‘I could tell you stuff that would help you.’
‘I know this.’
He gave me a stick of Big Red, and I chewed it till it was dead.
‘I wouldn’t, strictly speaking, be what you’d call a snitch, then?’ I said. ‘I mean, if I helped out?’
‘It’s totally respectable to save your ass. Everyone knows this. Even Sammy the Bull did it.’
‘If I helped you out . . . if . . . it wouldn’t even be for that reason.’
‘No?’
‘It’d be to get scumbags off the street. Drug-dealers and things. So kids aren’t fucked up like I got fucked up. My life . . . I could’ve done something.’
Munoz nodded. ‘I could tell you stories,’ he said. ‘Kids twelve, thirteen years old – they hook them that young. Girls twelve, thirteen selling themselves for some rock. I’m thinking, “This could be my little niece.”’ He added with emotion, ‘That ain’t right. And you know what? I think you know it ain’t right.’
‘I don’t want my name down on any court papers.’
‘Nothing like that, buddy. We give you a Confidential Informant number, we put that on our warrants. You won’t need to testify, nothing.’
‘Starsky and Hutch? They never woulda solved anything without Huggy Bear.’
‘You’re right. He was one of them. An equal partner.’
‘And he was a snitch.’
‘No! A confidential informant. Whole different ballpark. Which isn’t to say there won’t be some change in it down the line. You need to eat.’
He passed me a lined yellow notepad and a pen. I strolled down the halls of that big memory mansion in my head, opening doors, rifling rooms. I filled three pages with names, aliases, addresses, phone numbers, pager numbers, drivers’ licenses. I loved the marveling look in his eyes, as he saw it spill out. I realized I had been storing up this information with the half-conscious hope that someone like Munoz would arrive to relieve me of it, make important use of it, redeem the years of sickness and squalor I had trudged through. I gave up the UC Irvine frat boys with the hydroponic rig in their basement who once threatened me with an ass-kicking when I said hello to one of their girls. I gave up the Snell Brothers, redneck meth monsters who kept trailer labs in Anaheim and Santa Ana and who liked to insult me. I gave up a Newport Beach coke dealer who owned a nightclub and refused to let me in the door. Grudges were as good a place as any to start.
‘Talent like that, it’s about time you started working for the good guys,’ Munoz said. ‘Nobody shits on your shoes anymore. You don’t take any disrespect. You and me? We’ll fuck this town up a little bit.’
So he recruited me, Munoz did, or – as they say in the streets – ‘turned me out.’ Which, funnily enough, is the same phrase a pimp uses when he ropes a fresh girl into his stable, teaching her the crucial distinction between a whore and a lady. A whore spreads just for the cash, he tells her. A lady does it because she loves her pimp.
He measured me for the snitch jacket and slipped me snugly inside so it came to feel like a noble second skin.
On police reports, I was Confidential Informant # 8342. On search warrants, when Munoz referred to me as ‘a reliable CI,’ I never failed to feel a twinge of pride. What I brought him, I learned mostly just by listening, by making myself disappear in the smoke of a dozen dives from Costa Mesa to Huntington Beach where men plotted half-witted break-ins and bragged of stashes of stripped auto parts and discussed the quality of the crops yielded by their basement rigs.
Munoz called himself El Guapo and drove a chocolate Porsche Carrera. When not in disguise he was fond of sleek, loose-fitting sport coats, ribbed muscle-shirts, no socks. He had olive-brown skin and a bleached row of large, feral, cosmetically capped teeth. He vibed sex and weight racks and suicidally dangerous sports. On the walls of his office, along with a series of enlarged newspaper clippings charting his big arrests, he kept photographs of himself dangling from one impossible precipice or another (‘Suicide Rock ’95’ or ‘El Cap ’97’). While his hands were small, as I said, kind of delicate and bird-boned like a piano player’s, his arms were roped with veins and corded with muscle. He had the Latin thing in overdrive: I think you know what I’m talking about. He looked like he hailed from some sub-equatorial zone where, early in the great forward march of coital history, they invented the wheel, the arch, and the alphabet.
One of the clippings in his office called him a ‘hero cop.’ He became a hero in the traditional cop way: by getting shot. It happened in an alley behind the Ross Dress for Less on Costa Mesa Boulevard. I remember the night. I was there strictly by accident. A piss-drizzly, foggy night in late January soon after I joined his stable of confidential informants. My bike taking me puddle by puddle toward home from a bottle club on the city’s north end, and my brain as fog-steeped as the streets. From somewhere in the fog: the Pop! of a gunshot, followed by Munoz’s angry voice: ‘Ah ag ahg! Cabron, that’s a bitch!’ Then someone came rushing out of the fog and collided with me and I found myself on the ground, blinking up into the furious face of a man with an enormous jawbone and a police badge three-quarters concealed on his belt. Before vanishing in the fog he managed to scream, ‘No pedaling on the sidewalk, citizen!’ Behind the store I found Munoz sitting on the wet ground with his back against a trash bin, smoking.
‘Dude?’ Munoz said, noticing me.
‘Dude,’ I said.
‘What’d you see, Cowboy?’
‘I dunno.’
‘You sure?’
‘I guess.’
After a long pause, in which he seemed to be making up his mind whether I was telling the truth, he said, ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here. You’re my man. My boy! El Guapo took one in the gut.’
‘What does it feel like?’
‘Lot worse if my vest hadn’t stopped it. Or if I were one of those cruller-sucking slobs like McGorsky or O’Daniels, instead of a cop who does five hundred sit-ups a day. Still felt like a Louisville Slugger. So – ahg – tell me what you saw.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’d be a great assistance to law enforcement if you could . . . for identification purposes . . .’
From a shirt pocket he produced a mug shot and extended it toward me. It showed a ferocious-looking black guy with dreadlocks dangling over a pitted forehead, crazed eyes, and a scar high on one cheek.
‘Ivory “Daddy Glock” Williams,’ Munoz said in a confidential buddy-to-buddy tone. ‘My man, this is a very bad, very dangerous scumbag. Stone crackhead psycho killer. As you might have been in a position to witness, I was pursuing him through this alley when he turned and fired his Glock at me from a distance of about three yards. As you – ahg – might have clearly seen for yourself, he was standing about where that lamp pole is there. I think you’ll agree there’s ample illumination for you to have seen, without obstruction, the events you might have seen . . . and probably did see . . .’
I stood under the lamp pole with my right index finger pointed at him and said, ‘Blam! Like that?’
‘Exactly, except he’s a lefty. You probably were at a good vantage to witness his left hand firing that Glock.’
‘Who was that cop running out of here?’
‘Cop? You must have made a mistake.’
Sirens were already screaming toward us in the fog; he had radioed them. After they hustled Munoz into an ambulance, I gave my account to detectives, corroborating his story point by point and helping to furnish the basis for Daddy Glock Williams’s arrest warrant. Hours later cops raided his crib and, claiming he refused an order to lower his gun, shot him in the neck, the forehead, and the heart.
The newspapers, which made no mention me, devoted five or six paragraphs to Daddy Glock Williams’s criminal record. It was reassuring news. He was indeed a very bad scumbag who was linked to three shootings for which witnesses had all been killed or disappeared.
While Munoz convalesced at Hoag Hospital, the mayor and a state senator posed by his bedsi
de. There he was in the Pilot and the Register, showing off that bullet-dented Kevlar shield and looking right at the camera from his bed, very steely and undaunted. Standing with him in one of the photos was Capt. Harvey Wein. The stories described Wein as the first cop through the shooter’s door, the one who had been forced to waste the sinister Mr. Glock Williams. He possessed the granddaddy of hard-on jaw lines, this Wein – the kind of oceanliner-prow, Dick Tracy mandible you could visualize those man-apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey picking up to brain each other with. I recognized him immediately as the man who collided with me fleeing from Munoz’s shooting.
I was not so stupid that I didn’t understand how I’d been used, that Munoz and Wein had staged Munoz’s shooting as a pretext to waste Williams, that my accidental presence – and my lie – had abetted a man’s death. I did not ask Munoz to come clean with me about the incident; it seemed like a violation of an unspoken pact we had. It was like your dad, on your 15th birthday, wordlessly marching you to a whore’s door and handing you a rubber; he would not ask about it when you got home, and you would not need to tell. I believed Munoz was giving me a lesson in the Hard Facts of How the World Worked, and that his willingness to do so was a sign of his trust and respect for me. I’d seen enough cop shows to know you had to skirt the rules to get anything done. Apart from the exhilaration of playing a role in a real-life cop drama, it elevated my sense of self-worth to help law enforcement win a round. I believed loyalty went a long way with a Latin like Munoz. He knew he could count on me, knew whose side I was on.
Having made my peace with my lie, a funny thing happened. After a while I began remembering the back-alley incident as I was supposed to have seen it, not as I really did see it. I began to believe I had seen the dreadlocked drug dealer raise his left hand with that gun; I could even remember seeing his eyes. It became an actual memory, and the jut-jawed officer who actually pulled the trigger – that fog phantom became a dream.
CHAPTER 6
Dogs ran through your dreams on Pomona Avenue.
Even before dawn, all across the block of low-rent tenements and dirty, laundryline-streaming cinderblock flats, the dogs started going at it: the terriers, the rotts, the pits, the porch chihuahuas and the stray gutter mutts, the reedy altos, tremulous tenors, and mournful crooners sending up their cries, conducting obscure long-running debates, haranguing, reinforcing their hierarchies, the cruel alphas threatening their cringing inferiors with rape and quick death, the whole block moaning for food or sex or sniffable pisspuddles or hydrants to baptize with a raised leg, or whimpering in thrall to cravings that their dog-throats couldn’t even name. You learned to sleep though the noise, but it permeated your sleep and sent you dog-themed dreams.
On the morning after I met Gus Miller – Nam vet, Black Ops assassin, and soon to be my best friend – I woke late with my heart hammering in my chest. I lay flat on my back listening to the dogs and staring at the ceiling with its little family of brown water stains. It must have rained the night before, because the splotches seemed to have conquered a few more inches of the stucco. My ceiling has cancer, I thought. My walls sweated nicotine. My woman slept beside me, wheezing. I was 41 years old.
The afterimage of trains – a flash of gorgeously lacquered locomotives in sky blue and candy-apple red – imposed itself for an instant between my eyes and the ceiling. I closed my eyes to retrieve the dream. I was moving through a noisy train-station. All around me crowds streamed into magnificent Crayola-hued trains. I couldn’t find my platform: the departure boards melted and slid when I looked at them directly. A blonde woman behind a partition was trying to help me, but the clamor swallowed her voice. I chased a train as it roared away. I screamed, ‘Is this the one? Is this mine?’ Neat nuclear-family dogs yapped happily from the receding windows; the blonde held one of them.
Now, I never put a lot of stock in dreams, though I don’t begrudge the shrinks and shamans and TV writers their gravy-train; you find your livelihood where you can, and a snitch is no one to judge another man’s hustle. Still, I felt this particular dream might mean something, if only I knew the identity of the blonde. I felt it was the dream’s most important detail, that all the ambiguous emotion in it – panic and longing and dread and hope – was somehow tied to her.
The sun spilled through the cheap, buckled blinds into the apartment’s cramped spaces, pitiless light suffusing the Martian towers of unwashed laundry, the milk-crate mountains, the neglected Ab-Flexer and trampoline, the driftwood piles of clothes and magazines and old bills. All around me, the world was sending me its voices. Gwooff-urffurff-arff-uff, cried the dogs. Whump-whump-whump-whump, thumped a boom box. Ploopplop-ploop, muttered the water drops, falling from the lesions in the ceiling into the Tupperware and Hormell chili cans strategically arrayed around our living room. I heard the shriek of chicano children chasing each other in the street; the tick of car motors in their cages and purr of tire-tread on blacktop; the heavy bad breathing of Donna in her sleep. I lay there, owned by entropy, lashed to my mattress by so many invisible cables.
There was a lot to do, before I was prepared to enter the world. There were certain chemicals to ingest. I already had the first Marlboro going as I padded in my socks to the kitchenette, where I heated water for Folger’s instant. I peeled open a can of Spam, drained the jellied slime and Spam juice, and sliced three thin pieces from the rubbery pink brick. I let them fry in Country Crock, flipping them every 30 seconds and pressing them flat for the death-sizzle. Donna stirred, wheezing, and, in a motion so habitual she didn’t even need to wake up to do it, turned her head to hack into a napkin. Her mouth hung open when she slept. Seeing her in this state brought to my heart a spasm of the old tenderness.
To avoid the sound of her lungs – they were in very bad shape – I put on my headphones and listened to some Credence while I ate breakfast. I had tried to get her in shape by hauling home various pieces of exercise equipment that went unused. Last year I bought the little trampoline off Telly brand-new for 15 bucks and brought it home with unreasonably high hopes. Her expression said, What kind of idiot have you been? She asked what she was supposed to do with it.
‘Jump up and down on it,’ I said.
‘Why would I want to?’ she said.
‘To get in shape. It’ll get your pulse moving.’
I stepped on, knees slightly bent and legs planted shoulder-width, and started bouncing. It squeaked and creaked and skittered under me. I spun, I touched the ceiling, I did jumping jacks, I pretended to kick like a Rockette, ripping the crotch of my Wranglers.
‘Calisthenics,’ I said. ‘Like the Japanese do before they start on the assembly line, which is why they’re kicking our asses.’
‘What you’re saying is that I’m a repulsive fat-ass and you don’t want to be seen on the street with me, and yet you’re too cowardly to come out and say so,’ she said. ‘Are you trying to stage some kind of dumb-ass intervention? Is that it?’
‘No, no, no, honey. Of course not.’
She was crying. ‘I resent that you feel that way about me! With all I’ve got wrong with me!’
‘I don’t!’
‘Look at you! You ain’t no Adonis! You ain’t no Greg Louganis! Maybe I should be ashamed of you, Benny!’
Sleeping, as she was now, my dear Donna was easier to love. I smoked two more cigarettes and began to feel alright, but I needed a half-bowl of cannabis before I would feel alright enough to go outdoors. I broke out the good Oregonian shit, a deep green species that made me contemplative and poet-souled. The first thought it sent me today was a strange one, just a phrase, really. Benny Bunt’s whimpering inarticulate dog soul. Strangely I found tears in my eyes. I was incredibly moved by this. Like the dream, I didn’t know what it meant, yet I was certain it had significance. I wrote it down. Then I wrote, ‘What is my train?’
Escaping through the door before Donna woke up, I found my Schwinn 10-speed toppled on its side at the bottom of the back stairwell, where I kept it chai
ned to the steel slats of the railing. Someone had kicked it over again and it lay in a detritus of dead cigarettes and Trojan wrappers. Ass installed in the worn twin craters of the seat-cushion, I pedaled out of the complex and through the alley and onto Pomona, the dog chatter growing fainter and finally disappearing behind me. I cut onto 19th, taking the sidewalk the whole way and watching the cars fly contemptuously by.
Every motorist felt superior to me. Not just the psychotic soccer moms in their Expeditions and the wage slaves in their Tercels, but even the teenagers in 1970s Camaros with mismatched doors and the illegals in their junk-ass Gremlins and Pintos. Yes, even people whose cars turned into blazing death-cages when kicked on the bumper knew for a certainty they were better than me. And they were glad I was there, glad to see me. Hi, Benny! Hi, biketrash! I was good for their self-esteem. In Southern California a man who does not own a car is considered a freak, barely human, and probably dangerous.
Since the repo men yanked my shitheap Datsun a few years ago, I’d racked up about a grand worth of tickets for pedaling on the sidewalk, mostly in Newport, where the cops wear great, even tans and grow sadistic around ugly guys on old bikes, tunnel men, mole men. The law required you to ride right there on the blacktop with the Land Cruisers and Avalanches, right there under the grinning grilles of the semis. This I refused to do. In the world of the car, the authorities do not give a rat’s ass for the life of a bike man. Still, when I saw screeching near-misses between cars and people stupid enough to pedal their $3,000, space-alloy machines in the ‘bike lane’ – I call it the suicide lane – I rooted instinctively for the car.
So I was on my way to work, gliding down the hill out of Costa Mesa toward Pacific Coast Highway, and beyond it I could see the long silent blue of the Pacific, looking so big and friendly from this distance that it was possible to forget the sea was really a great salty puddle waiting to be nudged by an earthquake or asteroid into an annihilating hiccup. It gave me pleasure to think of the sea someday uncoiling its body vertically for a death-run at California. People say they love California, but it occurred to me that maybe everybody would like to see California destroyed, because it’s the state Hollywood visits most with its Technicolor Armageddons by fire and water and bomb. I don’t know why people should feel this way, except that everyone knows California sunshine is the world’s loneliest light. Sailing down the hill, I found myself dreaming of possible apocalypses and of the battles royal I followed in the pages of The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, where muscle-bound demigods yanked up city sidewalks for use as bullwhips and hurled buildings like javelins, the panels raining rubble, though no one ever seemed to die or raise the question of litigation.
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