by G. M. Ford
"So," I began. "Not only did the cops not bust places like the Garden of Eden, they didn't allow anybody else to mess around with them either."
"Exactly."
"And Nixon changed all that?"
"In a heartbeat. Government was suddenly suspect. The old depression-era 'the government is my friend' illusion was dead. All gentleman's agreements were off. If the cops were watching the criminals, people started to want to know who was watching the cops. Accountability became all the rage in the public sector." He waved a big hand in my face. "Don't get me wrong. They were still allowed to be incompetent, they just weren't allowed to be corrupt."
I must have looked confused.
"It's hard for you to imagine the climate of the nineteen fifties concerning gays and lesbians. Words like 'repressive' don't cut it. It was worse than that. The suicide rate within the community was astronomical. The Garden was like a beacon in the night. All the big national impersonation acts came through every year. People could let their hair down."
"Literally," I added.
He nodded. "And figuratively as well. The movement was particularly giddy back then." He stopped talking, as if he suddenly wasn't sure he believed what he was saying. "I know it sounds corny, but there was a great deal of hope back in the late sixties. For a while it seemed the yoke had been lifted. Back before it became apparent how long the haul was actually going to be, a place like the Garden of Eden was like an oasis."
"Hence the name," I said.
"Exactly. Places like the Garden were where the first sense of a community was formed. It all started in places like the Garden and the Green Parrot and the Palomar up on Third. By the mid-seventies politicians were listening to the leaders of the gay community. By the mid-eighties, openly gay men and women were being elected. Nowadays, the mayor and the chief of police march at the head of the Pride Parade every year. And yet, down at the bottom of it all, not as much has changed as you might think."
He caught himself lecturing and stopped.
I figured . . . what the hell ... we were having a little break in the action, maybe I'd assuage my curiosity, so I asked, "You know . . . when I started to look you up, I figured . . . you know . . . that anybody who'd write a book about . . . something like this . . . would be ... I mean, not necessarily, but probably would be . . ."
He helped me out. "Gay," he said.
"Yeah."
"I used to be," he said.
Before I could close my mouth, he asked, "What time frame were you interested in again?"
"July nineteen sixty-nine," I said.
"The Garden was closed by July sixty-nine."
I admit it; I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
"Actually," I amended. "It was two specific dates. May eighteenth and June first, nineteen sixty-nine." He pursed his Lips and leaned back in the chair. "Why did you say you were researching this?" "I didn't."
He mulled it over. "This have anything to do with your father?"
"I didn't say that." "You didn't have to."
"Why would it have anything to do with him?"
He gave me a shy smile. "Well . . . you're too young and Wild Bill Waterman and old Peerless Price have been looking back at me from the front page every morning for a week." He leaned across the table at me. "Besides that, your father being involved would explain a lot of things."
The weight which had a scant moment ago been lifted, now settled heavily back upon my shoulders. "Why's that?"
"You happen to know what night of the week May eighteenth, nineteen sixty-nine was?" "A Friday."
He nodded. "You notice I didn't ask you about June one.
When I didn't say anything he asked, "You know why that is?"
"I'm betting you already know."
"June one was the last night the club was ever open."
I tried to sound calm. "Really."
"That was the night of the raid, man. The famous disappearing raid." He eyed me closely. "You do know what I'm talking about here, don't you??'
"Remind me," I wheedled.
He pointed a huge finger at my chest. "No way," he said. "I was born on a weekend, Waterman, but it wasn't last weekend." I tried to look shocked and offended, but he wasn't going for it. "You know damn well what I'm talking about here. If we can't manage an open exchange of information, maybe you ought to get up the road."
Much as it pained me, I allowed how I did know what he was talking about.
"Tell me what you know for sure."
I told him the story about my old man taking the car on those specific nights. "That's all I know," I said when I finished.
"If it was anybody but your father, I'd say it was damn little." "Why's that?"
"Because, man, what this whole mystery has always been lacking was anybody with enough clout to quash the arrest and subsequent booking of nearly a hundred and fifty people. Especially when it was orchestrated by a public figure like Peerless Price. That took real balls. There couldn't have been more than four or five men in the state who had the clout to pull that off."
He was kind enough not to add that my old man was definitely one of them, but I'm a quick lad and figured it out.
"That's all I know," I said.
"That's about all anybody knows. I spent a month trying to dig up something on it and came up dry."
"What did the cops say?" I asked. "You mean to tell me departmental heads didn't roll over that one? I thought you told me police corruption was a thing of the past by then."
"For the most part, it was. The cops were clean. Before they ever even got the whole lot of them booked, an Order of Provision was issued and delivered to the precinct."
"What's that?"
"An order from a district court judge for all documents to be sealed and sent to his office. It's used sometimes in cases where the veracity of an accuser is in question, so that a person won't be tainted by the mere fact of an accusation. A judge reviews the material before it has a chance to become public. The cops just did what they were ordered to do. They packed up every bit of paperwork and sent it off to the judge."
"And?"
"The judge never got it. Or at least, that's what he says."
He was smiling. I didn't like it one bit. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end, but I asked the question anyway.
"What judge was that?"
The grin got bigger. "Your old buddy Douglas Brennan."
Chapter 17
Bermuda was exactly where I left him on Monday, sitting in that white leather chair by the window with the pictures of his past framed on the wall behind him and his glasses and canes close at hand. When I poked my head in the door, he reached over and slipped on his glasses.
He got me into focus and said, "I taught you to swim, kid. What, you forgot how?"
"You left out the part about being strapped in the car."
"That was in a later lesson."
When I was eight or nine, Bermuda would take me to the Y on cold winter afternoons. When we first started going, I couldn't swim yet. As a matter of fact, I was scared to death of the water. My parents had paid for two years of private lessons. The experience had only multiplied my fear, leaving me clinging to the wall at the shallow end while the other kids my age were rough-housing in the deep water. It drove my old man crazy. He used to leave the pool area at the country club so he wouldn't have to be party to my terror.
Bermuda had a better idea. After the country club debacle, he started taking me to the Y. I remember how surprised I was that he could swim. He explained that although his back and legs weren't up to the demands of gravity, the buoyancy of water allowed him an ease of movement which he never experienced on dry land. His motion was odd; he kicked with both legs at the same time and sort of doggie paddled with his hands, but he could swim forever, slowly, doggedly, moving back and forth along the wall of the pool, seemingly oblivious to everything going on around him.
He never pressed me about swimming either. Never said
a word. He just left me alone to play with the other children. He knew that's all it would take, because he knew me.
I can still remember the day I began to swim. I remember because, for me, in order to swim, I had to be willing to die. I remember standing on the diving board, holding my nose, telling myself that a watery grave was better than spending the rest of my life on the concrete, listening to that fat Rocco De Grazia busting-my chops. I remember jumping off the end and thinking that my death would, once and for all, teach my parents a lesson, and being vaguely disappointed when I found myself alive and clinging to the pool ladder.
Bermuda gestured toward the ladder-backed chair across from him. I crossed the room and took a seat
"To what do I owe the honor of a repeat visit?" he asked.
"Confusion."
"Confusion is a high state, kid," he said. "Being confused means you're open and ready for an answer. Beats the heck out of being sure. People who are sure don't learn a damn thing. They already got the answers."
"I spent some time with Judy Chen this morning."
The rest of his face never moved; he just wrinkled his brow.
"Who?"
"Judy Chen. A short little Chinese lady. Owns most of the International District these days. The one who was sleeping with my father for about thirty years. That one."
"Oh, that Judy Chen," he said. "Yeah."
He looked older than when I'd seen him the other day. In the deep shadows of the receding light, he appeared to be loose and disconnected, almost at large within his own skin.
"Don't be pokin' in there, Leo. It's none of your business. Even dead, a man's got a right to a private life."
"I thought my mother and I were his private life."
He lifted his gnarled hands from the chair.
"You live and learn."
"Maybe we were just his public life."
He let the hands fall with a slap.
"Or maybe you were both," he offered.
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" I asked.
"I'm just trying to tell you who you are. That is what you came for, isn't it?"
I shifted gears.
"You ever hear of a club called the Garden of Eden?" "Fag joint down on Western. Under the hotel. Why?" "You ever hear about the raid on that place?" "Old Peerless' raid? The one that they say disappeared?" I nodded.
His eyes lacked their usual bemused animation. "Everybody heard about that," he said.
"You think my father could have engineered that?"
"Could have?"
"Yeah."
"Sure he could have. Nobody had more juice than your dad. He could arrange for Mt. McKinley to disappear."
"Did he make that raid disappear?"
He hesitated, stuck out his lower lip and grimaced as he spoke, "Why would he do that? I mean . . . what was in it for him?"
He pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked me over.
"You're not thinkin' ..." he began. "No, of course not."
"Good, 'cause not only was Bill straight as the day is long, but he didn't waste his time on things unless there was an angle. You got any idea how much juice it would take to pull that off?"
When I reckoned how I wasn't sure, he went on.
"Just for starters, you'd have to own a district judge and a precinct captain. That's no small shit, kid. And they'd have to owe you big favors. Big enough to call in markers of their own. All the way down the line. You gotta ask yourself why would your dad call in that many markers over a raid on a fag bar. Don't make any sense." He waffled a hand in the air. "To save his own ass . . . sure." He gave me a look I didn't like at all. "Or maybe your ass . . . somethin' that would reflect on him like that, somethin' some yahoo like Peerless Price could use, but . . . short of that ... it don't make sense."
He stopped talking and looked at me like I'd made a mess on the carpet. I made like I didn't notice, and pressed on.
"You remember back in sixty-nine, that whole family of Chinese they found dead in that container down on Pier Eighteen?"
"Yeah, I remember. Why?"
"Because I met a guy used to work down on the docks tells me it was pretty much common knowledge that Judy Chen's import company was the one smuggling aliens. And guess what? I gave Judy Chen a chance to deny it and she didn't."
Now even his brow was smooth. His face was as featureless and bland as a cabbage.
"Wadda you want to go there for, kid?"
"I'm just along for the ride."
He craned his neck toward the wall behind him.
"You see the picture of me up there with the big fish?"
I scanned the wall and found it. The back of a boat. Bermuda sitting in a deck chair with three other guys standing around him. The one on the right was former city councilman Richard Barre, rhymes with Larry. The other two I didn't recognize. Bermuda held in his hands what appeared to be about a thirty-five-pound king salmon. Both he and the salmon were showing their teeth. The other three guys looked like they'd rather be having a prostate exam.
"Yeah, I see it," I said.
"I let myself get talked into that. Barre owed your dad a favor. Insisted on going fishing. Your old man talked me into going in his place. Worst day of my life. You know what you've got to do to catch a fish like that?"
I had a good idea where this was leading, but I decided to be polite.
"What?"
"Well. . . let's say you want to go fishing on Saturday. Then Friday afternoon you've got to pack up and drive down to Westport. What's that—two, three hours?"
"Two and a half."
"So you get there and you get a crappo motel and you take all your shit outta the car and then go out to dinner and get shitfaced. You know how it goes, right?"
"I know."
"Then . . . five friggin' o'clock the next A.M., you've got to drag your ass out of bed, hungover as a son of a bitch, get dressed and go out on this boat with about thirty other assholes whose breath is even worse than yours. Then, as if everybody wasn't already about to puke, you all get a ride over to the Westport Bar, one of the ugliest mother-humpin' pieces of water on the west coast. You spend six hours bobbing around out there. They feed you the sandwiches the last group didn't eat and all the flat beer you can swallow and then take you back in over that same humpin' bar and dump you on the dock, where, for a mere thirty bucks, some other asshole takes your picture."
"I've been there," I said.
"Then you know what I'm talking about."
"What?"
"That's the question, kid. For what? All that friggin' trouble just to catch some fish who's minding his own business down there on the bottom of the ocean." He spread his hands. "It's not worth that much trouble and aggravation just to catch one little bitty fish. That's a ride I don't go on no more. You hear what I'm saying?"
"I told you. I'm not driving. I'm just going where the bus takes me," I said.
"Well, maybe you ought to get off. 'Cause when you start sticking your nose into things you don't understand, I personally have to wonder about your motives, kid. It's beginning to sound like you're one of those sad cases who has to denigrate his father. One of those Oedipal types who secretly yearns for his mama's bed."
He read the color of my face and the tightness of my hands.
"What? You gonna hit me?" He stuck out his chin. "I been hit before. Go on. Hit me with your best shot, kid."
"Stop it," I said. "I just want to . . ."
He cut me off. "You just want to tear your old man down so's you can feel better about being Wild Bill Junior."
"I just want to find out who did what to who ..."
He spread his hands. "Why? So you can draw a line in the sand and tell yourself the good guys are on one side and the bad guys are on the other? I thought I taught you better than that. It's not that simple, kid. People aren't one way or the other. They got a little bit of both in there. People look for simple answers . . . Usually turns out the only thing simple about the situation was them."
"If you say so," I said.
He leaned forward and looked at me sadly.
"I guess I didn't do as good a job with you as I thought. Go on .. . get out of here. I got nothin' to say to you. You get some respect, you come back and see me. Otherwise, I figure I can probably go another twenty years without seeing you."
He set his jaw like a bass and turned toward the window.
"I didn't mean for this to come between us, Bermuda."
He kept his face turned to the darkness. His lips were set in a thin line. I got to my feet, zipped up my jacket and crossed to the door.
I had one hand on the doorknob when I spoke. "I'm going to find out what's going on here, Bermuda," I said.
His head snapped around. "Don't call me that," he spat. "You hear me? I never liked that dumb-ass name, anyway. My name is Ed. You ever talk to me again, you call me Ed. You hear me?"
I said I did and stepped out into the night.
Overhead, a sky the color of dirty wool hovered inches above the treetops like an oily shroud. Along the narrow street, the yellow lights of the houses dropped tentative pools among the gathering darkness. I pulled open the car door, got in and turned the key. Nothing. Stone dead. Tried it again. Same thing. Shit
By now, I knew the drill. If I waited for a while, it would start right up and take me wherever I wanted to go. I folded my arms across my chest and settled back in the seat. I counted my breath and contemplated my options. As much as I hated the idea, maybe, just this once, everybody was right and I was wrong. Maybe I had the worst seat in the house for watching my own movie. For the first time all day, my head was beginning to throb. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, the car windows were completely fogged. I guess it was the familiar sound that jiggled me awake. The flat clacking of his canes. I rolled the side window halfway down. Bermuda was wearing a light brown wool jacket and matching beret. He leaned heavily on one cane while he pushed open the double wooden gates that separated his house from the house next door. When he'd swung the gates out of the way, he reached over and retrieved his other cane from where it leaned against the side of the house and went clacking around the back in his unmistakable crab-like gait
