The Glitter Dome

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Wing ended poor old Cal Greenberg’s imminent crying jag by pouring him a double. He let his furtive emerald sleeve slither across the pile of bills in front of the old detective. Wing managed to steal two bucks along with the price of the double to add to the box of mad money.

  “Tell him, Wing,” poor old Cal Greenberg pleaded. “Tell this kid. Glenn Miller was a hero!”

  ‘Hero, my tush,” Wing giggled, turning the hard rock two decibels louder. “He couldn’t even fly.”

  Wing dropped the booty in the box made of monkeypod, gave the abacus a sprightly fingering, and hopped down the bar toward a bombed-out kiddy cop from Hollenbeck who had at least thirty bucks in front of him.

  Perhaps Al Mackey’s misfire at the Chinatown motel was inevitable. Her flesh collapsed when she took off the bra and panty girdle. She fell out in sections: gelatinous thighs, varicosed greenish calves, stomach crisscrossed by a network of wrinkles and stretch marks. The gray belly of an aged seal.

  “Well, goddamn!” she said finally, sweat-drenched and panting, not from lust but exhaustion. “You a fag or what? I suck my goddamn teeth loose! For what?”

  “I’m sorry,” he belched. The combination of booze and tension had him incredibly flatulent.

  “It takes a stiff rod to catch the big fish, boy!”

  “I know. I know!”

  “Just my goddamn luck! A bar full a real men and I get some kind a fag.”

  “Maybe we should leave.” He tried to sit up but the ceiling spun. Not in the same direction that it had when he lay down. It was the first time he could remember the ceiling ever spinning in different directions. Amazing Grace. He needed a Saving Grace!

  “Okay, okay,” she said soothingly. “I didn’t mean that. That was wrong for me to say. Lord, what’s the matter with me? You’re havin a little trouble and I call you a fag? Lord, what’s wrong with me? I should be helpin you.”

  “It’s my fault. It’s not you.”

  “No, no, sweetie. Here, come to Mama.” She pulled the skinny detective to her soft sagging breasts and shoved one in his mouth. “There, there. You’ll be okay in a minute. It was wrong of Mama to scold and call nasty names. There, there.”

  Spittle was drooling from the corner of Al Mackey’s mouth. His right eye was closed, the left nearly so. He was unaware of her fondling his flaccid whanger. He was unaware that he had fallen asleep. She was unaware that he had fallen asleep. Then she noticed.

  Al Mackey’s elbow cracked against the night table when his body hit the floor like a bag of sticks.

  “I suck my teeth loose!” Amazing Grace shrieked. “For what? A fuckin FAG!”

  Al Mackey didn’t know if she had taken him back to The Glitter Dome. He didn’t know what time it was. He didn’t know where he was, except that he was driving his five-year-old Pinto on the Hollywood Freeway. The next thing he did know was that a very strange thing happened: A California Highway Patrol motor cop was traveling beside him on the driver’s side, motioning for Al Mackey to come his way.

  Al Mackey thought it exceedingly dangerous for the motor cop to be cruising so close to his car, so he held the steering wheel firmly in his right hand and with the left tried in vain to roll down the window. He couldn’t understand what the Chippy wanted. Maybe he’d better pull over.

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. The Chip yelled at him so loudly it hurt. The motor cop said: “Get outa that fuckin wreck, asshole!”

  Al Mackey decided to pull over. He could hardly see the freeway in front of him. Where were his headlights? He was suddenly aware that cars were passing him as though he was standing still.

  He was standing still.

  The door was opened by the enraged Chip, who grabbed the detective by the torn coat sleeve and jerked him out of the car. Al Mackey bumped his head. The roof seemed lower.

  The roof was lower.

  Al Mackey was standing on the freeway. There was a flare pattern behind him and several rubberneckers slowed to see what happened. The motor cop waved them past, holding Al Mackey erect by the scruff of the neck. An L.A.P.D. radio car rolled up behind them. Two cops came forward with flashlights.

  “Need some help?” the younger one asked the motor cop, who at last released his hold and let Al Mackey slump against the demolished Pinto.

  “I was tooling along when I see this drunk run up on the embankment,” the Chip said. “His Pinto climbs the embankment after crossing three traffic lanes. Then he rolls over a hundred and eighty degrees and comes back down on the wheels. He thinks he’s still driving when I walk up to the car!”

  Al Mackey was starting to come around a bit and sensed he was in some trouble. He stepped back from the Pinto and examined it. The roof was six inches lower all the way around. The entire car was more than a foot lower since all four tires were flat. Every window was shattered and the windshield was gone. The right passenger door was lying in the lush ice plant beside the freeway. Al Mackey was unmarked except for the bump on the head he got when the motor cop pulled him out.

  “Hey! It’s Sergeant Mackey!” the younger cop said. He turned to his partner. “Ron, it’s Mackey from the dicks bureau!”

  “Oh shit. A cop.” The motor cop’s eyeballs rolled back under his helmet. He’d been here before. Déjà vu.

  Al Mackey just couldn’t quite fit it all together. It was like the first moment of dream awakening. Things made sense and yet they didn’t. The truth was more elusive than usual at those moments.

  “I think I can explain,” Al Mackey began, but he had to stop. Each step he took made him rattle. He tinkled and crunched as he walked. Windshield glass was falling from his clothing like snow. His hair was full of shattered glass. It was even in his pockets.

  “Look here,” the young bluecoat said to the Chip, “we’ll call tow service for the car and get him home. He’s an okay guy. Give him a break?”

  “Asshole!” the motor cop said to Al Mackey, as he stormed back to his bike, kicking up sparks with his cleated boots. He drove his fist into his saddle before climbing on and roaring away.

  Al Mackey was absolutely certain that this could be explained, given a few moments to put it all together.

  He stroked it again. This was the real whanger. This one he held in his hand, not the one that misfired in the Chinatown motel. And look at it, the cylinder so crusty with powder rings it could hardly turn. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had cleaned his unfailing surrogate cock. Yet this baby never misfired. If he treated the other one like this, what? Terminal scabies? More likely, treatment from some unlicensed Chinese croaker (compliments of Wing after a finder’s fee) so the Department wouldn’t charge him with Conduct Unbecoming an Officer for coming up with some kind of venereal Red Death. But it couldn’t happen. He regularly cleaned and lubricated and pampered the one that misfired.

  The glass was empty. He didn’t even remember draining it. He put the six-inch Smith & Wesson service revolver on the table in front of him. Lots of people are scared of their cocks. He was only afraid of the one that didn’t work. Marty Welborn confessed that occasionally his didn’t work these days. With Marty it was probably not booze but religion. Maybe they were one and the same? In any case, he was not afraid of the surrogate on the table. He’d carried it too long.

  Al Mackey staggered to his feet. The bump on his head was now marble-sized. He weaved his way across the kitchen and through the cramped boxy living room. He kicked his way through the litter: newspapers, magazines, an empty bottle of Tullamore Dew on the three-legged coffee table, which sagged whimsically, propped up by a stack of useless books on criminal law, criminal evidence, and criminal procedure. Books he had never been able to bring himself to study in all the years he had never troubled to take the lieutenant’s exam.

  He looked at those books, performing their first useful function, supporting the table he had broken two weeks ago when, even drunker than tonight, he had tripped over the goddamn cat.

  How he hated that ugly table. How he hated
those books he’d never studied. How he would have hated being a lieutenant and sitting at a desk and sucking some captain’s ass. How he’d have hated the humilation of failing the lieutenant’s exam. God, how he hated that fucking cat.

  The tomcat was standing on top of the couch hissing at him, as mean and spiteful as ever—unblinking, glaring. Then the no-name cat turned away and began sharpening his claws on top of the already shredded sofa back, just as he had every day since that rainy night five months ago when the detective took in this nasty, skulking alley cat during a bout of drunken Yuletide sentimentality.

  Al Mackey watched the cat and smiled malevolently. It was perfect. It suited the mood, this blatant display of haughty destruction.

  “Maybe you want to go with me?” Al Mackey said to the cat, who looked up and arrogantly ripped deeper into the fabric. Tufts of cotton began to ball up and leak out. Al Mackey turned and staggered the few steps back into the kitchen. When he returned to the ruined living room he pointed the six-inch Smith & Wesson at the blazing yellow eye.

  “Right between your frigging horns,” said Al Mackey.

  The striped pearly tomcat narrowed the yellow eye and responded by insolently ripping the fabric yet deeper.

  “You miserable prick!” Al Mackey said.

  The cat yawned. That did it.

  Al Mackey kicked the lawbooks from under the coffee table. The cat arched and screamed. The bottle of Tullamore Dew went flying. Al Mackey kicked the wrecked table again and the cat went flying.

  Al Mackey watched the remnant of Irish whiskey dribble out on the matted filthy Oriental rug, which like everything else in the bachelor apartment belonged to the landlady. Al Mackey heard the cat snarling as it retreated to its bed in the corner of the bathroom.

  Al Mackey was ready to show the world. He went straight to the closet. He pulled a sweat shirt and two pairs of jogging shoes onto the floor. He hadn’t done any running in two years. He kicked the jogging shoes across the room. He felt the leather. He took it down from the shelf and lurched back into the kitchen, to the formica table.

  This wasn’t anybody’s cock. He slid the two-inch Colt revolver from the black leather holster.

  An “off-duty” gun. It was the first thing they all did twenty-two years ago, those slick-sleeved, scrubbed, and hard-muscled rookies with their big eyes and crewcuts and bags full of hope. They ran out and bought “off-duty” guns. Dodge City. The John Wayne syndrome. They wouldn’t go to the grocery store without an off-duty gun in a pocket or strapped to the armpit or ankle or at least under the seat of the family car. Never know when they might stumble onto a pursesnatch in progress. Or a burglar climbing out a neighbor’s window. Or (dare they hope?) a bandit holding up the teller in the local bank while they’re in mufti at the next window, clutching their City of Los Angeles paycheck. Then, a shoot-out! (They win, of course.) The L.A. Times. A television interview. The Medal of Valor maybe? An accelerated transfer to plainclothes. Glory.

  The syndrome passes. The off-duty gun is sold, or traded for a more useful revolver, or put away into closets with youthful fantasies.

  Al Mackey was such a poor marksman he always shot the pistol range with his six-inch. And though it was unwieldy, he carried it through all the years of detective duty. Not that he still expected fantasy shoot-outs—it’s just that he hated these pig-snouted, inaccurate, bullet-spraying off-duty guns, which in fact got so many Los Angeles cops into so much off-duty trouble in barrooms and bedrooms from Sunland to San Pedro.

  Suddenly he pointed it at his face. This isn’t anybody’s cock. Don’t try play-sucking on this baby. This one wasn’t familiar. This one was a terrifying machine, which, if properly used, could take a three-inch shard of glistening skull and deposit it across the kitchen on the windowsill. Would that filthy cat drink his blood?

  His hand began trembling. That’s why the really serious ones chew on it. Eat it. Chew on it. Put it in your mouth because the hand’s shaking too much to hold it at the eye or temple. But point it upward. He remembered so many failures: slugs lodged in the soft palate, in the jawbone, in the neck, in the ear. Every goddamn place but in the brain, where they were meant to go. Then: agony, paralysis, deterioration. Consummate failure.

  He opened his mouth. He moved the two-inch closer. Chew on this baby. But the rounds are twenty-two years old. He’d never bothered to replace them. He’d never used the gun. It was dust-covered. The cylinder might be frozen. He’d wiped it off from time to time but he’d never fired it. The rounds were twenty-two years old! They probably wouldn’t ignite. The firing pin would make a nice big gouge in a dud cartridge. They’d never fire. He was only playing a game.

  Okay, test it. Pull. He was drenched. The sweat slid down his cheeks. Al Mackey was only forty-three years old, but his cheeks were gray and hollow and lined. The oily rivulets followed the premature creases in his face. His hand began to steady a bit. He thought about cocking it. No, do it double action just like on the firing line. It’s only a few pounds of trigger pull. He used his thumb. These old rounds won’t fire. Possibly.

  Chew on it! Eat it! Mercy!

  Then he felt it. The gun slid from his fist and clattered on the formica tabletop. A warm puddle under his ass. He jumped up in horror.

  “I pissed my pants!” he wailed.

  The cat hissed. The phone rang.

  “I pissed my pants!” he cried, in shame, degradation, disbelief.

  The phone rang and rang. Gradually he heard it. He lurched into the bathroom. The cat was in bed licking his balls. It caused Al Mackey to look down at his own dripping crotch.

  He moved into the bedroom with the Frankenstein gait of a man who’d pissed his pants, in slow motion toward the incessant telephone.

  “Sergeant Mackey!” the landlady screamed in his ear. “It’s four o’clock in the morning!”

  “Please, Mrs. Donatello.” He could only talk in an unrelenting monotone.

  “I thought I could at least trust a policeman to respect my property!”

  “Please, Mrs. Donatello.”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if you was a lover boy or a queer or something, but you! You make all this noise and destroy my property when you’re all alone! I never seen nothing like this before! You get in these terrible fights with your own self!”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if you was a lover boy or a queer or something, but you! You make all this noise and destroy my property when you’re all alone! I never seen nothing like this before! You get in these terrible fights with your own self!”

  “Please, Mrs. Donatello.”

  “I’m telling you, Sergeant Mackey. I felt sorry for you. I begged you to go to the A.A. meeting. They can help alcoholics.”

  “I don’t think I’m an alcoholic, Mrs. Donatello.”

  “You’re an alcoholic, Sergeant Mackey. You’re the fourth detective I had as a tenant. Three of you was alcoholics. No more cops!”

  “Yes, Mrs. Donatello.”

  “What did you break this time?”

  “I just broke the coffee table again.”

  “That’s something to be grateful for at least. Did you fall down again?”

  “Yes, I fell down.”

  “Do you want me to call a doctor?”

  “No, an exorcist maybe.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I want you out, Sergeant Mackey. Your apartment is filthy. And I don’t allow cats. You got too many fleas and roaches in your apartment.”

  “How many fleas and roaches am I allowed, Mrs. Donatello.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Donatello.”

  “I’ll give you thirty days to find another apartment. Thirty days is enough time.”

  “All the time in the world, Mrs. Donatello. More time than I’m going to need, that’s for sure.”

  It grew into an enormous wet balloon of a sob. Then it exploded. He hung up the phone and began to heave. His narrow, rounded shoulders shuddered and lurched. He
looked like an armless man trying to swim. He heaved desperately, unable to hold back the huge wet balloons. Each balloon burst. The tears scalded.

  He stripped off his pants. The urine was already beginning to chafe and burn. He wasn’t wearing underwear.

  “Where’s my underwear!” Al Mackey cried. “I left my shorts in Chinatown!” Sing that one, Tony Bennett! Oh God, for a man to lose his underwear!

  The cat looked at him blankly. Much the same as Wing had looked at poor old Cal Greenberg, who couldn’t make them understand that Glenn Miller made music. The pitiless cat licked his genitals contentedly and never again glanced up at the weeping man. Even when he cried so hard he vomited in his bath water.

  2

  The Altar Boy

  The last sun shafts cut through the stained glass like venerable swords, but quickly retreated in the face of iniquitous coppery thunderclouds. The lingering smell of incense and charcoal made him nauseous. He actually felt faint, so acrid was the cloud of smoke from the censer during the procession. Father Dominic loved plenty of smoke. Easy on the wine you poured over his tapered fingernails into the chalice, heavy on the charcoal you put in the censer. The altar boy always got dizzy blowing on the coals to get them glowing hot for the pall of somber smoke. But worse than the procession down the narrow aisle was kneeling during the Forty Hours Devotion, in an empty church, cold and shadow-shrouded, during the twilight hours when the wounded, tortured saints and martyrs loomed like bloody phantoms in the gloom. No matter how much personal pain the altar boy endured from the hours on those wooden kneelers, he could of course never begin to appreciate the awful agony suffered by those enshrined forever in paint and plaster and leaded glass.

  And each time he sat for a few moments to relieve the muscle cramps, wouldn’t Sister Helen or Father Dominic appear black-robed from the dusk and remind him of an altar boy’s special obligation to endure that pain and to offer those tiny, insignificant moments of suffering as a special sacrifice to Our Lord and His Mother. Agony was a privilege, if endured without complaint and offered to Them.

  The tall priest, frail as a secretary bird, would point a bony finger toward those bleeding martyrs who had been consumed by fire, stripped of flesh, ripped asunder, blinded, mutilated, buried alive. Remember Mother Superior’s tale of the candidate’s corpse disinterred by the Vatican in search for Miraculous Signs? They found hairs in the hands of the skeleton! Proof that he’d been buried alive, and despairingly ripped his hair from his own head instead of dying serenely, six feet beneath that black earth, triumphantly awaiting his last breath of air with eternal salvation guaranteed. But they found hairs in the skeleton’s hand. Not only would he never be canonized a saint, but Mother Superior feared for his very salvation, he of little faith.