Free Sick City by Tony O'Neill Page B

to Jamaica with your girl. That’s cool.”
    â€œBig up! Dat’s the shit that keeps me going, mon. Three more months of dis, and we’ll be outta Babylon. Easy.”
    Somewhere outside of their room, a bell rang.
    â€œCome on, mon, forward . . .”
    â€œWhat is that?”
    â€œTime for our morning meeting, mon. Come wit’ me. I’ll get you orientated.”
    â€œSo what does the good doctor say about weed being a sacrament?”
    â€œWe disagree on dat. So I tell ’im what him want to hear. Only one man can judge me . . .” Levi turned his eyes up to the ceiling fan. . . . “The creator. The root of David. Ites . . . me nah want all da bagels to be gone by the time we gets downstairs.”

Chapter Eleven
    The girls sat around and talked. It was early afternoon, and Crazy Girls seemed even more lonesome, the air a little more stale, and the darkness a little more pervasive at this time of day. The stray sliver of sun that crept in past the doorman had an accusatory look about it. It made the holiday garlands that hung from the entrance to the stage shimmer slightly. They drank vodka to combat the effect of the uppers. Onstage a chubby Dominican girl called Lupita danced to Lil Wayne’s grunts and implorations. Trina had just started her shift. She was drinking with some of the other girls, waiting for the club to start to fill with the early-afternoon crowd.
    â€œLook at this shit,” Trina said, putting a crumpled piece of paper on the table.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œA fucking eviction notice. That bitch is trying to throw me out of the apartment now. Says I got three days to vacate or they’re gonna change the locks.”
    Â· · ·
    The saga of Trina’s apartment was an ongoing topic of discussion at Crazy Girls. The actual landlord was a hunched-over little soft touch with a beaten, hangdog face called Manny. Manny wasn’t the problem, though. The problem was his wife: a fake-titted Eurotrash cunt who had shown up on Trina’s doorstep a week after she’d moved in, brandishing an early ’80s copy of Greek Penthouse in which she was the centerfold. She was there to warn Trina away from her husband.
    â€œManny say you are model . . . ,” she had said through tight lips. “Well, I am model, too. And Manny is happy with this model, yes? I don’t want you to come shaking your ass around my husband thinking you get special treatment. If you have problem with apartment, then you come to ME.”
    After a month or so when a virtual army of cockroaches and mice had emerged from the walls and taken over the apartment, suddenly Manny was nowhere to be found. She could hear armies of creatures scuttling across her ceiling in the small hours, and the poison that she put down for them only seemed to turn their shit neon blue. Aside from that, the little bastards seemed to quite enjoy it. “This is Los Angeles, darling,” the wife told her when she complained. “You must get used to vermin, yes?”
    When Trina retaliated by withholding the rent, a standoff ensued. The neighbors, all Armenian like the landlord and his wife, became openly hostile to her. The men spat as she walked past, and the women would not make eye contact with her. Her car was often boxed in, and nobody ever seemed to know who owned the offending car. There were drunken phone calls in the middle of the night from the wife: “You pay what you owe us, bitch, or you get what comes to you!” And now notice to quit the apartment. This was not a good day.
    A hard-faced redhead called Cherry picked up the paper and looked at it.
    â€œI got these before,” she said. “Go to the courthouse downtown. If you file the right papers, you can drag this shit out forever. . . .”
    â€œBitch, just pay your rent!” chimed in another girl, who danced under the name Foxy. “You ain’t