Not in the entire time I’ve known you, brother, I managed to avoid saying. As much as I liked Shelly and was curious to see what his living quarters looked like, I wasn’t sure I was quite up for it right now.
I parked and climbed out of the truck, my tongue tasting of dark rum, my hands tingling from holding the steering wheel tightly for too long, and followed Shelly up his driveway. Through the tall ragged hedge I caught a glimpse of a wagon wheel crawling with vines. The windows of Shelly’s house were black and gleaming as obsidian. Forming a vast umbrella over the roof was an acacia tree that looked as if it had been drawn by a demonic magician with a charcoal pencil who’d then smudged the lines.
Shelly, waiting for me, keys in hand, seemed now to be having second thoughts about his invitation. Cold phantom flashes whispered through my bones. This was the house full of crazy secrets, the museum of the savior of his wretched affliction. I caught a corner-eye glimpse of his father sodomizing him in SS boots while his mother chanted in circles all around him holding an incense burner and a pattern for a size-nine dress.
Shelly pulled a string with a wooden ball attached to it. The tall wooden gate opened with a creak. “Scene of the crime,” he said with a leer.
The garage was to the right, so stuffed with junk that a car could not be parked inside. The backyard was a bosky snarl of stunted pepper trees and yucca plants, thornapple, gnarled live oak, and that otherworldly acacia tree.
Besides being a repository of suffering and his sanctum of television and light beer, this is where he ran his record business, most of which involved rare or odd issue records, though he made the bulk of his earnings buying chaff like Pat Boone and Ed Ames albums and selling them at a 1,000 – 1,200 percent markup to the Norwegians and Japanese, the International Schlock Market as he liked to call it. Shelly hunched up in the darkness worked keys into two locks until he freed the door.
The house smelled dank, the airless chill of a vault. My impulse was to move about and open windows. He switched on the living room light. The low-pile carpet, once green, was worn down in most places to gray thread. The curtains slowly moldering to dust didn’t look like they’d been opened for years. Every furnished surface in that living room was heaped with mail, Racing Forms, newspapers, album covers and sleeves, receipts and music lists, slumped and slid and lapping up against the island of the hallowed TV, an ancient Zenith with a curved screen. He made his way down a narrow path and turned the TV on.
Indistinct cottony green and murky blue shapes flittered and floated up into view. The speaker was about an inch wide and the voices all came across like mice playing kazoos.
“After all these years, why did you invite me in?” I asked him.
“I always wanted to invite you in before, babe. But Hitler’s henchmen were here.”
“Where are they now?” I said.
He cranked out one of those snaggly bugcatcher smiles. “Bay Minette.”
“Alabama?”
“Yeah. They don’t come back here anymore. Too old. They never much liked California anyway.” He smiled without showing teeth. “I’m the sole curator of the museum now.”
“When was the last time you went back?”
“Oh hell,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a grimace of grievous amusement. “Twenty years maybe. Not long enough. Beer?”
“Sure thing.”
He moved to the dingy gray-green film noir kitchen, cracked the fridge, leaned inside. I scanned the acres of spider silk strung across the ceiling.
He handed me a can of Miller Lite, shook his heavy head. The forelock, limp from a day of action in the rain, fell into his eye and he brushed it aside. “Have a seat.”
I sank into the one spot open on the couch among the peanut shells and crumbling foam rubber. The end table had a stack of books, true crime and pop psychology. Shelly was a serial killer scholar. He could recite facts about the lives of Ed Gein (the real-life killer used as the model in Psycho) and Jeffrey Dahmer (one of the rare killers who preyed exclusively upon and cannibalized young men) with the same facility and lipsmacking relish as he could the history of early rock music. He was a fan of the famous ones as well as the obscure. His favorite might’ve been Charles Starkweather, a James Dean knockoff who did his work in the late fifties, was executed in 1959, and became the literary basis, as did Ed Gein, for many dramatic and creative works. Starkweather was one more case of a young misfit who got his revenge on a society that treated him poorly and refused to understand him. Shelly identified with the serial killer. I would go as far as saying that he idolized them. They seemed to him an answer. He was fond of saying with a gleam in his eye that the killer was always the last person anyone in the neighborhood suspected. I had shared this romantic view until I’d actually met and interacted with mass murderers at Napa. There was nothing glamorous about them.
Shelly pulled up a chair at a dining room table piled high with papers. There was an electric typewriter on it along with a number of records, slips, boxes, a roll of bubble wrap, and postal equipment, including a scale.
I riffled the pages of a paperback called I Ain’t Much, Baby — But I’m All I’ve Got. It was well thumbed, busted binding, many underlines. It looked like the typical self-help book written by the typical screwed-up psychiatrist.
“You can read it if you want,” Shelly said. “That book saved my life. It’s my Bible.”
“Maybe I oughta write one of these things,” I said, setting the book aside. “I Ain’t Much — But at Least I Ain’t Killed Myself Yet.”
Shelly’s cackle punctuated the air.
“I’m serious, man,” I said. “If this yo-yo can write one, why can’t I?”
Shelly, taking fast sips from his beer, said, “Self-help shelves are pretty crowded.”
“I’ve got an angle. A murder self-help book. Just kill all the people who made you feel bad. That would sell.”
Shelly, sipping faster and faster, seemed to be drinking my words as well. I heard the rattle of beer getting shallow in the can. “Throw the sex in there, babe, don’t forget the sex.”
“Sex and Murder Self-Help book,” I mused.
“That’s it. You’d sell a million of ’em. I’d buy one. You want another brewski?”
“All right.”
He waddled off to the fridge. “So how you think Marvelle got rich?” he called over his shoulder.
“Real estate. Drugs. Maybe her daddy is a chicken tycoon. What part of the South you think she’s from?”
“Ozark twang,” he said. “Arkansas maybe.” He handed me a beer and heaved a sigh. “God, now my nuts really hurt.”
I cracked my fresh beer and took a pull. On the top of the TV were two photographs, one a girl, the other a family portrait, both filmed with dust. I couldn’t resist. I set my beer down and navigated the path to the television. The girl I picked up first, tilting the heart-framed photo in the dim light. Shelly watched me, slurping from his can. “Old girlfriend?” I said.
Shelly nodded. I put it down and took up the family photo. Shelly had not changed: same part in hair, same fallen lock over forehead, same ill-fitting brown corduroys, sleepy detached green eyes, and square chin. I’d never met his parents. His father was a beefy man, florid, with a navy haircut, a civil servant as I recalled, somewhere in his fifties in this picture, which had to be at least twenty years old. His mother was a small woman in a dress that looked like something a cardboard doll would wear. She wore a sun-squint expression, though the pose was indoors. Shelly used the term “airhead” more than any other to describe her. Standing next to Shelly was a swarthy young man with slicked back hair. He was a good six inches taller than Shelly, and with his cool and confident air didn’t seem to fit in the picture. “Who’s this?”
“My family.”
“I mean the dark-haired kid.”
“My brother, Donny Ray,” said Shelly, stifling a yawn. “Donald Raymond Hubbard.”
“Brother? I didn’t know you had one.”
“Younger?”
“Four years.”
“Same parents?”
He nodded drowsily. “Far as I know.”
I looked back at the photo. “Looks like an athlete.”
“Oh yeah, Donny did it all. Sax player, varsity football, swim team. Happiest kid I ever met. Got all the girls, too. Dad used to beat the tar out of me, but he’d never touch Donny Ray. My whole life I was convinced someone left him at our doorstep. Dad was always pretty nice to strangers.”
“Where is Donny Ray?” I asked.
Shelly hauled back on his beer. “Dead.”
I nodded, holding the picture, waiting for him to tell me the how and the when.
“How?” I said, finally.
“Dove off the Clam. Know it?”
“Yeah, of course.” My head continued to nod as if the spring had come loose.
“Thirty-foot jump. Went face first into the rocks.” He shrugged and looked away.
“How old was he?”
“Eighteen.”
“You’ve never mentioned him before.”
“It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He tipped his can back, draining it. “That’s the kind of luck I’ve always had.”
14.Jimmy Is In Good Hands With God
I WOKE LATE THE NEXT DAY AND STARTED A POT OF COFFEE. BEATRIZ had sewn me a pair of pajamas, blue tops, plaid orange bottoms, synthetic fabric that caused static electricity that felt like bugs crawling up and down my legs. I got her newspaper and fed Sweets, who’d told me he liked tortillas better than meat. Beatriz had driven up to Temple City to visit her daughter, so Sweets and I had the Island to ourselves. I thought I might take a long nap in the sun with him today. Sparrows were flitting among the splashes of sunshine in the orange tree in the central yard. The tree cast such a deep and realistic reflection in my front room window that the little birds would occasionally fly straight into the glass and fall stunned to the ground.
I opened the paper to look at jobs, then I leafed over to the sports. What a joy it was to recount the trip to Santa Anita and to see those payouts! If I moved up to L. A. I could probably make my living just standing at the rail and listening to the horses think. It was a notion that should’ve invigorated me, but I kept getting pictures of Shelly’s brother, Donny Ray. I had dreamt of him all night, a tattered brown reel of cliff-diving dreams. In some of the dreams he was still alive, petitioning me, as if I could help him somehow. If he was four years younger than Shelly he would’ve been about my age. I was living in San Diego then, attending San Diego State University as a journalism major, and living off campus in an apartment on University Avenue. Journalism, which I was good at, was going to be my ticket to writing the great American horseracing novel. Times were good then, not a whiff of the pox that was soon to beset me. I tried to place Donny from the photograph or recall the story of a San Carlos boy diving off the Clam to his death, but there had been so many who had died on those rocks it was impossible to recount them all.
The pictures of Donny kept coming, beckoning to me. Finally, in the early afternoon, I put on my sunglasses, climbed into my pickup truck, and drove the few miles down the hill to La Jolla, home of the Clam.
La Jolla is an eccentric community, geographically and economically isolated, its own enclave. Even though it’s part of San Diego, you have to write “La Jolla” on the envelope for it to get there. Many wealthy people live here, so I’m not much disposed to it, though in the days when I had out-of-town visitors, I was obliged to show them the Cove (site of numerous TV and movie scenes), and if they had a literary bent, take them on the Dead Writers Tour, starting with Raymond Chandler’s home at 6005 Camino de la Costa and ending at Dr. Seuss’s converted observation tower at the top of Mount Soledad. Both of San Diego’s two famous writers lived and died in La Jolla but were born elsewhere. San Diego is not a literary wellspring. You’re much more likely to run into a famous killer here. However, nowhere in its official annals is the city’s most famous and prolific killer, so designated.
La Jolla is Spanish for “parking nightmare.” I wandered around for about half an hour before I finally wedged into a tight spot at the bottom of the hill and walked up under the tall mottled palms. Down below the railed walkway, seals barked and yawped as the ocean waves clapped onto the rocky shore. One seal applauded, and I acknowledged it with a slight bow. An old woman bent from the weight of jewels dragged an ornamental rat of a dog at the end of its leash. A little tyke chased a flock of cormorants into a copse of stumpy cypress trees.
The Clam lies north of La Jolla Cove. Ask a lifeguard and he will pretend not to know where or what the Clam is. He doesn’t want you to know. He doesn’t want people jumping or diving off. He doesn’t want to have to call the paramedics, doesn’t want to have to scramble in himself and drag your broken bones up the smuggler’s tunnel. He doesn’t want helicopters flapping over, blood on his hands, nightmares, angry parents, journalists. He doesn’t want to tell Mom and Dad that Donny is dead.
The notorious cliff was fenced off and NO DIVING signs were posted conspicuously, but it was public beach, legally accessible to all. Against the chain-link fence that symbolically prevented pedestrians from wandering down the treacherous bluff many memorials had been placed — rough crucifixes, baskets of flowers, ribbons, medallions, and crude reliquaries full of photos and postcards. Most salient among these was a large green handmade crucifix wired into the links. It had faded and roughened in the sea air, but the words written in black felt pen across the transverse piece were still clearly legible: JIMMY IS IN GOOD HANDS WITH GOD.
I walked around the fence and strolled down the limestone bluff, its gritty, eroding surface netted with tiny succulents. This promontory was so carved and worn by the endless action of wind and sea that in a few hundred years it would no longer exist. The diving arena was horseshoe- or clamshell-shaped, hence the name Clam. A lone palm stood to the left. The ocean smelled of kelp, fish, sea lion, iodine, and fermenting zooplankton. A yacht puttered far out to the south. A Channel Ten news team was close by to the north, divers jumping backward off the rocks.
I had always been afraid of high places not because I thought I might fall but because I thought I might jump, so it was with extreme reluctance that I moved into the area where Donny must have stood, where all divers must stand, and stared down dizzily into that grotto of sorrow thirty feet below. The shivering mosaic of blues and greens shifted against the coral. The exposed rocks were shiny round and black. The waves rolled in to cover them, then withdrew again.
No one, as far as I knew, had ever jumped with the intention of suicide here. Death would be too complicated, not a certain outcome by any means. The Cabrillo Bridge in Balboa Park (often called Suicide Bridge by the locals) and the Coronado Bridge over San Diego Bay were better, more effective choices for those who wanted to fly for a time before they died. So as shameful or grievous as Donny’s death might’ve been to the family, I didn’t imagine he had intentionally tried to end his life here. It had been all about the thrill, and perhaps the dare.
A diver’s luck will depend on the tide. Thirty feet should be enough of a deterrent, but the jumper must also have good timing, must actually jump as the water has receded and is just returning. The entry point will almost always be shallow. A poorly timed jump or an improper entrance and you’re feet or headfirst onto the rocks. And no number of signs or laconic lifeguards or horror stories can deter the young daredevils from taking their Acapulco chances. Prohibition, on the contrary, makes the risk all the more appealing. Every week in the paper San Diegans will read about some unfortunate child who’s come here for the ecstasy of the dive only to bust his legs or crown. The last story I heard before moving north was two Vietnamese kids who made a successful jump but got caught in the surge and drowned. Nowhere did the signs read: “DANGEROUS CURRENTS.”
To the north a hundred yards w
as the steep trail that led to the precipice called Dead Man’s Jump, reputedly a hundred feet to the water. Just back from Dead Man’s was a shell and gift shop. It’d been there longer than I could remember and was perched above a network of grottoes and caves, some of which had been used by bootleggers during Prohibition. One tunnel called the Sunny Jim Cave came straight up into the shell shop itself. This was the portal through which the injured and the dead were often transported. Bringing them up through the tunnel was easier than fishing them out with a helicopter or trying to drag them up the rocks with a rope. Public legend had it that the woman who ran the store had catalogued every poor soul who’d ever been carried up through her tunnel.
Lulled and drawn by the falling and retreating waves below, I finally tore myself away. Insidious chanting voices in my head, the palm tree to my left rattling like a snake, and hands out like a tightrope walker, I made my meticulous way back up the grade.
15.Beauty Chasers
ONE NIGHT I HAD A DREAM THAT I HAD GONE TO SEE A MOVIE called Through the Looking Glass that had been made in three Civil War sequences and that I thought was going to be about Alice, who was fourteen years old with slats of sunshine between her legs. But instead it turned out to be someone’s home movies on a lake. When I woke up the Sex and Murder Self-Help Book had formed completely in my mind.
I had seen a typewriter through the window of cabin number 4. One winter many years before, Charles Bukowski, the L. A. racetrack poet, had rented cabin number 4 from my father to work. I was only a teen then and opposed in principal to poetry, so he only seemed to me a pockmarked crank who drank too much. My father did not like him either. Later, after Bukowski got famous and my father and I were shown to be philistines, I would admire him from a distance at any of the three southern California tracks. There he’d be talking with a bartender, standing in a litter of losing tickets, roaming with a plastic cup of whiskey, knit-capped, potbellied, sometimes in high collar or black overcoat, leaning under the eaves blowing the steam off his coffee, the ever-present cigarette burning in his fingers. At Del Mar he stationed himself at the west end of the track by the benches along the rail. He was always alone, the way he wanted it, the way I and Shelly, who admired Bukowski for his father-tyrannized character in Ham on Rye, kept it.
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