“Mr. Seymour Bittleman—you should pardon the expression—has made a ridiculous misinterpretation of history,” she told the boys as they climbed onto her lap. “After seventy years of struggle, he now announces that Kautsky was correct at the Second International . . . Vey es Mir! . . . Don’t you remember what Trotsky wrote in ‘A letter to Party Meetings,’ that the Kautskian line leads to nothing but revisionism and Social Democracy?!”
“The rabbi of Kotzk said: Everything in the world can be imitated except truth. For truth that is imitated is no longer truth.” Bittleman grinned and stabbed a piece of codfish with his fork.
“Now what the hell does that mean?” She tugged at her babushka and made a face somewhere between Ethel Merman and La Pasionaria.
“The rabbi of Ger said: I often hear men say they want to throw up the world. But I ask you, is the world yours to throw up?”
“Shut up, Bittleman. I don’t want you polluting these children’s minds with your cheap religious talk. Next thing you know you’ll be putting on a prayer shawl and quoting Hillel.”
She turned away from him with a wave and I opened the lunch in front of us. Bittleman snickered and tucked a tiny napkin into his white shirt which was already stained with fish oil.
“We’ve got a pastrami sandwich for you, Aunt Sonya,” said Jacob.
“Good boy,” she said, taking the sandwich from him, but her voice was still fuming. “So what’s news?” she said, turning to me.
I recounted how I was doing some investigating for Senator Hawthorne’s campaign.
“That’s news?” she said, sneering at me in disgust and biting off a large hunk of pickle. “Better you should tell me your youngest son is having a lobotomy.”
“Come on, Sonya. A man’s gotta make a living.”
“Some living!” She spread mustard on the pastrami and gobbled it down in three mouthfuls. “I’ve seen those chozzers. Kissing the tuchases of old people. Hawthorne? A nothing reformer. A Menshevik. And Dillworthy? Comes around last week grinning like an imbecile. Asks me how I like living at the Center.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“The truth—it’s a shit-hole!” A younger man in bellbottoms and an obvious wig walked on stage to congratulate the musicians as the band went into “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” Sonya looked up at him with obvious disdain and reached for the potato salad. “So the chozzer has the nerve to ask me why—what’s so bad about it? So I tell him. They treat old people like children and the whole place just exists to make a quick profit. So he says, my dear lady, we’ll have to do something about that. And I say, my ass you will; one of your biggest backers owns the place.”
At the other end, Bittleman started to laugh in spite of himself, dipping the bottom of his tie in the fish oil.
“What’d he say to that?”
But I didn’t wait for an answer. Something had attracted my attention through the front window. A battered Studebaker was parked in front of the Senior Citizens Center. Standing up slowly, I sauntered off toward the men’s room and pushed open the door. An oldster was standing at the urinal trying to tinkle. I walked past him and climbed up on the radiator. He looked at me in terror and was about to scream when I smiled at him and put a finger to my lips. Then I turned and, pulling open the window, slipped out onto Beverly Boulevard. I was in the parking lot of a Pup ’n Taco. I crossed the lot to the sidewalk on Fairfax Avenue. Moving up among the shoppers, I came on the Studebaker from behind. Alora wasn’t there this time; a Mexican-American man in a fatigue jacket occupied the front seat. He had a pair of binoculars around his neck and was staring directly at the Senior Citizens Center. His expression was so intense it was easy to sneak up on him. I walked up to the Studebaker, opened the door and sat down beside him.
“Looking for somebody?” Before he could answer, I removed his keys from the ignition. “You guys don’t give up, do you? Maybe I should just give you a copy of my itinerary. It would save you a lot of effort.”
The Chicano turned and gave me a cold stare. “Are you going to get out of my car or am I going to have to call the police?”
“Call the police,” I said.
I reached up to the sun visor and pulled out the automobile registration. The car was registered in the name of Alora Vazquez, 3201 ¼ Evergreen Way, East Los Angeles. He grabbed the card back and stuffed it in his shirt.
“You shouldn’t keep those things in the open if you’re going to do this kind of work,” I said.
“Get out of here.”
“Not very professional. . . .Who’re you working for?”
“I’m not working for anybody.”
“What about your Vegas buddies?”
“I said I’m not working for anybody. Now get out.”
I didn’t move.
He stuck his hand inside his fatigue jacket and pulled out a knife. The leather handle was worn but the blade was sharp enough to cut diamonds.
“I get the message.” I twisted the handle but stopped myself when the door was half-open. “Say, you look a little like Alora Vazquez . . . a brother or something.”
He flicked the blade against the side of my jeans, carving a neat half-moon in the denim. I nodded to him and got out of the car.
“If it’ll save you trouble,” I told him, “my next stop is the Grit Recording Studio in Westwood. You can park across the street, but don’t try to go inside. They don’t allow wetbacks in nice places like that.”
I tossed the keys on the seat and headed for the Center.
Back inside, Sonya had resumed her argument with Bittleman. Simon was smearing the potato salad across her plate into a dog-eared copy of Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision.
“Ouspensky-Shmoospensky,” she was saying. “I don’t give a crap for your addle-brained metaphysics. Need I recall at this late date what Bakunin said concerning the ignorance of theological conceptions?”
“What’s theorojiggle conlepshuns?” asked Jacob.
“Something for nudniks,” said Sonya, patting him on the head as I moved Simon out of reach of the potato salad.
“I’ll be back for the kids in a few hours,” I said, turning toward the door. “And remember what Marx said of Feuerbach in the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy.”
“What was that?”
“Philosophy is nothing but religion rendered into thought hence equally condemnable as just another estrangement from the true essence of man.”
“That’s right!” said Sonya.
6
HOWARD EPPIS.” EARL Speidel mumbled the words with his feet up on the 12-track board and a reel of white leader in his mouth. “You always come to me with the dillies.”
“Who else knows all the superstars, Earl?”
The band was warming up and I couldn’t quite hear his reply. It sounded like “Get fucked!” Beneath the giant Altec A-7’s, R. T. Higgins, king of the Texas blues, tuned his guitar opposite a horn section of white longhairs. The lead trumpeter leaned against the wall snorting coke from a double-nostrilled onyx plate.
“Who wants him?” asked Earl, stepping away from the board to the Dolby. “The FBI or his mother?”
I raised my hand in protest.
“Oh, I forgot. Psychiatrists and private detectives, they only talk about their clients at cocktail parties.”
“When’d you last see him, Earl?”
“Three years ago. When we made the record. What a depressed sonofabitch.”
“Depressed?”
“You’re telling me. Eppis was one of those radicals who thought the revolution would be fought and won by March 1, 1969. When his timetable fell through, he went bananas. No wonder she left him.”
“Who?”
“What’s her name? Great girl. Real smart. Knew the whole Charlie Parker solo on ‘Confirmation.’ She walked out on him over that madman Procari. Can you blame her?”
Earl signalled to the engineer who flicked the switch. “We’re rolling!” The band launched into a blues in the Elmore James sty
le, R. T. Higgins out front, wailing with a bottle of Kentucky bourbon propped against the amplifier. A half-dozen hangers-on in the control room kept time smoking joints and munching fortune cookies. I picked one up. It read: “Help Help! I am being held captive by Grit Records!”
When the song was over, Earl congratulated the musicians and told them the day’s session was completed. I waited until they had gone.
“Who was she, Earl?”
“I forgot . . . I forgot . . . I’m terrible about names. I flew all the way to London to record the lead singer of the Pink Floyd and I couldn’t even remember what to call him.”
“What about this Procari?”
“The rich boy who owns this studio . . . or did, until his old man took it away from him. Oscar Procari, Jr., ne’er-do-well son of the financier Oscar Procari, Sr. Flunked out of every school in the East and bankrupted five businesses until he landed here. I would have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been such a pretentious pain in the ass, always whining about his father.”
The engineer locked the day’s tapes in a metal cabinet and said goodnight. I fingered the last of my roach and walked over to Earl.
“What did Eppis have to do with this?”
“Watch,” said Earl, crossing the studio floor past the door to the echo chamber and a room filled with automated mixing equipment to a wide wall mirror with an Art Deco decal. He pushed the side and the mirror swung open, revealing a hidden passageway. “When Procari first came out here, he wanted to be a record producer, but he didn’t know middle C from the man in the moon. So to stay on the good side of the musicians he started staging orgies, providing lots of dope.” Earl entered the passageway and I followed him. It was dark and I couldn’t make out much from the light in the recording studio. “The orgies escalated. One thing led to another. Procari would do anything kinky for attention.”
We came to a small room and Earl switched on a wall lamp. It illuminated a shrine of the most eclectic sort. Paintings of Christ, Merlin, Buddha, Confucius and Satan hung over an altar beneath a gruesome pair of spiked medieval handcuffs and a mace. A tryptich in the tradition of Hieronymous Bosch decorated the far wall beside a chalice and some dried dandelions. The floor was covered with straw mats painted black and purple with a bloody hand outlined in the center.
“The Church of the Five Deities. Procari invented it, based on his own version of the Hell Fire Club and some San Francisco devil cults. He was very successful for a while. He had one of those weird magnetic personalities that could dupe people into believing anything.”
“Even Eppis?”
“I don’t know. We were into some pretty heavy recording then. Militant political raps. Blacks. Brown power people. Vietnamese. Eppis was out of his league. Depressed. He’d duck back here whenever he got the chance.”
“Did you ever see Eppis again . . . after the recording?” We headed back out into the studio.
“Nah. Never heard from him. And he never had to come around for royalties. Those political records never sold shit.”
“What happened to Procari?”
“Excommunication from his own church. Procari, Sr., found out about it and was pretty disgusted. I guess he was afraid of the kind of scandal that would ruin his own business. So he cut his son off . . . disowned him totally and sold the building to a Midwestern conglomerate without so much as a phone call. One evening in the middle of a whip ceremony some lawyers arrived with an eviction notice. Procari, Jr., was humiliated. Broke down in front of everyone.”
“What’d he do after that?”
“He killed himself. They found his Maserati floating in the ocean off Palos Verdes Peninsula two years ago this spring. He must have driven off the cliff.”
“So much for Oscar Procari, Jr.”
“Yeah . . . Although a few of his acolytes seem to think he’s still alive. But then this city’s filled with demented maniacs.”
He stopped at the end of the corridor and looked at me. We stood there silent for a moment. Then a thought crossed my mind that I didn’t like at all because it gave me the same sinking feeling I had felt the previous day.
“Eppis’ girl friend,” I said. “Was she a blonde?”
“Yeah.”
“With a mole on her left chin?”
“Uhuh.”
“Lila.”
“That’s the one. You know her!” He sounded excited. “She can tell you where Eppis is.”
“She’s dead.”
The smile faded from Earl’s lips. He stared at the floor.
“A brilliant girl,” he said. “What a goddamn shame. She knew all of Charlie Parker by heart. ‘Confirmation,’ ‘Groovin’ High,’ ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ The works.”
“I know.”
Earl pushed the top of the mirror and we re-entered the studio. All the lights were out except for a couple of pilots beneath the tape decks and the red exit sign. Through a window of the sound stage, it looked like the engine room of a spaceship or the front end of a great international jetliner. Mission control, Houston. Thirty-six hours and eleven minutes to blastoff. Earl pulled an impressive ring of keys out of a drawer and let me out of the building. The midday smog had turned vermilion. It was already twilight.
7
THAT EVENING I watched the first televised debate between Dillworthy and Hawthorne while my sons tried to wreck my Clue set with a plastic letter opener. I took that away quickly, but while my back was turned Simon spilled half the contents of a Gerber’s jar into the game tokens. That’s the younger generation for you. No respect for Colonel Mustard or Mrs. Peacock or even for the demure Miss Scarlet. But they had some sense. The minute Dillworthy opened his mouth, they both fell asleep on the sofa. They didn’t even have the energy to ask me to change the channel.
I studied the two men carefully. Hawthorne looked like a New England transcendentalist who got lost trying to find the twentieth century. His complexion was a sickly yellow and his lower lip had a peculiar self-righteous curl. There was something of the prig in the man but, I had to admit, something natural about him too. Decent. I didn’t want to recognize that at first. It was too much of a shock to see it in a politician, an aberration of the human personality too extreme to trust—like meeting a bookie with a social conscience—but it was there all the same.
Dillworthy was something else again. His face was pan-caked in layers, his hair lacquered and retouched follicle by follicle. He must have spent more hours in make-up than Gloria Swanson before she descended the staircase. He looked like an interior decorator from a smallish Midwestern city whose clients were beginning to desert him. He wanted to win so badly he was constantly on the brink of tears, as if the threat of an imminent emotional collapse in front of millions of people would convince them to vote for him out of a sense of priority. Don’t let it come to this, folks. Don’t have my public breakdown on your shoulders . . . And when he wasn’t whining, he was flailing about in righteous indignation, berating Hawthorne for anything his little mind could think of. He would have accused him of pederasty under the bleachers of Dodger Stadium, if he could have gotten away with it.
But I wondered if he were capable of an act even more desperate—if, like a Rotarian Richard III or a Kiwanis Club MacBeth, he would drive for the throne along a grizzly trail of blood.
I doubted it. He lacked the combination of determination and insanity necessary for such deeds. He was a sad man when you thought about it, just barely hanging on. No, it was likely someone else connected more tenuously to the campaign.
I turned away from the television for a moment and reached for the pamphlet listing the delegates. It was on the couch under Jacob and I had to turn him on his side to get it out. The pamphlet had been crumpled and the frontispiece was torn. I flipped through the pages for the list of delegates pledged to Governor Dillworthy. 238 names and then the alternates. A long list of suspects and accomplices. The addresses were spread throughout the state—Marysville, Sacramento, Petaluma, Oakland, San Bernardino, Bakers
field, Stockton, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, San Pedro. And then there were delegates and supporters from forty-nine other states. They were suspects too. The object of the smear was to win California, but that didn’t mean the mastermind was a Californian. He could be from Illinois or Ohio or even Nevada.
I placed the pamphlet on the coffee table and returned to the debate. I would need more information before the names could mean anything. And the list didn’t include financial backers, every one of whom had sufficient motive to shoot their mothers in the head with a burp gun, not to mention anything so mundane as pushing Lila Shea over a cliff after stashing a few reds in the glove compartment.
I took a second look at Hawthorne. He wasn’t so different from Dillworthy. He wanted to win. Soothe his way into the soul of America like a man with his hand on his heart but his eyes cocked on McLuhan. I was rooting for him, rooting hard, but I wasn’t sure I liked myself for it. Once you began to place your trust in a politician you were something of a fool. You ran the risk he would betray you for the next vote. And he surely would. He wouldn’t have been there in the first place unless that was what he needed most of all. Politicians were like actors, always needing that external verification, as if life were one long instant replay in a world of Monday Morning Quarterbacks. Only actors sometimes improve with the feedback; politicians usually get worse.
A trio of CBS news men thanked the candidates and bid the nation goodnight. Jacob snorted through a stuffy nose like a rhinoceros with bronchitis. He was catching something and his little brother was soon to follow. I wrapped him in an afghan with a portrait of Trotsky in the middle that Aunt Sonya had knit and picked him up under my arm. What a load he was becoming. Then I propped Simon on my shoulder and headed out the door.
The night was cold and damp. The evening fog had rolled in again from the ocean and I didn’t notice the squad car blocking my driveway until I was halfway to the Buick. A plainclothes man and a driver were in the front seat. The plainclothes cop leaned out the window. He was smoking a rum crook and wearing a brown suit with thin 1958 lapels that looked like a Goodwill reject. The bashed-in Panama hat on his head I would have recognized anywhere.
The Big Fix Page 4