We made it back to the motel just before dawn. Arturo climbed between the sheets fully clothed, while I watched the farm reports and nursed a double bourbon to wind down.
But really, I was thinking about little Dakota Chad.
* * *
The day beat down on the convertible like a thousand angry Green Party punks somewhere in what was once West Germany. We’d blasted out of the city after finding nothing about little Chad Dakota. Nothing except some ancient headshot from a few years back. A cherubic-faced kid with a mullet and a designer acid-wash jean jacket. It was black and white. It was Hollywood’s version of an average preteen kid. In a font best reserved for B-movie fantasies about re-fighting ’Nam and winning was the name Chad Dakota. The headshot listed only one credit. Tiny Tim in the Yucca Flats Community Players’ production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Yucca Flats was a small high desert town that lay near the edge of the Mojave and the deep well of Death Valley beyond. In the days of twenty-mule-team Borax, it had been a sort of gold mine. A Borax boom town. Now it was a few buildings going ghost, kept alive only by a new drug called meth. Cocaine was too expensive and much too eighties. Meth was the rebranding of the great Wall Street marching powder of captains and whores. And cheaper, too. Back in my day, we called it biker speed. It was dangerous then, and I was sure things hadn’t gotten any better since.
Three hours beyond downtown LA, we arrived at the cracked front steps of an old steeple church tattooed in boarded-up windows. A sign had fallen down in the hard packed dirt and cacti of the front “lawn.” When we picked it up and tipped it over on its back, we found that the Yucca Flats Community Players had once had a home here.
We drove the lonely town, which seemed dry and empty. A three-legged stray dog wandered in front of us. The heat of the day passed furnace level and then dropped off when an absolutely moisture-sapping afternoon wind began to buffet the old houses, blowing away the last of the peeling paint and racing in between the clapboards. A few flat cinderblock buildings resisted the wind here and there. Outside of one, a few pickup trucks were parked in a dirt lot. Inside we found cold beer, pool tables, cigarettes, darkness, and Merle Haggard on a jukebox.
It was the kind of place you could get killed in.
But I was thirsty.
Haylene, yes, that was her name, pulled two tall cold drafts and smiled from underneath her platinum mane. She muttered a quiet, “Y’all be careful now,” and lit a cigarette as she sauntered back to the darker side of the bar where some local background casting types worked on their roles as shiftless ne’er-do-wells.
If I’d known then what I know now about the meth trade, I would’ve nailed them as mid-level distributors. In hindsight, they were probably some of the first entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor of the coming meth boom that would lead to the deaths of so many. So, in other words, they were enterprising scum.
I knew there’d be trouble. I briefly tried to remember if I’d loaded the .44 Magnum in the trunk, but I could only picture putting a few bottles of Clevinger’s in the empty spare wheel well that morning.
“You Mexican?” said a voice in Arturo’s ear. A thin, ropy, dirty or tanned, lowlife redneck I’d later come to know as Gene had sidled up behind us from the pool tables.
I led with a “Nah,” which seemed apropos. I didn’t want to alienate them with a multi-syllabic vocabulary. “He’s Chinese.”
My answer literally stopped Gene in his tracks. As in, Gene had never considered that the outcome of his attempted afternoon drunken bullying in preparation for his role in a hoped-for forthcoming Billy Jack revival film as redneck-who-gets-the-tar-kicked-out-of-him in the bar parking lot would be the answer he hadn’t considered. He probably expected a fight. A denial. An, “Our mistake, we’ll be moving on, sir.” But before I said, “Chinese,” he might never have even heard the word, much less expected it to be used as an answer to a question that he, Gene, would ever ask.
He recovered a long moment later. Then, “You funny?”
Which I took to mean, was I mocking him?
“No.” I spun around on the bar seat. I smiled. I was thinking, “I like violence.” And, “A lot.”
Gene got the message.
Crazy eyes do that for you.
“You know that playhouse a few streets over?” I asked. I might as well have asked him to name any element from the periodic table.
Again, Gene seemed to go all “out of order.”
“Was an old church…” I waited.
“Yeah, I guess…” Gene’s level of bewilderment was Oscar-worthy. If only he were acting.
I heard Haylene wiping the bar behind us.
“They haven’t had a show there in years. Not since Gay Kurt died of AIDS.”
It was Haylene in my ear. Maybe she was trying to defuse the impending über-violence I was allowing myself to consider. My plan was to nerve-pinch Gene’s dirty arm so he couldn’t use it to defend himself while I rained down a series of karate chops on key pressure points. Once he was immobile, due to temporary paralysis and pain, I would kick him in the ribs. I doubted there would be any lasting damage. Then, of course, we’d need to leave.
“Saw Our Town there once…” grunted Gene in a stunning turn of events worthy of the most desperately-in-need-of-ratings soap operas.
“Hmmmm…” I said. “If you saw a production of A Christmas Carol, I’ll buy everyone in the bar drinks for the rest of the afternoon.”
Gene seemed to perk up. I imagined that liquor to him was like some sort of bonus for quarterly sales. Or at least breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner.
“But… I never saw that one…” His face instantly dropped. As though all the booze he could ever drink had been snatched from his dirty fingers. To him, it was probably like he’d almost won the Super Bowl. He would’ve talked about this day for the rest of his life in the prison I was sure he would die in.
“Anyone see a production of A Christmas Carol at the old church?” Gene whined into the darkness of the bar. He was like a three-day-binge meth-head Captain Kirk. He would stop at nothing to outthink his sobriety.
No one in the cinderblock bar in the middle of nowhere had seen a production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Imagine that.
No one, besides Gene, had seen any show at the not-much-heralded Yucca Flats Players’ now-defunct theater.
“Gay Kurt’s mom’s still alive, I think…” someone grunt-shouted a little too enthusiastically from the darkness over in the corner of the bar.
“Sylvia?!” exclaimed Haylene.
“Yeah!” came the grunt from the darkness. “Think so.”
“Well, lemme call Momma. She’ll know for sure.” Haylene picked up a phone near the cash register and dialed.
Haylene’s momma confirmed that Gay Kurt’s momma was still alive and that she would receive “callers” after five for a cocktail party in the garden.
I bought the bar a round, and the pioneers of the meth trade turned out to be fairly nice. My guess, now, years later in hindsight, is that they hadn’t started taking their own drug yet. They were just venture capitalists looking to move on from the flagging marijuana trade. I even got a free sample. I tried some in the bathroom. It made my eyes burn and my nose water.
Later, when I began my long-form epic poem about the giant snake out in the desert, shirtless and screaming into the hot night, I suspected the meth may have been a little “chemical-y” in its composition.
One of the meth dealers got a little rough with Arturo after my lawyer displayed a brilliant, yet hesitatingly frightened, prowess with a pool cue and the billiards table. What he lacked in style and smooth aplomb, he made up for in running the table on the break. The hillbilly, possibly an enforcer for the meth-preneurs, got mad and didn’t want to pay the quarter we’d set the table stakes at. He was a moment away from running Arturo through with the cue he’d just broken against the bar in a Hulk-rage, when I informed him Arturo was a Chinese Mig pilot wh
o’d just defected to America in a state-of-the-art SU-27 Russian-made Flanker with stealth capabilities. I told everybody it was my job to keep him safe so he could tell us, the U.S. government, exactly how the Chinese had been planning for years to invade the west coast of the United States.
“You can kill him…” I noted above the silence that followed the shattering pool cue. “But he knows how to stop the invasion that’ll take place next year.”
“How he know that?” managed Gene.
“He’s the son of a top COMINTERN official. In fact, that’s what we’re doing here. A Chinese first strike will consist of three full divisions of Chinese rompin’ stompin’ airborne paratroopers landing in the desert right around this location. He’s showing us exactly where and how to bury the minefields the Chinese will land in when they invade next year. If you kill him, we’ll never know, and the Chinese will kill you and rape your women. And maybe not even in that order. Know what I mean…”
“They’s gonna invade us?” stuttered Gene.
“They is,” I assured him.
Now everyone’s sudden rage was turned against the Chinese, and a profusion of curses, blood oaths and war cries resounded around the bar as someone found the lone Lynyrd Skynyrd selection on the jukebox. Everyone assured everyone else in the most redneck of terms that no “Chinese” was gonna invade the U.S. of A without him having “somethin’ to say ’bout that!”
Five o’clock rolled around and we left the fledgling resistance movement to head up to Gay Kurt’s mother’s house for cocktails in the garden. I yelled “Wolverines!” as we left, and Gene drove us up through twisting volcanic rocks to a small hilltop where an old Victorian gabled house loomed above the dying high desert town. In the afternoon sun it reminded me of a vulture.
An old woman answered the door and said little. We were escorted through a house filled with gilt-framed watercolors of a mother and little boy in short pants. There were also silver-framed pictures of some opera singer. All of them were in black and white. All of them were from a long time ago.
I’ll save you the details. We drank Old Fashioneds from highballs with Gay Kurt’s mother, an ancient grand dame of opera. She and Gay Kurt had started the playhouse after her “exile,” as she repeatedly called it, from the stages in the great cities of “the continent.” It was all sad and I didn’t need to be told the story to know all the details. Single mother. Artist. Adoring son. Gay. Theater the only place he’d ever make it. Each of them holding on to some dream that never was. Some lotto ticket numbers that would never come up in the right order.
AIDS.
People used to die of AIDS all the time. Or at least it seemed that way in the eighties.
Now, you hardly ever hear of it.
It’s always pneumonia or cancer or some other thing. Never AIDS. Not anymore.
Eventually, after another blast of the speed sample in a sparkling, tiled bathroom with old-fashioned fixtures and doilies and a tiny window where I could look out at the moon and the desert, I asked Sylvia the once-famous opera singer if she knew of little Chad Dakota.
She did.
Little Chad Dakota had been her son Kurt’s most promising actor in the theater camp he ran for children each summer. So promising, he’d suggested to the child’s parents that they see an agent Kurt had been a “companion” to once. Her words, not mine.
Little Chad Dakota’s mother and her boyfriend, a man everyone knew as “Squid,” went west to Hollywood and were never seen again.
“Nope,” mumbled Gene, who’d been digging in his nose and gulping Old Fashioneds in the cactus garden we found ourselves in as twilight came on. Tiny soft lights were strung in the bare trees above us. It was warm and quiet, and the sound of Sylvia’s stentorian recounting of all her great love affairs and performances had put me somewhere else. But the “nope” of Gene the Unwashed drew me back.
Gene may have been the very nexus of randomness.
“How so?” I asked Gene.
“Well,” he began, and rattled his glass for a refill. The silent and ever-present maid hurried off, and for a moment in the garden quiet, Gene was able to hold forth as he probably never had outside of a bar or parole hearing. “Squid come back through ’bout five years ago. Then he up and left again. Come into the bar one night. I ’member he told us he was gonna live like a movie star, ’fore he up and left the first time, but when he come back he cried a lot that night. We all told him to “Cheer up now, Squid!” but he don’ want to. So Monster asks him what happened, and then Squid told us he lost everything and that Hollywood was a evil place. A few days later he was gone and we never seen him again.”
Later, we finished our highballs and had pot roast around a large dinner table in an actual dining room. The dinner was served on bone china. I excused myself for more speed. I came back and drank claret and barely ate. We went back to the bar and had farewell whiskies with Gene and the few barflies that remained. “We’ll see you all real soon!” I lied as Arturo and I backed out into the hot desert night. My heart was racing. I was sweating. Later, between Yucca Flats and somewhere else, we pulled over in the middle of nowhere on the long road that fled away from the dying town. I climbed a rocky outcrop and started my epic of the giant snake. I screamed myself hoarse and promised never to do speed again when we eventually climbed into our beds back at the motel on Sunset after dawn.
* * *
By the end of the next week, as Arturo was being thrust and stuffed into the back of a squad car down in Dana Point in Orange County, I was ready to confront Mark-Paul Gosselaar and demand the truth regarding little Chad Dakota. My lawyer cast his eyes about wildly in a state of bewilderment and fear as I watched the squad car roll down the alley they’d finally cornered Arturo in.
Thanks to my anonymous tip.
I knew he wasn’t really the Back Door Burglar, as the local newspapers were calling him. But turning him into the socialistas who run the People’s Republik of California had been my only choice at that very moment. Wiggles, a stripper Arturo knew, had filed a complaint against us with the local authorities regarding our failure to return her videotape collection of every episode of Saved by the Bell.
That morning, just before the police involved themselves in my investigations, as I walked up to Arturo’s friend Randy’s apartment complex after a full breakfast at the Harbor House Café, I saw the police nosing about my “convertible” Cutlass Sierra. I knew that either the rental car company or Wiggles, who’d left in a huff the day before because I wouldn’t give her any more of the speed I’d told her was all gone, was responsible for the police presence. You couldn’t shut her up even before she’d had any of the motormouth drug, but once she did, you heard every horrific story a stripper knew, and they know a lot of them, until she devolved into her cult-like obsession re: one of the characters from Saved by the Bell. She was a self-confessed “Slater junkie.” And a stripper. And she liked speed.
I watched the police cruiser with Arturo in back disappear down the alley as the morning fog burned off along the coast. My lawyer who was really a paralegal, the Sancho Panza to my Quixote, was gone and I would miss him. But he’d unknowingly sacrificed his freedom for a weekend in jail so I could finish up the last of Wiggles’s prized collection of something I was now coming to view as the end of culture and humanity as I knew it. I was close to confronting the beast. I felt it as I pushed play and swirled my Clevinger’s and soda. It was eleven a.m. Friday morning.
I’d returned to the apartment and phoned Wiggles. As usual, she answered in her singsong bandsaw voice. I told her I’d return her tapes by Sunday night and then asked her if she’d sent the cops to Dana Point. She said she hadn’t.
So I’d made the right call by phoning in the phony tip. The Fuzz had been there for the rental car. I’d seen them from the other side of the foggy, salt-misted parking lot giving the Butterscotch Bomber the once-over. I’d hidden behind some badly manicured shrubbery and moved like a frogman evading detection at a villa on th
e coast of Morocco for an off-the-books hit mission over to a payphone pegged onto a short pole next to a washed-out community pool no one ever swam at. I told the local police dispatcher that I was pretty sure the Back Door Burglar was holed up in an apartment in Dana Point and gave them Randy’s address, which is where we’d been sleeping on the floor all week as we surveyed the Saved by the Bell retrospective and built our case. We’d had to crash with Arturo’s friend Randy, who was some sort of über car stereo salesman, after being thrown out of the motel on Sunset for violating the moral character of the establishment. Which was fine, because the lawyer Arturo actually worked for had been calling repeatedly to tell me that the Hollywood Scene Beat wasn’t covering Arturo’s retainer.
When Arturo asked me what his boss had wanted, I told him Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s Satan-worshipping agent was threatening legal action, and that we were to “go dark” until we had all the evidence needed to convict, or to run the story. Whichever came first.
The evidence? All I really had was hearsay. I needed to know the real truth. I needed to look this Hollywood Adonis in the eyes and confront him with the dusty bones of little Chad Dakota. But there was no way we could get close. We’d lurked outside all the right places. We’d tried to find his house. We’d even bought a star map.
Nothing.
I decided I needed to know more about my quarry. I needed to get inside his skin. Inside his head. We were watching random episodes of the ridiculous show when we could catch them, but it wasn’t enough. Finally my lawyer Arturo, now prisoner 102467172, told me he knew a girl he’d gone to high school with who’d been a big fan of the show. It turned out she was and that she danced at a club out by the airport. We spent some money on an evening there and came away with Wiggles. We did an all-nighter at her house, watching back-to-back episodes from season one. By the second episode, I was raiding her medicine cabinet for medications just to keep going. She had a surprising collection of prescription anti-anxiety meds and sleeping pills.
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy Page 41