I killed this guy one time. It was weird. I was driving back up to school at UCSB late on a Sunday night. Right after you get outside of Oxnard, the freeway turns into Pacific Coast Highway. I was driving along--I can still remember the song on the radio--"Seven and Seven Is" by Love--and I felt this kind of thump on my car; it wasn't a great big thump or anything like that. Just a normal thump. Then my front windshield cracked. I pulled over to the side of the highway and got out of my car. In the middle of the road I saw what looked like a pile of grey rags. My first thought was that I'd hit a dog or something. Then, before I had a chance to do anything, several other cars ran over the thing. I saw pieces of stuff fly away from the object. It was only then that it struck me that I'd hit someone. Things get a bit hazy after that. I remember a cop car pulling up, then an ambulance. It all went really fast. The cop got my name, my registration and stuff, then he said they'd be contacting me. That was it really. I got in my car and drove back to Isla Vista, where I was sharing a one-bedroom apartment with another guy. When I got there, a couple of other people were in my apartment. I told them I had hit some guy on PCH, and I was pretty sure the guy was dead. For a minute or so, nobody said anything. Then we all started laughing. Not because it was funny or anything, just because it was so--well, weird. Then I started crying.
That was the only time I ever cried about what had happened. In fact, that was the only time I ever really felt anything at all about it.
I was in therapy at the time--my therapist was this real nice German lady named Mrs. Gottsdanker--and I told her about what had happened and all. I asked her how come I didn't have any emotions about it. At the time, I remember, I was having a problem having emotions about lots of stuff. I figured when something like this happened, you ought to have some kind of feelings about it.
Mrs. Gottsdankder was very "supportive" (her word) of me. She explained to me that since I knew nothing about the person I'd hit, that he effectively had no identity and so it was perfectly normal that I didn't have a lot of feelings about it.
"But I killed a guy!" I exclaimed."Shouldn't I be feeling something?!"
"First of all, she said, you are feeling something. The very fact that you're concerned that you don't feel anything, means that you are feeling something."
"But....I don't feel like I feel anything," I retorted.
"It's quite possible, "Mrs. Gottsdanker explained, "that you're in a state of shock. If that's that case, you'll probably experience a delayed reaction at some point in the future. She wrote out a prescription for librium and told me my time was up.
After that, I tried to find out something about the guy I'd hit so that at least I'd know who he was. After contacting the Ventura police department I got some information.
His name was William Travers Holben. He was 35 years old; the officer I spoke with described him as "a transient." Apparently he'd been drunk and was trying to run across PCH when I'd hit him. The officer I was speaking with told me that the accident was clearly Traver’s fault and not mine.
Even before they told me that it wasn't my fault, I'd already thought of other ways to get out of it....like maybe I'd just hit him but he wasn't actually dead. It was the cars that ran over him after he was laying there that killed him--not me.
But in my heart I knew that was bullshit. I'd dealt the death blow and I knew it. And even if the guy was a transient and all, he hadn't always been one. He was something else once. He had a mom and a dad. He'd once been in love with someone.
I mean, people just aren't born bums....something makes them that way.
It really bugged me that the police would just write him off like that. Anyway, who ever heard of a bum with a pretty name like William Travers Holben?
Nobody, that's who!
I thought all kinds of stuff about the guy for awhile, but finally I guess I sort of just forgot about the whole thing. The only two real bad things about the whole incident were that the next day, I was washing my car off, and I saw that there were pieces hair and what looked like part of the guy’s skull stuck in my grill. I remember washing them into the gutter real quick.
The other thing that still sticks in my mind was this weird thing that happened after I'd pulled away from the accident. I was driving along, just sort of numb; finally I came to a stoplight in Summerland, which is right outside Santa Barbara. This car pulled up next to me at the stoplight, and I saw that the man driving the car was trying to signal to me.
I didn't really want to acknowlege the guy, but he seemed real frantic about gettting my attention, so finally I reached over and rolled down my passenger side window. I can still see the guy. I remember thinking he looked exactly like Robert Mitchum. Not just any Robert Mitchum though. I specifically remember at the moment that he looked like Robert Mitchum in "Night Of The Hunter." I half expected the guy to have the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, just like old Mitchum did in the movie. Anyhow after I rolled down my window, the guy rolls down his window.
"Do you want to go to confession?" he said.
"What!?" I blanched.
The guy looked at me and kind of half-smiled. It wasn’t a very nice smile.
"I saw what happened back there, and I want to know if you would like to ask God's forgiveness," the man said. "I'm a priest, and
I thought I might be of help."
I just sat there looking at the guy. The next second, this huge black bubble of anger welled up in my gut. For a second, I imagined pulling the guy out of his car and beating his fucking face into the pavement until it was nothing but a bloody pulp.
"No thank you," I said. "I don't believe I'd care to do that."
I rolled up my window and drove off. But then the really weird part happened.
The guy started following me! He followed me almost the entire way back to campus. I remember thinking all these crazy thoughts, like maybe he was some kind of maniac or something. I thought all kinds weird stuff. Then I thought maybe I'd gone into shock and I was just hallucinating the whole thing.
Finally, when I got to Goleta, the guy pulled off the freeway. I watched his lights in my rearviw mirror as they dissappeared into the fog rolling in from the ocean. I remember my hands were shaking real bad. They didn't stop shaking until I finally got back to my apartment.
Like I said, the whole thing is pretty hazy. Sometimes I think I might actually have invented it. You know how if you tell yourself something so many times, sometimes you don't know whether it really happened or if you just made it up?
Anyhow, I never forgot that guy; in fact, I still think about him. Sometimes when I'm driving, I feel like some crazy preacher that looks just like Robert Mitchum in "Night Of The Hunter" is following me. I wish I wouldn't think that stuff, but I can't help myself.
Ah,well, fuck it....that’s life, I guess.....
The stupid gardener is outside with that goddamn blower thing again. Every Thursday morning the guy creates Living Hell right outside my window. It's horrible beyond words. But little does he know today I'm ready for him. Yesterday, I bought a brand new pair of earplugs at the Thrifty drug store. They cost $7.95. Guaranteed to block out all noise. Ha! Take that, amigo!
Actually, it's not even the leaf blower (whatever happened to rakes?) that gets me so much. All of the gardeners use them these days. But this guy--Jesus is his name, or maybe it's Juan--anyway, this guy sings while he works. Make that screams. If he could stay on pitch it might not be so bad, but he can't. So in addition to the fucking blower, I have to suffer a half hours worth of these hideous Mexican ranch songs. It's the worst thing you've ever heard. I'm not kidding.
"AIUDAMEEEE POR FAVOR....AIUDAMEEEE MI CORAZON....."
One time it got so bad that before I knew what I was doing I ran outside and told him to "shut up that goddamn lunatic singing."
That kind of stuff is really hard for me to do, by the way, because I'm kind of a coward about confronting people. Anyway, it was a big mistake. Ever since then, the guy's been singing even louder (and more offkey) than ever. Lousy stinking Mexicans. They're getting more uppity every day.
The thing is, I can't stand noise. Actually, I can't stand sound. I crave quiet. Perfect, absolute quiet. Which, of course, is non-existent. I usually walk around most of the time now with my earplugs in, but it's a losing proposition.
I don't remember when the noise fetish started. I think it was when I was living with Karen and her three kids. The youngest one, Dukey, used to scream at the top of his idiotic three-year old lungs whenever he'd want to get his mom's attention. Whenever I think back on that time, the memory comes complete with a soundtrack of that kid screaming.
Besides the pure decibel level, the screams had a certain tonal quality that caused a very peculiar physical reaction in me. The sound hit me in the brain and the stomach all at the same time. The screams literally made me feel like I was going to puke. Then it would be like I couldn't get any air in my lungs. A couple of times I got so dizzy I actually fainted from the sound of them.
Funny, Karen never seemed to mind them.
"You get used to it," she'd say.
But I never did. I got so sensitized to the screams (he'd always do it loudest when we'd be in bed together) that I used to have nightmares about them. I'd wake up covered in sweat, gagging-- the sound of those godawful wails making my brain feel like it was about to explode.
Sometimes when we were making love--and his screaming didn't work--the kid would start banging his fists on the door. Even the way he banged had a hideous quality to it. After a few seconds of banging and screaming, my dick had withered to nada, and I was finished for the rest of the day. I'd have to go for a walk before I would quit shaking.
"You're much too sensitive," Karen would say, trying to coax my shriveled penis back to attention. You're never going to be able to have kids." But I already have them, I thought morosely, looking down at my pitiful pecker.
First it was just Dukey, then it was the other kids -- then it was everything. Sound equaled pain. (The only sound I could seem to tolerate was the TV set).
It was like a cancer. It mestastasized all over the place. Literally every sound was excruciating. Some things were worse than others though. Like trucks. It seemed like the amount of trucks in the world had increased disproportionately over the years. You'd be sitting there in the evening, watching TV, and all of a sudden, the whole house would start thundering and shaking. You'd look outside and there'd be this monstrous garbage truck, as big as a goddamn building, just sitting there outside your house revving its engine.
Sometimes I'd go out there and try to stare the driver down (I was too much of a coward to do anything but stand there) but you could never really see the guy very clearly, so the staring was effectively nullified. It was always the same guy though. Some moron wearing a baseball cap (that's another thing I can't stand. Why the sudden American fetish with baseball caps?). I'd stand there and stare, and the guy would sit there, revving the goddamn engine--he knew what the hell he was doing!--and after awhile, he'd drive off, cackling madly to himself no doubt.
I was pretty sure it was all part of demonic plot of some kind. See, in my mind, demons had taken over certain parts of the Los Angeles. I got that idea from this bible tract that a guy had handed me while I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard one day.
Of all the places in LA, Hollywood Boulevard was totally demonized. Nobody could deny that. You just had to look at the faces of the people walking up and down the street. They were all insane.
So when the guy had handed me the tract, I'd read it with great interest. What it explained was that particular cities attracted certain types of demonic activity. Certain parts of each city were infested much more heavily than others. You could tell the infested parts from the non-infested parts by the crime rate, the amount of drug addicts, suicides--all that sort of stuff.
I thought it made perfect sense. I mean, once you'd accepted Christ and all--demons were simply part of the package.
I'd become a sort of half-assed Christian at the time. I'm not one anymore. I still believe in God and everything, but basically I think Christianity is completely crazy (not to mention totally illogical), and all of the people who believe it are crazy too.
But like I said, I was pretty sick at that time. The Christianity thing and the demons and all that stuff were just something to hang onto, because what it seemed like to me was that everything around me was going to fly off into space or something at any second. I coudn't hold onto anything.
The way demons worked, incidentally, was they'd figure out what your weaknesses were, and they'd attack you in those specific areas. Once they figured out that I couldn't stand noise, that was it, Jack. No matter where I was, there'd be some hideous noise going on around me. It seemed like the entire world had grown louder. In the movies the sound was louder. Television commercials were louder (I know that wasn't my imagination because I read an article about how they did that on purpose). Cars were louder. Flies buzzed louder. People talked louder for no reason. You'd be in a store and there'd be a couple of women standing there carrying on a conversation, and they'd practically be yelling right in each others faces! It didn't make any sense. But after you knew about the demons, it did. Yeah, those fucking demons really knew how to work a guy over.
(taking a breath)
Thank God! Jose, or Jesus, or whatever his name is, is finally gone. Today it wasn't quite so bad. A couple of times when he was out there with that blower thing and singing one of those awful Mexican anthems of his, I've thought of going out there and shooting him. I mean, I seriously considered it. I remember looking in the dresser drawer--the sweater drawer--where I kept my .38. There it was. Just looking at it made me feel better. I imagined walking outside to where Jose was and pointing it at him. He wouldn't notice me at first. Then when he saw me standing there with the gun, he'd stop singing. Then what he'd do, he'd just stand there with his mouth open--just staring with this dumb look on his face. (Mexicans are stupid like that). And then, while he was busy being stupid, I'd shoot him--right in the mouth. I could see it perfectly...how his face would explode and his mouth and pieces of teeth and stuff would fly everywhere. He'd still have that surprised look on his face when it happened. It was a nice picture. I imagined it over and over, until I felt quiet again inside my brain.
Sometimes I thought maybe I was the wrong type of person to own a gun. I certainly didn't want to be one of those guys that went into a McDonald's and killed a bunch of innocent people. But the thing is, I understood those guys. The only thing I didn't understand was that there weren't more of them. Actually, I guess there were more of them. The paper had been chock full of them lately. Almost every day you could read about some guy who went bananas and went into a place--he'd been fired or something--and killed a whole bunch of people. It got to be so normal, that nobody even paid attention anymore. So in light of the way things were these days, I figured that crummy Mexican gardener would hardly matter at all. Still, even at my sickest, I knew that shooting Jose wasn't a particularly good idea.
to be continued soon)
Fucking goddamn Skip called me at 8:30 this morning (11:30 his time) to tell me that we're going to be flying to Costa Rica at the end of the month. I figured it was just more of his bullshit, but then a few minutes later I got this fax showing plane reservations, and also a copy of a lease agreement on a beach house in Playa de Coco where we'd staying. We were even going to be supplied with two armed guards! Fucking Skip--he has to be so goddamned dramatic about everything he does.
Skip is this old (actually he's younger than me) ex-con that I went to interview for Penthouse a couple of months ago. I don't even know how I got the assignment. Some lawyer, I think. The article was about how in back in1976 Skip (his full name is Wayne Stanley Grundle Jr. ) was hired by the Dept. of Justice to assassinate this guy who'd run off with $250 million of the government's money. The guy had gotten involved with the Medellin Cartel and started running drugs and arms of Miami, so the government had hired Skip to whack him. No big deal. The government has people killed all the time. I din't think it was a particularly interesting story, but Penthouse had paid me $15,000 and flew me to Baltimore (where Skip lived in a rented townhouse with his girlfriend Shirley) to do the interview. I figured even if the story fell apart midway--which was a pretty good likelihood, because Skip was probably a liar (most of these guys are liars)--I'd pick up a $7,500 kill fee and get out of the room for awhile. It was good to force myself out of the room whenever I had even the slightest inkling to do so. When the medication didn't work, I stayed in the house without coming out for long periods of time. One time, I didin't go outside for six months.
Over the years I'd interviewed tons of guys like Skip. Bouncers, boxers, bodyguards, mercenaries, ex-CIA and FBI guys, private eyes, good cops, bad cops, snitches, dope dealers--criminals of every ilk. My Tough Guys, I called them. One time I spent a month with this ex-Mafia hitman, Harry Colodouros, working on a book project. Harry The Greek, he called himself. Harry was dying of cancer--at least that's what he told me-- and he wanted somebody to write his memoirs before he kicked the bucket so that he could leave some money behind for his daughter.
Yeah, right. It's funny. All these guys said the same thing. They were all dying of something or other. And they all thought they had a story to tell. Some of them actually did--those were the ones I chose to write about. The problem with Harry the Greek was that after I'd been interviewing him for about a month, he started strong-arming me for money. "Advances" on our book project, he called them. First it was just twenty or thirty bucks. But then he started wanting a hundred at a pop. "Don't worry pal," I'll pay ya back when we get the advance for the book," he rasped.
"I know Harry, but I really can't afford...."
"It's just this one time," he'd say. And I'd fork over another hundred.
I had liked Harry in the beginning. He weighed almost 300 pounds and he only had one leg. Even at fifty, he was still a very good looking man; he had a beautiful head of snow white hair which was combed in a perfectly shaped fifties style duck's ass. And he always carried a gun.
The first time we met --it was at the Hamburger Hamlet in Van Nuys-- Harry showed me a nickel plated .45 automatic that he'd stashed under his napkin. "Why do you keep that there? " I asked, trying to sound casual. The fact is, seeing that gun scared the shit out of me. For a split second, I thought maybe he was going to shoot me.
"Easier to get at" Harry answered, quite reasonably.
According to Harry, some of his old mob buddies were after him. The FBI had put him in a witness protection program, but later they'd dumped his ass. Either the cancer was going to get him, or the mob was. Either way, Harry only had a few months left, at best. Or so he said.
Frankly, I didn't believe anybody was after Harry, and I didn't believe he had cancer either. He looked too damn healthy. He just wanted somebody'd to tell his story to. Fortunately, it was a good one. So far, I'd recorded about 45 hours of tape with Harry. He'd call me at all hours of the day and night and just start blabbing away. I could never call him. He was very secretive about giving his telephone number out.
Harry was a great storyteller (insert material). But sometimes he could get very belligerent. "When are we gonna get the advance on this fucking book deal ya promised me, kid?" he'd rasp.
"Harry, you've got to be patient. These things take time," I told him.
"Fuck time. I need some bread...an' I need it now! "
When Harry would get belligerent like this, there was something very frightening about the guy. Early on in our interview I realized he was a sociopath. He could talk with great affection about his family--in fact he was overly sentimental. Like whenever he talked about his mother, he'd start crying. What a fucking actor. But when Harry talked about all the people he'd beaten up, maimed, or killed, he didn't show even the slightest trace of emotion. One time he told me this about incident where he'd had to shake a guy down at the racetrack. The guy had owed some dough to a bookie who'd hired Harry to tighten the guy up a little bit.
"I cut his fuckin' finger off," Harry told me. "The guy started cryin' an shit , so I gave him his goddamn finger back. Told him he could get it sewed back on. Stoopid chooch...I mean, he was lucky I didn't cut off his fuckin' prick."
I believed Harry about the finger. I could pretty much tell when he was lying by now. He had a way of talking in this certain tone of voice when he was bullshitting you Usually, he'd lie when he talked about something he'd done regarding some movie star....like he said he and this other guy, Sal Sunseri, had been the ones that bugged Marilyn Monroe's house just before Giancana and his boys had shoved the suppository up her ass that killed her. That was clearly absolute hokum. But when Harry talked about hurting people, he usually wasn't lying. You could tell by the tone of his voice and the look in his eye. He was enjoying the recollections too much. They made him feel powerful.
One day, after he'd gotten ugly with me after I told him I couldn't "loan" him any more money, I'd decided I'd had enough. I was tired of shelling out dough to him, and frankly, I was tired of him in general. There were a million guys like Harry out there who I could write books on. See, most people don't understand that. They think they're special. They don't realize that there are a million other versions of them out there. I'll tell you more about the Version Theory later. It's very important. Anyway, after I decided to dump Harry, I had to figure out how to do it. It took me a few minutes to decide to just tell him the truth ( my first inclination is always to lie). I called his pager (he'd never give me a phone number) and five minutes later he phoned back.
"Listen Harry, I said, "I don't think I'm going to be able to go on with this project. You want things to move too quickly and it just doesn't work that way. It's nothing personal," I said, using a favorite line of his. He'd always say it after he'd described how he'd fucked somebody up (if cutting off a guy's finger isn't personal, what the hell is?!). "I just don't think I'm the right guy to do this book," I told him. You need somebody that can dedicate full time to it. I've got too many other irons in the fire."
There was an ugly silence on the other end of the line. "Listen, ya motherfucker," he said. He was whispering. He did that whenever he was angry. "Nobody backs out on Harry the Greek.... y'unnerstannn?"
"Ah, sure Harry," I said weakly.
"I know where you live. I know where your mother lives. You get the picture?"
I got the picture. It wasn't a nice one. Still, after about 20 minutes of schmoozing, I'd convinced Harry that I'd find him another writer, plus I'd give back all the interview tapes I'd recorded. I can talk anybody into just about anything once I make my mind up. In fact, there's nobody better than me that I can think of at the moment.
"Allright, pal," Harry said. "But don't you try to pull nuthin' on me." I almost laughed out loud when he said that. Not because I didn't believe him; it was just that I couldn't get over how "gangster-like" he sounded. That's one of the things I liked about the guy. Everything he said was straight out of The Untouchables. Actually, maybe it wouldn't be so easy to find another version of Harry. After all, how many one legged Greek gangsters do you find running around out there who keep their guns under their goddamned napkin when you're having lunch? Not very many, I'll tell you. But I'd made my mind up, and that was that.
I agreed to meet Harry at the Sportsman's Lodge and give him the tapes. What I did instead, though, was to drop the tapes (they were sealed in a manila folder) off at the Hilton, which was just down the block. Then I drove back to the Sportsman's Lodge and waited across the street in a phone booth until I saw Harry's ratty old maroon Cadillac pull up in front. (What'd you think he was going to drive, a Toyota?!) When he got inside the hotel, I dialed the desk and asked for him. He came on the line a second later.
"Ya' fuckin' cocksucker....I tol' you that..."
"Shut up and listen to me," I said. I was in control and I knew it. "I left the tapes at the front desk of the Hilton. The address is 36421 Ventura Boulevard, right down the block from Dupar's. They're under the name of Dr. Goldstein. You can pick them up anytime. I'd suggest you collect them as soon as possible."
There was nothing but silence.
I could feel him thinking, trying to get the edge back.
"Listen Harry," I said, "I don't ever want you to call me again. If you do, or if I should get even an inkling that you're fucking with my credit, my bank accounts, anything (I knew all his tricks), you need to know that I've got copies of all your tapes in a safe deposit box at my bank. I'm quite sure that certain parties--like your probation officer, or perhaps the FBI--would be highly interested in some of the material on them."
More silence. I was practically shitting in my pants, but I knew if I didn't make this move, I'd never get rid of the guy.
"You're a smart punk," Harry finally said. "But I like ya. You got balls."
"I like you too Harry, " I said.
"Good luck with your book." I hung up the phone.
I watched from the booth as Harry limped out of the hotel (he worse a prosthesis on the amputated leg). I felt giddy from the adrenalin rush. He started his car and drove off, his ancient Caddy emitting a noxious cloud of black smoke. I felt kind of sad as I watched him disappear into the Ventura Boulevard traffic.
I probably just blew a nice fat book advance, I thought to myself.
But I knew I'd done the right thing. Harry and I were the wrong combination. I mean, what's a nice Jewish kid from Shaker Heights doing hanging around with guys who cut off people's fingers in the parking lot at the racetrack anyhow!?
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