South on Highland: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  South on Highland

  “A very cool debut from a very cool writer. South on Highland belongs to a special literary tradition: the kind of book that kids will steal from each other.”

  —B. J. Novak, bestselling author of One More Thing and Book with No Pictures

  “A humorous work of provocative nostalgia. Liana Maeby has written Less Than Zero for the emoji generation.”

  —Jason Reitman, director of Juno and Up in the Air

  “Liana Maeby has a serious way with words. South on Highland is a delightful, Adderall-fueled romp through Hollywood indulgence.”

  —Ariel Schrag, author of Adam

  “Hilarious and gut wrenching, both by turns and sometimes simultaneously. If this world is familiar to you, you’ll instantly fall into its authentic groove. If it’s foreign, you’ll find no tour guide more witty, more soulful, or more full of perception than the immensely talented Liana Maeby.”

  —Rian Johnson, writer and director of Brick and Looper

  “Liana Maeby has crafted a magic trick of a novel—profane and funny and devastating, and above all, fun as hell. As sexy and silly, dangerous and creepy as Jim Morrison’s leather pants, South on Highland does what the best drug novels do: make one both deeply aware of the insidious cost of drug addiction, and want to go get super wasted.”

  —Stephen Falk, creator of You’re the Worst on FX

  “Don’t say no to Maeby, say yes to South on Highland. If the madness and kaleidoscope values that make up life in LA could be captured in a book, it would have to be in the format hilariously realized in this incredible book. So funny because it’s so real, so real because it’s so horrifying, Liana Maeby has written the ultimate eulogy to American culture at its logical and geographic endpoint.”

  —Richard Rushfield, editor-in-chief of HitFix and author of Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost

  “Liana Maeby makes possibly dying from a head wound on the floor of a millionaire’s bathroom funnier than it has any right to be. South on Highland is fast, thrilling, and incredibly clever.”

  —Kevin Seccia, author of Punching Tom Hanks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Liana Maeby

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477829882

  ISBN-10: 1477829881

  Cover design by Adil Dara

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014921615

  For Carol, my mother, the strongest and the best person, to whom I owe everything.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  The pills spilled to the ground like debris from a tornado, landing in various wet spots around the toilet. No, they tumbled out like a wintry mix: Klonopin hail, OxyContin rain, Vicodin snow. No, like that moment on the 101, somewhere around Barham, when accident traffic suddenly unclogs and the cars all shoot forward at once.

  I was supposed to be looking for the afikomen at Jerry Weinbach’s Passover seder, but instead, I raided the master bathroom for the pills I assumed Jerry’s wife, Miriam, a blank Barbie doll who’d been left out in the sun for too long, likely had in great quantity. All around the house, women with high-end hair and designer souls were sticking their manicures beneath couch cushions and inside the slats of modernist pendant lamps. My agent, Harlan Brooks, was down there somewhere, no doubt determined to score the five back-end points Jerry was offering as the prize, and Johnny held court over a parade of models in the backyard. But I was up here, plundering Miriam Weinbach’s medicine cabinet like Captain Jack Sparrow left alone on Johnny Depp’s yacht.

  I conjured the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center on a Saturday afternoon. Toddlers banging on the timpani, lawyers plucking at guitars they’re thinking about buying for their estranged sons, some junkie with Rod Stewart hair nodding off against a row of amps. General orderless cacophony, portending disaster. That’s what the pills sounded like when they scattered across the floor: an absolute racket. And I fell with them—the high-heeled booties I was too frail to be wearing in the first place splaying out from under me, my head slamming against the fella’s side of the matching his-and-her sinks. I can’t be sure exactly what made me fall. Maybe I was straining to reach for a bottle of codeine buried in the back of the cabinet, or maybe I just lost the ability to stand upright. I had really taken my motor skills for granted in the years before I became enchanted by the spell of drugs: those tiny, potent assassins who, for kicks, will suddenly make your left hand incapable of following the orders your brain is trying to convey.

  What I did know was that everything went dark for seconds or maybe minutes. I heard a woman shriek and then a round of clapping. The matzoh had been found. But I couldn’t see anything, just a hazy imprint of the objects in the room. My phone buzzed. I raised my head from the cold tile and willed my eyes to focus as I plucked the cell from my bag. It was Johnny, and he was looking for me. Upstrs bthrm, I typed. Fck.

  I lay back and watched the stars inside my head. Tried to find Orion swirling above my right eyeball. Tried to remember a point when nightfall meant something other than time to score, when the infinite sky was a reminder of the possibilities of the future and not the mistakes of the past. Back before I’d descended into my own personal hell.

  “Leila?”

  The door opened, and Johnny walked in. Impossible, green-eyed Johnny. Unshowered but even more handsome for it. Face of a thousand billboards. He shut the door and stared at me.

  “Jesus. The hell happened to you?”

  I shrugged. I felt blood trickle down my chin.

  “Are you missing a tooth?”

  I stuck a finger in my mouth and found a fleshy volcano.

  “Christ,” Johnny said. “I knew we shouldn’t have gone outside today.”

  Johnny helped me up. He lifted me from the ground like he had so many times those last few months. But before he did, before he put his thin arms—covered in leather to hide the track marks—around my equally skinny frame, Johnny made sure to scoop up every last pill from the ground. He d
owned a couple and pocketed the rest for later—later that day, that week, or maybe even that hour if he was feeling ambitious.

  I tried to talk, but blood gurgled in my throat. Johnny was carrying me down the steps and out the front door. He caught Harlan’s eye and beckoned for my humiliated agent to follow us outside.

  “Hold on. I think I’m gonna—” I managed to say just in time for Johnny to put me down so I could vomit into Jerry’s pink rhododendrons. I wiped blood and puke from my mouth and sat down on the curb.

  Harlan put his hand on my shoulder, then removed it as soon as he realized he’d touched a splotch of vomit. I was embarrassed, but I didn’t ask him to leave. There was nothing to do but let these men take over. There was no fight left in me.

  “Hey,” I croaked, wiping my face on my blazer. “Johnny?”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Where was it?”

  “Where was what?”

  I tilted my head upward. “The matzoh?”

  Johnny laughed. He wiped matted-with-upchuck hair out of my eyes. “Underneath Jerry’s Oscar.”

  And I laughed too, a cackle that caused me to spray colored fluids from my mouth.

  “Perfect,” I said, and then I let Johnny and Harlan scoop me up and carry me to the car, for a ride I would come to regret sleeping through. The click of a seat belt secured my body, and I chuckled, as if external turmoil could hold a candle to the chaos raging inside my failing veins.

  The sound of my own choked laughter was the last thing I remember before I regained consciousness on the floor of the East Hollywood Rehabilitation Center, weighing ninety-seven pounds at twenty-three years old, and in possession of nothing but a bloody bandage that covered my forehead, a fringe cult’s satanic symbol tattooed on my hip, and a movie star’s semen in my hair.

  PART ONE

  Just a Little Bit More

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was fourteen the first time I tried stimulants, alone in my bedroom with the door locked and a Sex Pistols CD playing on a loop. A brand-new Boogie Nights poster hung over my bed, where it covered up a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars that, several years before, I’d applied in such a way that it outlined a very impressive accidental penis. I pulled my backpack toward me on my bed and removed a baggie containing five tiny Adderall pills, offered to me by an extremely hyperactive classmate named Tyler in exchange for letting him see his first pair of real live boobs. (“Pair” being the operative clincher here—Tyler claimed he’d already seen a single breast in a hotel peeping adventure during a family vacation.)

  I hadn’t asked for the drugs, but I felt a tantalizing sense of excitement the moment they were in my hands. I wasn’t sure what I should do with them. I considered roping in my best friend, Mari, a tall black-haired girl who was ethnically half-devil, for a late-night adventure she undoubtedly would have been up for. Alternately, I thought about saving them for a party or a concert. But in the end, with no way of knowing exactly how I’d react and the hunch I’d want to spend some time inside my own head, I decided to be alone for the experience.

  I drew the blinds over my window and switched on a lamp, trying to make my room as optimal a setting for this undertaking as possible. Satisfied with the feng shui, I slipped a little orange pill from the plastic bag and downed it with a gulp of water. After fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-one minutes, I was feeling nothing, so I did what idiotic kids have been doing since the beginning of time and will no doubt continue to do until the world is either on fire or underwater: I took another dose. Seemingly moments after I swallowed the bonus tablet, the first one hit and my heart began to race, spreading warm lightning through my veins. The first thought I had was what a good idea it was to take these pills, and the second thought I had was what a seriously fucking good idea it was to take these pills! The third thought I had was centered firmly around my own undeniable genius. I sang along to the music, riffing on the lyrics (sex and violence is cool, but how deep is vex and silence?), and had the idea that I ought to become a songwriter myself.

  Twenty-five minutes later, the second pill kicked in, and I could feel my heartbeat in my throat. I lifted up my shirt and noticed that I could see my most vital organ pounding back and forth through a thin layer of skin. I got up to pace the room but realized movement would only make my heart beat faster. I sat back down. I hummed along with the music. I picked up a Seventeen magazine, an unsolicited subscription courtesy of my grandmother, and began flipping rapidly through its pages.

  Just below “7 Tantalizing Tips for Spicing Up Second Base” was an ad announcing an essay contest, open to any and all teenagers residing in the fifty United States. Sponsored by D.A.R.E., the contest asked for a thousand words about why you have vowed never to do drugs. A cash prize of $300 was being offered to the winner, which, for a teenager, might as well have been a million. I read the paragraph over. Minors only, stories must be true. My confidence amped up artificially, I was certain I could write exactly the kind of essay that would win me three hundred bucks. And my speeding brain was vying to be put to use.

  My heart raced, and I laughed at the delightful irony of the situation. I whipped out my notebook and started jotting down ideas. What angle to take? Religion? The desire to be president one day? Juvenile renal failure? Being really into track and field? Estranged sister?

  “Estranged sister” instantly felt like it would be the most fun to write. I pressed pen to paper and tried to put myself into the mind frame of a normal fourteen-year-old girl, one who would write this essay in earnest. I talked about Katrina Massey, who had been the best older sister in the world until she fell victim to the irresistible pull of narcotics. My heart beat erratically as my fingers struggled to scratch out words as quickly as I thought of them. I found myself smiling as I scribbled, my mind half-focused on the task at hand and half-attuned to the accolades that lay in my future.

  It took all of thirty minutes, with a pee break included, to hammer out the essay, which I immediately typed up and printed out. I read the thing over and was rather impressed with its believability, if I did say so myself. I mailed the essay off that afternoon, finding that the most difficult part of the whole process was trying to lick a stamp with a raging case of dry mouth.

  I walked back into my room, shuffled around, and decided it was time to make a collage—I needed this direly and immediately. I began to cut apart photos of models from the magazine, taking a head here, an arm there, a pair of chiseled cheekbones and a pouty lower lip. Then I glued the pieces together onto a sheet of computer paper, creating a glorious composite human made of all these desirable body parts. It was totally poignant, I thought, important, even. Take that, Picasso! Take that, Mary Shelley! Take that, serial killers on network procedurals!

  And suddenly, I was bored of collage making. So I cleaned out my sock drawer and organized the pens on my desk by color and then again by size. I did the history homework that wasn’t due for a week, and then I trimmed my own hair.

  After a few hours of manic thinking, I started to come down from my high. My body still felt warm and electric, but my mind wasn’t as eager to complete a litany of crazy tasks. I lay down on my bed and looked up at the phallic poster that covered up the phallic constellation on my ceiling. My mind began to wander, but I didn’t try to call it back. I daydreamed about my future self, watching as she drank coffee in a Paris café and paraded around a Tribeca loft—or maybe it was in Brooklyn. I saw her in London and in Los Angeles—as high up in Los Angeles as you can go—sipping drinks with her heroes, who all did spit-takes at her jokes. I watched her sit down at her computer and write page after page after brilliant page, her brain on fire, and the world eager to consume the words that flashed across her screen. And then I got a Coke from the kitchen, made myself a quesadilla, and turned on the TV.

  I ended up winning second place in the Seventeen contest, receiving a check for $150 and the news that my piece was going to be published in an upcoming issue of the magazine. I had comple
tely forgotten that I’d entered the thing, so grabbing silver was more than fine with me. I used my winnings to take Mari out for a Melrose Avenue shopping spree, where we demolished piles of vintage T-shirts and snapped up the most artfully tarnished denim jackets we could find. We crammed ourselves into a single dressing room and executed a fashion show. I put on an oversized shredded shirt and posed with my hands on my hips. “Punk or bohemian?” I asked.

  “Neither,” Mari said. “Hippie.”

  “Yikes. Burn pile.”

  We linked arms and hopped down the street with our thrift scores stuffed into our backpacks. I felt swept up in the giddiness of a Friday afternoon, surfing a wave of pheromones that ricocheted off the teens who walked the block in throngs. “Milkshake?” I asked as we passed a Johnny Rockets.

  “I have a better idea,” she said, and dragged me off Melrose proper.

  Local lore held that there was a homeless man named Andy who kept himself stocked in malt liquor buying cigarettes at the request of underage kids for a five-dollar fee. Mari was pretty sure she knew the alley he ran his bootlegging operation from and led us that way. The back corner of an empty parking lot had been taken over by a group of skateboarders attempting tricks off railings and trash cans. And sure enough, one of the pint-sized punks was rocking back and forth on his board while talking to a dusty bearded guy who sipped from a forty-ounce bottle of Mickey’s.

  Mari and I hung back at the edge of the lot and watched. “Should we just go up to him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s be cool for right now.”

  We stood for a minute, and then we moved a few feet closer. Andy’s pimply partner in conversation spotted us. He leapt off his board, hitched up his pants, and strutted our way. “You ladies looking for something?”

  “Yeah,” Mari said. “We wanted to talk to the guy over there. Andy?”

  “No one talks to Andy. You talk through me.”

  “Okay. We’d like a pack of Parliaments.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the kid said, and just stood there. “It’ll cost you five bucks.”