I pushed the button on the reel-to-reel to hear the song “Venus” by Shocking Blue. I rewound about ten minutes’ worth and pressed play. The voices were from a distance. One was Shelly’s. The other was unintelligible. Shelly was upset: “I took the brunt of Dad’s shit. You went to the beach. I don’t care if you don’t remember. You said that Lily was your friend — well, I never felt that way . . .” A dog was yapping throughout. “Goddamnit, I told you not to answer the door.” There was a pause, the sound of footsteps, the sound of harsh breathing, then my voice, the front door closing, a conversation about Adolf Eichmann. I’d never liked the sound of my voice. Someone was standing by the player it sounded like, breathing in a careful but labored way. A crash, even though I knew it was coming, made me jump. The thump of footsteps up the hall again: “Shut up, will you? I’ve got company. Just sit down.” The radio clicked on, the song “Venus” by Shocking Blue. “Play with this.”
I snapped off the player and headed for the front door.
20.The Missing Prostitutes
I COULDN’T LET SHELLY DOWN OR PERMIT HIS BUSINESS TO GO under or allow someone to break into his Cracker Jack box of a house and steal his “Rocket 88” or Electric Toilet or “Ring Chimes” by the Dots, and his house was the perfect hideout since I had talked to my father who said a detective asking about me had stopped by and I didn’t know how long I could trust him before he spilled the beans. So I went back to the Island and got Sweets and a King James Bible and a bottle of Presidente brandy. I apologized to Sweets about the killing of pets. Sweets pointed out that forgiveness, along with gratitude, spontaneity, and eating stale food without complaint, was his bag. He had a good sniffing all around and confirmed that no one was there.
So, what I am I receiving? I wanted to know.
Fear, he said. Crimes.
What kind of crimes?
All kinds, he replied.
Killing?
Yes.
People, I mean.
Yes.
Old or new?
Both.
Men or women?
Hasn’t been a woman in this house for years.
I took a slug from my brandy and let it glow in my gullet. Is Shelly a killer, Sweets?
Someone in this house is.
Man, am I a magnet for killers, I said.
That’s because you’re corrupt, came the reply.
All humans are corrupt.
Not to your degree.
Well, I’m working on it.
I hope you brought tortillas.
Forgot, sorry. How about a can of tuna?
Tuna will be fine.
21.The Bones of La Zona Basura
THE DAYS PASSED PLEASANTLY ENOUGH IN THE COMPANY OF Sweets. We listened to records. We sat out in the yard, feeding peanuts to the blue jays (as Shelly was fond of doing). We cuddled and took naps. On Saturday nights we had pork chops and popcorn and watched a movie together. Now and then I’d dredge up one of Sofia’s made-up camp songs (“Faaar From the Outhouse on a Cold and Runny Night” was Sweets’s favorite) and get him to sing, which he did with gusto. I thought of Sofia often and ran memories of her like magic lantern slides through my head, revisiting the time we’d organized the first (and last) Wienerschnitzel Parade, and the day she and I had taken on Morris and his Tagalog social worker buddy, Angelo, in a game of two-on-two basketball. She was an ace from the three-point line, and though I couldn’t shoot for beans I was four inches taller than Morris, gleefully boxing him out for every board and assuring our five-dollar victory: 21 – 3.
I studied the Giddings, memorized collectibles, read up on bands and songs. I closed off all the parts of the house I didn’t need, sealing Donny’s bedroom with a hook that latched curiously from the outside. I rolled sheet after sheet into the platen of my typewriter, staring into the white wilderness of what was supposed to be the chapter on ethics. I mowed the lawn and pruned back that thornapple tree whose branches were growing into the neighbor’s yard. Shoring the fence with a piece of angle iron where the dog hurled itself every time he heard me coming through the gate, I knocked it down to reveal a woman and her daughter sunning topless. The mother said, “What are you looking at, asshole?” Sweets made a run at the yapper, who was lucky to get back through his little pet door in time. The neighbors cursed me once more and I fixed the fence so that it would not fall again.
As my Sex and Murder Self-Help continued to fizzle, a deep and complicated melancholia began to seep into my soul. Fat people when they become thin realize that only the misery that made them fat in the first place is there to welcome them, as is often the case with the long-incarcerated released to a stigmatized life without purpose, structure, or companionship: a life in which freedom is a burden. I fell back into old mental health strategies: comparing myself to those worse off than I, attempting to live in the moment, reminding myself of God’s mercy and His plan. I recited New Age saws: everything has a reason; be grateful for the simple things. When those failed, I switched to heavy but equally useless doses of darker wisdom: life is tragic, no one gets out alive; pleasure is transitory, existence is an illusion. I had known people, like Flightless, who’d been spared from their date with death, and who’d done nothing with their extra days except make things worse for themselves, as if not dying at their appointed time had been a karmic violation. I wondered if Napa State Hospital had been my fate, if I had died with Sofia (as I’d wanted), and I was now only a ghost whose greatest power was scavenging vinyl and annoying my topless neighbors. Aware that somehow I needed to forget myself, for the first time in my life I fell back on my father’s method for killing the days without killing myself: I worked.
Shelly’s catalogues, his guides, his pricing, were all in need of an update. His Xeroxed order forms were fading. His accounting system was in disarray. He needed to expand the catalogues. Why, if the Japanese liked Ed Ames and Dinah Shore, wouldn’t they want Eydie Gormé and Paul Anka too? There was no inventory for some of the orders, so I had to go through other dealers in a less profitable arrangement to find the requested records. Shelly needed to put everything up on a computer and save himself a few hundred hours of work. I didn’t know how many dealers had international mailing lists and were exploiting the vinyl Pat Boone market in Norway, but eventually the internet would supplant his post-office-box-and-money-order business. Unfortunately, Shelly was a Luddite who enjoyed exclaiming that he “didn’t even know how to turn a computer on,” (there’s a switch right on the front there, babe, I’d tell him), and so for all the time I knew him he was committed solely and stubbornly to the old-fashioned mail-order-catalogue method.
One day, looking for stamps in Shelly’s desk, I came across a scrapbook full of news clippings about the butchers, torturers, cannibals, and vampires he so esteemed. He’d been keeping this book since the 1960s, starting with the Zodiac Killer, who’d never been caught. The bulk of the book was dedicated to local killers, no shortage of those. There were several articles about the Green River Killer, who many thought had migrated from Washington State to operate in the wooded areas of east and north San Diego. Then there was Cleophus Prince, Jr., dubbed the Clairemont Killer, a black mother-haunted chap who stabbed his white female victims with repeated frenzy in their chests. The Marine serial killer Andrew Urdiales had started killing prostitutes in his home state of Illinois before his pathological talents were relocated to Camp Pendleton and consequently the unfortunate prostitutes of San Diego. Ramon Rogers was a TV actor and a heavy metal drummer who managed an apartment building in east San Diego and dismembered his close friends with a jigsaw and bolt cutters. Shelly lived in San Carlos, so he had also enshrined the San Carlos Triumvirate: David Allen Lucas, an awkward bullet-headed kid who had cut the throats of many women and children; sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer, who’d shot students of Grover Cleveland Elementary School (the same school Shelly had attended) across the street from the window of her home because she claimed to not like Mondays, yielding a hit single for the Boomtow
n Rats called “I Don’t Like Mondays”; and Eagle Scout Daniel Alstadt, who after being prohibited from attending a keg party by his authoritarian father, chopped up his entire family — father, mother, sister, brother, and dog — with a hatchet, started his San Carlos home on fire, and went to the party. Lucas was on death row at San Quentin. Spencer, whose school shooting had kicked off a national trend, continued to be refused parole. Alstadt hanged himself in his cell. All three of these killers had struck within the same decade and the same square mile. Murder was definitely in the air in Shelly’s quaint suburban neighborhood.
In another section of this scrapbook, toward the back, were several backpage briefs about missing Tijuana prostitutes. I wondered why Shelly would clip, much less save them. I could determine no dates, though by the newsprint I could tell they were fairly recent. No bodies had been found, no doubt due to the usual public apathy surrounding ladies of the night, but in one of the longer stories, the only one with a hook, it was mentioned that human bones had been recovered from the great incinerator at La Zona Basura, Tijuana’s largest landfill. And though no forensic connection between the burned bones and the vanished hookers had been made, there was prevailing suspicion in the mind of the Tijuana chief of police that the bones belonged to the missing prostitutes.
I returned the scrapbook to its drawer and began to wonder again about Shelly’s claim of multiple personalities, his fractured but carefully partitioned life, his instability, long suffering estrangement, frustration with women, necrophilic fantasies, his long disappearances, his absence of official identity, his frequent expeditions into Tijuana to “straighten out the mess in his head,” and those scorch marks up the passenger’s side door of all his pickup trucks.
22.Mo Ho
MY GROWING INABILITY TO WATCH TELEVISION FOR FEAR THAT IT was stealing my thoughts, brief periods of amnesia and lost time, that fellow approaching in the black overcoat with impulse camera lenses for eyes, the notion that I might somehow be on the verge of isolating the “spice” of the eighth sense, a daylong Tijuana infatuation with obtaining a nonexistent tequila called Monstruo that possessed occult powers, my coffee crystal revelations that had no bearing on the subjects I was attempting to address, my tendency toward echolalia and word transposition, my active fantasy that I was being interviewed by a late-night talk show host, and my rising rage when I encountered a female stranger, were all warnings I should’ve heeded.
But I told myself that a few bumps and blowouts and stormy days down any highway were to be expected. I surely wasn’t going to call Jangler over a handful of minor episodes. And though every schizophrenic I had ever known had been capable of only destructive plots, my view had been tainted by being housed with chronically criminal psychotics. Many more others like me sat harmlessly in wicker chairs playing bridge in sunny sanitariums. Still others functioned benignly and contributed to society. There were even examples of stark-ravers who flourished despite (or perhaps even because) of their affliction: John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize in economics; the artist Louis Wain and his electric Hindu cats; dozens of musicians, including space-rocker Syd Barrett, a founder of Pink Floyd, and blues great Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac; and myriad other Poes, Goyas, El Grecos, and van Goghs.
Neither did I intend to return to medication. My dyskinesia was down to faint tremors. Any possibility of spontaneous recovery, slim as it was, got slimmer under the influence of neurologically toxic antipsychotics, which I now understood were designed to be addictive and therefore to supply an endless river of revenue into the reservoirs of the pharmaceutical companies. The classic psychiatric description of psychosis is an individual untethered from reality, but it seemed more precise to say that this same individual had gotten untethered somehow from the truth. And the truth was not drugs, so I vowed, as Jangler had advised from the beginning, to commit myself to clarity and lucidity whenever possible, to resist temptation, murmurous superstitions, and chimerical talk show hosts, to stop dividing myself against what I could not naturally achieve. As my own life improved I would endeavor to improve the lives of others, not just by putting coins in charity cans and recycling my aluminum but by being a good neighbor, paying the utmost attention to the operation of Shelly’s business, deferring to the instincts of my long-neglected soul, and reinvigorating my stalled self-help book by moving it out of the genre of vulturous pop quackery into a less profitable but hopefully more utilitarian category of observations based on personal experience. I intended to call it Benevolent Madness: A Manual for Recovering Schizophrenics.
Fifty percent of Shelly’s mail was from Japan. About 30 percent came from Scandinavia. Looking back, I marvel at how Shelly ran his business with faded Xeroxed catalogues, checks, and money orders, all of it conducted at a snail’s pace through the narrow slot of a P. O. Box, an unthinkable and completely impractical arrangement for a dealer of Shelly’s ilk today. One of Shelly’s devoted customers, a bar owner in Barcelona, was obsessed with Don Ho. The French wanted jazz ( je regrette). The Swedes loved surf music, and with all that ABBA right up to their eyebrows, I knew they’d love punk, but Shelly didn’t deal in punk. Punk was smut to him. So were rap, heavy metal, and disco. He had a few discriminating customers, that fellow in the Hague, for example, who couldn’t get enough Cannonball Adderley. There was the occasional letter in English, but the majority of the order forms were simply accompanied by money orders, personal checks, and the occasional international reply coupon or envelope of U. S. cash.
These orders were not hard to fill. Shelly shipped his vinyl discs, bubble-wrapped and cardboard slip-covered, in flat boxes. Most people ordered multiple records because the shipping price of five records was only nominally more than the cost of shipping one. The Japanese, who loved fifties and sixties Americana more than Americans did, would take almost anything from that period, especially if the singers had been TV or movie stars like Ricky Nelson, Jim Nabors, Dean Martin, or Dinah Shore.
I opened three to six envelopes a day. The postal clerks, all three of them, were delighted to hear that I represented Shelly Hubbard. I was treated as if I were royalty. “Hey, so where is the old fuss budget?”
“He had to go back to Alabama,” I explained.
“His mom?”
“Dad this time.”
“Oh no.” Their faces registered genuine concern. This was my first experience with post office emotion. I was impressed but not surprised by the scope of Shelly’s charm. The clerks stressed to me that whatever it was I might need that I should please let them know.
Week two watching Shelly’s business, I got a postcard from him:
Doctors say Dad will die soon, but they don’t know him. The track here is no good, even if they run all year. All the horses are lame. Birmingham’s not a llamadrome but a lame-o-drome. It’s like Return of the Mummy. I can’t play thousand-dollar claimers. How goes it with you?
By the end of the second week I’d run out of Don Ho. The Barcelona bar owner had made a run on me and his customers still wanted mo’ Ho. Shelly never said anything about replenishing stock, but he did say if I needed anything, petty cash was in the medicine cabinet. There was over four hundred dollars stuffed into the Band-Aid box, and since I was getting a 10 percent commission on all sales I didn’t mind funding some of the effort out of my own pocket.
Don Ho won’t be hard to find, I thought. In my mind was a picture of a thousand garage sales and in each a box full of Don Ho, but as I flipped through the garage-sale boxes I found no amiable Hawaiian faces. I saw a lot of Christmas albums, Chicago XVIII through XXI, Mantovani, One Hundred & One Strings Orchestra, the balladic efforts of an actor who played in a popular police drama, endless hairy dope children, polka players, dancing polyester schlockmeisters, cowboy crooners, blues stealers, and vacant clean-cut Dylan clones with Brylcreemed heads and big wooden guitars.
On Sunday I hit the swap meet at the Aero Drive-in in El Cajon and struck out there, too, though I loaded up on Elvis, Bobby, Ricky, Pat, Debbie, Dinah, a
nd Doris. The Japanese, unlike their counterpart Scandinavians, worshiped blonds, even those who couldn’t sing. And no one was going to argue that this Loggins and Messina album was worth any more than seventy-five cents. Nevertheless, there were Portuguese teenagers who would pay seventeen dollars for a copy of Mother Lode, not including shipping, without batting an eye.
Which didn’t address the Don Ho desires of the Barcelona saloonkeeper, so on Monday I ventured to one of Shelly’s regular dealers, a used record store in Del Mar. I was over my head here. There were no bargains, no steals, no exploiting market differentials. The records were pricey, more the realm of coin collecting, where you could get what you wanted but had to pay the going rate. I wouldn’t net for Shelly or myself any kind of reasonable profit. And Don Ho should have been a 700 percent prospect, minimum. Nevertheless, I needed that Ho.
One of the clerks recognized me. “Hey, you’re Shelly’s buddy, right?
“That’s me. Willie Wihooley.” I put out my hand.
He nearly embraced me. “I’m Dirk,” he said. “Where’s the kid?”
“Had to go back to Alabama.” I gestured east with my thumb.
Dirk nodded for a while. “You don’t say?”
“I’m sort of running his business for him. His mother died and now his father is sick.”
“I heard about his mom.” He bit his lip. “Gee, that’s tough.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I got the best prices for you, man.” He clapped my shoulder. “You just tell me what you’re looking for. Everything’s 50 percent off for you.”
“Hey, thanks.” I felt as if I’d been swept into a secret society. Everywhere I went in Shelly’s World the mention of his name rolled out the red carpet. I drifted back toward standards, and found Mr. Ho not far from his antithesis: Billie Holiday. There were five Ho albums in stock. I scooped them all hoping I hadn’t blown the cover on Shelly’s secret international treasure-trash niche. At three bucks each against international market price I could still turn 600 percent profit. Fish in a barrel. Why were there not a thousand people doing what Shelly was doing?
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