Survival Of The Fittest

45

Down in front, parked next to Daniel's Toyota, was the Karmann Ghia from the Genesee garage, cream-colored, not yellow, in the sunlight, with a scarred hood and a dented door.

He handed me a small color photo.

Headshot of a young woman with a narrow face, white-blond hair cut almost as short as mine.

Her features were good but her skin was beyond pale- Kabuki white. Black liner enlarged her blue eyes and emphasized a hypermetabolic glow. Despite that, she looked bored. Resentful. I resisted the urge to interpret; standing in line at the DMV could make anyone feel that way.

“Driver's license?” I said.

He nodded, took the picture from me, and put it in his pocket. “The store is at 2028 Apollo Avenue. Good luck.”

We shook hands and he drove off.

The Karmann Ghia's seat was adjusted to my height and the car started up easily. Plenty of power, as Daniel had promised. The interior was trashed- torn upholstery and headliner, crumpled paper cups and fast-food boxes tossed behind the seat.

The AM-FM radio was old enough to be original. I turned it on. KPFK. The guest was a black “sociopolitical theoretician and author” who believed Jewish doctors had created AIDS in order to kill off inner-city babies. The host let him preach for paragraphs at a time, then threw him grounders that evoked more hatred.

Daniel was a planner and I wondered if he'd preset the dial.

Getting me in the mood.

I switched to jazz and drove.

Spasm's address put the store just past the border between Hollywood and Silverlake. I passed Sunset's Hospital Row and the Hillhurst intersection, where the boulevard veers southeast toward downtown- today just a smog-shrouded theory. Then a quick left on Fountain, which I followed until it became a side street, yielding to two lanes of dips and curves- Apollo.

The street was planted with huge, untrimmed trees. Old trees; this was the kind of one-story, mixed-use neighborhood you see only in older parts of L.A.

Mostly it was auto-body shops and printing plants and used-tire yards, but interspersed among the dreary lots were liquor stores and other small businesses, and small houses- some converted to commercial use, some still sporting gardens and laundry lines, one a Pentecostal church.

A nail parlor, a tattoo parlor, a botÁnica advertising crystals and herbs. Unmarked buildings, many with FOR LEASE signs. Looking down on all of it were the steep embankments of Silverlake, weedy and tree-shrouded where they weren't toasted golden. Dry spots; primed for the arsonist's match.

The hillside was planted with uneven rows of residences, like shrubs sprouting from a careless garden. Some of the houses flamingoed on stilts, others rested at skeptical angles on tremor-throttled foundations. I saw cracks snaking down stucco, parted seams, roofs missing entire sections of shingle, porch beams bent like reeds. The whole neighborhood looked off-kilter. A mile away, the city was excavating a subway.

The 2000 block appeared and I spotted Spasm right away.

The black window was the tipoff. Small black plastic letters were placed near the top of a gray door, illegible from the street.

Empty curb; no problem parking. As I got out I made out spasm books.

On both sides of the store were body shops, then an acre of asphalt bearing the badge of an official police tow yard. Across the street was a mom-and-pop taco joint, its doors shut, a CLOSED sign hanging on the knob.

It was impossible to tell if Spasm was open for business but when I pushed the gray door, it yielded and I stepped into a long, skinny, tunnel-like charcoal-colored room vibrating with loud calypso music. Skimpy lighting was turned even murkier by the tinted lenses of my glasses but I kept them on and tried to affect an air of mild curiosity.

To the left, a bald, wildly tattooed man sat at a checkout booth and smoked energetically. Leather vest over blue-and-crimson flesh. He was swaying to the music, didn't look up.

The booth was three panels of plywood pushed up against the wall. On the floor were loose piles of throwaway papers- The Reader, The Weekly, The Maoist Exile Wanderer-flyers for Divas in Drag: Where You Can Be What You Want To Be; MaidenHead in Concert; Tertiara Malladonna: A One-Wimin Show About Tampon-Sucking and Rice Confiscation; Uncle Suppurato's Body-Piercing Studio, schedules of night readings in Barnhard Park of poetry concerned with “quantum physics and gum disease.”

Leather Vest continued to ignore me as I passed him. Both side walls were lined with slanting shelves of books displayed face-out. Accent lights brightened the covers. Toward the back was a cable-and-plank staircase leading to an upper loft. On the back wall, another gray door.

Three customers on the ground floor: a wan-looking, clean-cut man in his twenties with bad posture and a fearful frown. He wore a madras button-down shirt, khakis, and sneakers, and glanced over his shoulder nervously as I approached. I could imagine him masturbating in his car, dreading discovery, yet hoping for it. The paperback in his hand said Cannibal Killers.

The other two browsers were a man and woman in their late forties, both with pemmican faces shellacked with a sun-and-booze luster. Long hair, missing teeth, lots of beads, a shopping bag full of scraps. Had their tie-dyes and serapes been clean, they could have been traded on Melrose as antiques.

They were sharing a white-covered paperback and cackling. I heard the woman say, “Cool,” in a grandmother's voice, then the man returned the book to the rack and they left looking jolly.

HeilRock: Marching Songs of the Waffen SS.

Peace, love, Woodstock had come to this.

The man with the cannibal book brought it up to Leather Vest and paid. Now I was the sole patron. The calypso soundtrack shifted to Stravinsky. The illustrated clerk lit up another cigarette and began tapping his knee to no discernible rhythm.

Time to browse.

Maybe I'd be lucky and find a DVLL reference.

I decided to start with the second floor, out of view of the clerk.

The staircase took me up to half a loft- just one long wall, with the same face-out display and spotlighting.

One copy of each book. Nothing labeled by subject matter or author, no alphabetization, though I did find clumps of volumes that seemed related.

Collections on sadomasochism, lavishly illustrated, some taken to the blood-wound-pus level.

Prison diaries, crudely printed. A glossy thing called Penitentiary Magazine, with stories on “Lifer in the Top Bunk: My Favorite Celly,” “Stand Up for Your Rights and Don't Let the System Buttfuck You,” “Why Writers Don't Know Shit about Crime,” and “The Best Jack-Off Videos of the Year.”

Another cluster on human oddities, most written with cold, leering tones.

Racist comics.

Alternative comix that glorified incest.

The Turner Diaries and other white-supremacist tomes.

Lots of that: The Biological Jew; The Secret History of Zionism; Bloodface; Pickaninny Palace; The Mud People: Why Africa Has No Culture.

The savant on the radio would have liked at least some of it.

No DVLL.

I came upon a shelf of academic texts, mostly philosophy and history. Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, a Frenchman named Bataille.

Shelves of practical paranoia: how-to primers on bomb-making, wiretapping, exacting revenge, getting away with slander and libel, dirty tricks.

Knife Fighters of the Philippines.

The Bizarre Magazine Compendium.

Fetishism, bondage, coprophagy. Step-by-step photo-essays cobbled from operating-room videos: sex-changes, face-peels, brain-tumor removals, liposuction, autopsies.

The Firearms Bible. The Freemen's Manifesto; The Anarchist's Cookbook; Trotsky's Roach Motel: Exterminating Capitalists.

A big black-covered thing called The Demon's Workshop, offering exquisitely detailed instructions on building silencers, converting conventional weapons to automatic, imbedding poison in bullets.

A pictorial history of the Chinese Revolution, devoted to carnage. Its centerfold was a double-width sepia print from the twenties showing a royalist scholar being torn to pieces by a mob, chunks of his flesh gone, ribs and viscera exposed. Fully conscious. Screaming.

The Pinhead Review: one hundred pages of empty-faced, clown-suited microcephalics in sideshow booths. Accompanying cartoons and jokes about sex among the retarded.

Einstein's theories alongside astrology.

Slavic dictionaries neighboring The Art of Harassment. How to disappear, how to find anyone.

Computer science. The I ching, hypnosis, Raising Swine for Slaughter.

The collected works of George Lincoln Rockwell; erotic aromatherapy; A History of Natural Disasters; The Thinking Man's Guide to Idol Worship.

The organizing criterion seemed to be Stuff Other Stores Won't Carry.

Nothing on DVLL.

On the last rack was a collection of solemn-looking hardcovers from a well-respected scientific publishing house: forensic pathology, homicide and rape investigation, gunshot wounds, crime-scene techniques, toxicology.

Densely worded manuals for police detectives, eighty bucks each.

Had someone considered them primers, as well?

I pictured Wilson Tenney or some other cruel loner up here, browsing, maybe even buying.

I opened the book on homicide procedure.

The usual cop mix of detached writing and close-up views of the destruction visited upon human flesh by shotgun, blade, blunt instrument, strangulation. Toxicology and lividity charts. Rates of putrefaction. Victims, sexually posed, mutilated; the blank, helpless face of death.

The modus operandi section said that while some serial killers traveled the highways, most tended to work within circumscribed areas.

Patterns to be broken?

Replacing the book, I returned downstairs. The clerk had switched to a cigar and was trying to create his own toxic cloud.

He stared at me for a second, leaned forward, twisted something, and Stravinsky blared well above the ear-bleed range.

Not into user-friendly.

I used, anyway.

The first floor started off as more of the same brutal eclecticism and I skimmed, trying to look casual.

Then I found the eugenics books and slowed down.

The Collected Essays of Galton. Desktop publishing by New Dominion Press- why did that sound familiar?

The publisher's address, St. Croix. The Virgin Islands.

Another Loomis venture?

The book was nothing more than what it claimed to be.

Next came Dr. Charles Davenport's 1919 report to the Cold Springs Eugenics Society. Hereditary charts of patients whose “degenerative spawn” had been curtailed by sterilization.

Annotations at the bottom by Dr. Arthur Haldane, resident scholar at the Loomis Institute.

I checked this one out carefully.

Published five years before The Brain Drain. Haldane's pre-best-seller days.

In it, Haldane remarked upon the relative unsophistication of turn-of-the-century science but reaffirmed Davenport's thesis: society was doomed unless “genetic restructuring utilizing advanced technology” became public policy.

I flipped to the index.

Still no DVLL.

Nothing on Meta, either.

I found six more books on selective breeding and quality-of-life issues, one by the Australian ethnicist who'd recommended killing retarded babies. Same old crap, nothing new.

The stench of the clerk's cigar had enveloped me and I looked up and realized I was fifteen feet from the register. No insights, no Zena Lambert. Mr. Tattoo was reading something called Wet Bandage.

Then, just as I was about to give up, I found one more nugget: a fifty-page pamphlet, that same laser-printer look under brown paper covers.

Humanness: New Perspectives

by Farley Sanger, attorney-at-law

An expanded version of the article from The Pathfinder, supplemented by charts and graphs, government statistics on crime, race, unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, DNA testing, the Human Genome Project and how it could be used to “cleanse the dross.”

Dry as a legal brief.

Lawsuit against the disadvantaged…

Sanger ended with a call for “the brutally efficient elimination of mind-set censorship of indisputably valid areas of research simply because certain elements with vested interests are offended or justifiably frightened of what can only be regarded as the logical conclusions of carefully tested hypotheses.”

Golden prose. Pity the poor judges who had to read his work-product.

Twenty-two-dollar price tag. I tucked the book under my arm, returned to the Galton book, and took that, too.

The door at the back of the store opened and Zena Lambert came out.