First, a trigger warning: this series of stories will feature some fairly brutal violence. I shouldn't overstate it — we're not going to chart any territory previously unexplored by the written word, and none of the violence is sexual — but this is definitely not for everyone.
So: caveat lector!
If you've read the "Raoul's 18th birthday" stories, you can skip the rest of this note, as this story picks up where those leave off, but if you've found your way here directly, and don't wish to read those stories first, you might benefit from this introduction.
We begin on Friday, January 2nd, 1987, the morning after Raoul Cock's 18th birthday. (Yes, that's quite a set of coincidences. You are not the first to have noticed.)
He has just ridden away from Easy Riders, a strip club operated by the Khan Nation, an outlaw motorcycle gang whose members are big fans of Boss Badoss, the villain Raoul played in the Jean-Claude Segal Fist Punch
movies.
Two of the dancers, powerfully attached to him now because he just rescued both of them from violent attacks, have ridden away with him on his Harley. Emma (stage name "Raven") has been an acquaintance of some of Raoul's sisters and cousins, but now it's fair to call her one of his lovers, as you can tell by the way she hugs his back as she rides behind him. In front rides "Candy," still basically a stranger to him; however, seeing her lean back into his chest and crotch leaves no doubt about her intention to change that status as soon as she can.
Emma is on the skinny side and Candy's a little short, so Raoul looks comical between them: he's 201 centimeters tall (that's 6' 7" for the Yanks) and not done growing. Americans would say he's 250 pounds and communists might round it off at 115 kilograms, but to native speakers of the English language he's 18 stone.
Finely-chiseled stone at that. A star student-athlete at the Essex Academy for Boys (which at this time has not yet formally merged with the Ridgway School for Girls) in Los Angeles, he's appeared in a variety of minor roles on screen and television, including the Fist Punch
movies mentioned earlier, but he's currently best known as the face, or especially as the body, of Barry Schwartz's cologne Obsessed for Men.
As the bulge in his tighty whiteys in those ads reveal, they don't call him "Big Cock" for nothing.
If we can venture a slight criticism of our hero, he might've had a bit too much fun at Easy Riders. There was a bit of a melee, actually. A man with a small knife managed to give him a little gash on the left forearm, and sundry other attackers got him here and there with bottles, ashtrays, and who knows what.
He's fine, really; it's nothing that a couple ice packs, a dozen stitches, and a couple of days in bed won't fix.
No, most of the blood you see on him once belonged to other men. Armed with a pair of brass knuckles given to him by the Khans, and with years of experience in boxing and martial arts, Raoul carved a path of destruction through the bar, breaking noses, jaws, and teeth.
In short, he had a romping, rollicking good time without any regard for the consequences that he will now have to face.
Among his least fortunate victims is a man who has turned out to be Emma's cousin Phil. Raoul caught Phil smacking Emma around in the dressing room.
So Phil is dead.
Raoul only meant to beat the hell out of him, but accidents happen when big boys who know how to throw a punch get carried away with brass knuckles.
Still alive, but humiliated and badly hurt, are a trio of brothers led by Phil's friend Todd. Todd was probably the luckiest, having been merely knocked out when Raoul was still fighting barehanded. He's concussed, of course, and still hours away from waking up and wondering where he is, but one of his brothers — the one who attacked Candy with the knife and got Raoul's arm — lost several teeth, and the other brother has a severely bruised kidney. He'll piss blood for a week.
Earlier yesterday evening, before all that fun broke out, Raoul had visited his cousin's sorority at USCLA, Kappa Phi Theta, where he met (among others) a pretty girl named Trang who lives in Little Saigon. She let Raoul know that (like a few of her sorority sisters) her New Year's resolution is to lose her virginity, and you will have to continue reading to find out whether she will be successful. The sorority has invited him to their Chinese New Year's party in a few weeks.
Before that, the family of one of Hollywood's richest executives, whom this narrator dares refer to only as Mr. X, hosted the eighteenth birthday party for Raoul and his twin sisters (together they're triplets) Sam and Reza. Things went so well for Raoul that he ran off just as Scarlett — the darling daughter — discovered Mrs. X naked in a bathtub with Raoul's ejaculate dripping from her face.
Raoul has promised to visit the X family again today to try to calm Scarlett down before she shatters her fragile family, potentially subjecting all of them to an appalling scandal.
But that is probably everything you need to know to pick up where this story begins. If you want a general introduction to Raoul and his family, you can find that in the first chapter of the "Raoul's 18th birthday" stories, titled "Shona and Coach Roberta," but you can probably get by without it.
So we resume as Raoul, Raven, and Candy are riding away from the club in the steel blue light of an LA dawn.
—————————————
Candy turns out to live in a little old rusty mobile home in a lot that looks like a junkyard, accessed by what looks like an alley through a junkyard.
This is the real Compton, Raoul thinks, and probably one of the worst parts of it. He's never really been in it before. Much worse than anything he experienced in Harlem or Brooklyn as a kid. Everything is rust, broken glass and concrete, stubborn bits of old paint clinging to warped wood, cardboard in windows, weeds growing around cars stripped for parts.
It's interesting, but his mind is elsewhere.
"It's nicer inside," Candy says, getting off to unlock the gate when they arrive at her house. "Just pull right on up next to the porch. Don't worry about the grass."
Raoul follows her instructions, barely aware of what she's saying or what he's doing.
His heart is pounding, his whole body is shaking. His mind wrestles with the question: Did he really kill people?
He tries to anticipate what the consequences will be. Will the Khans, as Scott promised, really be able to protect him from the police? Will they actually even try?
What should he do? Should he run? He could be in Tijuana in two hours. But then what? He may not be really famous, but he's been in ads, tv shows, movies — he's not
that
famous, but he's far too famous, and far too large, to hide.
Should he turn himself in to the cops, then, and hope the law will be merciful? He didn't
intend
to kill anyone. Will that matter?
But he shouldn't have been fighting. He shouldn't have worn the brass knuckles.
Surely he didn't
kill
anyone, he hopes, briefly.
But no. He definitely killed Phil. He remembers hearing the bones in Phil's face break. Remembers
feeling
them shatter as his fist moved through Phil's cheek and jaw. He remembers how Phil's body hung limp when he held his head by the hair, how the body fell to the ground when he dropped him, how the face bounced off the floor.
Some part of his mind
knows
he killed Phil.
And maybe other men — maybe several others. He tries to replay the fight in his mind, over and over, trying to remember how his fists hit each man, and how they fell. But he can see only individual moments, as if in a strobe light.
"Alright," he thinks. "Alright. I killed Phil. Maybe others." He breathes deep. The question is what to do next.
He needs to clear his head, to think clearly. But he needs to think quickly too.
He parks his bike right in front of the steps to the mobile home while Candy locks the gate behind them. Looking around, he manages to realize that he doesn't want to leave his bike parked in this neighborhood very long, even inside that locked gate, and he decides that as soon as he gets cleaned and bandaged he'll be on his way again.
Candy leads them inside and talks to her mother in Vietnamese while Raoul and Emma wait in the doorway. Her mom was asleep on the living room floor and although Raoul cannot understand Vietnamese, her mother is obviously very upset. She physically bars them from stepping further into the house, afraid to look up at Raoul but subjecting Candy to a ruthless barrage.
"No, Mom, I'm totally fine," Candy says in English. "Calm down."
Her mother yells short, angry words at Candy, who yells back in English:
"It was just a little fight! None of this is my blood! He totally saved me from a guy with a knife and now he needs help. We've got to take care of him."
