MDA PressRed Lines, Part 1
By Chris McCarthy
The cop in the front seat was coughing. A guttural sickly cough, the kind that gives you pause. Leo had no idea what was going on. He looked through the windows, he wasn’t even belted in the back of the car, much less cuffed. He wasn’t a prisoner. His mind was finally ready to start processing how he got there, where they were going and what was going to happen when they got there. In his gut he sort of already knew.
Another rough coughing fit, then the cop leaned over and searched with his free hand under the passenger seat. He pulled out a small square microfiber gun cloth and, still looking out the windshield with his deeply bloodshot eyes, handed it over the seat back to Leo.
Leo looked up, confused, and locked eyes with the cop in the rearview mirror.
“For the blood,” the cop said before looking away to make a quick lane change to get onto the 405 freeway heading south.
Leo looked down at his hands and saw the fresh red blood on the knuckles of his left hand. Most of it wasn’t his. The pain set in as the shock wore off.
The two women were deeply concerned. Well, the one was. Her son, Adam, is sixteen years old, and has a lot of friends at the nearby high school. He’s not necessarily a heartthrob, but he does ok. OK enough that he has things to do other than attend class. Things that, yes, sometimes involve girls. The mother of the boy wanted this in the conversation, as if she pulled it out as an imaginary item and sat it on the table for the two of them of them to consider. The one woman who wasn’t as deeply concerned said she thought if Adam could get in this summer at one of the chemistry labs nearby for an internship, he might be able to hold that internship the following year and it will look good as a long term “extracurricular” on his college applications. The concern of the mother was palpable and she was clearly paying the slightly less concerned woman for this advice.
It wasn’t the first time Leo had heard this conversation. This was Manhattan Beach, one of the richest enclaves in Los Angeles. The mother was telegraphing Torrance or Redondo Beach, which meant that she would fight even more for the things the people in her community deemed were the steps to a good life. The people just outside of the circle were the ones with the sharpest claws. Leo could relate. He’d always just been right outside of everything, an observer, close enough to the warmth to have the capacity to miss it. He’d overheard similar conversations recently. These education consultants who billed $200 a session and could supposedly plan your teenager’s (sometimes the planning started sooner) path to college—a UC and possibly a minor Ivy League school or respected school like University of Michigan. Fuck, even Long Beach State was starting to get hard to get into.
As Leo sat in the expensive coffee shop just off a busy street in Los Angeles, frustrated with his script he looked out into the parking lot, staring at the late model silver Honda Civic, a car about as exciting as the backside of a thumb. And admittedly, like a thumb: useful, practical and allowing for all kinds of possibilities, but really fucking boring. He knew he was being particularly harsh to the make and model of car because its owner was fucking the girl he loved. Or used to love. Or… It was confusing. The uncomfortable thought that he didn’t really understand his true feelings and probably needed to spend more time untangling them and examining them in greater detail bubbled up, but he pushed it away just as quickly.
Asher, the guy fucking Leo’s girlfriend—ok, ex-girlfriend, Leo would allow—worked at a soulless Citibank branch on the westernmost side of the shopping center, just off the perpetually busy westside LA artery Sepulveda Boulevard, which just a few miles down the road in either direction was known by its more famous name, Pacific Coast Highway. Leo’s table faced the front of the coffee shop with its ceiling to floor windows, giving him an unobstructed view of the bank’s employee parking lot.
Leo had been coming to the coffee shop every morning for a week. The day Celia left him, which was sixteen days after they had signed a lease on a two bedroom apartment in Torrance, and twelve days after delivery of a new dresser and new bed, still in the boxes, Leo found a wet and bent business card in the bathroom trashcan underneath the bag, grimy and stuck to the side. Leo noted that a cell phone number was written in blue ink on the card—this was something beyond a business card hand-off. He flashed to a vision of Celia in the bathroom, the door locked, smiling breathlessly as she sent an illicit text message to the person possessing the name on the business card: Asher Williams, Citibank Location 103 Branch Manager.
Celia had told Leo she was staying at her friend’s apartment in Pasadena, a white lie so easily debunked that her lack of effort in covering her tracks hurt him to his bones.
He felt another similar pain, this one was in his chest for some reason, as he sat in the coffee shop looking out the window, the still powerful heat of the sun on the mid-November day warming his face. Not that he felt it. He felt… nothing, maybe. That felt dramatic to think. But it also felt accurate, he thought as he watched a crow inspect a discarded Fat Burger wrapper in the parking lot before flying away…
When out of nowhere Celia walked up to the car… Leo wasn’t sure if his mouth dropped open. The look on her face. The way she walked, head up high, already wearing a half-smile in excitement. It was a punch in the gut. Seeing her so… happy.
A moment later, Asher walked out the front of the bank towards the car. They embraced and kissed then walked over to Chipotle. A cheeky little lunch date—a bank manager and a paralegal. How fucking cute. Maybe the kid will go to Long Beach State.
It’s the ease of the hug, the kiss, the holding hands, the opening of the door for her that hit him like a splash of ice cold water to the face. The familiarity. Leo considered himself a student of human nature, often finding himself at a library in the middle of the day reading some new book on anthropology or social sciences, so…
How long has this been going on? He asked himself or rather tortured himself with the question.
Much longer than she admitted. Why she had destroyed him, lied to him, he had no idea. Couldn’t pinpoint one thing. Sure, they had had problems. His career hadn’t taken off the way he thought it would with his talent. And, sure, he had been fired almost exactly a year ago, but the guy who fired him was an asshole with an axe to grind who didn’t understand what marketing really is, the nuance of it, the time it takes… No, none of it was Leo’s fault. He could hang his hat on that. Besides, Leo was an artist. This was an extended rough patch. A rough patch with no sex for the last six months. How long had she been with this guy? Suddenly, moments where Celia avoided Leo’s touch flashed in his memory and he desperately tried to reach out to dates on an invisible calendar in his mind.
Leo was reminded of the paranoia of the Bill Withers song Who is He (and what is he to you?) where the listener is in the POV of a man walking with his girlfriend as they pass someone who is more than just a passerby to the woman.
Leo waited for thirty eight minutes, and they finally came out of the restaurant. In a quick fluid movement, Celia got up on her tiptoes and kissed Asher. Leo watched her familiar walk then lost her as she passed around the side of building to the west side of the parking lot, presumably to her car.
Leo looked at his untouched six dollar iced Americano with oat milk sweating in the sun and felt a heat in his face. He was frozen in place. A melting piece of ice shifted in the drink. Leo stood up and grabbed his backpack, a prop he hadn’t opened once today, and walked out the door. But it was too late to get to Celia, besides suddenly he felt smaller than he was sad, and what would he do anyway, so he hid his face and walked back toward the coffee shop. It was then he realized Asher has walked behind him toward the opposite side of the building away from Celia. The smaller less traveled east side of the parking lot where a hardly used side door of the coffee shop opens to another back door to the high class gym next door that some patrons run out of during the presumed cardio section of some workout. But most of the time, no one used this side of the parking lot, so it was empty.
“Yeah babe, I had a meeting during lunch,” Asher said into the phone. Leo heard this clearly. “We still on for tonight?” Asher turned the corner and Leo made a quick decision. He didn’t know what it meant but he was excited—it was a good feeling to be distracted by right then. He darted back into the coffee shop instead of following Asher around the side of the building and being obvious about it. He walked to the bathroom at the back of the shop, his eyes already on the side door that exits to the side parking lot.
Leo popped out of the side door and descended the three concrete steps, pretending to look into his phone. Asher was puffing on a lit cigarette leaning against the gym as he spoke into his phone, his back to Leo. Who smokes in 2024? This fucking guy who is clearly seeing another woman—she chose this guy over me? Leo tucked his phone back into his pocket and looked up again and saw Asher’s head back around the building to the front parking lot, his cigarette still smoking on the asphalt. Leo takes a step forward then stops himself, suspended directionless but now seething, his pulse beating in his ears.
Then SMAAASH!
Leo looked over to the back of the building. He heard the sound of crunching plastic as a green beat-up late 90’s Eclipse slammed into the three foot tall steel yellow barrier that bends around the building toward the back of the coffee shop. The building that today held the coffee shop, a nail salon, and a tailor shop, at one point was a Circuit City where trucks would snake around the back and drop off large items, hence the industrial grade protective steel barriers, which probably only survived to this day because they weren’t noticeable from the current day business side of the building and would be expensive to remove.
Leo watched, stunned, as the car rolled back from the yellow steel barrier it had just hit, a low speed collision that made no sense, yellow paint now caked on its front bumper. Independent of the crash, the car was in terrible condition. The hood was painted a different shade of green than the rest of the car, rust seeped through all over so much so that the tail gate looked like it would disintegrate with the flick of a finger.
He watched as the driver leaned his head down a bit, gathered himself after perhaps knocking his head on the steering wheel or on the drivers side door window. Leo looked around but no one else was around to share in the strangeness of the moment. The driver looked to be in his fifties with a weathered and worn face. He wore a cruel expression that Leo understood to be his default look. It was a face that sets off alarm bells in your gut and instinctively makes you turn away.
Then the passenger door swung open and the woman jumped out of the car. She wore purple Uggs, off-brand high rise athletic shorts, and a dirty yellow men’s hoodie that slid down off one shoulder. None of it fit well. Leo caught the first look of her face as she ran toward the back of the car, tripped on her boot and fell backward, landing behind the bumper of the car. She had streaked eye-liner on her face, behind which Leo could see clear acne scars. She possessed wide, intelligent eyes that looked like they had once been kind and open to the world but were now fixed into tight small daggers for self preservation. Hers was a face that radiated neglect.
The man, in full control, opened his door and exited toward the back of the car. He threw his hands up into the air violently.
“Get in the fucking car, bitch.”
On the ground, she slid herself away from him with her feet as she simultaneously tried to pick herself up.
“No. No. Let me go, you psycho!”
The woman quickly got to her feet and ran away toward a small section of dirt behind the side parking lot and the small street behind it. That’s when he looked right at Leo.
“What are you looking at, buddy?”
Something about the word buddy stopped Leo from listening to the alarm bells and running in the opposite direction. And he couldn’t shake the look of fear on the woman’s face. So, instead, he surprised himself and took a step closer.
Leo noticed his shaking voice start to get more steady. “What are you doing with this woman?”
The man considered Leo for another moment then turned to run after the woman. He caught up to her with ease and grabbed her by the arm, viciously turning her toward him. He walked her toward the car as she tried to use her body weight to pull herself way from him.
She screamed, “Get the fuck off of me.”
Leo looked around for help then said, “Let her go. What is this? What are you doing?”
“Stay the fuck back,” the man yelled. But Leo hadn’t move forward.
But now he felt himself move forward. And with this one step, there was a clarity.
As the man shoved the woman into the passenger side of the car and elbowed her in the face for good measure, Leo found himself walking around the backside of the car.
The man trained his eyes on Leo and slowly turned toward him, his open mouth and sharply-turned neck telegraphing his surprise.
“You don’t want to get involved bro. I’ll fuck you up.”
“Let me out,” the woman yelled.
The man slammed the car door and pointed at her.
“Stay the fuck inside the car,” he said.
Then all was silent. She gave up. The whole episode could have been over. Swept under the rug, no repercussions. The man turned toward Leo.
As he took a step towards Leo, his face became more clear. He wasn’t in his fifties. He looked to be more like early forties but with a pock-marked overly tanned face, and a scar running deep over his right eyebrow down just past the top of his cheekbone. A faded neck tattoo peaked up above his shirt line.
Leo’s eyes darted to the woman in the car. Through the tinted window he could see she had her head in her hands, crying and defeated.
The man got another step closer. Leo knew he should run. And that’s when he felt the brick in his hand.
——
Sitting in the back of the police car, Leo saw PCH differently than he’d ever seen it before. The spaces between buildings, the dumpster-filled alleys all came into stark focus. The small little lawless sections of this upscale area and every area.
“Is that guy…?” Leo asked.
“What do you think, man?” The cop asked, almost chuckling.
The cop then leaned over and said something quietly into the radio in his right hand, an action that caught Leo’s rapt attention.
“What are you…”
“It’s not about you.” The cop’s whole body shuddered as he again coughed into his hand, which still awkwardly clutched the radio receiver.
Leo asked, “Where are we going?”
“We’re taking a short trip.”
Leo looked down at his hands.
“Can you just drop me off here?”
The cop laughed hard until he coughed again. This time Leo noticed there was blood.
“OK, so where are we going?”
“To get the rest of them.”
“The rest of them?”
“Let’s listen to some music. You like rap?”
The cops turned the radio up. Big X The Plug’s clogged-throat and lispy boasts in the song MmmHmm filled the car as Leo takes a deep breath and leans back in his seat.
Copyright Chris McCarthy and MDA Press 2024, Graphic by Sara McCarthy Designs