“I’m gonna let you two wander about, you know, so you can get the feel. Buying a home is a real head-shaker. I don’t want to rush you none.”
Then Lila left. We heard her going down the stairway. Sarah and I stepped out into the hallway. Hanging near us, from a frayed rope, was an old rusted coffeepot.
“Oh my god,” Sarah said suddenly, “my god!”
“What is it?”
“I’ve seen photos of this house before! I remember now! I thought it looked familiar!”
“What? What is it?”
“This is one of the houses where Charles Manson killed somebody!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Let’s get out of here...”
We went on down the stairway. They were waiting for us down there: Lila, Darlene and Double Quartet.
“Well,” asked Lila, “what do you think?”
“I’ve got your card with your phone number,” I told her, “We can get in touch.”
“If you people are artists,” said Darlene, “we can knock some off the price. We like artists. Are you artists?”
“No,” I said. “Well, I’m not, anyhow.”
“I can show you some more places,” said Lila.
“No, no,” said Sarah, “we’ve seen enough today. We have to rest up.”
We had to push past them, and all the time Double Quartet just kept smiling, smiling...
11
Back at my place there were two envelopes. While Sarah got a bottle of wine I opened one of the envelopes. It was a manuscript of some sort, with a covering note:
Chinaski! Piss on you! You were once a great writer! Now you suck! You’ve sold out! My grandmother writes better shit than you do! You’ve had your head up your asshole too long! I sent my stuff to your publisher and he sent back a letter. He said “Thank you for submitting but we are overstocked.” The prick, I’ll overstock his butthole! He gobbles shit for breakfast!
The great poets are ignored. They are afraid of the great poets! You were once a great poet but now you are only a band-aid covering a pus-hole! You gobble your own weenie under a sky of vomit! You’ve sold your balls to the butcher! You’ve killed the baby of your love! You are monkey stink! Forever and ever and ever!
I enclose some of my latest work...
He signed his name with a leaping downward stroke to the right, making a long curving line after the last letter of his name, and below that, what appeared to be a drawing of a face.
It was an envelope full of poems, none of them typewritten. They were hastily printed in blue ink on yellow paper with thin blue lines.
Sarah brought the wine bottle and corkscrew, opened it herself and poured two glasses.
“Charles Manson,” she said, “no wonder they wanted to let that place go cheap.”
“I’m glad you remembered the photographs.”
Sarah opened the Herald Examiner and I began on the first poem:
THE POET
they slay the poet
they burn the poet
they ignore the poet
they hate the poet
but the moon knows
the poet
and the prostitutes
know
the agony of the
poet
and they give it to him
for free
they lick the hair
of his balls in
holy prayer
the poet will not die
even in death
he sits inside the
moon
and gives the finger
to the
universe!
THE POET AT PLAY:
I suck her strawberry
tits.
I suck the hairs of
her ass.
I eat her vanilla
come.
at dawn she sucks
my toes.
I sneeze through my
ass.
she laughs.
we
sleep.
I didn’t feel inclined to read the remainder of the manuscript. I knew what the remaining poems would be about: THE POET.
Sarah looked up from the Herald Examiner.
“Somebody send you some more poems to read?”
“Yes, it happens 3 or 4 times a month.”
“You’re not a publisher. Why do they do it?”
“It’s a hate-love relationship they feel toward me.”
“How are his poems?”
“He’s not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.”
“You get poems from Women too, right?”
“Yeah. Some of them with nude photos and come-ons. They think I can get them published. Or they want a blurb for the cover of some small press book.”
“Those dirty cunts!”
“Right!”
We clicked our glasses, drained them, then I poured two more.
I opened the other envelope. It was from Vin Marbad:
ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION
I began reading. The jargon was Corporate Lawyer. I tried to break it down into plain English and a part I disliked immediately said:
If the President of the Corporation is judged insane by a court-appointed psychiatrist the other members of said Corporation may by a majority vote divide all the assets of said Corporation equally among themselves.
I took my pen and crossed this passage out with heavy dark lines. Then I poured another drink after emptying my glass and read on:
If the President of said Corporation is judged incapable to carry out his duties because of the use of drugs or intoxicating beverages, or if he is deemed sexually overactive detrimental to the common good of Society or the Corporation, then after a majority vote of said members, the President of said Corporation will be placed in a role of diminished authority and all assets of said Corporation will be divided equally among the remaining members.
I took my pen and heavily marked out this section. Then read further:
If the President of the Corporation is judged senile...
I crossed out this passage.
If the President of the Corporation is addicted to gambling...
Cross out.
The President of the Corporation is allowed one vote equal to the vote of each member, all votes counting the same...
Cross out.
I read on and on. It was horrifying, it seemed barbaric. It was terrifying. I crossed out passage after passage. There must have been 17 or 18 pages. When I finished, the pages were a mass of black lines.
Sarah brought another bottle. I pushed the pages away.
“God Almighty, God Almighty, this has made me sick! This is wretched and pitiful stuff! I can’t believe it!”
“Don’t sign that crap then,” said Sarah.
“Never,” I said.
I found a piece of paper, then wrote on it;
“Vin: I can’t do it. This is a nightmare in hell!”
Then I jammed everything into the stamped return envelope and pushed it away to mail later.
“It’s been a long day,” said Sarah.
“And Charles Manson is not the only killer,” I added.
“You know,” she said, “he bumped them right off. The others do it from a distance and seldom get caught.”
“Let’s drink a while,” I said, “and readjust to our own reality.”
“Let’s drink until the sun comes up.”
“Really?”
“Sure, why not?”
“You’re on,” I said, already feeling much better.
12
The place I was living in at that time did have some qualities. One of the finest was the bedroom which was painted a dark, dark blue. That dark dark blue had provided a haven for many a hangover, some of them brutal enough to almost kill a man, especially at a time when I was popping pills which people would give me without my bothering to ask what they were. Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die. I would
walk around alone all night, from the bedroom to the bathroom and from the bathroom through the front room and into the kitchen. I opened and closed the refrigerator, time and time again. I turned the faucets on and off. Then I went to the bathroom and turned the faucets on and off. I flushed the toilet. I pulled at my ears. I inhaled and exhaled. Then, when the sun came up, I knew I was safe. Then I would sleep with the dark dark blue walls, healing.
Another feature of that place were the knocks of unsavory women at 3 or 4 a.m. They certainly weren’t ladies of great charm, but having a foolish turn of mind, I felt that somehow they brought me adventure. The real fact of the matter was that many of them had no place else to go. And they liked the fact that there was drink and that I didn’t work too hard trying to bed down with them.
Of course, after I met Sarah, this part of my lifestyle changed quite a bit.
That neighborhood around Carlton Way near Western Avenue was changing too. It had been almost all lower-class white, but political troubles in Central America and other parts of the world had brought a new type of individual to the neighborhood. The male usually was small, a dark or light brown, usually young. There were wives, children, brothers, cousins, friends. They began filling up the apartments and courts. They lived many to an apartment and I was one of the few whites left in the court complex.
The children ran up and down, up and down the court walkway. They all seemed to be between two and seven years old. They had no bikes or toys. The wives were seldom seen. They remained inside, hidden. Many of the men also remained inside. It was not wise to let the landlord know how many people were living in a single unit. The few men seen outside were the legal renters. At least they paid the rent. How they survived was unknown. The men were small, thin, silent, unsmiling. Most sat on the porch steps in their undershirts, slumped forward a bit, occasionally smoking a cigarette. They sat on the porch steps for hours, motionless. Sometimes they purchased very old junk automobiles and the men drove them slowly about the neighborhood. They had no auto insurance or driver’s licenses and they drove with expired license plates. Most of the cars had defective brakes. The men almost never stopped at the corner stop sign and often failed to heed red lights, but there were few accidents. Something was watching over them.
After a while the cars would break down but my new neighbors wouldn’t leave them on the street. They would drive them up the walkways and park them directly outside their door. First they would work on the engine. They would take off the hood and the engine would rust in the rain. Then they would put the car on blocks and remove the wheels. They took the wheels inside and kept them there so they wouldn’t be stolen at night.
While I was living there, there were two rows of cars lined up in the court, just sitting there on blocks. The men sat motionless on their porches in their undershirts. Sometimes I would nod or wave to them. They never responded. Apparently they couldn’t understand or read the eviction notices and they tore them up, but I did see them studying the daily L. A. papers. They were stoic and durable because compared to where they had come from, things were now easy.
Well, no matter. My tax consultant had suggested I purchase a house, and so for me it wasn’t really a matter of “white flight.” Although, who knows? I had noticed that each time I had moved in Los Angeles over the years, each move had always been to the North and to the West.
Finally, after a few weeks of house hunting, we found the one. After the down payment the monthly payments came to $789.81. There was a huge hedge in front on the street and the yard was also in front so the house sat way back on the lot. It looked like a damned good place to hide. There was even a stairway, an upstairs with a bedroom, bathroom and what was to become my typing room. And there was an old desk left in there, a huge ugly old thing. Now, after decades, I was a writer with a desk. Yes, I felt the fear, the fear of becoming like them. Worse, I had an assignment to write a screenplay. Was I doomed and damned, was I about to be sucked dry? I didn’t feel it would be that way. But does anybody, ever?
Sarah and I moved our few possessions in.
The big moment came. I sat the typewriter down on the desk and I put a piece of paper in there and I hit the keys. The typewriter still worked. And there was plenty of room for an ashtray, the radio and the bottle. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Life begins at 65.
13
Down at the Marina del Rey times were getting hard. For transportation Jon Pinchot was driving a green 1968 Pontiac convertible and François Racine drove a brown 1958 Ford. They also had two Kawasaki motorcycles, a 750 and a 1000.
Wenner Zergog had borrowed the 1958 Ford and by driving the car without putting water in the radiator had cracked the engine block.
“He’s a genius,” Jon told me. “He doesn’t know about such things.”
The motorcycles were the first to go. The 1958 was used for shorter trips.
Then François Racine packed off for France. Jon sold the 1958 Ford.
And then, of course, the day came when the phone rang and there was Jon.
“I’ve got to move. They are going to tear this place down and build a hotel or something. Shit, I don’t know where to go. I’d like to stay in town and work out a deal for your screenplay. How’s that thing coming along?”
“Oh, it’s coming...”
“I’m close to a deal. And if it falls through I’ve got a guy in Canada. But I’ve got to move. The bulldozers are on the way.”
“Listen, Jon, you can stay at our place. We’ve got a downstairs bedroom.”
“You mean that?”
“Sure...”
“I’ll be out most of the time. You won’t know I’m there.”
“You still have that 1968 Pontiac?”
“Yes...”
“Then put your stuff in and come on over...”
I walked downstairs and told Sarah. “Jon is moving in for a while.”
“What?”
“Jon Pinchot. They’re going to bulldoze his place. He’ll be staying here a while.”
“Hank, you know you can’t stand living with people. It will drive you crazy.”
“It will just be for a little while...”
“You’ll be upstairs typing and he’ll be downstairs listening. It won’t work.”
“I’ll make it work. Jon has paid me money to write this thing.”
“Good luck,” she said, then turned and walked into the kitchen.
The first two nights weren’t bad: Jon and Sarah and I just drank and talked. Jon told some stories, mostly about problems with actors and what he had had to do to get them to perform. There was one fellow, halfway through a shooting, who suddenly refused to talk. He would rehearse the scenes but he wouldn’t speak. He was demanding that a certain scene be shot as he wished. They were in the middle of a jungle somewhere and running out of time and money. Finally Jon told the actor, “Shit, have it your way!” And the actor acted out the scene his way, with dialog. Only he didn’t know that there wasn’t any film in the camera. After that, there were no problems.
It was on the second night that the wine really flowed. I did some talking myself, mostly repeat stuff, stuff that I had already typed up long ago. It was early in the a.m. when Jon said, “Giselle has fallen in love with a director with one ball...”
Giselle was Jon’s girlfriend in Paris.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Only it’s worse now. Cancer. They have cut out the other ball too. Giselle is very very distraught.”
“It sure seems like bad luck.”
“Yes, yes, I write her, I phone her...I do all I can to help. And there they are in the middle of a shooting...”
(Everything always happened in the middle of a shooting.)
Giselle was a famous actress in France. She shared an apartment with Jon in Paris.
We attempted to cheer Jon up about his girlfriend’s bad luck. He unpeeled a long cigar, licked it, bit off the end, lit up, inhaled and let out the first plume of exotic smoke.
“You know, Hank, I always knew that you would write a screenplay for me. There are things that a man knows instinctively. I’ve known this for a long time. And I’ve been searching for the money to do this for a long time, long before I contacted you.”
“Maybe I’ll write a very bad screenplay.”
“You won’t. I’ve read everything you’ve written.”
“That’s past. In the writing profession there are more has-beens than anything else.”
“This does not apply to you.”
“I believe he’s right, Hank,” said Sarah, “you’re just a natural-ass writer.”
“But a screenplay! Shit, it’s like I’ve been roller skating and now you put me on an ice rink!”
“You’ll do it. I know you’ll do it, I knew you would do it when I was in Russia.”
“Russia?”
“Yes, before I met you I went to Russia looking for the money to produce your future screenplay.”
“Which I didn’t know anything about yet.”
“Exactly. Only I knew. Anyhow, I heard from a reliable source that there was a woman in Russia who had $80 million in a Swiss account.”
“Sounds like a cheap TV thriller.”
“Yes, I know. But I checked. I have sources for this kind of thing that are very good. I can’t tell you too much about them.”
“We don’t want to know,” said Sarah.
“So I found out the lady’s address. And then began the long slow process. I began writing the lady letters...”
“What did you do?” asked Sarah, “put in frontal nude photos?”
“Or anal nudes?” I asked.
“Not at first. At first the letters were quite formal. I told her that I had come upon her address in the strangest way, that I had found it scribbled on a tiny piece of paper in a shoe box in a closet in Paris. I suggested that we might be destined. Oh, you have no idea how hard I worked on those letters!”
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