The phone makes the noise of a one-armed bandit paying off, a special ring I have for choice clients. Text message “come by in half hour :)” The message is from Shiba Maertin. You may remember Shiba as a spooky kid from a Spielberg movie, or the sitcom with the black dad and a white dad. Either way, you wouldn’t recognize her now.

Evidence suggests that there is a Post Dramatic Success Disorder and, further, that drugs are the only viable coping mechanism for the horrors of modern stardom. Child stars are an anomaly that don’t exist outside of Los Angeles. But, god help you, you’ll bump into one sooner or later if you’re insane and love drugs as much as they do.

I leave Jewels post haste and get on the bike without bothering to hide my felonies again. As I kick the Triumph to life the Easter basket kids jump like they’ve been shot. The Triumph is louder than bombs going off, which is the only safety feature on the thing. I slip back into traffic to rattle the brains of suckers stuck in their cars. Sure, people try to run me over because they are watching porn on their phones. But I am unafraid because two things I never do is die or pay taxes.

Helicopters, news and police, converge in the night above where Sunset meets the 101. So, I take Fountain instead. The earbuds under my helmet ring. As I feel around to answer a Prius swerves across the dotted line. I flash the high beams. The car swerves further, then slows to ten miles an hour forcing me to grab brakes hard enough the back wheel skids out. I have to put my foot down to keep from dropping the bike.

“Say it quick because I’m about to die.”

I pull up next to the Prius and stuck my middle finger in the window. The Prius lady, busy facetiming, horrified at being attacked, holds her phone out and commands me to “Do that again, asshole!” And I do. Her friend on the phone is outraged, too.

So, when the light changes she tries to run me over, but I twist my wrist to shoot up the middle of stopped traffic, leaving the her locked in the rage cage. This type of shit happens every night. To ride a motorcycle is to take that line between what you are and what you are not, and charge right up the middle of it between a bunch of distracted, drunk, high people. To constantly commit suicide in this fashion is a reaffirmation of life. Doing it on drugs to deliver drugs is reaffirmation of Van Halen.

I don’t need Siri to tell me how to get to Shiba Maerten’s house because shit rolls uphill in Los Angeles. I can see Shiba’s stilted glass pied a terre on the ridge above me. An obvious landmark, not as private as someone constantly stalked by paparazzi might desire, but years of attention has institutionalized Shiba Maerten so she needs to live in a Panapticon.

I swoop around the block, checking for paparazzi, until I’m sure it’s clear. You got to be careful about being a “caregiver” in Hollywood. I know the guy that sold Kurt Cobain his last shot. To this day he wears a hood to get around because people accost him in the street and put needles in his vegan wraps, shit like that.

I dismount the bike and sneak from shadow to shadow until I find the security gate open. Once inside the privacy fence of Shiba’s compound I make my way up the stairs cut into the steep front lawn as Stevie Nicks sings, “Gold Dust Woman put your kingdom up for sale” from hidden speakers. The stairs are flanked with iceplant, driftwood, antique green glass buoys, cold drippy candle remnants, wreaths of cigarette butts jammed in an ashtray under the porch, empty wine bottles and several red cups rolling around in the evening breeze. The lights of the house above cut the fog rolling in from the west. I take the stairs.

The light dazzles me when the stairs end abruptly at Shiba’s front door. The curtains have been thrown back so I can see inside. Ms. Maertin has placed an antique leaded mirror on the dresser outside of her bathroom door, so the reflection angles into the shower. As there’s nowhere else to look, I happen to see Shiba’s pink taffy nipples frescoed behind the roiling steam as she rubs herself all over with one of those loofah sponges, the kind with the weird nubs all over it.

I’m struck flat footed, dumb, frozen in place. A gentle breeze nearly blows me back down the stairs. My movement makes Shiba turn the shower off. Busted. Now what? I go through all the modern pervert shaming horrors that await me: ousted on twitter as a peeping tom, falling so low that I won’t even be able to sell drugs anymore.

But it’s a game. Shiba shines her famous tits on mortals, rendering them into pillars of quivering salt. I’m supposed to knock on the door. I don’t have enough class, so, I light a cigarette and fiddle with the phone. But there’s nothing in the phone good as Shiba Maertin tits when she flounces out of the shower, pale skin flushed from that hot, hot steam.

Shiba traces her body with a downy white towel, slowly, making sure to dry the places that I preferred she leave wet. I drool so hard my cigarette hisses out. Shiba dries the small divot behind her knee.

Finally, I’m able to knock on the door, with three unimpeachable raps, like a cop. Shiba jumps in a dumbshow of surprise which might have passed in a child’s acting class. She skips to her closet, puts a white silk robe, then comes to the door, smiling, pushing wet hair out of her eyes.

“Oh my bad… hate to interrupt your… bath.” I’m nervous, confused, short of breath.

“Shower. Oh no, it’s fine, darling, I called you, you know,” Shiba says in her precious British accent, drying behind her ears, braille of goosebumps around her nipples. “Do come in,” she coos, brushing her hair back with a big red comb. I flop on the shabby chic couch and try to page through French Vogue nonchalantly as I place three bags of white powder between us. In my opinion Shiba’s interior decorator was a little too on the nose with the vintage Serge Gainsbourg movie posters and a huge lava lamp goobing away on an honest to god mirror table.

“Is this any good?” she asks. Hyperventilation has me unsure of what she means, but I murmur in assent, “Yes. Good,” as Shiba throws a handful of cash at me.

“How’s the writing coming?” Shiba says around the hair tie in her mouth, as she piles shimmering blonde hair on her head. Usually I answer, “not so good if I’m still selling drugs,” but it would be the wrong thing to say now. So, I tell her about how my agent has big big things in the works. How the movies I wrote are still getting thumbs up and the book deal, too. Not to mention the magazine bullshit. She nods knowingly as she takes a lighter and rocks it back and forth, pulverizing the cocaine in the bag.

“Writers are so cool,” Shiba lies, “Will you write something for me one day?”

“We’d have to talk to my agent,” is the nicest way I can think of to say no.

Shiba removes the hair tie from her mouth and wraps her hair away in a neat little bun.

“Does he get you good work?”

You can tell a lot about someone by how wack up their dust. Shiba stretches a gram in one continuous line across a mirror table, about a foot long, because she’s been down since the age of twelve.

“The only job he’s ever gotten or given anybody was at the CAA circle jerk.” Shiba laughs at the memory of CAA circle jerks, then, bends to do the rail. As she ducks in front of me the silk of her kimono lifts to exposes the bottom of her ass cheeks. She steers her little glass straw to follow the last grains of cocaine, leaning further, so the petals of her labia peek from the alabaster of her thighs. I know it seems that this type of shit happens all the time to a guy like me. But the reality is that cocaine is usually less about sex and more about crapping.

Shiba turns and hands me the straw,

“Want some?”

I stammered that I had my own, and I’d hate to take any of hers. Shiba waves the glass straw at me.

“I insist.”

And so I did, I bowed to the powder, inhaled the dust. It slapped me like a rogue wave of cold shorebreak. I choked and sputtered. When I returned to sentience I was armed with the clarity of hard drugs which divined that Shiba was hitting on me.

“Is that all you are going to do, love?”

Shiba let the robe fall. Whoops. And then I took something else from her, too.

Later, as we lay on the overstuffed bed, by the window above the pulsing grids of the city below, watching helicopters spin on needled spotlights, eruptions of red brakes bleeding out from the blue siren pulsing under the marine layer, Shiba demanded, “Isn’t it beautiful?

I’ve stood on the hill people’s balconies, I’ve pissed in their hot tubs, and listened to them, every one, ask the same thing, voice sotto. I almost told it to Shiba straight this one time, “No. It’s not beautiful. All that glitters isn’t glitter. It’s traffic, a baitball, a barrier. It’s the many hearted beast that drove you insane.”

But I notice she’s busy combing the hate paste out of her mink bed spread and decide to let her live the dream a little longer. You can’t tell people like Shiba nothing, anyhow.