Boulevard

by Bill Guttentag

  Stuck in the mirror, was a picture from the LA Times of the West Hollywood Halloween parade where a stunning Imelda Marcos was striding down the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. Jimmy realized she was none other than the guy cutting his hair.

  “You always go out as Imelda?”

  “No!!” he said as if he was shot with a bullet. “I used to. Every night—for years. But American men they don’t appreciate class any more. They want trash. So now I go out as Sharon Stone. Ugh. But it works.”

  “Yeah … I guess.” What else could he say?—We American men really do appreciate class, and you were so wrong to abandon Imelda?

  Erin flipped through a Harper’s Bazaar on the couch. “We heard you did Mark Lodge,” she said.

  “Honey, I didn’t do him. I just cut his hair.” Turning to Jimmy, he said, “She tell you how many cops I do?”

  “You’re kidding.” As soon as he said it, Jimmy realized his answer should have been, I didn’t know that, and kill the conversation. It was too late.

  “Oh yeah. In uniform—and on duty. You cops love it. It’s a nice little dirty thing. Makes the night go by faster.”

  “You tell them what you are?” Erin said.

  “God yes!—I always says to them this hot chick got a hot dick. I don’t want no surprises later.”

  “And they don’t mind?” Jimmy said.

  “Nah, that’s what they there for.”

  “What about Lodge?” Jimmy said.

  “He was nothing. His secretary sent him to me the first time. I couldn’t believe he came back.”

  “What did he talk about with you?”

  “Pfff. Borrrrring. Too, too Valley. But he liked the book, so he wasn’t a complete nothing.”

  “What book?”

  “What book?—The book. You never saw it? Right there on the table.”

  Erin picked up a large red photo album—and pulled back.

  “See what I mean?” Cat grinned.

  “Show it to your partner.”

  She held it open for Jimmy. On the first page there were half a dozen Polaroids of men of all different ages and races, but all in the same basic pose—on their backs, stretched out the same couch that Erin now sat, and naked. The book was packed. It looked like he had half the city in there.

  “Okay. I get it.”

  Erin shut the book.

  “Sure you don’t wanna see the whole thing,” Cat said. “Might find someone you know.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Jimmy said. “Those are all cops?”

  “Not all—but plenty.”

  “Lodge was interested in it?” Erin said.

  “Honey, everybody but you two is interested. That book is worth a million dollars …”

  Not to me, pal, Jimmy thought.

  “… If I wanted to sell it, it would be bye-bye shopping Betsey Johnson and hello owning Betsey Johnson. All these closet queers with wives in the Valley? Name your price.”

  “Lodge ever talk about what he was doing?” Erin asked. “About work or anything else?”

  “Nothing, honey”

  “You’re sure?”

  Jimmy was about to pump him for more info. Then he stopped. Whatever Lodge was, he wasn’t an idiot, and Cat had to be the most indiscreet man in Hollywood—hardly the person you confess anything to.

  Jimmy had about all he could take and started to get up. He looked into the mirror and realized that for all the craziness—this drag queen was giving him the best haircut he ever had. Maybe he’d come back sometime.

  31

  Jimmy drove towards the stationhouse, cutting through a light rain misting over West Hollywood. Erin was staring out the window, trying to catch sight of any kids she knew who could tell them something. When the streets were this quiet, every house seemed to have a memory for Jimmy. As they drove down Seward he passed a big place with a nice white picket fence. Six or seven years ago, he was the first one on the scene where a young Japanese woman with an eight-month-old baby had been pistol-whipped during a break-in, and her husband shot in front of her. Every time he drove past the house, Jimmy thought about the woman as he arrived—the baby crying in her arms, the husband on the floor still bleeding from a shot to his cheek, her screams tearing into the night. That image, a snapshot of unimaginable pain, he figured would be with him till the day he died.

  The light changed. Jimmy shut his eyes a moment and tried to push the woman’s screams away. It worked. For now. But they would be back. There wasn’t a street in Hollywood that didn’t have a memory that Jimmy wished he could shake. An apartment building where a waitress was stabbed in the vagina by her jealous boyfriend and left to bleed to death in the bathtub; a nice tiny house where a raging drunk kicked his nine-months pregnant girlfriend so hard in the stomach that the baby died. Over the years Jimmy tried to change his route home—so he wouldn’t keep seeing the same ghosts, but there was always some house, some park, some spot where the ghosts found him.

  “Striking out—the rain, “ Erin said, pulling him out of the horrors.

  They drove in silence for a block. He could see the side of her face from the corner of his eye and wondered what she was thinking. She turned to him. “How come you moved out here?” she asked.

  “I had an incident in New York.” Lousy way of putting it, Jimmy thought, but it was the best he could do.

  “Bad?”

  “I guess.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”

  “No. It’s alright. I was coming back from a break-in with my partner Angelo in the East Village—or the Lower East Side—that’s what it was called when my father and uncles used to be cops there. And I see this little twelve-year-old girl who comes running up to me screaming there’s a guy at the bodega at the corner chasing after a kid with a nine. Angelo hits the gas, and the girl was right—at the end of the block, there’s this fat black guy waving the gun and running after a fourteen year old kid yelling, ‘Gimme that the fuck back.’ But the kid kept running. Angelo pulls the car onto the curb across the street from the bodega. I jump out and squat behind the open car door for cover. Angelo pops out the other side, and leans over the cruiser with his arms stretched out on the hood pointing his gun at the perp. Angelo yells across the street to the perp, ‘Drop the gun, buddy’. The perp is a nasty-looking guy, his pants are unbuckled and hanging half-open, and his face is covered with scrubby white stubble. ‘Drop it!’ Angelo calls over again. But the perp just stares at us with the strangest goddamn look. But then, he does like he’s told and drops the gun onto the lid of a dumpster. So we relax a little. Another scumbag with a gun, but at least he was giving it up without a hassle. Angelo yells, ‘Just walk way from it, man. With the hands up.’ The perp takes a step away from the dumpster. I feel for my cuffs on my belt—and then the perp scoops up the gun and aims it right at my head. What was it?—a tenth of a second. Less? And that tenth of a second was filled. Filled with thoughts of my wife being a widow, my kid, the person in the world I cared the most about, growing up without a dad. I pulled the trigger—but before my shot was even out, Angelo’s shot had already hit. Then mine hit. Then two more of Angelo’s. And the perp was dead. No question.”

  “Hell to pay?” Erin said.

  “God, yeah. Complete shitstorm. It took over seventy cops to calm the neighborhood—they had to bring in guys from three other precincts. Two white cops shoot a fifty-three year-old black guy. If that won’t rip the city apart, nothing will. Before the shooting, he was just another drunk from the neighborhood, but the second he hit the ground, he became a community leader. That’s all the papers wrote about—cops shoot community leader. The autopsy showed he was off-the-chart drunk, but that only made things worse—what kind of cops shoot a drunk? That night I dreamed about it. I dreamed about it for weeks—more. I’d taken a human life. He may have been a perp chasing after a kid with a gun when it happened, but the truth was, he still was somebody’s father, grandfather. I’d lay in bed at night thi
nking, what right did I have? I wondered what my wife thought—what did she think of me now that I had killed someone?

  “We got a thirty-day suspension and Angelo and I couldn’t be partners any more. The captain called it a bone they had to throw to the neighborhood. But the city just got too hot. I was on the front page of Daily News for a week—the guy who killed the community leader. I could’ve stuck it out. But I kept asking myself, is this was really where I wanted to raise my kid? LA was looking for cops—they had all these flyers on the stationhouse bulletin board, and suddenly it didn’t seem so bad.”

  “That’s hard. Really hard.”

  “Sorta … Yeah. I dunno.” Jimmy felt it in his stomach. He hated going back to the shooting again—but telling her was like letting go a huge breath of air. And no one had asked him about it for a long time—until Erin.

  32

  It was pushing three in the morning when Jimmy finally made it home to Santa Monica. He had a small house on Yale that they moved into when they first came to LA nine years ago. When they bought the place, most of the houses on the block were like his, with low fences around the yards, kid’s toys on the lawns. Over the years, one at a time, the houses were being torn down and replaced with lousy-looking, overpriced apartments.

  For a while, things were pretty good. But that was before Rancher fell into the abyss. Rancher was fourteen and went to a party at the beach where one of his buddies passed him a crack pipe. He had smoked some pot and drank a little, but nothing serious. Crack was a whole other animal. After the first hit, he did another, and then one more. When he woke up the next morning, all he could think about was how to get the next hit.

  First, he emptied his bank account, then he stole all the cash in the house. And after that he stole Jimmy’s ATM card from the dresser while they slept—anything for the rock. It was hell for Jimmy and Shannon. Rancher was a solid “A” student before this, and two weeks later he wasn’t showing up at school. When Jimmy confronted him, he was still together enough to realize what he was doing with his life, and Jimmy got him to agree to go into a treatment program. After two nights, Jimmy was woken by a call from the treatment center at one in the morning, telling him that Rancher and a girl had busted out. It didn’t take a genius to know where they would go.

  Jimmy hit Hollywood. He drove down countless dark streets passing pack after pack of strung-out street kids, slowing the car to a crawl, to see if Rancher was with them. He went by dozens of crack whores and their scumbag pimps. He drove past every crackhouse he knew—fifteen or twenty of them—but from the outside there was nothing. Not the tiniest hint of whether Rancher was inside. A giant knot of pain was in his stomach. He cruised the streets endlessly, eyeing every kid he saw, praying that one of them would be his. These were the same streets he worked everyday as a cop, only then he was dealing with someone else’s problems, not his own.

  He rolled up on the baby transvestite Gina as she was getting out of a car. He could make life miserable for her and she knew it. For fifty bucks Gina told Jimmy about a kid who fit Rancher’s description she saw earlier at a crackhouse on Wilton. Jimmy knew the place: the SWAT guys in his precinct had raided it half a dozen times. It had a door like a battleship’s, and there were God knows how many guns in there from crackheads trading them for rocks. There was no way Jimmy was going to be able get inside on his own. He parked the car half-way down the block hoping that Rancher would eventually come out. No luck. The sun came up and when it was eight, Jimmy called Charles. It was a call he hated to make, but what choice did he have? Charles told him the SWAT team was serving warrants starting at nine, but the place on Wilton wasn’t on the list. Without a second of hesitation, Charles added it on. Fuck a search warrant, Jimmy’s kid was inside.

  An hour and a half later, twenty cops in black fatigues, Kevlar helmets, bullet-proof vests, and M-16 machine guns charged the door. The lead guys screamed Police—we have a warrant! A second after, two guys behind him smashed the door down with a steel battering ram. The cops raced in yelling Get on the ground!, and On the ground, asshole—now! His gun drawn like the rest, Jimmy followed the SWAT team in. He had been in plenty of crackhouses, but this was a bad as they got. The place was strewn with garbage, empty cans were all over the place, along with rotting remnants of fast-food burritos and burgers. It smelled of shit and piss. In the first room he went through, a guy with a scraggy beard lay on the floor already cuffed, and beside him was a girl still in her teens, sitting on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest. She must have been seven or eight months pregnant. A cop was kneeling next to her holding up a crack pipe he found in her boot. She was crying and saying, I try to stop … I’m trying to stop. Jimmy walked past her into the living room where two Latino guys faced the wall as the lieutenant was speaking Spanish and holding up a gun which he took off one of them. Jimmy made it to the back room. There, sitting on the rattiest mattress he had ever seen, in a room with stench so bad he could barely stand it, was Rancher. He was completely strung out. Beside him was a pretty Hispanic girl with waist-length black hair who must’ve been a nice kid too before she got into this. She was wearing only a tank top and panties—so it was obvious how she paid for the shit. Rancher’s eyes met Jimmy’s, not with surprise or even hate—but like he barely recognized him. Jimmy felt like screaming at him, he felt like hugging him. How could this be the same kid he taught to ride a bike, he read to every night, whose little league team he coached, whose laughter and kisses were the happiest parts of his whole life? … He helped him to his feet, then reached across the mattress for a pair of corduroy pants and passed them to the girl. As she slipped them on, Rancher looked up at him. His eyes were distant and drained of life. Somehow, it all began to register. He said, “I’m sorry,” and leaned his head on Jimmy’s shoulder.

  The girl, Mary, was returned to her parents in San Diego, and when Rancher got home, he slept for almost a day. When he came to, he asked Jimmy for one more chance. Jimmy begged the treatment center to take him back. If Jimmy wasn’t a cop, they probably wouldn’t have gone for it. Rancher went back in, saying he was completely committed to making it work. But six days later, Rancher bolted and was back out on the street. This time for good.

  Jimmy paced his house. He couldn’t sleep. He opened the refrigerator. Lots of condiments—pickles, mustard, relish—but little else. This is what happens when you live alone. He threw out some tangerine beef from Wok Fast that should have been tossed last week. He walked some more. He thought of Erin—tried to stop. He picked up a picture on the mantelpiece—the family on the beach in Florida. Shannon, looking as good as she ever did, her arm around his waist as Jimmy held a seven-year-old Rancher. They were happy then. Jimmy flopped down on the couch and pushed the clicker. Bond and some babe racing through a building exploding all around them. Next channel, Australian rules football. Who cares? Next, a cute blonde in some cheeseball Showtime movie running her hands all over her breasts in a sauna. Jimmy used to like bumping into shots like this, but now it made him think of Dani, and all the shit she had to do. Back to Bond. The building was still blowing up. He thought about Erin. Wondered what she was doing now. Was she with the husband? Probably. Was she sleeping? The phone rang.

  “It’s Erin. I hope it’s not too late to call.”

  Jimmy felt a jolt in his chest. Should he tell her he was thinking about her, or play it cool. Better not say anything. But he did it anyway. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess we’re on the same wavelength,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about the Chateau girl who the busboys told us about. What I would do if I was in her shoes.”

  “And?”

  “She’d have to be unbelievably hardcore not to tell anyone about it. It would have to be burning a hole in her.”

  “You think she spilled it?” Jimmy said.

  “It’s worth checking out, right?”

  Jimmy imagined Erin—sittin
g at her kitchen table in Chatsworth; the kitchen probably had blue and white wallpaper; glass cabinets with perfectly lined up coffee cups; dark but for one light above the table where she sat in a T-shirt—and he wondered if he would ever get her out of that kitchen, and himself off the fucking couch in Santa Monica.

  33

  Casey

  Casey and Dragon found Tulip sitting on the low wall by the Chinese Theater. She looked bad—her arms rested on her knees as she bent over to light a smoke. It was ten or eleven and Hollywood was just starting to come alive. Tulip was by herself at one end of the wall. At the other, were a bunch more kids. A couple of skinheads were coming out of Mickey D.’s. Gina, Barbara and two other baby trannys were heading for Joey’s. As Casey came closer to the wall, she could see Tulip was more than tired, she was hurt. Her right eye was purple and swollen, the sort of major black eye that cartoonists draw when they’re exaggerating what a black eye really looks like.

  “What happened?”

  “Date. I thought it was straight. Nothing bad. But this jerkoff wanted to piss on me. I told him no way. He gets like, ‘Look you fucking whore, that’s what I’m paying you for.’ And he wouldn’t let it go. Like an idiot, I yell, ‘Go fuck yourself, pervert.’ And this is what I got back. Fucking asshole.”

  “You gotta get some ice,” Dragon said.

  “Nah. I’ll be okay.”

  “You gotta. We can get it at Joey’s. It’ll make the swelling go down. You’ll feel better.”

  Tulip pushed out a smoke. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  “She’s right,” Casey said.

  “You’ll feel a lot better—really,” Dragon said. “I’ll get it.”

  Tulip looked up, and with the faintest smile said, “I’m supposed to be the one who takes care of everyone around here.”