Chapter Text
Just another runaway.
That's all Carly Lynn was.
She must have had a last name but what that was exactly she never would tell me out of fear that I would send her back to wherever she had run away from before she had landed at Jerry's Motel in sunny California at the ripe old age of 13. Jerry's. A place run by a man named Hank whom enjoyed collecting runaways so he could spy on them and lust after them on the side. You could often catch him outside of his office trying to survey his seedy little kingdom and having a smoke. He had reached middle age a few years back, possessed small brown eyes which always seemed to be hiding some equally dark thought in his always working mind and a beard of brown to match the hair on top of his dirty minded head. He was a big framed man and physically intimidating.
Which turned me on although I could never confess it to him.
Hank and I never got along. Not at the start anyway. I was too old at 37 years old, when we first met, for his liking and too fat. He would have been just my type, oddly enough, if it wasn't for the fact that he was a pervert and scary as Hell. Unfortunately he could also be kind of funny in his own antisocial way too so I could never really hate the man no matter how much he seemed to despise me. The more I tried to win his kindness with my warmth the colder he became and so I tried even more out of desperation to try to make him like me even though he was a creep.
It reminded me of a quote from a Graham Greene novel that I had always remembered:
"Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away."
I was warm and Hank did not want me so he tossed my heart away but took my rent money every month. He was cold and unfathomably special to me, kept close to my heart behind the walls of my skin which there was too much of for his liking.
Of course, my age and my weight made me less of a draw for him to be able to pimp me out like the other girls whom stayed at his motel and that might have had more than a little to do with his animosity.
I had tried to save a few of the girls. I'd offer them money or tell them to call up their folks but you soon learn a few sad facts about runaways being around them for months as I was: most of them have a reason for not wishing to go back home again. You found out that they had already lost their innocence to somebody they should have been able to trust: a father, an uncle, a stepfather...Even a mother or aunt sometimes. They came with bruises to Jerry's motel, on their bodies or on their souls and the pleading in their eyes made you not phone up the cops as you would have previously believed that you should do. So many things die in Hollywood and beliefs were just a few of them.
Dreams.
Dreams died too. I'd come out here from Ontario, Canada not to make it as an actress, I could not fool myself into that particular belief, but to be a screenwriter instead. I'd been trying ever since and failing miserably. That was how I came to stay at Jerry's and made my introduction to Hank and his group of teenage runaways.
Carly Lynn arrived the day before I finally told Hank I would be leaving. She was my main reason for making the announcement, in a way, because I'd heard what Hank had said about her to the boyfriend of another runaway named Jesse.
If Carly Lynn had never come to California with some young girl's dream of being a star and some demon close on her heels she'd never have met Hank.
And if she'd never have met Hank she would have lived to see 14.
* * *
My room was just over the motel manager's office and I could practically hear every single thing he did below me, thankfully barring him taking a leak or dump.
I'd been in a room across the way for a while until Hank had moved me to my then current room. He'd made some joke about the reason being that then he wouldn't have to see my gross, fat little body and I really should have left then and there when the tears were stinging my eyes but all I had done was foolishly move. Without much of an income, Jerry's was one of the few options for me in the city. And I was still hoping in vain for some sign from the jerk that he did like me afterall. So I had dragged all of my belongings, an Underwood typewriter, 575 pages of various screenplays and 375 sheets of blank paper, my clothing, books and stuffed toys to the room above Hank's where I would listen to his actions all day and his amusing and sometimes disgusting conversations with a man named Mikey.
Over the last few hours their talk, mostly from Hank since Mikey was virtually a mute, had focused mostly on the mountain lion they had had to drag out of Jesse's room, 214. They laughed and acted all balls and machismo. The worst part was that they had actually been actually pretty brave with the beast.
When Jesse had come rapping on Hank's green metal door below it had woken me up instantly. I'd then left my room and watched the two men eventually forcing the creature out of the room and across the courtyard out into the wilderness of California. They hadn't dare call animal control or anything else remotely official unless the persons who came decided to have a look in any of the other rooms. I'd stood on the balcony and looked down at Hank and folded my arms as Mikey ran after the wildcat with his baseball bat. Both men never flinched. Hank must have seen me out of the corner of his eyes or maybe he just felt me staring. He suddenly looked up at me and I just as suddenly realized how short my nightshirt was.
"Should I have sent it up to your room, Erin?" he called up to me. "Finally give me a little action to overhear up there?"
I shook my head. It struck me as absurdly ironic that I was the oldest person renting a room at Jerry's Motel but that I was still a virgin. Obviously due to our close proximity and Hank's hobby as a voyeur it had not escaped him that I had been lonely ever since I had checked in.
Boldly I retorted, "I prefer my lions with manes."
"I'm sure the cougar would have appreciated it better. Probably not as many fat rabbit up where it came down from," Hank remarked, without looking at me, cruelly before stomping back to his office, Mikey following closely behind him.
I stayed out on the balcony and grabbed the railing, trying to compose myself. I hated his words and the fact that it bothered me equally as much that he hadn't tried to look up my nightshirt as he had passed under me. I'd seen that he hadn't stopped checking out Jesse's ass all the way to her room. She was 16 and beautiful though as opposed to me. Still I'd have loved to see his eyes trying to sneak a peek between my own legs. Being infatuated with a man that was a pervert was one thing but that he was turning me into one as well was doubly upsetting.
Now, though, Jesse's boyfriend had come to pay for the damages committed by the mountain lion and Hank was greeting him with the same hospitality that he showed everybody that happened to cross his path.
It was amusing in a way. Hank was his usual belligerent self but with his delivery it was funny even if I had been on the opposite end of it more times than it was comfortable to remember. It wasn't so cute anymore when he started to tell Jesse's boyfriend about Carly Lynn, however, and referred to her as a Lolita. I guessed it was accurate in a way. The girl dressed far older than she was and seemed sexually precocious like Nabokov's infamous nymphet. But it made me uncomfortable to hear it alongside Hank's proclamation to the man that the girl was "Room Two-Fourteen! Gotta be seen!"
She was 13 years old for crying out loud! I'd never seen Hank force himself on any of the younger girls here but I had seen him looking. The man was a predator but I'd never witnessed him take down any prey. If I had I would have been out of there. His words stuck in my head though and as I lay with my back on the mattress and my head staring at the cracked ceiling I hated having stayed at Jerry's Motel even for this long.
Several seconds after the younger man had left and Hank had closed his green metal door, I flew off of the bed, my brown auburnish hair in a mess of curls behind me and ran to leave my room. Running down the stairs, I reached Hank's door and started banging on it. I heard the manager swearing inside and when he opened the door I knew he was expecting to see me.
Little wonder why really; He'd probably heard every step I had made on my way down.
"Yeah?" he demanded. "I'm missing People's Court, here. Make it snappy. Plumbing, rodents or roaches?"
I stared into brown eyes that obviously saw me as little more than another pest in the motel he lorded over and cursed myself once again for having stayed this long.
"I'm going to be leaving soon," I commented.
Hank's mouth opened, just a little, and he took two steps out of his office as he continued to glare at me. "What's the problem?" he inquired suddenly and I thought he looked as momentarily upset as I felt. Believing that it had to do with some perceived insult directed at his motel, I sighed.
"I just heard you call Carly Lynn a Lolita!" I stated in disgust.
"Carly Lynn?" he asked in confusion, slamming the door behind him.
I saw a shadow appear through the screen and knew it was his often silent lackey Mikey coming to make sure his owner wasn't being mistreated.
"The girl in Room 214," I informed him and watched his face go from understanding to outrage in a heartbeat.
"You've been trying to save the girls here again, snowflake?" he demanded.
"She's so young," I bemoaned. "She needs somewhere safe, Hank, and this place and you aren't it."
"I never touched her!" Hank yelled at me.
"I heard what you were saying about her!"
Hank rubbed a hand over his bearded face and inhaled deeply, looking like an irritated dragon. "You should be getting mad at that guy that just left! He's making the moves on 212 and she certainly ain't legal either. I was just tossing the fact that I knew he liked them young in his pretty boy face was all. I called Jesse hard candy; You gonna rake me over the coals for that one, soft candy?"
I shook my head and ignored yet another insult hurled at me. It sounded possible and I could fool myself into believing it but my conscience was finally not letting me forgive the motel manager quite so easily. "I still think I should leave," I said more to myself than to Hank.
The hulking man took a lumbering step closer towards me and I looked up to see that he was staring down at me in the same unique annoyance he seemed to have reserved especially for me. "Why you wanna do that? You finally sell one of your stupid stories? The ones about detectives and ghosts?"
I gasped. I'd never shared any of my ideas with the man let alone ever let him read my work. How he knew I liked to merge noir tales with the supernatural, two opposing genres, startled me. I suddenly knew that being the motel's manager it wouldn't have been too difficult for Hank to let himself in whenever I was out and for him to go through my stuff.
"Have you been in my room and reading my stories?" I asked him and tried to probe his dark eyes to see a more truthful answer than I would likely ever be given.
"Nah snowflake," he spat back. "You're just an easy one to read. Seems right you'd write some stupid bullshit like that."
I was hurt once again. I turned around to leave but couldn't resist looking back once to hurl my own insult back at him. "You know at least Humbert Humbert knows he's a monster by the end of that novel. When are you going to realize that's what you are too, Hank?" I said. I wanted it to come off tough but I was too badly shaking which made my words tremble too, making me seem only a snowflake melting in the LA heat like he thought I was.
Rushing up the stairs, I heard Hank standing there silently under me as I went back inside of my room. He'd started to smoke a cigarette and amazingly had gotten his lighter to work for once. I maybe should have been happy so then the man stood a decent chance of developing lung cancer and dying, freeing the world of a creep. But I wasn't. As the scent of nicotine reached my own lungs, I only wanted him to live as long as he could.
Long enough to maybe change someday.