I was hoping for the kind of gritty neo-realism that informed some of the best songs of bands like Eric Burdon & the Animals… but what I ended up with was a couple of local insider references and a sadly obvious yet actually unintentional central pun. (Yeah, yeah, there are no accidents, I hear you. Nonetheless, I was oblivious, even when the first verse began with “junkies” and ended with “final score”…)
He used to live in a funky old high rise on the edge of downtown. He could look out his bedroom window and see the gleaming hotel towers rising far above his 7th floor window. If you squinted between a couple of buildings you could see a flash of ocean through his bathroom window.
Things were a lot better then. He had a good job, money for booze and drugs, a good, usually reliable dealer just a few doors down.
But after his girl dumped him, he let his orbit get a little wobbly.
One weekend, the weekend didn’t stop.
He’d just been paid. He hooked up with a new girl down at the Red Room and it turned out she had a bigger hunger than he did… for everything.
He meant to call in sick Monday morning but he was dead out. On Tuesday he called but he already knew what he’d hear. Pick up your check and clean out your locker.
By Wednesday afternoon, he was out of cash and the girl was as gone as the dope.
He managed to squeak by for another few weeks, selling his stereo and his motorcycle, his leather jacket. He made the rounds looking for work but he could have picked a better time… there was nothing. And when he finally got a nibble, the first thing they did was check his refs…
Eventually he came home to find a padlock on the door. He rousted the manager — it was one in the morning — who came to the door with a gun in his hand.
“Oh. I should have known,” he said, not lowering the little automatic by more than a few degrees. “You’re outta here. Your shit’s stacked up in a corner of the garage, by the laundry room.”
“You can’t just put me out! What about…”
“F—ing sue me,” he said and closed the door.
Now, a couple years later, he had a spot under a thick growth of shrubs near the loop that cut out around the convention center and auditorium. When he stepped out of his hidey hole — cautiously, since they were always looking for people camping in the bushes near the beach — he could see his old apartment window, catching a glint of sunlight and shining it like a blinding message straight into his brain.
