The Last Will and Testament of Ernie Politics

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THE STALE STINK OF piss snatched Ray away from the comfort of sleep. It was sweating from the walls, coupled with the stench of body odor and old cigarettes. His damp pants clung to his legs, stiffened by the holding cell’s air conditioning. At first he thought he’d pissed himself, adding to the aroma of the room, but then he remembered how he’d gotten arrested. And why.

The ice machine was as good a place as any to fall asleep. Los Angeles’ thick summer air drove most transient folks to the shore; cool Pacific winds and the dampness of the piers the only respite from the heat, but Ray didn’t care much for the beach. Sand snuck into every pocket and crevice, buried for months in his only change of clothes. He preferred to suffer through the heat rather than find sand in his skivvies come January.

He remembered the sting of the sunbaked concrete. It seared his feet through the soles of his worn shoes as he walked the cracked sidewalk of the 101 overpass. A strip of seedy hotels on Sunset Boulevard, vacant in the daylight and popular only by the hour, offered small pockets of shade in their outdoor hallways. Ray could easily loiter there as he dug through the treasure troves of discarded soda cans next to the vending machines.

Huddled behind a wall of crumbling stucco, stewing in his own filthy juices, Ray watched a resident of the StayInn fill a towel with ice. The man, exhausted and hungover from the friendly exchange of venereal disease, let the cold air of the ice machine pour over his protruding belly before belching and stumbling away.

Making sure he wasn’t being watched, Ray stuck his head inside the machine, the refrigeration cooling the dust-streaked sweat on his forehead. Frost soothed the ache building in his body and the world went away as he basked in the sterile smell of stainless steel and filtered water.

A door opening down the hall pulled him out of his daze and he closed the ice machine’s lid. Beads of sweat immediately set up camp on his exposed skin. The frigid case beckoned to him, and opening the door again, he climbed in. The cold was sharp, but the dull bites of false winter were welcome after the beating he had taken from the sun pulsing in the cloudless sky.

He knew it was smart to get drunk before he tried his little experiment. A sober body couldn’t have taken the constant cold and the mixture of bourbon in his veins and ice on his skin produced a comforting tingle that lulled him to sleep.

As his eyes slipped closed, he knew he’d made the right decision. When it came to the amount of paperwork a cop was willing to do for arresting a trespassing vagrant, liquored up was much easier to process than crazy. Ray also wasn’t the kind of guy who got off on assaulting tourists at Hollywood and Highland.

A meth addict peered down into his field of vision, reminding him he’d accomplished his mission.

“You holdin’?” the gaunt man slurred, noxious gas billowing from behind his rotting teeth.

Ray sat up, his temples exploding as his eyes opened to the light in the room.

“Sorry, pal,” Ray said.

Drugs and weapons were at the top of the list of things that didn’t make it through processing, but those in need of a fix don’t necessarily thrive on long-term memory or common sense.

“Ask him,” Ray pointed to the bloated man with running sores on his face and neck. If the fuzz chose to not do an extensive sweep on anyone, it was the dude who might have given them leprosy. Meth Man didn’t care either way. He would have licked the tubby guy’s pustules dry if someone told him the juice was lined with buzzard dust. He shuffled across the room, leaving Ray to take in the rest of his roommates.

It had been a slow night for the Los Angeles Police Department. Two other drunks remained dead to the world, one wrapped around the steel communal in the corner. Decades of filth clung to his mouth as he drooled into the bowl, his lower lip stuck to the diarrhea-sprayed rim. A group of gang members had taken over the far corner of the cell. They’d managed to hang onto a deck of cards and were playing an odd variation of blackjack.

Ray stood up, bracing himself for the stiffness in his joints and swelling of his brain. He made his way over to the toilet and unzipped his fly. Doing his best to avoid splashing the bowl’s current occupant, Ray stared hard into the reflective piece of metal bolted to the wall. If he was in the wrong cell or was given the wrong information, all the bullshit had been for nothing.

As his bladder finished evacuating, the final drops spattering the drunk’s cheek, Ray’s eye caught the small curl of paper from underneath the mirror. Tucking himself back into his ragged pants, he glanced over his shoulder. The poker game had become more heated and Chunky Sores had obviously been holding, because he and Meth Man were engaged in figuring out the best way to ingest said substance without arousing suspicion.

Ray turned his attention back to the mirror, standing as though he was still urinating, though the familiar ping was not reverberating off the bowl. He leaned forward with one hand held straight out to brace himself, like he was trying to pass a kidney stone, and began to finger the edge of the paper, prying it out from its hiding place.

He crumpled it into his palm and bent down to flush the toilet. The loud rush of water didn’t awaken the sleeping drunk, he merely clutched the metal toilet tighter and darted his tongue out to lick the drops of Ray’s piss off his cheek. Ray’s stomach turned and he whipped around, a tattooed chest blocking his way.

“What you got there?”

He brought his eyes up from the dirty floor. Towering a good foot taller than him, one of the gang members breathed halitosis into Ray’s face. His beard was shaved into a thin line at the sideburns, but gave away to a scruff of hair at the chin. One of his eyes was lazy and Ray couldn’t figure out how to make eye contact with him.

“Bacon Cream!” Ray screamed.

“What muthafucka?”

“Happenstance would bequeath frosty bacon cream onto your majesty’s jowls!”

A fist as large as Ray’s head realigned his jaw, sending him to the ground. The impact caused his hangover to burst and the vomit burned his throat, stomach acid stinging the hole where one of his back molars had come loose. Crazy talk usually worked with the tough types, but Lazy Eye didn’t care how crazy he was, his curiosity was already piqued by what Ray held in his hand.

“You puke on my kicks muthafuck?” Lazy Eye wrapped his hand around the back of Ray’s neck and lifted him to his feet.

“You gonna lick that s**t off them ‘til theys clean, crazy muthafucka.”

One eye bore into him as the other drifted off to some unknown focal point.

Ray’s tooth slipped loose and dark iron began to fill his mouth. He spit the molar out and it bounced off of Lazy Eye’s forehead, leaving a pink streak of blood and saliva between his caterpillar eyebrows.

“Cobb!”

Lazy Eye’s rage was halted as all heads turned toward the voice beyond the bars. Ray raised his hand ever so slightly to indicate he was the one they wanted, and felt Lazy Eye’s fingernails dig deep into the flesh of his neck before letting him go. By some miracle, he’d had enough sense to give the attending officer his name the night before. If he had been a John Doe, he might not have made it to the end of the day.

Raymond Cobb staggered out of the holding cell and down the hallway of the county jail to be released back into the world. In one hand, he held his swelling jaw, and in the other, the last will and testament of the man Ray knew as Ernie Politics.