Destination (16 page)
I survived without them. I had the goods. I was one unhip cognoscente.
I had the dirt, the dish, the scopophile skank. No one cared. They had their own sex lives and dope habits. The rags were prophetic. THEY were US. The Glamour World had merged with the Real Worldâat least in L.A.
Dubious mortar. Sex and dope. Promiscuous egalitarianism. The whole city was bombed. It was fried, fragged, zorched, zonked, blitzed, and blotto. It stayed stoned to the late '70s. I stayed stoned and stupefyingly chaste. I had the goods. It was innocuous information.
I utilized it twice.
I spotted an actress on Wilton and Melrose. She had a flat tire. She looked helpless. I knew she was a nympho. The rags said so.
I was bombed. She was bombed. I changed her tire. I suggested a drink at her place.
She said no. She gave me a dollar and a pat on the head.
The goods did me no good.
I was hitchhiking. I was bombed. A car pulled up. I recognized the driver.
He was a name actor. The rags ratted him out. A buddy confirmed it. He had firsthand knowledge.
The actor craved young males. He was indiscriminate. He picked up hitchhikers. He offered them cocaine and head.
I declined his ride. The goods did me
some
good.
I cleaned up my life. L.A. stabilized and de-stoned. The rags resurrected in partial spirit. They metastasized into supermarket tabloids.
I noticed them in the early '80s. I'd quit shoplifting. I was walking through check-stand lines.
I watched housewives shag the tabs. I watched hipsters goof on them. I read over their shoulders. I glommed the gestalt.
The tabs pushed minor gossip. They dick-teased their readers. The headlines promised spice. The text was coitus denied.
Bait-and-switch. Buy the tab off the headline. Jump from implied incest to kids rescued by movie stars.
The tabs pushed the lives of monarchs and TV actors. The tabs reported cancer cures and mystical amulets. The tabs reported double-digit births. The tabs tattled tales of thousand-pound women confined to their beds. The tabs detailed abductions to Mars.
The tab readership was the rag readership expanded and lobotomized. Tab readers craved reassurance and surrogate lives more than they craved the goods. They did not want their idols deidolized and rendered attainable by chance. They wanted their fear of death assuaged. They wanted their disbelief smothered. They wanted to blunt their boredom with yarns of the gilded and blessed. They wanted to extend their realm of possibility past
all
sane boundaries.
The tabs delivered.
Amazing rescues. Chocolate diets. January-December romance. Miraculous healings and saves at death's door. Firsthand sightings of God.
Full circle.
The rags disillusioned. The tabs reillusioned. The rags proferred sex in a sexless time and succumbed to sex abundance. The tabs metamorphosed from profligacy. They offered a fulsomely lunatic love.
Outsiders crave the goods to grease their way in. The rags said you might not want to go there. The tabs showed the insider's world as one of your limitless options.
The rags and the tabs showed their venal colors. The rags and the tabs showed some balls and some heart. The tabs pandered lower and kinder. They warmed more souls and showed more legs in the end.
AMERICANS ARE SUCKERS for dish and redemption. The tabs and the Bible notch big numbers still. The goods remain the goods. Hard data to hoard in yearningâor judgment.
Tabloid TV slimed out of the rags and the tabs. Large-scale entertainment reporting hatched concurrent. TV shows and magazines devoted to gossip and scandal. Chroniclers of the NEW Glamour World.
Puerile actors and rock stars. Fashion moguls with anorexic models in tow. Doomed and fatuous royals. Homicidal halfbacks. Sex-harassing politicians.
Entertainment reporting arrived at a wild-ass juncture. Movies were bad. Mindless blockbusters ruled. Stupes reveled in their brainlessness. They wanted to know all about them.
It was voyeurism sans sex or soul. The goods as box-office numbers and deal memos revealed. The deal as the foreplay. The boffo opening weekend as the climax.
Glamour World arrivistes: feral film execs and agents. Officious and prim. Seductive because they choose what movies get made. Sexy names in a prostitute's trick book.
Entertainment reporting merged with tabloid TV. Film criticism was subsumed by back-page plot summations and televised yeas or nays. Hard news got mauled in the flow. O.J. updates ran between premieres and bikini-waxed starlets.
Narrative lines blurred. The late-breaking goods:
The Glamour World
is
the Real World for stupes. Conglomerates dictate the aesthetic. They own the TV stations. They own the film studios. They run the entertainment mags. They collude in their shared interest.
The dish is an advertisement.
Let's huckster the new epic of hijinks gone wrong. Let's pull for the kids in our dysfunctional brood. Let's juke our ratings and bait the stupes out to the multiplex.
Robert Downey's in the slam. His new flick debuts next week. O.J.'s got a new babe. Will he off
that
one? Buy his doofus comedies on DVD.
Our kids are unruly and beautiful. They eat the poisoned fruit that we're afraid to touch. We're their flunkies and their enablers. We cosign their shit. We buy them their dope and urge them to drive drunk.
We've got the goods. It allows us to live vicarious and judge harshly at whim. It makes us feel alive.
Our new brood is soporific. Everyone's got their goods. That tops the “t” off “titillation” and vaps the “v” off of “voyeur.”
I don't want the new goods. I live in Kansas. I don't want to exploit movie stars with flat tires. I'm a Lutheran. I live by the scandal-rag message in ellipsis.
Only character counts.
I'm full of Midwestern fervor. I judge sternly. I hate Bill Clinton. I love Bill Bennett and Bill O'Reilly. I mess with notions of the Lutheran ministry. I know a pastor of some renown. He said he could get me into divinity school. They'll waive the high-school-diploma requirement in my case.
My wife finds this calling dubious. She sees me as a man of soiled cloth. I wouldn't hack divinity school. I'm too joyous and profane. I see God in foul language and sex. I'm more L.A. than Kansas City. The Lutheran Church would disdain me. They'd quash the dirty tales I write for
GQ.
The notion persists. The calling calls. My wife has successfully countermanded it.
She's got the goods on me. She'll go to the tabs in a hot fucking flash.
The Trouble I Cause
Blind Item.
Hush-Hush
Magazine,
March 1957 issue.
COP CONTRETEMPSâ
CALL IT COERCION OR????
We won't waste words. What paparazzi-plagued police department deploys proactive propaganda via a vivid TV show? Said show: sadly sagging into retrograde ratings. A ripe rumor: The star of the stale show shivers in the shadow of a politically potent police chief.
The chief chirps. The star stutters and stammers. That's the standard stamp of their relationship. Hot news: Has the hell-bent El Jefe handed the star a startlingly malevolent mandate?
Item: A certain PD circumvents civil rights routinely. During the Depression they deep-sixed the dispossessed and deported them to distant states or whipped them into work camps. The cops called it the “Bum Blockade.” It kept hungry hordes out of Hollywood. It hustled homeless herds out of
Hermosa. Hellâit kept a scintillatingly sinful city cosmetically clean.
Item: Has the pissed-off police chief told the stuttering star to scrawl a scurrilous script? Will said script scrutinize the Bum Blockade and blasphemously blast the need for its reinstatement? Do you smell a smoke screen to finagle a Fascist agenda? Will the servile serfs of a certain PD implement it?
Remember, dear reader, you heard it first here: off the record, on the Q.T. and
very
Hush-Hush. . . .
1.
Jack Webb: a jejune jerkoff jacked around by the LAPD. A punk pawn in the paws of Chief William H. Parker.
A script reader skimmed me the skank. She perused paper at Paramount and perched in my pocket. I owned her. She dove dusky girls at a dyke den in Duarte. I had snappy snapshots.
The script was surreptitiously submitted. Jackoff Jack wrote it. Sapphic Sally noted notes in the margins. She pounced on the PARKER penmanship.
She recognized the round R's and tall T's. She'd dragged herself through three years on
Dragnet.
Parker penned moronic margin notes on all the scripts she screened. She hated Jumpy Jack. Jack tried to juke her into bed with a muff-munching mulatta. Jack loooved to watch.
I paced around my pad. I mixed a morning martini. It mingled through my membranes and mesmerized me. The March issue was a motherfucker. I rained rancor on a randy boy who rammed Rock Hudson. I blasted that blind item.
Dick Contino called me. He dished more dirt. Baaaad blood bopped between Bill Parker and Juvenile Jack. It bipped back to '54. Parker partisaned Bum Blockades then. Parker the facile fascist with fangs. Jive Jack the unctuous
Untermensch
under his thumb. Dick demurred on more details. Impetuously implied:
Jack Webb was so convincing in his role on
Dragnet
that the LAPD would receive constant calls asking for Sergeant Joe Friday's help.
(Los Angeles Times Collection,
Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young
Research Library, UCLA)
Parker pulled the puppet strings and pitted his will against Webb's. Webb wiggled, withered, and wailed, “What do you want?”
I mainlined my martini. It seared my cerebellum and pinged my pineal gland. It was godlike good to be Danny Getchellâthe scandal-scamming Scopophile King!
My living-room door lurched loose. It levitated. It lolled off its latches. It creaked, crashed, and flew to the floor.
Look: LAPD Sergeant John O'Grady.
He bristled. He brandished a Browning pump. He brought the butt end down and bumped the bulge in my BVDs.
I retched and ran out of breath. I belched up bile and Beefeater's. My shag rug shot up and hauled me down in a heap.
THE LINCOLN HEIGHTS drunk tank:
An inferno. Incontinent inebriates installed within. Howling hopheads. Wetbacks and wienie waggers. Misanthropic misdemeanants crammed in a crap-crusted crawl space. Sixty sunken-faced sub-felons sunk in a subterranean shit chute.
Bars. Stainless-steel staves. Sticky stained and sealed with semen. Cement walls. A flat floor flecked with floating phlegm flakes. Catty-corner off a catwalk: the INS tank.
Mucho
Mexicanos mopped up by the
migra.
My head hurt. My balls boinged. O'Grady ossified me. He planted righteous reefers on my ass and popped me for Possession. He blitzed me for that blind item.
I stood by the stainless-steel staves. I fretted. I froze in a fresco of frustration. I was fundamentally fucked. I'd landed in the lurid lurch of LAPD limbo.
Winos wailed. Hopheads howled. Homos humped in a hot heap. Sheriff's shits moved Mexes out of the
migra
tank. Jungle John O'Grady assisted.
The shits chatted up the cholos. “You want
trabajo
? You want to be in a movie?” The cholos chained cigarettes. They chomped their chancre sores and chewed on the offer.
The shits shot back to the drunk tank. They walked up to wickedly wasted winos and whispered. The winos wiggled and went wow! The shits ripped off their wristbands. They scooted a scurvy line out to the catwalk.
O'Grady observed. I orbed in on him. O'Grady ordered the Sheriff's shits about. They moved the Mexicans. They led them to a loading dock. The winos wiggle-walked their way.
I felt squirrelly. I squinted square at the dock. O'Grady squawked at the Sheriff's shits and shoved his weight around. The shits whipped on the winos. They manhandled the Mexes. They ripped wristbands off four choice cholos. They chewed out four chumps and sidled them in a side door.
I got the gestalt. Troublesome
trabajo.
A movie or the
migra
and a march to Mexico. A chilling choice for Charlie Chorizo.
A truck trundled up. The back bed dipped down to the dock. O'Grady growled gruff. He grabbed wetbacks and winos and herded them wholesale.
Movie meshugas.
Bum Blockadeâ
a blighted blockbuster for LAPD? Threatening threads thrown down at ME.
I paced. I skirted scurfy scamsters and chirpy child molesters. I was framed. I was french-fried and frappéed. I was fright-fraught and frazzled.
I heard hard voices wafting out a wall vent. I crawled over two crybaby creeps crapped out by the john. I jumped on a jigaboo's head and vaulted up to the vent. I heard John O'Grady grand-stand gratuitously.
“We'll take two birds out with one stone. The pretty boy and Getchell.”
The jigaboo jiggled. I jerked into jitters and jumped off his head. I jostled a junkie draped on a drag queen.
I paced. I plodded and plotzed. Deputies dipped through the tank. They read wristbands and ran inmates into court. Sixty sullen sub-felons sank down submissive and slinked toward a nudge from the judge.
I was alertly and alarmingly alone. I was the Strangerâ stranded and stripped bare. It was existential exile. I was freaked out like that frigid frog Camus.
The bars banged and boomed. They sluiced and slid. A pouty punk with a pompadour popped in. The bars bashed shut behind him.
I moseyed up. I moved in and made him.
Harry Hungwell. A hunky homo. A hophead. The studly star of Stan Stevens's flick
The Greek Way.
Harry hated me. I hung his handsome hide in
Hush-Hush.
I hipped Hollywood to his homophile habits. PRIAPIC PROSTY PRIED OFF PRINCE SAHEED AT ALL-BOY BORDELLO.
I said, “Hi, Harry. What's shakin', Daddy-o?”
Harry hiccuped. Harry heaved. Harry twitched and twanged and ran red in rage.
I read his wristband. Fuckâ555 PC.
The code numbers numbed me. Possession. Paraphernalia. The narcs nabbed Harry with heroin and nailed him with needles.
Harry said, “You framed me. O'Grady said so.”
I laughed loud. “Back off, bun boy. O'Grady framed
me.
”
Harry hurled my way. He lurched and lunged and shagged a shiv from his pants. A black book blipped out and flew to the floor.
I jumped back. I judo-chopped. I jabbed and jammed and julienned Harry. I humped heavy hurt. I ripped and raked and raised welts. I hammered Harry with hapkido and japped him with jujitsu and tore him up with tae kwon do. I sheared the shiv from his hand and socked an eyeball out of the socket.
Harry screeched and screamed. He spun and spasmed like Sputnik on speed. He listed and lolled and launched into one-eyed orbit.
Fuckâfuzz at five o'clock. Big bulls barging down on the bars. Setupâthe Sheriff's shits shot Harry in to shank me. O'Grady ordered it.
I hunkered down. I hid behind hysterical Harry. I bagged his black book. I throttled his throat and shoved him up to shield me.
I ran. I held Harry. The Sheriff's shits shot through the bars. Harry hemorrhaged and absorbed ammo. He buckled behind buckshot and slumped slow with slugs.
I jumped on the john. I hurled Harry down. Bullets bit his balls and popped off his patellas. I shook and shimmied up the wall and vipped into the vent. I blasted my way into black.
2.
Vibrating vents to silt-sifting sewers. A manhole maze under L.A.
I slogged slow. I swam swift. Currents curtailed and carried me. I flew through flipped-out flotillas.
Fetid fetuses and hamburger husks. Rats like Rin Tin Tin. Squishy squids and squashed beer cans.
I paddled with a propeller piece and steered with a stick. I soaked my way soddenly south. I was aqueduct-adequate and sewer-certified. I played a plump pimp in
He Walked by Night.
Bad guy Basehart buys it by Ben Hong's herb hut in Chinatown. He's the undulating überfiend under the Broadway Bridge.
I looped through Lincoln Heights. I churned through Chink-town. I crested on a crosscurrent and crashed at Chavez Ravine.
I meandered out a manhole. I bopped to Ben Hong's. Chinks checked me out. Slanty-eyed slicksters with pierced pigtails and pointy-toe shoes. I shivered. I shook. Shitballs shot off my shirt.
Ben Hong handed me a hophead highball. Boss belladonna buttons and monster ma huang. I chugged it. It churned through me. I charted my chance to chisel and cheat my way free.
I owned Bad Ben. I quashed a quixotic
Hush-Hush
piece on his perverse peccadillos. Ben poked Peking ducks with his peewee pecker. Ben dicked ducks from Shanghai to Sheboygan.
Ben hid my
Hush-Hush
bug gear. Ben bowed and beamed and bent to my bidding. He brought me a big bowl of Hochohan soupâhard on the hoisin. I hauled out Harry Hungwell's black book.
I tripped through his tricks. Harry was heavy hung and cooly connected. He trick-trucked with all the hot homos.
Rapacious Raymond Burr. Robert Taylorâribald and right-wing. Dirty Dave Garroway. Adlai Stevensonâstandard stands at the Statler. Randy Randolph Scottârump wrangles at his ranch in Rio Ricondo.
I tracked tricks. I nabbed names. Harry played hide-the-hose with half of hip Hollywood. He mowed his meat on Monty Cliff. He laid the linguine on Leonard Bernstein. He boffed butch Burt Lancaster at Leo's Lavender Lounge.
Two no-name names and numbers nudged me. “Jack” and “Bill.”
I called Carla Cardiffâmy cop communications contact. She noodled the names and numbers. She ran them through her reverse book.
Holy
Hush-Hush
Hannahâ
Jolting Jack Webb. Wicked William H. Parker.
I BORROWED Ben Hong's Hudson Hornet. I parked by Parker's pad on Parkman.
Dusk dimmed down. Twilight twirled and slid through slits in the smog. I bopped behind belladonna and metastasized with ma huang. I was hopped up and homicidal.
Parker popped out of his pad. He poured himself into a Pontiac and punched it. He was bleary-eyed and blotto. He blew a red light and raised rubber.
I sidled up to a side window. I screwed off the screen and scrunched my way in. I listed and landed on the living-room rug.
I heard gravel growls. I flipped on my flashlight. My beam beat down on a beady-eyed bull terrier.
I tossed him a taste treat. Ben Hong's lichee-nut lollipop laced with LSD. The hound hooked it down and humped a hand-sewn hassock.
I peered around the pad. I slinked and slunk and surveilled surreptitious. I pored through piles of Parker's papers. I caught his coruscating correspondence.
Parker pen-palled with punk patriarchs in Paraguay. He kept carbon copies of his own nasty notes. He fulminated to Fulgencio Batista. He waxed weepy to Juan Perón. He ballyhooed Bum Blockade to rasty Rafael Trujillo. He lavishly lauded the “LAPD Reich” and lachrymosely lamented likely losses in the '58 elections.
William H. Parker, appointed chief of police in 1950 and serving until his death in 1966, molded the LAPD's paramilitary image that would earn the force both fame and infamy.
(Los Angeles Times Collection,
Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young
Research Library, UCLA)
?????
I pawed more papers. I shot through shelves and drove through dressers and drawers. I found a fat file: “'58âSenate/Governor's Race.”
I read itâred-eyed and
rapidamente.
Facts. Fatuous fancies. Prissy prognostications. Doleful dope on the cancerous candidates.
Idiot incumbents: Governor Goodwin J. Knight and senescent Senator William F. Knowland. Retards. Retread Republicans. Late-breaking lowdown: Both boobs plotted a ploy to ply themselves with more power. Noxious Knowland would seek the governor's seat. Goody Knight would swing a sweet switcheroo and sententiously seek the Senate.
Bodes big, but:
Goody and Boiled Bill boasted paltry poll numbers. The numbers negated them and nodded to their obvious opponents:
Senator Clair Engleâa Democratic demagogue. Attorney General Edmund G. “Pat” Brownâa dipsomaniacal Democrat diva.
The file fulminated:
Pat Brown bristled and broiled with hate for Bill Parker. Brown brewed a brilliant plan to broast himâif he got his gloves on Goody Knight's governorship.
Pat patterned a plenary plan to plow the LAPD. Fuckâfull-scale floodlights on their fascist agenda!
The file text turned torrid.
Parker paid heavy headshrinkers to hatch populist polls. Their freakily Freudian findings:
Cal Californian calls it this way. Carla Californian concurs. We want Homeric heroes to love and lead us. Menschy men with magnetic machismo. We want magnanimously male MOVIE STARS.
Ooo-hooh, Daddy-o! I was digging it all, Democratic!
Torrid text. Followed by: filched tax returns.
Menschy men:
Doofus Duke Wayne. Holy Hank Fonda. Randolph Scott and Robert Taylorâturgid turd burglars tracked from a trick book.
I read the returns. Doofus Dukeâsolidly solvent. Holy Hankâ in hock on stiffed stocks and half-breed haoles hatched in Hawaii. Robert and Randyârolling in rice.
Oooooh, papa-san! I was paring it down, paranoiac!
JACK WEBB LIVED in a lurid lanai in Laurel Canyon. A lavish lean-to off Leawood and Lotus Lane.
I slid my sled slow to the curb. I bipped the back bumper of a big Bonneville. Fuckâa furtive fuzzmobile with fish fins and a wiggly whip antenna.
I loped around the lanai. I leaned low and lurked under wide windowsills. I popped up and peeked the pad. I spotted Jive Jack and John O'Grady.
Simmering silhouettes. Bad boys backlit by lava lamps and low shadows. A TV cop caught in a conundrum. A goon who got Getchellized.
Webb waved a scrawled-up script. O'Grady groused and grew grave. I loitered and listened.
Webb said, “I want Ronald Reagan. Randy Scott's too swishy to play a cop.”
O'Grady sneered snide. “We've got no wedge on Reaganâand he won't work for the low coin the Chief's paying.”
A ripe revelation ripped me:
Harry Hungwell's whore book. One wild wedge on Raw Randy Scott.
Webb whined and whinnied. “Johnny, have a heart. I don't want to direct this fucking lox.”
O'Grady said, “Shitfire, Jack, you have to. You direct
Bum
Blockade
or Parker pulls the LAPD's sanction on
Dragnet.
”
Webb withered. “Okay, I'll do it. Jesus fucking Christ.”
O'Grady groaned. “No, Danny Getchell.”
Webb said, “What's that cocksucker got to doâ”
“He killed a fruit hustler at the Lincoln Heights tank. The D.A. just issued a warrant. The first cop who spots him will waste his alliterative ass.”
Cowabunga! Call it coldâcop conspiracies collidingâ
Webb whistled. “That fuck will rue the day he wrote that blind item.”
O'Grady said, “Rue, shit. You just be at the set at midnight. We're hijacking a load of wetbacks and bringing them in to play bums. Between them and those humps we got from the tank, we'll have enough extras.”
A telephone trilled. O'Grady grabbed it.
“Yeah?”
Scintillating silence. O'Gradyâgrossly gruff.
“Listen, Pancho, you'll do as you're told. The truck's crossing the border at eleven. We'll take it down in Chula Vista.”
Simmering silence. O'Grady: “Yeah, what's the plate number? . . . DDX089. . . . Yeah, right.”
I went slit-eyed. I sluiced back to my sled and slid in. I sliced southâsilent and psychopathic.