by Susan Orlean
I met Debra because I was looking for Harry Peak; I wanted to figure out whether he really set the library on fire, and if he had, why he had done it. If he wasn’t guilty, how did he end up accused? It wasn’t easy to track Harry down. Finally, I came across a phone number for Harry Peak in the Los Angeles area, but it turned out to belong to Harry’s father, who was also called Harry. Debra answered the phone when I called. Once we sorted out which generation of the family I had found, I explained why I was trying to locate her brother. Debra told me it was impossible, because Harry had passed away in 1993, seven years after the library fire. She went on to say she was glad I was going to write the story of what had happened to Harry. She invited me to visit, so I went the next day.
Debra is small and muscular, with pale blue eyes and cottony blond hair and pretty dimples that show when she smokes or smiles. She could pass as a toughened teenager, but in fact, she is a grandmother in her mid-fifties. The day we met, she was wearing a small white undershirt and big, baggy jeans. Both articles of clothing looked like she might have borrowed them from people whose body types were very different from each other and from hers. Debra is widowed and her children are grown. She recently moved back in with her parents so she could help them with their afflictions and ailments and save on rent at the same time.
The Peaks have a modest ranch house in Hemet, a small town of modest ranch houses in the San Jacinto Valley. Hemet is about eighty miles east of downtown Los Angeles and about an hour from Santa Fe Springs, where the Peaks lived when their children were growing up. The day I visited Debra was blazing, blindingly hot. Hemet was treeless and still, and everything shimmered as if it were in a broiler. The road in front of the Peaks’ house shimmered. Their lawn and sidewalk and driveway shimmered. When I drove over a patched section of pavement in front of their house, I could hear the sticky suck of melted tar on my tires.
“Well, you found us,” Debra called out to me as I was parking. She stood near the front door and motioned me inside. In the living room, her father was snoring on the sofa, and her mother was dozing upright in an armchair. A television in the corner erupted with sharp blasts of applause and laughter from a game show. We walked out to the backyard and dragged two folding chairs into a sliver of shade cast by the lip of the roof. Debra opened a can of beer and then started talking about her brother—what he had been like, what a joker he had been. She laughed while she was talking, then segued into a phlegmy cough. She sipped her beer and caught her breath. After a moment, she started telling me how Harry brought trouble on himself all the time. For instance, she said, he grinned like a lunatic when he was released from jail after the fire, so all the pictures in the newspaper made him look like he thought the whole thing was a sitcom. “He was incredibly smart, but he didn’t have sense. He tended to take things too far,” Debra said. “He got in trouble because of it. He just didn’t understand something like that and what a dumb move it was.”
Harry Peak
The Peaks didn’t need more trouble; Debra said they had plenty of it. She began listing her burdens, which were plentiful: She almost succumbed to crib death as a baby and she now suffers from fibromyalgia, a painful neuromuscular condition. One of her nephews was murdered in a gang dispute and another nephew is severely autistic. Debra’s husband, who weighed almost six hundred pounds, died of a massive stroke not long ago. Misfortune even reached back through the generations. Debra’s maternal grandparents were killed in a car wreck a few years after they moved to California from Missouri. She had shown me a newspaper article about the accident when we’d walked through the house. The article was framed and displayed amid the bric-a-brac in a hall near the kitchen. I’d remarked that the accident sounded awful, but Debra had shrugged and said, “Well, they were drunk.”
After finishing her accounting of the Peaks’ troubles, Debra said, “I’ll tell you one thing for sure, though.” She paused for a moment, laughed, and then said, “We are not a boring family.”
The Peaks came from Missouri in the 1940s, at a time when California was like a giant electromagnet tugging farm families away from the prairies. California seemed like a promise: a flawless golden abundance in the rich space between the ocean and the mountains and the desert. The places that drew them were towns like Hemet and Santa Fe Springs. The city of Los Angeles—dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors—was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been on the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it. They aspired to more space, fewer people, greater sovereignty, less commotion. In a sense, families like the Peaks tried to re-create the rural life they’d left behind in places like Missouri; they wanted to be in the California of chaparral, of scrub grassland, of ranchettes, and not in the fevered, extroverted, New York–inflected mess of L.A. It’s as if the San Jacinto Valley were not really an outlying region of Los Angeles but just a tributary of the Great Plains that spilled westward, skipping over the big cities, and had its true terminus someplace remote and fierce, like, say, Alaska. Even where this part of California is paved over and packed with houses, it conveys a feeling of wintry desolation.
Harry and Debra’s father was born in Missouri, but his family moved to California when he was young. He dropped out of high school and eventually became a sheet-metal mechanic, joining the thousands of men hired by the Southern California aerospace industry in the 1950s and ’60s when it was swollen with postwar defense contracts and space-race money. He married young. In short order, he and his wife, Annabell, had four children—Debra, Brenda, Billy, and Harry.
The scratch farms and bare acreage around those aerospace factories were plowed and planted with rows of one-story, two-bedroom bungalows to accommodate all the young families like the Peaks. These instant neighborhoods were so uniform that they looked like they had been punched out of a kit, delivered by air, and installed as complete sets. Kids spilled out of every house. Little satellite towns popped up among the developments, featuring a confounding abundance of fast-food restaurants and mattress stores. Most mothers in the neighborhood stayed home with their children, but Annabell Peak worked as a cashier at a supermarket in what would be considered the wrong direction—the store was on the edge of Los Angeles. I told Debra that I lived in Los Angeles, and she thought I might be familiar with the supermarket. “It’s the one near L.A., you know, that’s owned by the Jew,” she said. “You know that one, don’t you?”
The four Peak children grew up in the 1960s. They were left on their own more than other kids because both of their parents worked nights and slept days. Unsupervised, they smoked pot and drank beer. They sometimes did things that could be viewed as either mischievous or borderline criminal. They were known to the police because they’d all been stopped at one time or another, though they weren’t police station regulars.
When the whole family was at home, there was a lot of hollering and conflict. According to Debra’s sister, Brenda Peak Serrano, their father was “a cruel, mean man.” A month or so after visiting Debra, I called Brenda to talk to her about Harry. In the course of the conversation, she told me that her father had just died. I said I was sorry and then asked what had happened. “I was visiting him, and he was on the couch for a couple of hours,” Brenda said. “When I spoke to him, he didn’t answer, so I just assumed he was drunk and passed out.” After several more hours, he still didn’t move or respond. Brenda began to suspect something else was going on, so she rolled him off the sofa and got him to the hospital, where she was told he was comatose. He never regained consciousness. Right before his life support was turned off, Brenda said, she leaned over and whispered to him, “I don’t know why you never loved me.” She knew some people might think that was a harsh thing to do, but she told me that she was proud of herself for finally telling him how he made her feel.
The Peaks h
ad a conventional life, as measured by the conventions of postwar prefab bedroom communities. They were not rich, not poor, not chasing after big ambitions; there was a quiet, inert assumption that the kids would stay close to home and slide into jobs at Lockheed or Rockwell or McDonnell Douglas when their time came. If you were to diagram the town anthropologically, the Peaks would be hard to place: In their case, the signifiers of status aren’t clear. Perhaps they had a little less than some people; perhaps their mobility was more lateral than upward. Debra told me her father had built the space shuttle, so for a while I was under the impression that he was a mechanical engineer, a profession with a level of training that didn’t fit with anything else I knew about the family and completely stumped my effort to place them sociologically. Later, Debra elaborated and explained that he’d worked on the assembly line at McDonnell Douglas, where part of the space shuttle was built, which made much more sense to me.
Neither Harry nor his siblings were prominent in school sports, the most valuable social currency in towns like Santa Fe Springs. Nor did they make themselves known academically—a somewhat less valuable social currency but a distinction nonetheless. Even though they were white, all of the Peaks except Harry ended up allied with the Hispanic kids at school. Brenda hung out with the low-riders and eventually married a young man whose family was Mexican. Billy joined a Hispanic gang, although Debra says it was more for protection than for anything else. Debra was popular but had her challenges. Some of the girls at school gave her a hard time, so she started carrying a box cutter in her purse. In tenth grade, she got suspended for cutting a student. She explained to me that the girl she’d slashed had been harassing her. “I mean, come on!” she said, brightening up. “What else was I going to do?”
Harry, who was born in 1959, was the youngest of the four kids; he was doted on, babied, and a little spoiled. For a time, he seemed to have some magic that would help him escape the Peak penchant for bad luck. Tall and well built, with the narrow hips and long legs of a cowboy, Harry could have passed as the younger brother of actor Jon Voight. He always told people he wanted to be an actor, even when he was little. His looks and charm made it seem like a possibility. He had other assets. He did well in school when he applied himself. He could write with both hands. He could perform magic tricks. He made people laugh. He was puppy-doggish, immensely likable, eager to please, anxious to entertain, hungry to be noticed. Two or three admiring girls were always trailing behind him like ducklings. One by one, Billy, Brenda, and Debra dropped out of school, but Harry stayed and got his diploma. He was the first one in the family to do so. His brother didn’t have much use for him, but the rest of the family savored Harry’s potential; he was going to be the family star, the one who got out of town and got big. To be honest, though, his vanity and bragging sometimes annoyed people, including his own family. His sister Brenda once stabbed him with a fork because his showing off got on her nerves. She loved Harry, she told me, but he really thought he was a king.
Not everything was perfect for Harry. He was suspended a few times for homework irregularities. The police roughed him up when he was caught drinking. He liked to get wasted as often as possible. When he was a teenager, he smoked marijuana with a counselor at summer camp, and then the counselor molested him. According to his sisters, the assault devastated him, and afterward, he tried to commit suicide several times. Debra believes that the counselor’s assault pushed Harry toward homosexuality. “He didn’t want to be gay. He wanted to be straight,” she said, flicking the tab on her beer can back and forth until it snapped off. A raven hopped along the edge of the yard, swiveling its head like a windup toy. Debra tossed the tab in the bird’s direction, then leaned back in her chair and said, “He really tried to be straight.”
For several years after the assault, Harry kept up the appearance of being heterosexual. He tried to act like a player, keeping several interested girls on a string. In his senior year, he finally settled into a steady relationship with one of them, and told everyone they planned to get married. Harry enlisted in the army right after graduation. His girlfriend promised she’d wait for him, but when he got home after his discharge, he discovered that she was seeing someone else. According to Debra, the breakup crushed him.
A few months later, Harry got involved with another girl. Soon after they started seeing each other, she became pregnant with twins. I asked what became of that relationship. “The problem was this girl liked to party,” Debra said. “She partied, and lost one of the babies, and kept partying, and then lost the other one.” Debra took a deep breath and added, “I think that’s what finally turned Harry to being gay. Every time he got serious about a girl, something would happen. He would tell me, ‘Deb, it hurts too much.’ ” She looked over her shoulder and then said, “My parents would kill me for telling you about him being gay. It was so hard on my dad that Harry turned out that way.”
Just then, the sliding door to the kitchen opened with a raspy screech, and her father stepped outside. He was a tall, beefy man with a big belly and a friendly, reddish face and silvery hair that stuck out straight, as if it were a quiver of exclamation points. He started yelling something at Debra about his lunch, then caught himself when he noticed me in the chair. I introduced myself and said I was writing about Harry.
“Harry was really something,” he replied. He scratched the stubble on his jaw and then began working his fingers through his tangle of hair. “Harry would have gone to the top. He would have.”
“He knew a lot of stars, didn’t he, Daddy?” Debra said. “He knew people who were on the uppity-ups.”
“He knew eighty percent of the big stars,” her father said, correcting her. He tugged at his hair more, and then added, “He knew Burt Reynolds and what’s-her-name that he married. Debra, what’s that name?”
“Loni Anderson, Daddy,” Debra said. She turned to me. “Harry knew them really well. He knew everything about them. He told me that Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson would get divorced way before anyone else knew.”
“He would have gone to the top,” Peak said. Then he scowled and said, “Debra, I’m hungry.”
Debra ignored him. “Harry was the biggest bullshitter in the world, wasn’t he, Daddy?” She gestured at her father with her empty can. “Wasn’t he, Daddy? You know he was. He was always the biggest bullshitter.”
Harry broke up with the girlfriend who miscarried their twins, and then he moved to Los Angeles—only fourteen miles but a world away from home. He had no plans except to figure out how to become a star. It was not an easy move for him. In Santa Fe Springs, a handsome guy like Harry was a big deal. In Los Angeles, he was a dime a dozen. The sidewalks in Hollywood sagged under the weight of all the handsome young men who flocked there, who all had someone tell them they were special, and some of them were blonder than Harry, or knew someone important, or were trained as actors, or had some sizzling charisma, whereas Harry was only the best-looking guy in Santa Fe Springs. He shared a house in Hollywood with a few other young men grasping at the tattered edges of show business. One afternoon not long ago, I drove past the house they shared. My guess is that it hasn’t changed much since Harry lived there. It is an aging, ageless, slumped little bungalow with a faded lawn and a fence clotted with scraps of street trash—one of a million such bungalows in the city where people with big dreams wait for something wonderful to happen.
Even after he settled in to life in Los Angeles, Harry drove back to Santa Fe Springs whenever he could, so he could party with his high school friends. Maybe he liked to be reminded how it felt to be someone who seemed dazzling. Maybe Los Angeles felt foreign to him. He boasted to his family that he loved being in the city; that he was in the running for some acting jobs; that he made friends with a lot of actors and was getting a taste for Hollywood life. In truth, he was probably just getting by, or maybe not quite getting by. His roommates complained that he was often late with the rent and sometimes skipped it altogether. They forgave him for a while be
cause that’s the sort of person Harry was—ingratiating, guileless, beguiling. He was the kind of paradoxical friend who would borrow things and never return them, and yet give you the shirt off his back. Several of his friends used that exact phrase when describing him to me: Harry would literally, actually give you the shirt off his back, but he was so flaky that he drove everyone crazy.
He earned his bit of income doing odd jobs. One of his steadiest employers was a neighbor, Dennis Vines, who hired Harry simply because he never failed to smile and say hello anytime Vines walked by. “He was just endearing,” Vines told me recently. “He was a really nice kid. He had that smile—such a wonderful smile. And he had those great teeth, you know?” Vines managed a number of apartments. He thought Harry was “too ditsy” to trust with serious responsibility, but he hired him to do errands and occasionally serve as a chauffeur. When Harry put on a crisp white shirt and black pants and a little driving cap, he looked great at the wheel of Vines’s vintage Packard sedan. Harry really enjoyed driving: He loved chatting with people wherever they stopped, especially because the car attracted so much attention.
Vines parted ways with Harry over what he described as “a typical Harry thing.” He had asked Harry to hold on to a key ring with keys to all sixty of Vines’s properties. Within a few minutes, Harry managed to lose the keys. “I don’t know how he did it, but he did it,” Vines said when we spoke on the phone. He chuckled and sighed. “That was Harry. He just had a way of messing things up.” Though Vines fired him, they remained friendly. “He was really that sweet,” Vines said, “or I would never have talked to him again after all the bullshit he pulled.”
