As times changed, and most of the state’s population and wealth gravitated to the south, Sacramento became rather isolated from the life of the people it was built to govern. But it retains an air of historic charm, and it is a strong reminder of California’s past and the men and women who crossed the mountains to settle here.
The face of fear that we find in Sacremento is the face of self-destruction – the face of somebody who will risk death time and time again in order to seek pleasure. This story deals with a highly dangerous obsession which, until comparatively recently, was rarely discussed in public. Only a greater openness in the press and the tragic deaths of several well-known men has brought it out into the open.
SUFFER KATE
There are some guys who have to live right on the very edge, the razor’s edge, no matter what. I could never understand that; I never wanted the fear. I always used to think there’s enough nerve-jingling experience in life, just waking up close to the woman you love, just walking scuffle-footed down some summer street.
Who needs to live right on the very edge? Who needs to test their mortality, time and time again, as if they can never quite believe their luck at being alive?
Maybe it’s something to do with the mentality of certain spermatozoa. Maybe some of them don’t have too much confidence, and when they penetrate that ovum, they lie there, trembling, with their tail dropped off, thinking, Shit, I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it, man, out of all those millions and millions of other spermatozoa, I actually made it. I’m going to be alive, man, while all of those other guys just fade away, just fade away, like a crowd scene in a 1912 silent movie, like unknown soldiers on the Western Front, disappearing through the mustard gas.
But my friend Jamie Ford, he always had to live on the edge. Beyond the edge, in fact, so that his toes were way over the abyss, if you understand what I mean, and nothing between him and falling but sheer chance. My friend Jamie Ford had discovered what it is to choke.
That’s what he used to call it, a Choke. Like, “I’m going for a Choke, man; I’ll see you in physics.” And there was nothing I could do. I mean, what could I do? We were both kids, and we were both at Sherman Oaks Senior High. We were friends, we were blood brothers, we’d cut our thumbs and shared our actual life-substance.
I knew everything about him. I knew the scar on the left side of his head, where his spiky blond hair never grew. I knew the grey-blue colour of his eyes. I knew all of the songs that he could remember, and all of his memories. I knew his bedroom as well as he did. I knew where he kept his Superboy comics and where he hid his copies of Pix and Adam.
I even knew the name of his imaginary friend, the one he’d had when he was three years old.
His imaginary friend whose second name was Kate and whose first name was Suffer.
Suffer Kate.
He used to tell me that it was something to do with his pillow, the pillow in his crib. It had smelled so clean and it had felt so soft, all he ever wanted to do was to plunge his face into it and never breathe, never again. And his mother had leaned over his crib, her face all tight with panic, and said, “No! No, Jamie! No, darling! I don’t want you to Suffer Kate!”
She had taken his wonderful pillow away; but he had still found ways to stop himself from breathing. He had wrapped his head in his comforter, round and round, so that it was tight over his nose and mouth. And one day, when he was eleven, his mother had found him naked in the middle of the kitchen floor, with a plastic shopping bag over his head, his features wrinkle-sucked into the lettering of Hallmark cards.
Dr Kennedy had said that he was lucky to survive. Another thirty seconds and he would have Suffer Kated.
His mother could only remember that he had fought her off. Desperately, as if he wanted to die. His mother could only remember that his penis had been totally rigid.
His mother was pretty. I can picture her now. Petite, with the same blue-grey eyes that Jamie had, maybe a little sad-looking. She used to wear a sky-blue checkered cowgirl blouse that I liked a lot, because she had very full breasts, and when she leaned over to butter my corn on the cob I could see her brassiere.
In the sixth grade, one by one, we all grew physically mature enough to ejaculate. At least, most of us did, and the ones who hadn’t quite made it yet always pretended that they had. “Oh, sure, I shot about a pint last night. It went right out the window and landed on the cat. He looked like the cat who got the cream, hunh-hunh-hunh!”
It was then that Jamie started to go for his Chokes. Jesus, it makes me go cold and shivery now just to think about it. If I had been an adult then, I would have stopped him, physically stopped him, and insisted that he go for therapy. But when you’re a kid, you don’t think that way; you’re all inexperienced, you’re all slightly crazy, believing in myths and legends and all kinds of weird superstitions, living on hormones and fear and expectations and zits and embarrassment.
What was I going to do? Knock on the principal’s door and walk up to that dessicated, arroyo-wrinkled face and say, “Please, Mr Marshall, my friend Jamie keeps hanging himself and whacking off”?
But, of course, that was what Jamie was doing. During almost every recess, he was locking himself into one of the heads in the science department, which hardly anybody used during recess. He was taking off all of his clothes. Then he was knotting a damp sports towel into a noose, looping it over the coat peg on the back of the door, and putting his head in it. All he had to do then was twist himself around a quarter-turn and lift his feet clear of the floor. He was literally hanging himself, while his cock rose stiff as a board, and the jism jumped out of him and spattered the walls.
Once he didn’t appear in time for class, so I ran to the washrooms and climbed over the partition and found him grey-faced and whining, his fingers caught between his crimson-bruised neck and the tightly wrung towel, unable to pry himself free. He was chilly and white, and his thighs were dripping with sperm. I cut the towel with my Swiss Army penknife and lifted him down. He was like Christ from the cross – thin and tortured, a soul in need of rest and absolution. I’ll never forget how he shuddered.
After that, whenever he announced that he was going for a Choke, I used to follow him, as quietly as I could, and wait outside the cubicle while he hanged himself and masturbated. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the choking noises, or the strangulated gasps of pleasure, or the sound of his bare heels knocking against the door. But I was mature enough to understand that if I tried to stop him, he would only do it someplace else, where I wasn’t around to take care of him. Maybe he was going to kill himself one day, but I wasn’t going to let him do it when I was around. I vowed that much.
In a peculiar way, not a homosexual way, I loved him. He was so good-looking, so edgy, so dangerous, a boy’s boy. He once asked me if I wanted him to suck my cock, just to see what it was like, but I said no. I had a feeling that all he wanted to do was fill his mouth with penis-flesh, so that he could hardly breathe.
He frightened me. I knew that he would have to die. Maybe that was why I loved him so much.
On graduation day, with the school band playing ‘Colonel Bogey’ and the sun dappling the lawns, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t find him. The first students were already lining up beside the rostrum to collect their diplomas, and the principal’s voice was echoing, amplified, from the gymnasium wall, and I began to panic. If I wasn’t on stage in about a minute and a half, my mom and dad were going to hang me out to dry. But Jamie might have gone for one of his Chokes, and if I did go down to the parade ground, and Jamie died because I wasn’t there to save him, then my graduation day was going to be a day of guilt and agony, not only today, but on every anniversary forever.
I ran to the washroom with my gown flapping behind me. I banged open all of the doors, but he wasn’t there. I ran to the locker rooms and shouted his name, but he wasn’t there, either.
He was dead, I was sure of it. The very last day, the very last minute when I wa
s responsible for him, and he was dead.
I barged into the senior common room, with its blue pastel walls and its carpet tiles and its posters of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. And there he was, lying on the floor, stark naked, his head all wrapped up like a science fiction mummy in Saran Wrap. His eyes staring. Sucking for breath. Sucking for breath. The cling film misted with lung moisture and sweat.
And, sitting astride him, Laurel Fay, the cheerleader, with her skirt lifted and her bare breasts bouncing out of her unbuttoned blouse, her arms lifted, her fingers tugging and winding at her golden-red hair. Her eyes were closed, and she was ecstatic, and I wasn’t surprised that she was ecstatic, because I’d seen Jamie’s boners when he was suffocating – tall and curved and totally hard, like some kind of animal’s horn.
She twisted around and stared at me. She started to say, “Get the hell—” when I walked across the room and pushed her off him. She fell awkwardly, and between her plump white thighs I saw a flash of pink sticky flesh and gingery pubic hair. The image of it stuck in my mind the way a Matisse painting sticks in your mind. Clashing colours. Erotic yet tasteless. She swore at me: a curse that was strange and vehement.
“Judas! Judas fucking Iscariot! You don’t even understand! You don’t even fucking understand! He wants it! He needs it! Damn you and all the rest of you! It’s death meets life! It’s life meets death!”
I wrenched the Saran Wrap from Jamie’s head, twisted it away from his nose and mouth. He gave a terrible, throat-racking gasp, and then he coughed and coughed, bringing up strings of phlegm and half-digested Rice Krispies.
Laurel had sat herself up with her back against the couch. She gave me a quick, venomous, disgusted glance, then looked away.
“He’s my friend,” I told her, trying to make my voice sound totally cold. “He’s my best friend, and you nearly fucking killed him.”
“I thought that was the whole point,” Laurel retorted. She reached out for her bra, and fastened it up, and lifted her breasts back into it.
I cradled Jamie in my arms. His chest was rising and falling, rising and falling, like an exhausted swimmer who knows that he won’t be able to reach the shoreline but can’t think of any reason to stop swimming.
His eyes flickered from side to side, and the saliva that slid out of the corner of his mouth was streaked with blood.
“You’ve been playing with Suffer Kate again,” I told him, dabbing his mouth with a Kleenex, and then stroking his sweat-cold forehead.
Jamie tried to smile, but all he could manage was a cough. “Everybody needs somebody to love,” he breathed.
I held him in my arms, and I knew that I would miss him. But I was so relieved to be free of his Chokes. I was so relieved that I wouldn’t have to take care of him any longer, him and Suffer Kate. If he strangled himself tomorrow, I would feel wretched about it, and miss him like hell, but at least I wouldn’t feel responsible for him any longer.
It was almost seven years before I came across Jamie again. I had taken a course in journalism at UCLA and then worked for eleven months as a freelance reporter before landing a job on the city desk at the Sacramento Bee. It was a roasting morning in August when Dan Brokerage, my editor, parked himself on the edge of my desk and said, “What do you know about the Golden Horses out on Highway 80?”
I shrugged. “Not much. It’s not the kind of place you’d take your sainted mother for an evening out. Why?”
Dan unwound his wire-rimmed glasses. “One of my contacts says that the Golden Horses has been pulling some unusually substantial crowds lately, especially on Friday nights.”
“Well, they have strippers, don’t they?” I said. “Maybe they’ve found themselves some girl who’s really special.”
“That’s not what my contact was suggesting. My contact was suggesting that there’s something bizarre being staged down there. His exact words were There’s something real sick going down.’”
I looked at the half-finished story on my VDU screen. ‘Mayor Praises Ornamental Gardens’. Unlike most young reporters of my generation, I prided myself on my attention to upbeat civic stories. Most of my contemporaries wanted to be gonzo investigative journalists, exposing bureaucratic corruption and police brutality. But I knew what sold papers like the Sacramento Bee: constructive, happy, feel-good stories, with everybody’s name included and everybody’s name spelled right.
All the same, I was pleased that Dan had chosen me to look into the Golden Horses story. It meant that he trusted me to get my facts straight.
“It’s Friday tomorrow,” said Dan. “Get yourself along there. It won’t be easy to get yourself in. From what my contact says, they’re shit-hot on security. But talk to a man on the door called Wolf Bodell, and tell him that Presley sent you. And take at least two and a half bills in cash money. And try to look like a pervert.”
“What does a pervert look like?” I asked him.
“I don’t know … but he doesn’t look like you. He doesn’t have clean-cut hair and an Oxford shirt and Sta-prest pants. I don’t know. Just try to look disreputable. Just try to look shifty.”
“Shifty,” I nodded. “Okay.”
The Golden Horses was a low whitewashed building with a shingle roof about a quarter of a mile south of Highway 80, in that flat, heat hazed no-man’s-land between West Sacramento and Davis. I arrived just after sunset in my beaten-up metallic-bronze LTD, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The main parking lot was already crowded with hundreds of vehicles of all makes and sizes – Cadillacs and Jeeps and pickups and BMWs and Winnebagos – some of them dilapidated, some of them gleaming new. Whatever attraction the Golden Horses was offering, it obviously appealed to the strangest variety of people, regardless of age or wealth or social background.
As I drove down the dusty, rutted track, I was flagged down by a huge man in a white Stetson hat and an ill-fitting black suit, carrying an r/t.
“Evening, friend. Where d’you think you’re going?” he wanted to know. His eyes were piggy and blood-shot, and his breath smelled strongly of whiskey and Big Red chewing gum.
“Presley sent me.”
“Presley? You mean Elvis Presley?”
“Of course not. I’m supposed to see Wolf Bodell.”
The man stared at me for a long, long time, his hand grasping my car windowsill as if he were quite capable of tearing off the entire door with one exerted heave. Then he raised his head and shouted, “Wolf! Guy says that Presley sent him!”
I didn’t hear the answer, but I had to presume that it was in the affirmative, because the man slapped the roof of my car and said, “Park yourself as close to that prickly pear as you can get.”
I climbed out. The night was warm. The sky was still the colour of warm boysenberry jelly. There was a smell of desert dust and automobile fumes and excitement. A long line of vehicles was turning off the highway, twenty or thirty at least, their indicator lights flashing. I could hear deep, heavy rock ‘n’ roll on the wind, ZZ Top or something similar, the kind of music that sounds like freight trains and people walking, hundreds of people walking.
On the ridge of the shingled roof, two neon horses danced. There were flashing lights, too, and smoke, and people yelping in anticipation. I walked across the boarded veranda and up to the doorway, where six or seven muscular-looking men in black suits and dark glasses were vetting everybody who went in.
One of them put out a finger and prodded me right in the centre of my chest. “You got your pass?” he wanted to know.
“Presley sent me. Said I should speak to Wolf Bodell.”
A thin man in a blue satin suit emerged from the crimson light and the cigarette smoke. His face was yellowish grey and deeply emaciated. His gums were so eroded that his teeth looked as if they could drop out in front of you. He walked with a slurring limp, and it was obvious that his left arm was wasted or injured, because he kept having to drag it upward with his right arm.
“I’m Wolf Bodell,” he said in a distinctive N
ebraska accent.
“Presley sent me,” I told him, without much confidence.
“Presley, huh? That’s okay. How long you known Presley?”
“Longer than I care to admit.” I grinned.
Wolf Bodell nodded and said, “That’s okay, that’s okay. So long as you know Presley. I’m afraid it’s still two hundrut ‘n’ fifty to see the show.”
I counted out the cash that Dave Brokerage had given me (and made me sign for). Wolf Bodell watched me dispassionately, not looking at the money even once.
“You seen this show before?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“You’re in for a treat, then. This is the show of shows. What you see tonight, you ain’t never going to forget, not for the rest of your born days.”
“Seems popular,” I remarked, nodding at the crowds who were still arriving.
Wolf Bodell let out a thin, cackling laugh. “What are the two most saleable commodities on this here planet? I ask. And you say sex. And you say vicarious suff’rin’. That’s what you say. The fascination of fucking! The fascination of the auto wreck! Death, and sex, and terror, and all of the glee that goes with it, my friend! Schadenfreude, to the power of n!”
Wolf Bodell hobble-heaved around me and gripped my elbow. “Let me tell you something,” he said, as he guided me into the Golden Horses, through the smoke and the luridly coloured lights and the knee-deep rock ’n’ roll. “I stepped on a claymore in Vietnam, and I was blown shitless. I was hanging from a tree by my own intestines. Can you believe that? My buddies unwound me, and they saved me somehow, although I still can’t help screaming whenever I shit.
“But, you know, I learned something that day. When I was blown up, my friends were laughing. They were laughing, when they saw me hanging from that fucking tree; and the reason they were laughing was their gladness, that it wasn’t them; and because they’d seen death, which was me, but it hadn’t hurt them.
Faces of Fear Page 20
