The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  I knocked on the door, heard ‘Come on in!’ and opened to a narrow room with dormered windows on either end, the walls built out of plain lumber bookshelves. In the far corner another beat-up, cozy looking armchair and knee-high table. In the other, a modern computer desk with what looked to be a full array of the latest cybernetic office equipment.

  De Petrie half twirled in his large mahogany deskchair. ‘You’re not interrupting anything in the least bit literary. I usually do correspondence and on-line finances in the morning. Did you have breakfast? Was it enough or are you still hungry? Did you sleep okay? Have you confirmed your flight? Do you need anything else? Have you read the piece? Do I sound exactly like Aaron Axenfeld?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. And, precisely like him.’

  ‘Have a seat. Give me a sec here, okay?’ he said, and spun back around to finish what he was doing. I sat on the edge of the armchair, in view of the trees and birds and garden outside. Much as that was diverting, it couldn’t compare to what was here. After a few minutes, I began to inspect the lines of books stacked almost carelessly and without organization upon the poorly sanded lath shelves. As I hoped, several were filled with De Petrie’s own books, hardcovers, first editions, trade paperbacks, mass market versions, book club volumes, foreign translations, reprints, anthologies he’d been included in. On the shelves above were books in various versions and editions of the other Purple Circle members. Maybe another fifty or so volumes. A real treasure trove if they were autographed. When I drew one out to check, sure enough Mark Dodge had written on the flyleaf of a first edition hardcover of Keep Frozen, ‘For Dom, on behalf of an intimate, long continuing intercourse with the Alfred A. Knopf Company’, and it was appended, ‘A representative thereof aims to please’. The double entendre brought me down from the literary empyrean as I realized what the dedication meant: they’d already had sex by then. Mark was telling De Petrie he wanted more.

  Before I could slip it back into its place, De Petrie click-clicked the mouse, turned and said, ‘Done! What do you have there?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to …’ I handed over the book.

  He looked at it barely a second. ‘Well! My reputation is safe today,’ he said and laughed his distinctive laugh. ‘So? You read the fable?’

  ‘I read it. I liked it. Someone should publish it.’

  ‘By itself? It requires context.’

  ‘Would Len have wanted it published?’ I asked.

  De Petrie shrugged.

  ‘It’s yours to do with as …?’ I began and stopped.

  ‘As we both know, Ross, it’s always more complicated than that.’

  ‘I feel,’ I began, ‘there’s still so much about him I don’t yet know. His background. His childhood. His …’

  ‘You mean is the car accident story true?’ De Petrie interrupted. ‘I don’t know. I do know he was the second child of four. That the first boy died as a child. He never said under what circumstances. Is the story his? If so, is it, while fake, a dramatization of some less melodramatic incident, yet an objective correlative for the guilt the little boy felt? Who knows? Is the story about the Eagle’s Nest on Christmas Eve true? I can’t imagine young Len not getting whomever he wanted. Maybe it was about someone else. Len never told me anything about seeing a gazillion flamingos. Nor being on a cable car when a line snapped. But there was a great deal he didn’t tell me.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘He told me he was homosexual early on. That by eight or nine years old, he was having sex with boys. By the time he was fourteen, he’d had scores of local kids. When the other boys stopped fooling around and went after girls, he knew he was queer. He went after the horniest boys he could find then. The ones who were a little slow. The ones who couldn’t hide their boners. The older guys who worked for his parents part-time on the farm. The jocks. He told me that when they moved to Bettendorf, he went into athletics because on the first day of Phys. Ed. he recognized that the track and field coach was also queer and had the hots for him. Between the two of them, they seduced most of the varsity teams. It helped Len was such a good athlete. When they needed a baseball star, Len came out and pitched and won. After every winning game, girls would throw themselves at him. He’d politely slip away and then pick himself another young athlete’s cherry. He sucked and fucked his way through the minor leagues, and the majors. And he never hid it. Everyone knew he was queer. They’d joke about it, he told me. His teammates would actually help him bed guys. He’d come home and find someone waiting for him, he said. Anything to keep their star pitcher happy. This was the early ’70s, when it was all very hush-hush. Then that football player came out. Dave Kopay! Len watched him do the talk-show circuits, the newspaper interviews, write that book – and be forced out of his profession! He figured the same would happen to him. Why bother? He’d stay where he was, and get what he wanted – most of the time, anyway.

  ‘Then he met Mark Dodge and the unexpected happened. Len fell for him. Len had never felt anything but what Whitman called “the camaraderie of manly love”. But Mark Dodge had that effect on many people.’

  ‘Not on you!’ I interrupted, remembering the inscription.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong! Mark Dodge was the absolute primo piece of male ass of the era. We did it a few times. But he didn’t, you know, grip my imagination. His writing, now. That was something else! I loved his books. Of all my contemporaries, probably Mark and Axey are the ones I most enjoyed reading then, and now too. Possibly because they’re so individual. Their imagined worlds are so very close to reality, yet totally their own. And utterly different from mine. Where was I? Right! Len fell for Mark. And for a while Mark fell for Len. And because they were both public figures, the affair went public very fast. Len didn’t quite suffer from Kopay’s problem, but he lost his privacy and a lot of the pixie dust that had surrounded him before. When Mark went on to even greater fame, and then moved on to an off-Broadway actor about to make it big, Len went into a depression and, worse, into a slump. A few years later, he was back in the minors. When his interest waned, he began working other angles. Coaching. Training. Modeling. Porn movies. Bartending. Whatever. The rest, you know.’

  ‘Among the fragments I read, there’s nothing about Mark,’ I said. ‘Nothing, you know … negative or bitter!’

  ‘Oddly,’ De Petrie said, ‘I think the character Theo in the story about the cable car might be construed as a portrait of Mark Dodge. You know, a decade after, when Mark was living in LA and had another lover, a fellow I only met once. Maybe. Don’t quote me on it,’ De Petrie temporized. ‘And since I’m suppositioning here, I think a case could be made for the bar story being told from Jeff Weber’s P.O.V. Pretty as Jeff was, he struck out in bars and clubs all the time. Guys would pick up on all the edges and burrs and quirks in his personality really fast and that was it. So that piece might have a been a slap at Jeff. I have no idea at all if what Bobbie Bonaventura told you about that bank robbery was true or not. Mitch Leo’s letter sounds totally true. So does Frankie McKewen’s “Berlin Diaries”.’

  ‘And Cameron Powers?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, the C. A. T. is out of the bag. That’s true. As for Dame … I don’t understand it. I would have thought that of any of us … he would have been the one who took Len to the Caribbean. I guess we’re all busy in our own way rewriting history at this stage of our lives. You packed and ready? I don’t mean to rush you, but …’

  De Petrie was out at the Z-5 rummaging through the car’s back trunk for something when I brought out my luggage.

  ‘You didn’t happen to see a narrow flashlight back here?’ he asked. ‘It’s supposed to be attached here, next to the internal CD changer. It’s pale green.’

  I said no, then remembered where I thought I might have seen it. ‘Could it be in the garage? The workshop?’

  Before he could ask how I could possibly know that, I headed toward the garage, and slipped in through a space in the slightly ajar double doo
rs.

  Not too long later, I was back out at the car with the flashlight in hand. As I handed it to De Petrie, the two of us found ourselves in a peculiar instant of déjà vu. He suddenly looked around. I did too. It had grown quiet, utterly without birdsong, all around us. But though we both listened for several minutes longer, looking at each other for signs, no ravens signaled their appearance with their characteristic caw-cawing. Another pause and the moment was over.

  BOOK TEN

  From the Paradise Garden

  … I guess in the end it comes down to who has it and who doesn’t have it. All the rest is baloney.

  Len Spurgeon,

  letter to a teammate

  I’D NEVER BEEN THIS CONFUSED DRIVING in LA before. I’d managed okay to get from Burbank Airport where I’d left the rented car for the weekend over to Route 170 going south. I knew that would connect to the Ventura Freeway, 101, and from there I could take any of three exits, Highland, Cahuenga or Vine, to Franklin Street and easily over to Casa Herrera y Lopez. But while I thought I was following the signs correctly, all of a sudden another Freeway, 134, going to Glendale and Pasadena, interfered. What was supposed to be a single break-off became two, one after the other. I took what I thought was the correct turn-off but once I emerged from the endlessly long cloverleaf, I found myself somehow wrong. The next exit should have read Moorpark Road. Instead it read Tujunga Avenue. What? I slipped into the slow lane and the next exit approaching was not as I’d hoped, Ventura Boulevard, but instead Laurel Canyon Boulevard. With another sign announcing Studio City. Meaning I was headed in the opposite direction. I flipped on my directionals too late for whomever was right behind me in a large black pickup, who proceeded to blow his horn long and loud to express indignation at my lack of thoughtfulness. Hey, I made a mistake! Sue me! Even so, I got off the freeway, thinking I’d immediately go around, get back on, and return the way I’d been originally headed. Only problem was, at night, in a strange part of town, I couldn’t locate the on-ramp.

  On the other hand, there directly in front of me was Laurel Canyon Boulevard and I knew where that went. At least, I knew in one direction. Not a week ago, driving home from Camden Phoenix’s studio, I’d taken it and had a fun drive through the Santa Monica Mountains. Why not do it again? It had been a jam-packed airplane flight, a long, cramped ride back from Boston. And while productive – I’d spent half the trip writing up an explanatory introduction to my thesis which I planned to hand in to Dr St George tomorrow, along with all the documentation I’d shown Dominic De Petrie – even so I’d still been irritated and felt a great deal put upon. My seat companions were an overweight, middle-aged married couple who liked to spread out, the family in front had a noisy, nosy eight-year-old boy and the folks behind were traveling with a cranky baby not even my earplugs could totally block. After close to six hours of all that, my nerves were more than a little jangled by the time we’d landed, thankfully after not circling overhead too long. No wonder concentration was difficult as I’d worked: words kept eluding me, well-known, often-utilized examples of sentence structure had proven evasive or, when accessible, had come out juvenile and cliché-ridden. Perhaps driving would make me feel more capable, more accomplished, lift my spirits a bit?

  Within two traffic lights I recognized the road. The four lanes ascended smoothly, veered left, right and sharply left. It was past midnight and the traffic was moderate and, as before, fast. Around me I noticed a French-blue Z-5 with a ragtop, a Mercedes-Benz coupe, a Firebird, two Jeeps and was that the same black pickup truck I’d stiffed? Looked like it. We whirled up, around and past Mulholland Drive, then down, merging into a narrow two-lane road. I was once more surprised by how the road twisted in smaller and smaller Ss, rising, opening out into an abruptly appearing canyon, then closing down into a mere gulch.

  As I completed a particularly sharp, angled left curve, and immediately countered that with a right curve, I realized the black pickup from the freeway had managed to get behind me. The road ran downhill, curling into tighter and tighter S-turns, and cars in the opposite lane seemed once more to fling themselves directly at me, their headlights in my eyes one after another. As before, all of us were moving so fast, it seemed we all but rode each other’s tail bumpers.

  Which didn’t at all explain matters when the black pickup actually bumped the Celica from behind as the road spun and rose up to a stoplight flashing red. I felt it with a jolt and, in reaction, I pulled away with a burst of acceleration as I flew up and then down a shallow S that ended suddenly at another stoplight, also green, which I shot through like a bullet. Despite the fact that I’d picked up maybe five miles per hour of speed, I could see the black pickup also kept up and was only inches from my rear fender spoiler. Not because there were cars behind pushing it. There weren’t. In front of me headlights flashed from around another unexpected bend, blinding me, swerving across my view, as I tried to pull away from the black pickup again. Was the driver harassing me because of a grudge? Because of that sudden slowdown I’d done on the freeway? It couldn’t have bothered him that much? Could it?

  The road curled up on itself, and I felt the pickup bump me again. And again. This was clear and intentional. I remembered now hearing students in my class talking about car assaults. How people in larger, stronger vehicles would purposely bump into, even crash into smaller cars, waiting until the driver in the front vehicle stopped and got out and then how they would assault, sometimes even shoot the driver. Was that happening? Was this such an onslaught? Or was I imagining this? My adrenalin was rushing. I was doing all I could to remain calm.

  I raised the speed to sixty on the next straightaway but I had to brake suddenly for an upcoming tight curve and then for another. I’d always felt confident in this car, felt sure it could do anything I asked of it, but the black pickup was keeping up with me, and now I was becoming aware that my adrenalin was rising out of control, making me nervous, angry, open to mistakes as the road curved yet again, opening into two lanes per side as suddenly as it had closed down into one lane before and meanwhile kept swiveling to the right, going straight, curving, straight, corkscrewing down at an incredible angle. The pickup moved between the two lanes of space it had and continued bumping me again and again, blowing its horn.

  I tried to see who in the hell it was as I accelerated faster, praying the Celica would retain its grip on the turns, and despite the darkness and how little I could keep him in my sights because of all the twisting and slewing, I could make out the figure at the wheel of the pickup was tall and thin and dark-haired. Ray Rice? He had a pickup, didn’t he? I tried to remember as we swerved and I tried to get further out in front of him, praying there were no cars stopped directly ahead in case I had to suddenly brake. Ray Rice would be stupid enough for this kind of antic, wouldn’t he?

  Whoever the driver was, he kept bumping me, crashing his front fender into one back fender of the Celica then the other, rapidly swerving back and forth so I couldn’t get a good look at him. Why? Ray or whoever? For fun? To scare me? And wait, now we were headed into a straightaway and coming up ahead on the left soon, wouldn’t that be my turn-off to Hollywood Boulevard? The one I’d missed before? Yes!

  I swung into the left lane, determined to hold my place despite him even as he continued bashing my right back fender, now seeming to aim for my wheel wells, as though he was trying to knock the wheel off the axle. Meanwhile, we hurtled down the mountainside, going far too fast for the road, flew around two more tight bends. I saw cars approaching, but luckily they stopped at the streetlight, three of them, and I took that as my chance. Without warning or directionals, I abruptly swung left onto Hollywood, almost hitting a car approaching from its correct side, but in the loud horn-blaring mess managing my turn, even though the car did tip slightly and the tires squealed for mercy. I was clear. I’d lost the black pickup.

  Sensing it would come looking for me, I slowed and made a left turn as immediately as I could, then a right, another left, and I pulle
d the Celica right into the driveway of a two-story Normanstyle house on what I guessed to be upper Ogden. The automatic outside house lights went on. I shut off the car lights and sat, idling, my heart pounding. The house lights went off again.

  Sure enough, a minute later, I could see in my back mirrors the black pickup slowly cruising by on Ogden, searching for me. From this angle, I got a profile, a tall one, and I could see it definitely wasn’t Ray Rice driving the pickup, which didn’t in the least pacify me.

  Then who? Some lunatic? Wait! That profile, though brief, had not been totally unfamiliar? I thought I knew who it belonged to. Who?

  I waited another four, five minutes, then with all of my car lights still turned off, I slowly pulled out of the driveway. With car lights off, I crawled along back streets parallel to Franklin and crept slowly up the road leading to Von Slyke’s house. As I approached the gate, I could have sworn I just missed the black pickup by seconds as its lunatic driver trawled for me.

  By this point, I was so freaked I parked on the side of the road by the Casa Herrera’s main gate and slumped over to make the car look empty should he drive by again as I dialed my way in through the gate, all the while checking around for the pickup. I counted the long seconds it took for the gate to open completely. Then dashed the car in, again parked and again slumped over as I dialed the gate closed. Finally, the gate was shut, and damn it, there was the pickup cruising by. It even seemed to slow at the gate, as though the driver were peering in, looking for me. Then he was gone. I shot around the circular driveway and didn’t stop until I was deep within the motor court, the Celica hidden by the foliage and house walls.