Silent Terror

1

Dusenberry’s estimated body count was low, and Warden Wardlow’s stone metaphor only partly accurate. Inanimate objects can yield blood, but if the transfusion is to take, the letting must be sanctioned by the object’s deepest and most logical volition. Even Milt Alpert, that eminently decent expediter of literature, had to cloak the announcement of our collaboration with justification-heavy sloganeering and words I never said. He cannot accept the fact that he will be earning 10 percent of a valediction in blood. That I feel no remorse and seek no absolution is incomprehensible to him.

A more farsighted person in my situation would seize this narrative opportunity and bend it toward the manipulation of the mental-health profession and liberal legal establishment — people susceptible to cheap visions of redemption. Since I have no expectations of ever leaving this prison, I will not do that — it is simply dishonest. Nor will I cop a psychological plea by juxtaposing my acts against the alleged absurdity of twentieth-century American life. By passing through conscious gauntlets of silence and will, by creating my own vacuum-packed reality, I was able to exist outside standard environmental influences to an exceptional degree — the prosaic pain of growing up and being American did not take hold; I transmogrified it into something more very early. Thus I stand by my deeds. They are indigenous solely to me.

Here in my cell, I have everything I need to bring my valediction to life: world-class typewriter, blank paper, police documents procured by my agent. Along the back wall there is a Rand-McNally map of America, and beside my bunk a box of plastic-topped pins. As this manuscript grows, I will use those pins to mark the places where I murdered people.

But above all, I have my mind; my silence. There is a dynamic to the marketing of horror: serve it up with a hyperbolic flourish that distances even as it terrifies, then turn on the literal or figurative lights, inducing gratitude for the cessation of a nightmare that was too awful to be true in the first place. I will not observe that dynamic. I will not let you pity me. Charles Manson, babbling in his cell, deserves pity; Ted Bundy, protesting his innocence in order to attract correspondence from lonely women, deserves contempt. I deserve awe for standing inviolate at the end of the journey I am about to describe, and since the force of my nightmare prohibits surcease, you will give it to me.

2

Guidebooks misrepresent Los Angeles as a sun-kissed amalgam of beaches, palm trees and the movies. The literary establishment fatuously attempts to penetrate that exterior and serves up the L.A. basin as a melting pot of desperate kitsch, violent illusion and variegated religious lunacy. Both designations hold elements of truth based on convenience. It is easy to love the place at first glance and even easier to hate it when you get to sense the people who live there. But to know it, you have to come from the neighborhoods, the inner-city enclaves that the guidebooks never mention and artists dismiss in their haste to paint with broad, satiric strokes.

These places require resourcefulness; they will not give up their secrets to observers — only to inspired residents. I gave my youthful stomping ground such implacable attention that it reciprocated in full. There was nothing about that quiet area on the edge of Hollywood that I didn’t know.

Beverly Boulevard on the south; Melrose Avenue on the north. Rossmore and Wilshire Country Club marking the west border, a demarcation line between money and only the dream of it. Western Avenue and its profusion of bars and liquor stores standing sentry at the east gate — keeping undesirable school districts, Mexicans and homosexuals at bay. Six blocks from north to south; seventeen from east to west. Small wood-frame and Spanish-style houses; tree-lined streets without stoplights. A courtyard apartment building rumored to be filled with prostitutes and illegal aliens; an elementary school; the debatable presence of a “fuck pad” where U.S.C. football players brought girls to watch ’50’s-vintage porno films. A small universe of secrets.

I lived with my father and mother in a salmon-colored miniature of the Santa Barbara Mission, two stories with a tar-paper roof and a mock mission bell. My father worked as a draftsman at an airplane plant and gambled cautiously — he usually won. My mother clerked at an insurance company and spent her leisure hours staring at traffic on Beverly Boulevard.

I realize now that both my parents had furious, and furiously separate, mental lives. They were together for the first seven years of my life, and early on I remember designating them as my custodians and nothing else. Their lack of affection, to me and to each other, registered inchoately as freedom — dimly I perceived their elliptical approach to parenthood as a neglect that I could capitalize on. They did not possess the passion to abuse me or to love me. I know today that they armed me with the equivalant of enough childhood brutality to fuel an army.

Early in 1953, the air-raid sirens stationed throughout the neighborhood went off accidentally, and my father, convinced that a Russian A-bomb attack was imminent, led my mother and me up to the roof to await the arrival of the Big One. He brought a fifth of bourbon with him, because he wanted to toast the mushroom cloud he expected to rise over downtown L.A., and when the Big One never appeared, he was drunk and disappointed. My mother made one of her rare verbal offerings, this one to allay her husband’s depression over the world not being blown to hell. He raised his hand to hit her, then hesitated and slugged down the rest of the bottle. Mother went downstairs to her traffic-watching chair, and I started checking science books out of the library. I wanted to see what mushroom clouds looked like.

That night signaled the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage. The air-raid scare created a bomb-shelter boom in the neighborhood, and my father, disgusted by the backyard construction, took to spending his weekends on the roof, drinking and observing the spectacle. I watched him get angrier and angrier, and I wanted to ease his pain, make him less of a pent-up observer. Somehow I got the notion to give him the “Wham-O” stainless steel slingshot I had found on a bus bench at Oakwood and Western.

My father loved the gift, and took to shooting ball hearings at the above-ground sections of the shelters. Soon his aim became excellent, and seeking more challenging targets, he started assassinating the crows who perched on the telephone wires that ran along the alley in back of our house. Once he even caught a scurrying rat from forty-six feet and eight inches away. I recall the distance because my father, proud of the feat, paced it off in yards, then calibrated the remainder with a metal drafting rule.

Early in ’54, I learned that my parents were going to get divorced. My father took me up to the roof to tell me. I had seen it coming, and knew from the “Paul Coates Confidential” T.V. program that many “Post war marriages” were headed for Splitsvilie.

“Why?” I asked.

My father toed the gravel on the roof; it looked like he was tracing A-bomb clouds. “Well... I’m thirty-four years old, and your mother and I don’t get along; and if I give her much more time I’ll have shot my good years; and if I do that I might as well pack it in. We can’t let that happen, can we?”

“No.”

“That’s my Marty. I’ll be moving to Michigan, but you and your mother will keep the house, and I’ll be writing to you, and I’ll be sending money.”

I knew from the Coates show that divorce was an expensive proposition, and sensed that my father must have had a big stash of gambling money put away to facilitate his move to Splitsvilie. He seemed to pick up my thoughts and added, “You’ll be well looked after, don’t you worry about that.”

“I won’t worry.”

“Good.” My father took a finger sight on a fat bluejay sitting atop our next-door neighbor’s garage. “You know your mother is, well... you know.”

I wanted to scream “nutty,” “crazy,” “fruitcake” and “couch case,” but didn’t want him to know I knew. “She’s sensitive?” I ventured.

My father shook his head slowly; I knew he knew I knew. “Yeah, sensitive. Just try to take her with a grain of salt. Get a good education and try to be your own man, and you’ll make yourself heard from.”

On that prophetic note, my father stuck out his hand. We shook, and five minutes later he walked out the door. I never saw him again.

3

All my mother required was that I maintain a reasonable degree of silence and not burden her with questions about what she was thinking, Implicit in that was her desire for me to remain moderate in school, at play and at home. If she considered the dictate to be punishment, she was wrong: I could go anywhere I wanted in my head.

Like the rest of the neighborhood kids, I went to Van Ness Avenue Elementary, obeyed, and laughed and hurt at silly things. But other children found their hurt/joy in outside stimuli, while I found mine reflected off a movie screen that fed from what surrounded me, edited for my own inside-the-brain viewing by a steel-sharp mental device that always knew exactly what I needed to keep from being bored.

The screenings ran this way:

Miss Conlan or Miss Gladstone would be standing by the blackboard, unctuously proclaiming. They would start to fade visually commensurate with my growing boredom, and involuntarily, my eyes would start to trawl for something to keep me mentally awake.

The taller children were seated at the back of the room, and from my far left-hand corner desk I had a perfect forward/diagonal viewing path, one that allowed me profile shots of all my classmates. With teacher sight/noise reduced to a minimum, the faces of the other children blurred together, forming new ones; snatches of whispered conversations came together until all manner of boy/girl hybrids were declaring their devotion to me.

Being loved in a vacuum was like a reverie; street noise sounded like music. But abrupt movement from within the room, or the clatter of books on the hallway outside would turn it all bad. Pieter, the tall blond boy who sat next to me grades three to six, would go from adoring confidant to monster, the noise level determining the grotesqueness of his features.

After long frightened moments, I would seize the front of the room, zero in on either the blackboard writing or the teacher’s monologue, and if I thought I could get away with it, interject some sort of comment. This calmed me and elicited full-face looks from the other children, sparking a part of my brain that thrived on producing swift, cruel caricature. Soon pretty Judy Rosen had Claire Curtis’s big buck teeth; booger-eating Bobby Greenfield was feeding snot balls to Roberta Roberts, dropping them over the cashmere sweaters she wore to school every day, regardless of the weather. I would laugh to myself, only occasionally out loud. And I kept wondering how far I could take it — if I could refine the device to the point where even bad noise couldn’t hurt me.

As for hurt: only other children were then capable of making me feel vulnerable, and even as early as eight or nine that queasy sense of being captive to irrational needs for union was physical — a prescient jolt of the terror and despair that sexual pursuits result in. I fought the need by denial, by sticking to myself and affecting a truculent mien that brooked no nonsense from other kids. In a recent People magazine article, a half-dozen of my old neighborhood contemporaries offered comments on me as a child. “Weird,” “strange” and “withdrawn” were the adjectives used most frequently. Kenny Rudd, who lived across the street from me, and who now designs computer basketball games, came closest to the truth: “The word was: Don’t with Marty, he’s psycho. I don’t know, but I think maybe he was more scared than anything else.”

Bravo, Kenny, although I’m glad you and your cretinous comrades didn’t know that simple fact when we were children. My strangeness revulsed you and gave you someone to loathe from a safe distance — but had you sensed what it was hiding, you would have exploited my fear and tortured me for it. Instead, you left me alone and eased my discovery of my physical surroundings.

From 1955 to 1959, I charted my immediate topography, coming away with an extraordinary collection of facts: the red brick apartment house on Beachwood between Clinton and Melrose had a pet burial ground in back; the strip of recently constructed “bachelor hideaways” on Beverly and Norton were built out of rotted lumber, cut-rate stucco mix and “beaverboard”; the apocryphal “fuck pad” was in reality a bungalow court on Raleigh Drive, where a U.S.C. prof took college boys for homosexual liaisons. On trash-collection days, Mr. Eklund up the street switched his gin bottles with the sherry bottles from Mrs. Nulty’s trash two doors down. The reason for the switch eluded me, although I knew they were having an affair. The Bergstroms, Seltenrights and Monroes had a nude pool party at the Seltenright house on Ridgewood in July of ’58, and it sparked an affair between Laura Seltenright and Bill Bergstrom — Laura rolling her eyes to heaven at her first glance of Bill’s outsize bratwurst.

And the projectionist at the Clinton Theatre sold “pep pills” to members of the Hollywood High swim team; and the “Phantom Homo” who had cruised the neighborhood for young boys for over a decade was one Timothy J. Costigan of Saticoy Street in Van Nuys. The Burgerville stand on Western served ground horse in its chili — I heard the owner talking to the man who delivered it one night when they thought no one was listening. I knew all these things — and for a long time just knowing them was enough.

Years came and went. My mother and I continued. Her silence went from stunning to mundane; mine from strained to easy as my mental resourcefulness grew. Then, in my last year of junior high, school officials finally noticed that I spoke only when spoken to. This led them to force me to see a child psychiatrist.

He impressed me as a condescending man with an unnatural attraction to children. His office was filled with a not-too-subtle arrangement of toys — stuffed animals and dolls interspersed with plastic machine guns and soldier sets. I knew immediately that I was smarter than he.

He pointed to the toys as I sat down on the couch. “I didn’t realize what a big fella you are. Fourteen. Those playthings are for little kids, not big fellas like you.”

“I’m tall, I’m not big.”

“Same difference. I’m a short fella. Short fellas got different problems than tall fellas. Don’t you agree?”

His questioning was easy to follow. If I said “yes,” it would be an admission that I had problems; if I said “no,” he would launch a spiel about everyone having problems, then share a few of his own in a cheap empathy ploy. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said.

“Fellas who don’t care about their own problems usually don’t care about themselves. That’s a heck of a way to be, don’t you agree?”

I shrugged, and gave him one of the blank-eyed stares I used to keep other kids at bay, and soon he was fading to a pinpoint as my mind zeroed in on a teddy bear off to my right. Within a split second the bear was aiming a plastic bazooka at the shrink’s head, and I started to giggle.

“Daydreaming, big fella? Want to tell me what’s so funny?”

I did a perfect segue from my brain-movie to the doctor, smiling as I accomplished it. I could tell he was disconcerted. My eyes caught g stuffed Bugs Bunny toy, and I said, “What’s up, Doc?”

“Martin, young people who are very quiet usually have lots of things on their minds. You’ve got a swell mind, and the grades in school to prove it. Don’t you think it’s time to tell me what’s bothering you?”

Bugs Bunny started waggling his eyebrows and taking playful nips at the headshrinker’s neck. “The price of carrots,” I said.

“What?” The shrink took off his horn-rims and cleaned the lenses with his necktie.

“Have you ever seen a rabbit with glasses?”

“Martin, you’re not following me, you’re not being logical.”

“Isn’t good eye care logical?”

“You’re talking in non-sequiturs.”

“No, I’m not. A non-sequitur is a conclusion that doesn’t follow its known inferences. Good eye care follows eating carrots.”

“Martin, I—” The doctor was getting flushed and sweaty; Bugs Bunny was hurling carrots at his desk.

“Don’t call me ‘Martin,’ call me ‘Big Fella.’ It sends me.”

Straightening his glasses, the doctor said, “Let’s change the subject. Tell me about your parents.”

“They’re carrot-juice addicts.”

“I see. And what is that supposed to mean?”

“That they have good eyes.”

“I see. Anything else?”

“Long ears and fluffy tails.”

“I see. You think you’re a funny man, don’t you?”

“No, I think you are.”

“You nasty little shit, I’ll bet you don’t have a friend in the world.”

The room became four walls of hideous noise, and Bugs Bunny turned on me, forcing an awful kaleidoscope of half-buried memories to flash across ray brain-screen: a tall blond boy telling a group of kids “Farty Marty asked me to watch traffic with him”; Pieter and his sister Katrin rebuffing my attempt to get them to sit next to me in sixth grade.

The shrink was staring at me, smirking because I had shown myself vulnerable; and Bugs Bunny, his secret pal, was laughing along, spraying me with orange pulp. I looked around for something stainless steel, like my father’s slingshot. Seeing a brushed-steel curtain rod leaning against the back wall, I grabbed it and hacked off the stuffed rabbit’s head. The shrink was looking at me with amazement. “I’ll never talk to you again,” I said. “And no one can make me.”

4

The incident at the shrink’s office had no external repercussions — I was passed into high school without further psychiatric/scholastic abuse. The doctor knew an immovable object when he saw one.

But I felt like a malfunctioning machine; as if there were a stripped gear inside me, one that could roam my body at will, troubleshooting for ways to make me look small under stress. When I played brain-movies in class, substituting faces and bodies, boy to boy, girl to girl and cross-gender, it was like an obstacle course, sex images assailing me without rhyme or reason. The randomness, the indiscriminate power of what I was making myself see was staggering; the need that I sensed behind it felt like an oncoming tidal wave of self-loathing. I know now that I was going insane.

I was saved by a comic-book villain.

His name was the “Shroud Shifter,” and he was a recurring bad guy in “Cougarman Comix.” He was a super criminal, a jewel-thief hit man who drove a souped-up amphibious car and snarled a retarded version of Nietzsche in oversize speech balloons. Cougarman, a moralistic wimp who drove a ’59 Cadillac called the “Catmobile,” always managed to throw Shroud Shifter in jail, but he always escaped a couple of issues later.

I loved him for his car and for a supernatural ability that he possessed — one that I sensed I could realistically emulate. The car was a gleaming angularity — all brushed steel, all mean business. It had headlights that flashed a nuclear death ray that turned people to stone; instead of gas, the engine ran on human blood. The upholstery was made of tawny cat hides — the flesh of arch-enemy Cougarman’s martyred family. It had a steel hangman’s pole sticking out of the trunk. Every time Shroud Shifter claimed a victim, his vampire girl friend, Lucretia, a tall blonde with long fangs, would bite a notch in the wood.

Ridiculous trash? Admittedly. But the artwork was superb, and Shroud Shifter and Lucretia breathed a stylish, sensual evil. S.S. had a cylindrical bulge that extended almost down to the knee of his left pants leg; Lucretia’s nipples were always erect. They were a high-tech god and goddess twenty years before high tech, and they were mine.

Shroud Shifter had the ability to disguise himself without changing costume. He got it from drinking radioactive blood and from concentrating on the person he wanted to rob or kill, so that he soaked up so much of that person’s aura that he psychically resembled him and could ape his every move, anticipate his every thought.

S.S.’s ultimate goal was to achieve invisibility. That goal drove him, pushed him beyond his existing gift of psychic invisibility — being able to fit in anyplace, anywhere, anytime. Being physically invisible would give him a carte blanche ticket to take over the world.

Of course Shroud Shifter would never achieve that end — it would destroy his potential confrontations with Cougarman, and he was the comic book’s hero. But S.S. was fiction, and I was flesh, blood and brushed-steel reality. I decided to make myself invisible.

My transits of silence and brain-movies had been a good training ground. I knew my mental resources were superb, and I had cut my human needs down to the bare minimum provided by my cipher mother: room, board and a few dollars a week for incidentals. But the quiet-outsider image I had carried as a shield for so long worked against me — I had no social graces, no sense of other people as anything but objects of derision, and if I was to successfully imitate Shroud Shifter’s psychic invisibility, I would first have to learn to be ingratiating and conversant on the teenage topics that bored me: sports, dating, rock and roll. I would have to learn to talk.

And that terrified me.

I spent long hours in class, my brain-movies quashed as my ears trawled for information; in the boy’s locker room I listened to lengthy, and lengthily embellished, conversations on penis size. Once I climbed a tree outside the girls’ gym and listened to the giggles that rose above the hiss of showers. I picked up a lot of information, but was afraid to act.

So, admittedly out of cowardice, I retreated. I convinced myself that, although Shroud Shifter could get away without disguises, I couldn’t. That limited the problem to the procuring of suitable body armor.

In 1965 there were three sartorial styles favored by middle-class L.A. teenagers: surfer, greaser and collegiate. The surfers, whether they actually surfed or not, wore white Levi cords, Jack Purcell “Smiley” tennis shoes and Pendelton’s; the greasers, both gang members and pseudo “rebel” types, wore slit-bottomed khakis, Sir Guy shirts and honor farm watch caps. The collegiates favored the button-down/sweater/penny-loafer style that is still “in.” I figured that three outfits in each style would be sufficient protective coloration.

Then a fresh wave of fear hit me. I had no money for purchasing the clothes. My mother never left any cash lying around and was stingy to an extreme fault, and I was still too afraid to do what my heart most desired: break, enter and steal. Disgusted by my cautiousness, but still determined to put together a wardrobe, I seized on my mother’s three walk-in closets full of girlhood clothes she never wore.

In retrospect, I know that the scheme I concocted was undertaken out of desperate fear — a delaying tactic to put off my inevitable crash course in social dealings; but at the time it seemed the epitome of good sense. One day I ditched school and took an assortment of sharp kitchen knives into my mother’s bedroom closet. I was hacking a cape out of one of her old tweed overcoats when she came home from work early, caught me and started screaming.

I put up my hands in a placating gesture, still holding a serrated-edge steak knife. My mother screamed so loud that it seemed that her vocal cords would snap, then she managed to get out the word “animal” and pointed to my midsection. I saw that I had an erection, and dropped the knife; my mother slapped at me with clumsy open hands until the sight of blood trickling from my nose forced her to stop and run downstairs. In the course of ten seconds the woman who bore me went from cipher to arch-enemy. It felt like a homecoming.

Three days later, she gave me my formal reprimand: six months of silence. I smiled as my sentence was passed; it was a reprieve from my awful fears regarding the invisibility mission, and the opportunity to screen unlimited brain-movies.

Although my mother only intended for me to remain silent at home, I took her edict literally and took my silence everywhere I went. At school I would not speak, even when spoken to — I wrote out notes when teachers needed answers from me. This created a stir, and much speculation on my motives, the most common interpretation being that somehow I was protesting the war in Vietnam or expressing my solidarity with the Civil Rights movement. Since I was getting excellent grades on exams and written reports, my lack of speech was tolerated, although I was subjected to a battery of psychological tests. I rigged each test to show a completely different personality, flabbergasting school officials, who, after many failed attempts to get my mother to intervene, decided to let me graduate in June.

So now my classroom brain-movies were accompanied by the outright stares of my classmates, a number of whom thought I was “cool,” “trippy” and “avant-garde.” Breaking through seemingly impenetrable objects was the main theme, and the awed looks I was getting made me feel I could do anything.

Along with that feeling grew a bitter hatred for my mother. I took to prowling through her belongings, looking for ways to hurt her. One day I got an impulse to check out her medicine cabinet, and I found several prescription bottles of Phenobarbital. A light snapped on in my head, and I tore through the rest of her bedroom and bathroom. Underneath the bed, in a cardboard box, I got the confirmation I was seeking: empty prescription bottles of the sedative, scores of them, the dates on the labels going back to 1951. Inside the bottles were stuffed small pieces of paper covered with a tiny, indecipherable pencil scrawl.

Since I could not read my zombie-mother’s words, I had to make her speak them out loud. The following day, at school, I passed a note to Eddie Sheflo, a surfer who was rumored to “think Marty’s act was bitchen’.” The note read:

The big blond surfer refused the dollar bill I was holding out and said, “You got it, strong silent type.”

That afternoon, I substituted Benzedrine for Phenobarbital, and replaced the light bulb over my mother’s medicine cabinet with a dud. Both types of pills were small and white, and I hoped the dim light would add to the confusion.

I sat downstairs to await the result of my experiment. My mother came home from work at her usual time of 5:40, nodded hello, then ate her usual chicken-salad sandwich and went upstairs. I waited in my father’s favorite left-behind chair, absently perusing a stack of “Cougarman Comix.”

At 9:10, there was a thumping on the stairs, and then my mother was standing in front of me, sweaty, bug-eyed and trembling in her slip. I said, “Hitting the carrot juice, Mom?” and she grabbed at her heart, hyperventilating. I said, “Funny, it never affects Bugs Bunny this way,” and she started jabbering about sin and this awful boy she slept with on her birthday in 1939, and how she hated my father because he drank and was a quarter Jewish, and how we have to turn the lights off at night or the Communists will know what we’re thinking. I smiled, said, “Take two aspirin with a carrot-juice chaser,” and about-faced out of the house.

I prowled the neighborhood all night; then, at dawn, returned home. When I flicked on the living-room light, I saw red liquid dripping from a crack in the ceiling. I went upstairs to investigate.

My mother was lying dead in her bathtub. Her gashed arms were flopped over the sides, and the tub was full to the top with water and blood. A half-dozen empty Phenobarbital bottles were strewn across the floor, floating in inch-deep red water.

I skipped down the hall and called Emergency, telling them in an appropriately choked-up voice my address and that I had a suicide to report. While I waited for the ambulance, I gulped down big handfuls of my mother’s blood.

5

The Rosicrucians got the house, the car and all my mother’s money; I got a custodianship hearing. Since I was within six months of high-school graduation and my eighteenth birthday, a formal foster home was deemed a waste of time, and my twelfth-grade guidance counselor told the juvenile authorities that I was “too inward and disturbed” to be cut loose as an “emancipated minor.” My refusal to attend the funeral or contact my father in Michigan convinced him that I “needed discipline and guidance — preferably a male figure.” So the Juvenile Housing Board sent me to live with Walt Borchard.

Walt Borchard was an L.A. cop, a big, fat, good-natured man in his early fifties. He had spent most of his twenty-three years with the L.A.P.D. on the elementary-school lecture circuit, delivering cautionary tales on dope, perverts and the evils of the criminal life, showing little kids his .38, chucking them under the chin and admonishing them to be “straight shooters.” He was a widower with no children, and he lived in the largest apartment in a twelve-unit building that he owned. A one-room “bachelor” was always kept available for the homeless juveniles the housing board referred to him, and that twelve-by-eighteen crawl space a block from Hollywood Boulevard became my new home.

The previous tenant had been a hippie, and he left behind a deep-pile chartreuse rug, Beatles posters on the walls and a closetful of bell-bottoms, fringed vests and Day-Glo tennis shoes. “Acid head,” said “Uncle” Walt when I moved in. “Got the notion he could fly. Flapped his arms and jumped off the Taft Building, and you know what? He was wrong. Went out stoned, though. Coroner said he was on a snootful of shit. You ain’t got any crazy notions, have you?”

“I have vampire tendencies,” I said.

Uncle Walt laughed. “So do I. Matter of fact, last night I bit the girl downstairs in number four. Listen, Marty, just lay off the dope and be nice to the other tenants, go to school and keep your pad clean and we’ll get along great. The board’s paying me to have you here, and I ain’t looking to get rich, so I’ll kick back thirty scoots a week for you to mess around with, and I’ll keep you in groceries. You gotta observe curfew until your birthday, though, off the streets by eleven. Lots of nice necks to bite on the Boulevard, but wrap your biting up by 10:59. And if you need anything, you know where I am. I love to talk, and I ain’t bad at listening.”

The arrangement jelled. I now had a new neighborhood to learn, my very own safe harbor to return to and a new, glamorous aura at school: I was the guy who never shed a tear when he found his mother dead, the guy with his own “crib,” the guy who bent the administration to his will with his extended silence and who now teasel people with occasional one-liners like: “Blood reigns, come stains,” and “Shroud Shifter will prevail.” I felt like I was coming of age.

My life consisted of school and brain-movies, nighttime walks along the side streets bordering Hollywood Boulevard and captive hours spent listening to Uncle Walt Borchard’s homespun philosophy. His one-liners were less terse than mine, and he was considering publishing them in book form when he retired from the L.A.P.D. Among his most-repeated nuggets of wisdom were:

“God bless the queers — more women for the rest of us”;

“I wouldn’t want the niggers moving into the neighborhood, but I’ll be damned if I’ll do anything to keep ’em out; and if they do move in, I’ll be the first one to welcome ’em with a bucket of ribs and a big bottle of T-bird”;

“We’ve got no business being in Vietnam unless we’re willing to win — and that means dropping the hydrogen bomb”;

“If God didn’t want man to eat pussy, then why’d he make it look like a taco?”

And on and on. He was lonely and filled with guileless goodwill. His lack of mental resourcefulness and need for a constant audience disgusted me, and I dreaded his knocks on my door. But I kept still. Above all else, I knew the value of silence.

The new neighborhood was distressing because of its lack of silence. There was the constant nighttime roar of cars headed for the Boulevard, and heavy foot traffic, shoppers returning from the all-night markets on Sunset, and furtive hippies making dope buys in side-street shadows. Even the visual quality was noisy. The neon haze that blanketed the sky seemed to crackle and hiss with intimations of the sleaze it was heralding.

After five months in Hollywood, I gave up on neighborhood prowls and spent all my nights in my room, screening brain-movies. Sometimes Walt Borchard came over and insisted on talking; I tuned him right out and continued the show. More and more, the scenario revolved around the triad of Shroud Shifter, Lucretia and me, plundering in our brushed-steel car, seeking invisibility. The scenes became almost multidimensional — the feel of myself pressed between the super-criminals, the scent of motor oil and blood, the gurgling sounds our victims made when we attacked their jugulars. As an internal cinematographer I had improved greatly over the years, and now my prowess had grown to incorporate all the latest technical developments. My brain was equipped with deluxe color, wide screen, stereophonic sound and Smell-o-Vision. Had I been able to charge tickets for admission, I would have become a millionaire.

In April of ’66 I turned eighteen; in June, I graduated high school. I was now technically an adult, and could leave Walt Borchard’s care. Having no money and no job, I pondered my options. Then Uncle Walt told me I could stay for a nominal rent payment, and he would even help me find a job. The pathetic motive behind the offer was obvious. No one had ever listened to him so attentively as I had, and he couldn’t stand the thought of losing such an excellent audience. The symbiotic aspect of it all appealed to me, and I agreed to stay.

Borchard got me a job at the Hollywood Public Library, on Ivar just south of the Boulevard. My duties were to shelve books and walk into the Men’s Room and clear my throat loudly every half-hour — a strategy aimed at disturbing homosexual assignations. The pay was a dollar sixty-five an hour, and the work was tailor-made for me — I screened brain-movies all day

One evening in June I came home from the library and found Uncle Walt cleaning out the garage in back of the building. Late sunlight was glinting off a collection of brushed-steel implements that he was wrapping in an oilcloth. The tools looked mean — like something Shroud Shifter would own. “What are they?” I asked.

Borchard held up an instrument that looked like a scalpel. “Burglar’s tools. This baby’s a lock pick and a gouger. You use the flat edge to slip the lock, and the sharp edge to whittle doorjambs. These other babies are a window snap, a push-drill and a chisel pry. Big daddy at the end is a suction-cup glass-cutter. What’s the matter, Marty? You look jittery.”

I took a deep breath and feigned indifference by shrugging. “Just a headache. Why do the handles have those deep brush marks? For a grip?”

Borchard hefted the chisel pry. “Partly, but mostly the ridges are there to prevent fingerprints. See, possession of burglar’s tools is a felony, and if a burglar gets caught with them it’s a bust, and if he gets caught with them inside a pad he’s burglarizing, it’s an extra charge. But these heavy brush marks won’t sustain fingerprints. So if he’s inside a pad and we nail him, he can stash the tools and say ‘Those things ain’t mine,’ even though it’s patently obvious they are. The ridges also make a good backscratcher.”

I smiled while Uncle Walt poked at his back with the handle of the chisel pry; then I said, “If they’re illegal, how come you have them?”

Borchard draped a fatherly arm around my shoulders. “Marty baby, you’re a smart kid, but a trifle naive. I was a burglary detective for three years before I joined the Speaker’s Bureau, and you might say I managed to acquire a few things at a five-finger discount, if you catch my drift. Tools are a good thing for a man to have, and I use the gouger-pick to play darts with. Tack a picture of L.B.J. or one of them other liberal chumps to my wall and let fly. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Come on, let’s go up to my pad. I’ve got a couple of frozen pizzas yelling ‘Eat me!’ ”

That night I kept Borchard’s monologues pinned to one subject: burglary. I did not have to feign rapt attention: this time it came of itself, as if the projector I used for brain-movies were on strike and I had found something better. I learned the practical uses of the beautiful brushed-steel tools; I picked up the rudiments of nullifying burglar-alarm wiring. I learned that dope addiction and a propensity for bragging about their exploits were the most common burglar downfalls, and that if a thief wasn’t too greedy and rotated his target areas, he could elude capture indefinitely. Criminal types imprinted themselves in that part of my mind where only the logical lived: pad crawlers who stole cash and loose jewelry they could swallow if the cops showed up; credit-card thieves who ran up a string of purchases and sold the stuff to fences. Watchdog poisoners, rape-o burglars and brazen smash-and-grabbers joined Shroud Shifter in my mental entourage.

Around midnight, Borchard, groggy from pizza and beer, yawned and steered me toward the door. On my way out, he handed me the chisel pry. “Knock yourself out, kid. Tack up old L.B.J. and nail him a few times for Uncle Walt. But try not to hit the wall, that beaverboard’s expensive.”

The steel ridges seemed to bum themselves into my hand. I walked back to my room knowing that I now had the courage to do it.

6

The following night, I struck.

My day had been nothing but furious brain-movies and external shaking, and the head librarian twice asked me if I felt “under the weather”; but when dusk hit, a long-buried professionalism took me over, and my mind honed in on the exigencies of the job at hand.

I had already decided that the dwellings of solitary women would be my “meat,” and that I would only steal what I could reasonably carry on my person. I knew from previous Walt Borchard monologues that the area just south of the east Griffith Park Road was relatively cop-free — it was a low-crime middle-class neighborhood that required only cursory patrolling. Holding that inside information in front of my brain’s viewfinder, I walked there after work.

The streets off Los Feliz and Hillhurst were a mixture of stucco four-flats and small houses, narrow and broad front lawns. I circled the blocks from Franklin northward in a figure-eight pattern, checking for cars or the absence of them in driveways and for flimsy doors that looked ripe for prying and whittling. The pick-gouger rested in my back pocket, wrapped in a pair of rubber gloves I had purchased during my lunch hour. I was ready.

The sun started setting around seven-thirty, and I got the feeling that the driveways that were still empty would stay empty — there had been a big crush of people returning home for work between six and seven, but now incoming traffic was dwindling and I was seeing more and more dark houses bereft of cars. I decided to wait until full darkness hit, then move.

Twenty-five minutes later I was on New Hampshire Avenue, approaching Los Feliz. I hit a stretch of dark one-story houses and started walking across the front lawns, perusing mailboxes for the names of single women. The first four designated the inhabitants as “Mr. & Mrs.”; but the fifth house was meat — Miss Francis Gillis. I walked up to the door and rang the bell before fear could take hold.

Silence.

One ring; two rings; three. The darkness behind the front window seemed to deepen with the echo of each ringing, and I slipped on my gloves, got out my instrument and stuck it into the narrow space where the door met the doorjamb. My hands were shaking, and I was prepared to push, gouge and whittle. But then my tremors accelerated, and the flat edge of the pick nipped the lock slide just right. The door clicked open on a perfect fluke.

I stepped inside and eased the door shut, then stood perfectly still in the interior darkness, waiting for the shape of the front room to make itself known. My body from knees to pelvis tingled, and as I stood there thinking of Shroud Shifter, the feeling localized itself in my groin.

Then there was a scrabbling sound, and a powerful blunt force knocked me onto my back. Teeth snapped at my face, and I could feel a section of my cheek being ripped loose. Two yellowish eyes glowed immediately in front of me, huge and weirdly translucent. When I saw cataracts near the black pinpoints in the middle, I knew it was a dog and that Shroud Shifter wanted me to kill it.

The teeth snapped again; this time they grazed my left ear. I felt legs digging into my stomach, and I swung the gouging edge of my tool in and up, just where I thought the animal’s lower tract would be. It was a perfect imitation of S.S.’s gutting motion; and when the blade pierced skin, and entrails slid out warm and wet, I felt myself approaching orgasm. I rolled out from under the dog just as he began a series of reflex death snaps, pressing myself into the floor as I came. My eyes were now accustomed to the darkness, and I could see a pillow-strewn couch a few feet away. I dragged myself to it, grabbed a large tufted cushion and flung myself on the dog and smothered him.

My head was reeling as I got to my feet, found a floor lamp and turned it on, casting light on a Danish Modem living room with a Plunkett Modem still life square in the middle of it — bloodsoaked carpet, dead German shepherd with a crocheted pillow for a head. My hands were shaking, but a blank-framed brain-movie kept me calm inside. I set out to perform my first burglary.

In the bathroom I cleansed my cheek wound with witch hazel, then pressed a styptic pencil deep into the cut. Soon a crust formed, and I crisscrossed the area with tiny adhesive bandages and walked into the bedroom.

Slowly, methodically, I went to work. First I stripped off my bloodstained shirt, rolled it into a ball and rummaged in the closet until I found a blue button-down shirt that would not arouse suspicion on a man. I put it on and checked out the result in a wall mirror. Tight, but I did not look incongruous in it. My pants were soaked with blood and entrail residue, but they were dark, and the stains were not that noticeable. I could safely wear them home.

Thinking loot, I dug through drawers, cupboards and cabinets, coming away with a small cedar box full of twenty-dollar bills and a velvet box of sparkling stones and pearl strands that looked genuine. I thought about making a search for credit cards, but decided it was inadvisable. The dead dog might mean that this burglary would receive more police attention than usual, and I did not want to risk fencing cards that would be the object of special cop scrutiny. For a first-time “caper,” I had stolen enough.

With the gouger, cash and jewelry stuck in my pants pockets, I took a last walk through the house, turning off lights. When I picked up my bloodied shirt, Shroud Shifter sent me a little commemorative embellishment, and on my way to the door I dumped a box of dog biscuits by the Shepherd’s pillowed head.

7

The night on New Hampshire Avenue was the beginning of my criminal apprenticeship and the start of a terrible series of conflicts — internal battles waged by the jigsaw pieces of my emerging drives. Over the next eleven months, I wondered if the different parts of me would ever reconcile themselves to the point where all the pieces would dovetail perfectly, allowing me to become the man of mean business I aspired to be.

I continued my burglary career two nights later, hitting three dark apartments on the same East Hollywood block, using only my pick-gouger to break and enter. I stole $400 in cash, a box of costume jewelry, sterling silverware and a half-dozen credit cards; and it wasn’t until I was home safely that I realized I was disappointed — my triple success felt like an anticlimax. A window punch job the following night forced the reason consciously into my brain: my first B & E had been blood and grit and viscera and courage, my subsequent ones a refining of skills, and not nearly so exciting. The realization sank in as the need for circumspection and super-caution; I must never, ever, get caught. Intellectually, that realization held me — for a while.

But other truths came hard on its heels.

For one, I could not bring myself to sell or fence the jewelry and credit cards I stole. I was afraid of establishing criminal connections that might make me vulnerable to blackmail, and I needed to touch the concrete rewards of my deeds. The hard plastic embossed with anonymous women’s names made their lives feed into my brain-movies, so that each card was good for hours and hours of escape from boredom. The jewelry gave added tactile weight to my screenings, and I never even bothered to learn whether it was real or fake.

So, as my burglary forays progressed, my only practical “take” was money, usually accrued in tiny amounts. I retained my library job, and kept my stolen cash in a savings account. Walt Borchard taught me how to drive, and early in ’68, six months into my apprenticeship, I got a driver’s license and bought a car, an innocuous ’60 Valiant. It was while charting wider territory in it that my most dangerous conflict came into focus.

A dreary Valley neighborhood of tract houses was unfolding in my windshield, and from the number of children playing in cement front yards I could tell that single women were at a minimum. I decided to head west toward Encino, but something kept me pressed to the edge of the right lane, with my eyes pressed to the identically laid-out driveways I was passing. Then a stray dog ambled down the sidewalk, and the picture within the picture hit me.

I had been staring at circular pet doors inset in the regular side doors that were stationed in the same place on every house I had passed for a half-dozen blocks. Suddenly I could smell the house on New Hampshire Avenue ten months before — a metallic scent that filled my nostrils and made my hands quiver on the steering wheel. I pulled to the curb, and the memory came back full. Along with it there was a bombardment of flashbacks from my other senses — the taste of my mother’s blood mixed with water; Beware of the Dog signs I had seen while choosing previous burglary sites; how it felt to climax. The dog on the sidewalk started to look like Shroud Shifter’s hated foe, Cougarman. Then the acquired sense of reason took hold, and I got out of that dreary and dangerous neighborhood before it could hurt me.

At home that night, I fondled my pick-gouger and shut down the movie theatre that was there to entertain me twenty-four hours a day. When a blank screen was in front of my eyes, I filled it up with what I knew and what I should do about it, in plain typeface that left me no room for embellishment.

You have been unconsciously trying to relive killing the dog;

You have been doing that because the excitement made you come;

You have been taking needless risks in order to achieve sexual gratification;

If you continue taking those risks, you will be caught, tried and convicted of burglary;

You must stop.

My brain-typewriter flashed a series of huge question marks in response to the last statement, and as they struck blank paper they felt like blows to the heart. I gripped my gouger harder and harder, and my mind flailed for the answer to the most self-destructive dilemma known to man. Then another set of statements hit:

Cut it off — don’t let it be the death of you;

Hold it in like Shroud Shifter;

But he has Lucretia;

Make yourself have dreams that will give you release;

But that is betraying myself;

Do what everyone does to themself;

No;

No;

No

Touch yourself, maim yourself or kill yourself; but do it now.

I stripped, and walked to the full-length mirror on my bathroom door. Staring at my image, I saw a tall, bony boy-man with pasty skin and fierce brown eyes. I recalled the sleep-time explosions that had come not from dreams but from an accumulation of hateful images from my brain-movies, and I thought of how shameful it felt when I awoke to proof of what I secretly desired. My heart pounded, and shortness of breath made my whole body flutter. I held the sharp edge of the gouger to the underside of my genitals, then to my throat. I drew thin trickles of blood at both places, then gasped at what I was doing and hurled myself away from the mirror and onto my bed. There, with the handle of the burglar’s tool making brushed-steel indentations in my groin, I wept and gave myself release — the bitter price of being able to continue.

8

My brush with self-annihilation filled me with a resolve to fantasize less and steal more. The diminished mental life hurt, but the boldness I gained in its backlash staunched the festering of the wound. In a week I pulled five jobs, each in the jurisdiction of a different police department, each with a different form of entry, netting a total of seven hundred dollars and change, two Rolex watches and a Smith & Wesson .38 that I planned to file down until it was completely ridge-surfaced — the ultimate burglar’s weapon. Then fate bonded me to history, and my ascent and descent began at the same time.

It was June 5, 1968, the night after Robert Kennedy was shot in L.A. He was lying close to death at Good Samaritan Hospital, the place where I was born. The T.V. news showed huge crowds holding a vigil outside the hospital, and huge crowds meant empty dwellings. Walt Borchard had told me that residental areas surrounding medical facilities were loaded with nurses — good places to “patrol for pussy.” The combination of factors spelled “burglar’s heaven,” and I drove downtown with visions of big empty houses dancing in my head.

Wilshire Boulevard was a constant stream of horn-blasting cars, a premature funeral procession. The sidewalk in front of the hospital was packed with gawkers and premature mourners weeping and waving placards, and hippies were selling “Pray for Bobby” bumper stickers. There were a number of women wearing nurse’s uniforms in the crowd, and a nice solid feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach. I parked in a lot on Union Avenue, several blocks east of Good Samaritan, and went walking.

My initial fantasies about the neighborhood had been inaccurate. There were no big houses, only ten- and twelve-story tenement-type buildings. I lost my solid feeling when I tried the outside doors of the first three red brick monoliths I came to and found them locked. Then, at the corner of Sixth and Union, I looked back on the block I had passed and saw floor after floor of dark windows, in building after building with identical side-access fire escapes. I retraced my steps and began squinting upward for open windows.

The third building on the east side of the street caught my eye; it had a half-open window on the fifth floor, within an arm’s length of the fire-escape landing. I looked around for possible witnesses, saw none, and dragged an empty garbage can over to just below the fire escape’s drop rungs. Swallowing a teeth-chattering burst of fear, I stepped on top of it and hoisted myself up.

The night was clear but moonless, and I pulled on my gloves and forced myself to tiptoe like Shroud Shifter did when he approached a victim. At the fifth-floor landing, I looked out and down, again saw no one watching me, and tried the fire-escape door. It was unlocked, and beyond it there was a long, threadbare hallway. It was the safer access route — if my target door could be easily snapped. But the window, with three feet and a sixty-foot drop between me and it, somehow seemed more powerful and sinister.

With my right leg stuck out to full extension, I tried to lift the window. It stuck, but as my foot gained purchase, I was able to push it open all the way. Squatting down, I flung my leg into the dark space beyond it, anchoring myself. Then, before I could panic, I pushed off the landing with my other foot, grabbed the wooden window frame with both hands and executed a perfect silent entry.

I was now standing in a modest living room. As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I saw mismatching sofa and chairs; brick and board bookshelves stuffed with paperbacks; a hallway off at a right angle directly in front of me. A strange sound was coming from the far end of it, and I went tingly with the thought of a possible watchdog. Pulling out my gouger, I treaded down the hallway until I saw an open door spilling candlelight and what I knew immediately to be the sounds of lovemaking.

A man and woman were on the bed, entwined. They were covered with sweat, and were moving snakelike, in counterpoint movements: him relentlessly forward, up and down, in and out; her sideways with her hips, jabbing outward with crossed legs wrapped around her partner’s back. A candle sitting atop a bookshelf acted in concert with a light breeze blowing from an open window, sending long flutters of light through the darkness — a flame dance that ended at the point where the lovers were joined.

Their moans rose, subsided, became half-verbal gasps. I watched the candlelight illuminate him inside of her. Each flicker made the point of bonding both more beautiful and more gutter-explicit. I stared, transfixed, oblivious to the risk I was taking. I don’t know how long I was standing there, but after a while I began to anticipate the lovers’ movements, and then I started moving with them, silently, from a distance that seemed vast but intimate. Their hips rose and fell; mine did also, in perfect synchronization, brushing an empty space that felt alive with growing things. Soon their moans escalated in unison, reaching toward a point where they would never subside. I caught myself about to cry out with them, then bit down on my tongue as Shroud Shifter sent me professional caution. At that point my whole being rocketed into my groin, and the two lovers and I came together.

They lay gasping, clutching each other fiercely; I pressed my back into the wall to hold down the residual shock waves of my explosion. I pressed harder and harder, until I thought my spine would crack; then I heard whispers, and a radio voice filled the bedroom. A somber-voiced announcer was saying that Robert Kennedy was dead. The woman started to sob, and the man whispered, “Sssh. Ssssh. We knew it was going to happen.”

The last three words startled me, and I moved back down the hall to the living room. I saw a pair of cord trousers draped across an armchair and a purse on the floor next to it. With one eye on the candlelight glow emanating from the bedroom, I pulled a billfold from the back pocket of the cords and a wallet from the open purse. Then I eased myself out the door before the beautiful candle magnet could draw me back to the lovers.

At the car, before I could even bring myself to examine my loot, I had an eerie moment of clarity. I knew I had to do it again and again, and unless my criminal profits made the risk worthwhile, I would die from submission to that desire. I thought of the jewelry and credit cards hidden in my closet at home, and of the names and hangouts of fences Walt Borchard had mentioned in his many beery monologues. I drove home, picked up my stash and went out to carve another notch on my professionalism. En route I felt sated; gently calm but determined. Loving.

My calmness turned to apprehension as I parked on Cahuenga and Franklin, a half block from the Omnibus — infamous “O.B.’s,” the place Walt Borchard called “a pus pocket even by Hollywood standards, a real carnival of lowlife; fences, bikers, hookers, dope dealers, junkies and fruits.” Even before I walked in the door I could see his appraisal validated. There were a half-dozen motorcycles parked on the sidewalk in front of the low cement building, and a group of rough-looking men in leather jackets were passing around a bottle of whiskey. Pushing through the swinging doors, I saw that the inside was a grand tour of things I had never seen.

There was a bandstand at the front of the large, smoky room. Shirtless Negro men were pounding conga drums on top of it, and a white man in back of them was swinging a colored arc light in the direction of the horseshoe-shaped dance floor. There was a line of youths, both male and female, standing at the periphery of the gyrating throng of dancers, and every few seconds one of them would move toward a door I could glimpse in back of the bandstand.

Walking into the lowlife maelstrom, I fingered the loot in my windbreaker pockets for luck and courage. Joining the line of hippies, I got a clear look at the dance floor. Men were dancing with men, and women with women. I caught the scent of a ripe, musky substance and knew it had to be marijuana. Then I felt an elbow in my side, and a marijuana stick was in my face. “Toke,” a girl with stringy red hair said. “It’s Acapulco Gold. You’ll fly.”

I thought of Shroud Shifter and psychic invisibility, then said, “No thanks. Not my scene.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at me and took a “toke” herself Exhaling, she said, “Are you a nark?”

“No, I came here to do business.”

“Buying or selling?”

“Selling.”

“Groovy. Grass? Speed? Acid?”

S.S. was whispering “when in Rome” in my ear. Impulsively I said “toke,” and grabbed the joint. I put it between my lips and dragged deeply. The smoke burned, but I held it in until it felt like a hot poker was singeing my lungs. Then I belched the smoke out and gasped, “Jewelry, watches, credit cards.”

The girl toked and said, “I’m Lovechild. Are you a criminal or something?” She handed me back the joint, and as I sucked in the smoke I could see Shroud Shifter and Lucretia doing a slow grind together on the dance floor. Other dancers bumped into them, and Lucretia snapped at their necks until they backed off. Within seconds the dancers were on their knees, and S.S. and Lucretia were naked and coiled together in a serpentlike mass of arms and Legs. I toked again, and heard music oozing from the bandstand: “I gotta get high, and fry on the sky! geez some china white in a purple haze thigh! Don’t ask why!”

Lovechild shoved herself against me and pouted, “Don’t Bogart! Don’t Bogart! It’s expensive!” With my eyes still on Shroud Shifter and Lucretia, I reached into my right wind-breaker pocket for a lady’s Rolex to keep her calmed down. My hand closed on metal, and I pulled what I was grasping out. Then someone shouted, “He’s got a gun!”

The line of hippies parted, and Shroud Shifter and Lucretia vanished. I heard the jabbered syllables “fuzz,” “heat” and “pig” over and over. Reality clicked in, and I forced my marijuana-addled brain to come up with the name of the “boss fence” that Walt Borchard said worked out of O.B.’s. I trained my unloaded .38 at Lovechild and hissed, “Cosmo Veitch. Get him.”

The crowd was getting itchy; I could feel them sizing me up. I had my height and square clothes going for me, but aside from that I was bone-skinny and only twenty years old. If someone decided to turn on normal indoor lights, I would be exposed as a non-cop imposter.

Old brain-movies and memories came to my aid; I felt my features congeal into my “don’t fuck with me, I’m psycho” stare. Shroud Shifter was whispering words of encouragement and pointing at his diaphragm; I knew he wanted me to speak in a deep, tough guy’s voice. “Ease back, citizens,” I said. “This isn’t a bust, this is just between me and Cosmo.”

The remark seemed to nullify the crowd. I could see tense faces unclench in relief, and the dancers immediately in front of me backed off onto the floor and resumed gyrating. I saw that I was still holding my .38 at waist level, and that the line of hippies had dispersed. I was concentrating on keeping my face in darkness when I heard a male voice in back of me. “Yes, Officer?”

I swiveled slowly and smiled at the voice. It belonged to a boy-man with hard eyes, a hard, short body, granny glasses and a ponytail hairdo. I said, “Someplace quiet,” and pointed my gun toward the back of the bandstand. Cosmo walked ahead, and led me to a small room filled with bar stools and disconnected jukeboxes. The light was bright and harsh, and I kept my whole being concentrated on looking and sounding older than my years. “I’m Shifter,” I said. “I’ve been working Daywatch Burglary out in the Valley and I’ve heard good things about you.” With my gun pointed to the floor, I emptied the contents of both my windbreaker pockets onto a bar stool. Cosmo whistled at the accumulation of jewelry, watches and credit cards. S.S. was making “be cool” gestures, and I sighed and said, “Name a figure, I haven’t got all night.”

Cosmo fondled the two Rolexes, then poked through the jewelry, holding several red stones up to the light. “Five hundred,” he said.

I felt another jolt of the marijuana. “Cash, not trash.” Shroud Shifter’s “be cool” motions got more emphatic, and I added, “Six hundred.”

Cosmo took a roll from his pocket. He peeled off six hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me, then pointed to a back door. I stuck my gun in my pocket, bowed and exited like a great actor leaving the stage after curtain calls for a bravura performance. I had conquered sex and achieved psychic invisibility on the same day. I was inviolate; I was golden.

9

Watching.

Stealing.

Watching and stealing.

I spent a feverish twenty-four hours trying to reconcile the dual logistics. The homes of young married couples? No, too risky.

Surveillance of attractive young women with sleep-over boyfriends? No, too hit-or-miss. Finally an idea dawned, and I walked down the hall and knocked on Uncle Walt Borchard’s door.

“Friend or foe?” Uncle Walt called out.

“Foe!” I called back.

“Enter, foe!”

I opened the door. Uncle Walt was sitting on the living-room couch, wolfing his usual dinner of pizza and beer, a newspaper spread on the floor to catch cheese drip. “I... I need to talk,” I said in a mock-sheepish voice.

“Sounds serious. Sit down and have a slice.”

I took a chair across from Borchard and declined the pizza he pointed to. “Have you ever worked Vice?” I asked.

Borchard chewed and laughed at the same time — as complex a feat as he was capable of. Swallowing, he said, “That does sound serious. You okay, Marty?”

“S... s... sure. Have you?”

“No, I haven’t. Are you in trouble, kid?”

“No. The vice squad arrests prostitutes, right?”

“Right.”

“And call girls? You know, like really good-looking prostitutes? Not the cheap hooker type, but, you know, beautiful girls, girls who have their own apartments to take guys to so it’s not cheesy, like in a motel?”

Borchard laughed so hard that an anchovy popped out of his mouth and landed on the coffee table in front of him. He popped it back in, rechewed it and said, “Marty, are you looking to get laid?”

I lowered my eyes. “Yes.”

“Kid, it’s 1968. Girls are giving it away like never before.”

“I know, but—”

“Have you tried Patty downstairs? She’s spread her legs so many times they’ll have to bury her in a Y-shaped coffin.”

“She’s ugly, and she’s got pimples.”

“Then put a paper bag over her head and buy her a tube of Clearasil.”

I forced out a trickle of crocodile tears, and Uncle Walt said, “Aw shit, kid, I’m sorry. You’re cherry, right? You’re a late starter, and you want a nice-looking cooze for your premiere fuck?”

I wiped my nose and said, “Yes.”

Uncle Walt got up and ruffled my hair, then went into his bedroom. He returned a moment later and handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “Don’t say I never gave you anything, and don’t say I never bent the rules for a buddy.”

I put the money in my shirt pocket. “Gee, thanks, Uncle Walt.”

“My pleasure. Now listen real close, and in an hour or so you will be de-virginized. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Here’s some astonishing information: the LA.P.D., of which I am a member, does allow a certain amount of high-line prostitution to go on in the Hollywood area. Isn’t that shocking? Well, there’s a part of the Boulevard, just West of La Brea, loaded with call-girl cribs. The girls hang out at the better hotel bars — like the Cine-Grill at the Roosevelt, the Yamashiro Skyroom, the Gin Mill at Knickerbocker and so forth. The girls sit at the bar and sip cocktails and eye the single men, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they do for a living. The standard operating procedure is that they mention a figure and suggest that you adjourn to their pad. The standard pop for an all-nighter is a C-note, which I just happened to press into your horny paw. Now, you’re under the drinking age, so act frosty when the bartender asks what you’re having. Act gentlemanly with the lady of your choice, tell her a C-note is tops, and pour her the pork till the hogs holler for hell.”

I stood up. Uncle Walt chucked me under the chin and laughed. “Some young lady’s gonna burn more rubber than the San Berdoo Freeway. Now get out of here, my pizza’s getting cold.”

An hour later I was not getting “de-virginized.” I was sitting at the bar of the Hollywood Roosevelt Cine-Grill, watching a woman in a tight black sequined dress make small talk with a bluff-hearty man wearing a summer suit dotted with conventioner’s buttons. The woman was a bleached redhead, but pretty; the man had a solid, muscular look. I sipped a Scotch and soda and kept my nervousness at bay by imagining them as Shroud Shifter and Lucretia, unwinding from a long day of stalking victims. I could almost feel the two together in bed.

They left the bar abruptly. As they got up to leave, I realized I was screening brain-movies, and that I had lost sight of them in physical reality. I counted to ten and pursued.

I saw them get into a cab in front of the hotel, and I ran for my car. The cab was easy to follow; traffic on the Boulevard was heavy, and they got stuck at the back of a line of cars at La Brea. I was right behind, reaching under the seat for my gloves and gouger. When the light turned green, I smiled: the cab was already pulling to the curb; Uncle Walt’s “call-girl block” had been gospel.

The couple got out of the cab. I parked hastily two car-lengths in back and watched them enter a large pink apartment building shaped like a southern plantation house. The woman did not use a key to open the front door, so I had my initial access. I waited ten seconds, then sprinted full-out, slowing as I opened the door on a long, pink-carpeted hallway. The two were just entering an apartment at the far left end of the hall.

I scanned mailboxes and willed the aura of a cool young man who belonged in an outré pink plantation on Hollywood Boulevard. It was easy, and affecting such supreme nonchalance made me feel brazen. There were no people in the hallway, but a variety of T.V. and stereo noise was booming from inside individual apartments, so that there was a general high noise level. I walked toward my target, checking out the doors on my way. The opener knobs were not reinforced, and there was at least a sixteenth of an inch’s play at the door-doorjamb junctures. If the hooker hadn’t set an inside chain, I could enter.

At my target door I listened for the sound of pre-sex amenities; all I could hear and sense on the other side was silence. Giving the hall a quick eye circuit, I slipped on my gloves, inserted the pick side of my tool and jiggled at the lock. I could feel individual spring-slides give one at a time, and when the third one clicked softly, I pushed the door open a fraction of an inch — just enough to glimpse a dark living room-dinette. Shaking my head to keep brain-movies away, I entered, twisting the doorknob out and then closing the door soundlessly.

Voices, not sounds of passion, drew me in the direction of the bedroom, and glimpses of flawed bodies were what I saw through the crack in the door. My heart crashed as I held an eye up to my inch-wide viewfinder. He was flabby; she had tattoos on her shoulders and thighs. Her pubic hair was obviously dyed to match the shade of her head; he kept his socks on. I tried to make them into Shroud Shifter and Lucretia, but my brain camera wouldn’t focus, and their voices were so grating that I knew their lovemaking would be hideous — and I could never join them.

“... I been in this building before,” the man was saying. “When I was in L.A. with the Moose convention in ’64.”

“Lots of working girls work out of here,” the hooker answered. “Some of them I run myself. You wanta get started?”

“Not so fast. You’re a madam?”

The hooker Sighed. “More like a big-sister confidante, like a therapist, really. I do fix up dates and take a cut, but I like to be a pal, like a big sister who knows the ropes.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Well, once a week I get together with the working girls I know, and we shmooze and talk tricks, and you know.”

The man giggled. “You ever make it with another chick?”

The woman groaned. “Oh, Jesus. Look, I think I’m gonna need a drink for this. You want one too? Maybe it’ll quiet—”

I saw what was about to happen, and padded for the door. When my hand was on the knob, I saw a purse lying on a chair a few feet away. I grabbed it, and managed to extricate myself from the apartment just as the bedroom door started to open. Then I ran.

The purse yielded $9.43 and sexual information that kept me watching, hoping, stalking and sometimes stealing for over a year. The money, of course, was negligible. It was the hooker’s notebook that kept me busy.

It was a makeshift ledger of customers, their phone numbers and the dates of their prescheduled assignations, and a list of the other girls that Carol Ginzburg, the “Therapist-Confidante” “ran,” along with the names and phone numbers of the “tricks,” and notations as to whether the “date” would be held at a motel, the “trick pad” or the girl’s apartment itself. It boiled down to a wealth of possible watching-stealing sites, and in the case of the preset “dates,” it allowed me the time to perform reconnaissance forays before the assignation.

With Shroud Shifter determination, I set out to write my own ledger. First, using the normal L.A. “white pages” and Walt Borchard’s police “reverse” directory, I compiled a list of addresses to go with the phone numbers; then, one weekend when Uncle Walt was out of town on a fishing trip, I staged a break-in of the back garage and stole the remainder of his set of burglar’s tools, his power lawn mower and an allegedly valuable stack of National Geographics. The mower and magazines I dumped in the Silverlake Reservoir; the tools I wrapped in a nylon tarpaulin and stashed in a hollowed-out tree trunk two blocks away.

Next came a series of “recon” missions.

Carol Ginzburg and her “girls” met each Sunday for brunch at the Carolina Pines coffee shop on Sunset and La Brea — it was designated in her ledger as “girltalk.” I eavesdropped at three of their sessions, and studied the “girls” themselves, eliminating “Rita,” “Suzette” and “Starr” as stupid floozies; sizing up “Danielle,” “Lauri” and “Barb” as acceptable for one-third of a triad melding. Lauri was particularly lovely — a tall, stately honey blonde with a Scandinavian accent. I decided that I would hit her “trick pad” dates first, and set out to chart the territory and hone my breaking-and-entering skills.

I did it all very methodically. Lauri had a date in Coldwater Canyon every third Wednesday; I checked out the house, found it impregnable, with home-to-police-station wiring, and crossed it off my list. She had a once-a-month Monday tryst in one of the less plush sections of Beverly Hills; the windows were child’s play and there was plenty of hedge cover adjoining the bedrooms. That was to be “hit” number one, on August 7, 1968.

And so on down the list, with Lauri’s dates first, Barb’s second and Danielle’s third. The three girls all lived in Carol Ginzburg’s pink plantation house, so actual “at-home” tricks would have to be bypassed — I could not risk repeated burglaries in the same building. Also, some of the trick pads were too well exposed and too burglar-proof, and had to be eliminated. But when all was said and done, I had a list of nineteen “probables,” all cased and calendar-marked — tryst burglaries that, if all went well, would last me until January 1970. And I had a built-in fail-safe: the girltalk coffee klatches. If the police had been alerted to the rash of hooker-connected burglaries, I would be among the first to know.

In the daytime, my life continued as usual as I waited for the seventh of August — I worked at the library, ran brain-movies, willed psychic invisibility. But at night, I worked at my hideaway — an abandoned maintenance shed I had discovered deep in the Griffith Park woods. In the glow of a battery-powered arc light I learned the feel of all six keyhole picks in my tool set, the imperceptible little give they activated when inserted and jiggled. I bought dozens of brand-new brushed-steel door locks at hardware stores, and got to know how to nullify the various brand names. I practiced windows with my suction-cup glass tool; I ran the dark hills of the park to build up my wind in case I ever had to flee a trick pad on foot. I came to believe that my first burglary year was an incredible melange of chance, heedless bravado and beginner’s luck. I had been a child voyager then. Now I was a consummate craftsman.

August 7, 1968.

The notation in Carol Ginzburg’s trick book said 9:00 P.M., so I left for Beverly Hills at 7:30 to facilitate the means to a last-minute brainstorm. The night was stifling hot, cloying. I parked in a meter space on Wilshire three blocks from my target and walked over, assuming the easy gait of someone with plenty of time and nothing to fear. At Charleville and Le Doux I saw the home of Mr. Murray Stanton, lit up like a Christmas tree in anticipation of a hot night with Lauri. Passing the driveway on the sidewalk, I could hear the window-mounted air conditioner humming at full power. I walked casually over and cut the cord, nipping it just at the point where it stuck out of the window and into the machine. Squatting down, I admired my work. The cord was frayed on its own, and the break looked natural. I walked into the backyard and squatted behind a line of rosebushes to wait.

At 8:20 I could hear a male voice muttering “Shit”; seconds later I heard windows being opened on both sides of the house. I caught a glimpse of Murray Stanton in silhouette. From a distance he looked as if he could pass for Shroud Shifter.

At 9:00 exactly, the front door chimes sounded. I slipped on my gloves, shut my eyes, ran brain movies and counted to five hundred simultaneously. Then I walked to the window farthest from the bedroom and elbowed myself up and into the dark house.

Squeals of ecstasy directed me to the bedroom door. I could see that it was pressed shut — not locked, and there was a light coming from beneath it. Taking a chance on the lovers having their eyes shut, I toed the door open an inch.

Murray Stanton was lying on top of Lauri, pumping, and the plague of acne cysts on his back made him an insult to Shroud Shifter. Lauri, tall, blond and regal from what I could see of her body was examining a framed photograph which had been resting on a nightstand beside the bed, with her other hand resting on Stanton’s pimpled shoulder, her fingers pushed out as if she was afraid the pustules might be contagious. She was the moaner, and she was a bad actress; the peak of her performance was when she put down the picture to scratch her nose. She was beautiful enough to be Lucretia, but she reminded me of someone else, someone strong and Nordic buried in a deep compartment in my memory vault.

I continued to watch, unaroused. After a while, Lauri stopped squealing and bit at the fingernails of each hand. Stanton’s movements became more frenzied, and he blurted breathlessly, “I’m gonna come! Say ‘It’s so big!’ Say ‘It’s so big it hurts!’ ”

Lauri mouthed the words, trying to hold back giggles. The satirical note in her voice would have been obvious to anyone but a piggish acne case approaching orgasm. I walked back to the living room, Shroud Shifter at my side, whispering, “Steal, steal, steal.”

In the living room, I started to obey. I was reaching for a billfold atop a coffee table when I got an astonishing typed-out brain message: Don’t steal, because the acne pig will blame Lauri, and then you won’t know who she is.

The message was so powerful that by reflex I complied. But on my way to the window I pocketed a tiny framed photograph of a trio of smiling children.

Watch ting.

Stealing.

Watching and stealing.

Those twin pursuits ruled my waking hours over the next year, and nightmares ruled my sleep. I had hoped that man-woman-me would be my trinity, but it wasn’t. It was a triad of: watch perfunctory sex motivated by greed and desperation; steal for emotional survival and the rationale for watching; dream to figure out the mystery of Lauri. That my dreams inevitably became nightmares was the worst part.

Laurel Hahnerdahl was Lauri’s real name, and from impersonating a police officer over the telephone I learned that she was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1943, and that she came to America in 1966. Her occupation was listed as “model,” she had no relatives in the United States, and she possessed no criminal record. That was all the Department of Motor Vehicles and the L.A.P.D. Records Bureau could give me.

We could not possibly have ever met, but she seemed almost symbiotically familiar to me. I prowled her apartment twice and found nothing to jog my memory; I observed four of her dates, without stealing, and still could not decipher the mystery. I dreamt of her constantly, and it was always the same: I was watching her make love to a man who looked like Shroud Shifter, and my vision got blurry, so I moved closer, only to turn into a sightless, armless, legless, voiceless inanimate object. All I could do was hear — and then I heard thunder — crashing thunder hiding thousands of unintelligible voices trying to tell me what Lauri meant. My nightmare would invariably end at that point, and I would wake up erect and drenched in sweat.

Lauri returned to Denmark in April of ’69, and Carol Ginzburg threw a brunch in her honor to celebrate her return to her homeland. I was distressed to see her go — and angry at myself for not having solved who she was — but with her departure came a diminuendoing of my nightmares, and I was able to put the riddle she represented out of my mind.

So I continued to watch and steal, until the hope of ever again feeling what I did on June 5, 1968, died from too many turgid bed performances, toe many pathetic expressions of loneliness. With my disillusionment in watching came a concurrent new joy in stealing, and I ran up eleven straight scores, pawning the loot to Cosmo Veitch, reveling in the fact that although he finally figured out I wasn’t a policeman, he at least was heartily afraid of me. From the late summer of ’68 to the midsummer of ’69 he paid me a total of seven thousand two hundred dollars for the goods I stole. I kept the cash in a steel safe-deposit box at a bank on La Brea, holding it for the time when I would quit my library job and move out of Walt Borchard’s lowlife building.

But in August of ’69 a series of events coincided to temporarily halt my criminal career. Sharon Tate and four others were butchered at her Benedict Canyon house, and when coupled with the similar La Bianca slayings on the other side of town in the Los Feliz district, the murder spelled panic and created a boom in all manner of security devices and services. Angelenos were buying guns and watchdogs, and were buttressing themselves against the still-uncaptured killers in specific, and the 1960’s in general. Burglary was getting to be a riskier business.

And Carol Ginzburg, finally put two and two together and connected the trick-pad robberies to her stolen “John” book. I listened at the Sunday restaurant brunch as she told her girls “coincidence, shmoincidence, something strange is going on.” She described her theory of a very cool robber who only hit intermittently out of caution, and how she was hiring a private detective to look into things. I paid my check and left the coffee shop as she spoke.

With watching and stealing gone, all that was left of my trinity were the nightmares. Even with Lauri gone, they came back, whispers taunting me between peals of thunder. I did not know what they were saying, but when I woke up, I could taste blood.

10

Without limbs to propel me and sight to guide me, my dreams became excursions into weightlessness. I was the prey of noises that tossed me about like a rag doll; I was at the mercy of thunder that singed my body. Only an undercurrent of consciousness kept the lid on my nightmares and saved me from the ruination of terror-induced insomnia. I knew, during the worst of the buffeting, that feeling the thunder-heat meant I could not possibly be disembodied. When I awoke each morning both refreshed and filled with a residue of fear, I knew that I possessed an automatic-pilot device that would always keep me short of the edge.

Yet, still I dreaded sleep, and sought to postpone it through the pursuit of utter exhaustion.

With my bank account as a cushion, I quit the library job and spent my days expending physical energy. I joined a gym in West LA. and lifted weights for two hours daily; in the course of a month my lean frame started to cord over with muscle. I ran the Griffith Park hills until lightheadedness made me collapse and hot showers at home felt like benevolent heat. Then, at night, I disembodied others.

It was a ritual spurred by awareness of my own body and driven by a desire to quash the nightmares. I became a trawler after human beings in their most prosaic poses, a brain-movie director adept at improvising drama out of street passersby and their throwaway gestures. Night after night I cruised the slow lanes, watching. I saw hands pluck at trouser legs and hemlines and knew how those people took their sex; neon lights shimmying across gang boys in tank tops told me why they did the things they did. My brain camera had an automatic slow-motion lens, and when beautiful bodies demanded an extra-close scrutiny to yield the truth of their poetry, that device clicked in and let me linger on all the lovely swells and junctures of flesh.

After a few weeks of mobile watching, my nightmares de-escalated, and I went from movie director to surgeon in an effort to kill them off altogether. My experimental surgery involved cross-gender limb transplants — men’s legs to women’s torsos, women’s faces to men’s bodies, with special attention pa id to the mental incisions that made the grafts possible. Driving close to the curb. I would take a bead on a hand-holding couple, then slow down until we were moving at the same speed. When streetlights illuminated their faces, I amputated limbs and heads and rearranged the parts; effortlessly, bloodlessly. And although unable to express the meaning of the act in words, I knew I was evolving three-way symbiotic unions that transcended sex.

The combination of daytime exertion and nighttime brain-movies finally brought my dreams to the point where they were no more than an occasional nuisance. As a precaution against their recurring in force, I slept with the light on, and if I happened to awake during the night I would walk to the full-length mirror on my bathroom door and stare at my own body. I was strong now, and getting stronger, and when I touched probing fingers to my muscles I felt an almost electric charge. The charge would run down to my groin and end at a verbal terminus: the word burglary.

I succeeded in pushing the word and its giddy connotations aside for weeks, until, in early October, a series of bodies stirred the old embers, and fate supplied the wind that forced me into a brushfire.

I was driving north on Pacific Coast Highway at dusk, wending my way toward the Topanga Canyon turn-in, the Valley, and watching. It was unseasonably warm, and groups of surfers crowded the blacktop that paralleled the beach. Male and female, they were all young and lithe, and my foot eased off the gas involuntarily. A foursome caught my eye: two boys, two girls, all sleek brunettes. My mind went into a pre-surgery “prep,” then went blank. I could not improvise with their bodies, and I knew it was because they were too perfect.

Although I made every effort, my mental scalpel would not descend, and the quartet grew more and more lissome. Car horns honked behind me; I saw that I had stopped dead and was holding up traffic. I started to get scared, and checked my brain arsenal for brushed-steel cutlery to maim the four with. Then, against my will, the brunettes turned to blonds, and the boys were kissing the boys and the girls the girls, and a car brushed my rear fender, the driver yelling, “Get a license, you faggot!”

I punched the gas reflexively, and my old Valiant tore across a busy intersection against the light, narrowly missing an old woman pushing a baby carriage. I took my eyes from the road and glued them to the rearview; the four perfect ones had vanished. I drove slowly out to the Valley, knowing it was only a matter of time until I would break, enter, watch, steal and come — regardless of the risk.

Full darkness brought an awful boredom. The only people out were flaccid and homely, unworthy of my machinations, and the beautiful brunette/blondes wafted inside me like a mental musk. I switched from commercial streets to residential, knowing full well my ultimate intent, and the houses I passed were uniformly brightly lit — bastions of cheap, incomprehensible happiness. My only alternative was to eat, go home and hope for a dreamless sleep.

I stopped at a Bob’s Big Boy on Ventura Boulevard. There was an attractive couple in a booth near the door, and I took a counter seat that gave me visual access to both of them. I was in the conscious process of turning them blond when they got up and walked over to the cashier. A pair of burly young men in denims took their place, the taller of the two pocketing the tip. As his hand scooped the coins, I turned it into a reptile’s claw; soon both youths were fixed in my mind as buffoonish lizards. Then their loud voices made me stop brain-gaming and listen:

“... yeah, for-real hippie hookers. I’m talking chicks who love their work, who groove on ballin’ more than money. Cheap, too. The one chick, Season, hit me up for a ten-spot in the morning; the other, Flower — can you dig it? — goes for even less. You gotta listen to their rap about this guru guy they groove on, but who cares?”

“And you’re tell in’ me they hang out at the Whiskey every night? That they’ve got a pad off the Strip, and they spread all night for a tensky?”

“I don’t blame you for not thinkin’ it’s for real, but listen: they got an altered motive, or whatever you call it — they’re recruiters for this guru guy Charlie, and they tell you the fuck bread is for ‘The Family,’ and you should come out to this ranch where they live. It’s a hype, but who cares?”

“And these chicks are boss foxes?”

“Primo.”

“And all I gotta do is hit the Whiskey and ask around for them?”

“No, just go there and look cool, and they’ll find you.” “Then why the fuck am I sittin’ here lookin’ at your ugly face?”

Not knowing I had just crossed paths with history, I left a dollar on the counter and drove to the Strip and the Whiskey Au Go Go. A neon sign announced “The Battle of the Bands” — “Marmalade” vs “Electric Rabbit”; “Perko-Dan & his Magik Band” vs “The Loveseekers.” Parking spaces were scarce, but I found a spot in a gas-station lot across the street. Knowing this was a criminal mission — not an exercise in mental surgery — I walked over to the door, paid my cover charge and entered into a dark cavern of high-decibel noise.

The amplified electrical twanging was hideous, and had nothing to do with music; the darkness that enveloped everything but the stage was soothing and an unwitting ally — I could not see the people who were jammed together at matchbook-size tables; there would be no fetching bodies to distract me from my mission. The six gyrators who banged guitars in the glow of strobe lights would force me to search for “Flower” and “Season” — their “stage presence” was a frenzy of long matted hair, Day-Glo “threads” and sprayed body fluids.

Turning away from them, I found an empty table and sat down. A waitress materialized, placed a napkin in front of me and said, “Three-drink minimum, three-fifty a drink. If you want liquor, I have to see some ID. If you want to leave and come back, I’ll have to stamp your hand.”

I said, “ginger ale,” handed her a five-dollar bill and squinted into the darkness. After a few seconds, the shapes of sitting people came into view. I decided to keep my eyes fixed on a midpoint among the rear tables, hoping to catch Season and Flower moving between them in their “recruiting” efforts. I was moving into my own world of pure concentration when I felt a hand on my arm and heard a breathy female voice. I was caught off guard, and my knees jerked up and hit the table, knocking it over. The girl who had spoken to me scuttled out of the way, and I saw that she was lovely, with waist-length black hair. Smiling, I willed an aura of psychic invisibility and spoke in a tone of pure nonchalance, pure savoir faire. “I just got back from the Continent, and the cafe accommodations there are more accommodating. Won’t you sit down and join me for a drink?”

Her mouth dropped, and her loveliness turned fatuous. “What? You mean you’re clumsy?”

“Just captivated,” I said. “Won’t you sit down?”

The girl said, “Captivated?” and gave me a look that was half-contempt, half-befuddlement. An errant strobe flash magnified her mouth; she was both slack-jawed and sneering. The sneer crept over me, and I mentally hacked off her limbs and tossed them in the direction of “Electric Rabbit” and their off-key wailing. The girl muttered “Weirdo” under her breath, then waved to someone in back of me and called, “Season! Wait!”

My targets.

The girl threaded her way toward an Exit sign by the back tables. I hesitated, then followed. When she got to the door she huddled with two others; from ten yards away I saw that both of them were long-haired and wearing buckskin pants and vests. I was not close enough to determine their genders, and I had to keep my brain scalpel from hacking through their britches so I could tell. Suddenly what the two had between their legs was the most important thing in the world. I was moving to the door when the black-haired girl skipped back into the nightclub melee, and the buckskin pair pushed through the door to the street.

I followed.

The two crossed Sunset in an androgynous swirl, fixed by a steel tracking device that kept me oblivious to everything else around me. Dimly, I realized that I was jaywalking straight through a stream of traffic, and that horns were honking and tires squealing. Still I pursued; still I kept my tunnel vision activated. When the street was behind me, with residential darkness looming ahead, a turning car illuminated my prey. I saw that they were male and female, both slightly built, a mustache on the young man the only distinguishing feature. My tracking device snapped off, a “caution” switch snapping on in its place.

I held back and took deep breaths; the buckskin pair rounded the corner and walked up the side stairs of a pink stucco apartment building with exposed doorways. “Season” opened the third door from the end and flicked on an inside light, then pointed the young man in. When she closed the door behind them, the light went off immediately. She had not used a key to enter; the door was most likely unlocked.

I waited for twenty excruciatingly long minutes, then walked over and up to the door. “Caution” burned behind my eyes in red neon, and I put my ear against the plywood surface and listened. Hearing nothing but the crackle of electricity coursing through my body, I entered.

The apartment was completely dark, and the spongy carpeting seemed to seduce me into it, slowly. The walls felt like an embrace; the stale air was warm. When my eyes were able to pick out details, the cheap wrought-iron and Formica fixtures did not register as sterile — they came alive as objects belonging to people I wanted to know. The heat of the four-walled vacuum settled near my physical center, smothering the Caution sign. I saw a short hallway and a doorway strung with beads immediately in front of me. Darkness reposed behind it, but I knew that would not stop me from seeing. I tiptoed to the last barrier separating me from the lovers.

Grunts, giggles and squeals of pleasure sounded behind it. Parting the beads and squinting until my eyes ached allowed me to see shadow-light on ankles locked together; breathing in gave me the taste of marijuana. The love noises grew more intense, and the words I was able to discern — “yeah,” “give it,” and “come” — issued from vulgar voices. It rattled me, and cold air started to seep into my sensual womb. To staunch the freeze, I turned myself dumb and stared through the beads until I saw two women writhing, friction producing sparks where their nipples rubbed together; two men joined groin to groin, their straining limbs keeping the juncture point hidden. Then all four became one, and I got lost trying to see who was where. I came then, my hands tightly grasping the beads.

Astonishingly, I wasn’t heard. I stood rock-still, enclosed by heat and bombarded by a series of Caution signs with missing and rearranged letters. It was as if a full-body dyslexia were trying to push me one way or the other, toward some hellish, irrevocable act. I stood very, very still, then heard Season’s voice for the first time. “It’s just the wind and the beads. Isn’t it pretty?”

The male lover answered, “It’s spooky.”

Season sighed. “It’s nature. Charlie says that after Helter Skelter, when the big corporations are all gone and the land reverts to the people, man-made things and nature will work together in perfect harmony. It’s in the Bible, and the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and Charlie and Dennis Wilson are doing an album about it.”

“You’ve got this Charlie dude on the brain.”

“He’s a wise man. He’s a shaman and a healer, and a metaphysician and a guitarist.”

The male lover snorted, and Season sang, “ ‘You say you want a revolution, we-el-el, you know, we all want to change the world.’ Charlie calls that the gospel according to Saint Paul and Saint John.”

“Ha! You want to hear the gospel according to Saint Me?”

“Well... okay, sure.”

“Then dig: good food, good dope, good vibes and good fuckin’, and if someone gets in your way, lock, load and fire between their eyes.”

“And death to the pigs.”

“Not my scene, my dad’s a cop. What’s Charlie say about instant replays?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come here, I’ll show you.”

Season giggled. I could feel the air heating up behind the bead curtain, and I got out of the womb before the warmth could claim me.

That night my dreams were a compendium.

I was armless and legless. A phantom named Charlie chased me, and I wanted to see why pretty young girls talked about him after they had made love with someone else, so I let myself be caught, screaming when I saw that Charlie’s face was a mirror that reflected not my face, but a collage of butchered sex organs. Walt Borchard taunted me for screaming, then shoved hundred-dollar bills in my mouth to shut me up. My mother grabbed at the money and tried to tourniquet her gashed arms with it; my father toasted a mushroom cloud rising over downtown L.A. Knowing that total silence would save me, I fastened brushed-steel clamps over my lips and turned a series of external gears that would keep my brain’s synapses from sparking. I started to feel impregnable, and tried to laugh. No sound came out, and a new array of mirror-faced enemies approached me, holding big metal keys that would unlock my voice, my brain, my memory.

I woke up at dawn, choking and gasping for breath. I had bitten through my pillow, and my mouth was filled with cotton and foam rubber. I spat it out and breathed deeply, then went into a coughing attack. I tried to bring my right arm over to wipe my eyes, but there was no feeling at all on the right side of my body.

I whimpered, “No, please,” then sent a “kick” signal to my right leg. It hit the floor, so I knew that part of me had not been amputated. Gritting my teeth, I signaled my arm: “Grab, tear, rip, gouge, live.” There was a stirring under the sheet, then my hand extricated itself from the wall by the bedstead. Blood and mortar covered my fingers, and I looked at the hole my nightmare had dug. The perfectly outlined apertures held my attention like cave hieroglyphics. I stared at them until feeling returned to my hand and I passed out from the pain.

I spent the day in a zombie state — sleeping, walking to the bathroom sink to soak my hand, returning to sleep. The ache in my fingers was dream proof that I existed as a functioning machine, and when I woke up to stay at dusk, I knew what I had to do. After removing the remaining plaster fragments from under my fingernails, I drove back to the womb to wait for the most perfect bodies it could give me.

Parked at the curb by the pink stucco building, I waited. At 7:00, Flower and Season left the apartment and hiked up to the Strip; at 8:19 Flower returned with a rodentlike hippie boy. The combination of the girl’s fatuousness and the rodent’s body flab spelled “no.” I continued my surveillance.

Flower and her weasel consort left at 10:03, parting company at the corner. Season and a rail-thin men of about thirty passed Flower on her trek back up to the Whiskey, exchanging words. Season was the one I wanted in my triumvirate, but her skinny partner looked mean-spirited and consumptive. Impatient, and itchy from the long transit of no brain-movies, I stayed put.

Shortly after midnight, Season and her lover exited the apartment and walked south, away from the Strip. I realized then that the girls probably synchronized their arrivals and departures, and laid odds that Flower would be returning within ten minutes. My hand ached, and I willed the throbs to a low ebb by concentrating on the question that had plagued my dreams: Who was “Charlie”?

True to form, Flower rounded the corner a few minutes later. A large man in army fatigues was with her, and he carried himself with an authority that was anti-hippie, anticounterculture, and purely masculine. Approaching the building, he took off his cap and smoothed his hair. It was a lustrous blond, and I knew he had to be Charlie.

Now my waiting was all shivers and tremors and tingles through the groin. Knowing Charlie would find a quick, violent coupling vulgar, I allowed for pre-sex mood-setting, then walked up to the door. With my heart thundering, I opened it and walked in.

The front room was pitch-dark, and I left the door ajar a few inches for light, then moved straight to the beaded curtain. I peered through, and candlelight framed him on top of her. I touched myself, but that part of me felt cold. My heart was going “ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud,” and I knew that soon the lovers would hear it. Touching myself again, I felt not coldness, but nothing. I whispered, “Charlie,” parted the curtains and walked to the bed. A breeze sent the light over entwined legs. I gasped and bent over and touched them.

“Oh God!”

“What the fu—”

I heard the words and moved backward; a light flashed on, and the legs I had been caressing kicked out at me. Then Charlie was pulling a sheet around himself, and all I could do was run.

I dived for the curtain, and a blow caught me in the back of the neck. Flower squealed, “Helter Skelter coming down!” and I fell to my knees. Then the front-room light went on, and a force around my neck uprooted me. I caught a topsy-turvy view of Tahiti and Japan via Pan American Airways, and billboards for the Jook Savages and Marmalade. I tried to run a defensive brain-movie, but my brains felt as though they were shooting out the top of my head. Charlie was screaming, “Fuck Fuck Fuck!”; then we were on the walkway outside, and people from the adjoining apartments were staring out their windows at me.

With my neck being twisted off its axis, I kicked sidelong at the gargoyles; glass flew into a succession of stunned faces. Screams and approaching sirens were ringing in any ears as Charlie dragged me downstairs, and the last thing I heard before blacking out was Flower singing an impromptu Beatles medley.

11

The caress cost me close to a year of my life.

I was arrested and charged with one count of Breaking and Entering, and the pick gouger in my pocket earned me a second charge of Possession of Burglar’s Tools. A voyeurism “beef” was pending, but my public defender told me that Uncle Walt Borchard talked the D.A. out of filing the charge — he did not want me to get a sex offender “jacket.” On attorney’s advice, I pleaded guilty at arraignment. My sentence: a year in the Los Angeles County Jail and three years formal probation. When the judge handed down the decree and asked me what I had to say for myself, I broke the pattern of silence/monosyllabic replies that I had maintained since the moment of my arrest. “I have nothing to say — yet,” I said.

My “practical silence” had snapped on automatically, the moment the sheriffs snapped the handcuffs on my wrists and I learned that my assailant was not the phantom Charlie, but a man named Roger Dexter. The cops, prisoners and legal officers I dealt with between arrest and sentencing expected terseness and faraway stares, and my behavior at the West Hollywood substation did not ring as incongruous. I was also 6'3", 185, rawboned and strange, and the bullies in the tank had plenty of frailer “fish” to toy with. No one knew that I was terrified to within an inch of my life, and that my jailhouse protector was a comic-book villain.

Shroud Shifter’s counsel blunted my nightmares, eased my memory of the moment when I touched flesh, and let me concentrate on surviving my sentence. Our dialogue was so constant that even while holding sustained physical silence, I felt hyper-verbal inwardly, with typefaced warnings imprinting themselves across my field of vision whenever I felt especially frightened:

Counting the “good time” and “work time” you will receive for working as a trusty, you have 9½ months in jail to endure. Your confreres will be stupid men and violent men prone to victimizing those weaker than they.

Therefore, you must utilize your outsize physicality without affecting a macho demeanor that will attract violence;

Therefore, you must never let your fellow inmates know that you are much more intelligent than they are, or that your own criminal tendencies derive from deeper needs and curiosities;

Therefore, you must utilize practical silence, and psychic invisibility, and a new, finely honed “protective invisibility” — assuming the personas of those you are with, blending in until you are indistinguishable from your fellow inmates.

Thus, mentally armed, I arrived at the L.A. “New” County Jail to serve my sentence. The structure itself, only recently completed, was a massive angularity of steel and glossy concrete, all painted blue-gray and orange, with long corridors inset with holding tanks and inmate “modules” — four-tiered cellhouses fronted by narrow catwalks. Escalators connected the six floors, each of them equivalent in height to a three-story building; the corridors ran the length of three football fields. The mess halls were the size of movie theatres, and the string of administrative offices was an eighth of a mile of steel-reinforced doorways. After a ten-hour stint of holding-tank waiting, skin-searching, lice-control spraying, blood-testing and more waiting, I was assigned with five others to a four-man cell to await trusty classification and my work assignment. With miles of trudging blue-gray/orange concrete behind me, and an accumulation of obscene conversations ringing in my ears, I stretched out on the bunk I had snatched from a pudgy Mexican youth and let overall impressions overtake me. Containment was the word most summarily accurate, and I knew it would come from the concrete and steel that held me in, and from the impoverished minds of my keepers and fellow prisoners, and from the noise level of the air I breathed. And with Shroud Shifter beside me, I knew that my self-containment within that containment would be impenetrable.

I waited four days for trusty classification, learning jail nomenclature and sharpening my skill as a dissembler. Aside from “chow calls,” I spent all my time in the cell, sleeping and listening to hyperbolized accounts of criminal and sexual exploits, participating in conversations only when asked direct questions. I began to get the impression that boredom overruled violence as the salient fact of jail-house life, and that my greatest personal danger would come from laughing out loud at ridiculous tales told with straight faces.

So, when Gonzalez, the fat Mexican kid whose bunk I grabbed, opened a line of talk with his standard, “You talk about bonaroo pussy, man,” I bit at my gums until chuckles were forestalled; when Willie Grover, aka Willie Muhammed 3X, came in with his standard, “Sheeeit! You talkin’ pussy, you talkin’ my language! I poked my ten-incher in more Brillo pads than you fuckin’ seen!” I poked my fingers against the cell wall to stifle belly laughs. The other inmates — two white men named Ruley and Stinson and a Mexican named Martinez — played off Gonzalez and Grover conversationally, and I was soon able to determine the sex and crime sub-themes that would induce them to talk.

Thus, the first days of my formal sentence became a crash course in socializing under duress. When queried about my “beef,” I said, “B and E. I was rippin’ off pads in West Hollywood.” When asked about my hand, still swollen from trying to dig a way out of my nightmares, I said, “I wasted this dude when he caught me in his crib.” The nods I got when I spoke the words encouraged me; the appraising eyes that roamed my newly muscled body told me that none of my “cellies” could risk voicing disbelief. My criminal verisimilitude was holding.

And, while lying on my bunk pretending to read back issues of Ebony and Jet, I listened, picking up colloquialisms and etiquette information to inform my jailhouse pose with even greater authenticity.

My year sentence was called a “bullet”; the mess-hall slang for Salisbury steak, hot dogs and breakfast jelly was, respectively, “Gainesburgers,” “donkey dicks” and “red death.” Inmates awaiting sentencing and classification were called “blues,” a reference to the denim uniform I was now wearing; an informant was a “snitch”; a homosexual was a “punk”; the deputy sheriffs who served as jailers were “bulls.”

If an inmate offered you candy or cigarettes, refuse him immediately, because he wanted to “turn you out.”

If a “fruit jockey” made a sexual advance toward you, “wail on his head,” even if the “bulls” were right there, because if you didn’t “put him straight,” you would acquire a “fruit jacket” and be “hit on” by all the “boodie bandits” looking to travel up the “Hershey Highway”;

Address the “bulls” as Mr.___ or Deputy___, but never initiate conversations with them on matters not germane to your “khaki gig” or “righteous business”;

Do not seek the friendship of blacks, or you would be considered a “nigger rigger” or “spook juke” and be subject to attack from the “Paddys” (whites), “Beaners” (Mexicans) and the “War Council” (whites and Mexicans who banded in emergencies to form a united front against blacks);

And always, always, “be frosty” and “hang tough.”

On my third day in the cell I got a letter from Uncle Walt Borchard. My hands shook as I read it.

Finishing, I felt a brushed-steel door close on a long part of my life. Another door opened, this one embossed with dollar signs I had thought would be lost. Willie Muhammed 3X said, “You look happy, homeboy. Your bitch get some sex shit past the censor?”

“My uncle died,” I said.

“And you happy about that?”

“He left me six grand and some other goodies.”

“Righteous, but he was your kin, and you happy?”

I threw the letter in the toilet and flushed it, then screwed my face into my newly patented white-trash glare. “He was a punk, and he got what he deserved.”

After morning chow on my fourth day in the “blocks,” the module jailer’s voice came over the PA system: “Lopez, Johnson, Plunkett, Willkie and Flores, roll it up for classification.” The electrically operated cell door slid open, and I joined the other men on the catwalk. A deputy appeared moments later, and led us down a series of corridors to a small room with blue-gray cement walls. A photograph of Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess, encased in a plastic sheath, was the only wall adornment, and the room held no furnishings of any kind.

When the deputy locked the door on us and departed, my colleagues descended on the photo with crayons, and soon the sheriff of Los Angeles County had swastikas on his collar points, Frankenstein bolts on his neck and a giant phallus in his mouth. The four hooted at their artwork, then an electrically amplified voice called out, “Good morning, gentlemen. Classification time. You’ve got sixty seconds to wipe off Sheriff Pitchess, then we want Plunkett, Flores, Johnson, Willkie and Lopez at the inside door in that order.”

Catcalls answered the ultimatum:

“I got sixty minutes with yo mama, punk!”

“Sheriff Pete too busy playin’ with my pee-pee!”

“Power to the pee-pee!”

I laughed at the two-sided ritualism, then ambled over and stood by the inside door. Two inmates were rubbing at the picture with saliva-soaked handkerchiefs. Just when the sheriff was chaste again, the door opened and a uniformed deputy pointed me toward a row of cubicles, muttering, “The one on the end.” I walked there, down a drab hallway with chin-up bars bolted to the wall.

A deputy was sitting behind a desk in the last cubicle. He pointed to a chair in front of him. When I sat down, he said, “Your full name is Martin Michael Plunkett?”

I wondered what kind of voice to assume. Seconds passed, and I decided to sound educated, in hope of getting a desk job. “Yes, sir,” I said in my normal voice.

The deputy sighed. “Your first time in jail?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your first mistake, Plunkett. Don’t call deputies whose names you don’t know ‘sir.’ Other inmates consider that brownnosing.”

“Right.”

“That’s better. Let me run down your vitals. We’ve got you as 6'3", 185, D.O.B. 4/11/48, L.A. One count B and E, one count Possession of Burglar’s Tools, even bullet, three years’ formal probation, release date 7/14/70. Sound about right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, now the personal stuff. What’s your occupation?”

“Librarian.”

“How far did you go in school?”

I glanced at the papers the deputy was holding; instinct told me his information was scant. “I have a masters degree in library science.”

The deputy drummed the tabletop with his fingers. “You’ve got a fucking masters degree at twenty-one?”

I chuckled self-effacingly. “From a small college in Oklahoma. They’ve got a special, accelerated masters program.”

“Jesus, librarian-burglar. Only in L.A. Okay, Plunkett. Are you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Diabetic?”

“No.”

“Epileptic?”

“No.”

“Addicted to any mind-altering chemicals?”

“No.”

“Are you taking any prescription medicines?”

“No.”

“Are you an alcoholic?”

“No.”

“Good, I am, and it’s no fucking picnic.” The deputy laughed, then said, “Now the twilight-zone stuff. Do you think there are conspiracies out to get you?”

“No.”

“Do you think people laugh at you behind your back?”

“No.”

“Do you hear voices when you’re alone?”

“No.”

“Do you ever see things that aren’t really there?”

I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. “No.”

Stretching his arms, the deputy said, “You’re a paragon of fucking sanity, but let’s test your brain. What’s ninety-seven and forty-one?”

Without hesitation, I said, “One thirty-eight.”

“Go, Bookworm. One eighteen and seventy-four?”

“One ninety-two.”

“Two eighty-four and one sixty-six?”

“Four hundred fifty even.”

“You musta been burglarizing adding machines. What’s—”

Falsetto giggles erupted from somewhere in the row of cubicles. A high voice cooed, “I can play this guessing game just as good over in the Swish Tank at the Old County. I got sent there—”

The deputy rapped the table. “Pay attention, Brainboy. That’s Lopez trying for the Queen’s Tank; he thinks it’s safer over there. Here’s my change-up pitch. What’s four and four?”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling.

Smiling back, the deputy looked over his papers, then said, “One psych question I forgot. Are you prone to night sweats or nightmares?”

For what seemed like an eternity of split seconds, I was without limbs, the captive of nightmare flashbacks that I thought jail had contained. Finally Shroud Shifter was there, whispering, “Slow and easy.” “No,” I said hoarsely.

The deputy said, “You’re sweating now, but I’ll chalk that up to first-timer’s nerves. Last test. Go over to the bars and chin yourself as many times as you can.”

I obeyed, attacking the bars, hoisting myself up-down, up-down, up-down, until I was drenched in day sweats that could only terminate in benevolent, dreamless exhaustion. When my muscles finally gave in and I fell to the floor, the deputy said, “Thirty-six. Anything over twenty is automatic Trash & Freight, so I gotta say you outsmarted yourself. Go to the holding room and wait; someone’ll take you to the T.F. dock.”

I got up and walked into the holding tank. The other inmates were there, embellishing Sheriff Pitchess with glasses and a Hitler mustache. The high-pitched voice I had heard in the cubicles trilled, “You sweaty hunk, aren’t you cute!” and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I pivoted, and saw that Lopez was giving me a vamp look, while the others were sizing me up for my reaction.

I held back, feeling something sickly sweet and mawkish. Then I got a jolt of terror that felt like someone was sticking a live wire into my brain. I looked at the three appraising and accusing inmates, and they turned into mirror-faced Charlie before my eyes. Lopez cooed, “I really groove on sweat,” and I hit him with my bad hand, then my good one, then bad-good, bad-good, bad-good until he was on the floor and spitting out teeth. I was zeroing in on his throat when the three inmates pulled me off and the classification deputy walked out, shook his head and said, “Lopez, you dumb shit, look what you’ve done now. Willkie, you take Plunkett to the Freight Dock; Johnson, you take Lopez to the Infirmary. You got a first-timer freebie, Plunkett. Don’t do it again.”

The inmates let me go, and Willkie gave me a gentle push out into the corridor. My vision was rimmed with red and black, and the throbbing in my hand felt like the restraining thread that kept me from exploding like a shrapnel bomb. Willkie smiled and said, “You’re good.”

Trash and Freight;

Listening;

Protective Invisibility.

The next six weeks of my sentence were spent juggling those pursuits. Assigned as a khaki trusty to the T&F detail, I worked the hardest job in the L.A. County jail system and received the rewards that came with it: a private cell, three meals a day from the officers’ dining room, and weekends off, with the free run of the honor trusty’s module — four tiers with ultrawide catwalks suitable for crap shooting, T.V. and card room, and a library filled with paperback Westerns and picture histories of Nazi Germany. The rewards were dubious, but, strangely, I came to love the work.

At 2:00 each morning, the module jailer awakened us individually, racking our cells one by one, then flashing a penlight in our eyes. I always snapped awake with a sense of relief. Since beating up Lopez, my sleep had been 100 % dreamless, but the fear of nightmares was always just a half-step away, and a quarter-step beyond that was the certainty that the jail/nightmare combination would be horrific.

After head count on the bottom catwalk, we were fed breakfast in the officers’ dining room. A dietitian employed by the county theorized that large men doing twelve-hour shifts of heavy labor required a commensurate fuel intake, and we were loaded up with huge trays of bacon, eggs, overcooked steaks and potatoes drenched in a nauseating gravy made up of flour, water and salt pork. My fellow trusties reveled in their special menu, devouring the food with the what-the-fuck panache of men determined to die young, and, not wanting to seem different, I greedily “scarfed up” along with them. And when we broke for lunch at 11:00, I was hungry.

Because the work was nonstop lifting, hauling, stooping and shoving. The jail was the distribution point for all correctional facilities within the county system, and every stitch of its institutional linen hit the T&F dock before being loaded into the trucks that would take it to its final destination. We did both the loading and unloading, and every laundry bag we moved weighed at least a hundred pounds. That part of the job was relatively easy and clean. Then, after lunch, with our muscles burning and aching, and stuporous from thousands of more calories, the slaughterhouse trucks pulled in.

Here I both worked and listened, and used my protective invisibility to its greatest advantage.

The other inmates found the meat transfers revolting, and mitigated their disgust by talking themselves through it. It was understood among them to save their best stories and crime schemes for the two hours or so we spent wrestling sides of beef and pork out of the trucks and into the storage freezers some hundred and fifty yards from the dock, With blood soaking my khakis, and fat and gristle sliding beneath my hands, I took in tales of good sex and hilarious sexual misadventures; I learned how to hot-wire cars and procure a variety of fake ID’s. I nodded and laughed along as the stories were told, and since I always strained with the heaviest pieces, no one seemed to notice that I had no tales to tell.

Women, beds and fast cars;

Shoplifting techniques;

The going prices for dope;

Pornographic details on women once loved, but later despised;

Wistful sighs over women still loved;

How to successfully exploit homosexuals for favors.

All this came to me while my body was pushed to its limit, with the blood of dead animals trickling down my pants. I knew that the stories I heard were now my stories, a part of my memory, and that the ritual of strain/ache/lift/blood/learn that gave them to me made them belong to me more than to the men who had actually lived them. And when the last slaughterhouse truck was unloaded, I always lingered on the dock, letting the autumn Santa Anas warm the crimson sheen on my body.

In a sense, Trash & Freight gave me my body.

My gym workouts had been the start, changing me from skinny to rangy, but my first six weeks of T&F added bulk and muscle definition, giving me a big man’s symmetry. Constant flinging of thirty-pound laundry bags made my wrist muscles bulge to twice their old size; stooping to lift the hundred-fifty-pounders built a wedge of hard ripples along my lower back. Hauling beef sides resulted in a thickening of the chest and a cording at my shoulders, and my arms, continually pulling, tossing and lifting, hardened to the point where a pin could not easily penetrate the muscle. During laundry hauls, I surreptitiously scrutinized the other bodies working beside me. All of them were strong, but beer bellies and ugly barrel chests predominated. Mine was the most nearly perfect, and by the time I was released it would be that much closer to perfection.

After work and a long solitary shower, I would listen to the men playing cards on the catwalk, then retire to my cell and read the texts of the Nazi picture books. The subject matter did not interest me, but the juxtaposition of printed horror stories and shouts from the catwalk felt somehow reassuring. Then, after evening chow and lockup, I segued from observation and invisibility to rituals of affirmation.

When the cell doors were racked shut, I stripped nude and imagined a full-length mirror in front of the bars. I felt my body for signs of new muscle, and mentally collated both the day’s practical criminal information and the sexual anecdotes I had heard. After a few minutes, other rituals made themselves heard — the creaking of bunk springs on either side of my cell told me that fantasies and touching were happening. Here I moved straight into the meat-hauling stories, assuming both gender roles alternately, using the name “Charlie” when I played the man. The process felt like usurping the memories of others, loading myself up with experiences I had never had in order to make myself more inviolate for not having had them. As the mattress squeaks surrounding me escalated, so did my recreations. Without touching myself, I always came in the role of “Charlie,” staring through blackness at my own mirror image.

On December 2, I found out who “Charlie” really was, and my self-containment exploded into pieces.

Banner headlines of the Times and Examiner delivered the news: Charles Manson and four members of his “family” had been arrested and charged with the Tate-LaBianca murders. Manson — known to his followers as “Charlie” — ruled a “hippie commune” at the near-deserted Spahn Movie Ranch in the Valley, and presided over nightly dope and sex orgies. Statements made by the three female members of Manson’s “death cadre” pointed to the killings having been perpetrated out of a desire to create social upheavel — an unrest that would ultimately lead to the Armageddon that Charlie called “Helter Skelter.”

I was taking a break on the laundry dock when I read those first accounts, and I shook from head to toe as memories of my own recent past blipped across the newsprint. I saw the two buffoons in the restaurant and heard one of them say, “They’re recruiters for this guru guy Charlie, and they tell you the fuck bread is for ‘The Family,’ and you should come out to this ranch where they live”; Flower squealed, “Helter Skelter is coming down fast”; and Season described the man the Examiner labeled “an ex-con Svengali with mesmeric brown eyes” as “a wise man, a shaman, a healer and a metaphysician.”

The T&F jailer called out, “Back to work, Plunkett.” After reading a concluding paragraph that promised pictures of the “satanic cult savior” in the next edition, I obeyed. On the slaughterhouse dock that afternoon, I was incapable of assimilating anecdotes, and my body churned with only one thought: Charlie Manson had brown eyes, and so did I. Given that one identical point, would the resemblance grow or crumble?

The evening edition of the Los Angeles Times gave me my answer. Charles Manson was a thirty-four-year-old, flaccid, sunken-chested wimp barely over five feet tall, with long, greasy-looking hair and a scraggly beard. I felt relieved and disappointed as I studied the photographs of him, and I could not place the reason for my ambivalence. The feature article on Manson’s background clarified my feelings only slightly — he was an ex-convict with previous convictions for pimping, forgery, narcotics possession and car theft, and he had spent over half his life in various prisons. This made me feel only contempt — one jail tour, exploited for outside-of-society learning skills, could be considered acceptable; a series of them pointed to self-destructive institutionalization. I began to wonder where this man would take me.

For a week he took me on a roller-coaster ride of frustration and self-analysis.

Manson became the talk of the jail, and the T&F trusties were divided in their opinions, some considering him a “stone psycho,” others admiring his hold over women and his dope-and-violence life-style, I stayed out of the discussions, listening to them for what they said about the participants, but trying to limit my. Manson intake only to the facts I could glean from the media. Putting aside the expressions of outrage that bracketed everything written about Charlie and his family, I composed a treatise that seemed factually sound:

Charlie was a street-smart manipulator of directionless young people, a good dope scrounger, well-versed in rock and roll, science-fiction, religious thought and the plethora of social movements impressionable youths were susceptible to, and, obviously, he had evolved his own ethos from them — one that was seductive to rootless kids. That was impressive.

Yet, as a criminal he was a complete bungler, trusting people who ultimately informed on him;

Yet, when interviewed, he came across as a mindlessly sloganeering psychotic;

But, he had created a fiefdom that revolved around his most extreme sexual fantasies; but people had murdered at his command; but he had the power to usurp my late-night mirror rituals, transmogrifying them into agonizing question-and-answer sessions.

Was there some dark cosmic reason why you crossed this man’s path?

His sexual power resulted in your one aborted coupling and thence a year in jail. Does that mean something hideous?

Intellectually and physically, you are capable of snapping him like a twig, but he was on the cover of Life magazine while you haul laundry bags as a criminal nonentity. What does that fact bode for your future?

I knew those questions were unanswerable, rendered as such by my bottom-line sense of powerlessness. I bludgeoned the line as best I could, shutting down all thoughts featuring Charlie and me as the symbiotic twins of celebrity and failure by hauling heavier and heavier loads on the dock, then doing hours of calisthenics in my cell, creating my own world of physical primacy and exhaustion. But that stratagem was always undercut by Manson headlines, Manson stories, Manson gossip and speculation. Trusties talked about Charlie on the dock, and I almost jumped out of my skin; a T.V. documentary on “The Family” featured interviews with Season and Flower, and I felt like ripping the set off the catwalk wall. Then, his grand jury and arraignment proceedings completed, the “Hippie Satan” was transferred to the High Power Tank at New County, and we were living under the same roof.

I knew we were converging; that fate was planning a rendezvous, and that all I had to do was continue my present course and my questions would be answered by the mirror man himself. So I wrestled super loads on the dock, knowing it was fear and doubt driving me; I lay on my bunk after work, worried that the body I was achieving would ruin my psychic invisibility, that I would be singled out for the rest of my life as a brick shithouse for other men to test themselves on. I began to perceive my dilemma as visibility or invisibility/screaming selfhood or the subtle power of anonymity. The pluses and minuses equaled out on both sides, made all the more cogent by knowing that my destiny was uniquely different and bold. Although I had never avowed a belief in God, I began to pray every night for him to get me to Charlie, so I could confront his brown eyes and see what they boded for mine.

The road to Manson started on a rainy Wednesday morning a week after he transferred into High Power. I was lugging cartons of canned goods from the dock over to a protective overhang when I heard, “Catch, showboat!” and caught a crate of lettuce square in the back. The blow stunned me and dropped me to my knees; I heard shouts of “Grandstanding motherfucker!” and “Come on, muscle-man!” Then, getting to my feet, I picked up a distant echo from Flower and Season’s fuck pad: “Lock, load and fire between their eyes.”

From my knees I assumed a sprinter’s crouch, then pushed forward and ran head-on into my accusers. Startled, the men made no move to separate. I hit them like a pile driver, and when I saw a flabby bicep directly in front of my eyes, I bit it, swallowing the small piece of flesh I was able to tear off.

Now the group dispersed, and my own momentum carried me back to the ground. I got up again and whirled around, seeing a group of outsize men standing shock-stilled, with amazement on their faces. Holding my ground, I listened, picking out whispers: “He bit me,” “... fucking Dracula,” “Not me, man!” Then the T&F jailer walked over. My point made, I let myself be handcuffed and led back to my cell.

I was given five days’ solitary confinement in the Adjustment Module — a row of one-man cells with no bunks and only a bucket to urinate and defecate in. No reading material was allowed, and nourishment was six slices of bread and three cups of water per day. If the jailers considered the Spartan accommodations to be a hardship, they were wrong; the decreased caloric intake purged my body, and the dark eight-by-five crawl space was the perfect habitat for the perfectly blank mind I willed for the length of my stay. When my cell was unlocked and I was walked out to my new “home” — the custodial trusties module — I felt relaxed and calm. Assigned to a cell with three other men, I was told my job: push a broom up and down the cellhouse catwalks ten hours a day, six days a week. I had only one question: “Do I ever sweep out High Power?”

“Sooner or later,” the module jailer said.

It was somewhere between the two; indeterminate hundreds of hours and thousands of catwalks and corridors down the line, with what felt like millions of miles of pushing my broom behind me — always blank-minded, with the mirror man’s questions sealed off, but ready to be hurled at a second’s notice. I don’t even remember what day it was, but when the custodial detail jailer said, “Plunkett to High Power,” I grabbed my broom and dustpan and walked there on automatic pilot, stopping only to read the inmate roster at the front of the module.

And there it was in black and white: Manson, Charles, cell A-11, and the California Penal Code number for First-Degree Murder — 187 PC. — next to his name in red.

The jailer racked the gate, and I entered the A-tier catwalk and looked down it, seeing the narrow-barred enclosures of one-man security cells. No noise was coming from within them, and I counted eleven over and marked the point in my mind. Then, as if I had all the time in the world, I pushed my broom down the catwalk, pivoted and said to the bars of A-11, “Hello, Charlie.”

Darkness seemed to throb inside the cell; I thought briefly that the mirror man was gone. I was about to grab the bars and strain my eyes to see in when a soft tenor voice sang, “You tell me it’s the in-stit-tu-tion, we-el-el, you know, you better free your mind instead.” There was a pause, then the voice said, “I can see you, but you can’t see me. You believe that song’s message, trusty?”

I laid my broom against the bars and squinted into the cell; all I could see was a shape on the bunk. “Yes, and I figured it out a long time before the Beatles did.”

Charles Manson snorted. “You just think you did. Saint John and Saint Paul got it from me, you got it from them. Cause and effect, karma coming back to roost. Now we’re both here. You groove the energy?”

I snorted back. “It’s a convenient interpretation. Tell me about Helter Skelter.”

Manson said, “Listen to the White Album and read your Bible. It’s all there.”

The shape on the bunk took form; Charlie looked frail and old. “Tell me about Helter Skelter.”

Manson laughed. It was a liquid sound, as if the hippie Satan were expelling drool. “You, me, God’s outcasts, on Harleys and dune buggies. The niggers rising up. The land reverting to me.”

“In your padded cell?”

A dry chuckle this time. “Ye men of little faith. If you knew the Beatles’ message, you wouldn’t be here.”

“You’re here.”

“My karma, trusty. My energy directing me to the people who need to hear my message most.”

From a deep part of my Q. & A. vault a question took hold, and before I could revert to verbal sparring, I asked it. “What’s it like to kill somebody?”

Manson got up and walked over to the bars. I saw that he came up to just below my shoulders, and that his “mesmeric” brown eyes had the sheen of the far-gone psychotic. It would be easy to pluck them out and squash them into goo on the catwalk floor. “I never killed nobody,” Charlie said. “I was framed by the Establishment.”

“By the Institution?”

“That’s right.”

“Then use your free mind to break out of here.”

Manson laughed. “Jail’s my karma. Teaching know-nothing jailhouse cynics is my energy. Tell me, unbeliever, what do you know?”

I squatted so that my eyes and the eyes of the sawed-off Satan were at the same level. Shroud Shifter jumped into my mind, making pantomime motions that spelled out SEIZE THIS MOMENT. With the most quintessentially cool voice I had ever willed, I said, “I know that people kill and take what they want and don’t get caught; and if they do get caught, they don’t rationalize their failure with mystical jive talk to make themselves look big; and they don’t blame society, because they had free will from the gate. And I know that there are people who kill by themselves, who don’t send doped-out hippie girls to do what they’re afraid of. I know that real freedom is when you do it all yourself and it’s so good that you never have to tell anyone about it.”

Charlie hissed, “Pig,” and spat in my face. I let the spittle settle, astounded by my eloquence, which had seemed to spring from deep nowhere of its own volition — as if that statement, not Manson’s answers to my questions, was what I had been waiting for with my blank mind these past weeks.

When I remained immobile, saliva dripping off my chin, Charlie began singing: “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, let Helter Skelter make it be-et-ter. Remember, make the pigs get out of your mind—”

Shroud Shifter interrupted the music by superimposing CASTRATE HIM across Charlie’s forehead. I reached for a deep draft of cool and said, “I fucked Flower and Season at your place by the Strip. They were lousy fucks and even worse recruiters, and they used to laugh about your little one-inch cricket dick.”

Manson hurled himself at the bars and started screaming; I picked up my broom and began sweeping my way down the catwalk. Hearing clapping on the tier above me, I looked up. A group of deputies were applauding my performance.

A pleasant weight embraced me in the following weeks. I knew it came from my confrontations with the loading-dock trusties and the cut-rate Satan, and it felt like a reprise of the old invisibility. My bodybuilding obsession started to feel callow; running brain-movies palled before the simple scrutiny of what was going on around me. My dreamless sleep continued, and as my release date approached I started looking forward to gaming probation officers, employers and my daily parade of workaday acquaintances. A potent notion simmered on the back burner of my brain: I could live anonymously and on the cheap, without nightmares and dangerous drives, and possess my own mesmeric power.

Charles Manson’s power over me diminished and fizzled out, until his jailhouse celebrity was nothing worse than a nuisance, like the swirl of a mosquito who deftly avoids squashing. The eloquence of my attack on him faded also — until, three weeks before kick-out, my fictitious masters degree was noted, and I was assigned to the library, with one specific task: chronologically file forty large cartons of news magazines recently donated to the L.A. County jail system.

The cartons contained issues of Time, Life and Newsweek going back to the forties. I was left alone in a storage cellar with them for eight hours a day with a bag of sandwiches, a Thermos of coffee and a Swiss Army knife for cutting cardboard and twine. The job was peacefully methodical until I hit a spate of recent issues featuring articles on Satanic Charlie, and read non-hyperbolic prose that summarized him as awesome.

I put those issues aside, enraged that high-paid writers could be duped by a pseudo-mystic drool case. With the Manson prose stuffed into a mildewed corner of the cellar, I abandoned my collating job for five days running, spending my work time reading through the old magazines for accounts of stupid killers who were ultimately caught, convicted and squashed like bugs. I read only the stories on L.A.-area killers; and as I recognized street names and locations, I felt the murderers’ self-destructive pathology enter me and become utter disdain for the limelight. Then, when my history of fatuous violence extended back to 1941, I got out my knife.

Juanita “Duchess” Spinelli, the murderous leader of a robbery gang, hanged at San Quentin, 11/21/41 — slash, slash. Otto Stephen Wilson, triple-woman slayer, gassed at Quentin, 10/18/46 — slash, slash, slash — one for each victim. Jack Santo, Emmett Perkins and Barbara Graham, immortalized in the movie “I Want to Live,” but fried for their bungled robbery-murders on 6/3/55 — multiple slashes. Donald Keith Bashor, burglar-bludgeon killer who plied his trade just east of my old neighborhood, executed 10/14/57 — stab, gouge, and rip for being so stupid so close to me. Harvey Murray Glatman, the sadistic T.V. repairman who “offed” three women after photographing them bound and gagged in agony — “snuffed” by the state on 8/18/59 — slashes of contempt for his whimpering on the way to the gas chamber. Stephen Nash, the toothless drifter and self-described “King of Killers,” terminated a week after Glatman on 8/25/59 — gentle knife thrusts for spitting at the chaplain and sucking in the cyanide gas with a grin. Elizabeth Duncan, who hired winos Augustine Baldonado and Luis Moya to kill her son’s wife, earning all three of them trips to San Quentin’s green room on 5/11/62 — numerous page-rippings for the drunken, parsimonious unprofessionalism of the job.

And on and on up to Charlie Manson, fate as yet undecided, but limited to two choices: the gas chamber or the rubber room at Atascadero — stab, slash, gash, rip, and urinate on his face beaming up from Newsweek.

When the mound of paper was reduced to confetti, I buried it behind some abandoned milk cartons and thought of how sweet and peaceful my anonymous life would be.

12

Over the next four years I metamorphosed into an object.

I became a depository for images; a memory bank. In essence, 1970-74 were my years of interpreting the human scene around me, but not fantasizing it into sexually gratifying variations. I know today that that hellishly stringent restraint is what finally caused me to burst.

I was released from jail on July 14, 1970, and went immediately to Uncle Walt Borchard’s apartment building and picked up my bankbook and safe-deposit box keys. The woman Borchard left my belongings with tried to hand me a big bundle of old clothes, but I smelled defeat clinging to them and said, “No.”

With interest, my savings account held a balance of $6,318.59, and my safety-box swag was still intact. I withdrew three thousand dollars in cash and the contents of all three boxes. From there it was only a hop, skip and jump to Cosmo Veitch’s pad off the Boulevard. I sold Cosmo my entire stash of watches, jewelry and credit cards for $1,500, and from there it was just a simple hop to a Ford dealership on Cahuenga and a “Summer Clearance Sale” on used vans. I purchased a ’68 Econoline, steel gray in color, paid $3,200 cash for it, and drove to West L.A. to look for a safe, innocuous place to live.

I found an apartment on a quiet side street south of Westwood Village, and paid six months’ rent in advance. The building was mostly inhabited by older people, and my three-room dwelling was cool and painted a restful gray similar in shade to my van. All that remained to be accomplished in my return to society was to report to my probation officer and get a job.

My P.O. was a woman named Elizabeth Trent. She was stylishly liberal, and gushed instant empathy as she laid down the terms of my probation: don’t steal, don’t fraternize with criminals, don’t use drugs, hold down steady employment and report to her in person once a month. Aside from that, she told me to “party hearty,” “reap good karma” and “call if you need anything.” Leaving her office after our initial conference, I pegged the woman as a post-hippie with man trouble, someone who meddled good-naturedly in the affairs of others to alleviate her own personal turmoil. Probation would be easy.

Employment was even easier than my one hour a month making nice with Liz Trent. From ’70 to ’74 I held down a series of menial jobs undertaken from one criterion: their potential to keep me mentally aroused without fantasy adornments. I was, by turns:

A deliveryman for “Pizza Soopreem,” my territory a West Hollywood area rife with unemployed artists, Writers and actors who sent out for pizza and beer 24 hours a day; night manager of a pornographic bookstore across the street from the notorious open-all-night Hollywood Ranch Market; dishwasher at a singles bar/restaurant in Manhattan Beach; shipping clerk at a mail-order house specializing in bondage attire.

All the jobs allowed me to observe lives caught off guard in small moments of flax. While working Pizza Soopreem, pizza orderers of both genders came to the door nude; and, occasionally, impoverished ones offered themselves to me for the tab. My gig at Porno Villa was a doctoral degree in the machinations of sexual guilt and self-loathing — the men who purchased beaver and fuck-and-suck books were pitiful negative exemplars of the strength to be gained from total abstinence.

Big Daddy’s Disco was “Candid Camera” gone x-rated and tragicomic. The kitchen boss had bored a hole through the dish-room wall into the ladies powder room, and when the Playboy calendar that covered it was lifted, you had a squint-eyed view of the makeup mirror and one toilet stall. The whole kitchen crew would take turns watching and giggling, but I always waited until they went home at 1:00 A.M. and I was left alone to clean up. Then I watched and listened; then I saw an array of young women tingle at the thought of coming assignations or cry at the mirror after a long night of barside rejections. Women discussed men in explicit terms, and I picked up their stylized lexicon; they snorted cocaine to give themselves courage, then smoothed the facial hollows it caused with powder. With one eye through the wall I became the mental chronicler of small-scale desperation, and it felt like tamping down my self-containment with a velvet hammer.

I was an object of assimilation and interpretation, and I coveted the touch of other sleek objects. Hearkening back to Shroud Shifter and my youth, I filled my apartment with brushed steel — pencil sharpeners and siding samples and cookery and Swiss Army knives with sharp blades that I brushed myself with industrial steel wool. As the years passed, my collection of knives grew, until I possessed the entire Swiss Army catalog, mounted on my living-room wall at angles that I changed on whim. Then I became interested in guns.

But handguns were what I desired, and as a convicted felon I was forbidden by law to own them. They were also expensive — more so if illegally procured — and the thought of violating my precious invisibility to obtain one was frightening, a potential apostasy that I knew would lead me back to ail my old dangerous drives.

I had just begun work at Leather N’ Lace, the bondage mail-order house, when the gun infatuation hit me. My job entailed opening the incoming envelopes containing checks and orders for whips, chains, dog collars, dildoes, dungeon equipment and the like, logging the orders while the checks cleared, then shipping them out when the front office gave the word. The mail room was packed to the rafters with perverse goodies made in Tijuana, most of the devices constructed out of cheap black leather and low-grade alloy metal. The ugly objects glared at me all day, and to keep fantasies at bay I put my mind to the task of turning them into something useful. No ideas took hold, and I used up my spare time reading handgun catalogs. The longing I felt perusing glossy pictures of Colts and Smith & Wessons and Rugers was awful, compounded by how the sex fools were constantly sending cash in their envelopes, the heft of coins a dead giveaway. I could steal the money, and the thefts would be attributed to the post office; I could obtain fake ID from criminal sources and use the stolen money to buy a big magnum or .45 auto; or I could steal more money and buy a street weapon. The more I thought about it, the more it moved me — and the more frightened I got.

So I did nothing, and nothing did me back.

Everywhere I went, ugly objects stared me down. When I took long walks at night, corrugated metal trash cans screamed, “Coward!”; neon signs blipped the penal code numbers of enticing offenses. It was as if my most suppressed brain area had suddenly developed the ability to run movies without my consent.

So I continued to do nothing, and nothing continued to do me back.

I kept my job at Leather N’ Lace, and resisted the desire to fantasize and steal incoming cash. In March of ’74 my probationary term ended, and Liz Trent cut me loose with the admonishment, “Find something you really like, and do it really well.” Those words gave me a temporary “something” that quickly backfired.

I was shipping orders the following day when I noticed the tubing on Leather N’ Lace catalog item #114 — “Anal Annie’s Love Bench.” I saw that the circumference was slightly larger than the muzzle specification of an S&W magnum I was particularly fond of, and remembered a jail rap on the construction of homemade silencers. Knowing it was a quasi-legal antidote to nothing, I bought the necessary tools and did it “really well.”

A hacksaw, a mound of metal fiber used for air-conditioning insulation, a metal pipe threader and a short length of iron tubing joined seven inches of “Anal Annie” in my living room, and with my Swiss Army knives I went to work. First I sawed and cut and assembled the pieces; then, with an “exact replica” toy magnum as my guideline, I cut thread for the muzzle. When I saw that I had a snug fit, I crimped large wads of fiber into the length of tubing, then rammed the smaller iron “bullet passage” straight through the middle of it. The passage would, I judged, carry a .357 hollow point with 1/32 of an inch to spare, causing it to “tumble” toward its target. With the basic assembly completed, I held the silencer to the floor and hammered the front of the tubing around the end of the bullet passage until only a little hole protruded.

It was the most beautiful object I had ever seen.

But with that “something” behind me, “nothing” hit harder and harder, reminding me that without the magnum my silencer was no more than a paperweight. I carried it with me as a talisman on late-night walks; and now if trash cans glared at me I kicked them over; and if parked cars offended me with their garish colors I used the silencer to cut S.S. on their sides. It was callow rebelliousness and hollow rage, but holding that hand-fashioned piece of cheap metal was the only thing that kept the hallucinogenic 187 P.C.’s from devouring me.

I came to believe that a change of locale would make things better. LA’s very familiarity was dangerous, and if I could escape its web of nostalgia and self-destructive temptation, then I would be safe. Living in a different city would infuse me with caution and quash the criminal fantasies that were attempting to destroy me. I made up my mind to get out, setting a strict departure deadline three weeks in the future — April 12 — the day after my twenty-sixth birthday.

The time passed quickly. I quit my job, liquidated my bank account and loaded my van with my clothes, toilet articles, and talisman/silencer, leaving my other steel objects behind to symbolize old ties being broken. The loss of my knaves hurt and warmed at the same time — I knew it was a conscious sacrifice aimed at avoiding catastrophe.

On my birthday night I took a farewell walk through my neighborhood. No objects glared at me, and no weird numbers flashed before my eyes. Only thunder and rain hit, drenching me to the bone. Looking for a place to keep dry, I noticed the neon sign in front of the Nuart Theatre: “Save the Seals.”

I ran over. The lobby was deserted, so I headed for the men’s room to get some paper towels. I had my hand on the door when I heard a high keening sound issue from the theatre proper. I forgot about drying myself and walked straight toward it.

Seals were being beaten to death on the screen. Their yelps were what I had heard, and now they were joined with sobs from the audience. The sound was thrilling, but the sight was ugly and pathetic, so I closed my eyes. The absence of sight brought the taste of blood — the blood of every body I had ever desired. Soon I was sobbing, and the taste deepened until the yelps were replaced by music. I opened my eyes, and people were filing past me, giving out looks of sympathy and commiseration. My shoulders were patted and my hands were touched — as if I were one of them. None of the people knew that the origin of my tears was in joy.