A Life in Parts

by Bryan Cranston

  Throughout high school I got sneakier and sneakier. I somehow connived to obtain two student-ID cards; both pictured me, but my alter ego was named Bill Johnson (I picked a name I could easily remember). My idea was that if I got into trouble, I could throw the authorities off Bryan Cranston’s scent by handing them Bill Johnson’s ID card. Bryan was in twelfth grade, Canoga Park High class of ’74. But Bill was class of ’75, a junior. I didn’t want any confusion. I considered every detail.

  I belonged to no school clubs or organizations, but on photo day my best friend, Sergio Garcia, and I inserted ourselves into a good many group shots. There we were among the Knights and Ladies. And standing tall with the proud members of the Chemistry Club. We were also handsome cub reporters on the Hunter’s Call, the school paper. The other kids actually took part in something; they learned about science or journalism or . . . I don’t know what the Knights and Ladies learned about. But I was just there to pose for a picture. It was a goof, a joke, and all the other kids thought it was funny, but behind the joke was the truth: I was a guy searching. Showing up for the wrong things. Not showing up for the right things.

  And in fact in my senior yearbook I am missing from the row of students with last names beginning with C. At some point, I drew an arrow to the place I should have been pictured and wrote in all caps: WHERE AM I? RIP-OFF!

  WHERE AM I?

  Beast Feeder

  I picked up a job a few blocks from my home, preparing the Sunday Los Angeles Times for delivery. Boring. But on the plus side, I got to work with Reuben Valdez. Reuben was an excellent athlete, with a great personality and a smile that made him popular with girls. I, on the other hand, didn’t make the baseball team, and I had a crooked smile. I was unremarkable and shy. I liked working alongside a beam of light like Reuben. Maybe some of his light would rub off on me.

  We arrived at our jobsite, an industrial garage unit, at 3:00 a.m., and the unmistakable scent of newsprint hit us before we even rolled up the metal door. We went to work assembling all the sections of the paper that had been dropped off at the door. Then one of us fed the beast, an ancient paper-folding machine with an assembly line of rollers and a wrapper; the beast made a horrible crunching sound as it bent the thick paper and tied it with string. The guy who wasn’t feeding collected the finished products and stacked them for our boss, Leroy Waco, whose name was pronounced with a long A like the city in Texas, but of course we called him “Wacko.”

  At dawn, when we were finished feeding and stacking, we’d stuff Leroy’s car. He’d go off to deliver, and I’d walk home in an exhausted stupor.

  Leroy was busier than a one-armed man flinging newspapers from a stick-shift VW Bug. Actually, that’s exactly what he was. The guys at the paper called him the one-armed bandit. He had lost his right arm. (I never asked how.) He’d slip his left arm through the steering wheel and rest it on the shifter. When he approached a customer’s home, he’d slow down, put the car in neutral, and pull his arm free, steering with his knees. He’d grab a paper and then hurl it toward a porch or driveway. He never, ever missed his target. He had the elegance, precision, and timing of a Gold Glove shortstop turning a double play.

  Occasionally when we were ahead of schedule and the papers were wrapped and ready to go, I would ride shotgun. “Coming up!” Leroy would say. That was my cue. Wedged into the passenger seat, I’d prepare to toss a paper out my window. We’d slow to a crawl. “NOW!” Out it went. I did not have a fraction of Leroy’s skills. I hit a lot of trees. A lot of gutters. “Goddamn it, kid,” Leroy grumbled. He called both Reuben and me “kid.” I don’t think he ever knew our names. We’d come to a stop, and I’d run out and put the paper where it belonged.

  It didn’t take long for Leroy to reconsider my role. “Just keep a steady supply of papers for me to grab when I’m ready,” he’d say with a sigh. Just feed the beast.

  Housepainter

  When the beast-feeding finally got to me, my friend Jeff suggested I work for his dad, a housepainter who needed help on the weekends. I’d met Jeff in the West Valley Division of the Los Angeles Police Department Explorers, a branch of the Boy Scouts. He was Native American, and his last name was Redman, and he was able to joke about it. He was cool and streetwise, with a strong mischievous streak. His dad, Jim, was a man of few words.

  On our first day together, a Saturday, Jim picked me up at 6:00 a.m., and we rode in silence to an industrial building, a job he’d already started. When we began, he tossed a rag to me and said, “Soak that in turpentine and keep it in yer back pocket. Any time you make a mess, clean it up right away. It’ll be your best friend.”

  “Okay,” I said. Made sense.

  We finished day one at dusk. I was beat. And uncomfortable. By the time Jim picked me up the next morning, I had developed a mysterious rash on my backside, raw and itchy and irritating as all hell. On the drive to work, he noticed me scratching my sore left ass cheek.

  “What’s the problem?”

  I told him that I didn’t know, but something probably bit me or else I was having some kind of allergic reaction. I glanced his way and caught a slight smile crossing his lips. We sat in silence for a while—easy for men to do. But why would he be smiling? Then it dawned on me. He told me to keep the turpentine-soaked rag in my back pocket. It was the turpentine! That bastard did it on purpose!

  I didn’t say anything. I took it as some type of initiation. But I did find another location to stash my turpentine rag.

  One day after quitting time, we didn’t go straight home. Instead, Jim drove to a far-flung neighborhood. In the alley behind a row of tract houses he slowed to a stop and got out of the truck. I wondered where he was going but didn’t say anything. I had become accustomed to his taciturn ways. He peered over a fence and then came back into the truck cab. He handed me a lunch-sized brown paper bag and told me not to open it. “Just take it up onto the bed of the truck. When you’re up there, look over the fence and you’ll see a swimming pool. Toss the bag into the pool, then come on down and get back in the truck.”

  The task seemed simple enough, and I knew why he asked me to do it instead of doing it himself. The years of physical labor had beaten him up pretty badly. He had limited mobility in his arms.

  I began to ask what was in the bag. “Just go on,” he said, and I did as my boss instructed, hopping into the back of the truck and peering over the tall fence that separated the homeowner’s property from the alley. I saw that it was an easy fifteen feet to the pool’s edge, so the throw had to be at least that. Better to be long than have it land on the deck or a chair. I flashed back to how disappointed one-armed Leroy had been after I’d botched it with the newspapers. I couldn’t mess this up. I weighed the bag with my hand and determined that it was heavy enough to toss underhand, like a horseshoe. I gauged the distance several times, thinking it all through, and finally Jim got impatient. “What the hell are you doing up there? Throw the goddamn bag.”

  I took a deep breath and I tossed it high into the air. It felt good. It looked good. It WAS good! Right in the middle of the pool. Swoosh. YES! I quietly pumped my fist and scampered down and into the truck’s cab. As Jim drove off I waited for an explanation. When that wasn’t forthcoming, I asked. He nodded and smiled. “Inside the bag was dried India ink,” he said. When the paper got saturated and fell apart, the powder would expand and bloom and spread throughout the pool, finally settling on the plaster siding and bottom and permanently staining it. The owners would have to drain the pool and sandblast the entire surface to remove it. That’s why he told me not to open the bag. It would have stained my hands. He explained that he’d painted that house nearly a year ago. He’d tried again and again to get them to pay, but no dice. This was his way of closing the account.

  On another occasion, Jim picked me up and we went to a small market that opened early. He grabbed a couple sodas, a few packs of cigarettes—the man could smoke—and six whole mackerels. An odd selection of groceries, but as I had come to know
Jim . . . not that odd. I didn’t even bother to ask.

  We drove to an unoccupied two-story modern in the Mount Olympus area off Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. We parked on the street in front of the house and Jim told me to grab the ten-foot ladder. He retrieved the hidden key from the planter near the back door and marched upstairs—I instinctively knew to follow. He pointed to a spot in the middle of the upstairs hall. I opened up the ladder on exactly that spot. He told me to climb up and open the air conditioning’s intake grill. I did. The filter plopped out of its resting place and I handed it to him. As I steadied myself about eight feet off the ground, I heard crinkling. I looked down and saw Jim removing the wax paper from the mackerel.

  He calmly instructed me to throw the first one inside the AC ducting in one direction as far as I could. I threw it and we heard it slide fifteen or maybe twenty feet. He handed me another cold dead fish, this time telling me to send it down a different duct. I threw three fish in three directions. I replaced the filter and reaffixed the intake grill’s clasp. We methodically moved to the downstairs intake and repeated the steps. Three fish—three directions.

  We returned to the truck and drove for a while in silence. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I asked what it had all been about. “No other fish stinks like mackerel when it rots,” he said. They’d only expunge the smell by replacing all the air conditioning ducts and compressors. The whole system. It was another nonpayment situation. I asked if he ever tried small claims court. He smiled wider than I’d ever seen him smile. “We just did.”

  Explorer

  My dad liked that the name Kim Edward Cranston sounded like King Edward Cranston, but when my mother suggested that they just name him King, Dad countered that it would be too hard for my brother to live up to that name, and it might confuse people. They might think it was our dog. Here, King! So, Kim it was, and Kim it remained for about a dozen years.

  Kim always felt he got short shrift in the name department. Kim was a girl’s name, he’d say. Edward, his middle name, was slightly better, but I think he hated his options there, too: Ed, Eddie, Edward. Blah!

  In high school he became Ed, the least objectionable of the bunch.

  Ed joined the LAPD Explorers, a training ground for future police officers, after career day at Canoga Park High. In those days every high school, especially ones like ours in lower-middle-class areas, would host visits from service providers to get kids to start thinking about their lives after twelfth grade. I’m not sure exactly what drew Ed to the program, but I know what drew me. The first year my brother was in the Explorers, he took a trip to Hawaii. The following year he went to Japan. I was marking time at odd jobs while my brother sent postcards of white-sand beaches and torii gates. I stared a long time at those images, steeped in envy.

  I joined the minute I reached the minimum age of sixteen. I had no designs on a career as a cop; I just wanted to travel the world. But in order to join the Explorers you had to go to the LAPD Academy for eight Saturdays in a row to study police work. Explorers were asked to man parade routes, help with minor traffic control, issue bicycle licenses, and participate in searches for evidence at crime scenes, among other duties.

  Our West Valley Division was the cream of the crop. The big reason was Sergeant Roy Van Wicklin, Van to everyone except new recruits; you had to earn the right to call him Van. He’d been a paratrooper in the army in World War II, and he brought a soldier’s discipline to the Explorers. He was squared away. And he was tough, but only because he cared so much. He arranged for his division’s newbies to go through a Hell Weekend prior to the start of the regular academy with the rest of the division’s recruits. We studied police procedures and codes, drill formations. We trained like animals: eat, train, sleep, repeat. The older recruits made it extra hellish. It was a bitch. The consolation was knowing the shit you were taking, you’d get to give back to next year’s new crop.

  Sergeant Van Wicklin set up a special trip to the morgue for us every year. Special. My ass. So many guys came up with lame reasons why they couldn’t make the trip: homework overload, my grandma needs me to walk her across the street, explosive diarrhea.

  Those of us without the brains or the balls to make an excuse took the bus over together. I looked around and saw all the guys smiling tightly. Every one of us felt deep dread, though none of us showed it. Wouldn’t be manly.

  The smell of formaldehyde—like pickle juice and aftershave—made my eyes water. We walked by a long row of bodies draped in white sheets. They seemed like zombie spectators settled in along a parade route to watch terrified teenagers shuffle past. I caught sight of a man’s bluish foot sticking out from beneath a sheet. Looking around, I realized that all the bodies had one foot uncovered, toe tag dangling—a way for the technicians to quickly locate the corpse they were looking for. Whatever these people had achieved in life, whatever they had seen or suffered, was reduced to a toe tag. That was the inevitable fact.

  In another room, two men wearing rubberized jumpsuits casually chatted as they worked. Music played from a tinny transistor radio. They barely registered our presence. One was tending to a new arrival, a body in full rigor mortis—natural muscle stiffening that occurs shortly after death. We saw the technician snap the body’s extremities. We’d learn this part of the process was called breaking rigor. They released the muscles, preparing the body for the next step. No explanation could change how savage it seemed. It was hard to accept that bodies didn’t feel anymore.

  The other man was washing a female body with a sponge and soapy water. I was sixteen. The only thing I wanted in life was to see a naked woman. To my great misfortune, this was my first. Well, outside of Playboy magazine, and accidentally seeing my grandmother stepping out of the shower.

  Whoever she was—midtwenties, pretty—I wondered what her name was, how she died, whether her family was overcome with grief. A shuddering, overwhelming compassion moved through me.

  BLAM! One of my fellow Explorers hit the ground. He’d fainted. Out cold. People rushed to his aid. He’d be all right. The technicians shared a smile.

  A doctor was describing the protocol at the morgue, but his voice became background noise, like the teacher’s drone in a Charlie Brown cartoon. It wasn’t until we were almost out of the room that I noticed the song that had been playing on the transistor radio. The Everly Brothers hit “Wake Up Little Susie.” I’d never hear that song the same way again.

  If breaking rigor and body washing was the warm-up act, then an autopsy was the main event. We watched a doctor cut a clean line through a man’s chest with an electric saw. At another table, a physician peeled back a woman’s scalp. Body cavities were opened. Fluids escaped. Organs were gently removed for study. Down went a couple more of my friends. They were carried from the room. Two others left so they wouldn’t have to be carted out. I focused on my breathing. My great chicken-shit epiphany crossed my mind, but I chose mouth-breathing in the end. If I breathed through my nose the formaldehyde would nauseate me. I wasn’t going to go down like my fallen comrades.

  At some point I was able to get beyond my physical responses and focus on the mystery at hand—the essential mystery. An autopsy is ordered only when the cause of death is not absolutely certain. There were discoveries to be made. What happened? Bodies were complex riddles to be solved.

  Once the doctors had collected all the evidence, they put the body back in the condition they found it, more or . . . less. They poured all the fluids and plopped the organs into the cavity and sewed it up. I saw how professional these people were, and how serious a duty it was to attend to the dead, and yet this was their job, and they needed to desensitize themselves, to be slightly workaday about what they might have once found gruesome; which, of course, was the point of the visit to the morgue. If I took the law-enforcement path, I would have to learn to shut down and not let blood and guts and death affect me.

  But did I want to be desensitized?

  At that moment, what I wanted or d
id not want in the long haul was irrelevant. The whole reason I’d joined the Explorers program in the first place was so I could see the world, and sure enough, when summertime rolled around, I got to go on a monthlong trip to Europe. The entire cost, including airfare, food, and travel was something like six hundred bucks. That was a fortune to me then, but the idea of seeing the greater world beyond Canoga Park and the confines of my mother’s house was all the motivation I needed. I socked away every dime I could.

  Police departments in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands hosted our group: twenty teenage boys accompanied by a few policemen chaperones. We slept in military barracks or police auxiliary halls. You put your sleeping bag on a cot, and you were home.

  My first trip abroad, my first time being around people who spoke different languages; they sounded almost moonlike to me. But we didn’t have much time to fraternize; every detail of our days was accounted for. We were guests at lunches and functions and took tours of police facilities, even Interpol. In the evenings, we were unshackled from the itinerary. Each night we got the lecture: Be back at 2300 hours. Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t go to bars.

  We went straight for the bars.

  One night in Austria, I paired off with two guys a little older than me, both more aggressive and confident. They were resolute, they were dogged, they were on a mission: their virgin years were about to be over. It was time.