We walked back to the Marriott, where Muriel had left her car. The valet pulled around a late model cream colored Aston Martin Vantage. It was almost as beautiful as Muriel, and as she had been snorting and drinking, I offered to drive.
“Do you have a valid license?” she inquired.
“Yes.”
“That’s another good reason for you to drive,” she responded. “Come, let me take you to my world.”
I fumbled with the six-speed transmission and tried to baby the twelve-cylinder engine, but with the obscene amount of horsepower the Aston Martin had, it was more like riding a rocket than driving a car.
We entered the stage door of her theater and continued to the costume and prop room. Muriel slipped behind a screen and quickly came out dressed as a cheerleader. She was holding a big fraternity-style wooden paddle. “Would you like to punish me?” she asked. “I’m not afraid of a hard spanking.”
“I’m not into that, Muriel, but if you bite me again I may make an exception.”
“So you don’t like being bitten,” she said, almost defensively. “Who knew?”
She slipped behind the screen and in several minutes emerged looking like a southern belle in a long, flowing white dress.
“I’m Blanche,” she said in a thick but cultured Deep Southern accent. “We can do the scene from Streetcar where Stanley rapes me. Now tell the truth, Jackson,” she said, still in character. “Haven’t you always wanted to fuck Blanche DuBois?” Taking note of my lack of response, she said, “I could be Ophelia. Or I have a great Cinderella costume. I have a waitress uniform: I could be Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Anyone you want.”
“What if I just wanted Muriel Lichtman?”
The light in her eyes dimmed, and suddenly they were as blank and hollow as Little Orphan Annie’s. When she spoke her voice seemed to come from another room. It was flat and had lost all its music.
“Why do you want Muriel?” she asked in a detached monotone. “She’s boring. Without her props and her costumes and her scripts she’s a cipher. A nothing. An empty vessel.”
I took a tentative step in her direction. “Are you kidding? She’s funny, talented, charming, sexy and, smart. Not just smart: brilliant. With the face and body of a goddess.”
Light and life came back into her eyes and her voice nearly sang as she said, “Goddess? I can do that. What type would you like? Celtic? Hindu? Or ….” She moved closer, took a long snort from her bullet snuffer, and stood on the tips of her toes to whisper in my ear, “Or would you prefer Greek?” Before I could respond she said, “Whatever goddess you choose you must pull her hair. Hard!”
At that point I remembered Nelson Algren’s third rule of life, something like ‘don’t sleep with someone who’s more screwed up than you.’ But I was dizzy with desire, and I’d never been much for rules anyway.
Chapter Forty-Five
The “goddess” that Muriel had metamorphosed into went back into the costume room and returned dressed as a French maid, with the obligatory starched white blouse, matching small hat, fishnet stockings, skirt that barely covered her derriere, and stiletto heels. She shrugged and stated there were no goddess outfits and who doesn’t like a French maid? She then announced that she loved motels, and it seemed she knew a great deal about them. According to Muriel, Motel 6 rooms were too small, Holiday Inns too sterile, Hilton brought back unwanted memories, and Travelodge accommodations lacked the certain sleaze and seediness she desired. I had arrived in town too late to get a room, so we let the night take us down Motel Row to a place with a broken neon sign.
We entered the claustrophobic lobby to register just as two obvious tweakers were leaving. A prostitute and her john were just ahead of us, and the jaded Arab manager didn’t blink when I asked Muriel what year her Aston Martin was, neither did he give her outfit a second glance. I doubted he would have raised an eyebrow if we had come dressed as Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane with four horses and a stagecoach.
Our drab room had the usual assembly-line art on the walls, a plastic ice bucket, a queen-sized bed, and a television and telephone left over from the Reagan administration.
“I love it!” exclaimed Muriel. “It has just the right amount of Jim Thompson decadence. It so turns me on.” She looked at me, took a step back and holding both ends of her French maid skirt, curtsied. “Do you think I am too kinky?”
“No,” I said, and I meant it. I thought Muriel was looking at too kinky in the rearview mirror.
“Jim Thompson?” I inquired.
“The fifties noir writer. A lot of his stuff has been adapted to films. You mean you’ve never read him?”
“No, but I think I know who he is.”
“How is it that you never read Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler?”
“I never had the advantage of an Ivy League education,” I said, taking off my jacket and loosening my tie.
“You are funny,” laughed Muriel as she took a snort of cocaine and then popped open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne retrieved from under the seat of her car, letting the foam spill on the colorless carpet. “I don’t want to break the mood but I brought the letters I promised. You can take them with you and get them back to me when you can.” She opened her purse and handed me a manila envelope.
“I don’t want to break the mood either, mademoiselle,” I said, accepting the envelope, “but why did you refuse to talk to the police? Captain Hobbs?”
“Outside of his being even more obnoxious than my own dead mother, he also was using Interrogation 101 games on me, which pissed me off.”
“What do you know about interrogation techniques?” I asked as she poured champagne into a paper cup.
“Haven’t you ever done policeman/prisoner, or KGB inspector/spy role playing? It can be very sexy. Anyway, one basic tactic in interrogation is to ask the same question over and over. The interrogator keeps waiting for a different response. That’s what he was doing with me, so I just said, ‘Fuck off and call my lawyer.’ I don’t like being manipulated.” She turned, looked into the small, dirty mirror on the wall and then moved enticingly toward me. With that outfit and that body it didn’t take much motion for her to be provocative.
“I don’t have to be a French maid,” she said, kissing me softly. “I can still be a goddess. Whatever you like, I have probably done it and can probably do it well.”
The vertigo returned; I felt lightheaded and had to sit down on the bed. My hands found the back of her thighs as she unbuttoned my shirt and her hands fondled my chest. I reminded her of her statement that just because she liked it a little rough, it didn’t mean she couldn’t still be romantic.
“You want romantic?” She took a sip of champagne, and after a thoughtful moment, said, “Light, medium, or extreme?”
Unused to ordering up romantic or requesting what degree, I sat silent until I told her I didn’t know how to respond.
“We should probably start with medium, because I usually end up at extreme no matter what it is.” She sighed. “It has been so long. Too long.” Her voice grew faint and she looked away. She sat down next to me, and her words were muffled as she put her arms around me and pressed her face into my chest. I reached to hold her, and she was crying.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said, looking up at me. As the dim motel-room light showed the tracks of Muriel’s tears, she said, “It’s because I’m sexy and sexually aggressive. Men don’t make love to me, they just fuck me. When they aren’t fucking me, they’re violating me. Because I am kinky and freaky, they think they can do things to me they wouldn’t ask a twenty-five peso a throw border-town whore to do. How about a golden shower, Muriel? No, better yet, a brown one? How about I set a new standard in vile and vulgar and degrading when it comes to talking dirty?”
She began to cry and sob. “Please hold me,” she whispered. I got her a Kleenex and she blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.”<
br />
“It’s just been so long. There’s a character in the new play I am writing who says, ‘Without romance, life is a mistake.’ Well, my life has been a mistake for a long time.”
She began to cry again and asked me again to hold her. As she dabbed her eyes she recited a poem she had written for when she found romance again. It was about rebirth and death and something about bright April shaking out her rain-drenched hair.
I had begun to find her French maid outfit and her romanticism incongruous, so I was happy to comply when she asked me to undress her. I did so gently.
“I hope you have a party hat,” she whispered. I did, and she helped me put the condom on.
I laid her on the bed, and just before I entered her, she said, “When I first saw you, Jackson, I knew that I knew you from another time. Another world. Another life.”
The sex was surreal, dreamlike, and only my climax brought me fully awake.
Muriel arose from the bed, reached for something in her purse, went to the bathroom and returned in five minutes.
When she got in bed, she asked if we could just snuggle and not talk. I agreed and in ten minutes we made love again. Afterwards, she told me that when she was in the bathroom she took some OxyContin. She offered me a tablet, but I refused.
“That was fun,” she said. Her back was to me, and she was pressed against me with her head on my right arm. “I really got off on being romantic. How about you?”
It took a moment for what she was saying to register. When it did, I said, “It was very nice. I liked your poem.”
“Oh, I stole most of that. You didn’t think the crying was too much, did you?” She turned over to look at me. “Was I over the top? Was the ‘I knew you in another life’ too corny?”
I took her in my arms and whispered that the crying was just the right touch and that everything she did was very convincing. It was then that I noticed that although she was completely naked, yet somehow with all the drama and sex she still had the maid’s cap neatly pinned to her hair.
“The Oxy is kicking in,” she said. “Sweet dreams.” She leaned on an elbow, kissed me, and then rolled over into unconsciousness.
I often hear people talk about the inner child we carry with us into adulthood. I believe we also carry an inner adolescent, and lying next to her, I suddenly wanted to call Dumpy and report that yes!—her tits are real. Of course, I hadn’t a clue about the rest of her, except to say that like her role model, Simone de Beauvoir, Muriel Lichtman was a fun girl on a date.
Chapter Forty-Six
I awakened that morning alone. On a small piece of paper left under an empty champagne bottle on the dresser was a note written in perfect, classical penmanship: It was fun playing cards with a guy named Doc. Thanks for the romance, Muriel.
I wondered just what all the implications of Muriel’s note were, just as I wondered how she fit into the mix of things. Perhaps she was no more than an innocent bystander, although it was difficult to see Muriel as innocent in anything. I had learned nothing about the murder from her, and learned even less from the three, short letters from Jesus she’d given me.
I took a cab ride to a car rental agency and found a place for breakfast. I scanned a photo from the playbill of Muriel and emailed it to Father Dunphy, then Googled the address and phone number of an old acquaintance in the Portland area. I booked an evening flight from Portland to San Diego, and then left a message for Hobbs to call me. I still hadn’t heard back from Grace. During breakfast I watched CNN and Day 11 of the Father Jesus Cortez murder investigation. Reward was now at $100,000. I saw pictures of my house and a procession of mourners at his grave. The announcer stated that the faithful had come to pray for miracles. Today I wasn’t looking for a miracle; today I was returning to a place I thought I’d never go back to again: Felony Flats.
Trailer parks are usually located on the outskirts of towns and the peripheries of cities, and like their denizens, on the margins of society. Populated by migrants, fugitives, the poor, and parolees, they tend to be secluded and isolated, harboring criminals and enabling crimes ranging from drug dealing to prostitution to fencing operations.
There are no signs and no directional markers on the driveway into the large trailer park at the intersection of Martin Luther King and Columbia Boulevards in North East Portland. It sits on a flat twenty-acre slab of land that is only two feet above sea level, and as Mickey Mahoney, who was the first person I heard call the place Felony Flats, remarked: “It’s the lowest point in the city in more ways than one.” Such parks cater to the lost or to those who wish to become lost: I was lost when I first came to Felony Flats.
Through Jefferson Davis Grubb, I’d made the acquaintance of one Poncho Gonzales—not the immortal tennis great, but the president of the Portland chapter of Diablo’s Disciples, a motorcycle club that had duffle bags full of cash they needed washed. Through an offshore corporation and a few shell companies, Diablo’s Disciples were able to leverage about 12.5 million in hundred dollar bills into 25 million dollars of equity in Portland metropolitan area real estate.
About a year into my relationship with the club, my cocaine addiction worsened and I was having trouble maintaining reliable connections. One day I went to Poncho, told him I had a girlfriend who liked coke, and asked for his assistance. Observing my twitchy hands and sniffling, he smiled and replied that he used to have a girlfriend like that himself. He gave me a slip of paper with an address and said, “It’s done, homes. Emil the Freak will hook you up.”
I followed directions to the trailer park, found Space 79, and met Emil. In short order I found out why he had the nickname he did. About thirty, he was so pasty and pale he looked translucent. He had a tattoo of an 8-ball on his neck, a red, bushy Yosemite Sam moustache, and like an Old West gunfighter, he was wearing two holstered pearl-handled pistols. His five-foot-six-inch 140-pound frame made the guns look even larger. He signaled with an open bottle of Budweiser for me to sit down.
“Do you know who really killed Bobby Kennedy? And Malcolm X? ” were the first words he said. When I demurred, he said, “The Freemasons. And the fucking Masons, who run everything except the territory that the Illuminati control, are the reason the world is so fucked up.”
Not knowing how to respond but vowing to stay on mission, I replied, “I know that it’s the Freemasons who made coke illegal.”
He took a swig of Budweiser and stared at me with his unblinking bug eyes. He left the room, came back with a mirror and a straw, and broke out two small lines.
“I’m not being cheap-ass here, but this shit is ninety percent pure. It’s the best shit you’ll get this side of Bogotá, Peru.”
It was the best I ever had, even if Emil the Freak was geographically challenged, and even if he thought the Freemasons routinely assassinated political leaders and social activists. Even if he was thoroughly convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney, and even if he truly believed that Princess Diana was murdered by Zionists. All that aside, he had great product.
And he was never closed—at least not to me—forever reminding me that “If Poncho says you’re cool, then you’re cool!” However, my attire and car seemed to exacerbate his paranoia. Understanding his concern that my Jaguar was bringing heat down on him, I told him I could drive my other car, but it was also a Jaguar. Furthermore, my suit and tie brought too much attention for his comfort zone. I responded that I was a bank executive, and what should I wear? Overalls? I gently pointed out to Emil the Freak that if he wanted a lower profile he probably shouldn’t have 98 bumper stickers stating “Protected by Smith & Wesson” attached to every side of his mobile home. I also pointed out that the homemade five-by-eight-foot sign “9/11 Was An Inside Job—We Won’t Be Fooled Again” sitting on the east side of his house probably drew more unwanted attention than my necktie.
Emil stared at me with his unblinking bug eyes for several minutes before he said, “I’m on The List, buddy. When you’re on The List,
you’re on The List.” His gesture indicated that the discussion was over. I didn’t know what The List was, but just as when he spoke about the Illuminati or the “International Jewish Bankers Conspiracy,” I let him have the last word. The quality of his product was as consistent as his paranoid delusions, and I soon learned to pack my nose and patronize his ranting with ease.
Later that year, things ran out on me personally and professionally: I was fired and subsequently indicted. I was summoned by Gringo, the sergeant-at-arms of Diablo’s Disciples, and brought to a face to face with President Poncho. I recall his exact words, “Your picture’s in the paper and on TV, and nothing personal, homes, but you are too hot. We have to break our business ties.”
He leaned across the table and signaled with his index finger for me also to lean forward. As I did, he whispered, “We never met. You don’t know me and you don’t know any Diablos. You’re a smart guy, homes, so I don’t have to get out the big crayons, do I?”
I assured him I was crystal clear on his message.
Later that day I went to score from Emil. He gave me a quarter ounce on the house and told me not to come back. “Too much heat. Probably the fucking Masons on your ass,” he said, closing his door on me.
There are signs that your life has become something you just hadn’t planned. Your colleagues will shun you, and your best friends don’t return your calls. You lose your house, your job, and your wife divorces you. But when the likes of Emil the Freak from Felony Flats and an outlaw Mexican-American biker gang close their doors to you, well, then you know you’re going down for the last time.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Driving through the park, I passed Space 79, and found Emil the Freak’s home was gone and replaced by a newer looking single wide. Perhaps he had moved to another park. Or was in jail. Or perhaps he had been assassinated by the Rosicrucians. I drove through Felony Flats looking at homes on wheels that seemed to have crawled here to hide from the law, from life, or from an outside world they had both rejected and been rejected by.
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