Television rehab doctors. Sex tapes of infamous murder victims. A dog named “Fuckface”. Junkies shooting meth into their jugulars. Napoleon Bonaparte.
In America, “whenever you make some money, there’d be a queue of bastards like Stevie lining up to take their goddamn cut. Usually they only had two things in common: they were already wealthy as shit and they had done nothing to earn their percentage.”
Author Tony O’Neill began his career in “art” creating music as a member of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I put art in quotations because while this book certainly fits the bill, it just might lack all the socially redeeming qualities usually required to be called such. His first book was published in 2006, Sick City followed a few years later.
Not a single character in this book is “good”. Prostitutes (male and female), junkies, killers, pimps, and rich perverts. They are all very well-written, though, and this makes most of them somewhat sympathetic; particularly Jeffrey, who we meet first and is the common thread through which the narrative weaves. Jeffrey is a sad-sack junkie who lucks into possession of a forbidden Hollywood totem, and convinces Randal, his privileged rehab roommate to help him sell it.
Very quickly, I was struck by how cinematic this book was, unfolding the way Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction did before it, although this one is also filtered through Boogie Nights, as if they were both written by Elmore Leonard or William Burroughs. In fact, Sick City is very much pulp fiction by the pre-Tarantino definition. It would not shock me at all if this book was adapted to film in the future.
O’Neill enhances the story by using real Los Angeles locales. Parts take place at the seedy Mark Twain on Wilcox, and the Hotel Cecil looms in the distance. Jeffrey haunts real streets and restaurants from Los Angeles, and it cast a spell on me. I’m not an native Angeleno or even a modern transplant, but I’ve long been fascinated with the strange, ancient, dark magic that permeates Los Angeles (particularly Hollywood), and O’Neill delivers by placing his story in the genuine middle of it. Smoky bars, flophouses, and venues of questionable taste, all real, or very closely based on a real place. I’m sure that Dr. Mike’s made-for-tv rehab mansion is not an actual place, but if you’ve seen Dr. Drew’s regrettable, real life show, you know exactly where these people are. I found myself using Google maps to look up street corners and addresses, and each one I looked up passed the muster. A very cool detail, and it made the story drip with vibes.
Sick City is a portrait of Dorian Gray: every beautiful, glittering starlet has a downtrodden counterpart. We only help each other because it makes us feel good about ourselves. We can talk ourselves into doing heinous things if we stand to gain from it. We grieve endings because we’ll miss those nostalgic hits of dopamine, or sometimes anger, that made us feel important. There is a little bit of Jeffery in all of us, and we are all intertwined.
8/10. Check it out
A Fool Speaks Loudest 