the Choirboys (1996)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "Where does it say that?"

  "Sam, don't you enjoy me in bed?"

  "That's dumb. Do I act like I enjoy you?"

  "As a matter of fact you act like a man who does a pretty good act of making love. Oh, I don't mean fucking. You like that all right. I mean loving. You don't really give yourself. You hold lots and lots back from me. It's purely physical, your lovemaking."

  "All this because I want twin beds. Kim, it's just that my old man and old lady were drunks and we were so goddamn poor I grew up on the floor. Or when we could rent a pad with a bed I always had to share it with two brothers. And I'm talking about a little bed, an army surplus cot. Christ, I felt like a married man at seven years old, always crowded into bed with one or both brothers. I just can't bear it anymore to be."

  "Close?"

  "Yeah, close."

  "You never want to get close to anybody."

  "What're you talking about?"

  "I'm saying that you won't let yourself get close to anyone. I can't understand how you could be friends with Harold so long. He's a sweet little guy but he's like glue. How do you stand it?"

  "Whaddaya mean?" Sam asked, then added, "Jesus, I'm starting to sound like Dean."

  "There's something about Harold. You've yelled his name in your sleep."

  "So maybe I'm fruit for Harold."

  "You don't like people, Sam. You've had a mean rough life with weak parents and you hate them even though they're dead. You won't even see your brothers and sisters unless you have to. It's very sad. You don't really want to be close to anyone. Not even me."

  "There oughtta be a law against people taking Psych 1b," Sam Niles said.

  "But why do you stay friends with Harold, Sam? You're so different. You've both been in war and police work, yet he still sees honey where you see slime. He's always enthusiastic, you're always bored. Why do you let him crowd you? There's something, something in the marines. In Vietnam."

  "My mother always told us it cost a nickel a minute to burn a light," Sam Niles said as he switched off the lamp, leaving Kimberly Cutler Niles to wonder in the darkness. "Of course it doesn't cost a nickel but I'm a creature of habit. It was just another thing that lousy drunken bitch lied about."

  And Sam rolled over, wishing the king sized bed was a twin, and went to sleep, yelling in the night about a spider hole and a cave, which Kimberly Cutler knew would never be explained, not to her.

  From then on the marriage deteriorated very quickly, especially after Sam Niles began to attend various choir practices with various groups of choirboys, much to the disapproval of Harold Bloomguard who tried to hint that he should go home to Kimberly.

  Three months later two bitter young people lay side by side in their twin beds, both doing poorly in their college classes because of their miserable relationship. They seethed over an argument they had about one watching television when the other was trying to study.

  "So I'll just quit school in my senior year," Sam said. "Why's a cop need an education anyway? No more than a trash collector. That's all we do, clean up garbage."

  "The garbage is in your mind, Sam."

  "Fine, I'll just feed on it. That's what pigs do, isn't it?"

  And then bitter silence until Kimberly made a gambit. "Sam, do you wanna come over here and make love to me?"

  "No, I'd rather have a wet dream."

  "Well then go up on Hollywood Boulevard and pick yourself up a queer if I can't turn you on, you cocksucker!"

  "Just like a woman. Never tell a man to go out and get some pussy. Too vain to think another woman might be able to do what you can't. It's go get a fag, never a broad."

  "Fuck you!"

  "Tennis, anyone?" said Sam Niles, and that was the last word spoken that night.

  Two nights later, after they had not seen each other except as she came and went to class and he to the police station, Sam came in after getting off the nightwatch. He found Kimberly sleeping soundly, but as he looked at her long tan body, the blue veiner he brought with him became a diamond cutter. He quickly stripped and got in her bed, nudging her. "Hi, Kim," he whispered.

  "Oh Christ, what time is it?"

  "Two thirty, maybe. I wake you up?"

  "Oh no, Sam, I've been lying here worrying about you getting shot like those idiotic cops' wives on television. Where were you? Out drinking with the boys again?"

  Then Sam was up close, breathing in her ear, touching her with a diamond cutter, saying, "This'll keep you awake."

  "Only if you stick it in my eye," replied Kimberly and she didn't mind at all when Sam slammed out the door, half dressed.

  The next night was perhaps the worst since they were both thinking about sex, hoping they could bring some of the drama back into their lives, neither wanting to make the move across the two feet of carpet to the other's bed.

  "You wanna come to my bed?" Kimberly finally asked pugnaciously.

  "What do you have in mind, a prizefight?"

  "Goddamnit, do you or don't you?"

  "Aren't you too tired tonight?"

  "I'm too tired every night after I've been studying for four hours and you come tripping in at some godawful time."

  "Well I'm a policeman and I work godawful hours!"

  "You wanna get in bed with me?"

  "Sure, but I'm tired too. Just for once, why don't you come to my bed?"

  "If we had one bed we wouldn't have to be walking a beat across the goddamn carpet"

  "All right, I'll come to your bed "

  "Not if it's too much trouble."

  "You want me to or not?"

  "All right, all right."

  Sam Niles pulled himself up and walked two steps and lay down beside Kimberly Cutler Niles, and after three minutes of silence wherein neither of the stubborn young people stirred, Sam finally said, "Shall we both put it in and toss a coin to see who has to move?"

  Five minutes later it was Kimberly who was half dressed and slamming out the door.

  The honeymoon was definitely Over, but like so many people, Sam and Kimberly needed a dramatic moment to convince them of what they should have known. Six days later they got it.

  It started with Sam Niles deciding to drive Kimberly bananas much as Celeste Holm tried to drive Ronald Colman bananas on a movie Sam had seen on "The Late Show." He felt a little silly that night as he lay in his twin bed, knowing that he had made enough noise coming home from work to wake up the landlady downstairs. He knew that Kimberly could not possibly sleep through his drawer banging, toilet flushing, door slamming, shoe dropping, and would have to respond as Sam lay in the darkness with his back to her and forced out a muffled hilarious laugh guaranteed to drive her wild.

  After the third stream of laughter he heard Kimberly stir in her bed and say, "Sam, are you drunk or what?"

  "No."

  "Then what's so damn funny at three A. M.?"

  "Nothing."

  "Then please let me sleep."

  "Okay."

  And moments later Sam Niles was giggling more hilariously than before, because, by God, it worked! He knew she would soon be beside herself with jealousy, curiosity and debilitating rage. Then Sam began chuckling in earnest, his body and bed shaking.

  Finally Kimberly spoke again. "Sam, honey."

  "Yes?"

  "No offense, but any guy who won't screw his wife and giggles a lot really should try to get himself together on Hollywood Boulevard. Why don't you put on my yellow miniskirt and go out trolling. You might get lucky."

  So Sam Niles angrily decided that what worked for Celeste Holm would not work on Kimberly Cutler, Niles. He was not yet convinced that Oscar Wilde was right and Aristotle was wrong: that life imitates art. So he went back to television for an answer to his domestic misery. And he found it. on 'The Late, Late Show."

  It was John Wayne telling Maureen O'Hara that there'd be no locked doors in their marriage as he broke down a three inch oak door and threw the stunning redhead onto their four-poster, breaking it to the ground.r />
  Like so many policemen, Sam Niles was a John Wayne fan, though he had never fallen prey to the malaise the Los Angeles police psychologist called the "John Wayne Syndrome," wherein a young hotdog responds with independence, assurance and violence to all of life's problems and comes to believe his four inch oval shield is as large as Gawain's ever was. Roscoe Rules, who swaggered and talked police work every waking moment and wore black gloves and figuratively shot from the hip and literally from the lip, was surely suffering from the syndrome. But though Sam Niles had never been a hotdog or black glove cop, he admired the direct, forceful, simplistic approach to life found in a John Wayne film. And he was given the chance to be the Duke that very week.

  It started over Sam's bitching about Kimberly's cooking which like everything else in their marriage had deteriorated to the point that even she could hardly eat it. It ended with her in angry tears, which was not unusual, and running into the bathroom and locking the door, which was extremely unusual. "Goddamn women," Sam Niles muttered in consummate frustration, hurling his half-eaten plate of food against the wall, his stomach afire from the poisons he was manufacturing.

  Sam found himself standing in front of the bathroom door, making a fist and shouting, "There'll be no locked doors in our marriage, Kimberly Cutler Niles!"

  And when there was no answer he John Wayned the door, kicking it right next to the lock and sending it crashing across the bathroom to smash into the wall and crack the porcelain toilet.

  The door exploded. It made a loud boom. But nothing like the boom his Smith and Wesson .38 made in the hands of Kimberly Cutler Niles as she stood inside that bathroom, half out of her mind, watching the door sailing past.

  Then Sam Niles was lying flat on his stomach from his feet trying to run backward. Then he was kneeling on his broken glasses pleading, "Please, Kimberly! Please don't kill me! Oh God!" And then there was another explosion and a third, and Sam Niles was up and crashing through the aluminum screen door and running down the walk and across the street to a vacant lot where he lay trembling in the knee-high weeds, watching the front of, the apartment building, waiting for a wrathful figure to emerge from the darkness. Ready to run like a turpentined cat as far as his legs could carry him from the maniacal Kimberly Cutler Niles.

  The police were called by three neighbors that night, but the walls and concrete walks of the apartment building had played tricks with the sound of gunfire and no one knew the shots had come from the Niles' apartment. It was finally thought that someone had driven by and shot up the place. Two detectives worked for three weeks on the theory that an unknown assailant had a grudge against the apartment house manager who sweated off ten pounds during the investigation. Kimberly bought a new door and toilet and had the interior bullet holes patched before she moved out and filed for her divorce.

  When he was sure Kimberly was in class Sam Niles came back and got his clothes, ready to bolt out the door any second. He found his belongings on the living room floor. There was a note beside his gun which read, "Who's got the biggest balls now, hero?"

  Sam Niles never fully appreciated a John Wayne film after that night.

  But he wasn't thinking too much about Kimberly Cutler or John Wayne the night the hype blew their case away and they arrested the man who painted himself red.

  Both Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard had heard of the man who painted himself red. But prior to the contact with him he was known only as the man who painted his car red. His name was Oscar Mobley and he was fifty-eight years old, white, unmarried, lived alone, was unemployed and liked to paint his car red. It would never have been called to the attention of the Los Angeles Police Department if it weren't for the fact that Oscar Mobley did it with a paintbrush and bucket and did it perhaps once a month. The policemen who knew him said that his fifteen year old Ford outweighed a Cadillac limousine, so thick were the coats of peeling red enamel.

  And yet Oscar Mobley would probably never have become the subject of rollcall gossip if it weren't that he would occasionally paint his headlights red and drive along Wilshire Boulevard at night, making cars pull over. Oscar Mobley had many warnings and traffic tickets over painting his headlights red, but just as it appeared that he would give up painting his headlights red, Oscar Mobley suddenly for no apparent reason painted all the windows of his car red, and unable to see through a red opaque windshield, got himself into a traffic accident on Washington Boulevard. He was ordered by a traffic court judge never ever to paint his headlights or windshield red again.

  Oscar Mobley had not been heard from for several months, apparently content to have a car with a red body, red bumpers, red tires, red hubcaps and red grille, but with unpainted windows and headlights. Then something happened on the night Sam and Harold met Oscar Mobley.

  "Seven-A-Twenty-nine, see the woman, male mental case, Eleventh and Irolo, code two."

  "Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger," Harold responded as Sam picked up speed a little and drove through the nighttime traffic to the residential neighborhood of Oscar Mobley.

  "It's about time you got here," said the caller, Mrs. Jasper, the next door neighbor of Oscar Mobley. Her hair was wet with red paint and a blue cotton dress she held in her hands was covered with the stuff "I just asked that crazy nut Oscar why he was painting his headlights and windshield red, that's all I did."

  "Wait a minute," Sam Niles said as he and Harold stood in the street with Mrs. Jasper, her husband, her brother and eight other neighborhood men and women who had almost decided to lynch the frail Oscar Mobley until someone had the presence of mind to call the police.

  "Oscar started to paint his car again tonight," said Mr. Jasper, a man with receding hair and a parrot's face, who was even more frail than Oscar Mobley and who had no stomach for fighting for Mrs. Jasper who could have licked Oscar Mobley and Mr. Jasper at the same time on her worst day.

  "Yeah, we know about Oscar," Sam Niles said.

  "Well he started to paint again," Mr. Jasper continued. "He ain't done that for three, four months now. He won't ever tell anyone on the street why he paints his car red and we asked him a thousand times, maybe a million. He just smiles and keeps painting and won't answer you. Well tonight he done what the judge told him not to do, he started painting the headlights and the windows red, and my wife just came out on the front porch and asked him why."

  "That's all I done and that crazy little."

  "Please, ma'am, one at a time," Harold said.

  "Well, my little woman just comes out and sees him there under the streetlight, painting everything red and she asks him why he's doing it and he says something she can't hear and she thinks at last maybe she's gonna learn the secret of why Oscar Mobley paints his car red and she just walks over."

  "Out of curiosity," added Mrs. Jasper.

  "Out of curiosity," said Mr. Jasper, "and when she gets close she says, 'Oscar, why do you paint your car red?' And he don't say a word. Then he done it."

  "Done. did what?" asked Harold.

  "Painted me red!" Mrs. Jasper shouted. "The little son of a bitch started painting me. I got the paintbrush in my mouth and I couldn't breathe. He was painting my hair and neck and arms. If he hadn't a surprised me I'd a knocked the little bastard down the sewer, but pretty soon I couldn't even see for the paint in my eyes. And I turn and run for the house and he chases me painting my."

  "Her ass," said Mr. Jasper.

  "Yes, the dirty beggar even did that to me and I've been scrubbing with paint thinner till my skin's almost wore off. Look at me!"

  Harold shined the flashlight past Mrs. Jasper's face so as not to hit her eyes with the beam and it was true, her face and neck were a splotched and faded red like a pomegranate. "Well, it's time someone did something about Oscar," Sam Niles sighed and he and Harold got their batons and put them in the rings on their Sam Brownes and went to find Oscar Mobley and let Mrs. Jasper make a citizen's arrest on him for painting her red.

  As Sam expected, Oscar Mobley did not open the door when he p
ounded and rang the bell.

  "It's unlocked, Sam," Harold said when he turned the knob of the front door of the little three room house where Oscar lived with two cats and a goldfish.

  Sam shrugged and readied his revolver and Harold Bloomguard also fingered his gun, ready to touch the spring on the clamshell holster. Both men entered the darkened kitchen and tiptoed toward the narrow hallway to the tiny bedroom where a lamp burned.

  Sam went in first, his gun out in front and he said quietly, "Mr. Mobley, if you're in here I want you to come out. We're police officers and we want to talk to you. We won't hurt you. Come out."

  There was no answer and Sam entered the room, seeing nothing but an unmade bed, a box of cat litter, a broken down nightstand with an old radio on it, a pile of dirty clothing on the floor and a napless overstuffed chair.

  Sam was about to check under the bed when he and Harold were scared half out of their wits by the naked Oscar Mobley who suddenly leaped out from behind the overstuffed chair, painted red from head to foot, arms outstretched.

  "Up popped the devil!" yelled Oscar Mobley cheerfully!

  It was miraculous that neither officer shot him. Both were exerting at least a pound of trigger pull on their guns which like all department issued guns had been altered to fire only double action. They stood, shoulders pressed together, backs to the wall, gaping at Oscar Mobley who posed, arms extended, grinning proudly, the paint hardly dry on his small naked body.

  Everything had been painted: the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, his hair, face, body, genitals. He had managed with a roller to get the center of his back. He had neglected his teeth only because he forgot them. He had not painted his eyeballs only because he started to and it hurt.

  As Sam Niles later stood in Oscar Mobley's kitchen and smoked to steady his nerves, the equally shaken Harold Bloomguard patiently persuaded Oscar Mobley that despite the beautiful paint job he should wear a bathrobe to go where they were going because it was a nippy evening and he might catch cold.

  After agreeing that Elwood Banks, the jailor at Wilshire Station, might object to their bringing in a man who painted himself red since it would be messy to try to roll fingerprints over the coat of red enamel, Sam and Harold took Oscar Mobley where he belonged: Unit Three, Psychiatric Admitting, of the Los Angeles County General Hospital. The hospital now had a grander name: Los Angeles County, University of Southern California Medical Center. But it would forever be General Hospital to the indigent people it served.