The Garden Of Eden And Other Criminal Delights

T he Back Page

“The Back Page” comes from one of those urban legends that circulated when I was in dental school way back in the Pleistocene age. No doubt, the story is as apocryphal now as it was then. Then again, with all these UFO sightings, one never knows…

He was always the first one there. Mr. Johnny-on-the-Spot. Radar Robert Roadrunner. The Scoop. No matter how fast the other stringers moved, Biggy Hartley always managed to arrive before anyone else.

No one could figure it out.

Some of it made sense. Hartley worked for the Chronicle, and the paper had the largest circulation. Stood to reason that it would have the most sources and the best resources. But even among his fellow reporters at the Chronicle, Hartley proved to be the early bird, finishing up when the others began, waiting with the proverbial worm in his mouth.

At first it was annoying. Then it became irritating. Finally, it turned out to be downright frustrating. And Hartley played the part to the hilt. Chomping on a cigar like a catbird-seated character out of a forties play. Arching his fat eyebrows and spitting bits of tobacco into the waste can.

When his colleagues expressed their consternation at his seemingly extraterrestrial sense of timing, Hartley answered evasively.

“I just get this feeling.” Chomp. Spit. “Can’t explain it. Like a buzz in my head.”

“C’mon,” they’d insist. “Who are you bribing?”

“You wish it was that simple.” Hartley smoothed back thin, ash-colored hair and smiled widely with yellowed teeth. “It’d make you look better to the boss, wouldn’t it? Nah, you can’t rationalize away my success with money. Some people just got the knack. Can’t help it. Just got the knack.”

Hartley had grown up in San Diego. None of his coworkers could understand why he spoke with a mid-Atlantic accent.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the man had an ounce of humility. Instead, each success instilled into Hartley renewed arrogance. He boasted, bragged, and preened like a peacock, spending hours in front of the mirror practicing badass looks.

Narrow the eyes, wrinkle the nose… yeah, that’s right. Now the sneer, raising the upper lip at the corner. Perfect.

Comical, except that Hartley got results. Which meant frequent raises and invitations to important functions. He would often arrive at the dinners in a rumpled suit with an open-necked shirt and scuffed shoes. His manner was abrasive. He flirted shamelessly with other men’s wives. He had dirt underneath his fingernails.

“You can act any way you want as long as you’re number one!” he told fellow reporter Carolyn Hislop. They were sitting in Hartley’s office. As numero uno ace reporter, Hartley was the only investigative reporter on the paper who had a genuine room with walls and a door that closed. The rest of the plebeians, as he often called them, were stuck with cubicles.

“C’mon!” Carolyn answered. “Everyone knows you’ve got some kind of card up your sleeve. You’re not a warlock. No one can be number one all the time.”

“I can!” Hartley answered.

A distasteful expression swam across Carolyn’s pretty face. For once Hartley decided to pull back. He decided not to spit tobacco into his waste can. He decided not to brag or boast or talk in his mid-Atlantic accent. Because he liked Carolyn. She had big blue eyes and cleavage. He wanted to get into her pants.

“I can’t explain it,” he said, trying to act very sincere. “I get this feeling, Carolyn.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“Like this buzz or this signal inside my brain.” As Hartley talked about it, he realized he really couldn’t explain it. He took a handful of nuts and popped them into his mouth. Chewing as he talked, he said, “I hear like a shortwave radio. Sometimes I even hear words… like the cops are talking to me.” He paused. “Plus, I sleep with the news station on. I hear lots of things in my sleep.”

“C’mon!” she shot back, doing her best Lois Lane. “We all sleep with the news station on. We all hear the cops talking over the shortwave. We all hear the transmissions as they’re going down. Why are you always first?”

“You hear the transmissions that come over the public lines.” Hartley took another fistful of goobers. “In my case, I hear the private TAC lines… the cops talking to each other before it even makes its way to the RTO. I just hear it in my brain-ah, shit!”

“What’s wrong?”

“I bit into a piece of shell.” Hartley spat into the waste can. Carolyn grimaced. He said, “Friggin’ nut can. It says shelled. The nuts are supposed to be shelled. I’m gonna sue the bastards.”

“You do that,” Carolyn said. “Claim mental as well as physical distress. By the way, I think you’re putting me on… all that crap about hearing it in your head.”

“No!” Hartley protested. “I’m not putting you on. Why would I put you on? I’m trying to get into your pants.”

Carolyn frowned. “Not a chance.”

“Even if I shared my byline with you?”

She pondered the offer. “For how long?”

“A month-”

“Nope.”

“A year?”

She nodded. “Maybe.”

“Wait,” Hartley backtracked. “A year’s too long. Six months.”

“Screw you.”

“C’mon,” Hartley said. “I’ll get you invited to all the parties. Drinks at Mais Oui, dinner at Pretensio’s-”

“I don’t need your smarmy deals. I can get invited on my own.”

“Yeah, so why haven’t I seen you there?”

“Because I haven’t made my move yet.”

Meaning she hadn’t shown enough skin to their lecherous boss. The man was a total sucker for a big pair of boobs.

“Besides,” Carolyn went on, “I’d rather lay him than you. Why eat hamburger when you can get steak?”

“Sometimes a hamburger can be very tasty.”

“You’re not even hamburger,” she said. “You’re headcheese.”

“Headcheese?”

“Yeah, headcheese. The luncheon meat made from the ears and the eyelids of a pig. That’s what you are, Hartley. You’re a pig.”

“You’re just jealous.”

“Damn right I’m jealous!”

She stalked off, shutting the door with force. The one bad thing about having a door. People were always slamming it in his face.

He had to be stopped, so they hired someone for the nasty task. He talked over ideas with Hartley’s colleagues.

“I’ll ice him when he pisses,” he said to the others. “His back’ll be to the door. He won’t see a thing.”

“Hartley uses the stalls.”

“Even better. Then he definitely won’t see anything. I’ll shoot him through the door.”

“You might miss him. Worse yet, you might hit the crapper. What a mess that would make.”

The bathroom was out.

“I’ll do it at his house.”

So it was decided. At his house, using the old standby ruse. Plugging him with a.32, then masking the pop by tossing the house and making it look like a robbery.

That night, as Hartley turned his twenty-five-year-old red Datsun Z in to his driveway, the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end. Senses heightened, Hartley pulled the keys out of the ignition and tossed them back and forth between his hands.

There it was. The buzz in his brain.

What was it saying to him?

What was going on?

Listen to the buzz, Biggy.

Yeah, it was definitely there.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

And it felt ominous, although he wasn’t sure why.

Figure it out, Biggy. You’re the man with the plan.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

And then he realized what it was.

It was the music.

The music from his house.

He couldn’t hear it with his ears, but he could damn well hear it in his head.

Yep, it was in his head.

Weird.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

And it was coming from his radio. Instead of the news station, his damn radio was playing music. And bad music, at that. Thrash metal. Some junked-up, long-haired pissy little moron in tight pants was screaming something. What was even more amazing was that some idiot thought it was worth recording.

The taste of today’s kids.

Mind-boggling.

Of course, that really wasn’t the main issue at hand. The main issue was why was thrash metal cacophony coming from his nightstand radio instead of the news station?

Maybe that was the news-a new thrash metal band.

He discarded that idea. More than likely, the bad music meant that someone had been inside his house and had changed his radio station.

That made Hartley nervous.

He approached the house with trepidation.

Slowly, slowly.

Come on, Biggy. Give ’im the old sneer.

What would Dick Tracy do in such a situation?

On tiptoes, he arrived at his front door. With great precision while crouching on the sidelines, Hartley deftly inserted the key into the lock.

Quietly, he turned the key.

With force, he pushed the door open while remaining in his hunkered-down position.

Immediately, the stillness broke into the rat-a-tat cadence of machine-gun volley as bullets came flying through the open doorway. Hartley held his hands over his ears, his head bent down to his chest. Like some friggin’ cornered cat. He prayed, waiting for the din to die down. It was loud-not as loud as the thrash metal music ringing in his ears-but loud enough to interfere with the buzz.

Then there was silence.

Hartley waited. He heard soft, muffled footsteps. Within moments, a man wearing all black, including a black hood over his face, came out of his door. Either Mr. Black was a hired assassin or the Ku Klux Klan had changed fashion consultants.

Hartley sprang, grabbing the man’s legs, and bit him hard in the thigh. The man went down with a thud, landing on his head. The rest, as they say, was history.

And guess who got the scoop.

Once the TV cameras had been set up, Hartley conducted the interviews in his office. With a wheel of microphones surrounding him, Hartley told his story. “I felt that something was off. I knew something was off.”

“How did you know, Hartley?” someone shouted. “How did you know?”

Hartley downed a mouthful of nuts. “I just knew. Just like I know all the breaking action. That’s me. Mr. Johnny-on-the-Spot. Radar Robert Roadrunner. The Scoop. I hear all the action in my brain.”

More questions as Hartley gobbled more nuts.

“No, I can’t explain. It’s just like this buzz-ah, shit!”

“What?” asked a group of anxious reporters. “What is it? A bomb? A disaster? A mass murder? Another political sex scandal?”

Hartley replied, “I just bit down on a shell. I’m going to sue those bastards!”

The networks bleeped out the cusswords. MTV left them in.

Sitting in the dentist’s chair, his mouth numbed and filled with cotton, Hartley breathed in lungful after lungful of laughing gas.

Friggin’ nutshells.

It had started out slowly as a dull ache. Within a week, his right jaw had swollen to twice its size until the pain had become unbearable. Without recourse to quell the agony, he finally summoned up the nerve to see the dentist.

“Cracked down the middle,” the oral surgeon reported. “The tooth can’t be saved. It’ll have to come out.”

Hartley figured the toothache was penance for all his bragging about his good luck. Well, if this was the worst-although it was pretty bad-he could live with it.

If it didn’t happen again.

The gas took the edge off the anxiety, but Hartley’s heart still raced when the surgeon entered the operatory.

“How’re we doing?” the doctor asked.

Hartley thought, I’m sure you’re doing well, but I’m doing shitty. Unfortunately, he was too crocked out to say anything.

“Open up,” the surgeon said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

Hartley managed to open his mouth.

With practiced skill, the dentist placed the forceps around the crown of the back molar. He gripped the handles, then paused. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Ahhhhh,” Hartley responded.

“I hear something.” Another beat. “Do you hear something?”

“Ahhhhhh” was Hartley’s answer. But he did hear something. The buzz in his brain. The voices, as always. But how could the dentist hear it?

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” Hartley responded, trying to talk louder.

“Can’t understand a word you’re saying.” With care, the surgeon rotated the forceps. Up and down, up and down, back and forth, back and forth, until he could feel the ligaments holding the tooth to the gum breaking. “Ah, well.”

Hartley heard the cracking of tooth matter along with the voice. Again he tried to talk, but the gas…

“There it is again,” the surgeon said. “Like someone’s playing a radio inside your head.”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Hartley tried to scream.

“Now, calm down,” the surgeon insisted as he turned up the nitrous portion of the nitrous oxide. “You were doing okay. Just hang in there. It’s almost over.”

Hartley felt his voice box weaken… just couldn’t move. But he could damn well hear.

The surgeon chuckled. “You know, you read about funny things in the dental journals… about radio transmissions that come through dental fillings. I never believed the stories. But maybe that’s what I’m hearing. Has that ever happened to you?”

Hartley couldn’t talk.

“There!” the surgeon said triumphantly. He held a bloody tooth aloft. “Got it.” Slowly, he turned down the nitrous. “Done. Hartley, I’ve got you breathing more oxygen now. You should come around in about a minute or two. I’ll just let you relax.”

The door closed. Again Hartley said nothing. Worse than that, he heard nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

No buzz, no voices, no sound.

All of it gone, gone, gone!

Damn those nutshells. He should have sued the bastards.

But what was the point now?

Gone!

No more Mr. Johnny-on-the-Spot.

No more Radar Robert Roadrunner.

No more the Scoop.

No more parties and special invitations.

No more press conferences.

No more office with a door.

Gone, gone, gone.

So what was left for him? Just a life as an ordinary reporter. As these thoughts came into his brain, Hartley became increasingly depressed. As soon as he was physically able, he reached over to the gas tanks, lowered the oxygen tap to almost nil, and turned the nitrous knob on full blast.

Good old nitrous.

He always wanted to die laughing.