or on a beach in Phuket.

>   Maybe they were right. Maybe Johnny was out there somewhere surfing his brains out. But Taj didn’t think so. More likely Johnny was in some motel room somewhere with that needle in his arm. She hoped, not for the first time and with a sudden panic, that he wasn’t dead.

  The phone rang. Taj was glad of the reprieve from her morbid thoughts.

  “Hey, is this Taj?” a friendly voice inquired.

  “This is Taj.”

  “Hey. Just wanted to see if you could play that song—you know, Johnny’s song.”

  When Johnny’s promo CD had arrived, fresh and shiny in its plastic package, she was surprised to find that the first song on the playlist was one he had never played for her before. It was a beautiful song, filled with ache and longing. He had told her it was going on his new album, but he’d never let her hear it while he was working on it. She recognized the first chord—it was the same one he’d played before he’d vanished in a puff of smoke.

  Since then, it was the most requested song on the radio. She played it on every show, and it was inevitable that someone would request it at least several times in the night.

  “Sure, and who can I say requested it?”

  “Nick. Nick Huntington,” the caller said, yelling over the sound of traffic in the background.

  “Thanks, Nick Nick Huntington.”

  She queued up the song, abruptly taking off the Stellastarr track that was playing. “This one is for Nick Huntington. Off of Johnny Silver’s new album. Enjoy.”

  The song played, and like clockwork the phone lines lit up like Christmas. But instead of answering, Taj closed her eyes, counting softly, one, two, three, four, as the lines blinked off one by one.

  Johnny’s song played on her headphones. Taj mouthed the words, the lyrics seared in her brain: Is this me? Love and loyalty. What do I see?

  Even the IMs stopped popping.

  Like her, everyone was just listening …

  Nick