The Continuing Saga of:
”ICICLE BILL and Tommy Two-Head”

Chapter Two: Bill Gets Carjacked

    Rule number one. When sitting at a drive-thru in L.A., windows up, doors locked. By the time I’d paid and was reaching for my coffee, I had company. A scrawny, wild-eyed and obviously agitated Mexican kid was sitting next to me with what appeared to be a forty-five automatic stabbing me in the ribs. His English was perfect, ”Drive.” I drove. Onto Vermont Avenue heading south I weighed my options. Jump out at the next light, wrestle with the dude for the gun, or wait and see. With the gun stuck in my side and this guy more than moderately hyped up, I chose number three. He gave directions, ”Turn right on Eighth. Look man, I just need a ride, I don’t want to hurt anybody, I just got to get somewhere.” He seemed intent on getting somewhere alright, the willingness to carjack tipped me off.

    We hit Interstate Ten heading east. My companion vas sweating profusely, breathing heavily, clutching his side and bleeding all over my white leather seats. He pulled a ziplock bag from his shirt, one of those big ones about a foot long and wide. It was full of an off white powder. He borrowed my coffee stirrer and snorted some piles, that seemed to perk him up. He looked at me, ”You want some?” Polite to offer I thought, ”No thanks, I got coffee.”

    Shortly, we cleared the city limits with open freeway ahead, I had no idea where we were going or what would happen once we got there. I began to wonder what this kid’s story was and if killing me might be an option. Well, if that’s how it’s going down, if this is the last person I might ever talk with, let’s talk. I began, ”How bad is it?” That seemed to wake him from deep thought. He rolled his head around, noticing the wound and blood, as if for the first time. ”Not so bad, I had worse.” I didn’t doubt it. The guy was young, lean and hardcore. Scarred up and tattooed down. Probably bleeding to death, snorting dope in a carjacked Lincoln, a gun, a hostage and it’s not even noon, he seemed unfazed.

    I don’t know if it was the dope, probably crack, or the nearness of possible death or perhaps boredom, but he began to talk. His name was Gangster G and he’d just escaped an attempted execution, his own...by his own homeboys. He winced when he told me that part. G came up from Mexico about ten years ago with his single mom, an older brother, a twin sister and an infant brother. I’m figuring he’d have been about nine or ten years old at that time. His whole world was packed into a beat up Pinto station wagon. His mom got a job at a shoe factory in Glendale. He’d baby-sit the kids in the Pinto in the factory parking lot all day and at night they’d go park in a nearby cemetery to sleep.

    In the mornings he’d roam the neighborhoods for milk deliveries left on doorsteps for the baby and scrounge soda bottles for food money. At night he took to trekking out on his own to give his mom one less mouth to feed.. He found that after midnight, for twenty-five cents, he could buy a ticket to one of those mammoth old movie houses downtown and spend the night there. The places that once gloriously premiered Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz, with stars on red carpets, were now no more than flophouses for drunks and derelicts and scared little future gangsters.

    It’s really no wonder this kid found refuge and belonging in a gang. By his mid teens he’d taken control of his destiny, rising up through the ranks through ruthlessness and treachery. Yet, there was something inherently honorable about this guy. You could tell just by talking to him that he was a born leader, that he wanted to stand for something. The fact that his own gang was responsible for his wounds seemed to hurt worse than the actual gunshot.

    We left I-10 and headed north towards Las Vegas. G’s sister lived there now after the rest of his family had returned to Mexico. He wanted to warn her that she might be a target also. Her name was Gloria and she worked at the Crazyhorse Saloon near the strip. Nobody was supposed to know that. She once was a Miss West Covina and now earned a pretty good living dancing and serving drinks.

    We stopped at a diner to get some gas and cold drinks. G wanted to do a good slam to get him through the trip. He realized by now I wasn’t trying to get away and I posed no threat. After hearing his story I figured the last thing this guy needed was another somebody turning on him. What he needed was a friend, or a priest.

    I exited the diner with two big cups of iced tea and some double cheeseburgers. I bet G hasn’t eaten in days. Get some food in him, find a doctor and get him patched up, locate his sis, that’s a plan. He was passed out with the needle still in his arm. In the rearview mirror I saw a State Trooper pull into the diner. I slipped the needle out of his arm, pulled G’s baseball cap over his eyes and slowly pulled onto the highway. A bag of dope, a gun, blood all over the place, a car not registered in my name and a dead Mexican were just too many questions that I didn’t have the right answers to at the moment.

    About thirty miles up I found a turnoff that looked like it lead nowhere, I wondered if that vas prophetic or symbolic, I hoped not. I followed the barely used dirt path out into the desert a few miles until I saw a scraggly old Mesquite tree up ahead. A nice spot, a quiet spot, peaceful. I think G would’ve understood, I like to hope so anyway. As I pulled up to the tree that’s the first time I laid eyes on Tommy Two-Head...half dead, tied to that tree.