Blood's a rover

48

(Los Angeles, 10/28/68)

Two dozen cabs. All bumper-locked, in rows. All with the Big Boy logo: a dinge in a fez like that dictator dude Sukarno.

The dispatch hut was off-site. The lot was half a city block. An all-night guard patrolled the premises. He always drank his dinner at Sultan Sam’s Sandbox. Froggy slipped two yellowjackets into his last scotch. The guy was snoozing in a Dumpster behind Sultan Sam’s now.

Wayne and Froggy called the shots. Crutch did the shitwork and took orders.

Wayne molded the C-4 and placed it in the wheel wells. Froggy set up the detonator. Crutch rigged the cords cab-to-cab.

The setup took hours. They worked from midnight to 4:00 a.m. Crutch got cramps from squatting down and duck-walking. They all sweated bad and carried towels to get some dryness. The C-4 looked like Play-Doh and smelled like burned oil. The cords abraded your hands.

All done-4:11 a.m.

They walked out to the street and toweled off. Wayne looked grim, per always. The Frogman was smiling. Crutch felt prom-date swoony.

Wayne pushed the plunger. The fucking cabs exploded and jumped off the ground. The noise was immense. A dozen shades of red and pink erupted. Glass blew across the sky.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 10/29/68. Los Angeles Herald Express headline and subhead:

Ex-VEEP HOLDS LEAD IN KEY STATES

DOCUMENT INSERT: 10/30/68. San Francisco Chronicle headline and subhead:

PRANKSTERS DISRUPT HUMPHREY RALLIES;

DOCUMENT INSERT: 11/1/68. Los Angeles Times article:

The victim himself called his palatial Beverly Hills home “the House That Hate Built,” so it’s no surprise to many that Dr. Fred T. Hiltz, 53, former dentist, former golf professional and alleged FBI informant, should come to a horrible end in that very place itself.

On September 14 of this year, Dr. Hiltz was shotgunned in his backyard bomb shelter, and the crime has remained unsolved. There are suspects: a robbery gang who held wealthy families hostage in Brentwood and Newport Beach. But some local journalists and many assassination buffs take issue with that. Dr. Hiltz was a well-known purveyor of viciously worded hate pamphlets that attacked Caucasians as well as racial minorities, was rumored to have a backyard hidey-hole stuffed with cash, had been married numerous times and allegedly indulged in scores of liaisons with provocative women. Beverly Hills Police Captain Mike Gustodas told reporters, “Dr. Hiltz had volatile relationships, was in a dirty business and cut our work out for us, that’s for sure.”

Yet, it’s the Los Angeles FBI Office that’s doing the bulk of the work on the Hiltz investigation, and that fact is what so intrigues certain journalists and conspiracy theorists. Captain Gustodas had no answer to address that issue; he simply stated that the FBI had usurped BHPD’s case for “national security reasons.”

John Leahy, Special-Agent-in-Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Office, told reporters, “Yes, it’s a politically sensitive case, and there is a national security aspect, albeit a minor one. I’m not at liberty to divulge the details just yet, but there will be a full recounting when and if this agency makes an arrest.”

An especially persistent rumor is that Dr. Hiltz was murdered by members of a black-militant group, as a political statement. SAC Leahy had no time for that theory. “I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “No black-militant groups have claimed credit, and I also think that the danger of black militancy has been grossly overreported by the press.”

Meanwhile, the Hiltz investigation continues.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 11/2/68. Dallas Morning News headline:

DOCUMENT INSERT: 11/3/68. Hartford Courant headline:

NIXON, HUMPHREY IN LAST BARNSTORMING EFFORT

DOCUMENT INSERT: 11/4/68. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,

November 4, 1968

Nixon’s going to win. Humphrey is saddled with the attenuated onslaught of LBJ’s war and the American people want a credible dialogue on the end of the war suffused with reactionary pap that will make them feel good about leaving (and, in fact, losing) the war, and Nixon is telling them exactly what they want to hear. Chicago was a disaster, not because it secured Nixon’s victory, but because it made the Left appear rancorous, petty, vicious, divisive and buffoonish. The sin of self-indulgence. I must take note of my self-indulgent tendencies, and I should begin by classifying them as misconduct and thus drawing a clear moral line to interdict their practice.

Dina has started asking me the inevitable bright-little-girl questions about Dwight and W.H.N. and my relationship to the two men. Of course, I cannot tell her that W.H.N. and I are politically compatible, but not comrades, and we have never had a fully passionate relationship, but are friends in certain shared ideals and the business of parenthood. W.H.N. knows about Dwight, but never mentions him; the prescient and too-worldly Dina never mentions Dwight to W.H.N. because she knows it would hurt him and because she understands that it might adversely affect my relationship with Dwight. Dina will become a compartmentalizer (as I am) and may/will inherit my penchant for dramatic and dubious men. Dina likes Dwight more than she likes her father, because he is fierce with the world, but very soft with her, because he carries a gun, because I am demonstrative with Dwight in a way that I am not with her father and it makes her feel properly loved as a child and thus feel safe. And-brilliant girl-she understands something that I just figured out: that Dwight and I truly are comrades.

It’s our lovers’ passion and the tender barter of our antithetical roles and ideals. It’s that we both want something (beyond each other) very deep and pure, and that I have a language for it, while he does not.

I keep thinking of troikas. Dwight, my largely absent husband and I are one. And, I now form the spark point of Dwight and Joan Klein. I’m not jealous, but Dwight is powerfully compelled by her. I have been less than truthful about my relationship with Joan, because I did not know how much of Joan’s various real and rumored histories I should reveal to a man who is, at day’s end, a police officer and a right-wing thug. Dwight told me early on: informants and operators withhold information to ensure their own safety and the safety of those close to them. That idea guides me in my lies by omission. Joan was an FBI informant at one time, but I don’t know her operator’s name or if he redacted her file. I have known Joan deeply for many years. Politically, I do not trust her any more than I trust Dwight.

I’m somewhat worried about Dwight. He’s losing weight, is sleeping ever-more poorly and mumbles in his sleep. I keep jokingly asking him if I can blow up Mount Rushmore and he keeps half-jokingly telling me, “Yes.” He’s giving me too much latitude. Is it out of guilt? I keep thinking there must be some immeasurably horrible deed weighing on him that I must never know about, lest it destroy my love for him or make me love him that much more. I wonder how old Dina (and Ella inside me) will be when they discover that truth of women and men.

Dwight and I have our barters. I wonder what form Dwight’s barters will take with Joan. Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?

DOCUMENT INSERT: 11/5/68. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

South L.A.,

November 5, 1968

It was my second beating at the hands of my former-and future, once this operation has concluded-LAPD brethren. I fared better at my first one, for Mr. Holly’s script had prepared me. Mr. Holly failed to witness this second encounter, and my wounds will have healed by the next time we meet face-to-face. I may or may not tell him of the incident, critique my spontaneous performance and request that he not discipline the officers involved. I may or may not tell him that the incident resulted in my making some wonderful new friends.

My unlikely rescuer was Jomo Kenyatta Clarkson, Propaganda Minister for the preposterously named Mau-Mau Liberation Front, along with his friends Shondell and Bobby. Jomo is garrulous and recognizably psychopathic and continues to break the world’s land speed record for use of the word “motherfucker” in a single sentence. His arms bear self-inflicted machete scars as a tribute to the real Jomo Kenyatta’s slaughter of British settlers in Kenya, circa 1947. Jomo and friends took me to Morningside Hospital, where a friendly white doctor, who treated Jomo for his most recent gun-shot wound, treated my wounds and injected me with Demerol. The injection dulled my pain, lifted my spirits and allowed me to stop replaying the words “Scotty Bennett sends regards” in a near-continuous loop. I wanted to go home and rest then. Jomo wouldn’t hear of it. He decided we should go pub-crawling.

We visited a series of after-hours clubs. I met numerous black males in the all-black attire that Mr. Holly has urged me to purchase, found it fetching on them, but decided that it wasn’t really my style. I witnessed a live lesbian sex show at Rae’s Rugburn Room and was generally shown off by Jomo at Sultan Sam’s Sandbox, Mr. Mitch’s Another World and Nat’s Nest. I geared up and performed; Mr. Holly would have been proud of me. I repeatedly described my beating by the “LAPD pigs” and never had to mention my ex-pig status, because I am a local celebrity and my former occupation subtextually pre-exists in the ghetto spiritus mundi. I kept saying ridiculous things like “Tell it like it is” and “Right on, brother” and never once burst out laughing. The rest of the night, following day and night are blurry. Jomo took me by his place of employment, the Black Cat Cab Company, where I watched the very fat owner eat an entire gallon of ice cream. I started to fall asleep at one point. Jomo force-fed me several spoonfuls of cocaine, which got me talking. It felt like an out-of-body experience spawned by alcohol, drugs, sustained shock and many weeks of barely controlled stress, excitement and wonderment, all filtered through what Mr. Holly has described as my “innate actor’s instinct and flair.” I critiqued the institutional racism of the LAPD specifically and white racist America in general and was conscious that I was shucking Jomo and his friends as I did it, as I concurrently believed it and did not believe it, as yet another part of me was off at another level of bifurcation, directing the performance and goofing on the whole thing. I can’t recall exactly what I said, but I do know that I was speaking at the limits of my mental capacity and powers of articulation. In retrospect, it felt like demagoguery, social analysis and apostalic fervor all rolled into one. And the amazing thing to me-that Mr. Holly would not find amazing at all-is that I don’t know whether or not I believe a word of it.

Black Cat Cab was followed by a visit to Jomo’s “crib” on East 89th Street. Many people, all black, were there. I heard six dozen hate-the-fuckin’-LAPD-pigs stories, told that many myself, and met two men whose armed-robber brothers were shot and killed by “King Pig” Scotty Bennett. Jomo tried to pass a shapely toffee-colored girl with a tinted Afro off on me, but I excused myself with something about my “main bitch.” Jomo ensconced me in a room festooned with revolutionary wall posters and filled with stacks of fatuous polemics, and I fell asleep for a very long time.

My dreams were my standard ones and easily explained, given my life’s overweening fixation. There were the shapeless waves of green representing the emeralds and the odd spatial doublings and triplings of prone shapes, my persistently unconscious urge to discover what truly happed on 84th and Budlong that day. At one point, I thought I saw a white woman with dark, gray-streaked hair looking in on me, but she/it was just a wisp.

Two dozen people were sitting in Jomo’s living room when I stumbled out however many hours later. They gave me a standing ovation. It was a superlative reward for my performance.

I’ve moved to a dingy crib on the Watts border.

I’ve started spending time at Black Cat Cab.

My MMLF and/or BTA recruitment is imminent, but I am not rushing into anything.

I want this performance to last. It’s my circuit back to February 24, 1964. Every disenfranchised part of me knows this to be true.