We arrived home a little before five o’clock the next afternoon.  There were two messages on the answering machine.  The first was a hang-up.  The second was David’s hysterical voice:

“Gary, it’s David, man, Krystal’s over here . . . something’s wrong, she’s flipping out or something.  I don’t know if you’re home yet.  I need to know what to do.  Call me as soon as you get this, man, it’s serious, I’m not fucking around.”

The automated machine voice said the call had come in at 3:11 a.m. on Monday.  This was Friday.  I had never set the clock.

I dialed Krystal’s number.

“What do you think ‘flipping out’ means?” I said to Lilly, who had listened to the message with me.  “With Krystal, that leaves a lot of open territory.”

“She’s probably still freaking out about me getting in her way on the stage last night.  I guess I’m a good target.  For her and for Heather.”

“You and Heather are fine.”

“We are now.”

I got Krystal’s voice on her machine: “We’re probably here but we don’t want to talk to you.  Leave a message.  If you’re selling something, fuck off!”

“It’s me,” I said after seven quick beeps.  “David, I got your message.  Call me back.”

I hung up, and Lilly and I looked at each other for about ten seconds.  ‘Flipping out,’ for Krystal, did leave a lot of open territory, none of it good.  I was stalling because I didn’t know what to do, because the territory was so fucking big.

“Why don’t you call Barb?” Lilly said.

“What for?”

“Because if it’s really serious, she’ll know what’s going on.”

“And if it’s not, she’ll lay into me about Krystal’s shit at the show, which I know she watched.”

“Call her.”

I got Barb’s machine.  I called her office, and a man said she’d never come in that day.  I tried her cell and got a recording.

“You want to go over to Krystal’s, see what’s going on?” I asked Lilly.

“Five o’clock on a Friday?  Traffic’s going to be bad.”

“I feel like I need to at least go over there.”

Lilly got her purse.

I had only been there once, right after Krystal bought the mammoth house set back thirty yards off curvy Mulholland Drive, just over the hill into Beverly Hills.  The grounds had looked okay then, but now the huge, rolling front lawn was growing out of control, sprouting three-foot weeds and spreading over onto the asphalt driveway and into the decorative green-and-orange rock borders.  Budweiser cans and Jack Daniel’s bottles decorated the stone steps and marble ledges leading to the main entrance.  It was like they’d been arranged for effect.  The front door was closed; all the curtains in the many front-facing windows were pulled to.  The back end of Krystal’s Porsche was visible in the open garage up ahead, but that was the only vehicle I could see on the property.

I knocked on the double oak front door.  Just above the doorknob was a cracked impression, as if somebody had rammed it with the end of a baseball bat.  I shouted Krystal’s and David’s names and knocked again, this time with the brass knocker that hung from the mouth of a brass owl.  I tried the door; it was locked.

“Maybe Ernesto’s here,” Lilly said.

“If Krystal’s not here, I doubt Ernesto is,” I said, but I took her hand and we walked around the side of the house and up the driveway, searching.

The white iron gate leading to the back yard was open.  I stopped, suddenly sad, suddenly understanding more than I wanted to, when I saw the destruction.  It looked like the garbage collectors had emptied their truck around the pool: big black trash bags ripped open and spilling contents, scatterings of food wrappers, fast-food bags, drink cups, and shopping bags, more liquor bottles – some half-full, others half-broken and surrounded by glass chips twinkling in the sun, clothing including black bathing suits, pink lingerie, and a purple Floozie skirt, two CD players – one running and playing “Bathroom Wall” by Faster Pussycat, Krystal’s $2,000 Guild acoustic lying face-down on the cement four feet from the pool, a Crate stack sitting for no clear reason in the middle of the grass.  We walked through the rubble to a door that opened onto the patio.  It was locked.

“She’s doing the same thing to her house that she’s doing to herself,” Lilly said softly.

“No shit.”

We went down a brick path that led to the guest house.  Ernesto’s Bronco wasn’t back there.  The sun was ridiculously hot, but I think I was sweating for a long list of other reasons.  Guilt over what I had caused hadn’t caught up with me yet, but it was about to.  Somebody called my name, and I turned and saw the hulk of Ernesto standing by the gate where we’d entered.

“She’s at the hospital, I just got back from there,” he said.  “I left a message at your house.”

Lilly and I ran over to him.  “What happened?” she said.

“Overdosed big-time.”

“Encino Hospital?” I said.

He nodded.

We started toward my car.  “Give me the abbreviated version,” I said.

“They were partying all day–”
     “Who’s ‘they’?”

“Her and David and his band and who knows who else.  I could hear the music.  I kept trying to get some sleep, but I was worried about her – she never slept since we got back, not that I know of, so I came over here a couple times, just to make sure everything was cool and make sure there weren’t no cops or anything.  It seemed about the same as always.”

“Okay, so they were partying . . .”

“Yeah, but they party all the time.  It’s like all day and all night, when she’s home.  I stay out of it.  I’m just here to keep her and people she don’t want no part of separated.”

I thought, too late, that we should have figured out a way for Ernesto to keep Krystal separated from the stuff she wanted most of all.

Barb, Larry, and David were clustered in a corner of the crowded waiting area outside ICU.  Lilly had on dark glasses and a hat, but some people still recognized her and stared at her.  Nobody approached her.  I guessed since it was a hospital waiting room, people had more important things on their minds than an autograph.

“They don’t know anything except she’s not awake and they can’t get her awake,” Larry said when Lilly and I sat down.  His eyes were puffy, his face sour.  “They’ve had her in there for two hours, and that’s all they told us.”

Barb ran through the story: Two doctors made David go back to the house . . . (some mumbling about the house) . . . bring samples of the drugs he thought Krystal had taken . . . (more mumbling and a fearful glance at two nurses talking loudly) . . . David brought back a shoebox with plastic bags of heroin and cocaine, about $40,000 worth.  He showed the doctors the bags he thought Krystal had used from, but he wasn’t sure . . . (a breath through her nose then something about the doctors) . . . they had her hooked up to all kinds of . . . (I think the word was “shit,” but now she was crying, so it could have been anything).

David was bent over, his face half-covered by his talented guitar-playing fingers, long white-blond hair hanging around his arms like bleached seaweed.  Barb sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, crying into one hand, toying with the strap of her purse with the other.

“I couldn’t watch her every second,” David said.  “I know it’s my fault, but I couldn’t make her do anything.  There was just too much shit going around.”

“It’s okay,” Barb said.

“No, it’s not, man.  I told her just take it easy, but she would get to where it was like talking to a brick wall.”

“Just shut up,” Larry said.  He sat back hard in his chair.  “You said that shit a million times.  There’s nothing you could do, because Krystal’s fucking hard-headed and nobody can talk to her about anything.”  To his mother he said, “Are you going to call Aunt Rhonda?”

“They’re in Rochester,” Barb said.  “There’s nothing they can do.”

“But you should–”

“I’ll call them in a minute, Larry!”  She covered her whole face and talked through her hands.  “Just let me think.  Let me get ready for this.”