To be exact, it was Bianchi’s second trip to California. In 1957, when he was barely six and Angelo was just married to Candy, Kenny’s parents had brought him to Los Angeles for a month or two to visit relatives. All Angelo remembered of him was that he had been a restless nuisance who kept wetting his pants, but he figured Kenny had learned to control himself by now. He gave him the spare bedroom on the stipulation that he would get a place of his own as soon as he landed a job.
Immediately Kenny found Cousin Angelo’s way with women impressive. The house in Glendale may not have been a Malibu mansion, was a good hour’s drive from the beach of Kenny’s dreams, but he could not imagine a movie star’s getting more attention from the ladies than Angelo did. Tanya, Twyla, Melinda, Antoinette, and all the others seemed drawn to Angelo like kittens to milk, and yet he showed them none of the chivalry Kenny compulsively bestowed on girlfriends. So awe-struck was Bianchi by Angelo’s success with women that he decided Angelo must know something. Kenny determined to learn as much as he could from an obvious master. Within a week of his arrival, Kenny had his first California date, a broad-beamed blonde he had encountered near the Orange Julius stand at the Eagle Rock Plaza. Chatting her up in his usual smarmy way, he talked her into visiting his cousin Angelo. Kenny wanted the Buono imprimatur on Sheryl. He and Sheryl found Angelo in his shop unreeling a length of cord from a big wooden spool.
“Angelo, I’d like you to meet Sheryl Kellison. Sheryl, this is my cousin Angelo.”
Angelo looked Sheryl over from tip to top, like a breeder at a brood-mare auction.
“Okay,” Angelo said. Sheryl had passed muster.
Sheryl and Kenny went out for hamburgers, which she paid for, and then returned to Angelo’s house to watch TV.
Thus was Kenny’s life as a pursuer of California women launched. But his encounters were not always so formally initiated. During the first weeks of Kenny’s stay, which was to last, much to Angelo’s annoyance, until July, Angelo Anthony Buono III, the eldest son by Candy, was also living at the house, paying his father rent for the privilege of sleeping in the den. Soon Angelo would raise the rent, driving his son, called Anthony, out; but for a time a certain conviviality, a familiar camaraderie, vigorously primitive, reigned. Other sons would drop by with their girlfriends, who presented opportunities for both Angelo and Kenny. Sometimes everyone would watch pornographic movies together.
“There’s one thing about the Buonos,” as Candy was fond of saying. “They share everything.”
Peter Buono, who was hooked on angel dust, brought his girl April Ritter over, and in Peter’s absence Kenny managed to coax April into bed, saying that he was a much better stud than Angelo. Peter, who was smoking five Shermans (dark cigarettes soaked in a PCP solution) a day, never caught on, but he had his drugs and, now that he was out of the Marines, a developing career as a thief on his mind. Son Danny would drop by, too; and daughter Grace would occasionally stop in after cheerleading practice and spend the night on her father’s water bed. Angelo had a special devotion to Grace. He monitored her dating, objecting to a boy she wanted to marry as being not good enough for her, and occasionally he took her to dinner at Henry’s. Once he drove her out to Palm Springs to visit, so he told her, Frank Sinatra; but Sinatra was out of town, unaware of the courtesy call, so Angelo left a box of firecrackers as a present on the doorstep.
One Sunday evening, the first of February of that year, Angelo, Anthony, and Kenny were sitting around with nothing to do. It had been a dull weekend. On Saturday night, Kenny and Anthony had driven over to Hollywood to look at the girls and rip off a bottle or two from a liquor store, but other than that, nothing had gone down.
“Got an idea,” Angelo said. “We get a girl over here.”
“A prostitute?” Kenny asked. “We just call one up? Great. A call girl. Super.”
They scanned the L.A. Free Press, a journal that had begun in political radicalism and progressed toward the more profitable fringes of pornography, for an outcall advertisement and selected one among a dozen. Kenny telephoned, asking for someone who could handle three guys. You could order a girl that way as easy as a pizza.
When the girl arrived, Angelo, as paterfamilias, claimed first dibs on the water bed. Anthony took seconds, and then, while Kenny completed his turn in the spare bedroom, Angelo looked through the girl’s purse, which she had left on the dining- room table.
“Five bucks,” Angelo said, stuffing the bill into his pocket. “Tell you what. This is one dumb cunt. She didn’t take no money up front. That is the first rule they teach you. You know what? She’s so dumb she ain’t worth paying. She ain’t that good, neither.”
“We don’t pay her?”
“That’s what I said. Just watch.”
Kenny came out of the bedroom with the girl, smiling at her as though he were going to ask her to the senior prom.
“You ain’t worth shit,” Angelo said to her. “Here. Take your purse and get the hell out of here.”
The girl protested. She said that they had made a legitimate deal. They owed for three lays and two blowjobs. They couldn’t get away with this. Fair was fair.
“Yeah?” Angelo said. “You’d be lucky giving it away. Tell you what.” He pulled out his wallet and showed her his police badge. “You don’t get out of here fast, you’re under arrest. What’s it gonna be?”
The girl left.
“That badge really works wonders,” Kenny said.
“Very useful item,” Angelo said, grinning.
They sat around congratulating themselves. Bianchi told his cousin how much he admired what he had done. It had taken real balls.
“You can’t let a cunt get the upper hand,” Angelo said. “Put them in their place. She wasn’t worth shit.”
It was now eleven at night. Angelo switched on the news. The phone rang, and Anthony answered it. He heard this:
“You all got a real nice house . . . real nice. Tell you all what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna mess you all’s house up. I’m gonna mess it up real good. I’m gonna blow up that nice house of you all’s. You gonna be flying high ’cause I’m gonna send you to the sky and you gonna die, motherfucker. You don’t pay for your play, man, you ain’t gonna see another day. I tell you what, son, recreation can be real expensive.” The caller hung up.
“Who was it?” Angelo asked.
“Jesus,” Anthony said, “some nigger says he’s gonna blow up the house.”
“He what?”
“Says we got a real nice house and says he’s gonna blow it up. It was some nigger.”
“Must be her pimp,” Angelo said. “Fuck it, he’s bluffing. Where’s he gonna find dynamite this time of night? He’s jiving.”
“You sure?” Bianchi asked.
“Calm down,” Angelo said. “It’s just a little excitement. Passes the time.”
“What if he’s serious?”
“Be cool, man. You’ll shit your pants. Ain’t nothing but some jive-ass pimp. Watch TV. Shut up.”
Sitting in the den, they caught sight of headlights as a car pulled into the driveway and honked its horn.
“I’ll see who it is,” Angelo said.
He opened the front door onto a yellow cab.
“Call for a taxi?”
“We didn’t call for no taxi,” Angelo shouted. “Must be a mistake.” He shut the door and set the deadbolt. The telephone rang again. Angelo answered it, and this time the voice said that the house would be blown up at midnight. It was a quarter to twelve.
“The asshole’s trying to bother us,” Angelo said.
“You think he’s serious now?” Bianchi asked.
Angelo did not reply. He strode over to the gun case in the den, removed three rifles, and handed one each to Kenny and Anthony.
“I tell you what,” Angelo said. “If that nigger gets within ten yards of this place, he’s gonna be one dead nigger.” Angelo distributed ammunition. He was showing some agitation now. He told Bianchi to watch the side door. He an
d Anthony would watch the front. There was no way anyone would come from the back. They took up their posts.
Headlights appeared again in the driveway. Angelo and Anthony crouched down and readied their rifles.
“Who is it?” Bianchi called from the back of the house.
“Shut up!” Angelo said. “Jesus Christ, it’s the cops! No it ain’t. Shit!”
From out of a white van with red lights spinning atop it stepped a white-coated ambulance attendant. Angelo unbolted the door and opened it. The attendant approached.
“We didn’t call you,” Angelo said, hiding his rifle behind the door. “Must be a mistake. Ain’t nobody sick here.”
Angelo closed and bolted the door again.
“Goddammit,” he said. “That motherfucking nigger is at it again. Who’s he gonna call next?”
“He might call a hearse,” Bianchi said.
“Shut up.”
The phone rang again. Angelo grabbed it.
“Your house will blow up at midnight,” the caller said and hung up. It was now only a couple of minutes before twelve.
Angelo could no longer conceal his fright with tough talk. He did what any alarmed citizen would do and dialed the police. Somebody was making bomb threats against him. No, he had no idea who the caller was. He had no enemies that he knew of. It might be some customer at his shop who figured it was easier to throw a bomb than pay his bill.
The police arrived. They told everyone to keep calm and put away the guns.
“I’m a businessman,” Angelo said. “I don’t want no trouble.” He signed a complaint, on which he was listed as the “victim” of a bomb threat. The police watched the house that night and kept an eye on it for the next few days. Nothing happened.
Such swift police action inspired Kenny Bianchi to apply for a job with the Glendale Police Department. He had done nothing about job hunting since moving to California, and Angelo was starting to get after him. “I don’t want no lazy bums around here. Move your ass.” Bianchi’s application required him to be fingerprinted, and he was asked to write a brief essay describing his reasons for choosing police work as a career. His creative writing skills took over:
“My reasons for wanting to be a police officer,” he wrote, “are simple and varied.” He listed five: he wanted to be able to help people, and he thought people needed help in today’s troubled world; he enjoyed working with people, certainly something that would be important for a policeman; he also preferred working out of doors, because he was not the sort of person who could see himself being cooped up in an office all day, and he liked the idea of being active in various parts of the city; he felt that the job of police officer offered both a challenge and a chance to assert his individuality, two things which were very important to him, because a man never knew what he could accomplish until he was challenged, and too many people permitted themselves to be just faces in a crowd; and finally, most important, he wanted to contribute to the task of making America safe for people who believe in law and order.
In spite of this eloquence, he did not do well on further examinations, and the Glendale P.D. turned him down. Undaunted, he tried to join the Los Angeles Police Department Reserves. He managed to get himself invited to participate in a “citizen’s ride-along,” joining officers on patrol in a squad car, and on his application this time he reached new heights of earnestness. “The main concern,” he wrote, “is to be exemplary in conduct off duty as well as on.” A police officer must remember that, no matter where he is, whether wearing his uniform or not, whether at work or engaged in recreational activities, “The is always representing the Department.”
He was turned down again, partly on the basis of suspicions about some of the references he listed from Rochester. But Kenny had other irons in the fire. He got Sheryl Kellison, to whom he was now hinting of marriage, to drive him over to Forest Lawn one day, saying that he had heard of a job opening there; but when they arrived, he refused to get out of the car: the atmosphere was too depressing. He began to talk of setting up shop as a psychologist. He would have brochures printed up and call himself the “La Brea Counseling Services,” and he began checking psychology books out of the Glendale public library to hone his skills in the discipline. The books included Teaching Young Adolescents to Think and several of Freud’s works. There were people on the radio in Los Angeles who advised distressed callers on every sort of problem—divorce, homosexuality, whether to have an abortion, how to deal with death and terminal disease, toilet training, impotence caused by unemployment, mothers-in-law—and he figured he could do as well as these disembodied gurus. He had discovered that Southern California was both enamored of psychology and blessed with dozens of diploma-manufacturing establishments, where you could buy a ready-made college degree without bothering with the time-consuming irritations of study, and he purchased a couple of these with some of the spending money his devoted mother was sending him.
But Angelo was not impressed. He had already gotten rid of Anthony, and it was time for Kenny to get out. Angelo could tell that Kenny would stay forever if allowed. Angelo enjoyed the way Kenny deferred to him and so obviously admired him. It was like having a woman around the house. But that was just the trouble. Like a woman, Kenny needed to be put in his place, and like a woman, if you didn’t watch out he could wheedle his way into taking over your life. He was like a woman or a dog, it was all the same. Angelo knew that if he let Sparky into the house, which he never did, Sparky would be all over the place, sniveling and cringing and licking his master’s feet; if you kept him outside and used him for what he was worth, a deterrent to burglars, he was just fine. It was the same with Kenny. He could be of use, but Angelo was certainly not going to support him. Let the jerk find his own house.
Facing eviction, Kenny submitted to an actual job with the California Land Title Company. He was assigned to pursue research in property ownership at the Hall of Records in downtown Los Angeles, and soon he was promoted to title officer at the company’s main office near Universal City in the San Fernando Valley. Without a car, he at first managed to get rides to work with a fellow employee, Mary Forsberg, who shared his interest in marijuana; but soon his mother, pleased at his progress, sent him enough money for the down payment on a car, the 1972 Cadillac four-door sedan that would prove so useful in the months ahead.
Things were looking up. In July, Bianchi found his own apartment at 809 East Garfield Avenue in Glendale, a convenient six blocks from Angelo’s, in a one-story U-shaped building resembling the California auto courts of days gone by, complete with palm trees. Not only the rent and the location but the other occupants suited him, for they included young, single women. His next-door neighbor, Kristina Weckler, who was an art student in Pasadena, shunned him, telling a friend that Bianchi reminded her of an incompetent used-car salesman. But a girl across the courtyard, Angie Holt, proved more appreciative. His range had now expanded to include the ever-cooperative Sheryl Kellison, the Garfield residents, the flood-tide of girls at Angelo’s, and the girls at work. He tried as best he could to cover all this ground. If he was as yet no Angelo, still he had advanced. California was beginning to live up to his expectations.
Yet he pined for Susan Moore, or so he told her in letters and telephone calls back to Rochester. He had never formally withdrawn his proposal of marriage to her, and he renewed it several times over in passionate entreaties for her to visit him. He had done what she had asked of him, established himself with a steady job. He had proved his independence by pulling up roots and putting down new ones. And only now, he told her, in this strange place so far from home, had he come fully to appreciate her. The girls out here in California were not for him. This entire society was corrupt, not what he was used to nor what he longed for. The girls, he said, were loose. They thought no more of making love than of eating a hamburger. Even their clothes he found disgusting, cheap, sluttish. They had no sense of personal modesty and were as ready to surrender their virtue as a dog or a cat. He n
eeded her. He wanted her to come to him and marry him. His prospects were good, better than they had ever been in Rochester, but he needed her, Susan, for his own forever.
Susan agreed to visit him but said that she would reserve judgment on marriage. Kenny sent her a one-way ticket and met her at the Los Angeles airport in his Cadillac. Susan was impressed.
But trouble between them started as soon as she entered his Garfield apartment and noticed the fake degrees on the wall. He tried to explain them away as “novelties,” but when he admitted that he was thinking of starting a sideline as a psychologist and was preparing a brochure offering his counseling services at cut rates, she told him that, much to her disappointment, he had not changed at all and was just as impractical as ever. When she asked him whom he was dating, and he replied no one, she did not believe him; and when she told him frankly about her romantic life in Rochester, he lapsed into the same old jealousies and resentments, telling her that she was no better than the California sluts. When she reminded him that they had always fought over his absurd possessiveness, that he had become angry when she so much as danced with someone else at a party, his anger increased.
They argued through the night, and by morning, Susan announced that she was leaving. Kenny burst into tears. She wasn’t giving him a chance. She did not understand the depth of his love for her. He was lost without her and might kill himself if she left him. They were perfect for each other and no man could love her as he could. She telephoned for a reservation on the next plane out.
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