Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  And so, one June night in 1980, I began to write what became the first pages of The Little Death. They were my homage to those opening scenes in classic noir fiction where the beautiful, seductive dame shows up at the private eye’s shabby office with an implausible story and troubles no sane man would want to touch. But in my scene, the private eye is a burned-out, gay public defender and the dame is a handsome gay boy brought in on drug charges who claims to have no memory of the events that led to his arrest. The lawyer is skeptical but also, in classic noir style, immediately smitten. And that, for the next three years, was as far as I got.

  7.

  In September of 1980 I went to work for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office. The City Attorney was responsible for all of the city’s civil law work, from conducting contract negotiations with public employee unions to defending police officers sued in federal court for excessive force to representing the city in tort suits arising from slip and fall accidents at bus stops. Unusually for a city attorney’s office, the L.A. City Attorney also prosecuted criminal cases, though these were limited to misdemeanor violations occurring within the city limits (the District Attorney prosecuted all felonies.)

  Although misdemeanor connotes a relatively minor offense, in California a section of the Penal Code allows more serious crimes—domestic violence and assaults with a deadly weapon for example—to be charged either as felonies or misdemeanors at the discretion of the District Attorney. My caseload as a Deputy City Attorney often included crimes that the District Attorney had kicked down to misdemeanor status because there were problems of proof or the victims and witnesses were as unsavory as the defendant or because, as in the case of domestic violence against women, the crimes were not taken seriously.

  Following a six-week training program, I was escorted by my supervisor into a courtroom at the Criminal Courts Building on Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles, shown where to sit, handled a couple of dozen case files, given her phone number which was to be used only in the case of extreme emergencies, and left to sink or swim. It was terrifying! It was exhilarating! This was what I had imagined it meant to be a lawyer and after the bloodless tedium of law school I threw myself into it.

  Over the course of the next four years, I tried 60 or so cases to a jury, another dozen or so to the court sitting without a jury and argued innumerable motions. In addition to staffing a trial court, I worked the arraignment court, a job that included the responsibility of reading arrest reports and deciding which crimes to charge. I also worked the master calendar court which is where all cases came after arraignment to be, in theory, sent out for trial. With over two hundred cases a day, and limited trial courts, most of those cases were either continued, resolved by pleas or, for one reason or another, dismissed. Nonetheless, our witness coordinators had to call the witnesses in every case to make sure they had been properly subpoenaed and were available should a case go to trial. (Our most effective witness coordinator was a thin, middle-aged African-American guy named John Freeman, a fount of weary wisdom. Years later, when I needed an investigator for Rios, I remembered John and patterned Freeman Vidor after him.)

  My job was all-consuming. Writing receded into the distance. Yet, there was that part of me that was apparently taking mental notes of my encounters with defense lawyers, cops, judges, defendants, jurors, victims and witnesses. These impressions bubbled just beneath my consciousness and were, unbeknownst to me, forming themselves into characters and stories that would eventually rise to the surface and demand to be told.

  And what characters and stories they were. L.A. cops, I observed, seemed to think of themselves not so much as public servants but an occupying military force, particularly in the city’s poor black and Latino neighborhoods, regarding the inhabitants of these areas not as citizens but potential enemies. Defense lawyers seemed to fall into three categories: the zealots for whom prosecutors like me were tools of an oppressive system; marginally competent lawyers who made their living taking court appointments and who could be counted on to plead out their clients at the earliest opportunity; and the occasional first-rate, big-time, privately-retained defense lawyers, slumming in misdemeanor land, who were polished, prepared and dispassionate, a joy to watch in trial even when they beat me.

  The municipal court judges were also a quirky lot. Municipal court was the first stop in a judicial career and the up-and-comers rarely stayed for more than a few years. At the time, in the 1980s, however, many of them were appointees of a liberal Democratic governor who had been succeeded by a reactionary Republican. They found themselves stalled trying drunk driving cases when what they really wanted was a seat on the Superior Court or the appellate bench. These frustrated judges tended to be a little cranky which, combined with their liberal tendencies, made for a rough ride if you were the prosecutor. There was nothing like being dressed down in front of jury for having interposed a perfectly legitimate hearsay objection by an enraged judge known behind her back as Cocaine Annie. Then there were the lifers on the bench who had, upon their elevation, reached (or even exceeded) the limits of their competence. One of my favorites was a red-faced, white-haired, jowly ex-police detective turned lawyer turned appointed judge whose post-lunch, bourbon-scented breath wafted across the well of the court to where I was standing arguing against a suppression motion. He regarded me with bloodshot eyes and interrupted me with a muttered, “Motion denied,” before departing the bench for a pick-me-up in his chambers. There were also some quite excellent judges, some demanding, some gracious, all of them briskly intelligent and thoughtful.

  After every trial, win or lose, I would talk to some of the jurors about the case and what had persuaded or failed to persuade them to convict the defendant. These were rarely edifying conversations. The things that moved jurors in one direction or another often had little to do with my meticulously prepared case. They based their decisions on which of the witnesses or lawyers they liked best, as if a trial were a high school popularity contest. When I figured this out, I used it by trying to stack the jury with jurors with whom I registered high on the likeability quotient. I did particularly well among older women (I was in my mid-twenties at the time and looked several years younger) in whom I evidently triggered a maternal instinct; they wanted me to succeed and would vote to convict for that reason alone. Once, after a trial, one of these women said, affectionately, “You’re too young to be a lawyer,” and actually pinched my cheek!

  The victims were the people who ultimately drove me out of the prosecutor’s office because their suffering reminded me that trials were not, after all, a sporting event. There was rarely any justice for the victims of crime in the criminal justice system, even when the defendant was convicted, because his crime had rent the fabric of their reality in ways the law could not repair. Contrary to TV lawyer shows, most crimes are committed by poor people against poor people who are usually black or brown. It is difficult and inconvenient enough to be poor in this society without the added stress of being beaten or robbed or sexually assaulted. This was brought home to me in a car theft case. The woman whose car had been stolen appeared faithfully for trial every time the case came up and every time the case was continued by the defense. She grew increasingly frustrated by the delays and I finally negotiated a plea bargain to settle the case so she wouldn’t have to come back to court. When I told her, I expected thanks, I guess. Instead, she burst into angry tears. Didn’t I understand that the loss of her car meant she had no way to work and had lost her job? What was I going to do about that? Nothing, I could do nothing, except send the thief to jail for six months for joyriding. I held her while she sobbed. I have never forgotten the futility and pointlessness I felt at that moment in my efforts to achieve “justice” for her.

  8.

  At the end of my second year at Stanford one of my classmates and I became boyfriends. After graduation, Bill had a clerkship with a federal judge in his hometown of Cleveland. When that ended, we reunited in Los Angeles and he went to work for
a big law firm. We found friends among other young gay and lesbian professionals. One of them was a surgeon who wrote science fiction. I told him about The Little Death. As it happened, John was taking a private writing class from a man named Paul Gillette. John suggested that I come to the class and show Paul what I had written. Hastily, I typed up the few pages of The Little Death and went with John to his class to present them to Paul.

  Paul’s 1996 Los Angeles Times obituary is captioned “Paul Gillette; Novelist, Wine Expert and Scriptwriter.” This captures the scope of his professional activities but doesn’t begin to hint at his larger-than-life personality. Like many people in L.A. who had rubbed up against the movie industry, Paul was a performer and the class was his stage.

  Paul was a journeyman writer who enjoyed his greatest success in the 70s when he produced a series of novels including Play Misty for Me, which Clint Eastwood made into a movie. Play Misty for Me is about a playboy radio DJ who starts a casual affair with a woman who turns out to be psychotic and stalks and attempts to murder him. The themes of the novel say a lot about Paul. He was shaped by the “Sexual Revolution” of the 60s which promised (with the help of the birth control pill) to liberate men and women from the restraints of conventional sexual morality but which for many straight men seemed to end up being a weird mishmash of licentiousness and misogyny. Guys might feel free to go bed hopping with no commitments but they couldn’t shake their underlying fear of women as personified in Paul’s novel as a knife-wielding maniac. Paul combined a Playboy magazine ideal of male worldliness with the social and sexual anxieties of a small town boy (he hailed from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, current population 8,891).

  Paul was, physically, a florid man. He was overweight but he carried his bulk like an athlete and seemed powerful rather than fat. A photograph of himself in military uniform standing beside John F. Kennedy showed he had been a handsome young man, but twenty-plus years later his face had a balloon-like quality as if it had been inflated by the passage of time, too much rich food and many, many bottles of wine.

  Paul’s class met on Thursday nights from 7 to 10 in his third-floor offices in a boxy, run-down building on Sunset Boulevard a little east of Highland from which he conducted his publishing business, producing what the Times obit described as “beverage industry trade newsletters.” There was a small reception area that led into a large office fronting Sunset. He sat at his desk while we students—at any given time there were ten to fifteen of us—arranged ourselves in a semi-circle around him on folding chairs. Behind us was a good-sized storage room filled with cases of wine and stacks of his novels. (Rios’s office on Sunset Boulevard is modeled on Paul’s.) There were always a half dozen open bottles of wine on Paul’s big desk from which we were free to imbibe. He himself kept his glass filled, using it as a prop while he passed judgment on our weekly literary offerings.

  The first time I walked into his office and surveyed the landscape—big man in a blue blazer, white shirt and rep tie sonorously holding forth to a middle-aged group of acolytes with a half-filled wine glass he deployed like a conductor’s baton—I nearly turned around and walked out. This was not the sedate literary gathering I had expected. But I stayed and listened. The set-up was that students signed up the week before to present their pages which were critiqued in 30-minute sessions, first by their fellow students and then by Paul. Paul listened intently to the student comments, mostly patrolling them for civility, and then, clearing his throat, would announce, “And now it’s my turn.” He delivered a detailed and always acute analysis of a scene’s strengths and weaknesses, plausibility and implausibility, graceful or clumsy style before seizing upon a particular point—a plot turn, a bit of dialogue, description or characterization—and using it to launch into a mini-lecture on that subject before summing up with his invariable, “Excellent work.”

  He was a magnificent teacher, shrewd, knowledgeable about craft, generous and patient. Moreover, Paul approached writing in the same way that his blue-collar forebears in Carbondale had approached mining or plumbing or selling dry goods—writing is a job and to do it well you worked hard to master the fundamental elements of which literature is constructed. Paul’s class was all nuts and bolts; there was no drifting into the ether. His working-class approach to writing resonated deeply with me because it assured me that writing a novel was not a grace bestowed upon the fortunate few but an achievement within the grasp of a born striver like me. At the end of that class, I shyly handed Paul the opening pages of The Little Death and told him I wasn’t sure if I had anything but would he call me during the week to let me know if he thought this was something worth pursuing? A couple of days later he called and announced, “This is a book that must be published and I will help you do it.”

  Over the course of the next year—this was 1982-83—I presented a chapter a month in Paul’s class and finished the manuscript of The Little Death just a few days shy of my twenty-ninth birthday. After so many years I do not, of course, remember Paul’s precise comments as I was working on the book; what survives in my memory is an overall impression of the acuity of his critiques and the generosity of his encouragement. The latter is important—I was very nervous about how he and my fellow students would receive my gay protagonist. But I needn’t have worried because Paul took a sophisticated view of the subject matter and that set the tone. It helped, too, that I was young, cute and self-effacing. (When one of my fellow students, a retired military man, suggested I give Rios a signature drink, I replied, “Pink lady?” The class thought this was hilarious.) A number of Paul’s other students were also really fine writers and I was not the only one who was eventually published. By and large, we gave each other’s work attentive and respectful readings, so different than what I hear goes on in many MFA classes. But then, we were not in competition with each other. Paul had a mantra I have taken to heart that, for a writer, the only true ambition worth having is the ambition to write well.

  True to his word, Paul attempted to use his contacts in New York to find a publisher for The Little Death but his efforts were

  fruitless. Back in the 1980s, some publishers would still look at manuscripts submitted “over the transom,” that is, by the writer directly without an agent. Over the course of the next year, I submitted The Little Death to 13 publishers. The book was rejected by every one of them. The common theme in the rejection letters was that, while the book was well-written, the editors could not see a readership for, as one of them put it, “material like this.” No one had to explain to me what that was code for.

  9.

  How Rios got his name. When I pulled out the handwritten pages of The Little Death to type them up to present to Paul, my lawyer protagonist was still nameless. When Matt Coles and I had been spinning our version of the story, we called him Nick but Nick was too breezy for the brooding figure who had begun to emerge from my pages. I needed a name that was solemn and memorable. But what?

  The criminal division of the City’s Attorney’s office was on the fifth floor of City Hall South across Main Street from the iconic Los Angeles City Hall of Dragnet. The two buildings were connected by a skywalk I sometimes took to the Criminal Courts Building which was on the other side of City Hall. One afternoon on my way to court I noticed a bust on a pedestal at the City Hall end of the skywalk and stopped to take a look. The bust was of the bureaucrat for whom the skywalk had been named: Henry P. Rio. With a little tweaking, Henry Rios was born.

  10.

  The rejections of The Little Death were disappointing but I had written it as kind of a lark and finishing it felt like accomplishment enough. Now that I knew how to write fiction, I thought I would put The Little Death in a drawer and try my hand at a “serious” novel.

  The Silverlake district was halfway between downtown where I worked and the Fairfax neighborhood where I lived. A friend of mine told me there was a gay bookstore, A Different Light, at the intersection of Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards in a tatty, one-story building which loo
ked not much different from the outside than the TV repair and discount shoe stores around it. Unlike the windowless pornographic bookstore across the street, however, A Different Light had plate glass windows and signage that announced its business purpose. Still, it was enough off the beaten track that foot traffic was minimal and most of its patrons were gay men like me who had heard of it via word of mouth. The store consisted of two big rectangular rooms lined with bookshelves and scattered with tables that displayed new releases. The carpet was worn and the walls needed paint but it looked lived-in rather than squalid; the shabby but cozy home of a confirmed bibliophile. This impression was heightened by the proprietor, a large, friendly, bearded man who wore flannel shirts and bore a passing resemblance to Walt Whitman in his later Good, Gray Poet days.

  Richard Labonté, a native-born Canadian, came to Los Angeles specifically to open a gay bookstore. By the time I stumbled across it, he and the store were fast becoming institutions in Los Angeles’s gay community. I showed up when Christopher Isherwood signed his last book to a crowd that extended outside the store and around the corner. Visiting gay writers from New York and San Francisco packed its tiny space and local playwright James Carroll Pickett curated an ongoing reading series for L.A. writers. In those days before the internet, when media representations of gays and lesbians were either nonexistent or pejorative, books were the one vehicle for the transmission of our stories and our lives as they actually were. Every gay man I knew had his half-shelf of the same gay novels, from New York writers like Andrew Holleran and Edmund White, San Francisco’s Armistead Maupin and the Brandstetter books of Joe Hansen as well as the classics like Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, Isherwood’s A Single Man and John Rechy’s City of Night. We read and reread these volumes because they were the only cultural mirrors we had and even when we did not see our exact reflections, there was enough of a resemblance so that our lives felt validated. Words validated us, reminded us we were not alone and that, in the face of society’s still relentless animus, our struggle to live authentic, open lives had a moral purpose. That, as Paul Goodman wrote in a poem, “We deviate but do not err.”