Even then she was complaining of her health and edging toward the heavy side, her thighs swelling against her tight polyester uniform. Management kept her planted in the ticket booth because she insisted she didn’t have the energy to stand at the popcorn counter or sweep the aisles, and she threatened to sue if they didn’t accommodate her. ‘I’m a special-needs employee,’ she told me. ‘The others hate me.’ One afternoon, between features, I heard a pair of aisle-sweepers maligning her in the nastiest way. It included a cruel impression of her bratty manner of speech, and remarks about her weight. It was clear from the way they carried on that she was a running joke at the theater.
This cut me, and I fled. Then I realized it was a good thing, in fact a godsend, because it finally gave me the courage to ask her out. She seemed surprised when I did. We shared an oily pizza and root beer and then hit a karaoke bar, and I sang ‘What a Fool Believes’ to her. I kept sneaking mints in case the kiss came. We drank all night, and I was so glad to have a woman’s company. Neither of us had been on a date in years. We shared lists of our top-10 favorite things in all the important categories, including movies, rock songs, sitcoms, and cop shows. We agreed Led Zeppelin was the greatest band of all time; that Homicide’s Andre Braugher was the greatest actor; that boy bands should be systematically gassed. We traded our Top 10 People We Despised in High School lists – all the beautiful, clear-skinned people whose adequacy tormented us – and she said, ‘How much did the prom suck? No one asks fat girls to dance.’ So when someone started doing Lionel Ritchie on the karaoke machine, I pulled her to her feet and got my arms around her and we swayed from side to side, real slow. It was the first time I noticed the difference in size between us; my arms didn’t quite reach around her waist to her back, and my head came up no higher than her bosom. I heard someone say, ‘Play some swing so she can flip him,’ and there were snickers, but I pretended not to hear. If she heard, she didn’t let on either; she just kept swaying with her eyes closed.
In the lobby of her building we kissed, and then, all nerves, I followed her inside to her cramped, musty apartment and we fumbled with each other in the dark. It was over too fast – I really wanted to please her – and I kept apologizing until she said, ‘Jesus, dude, shut up. We can do it again.’ And maybe that’s the moment I fell in love with her. She was so crass and sassy. She told me there was alcoholism and diabetes and high blood pressure in her family and she would probably be dead by 40. She wondered if those assholes at the theater might be a little nicer if they only knew all the horrible shit she’d been through, watching her mom dropped by a stroke in the meat aisle at Vons and her dad lose both legs to diabetes. I told her not to worry, there were a lot of shits out there, yes, but things balanced. Every bastard got his comeuppance someday, and every lowly sufferer got his moment.
She tugged at all my protective instincts, my sense of justice, my guilt: I wanted to do right by her. I thought maybe I could save someone.
I told Donna all about me. Stuff I hadn’t really told anyone. About how my father, Benjamin Bunt Sr., was a conductor on Amtrak’s West Coast line. He was supposed to be a little guy like me, but I didn’t have any memories of him because he split when I was two, and my mother’s only explanation was that I squalled a lot as a baby and my dad loved quiet. I think Mom said it just to shut me up, because she didn’t want to talk about the real reasons for his splitting. Maybe he fell in love with another woman, and it was the kind of love you can’t do anything about except follow it; maybe the company made him take a job on the Eastern lines and he tried to send for us and couldn’t; maybe he died and word never got back. I liked to think it was something like that. But all Mom would say is, ‘You squalled. Benny, you were a real squaller.’ I remember always asking about the old man. Was he tough? Was he smart? Was he good at stuff? What baseball team did he like? Didn’t he love us?
Mom refused to talk about him though, especially after she married Big Hal, because mention of Dad might earn her a beating. Square-jawed and husky, Big Hal drove a concrete truck and read a lot of rifle magazines and said the Holocaust was made up. When he was drunk enough, he spoke of how the State of Israel was engineering the apocalypse. Big Hal lived in our house on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys for 10 years and said maybe 50 words to me a year. Usually the words were ‘dumb-ass,’ because I was clumsy and couldn’t do anything worthwhile like hammer a nail, or ‘faggot,’ because I read a lot of comics and magazines, and he thought it was a faggoty way to spend time. Ignoring me was some kind of principle with Big Hal. He had to punish me for being someone else’s kid. He’d say to Mom, ‘Your brat has weird eyes and he gives me the creeps. Can’t you give him to someone? Can’t you find a doorstep?’ She’d reply that she couldn’t blame him for feeling that way, since she knew I was odd, but who would take a kid who looked like me and walked into furniture all the time? I think she said it to protect me. Maybe she half believed it, but I still think it came from love.
For a while I wanted Big Hal to love me. I memorized chunks of Mein Kampf to impress him. Once I made him a ceramic mug and painted ‘BIG HAL’ on the side, along with a swastika and my best effort at a concrete truck, and I brought him his Coors in it. He threw it into a wall and said, ‘Big Hal drinks from a can.’ He pushed me into a coffee table and my scalp bled. He wanted me to understand how wrong it was, trying something like that: a gift like that. It was sneaky and low of me. Because I wasn’t his, and he wasn’t mine, and you had to face fundamental facts. You couldn’t pretend you were something you weren’t. I took the lesson.
After that I thought a lot about killing Big Hal. I didn’t know how to go about it, without getting caught. In the seventh grade I tried to do it with black magic. That was the year I worshipped Satan, or pretended to. I took refuge where I could find it. I disfigured walls with pentagrams and 666s, flashed the devil sign in greeting schoolmates, and decorated my Pee-Chee folder with quotes from ‘The Satanic Bible.’ It’s really the same impulse that makes a kid wave around a stick covered with dogshit, looking for screams. In this case I had turned myself into the repugnance on display. I was the dogshit. Girls were horrified of me. For a while people knew me at Van Nuys Junior High as ‘the Satan dude,’ which I liked a lot, because even a stupid rep was better than no rep. Eventually some Christians on the wrestling team put my head in a urinal and took turns pissing on me, and it wasn’t fun anymore. And when my spells failed to bring an embolism or freak electrocution down on Big Hal, as I begged the masters of darkness to do, I renounced Satan-worship as not only dangerous but useless.
Big Hal left cigarette burns on me and bruises on Mom, and for a whole week, after one beating, her head looked like a pumpkin. One day a surgeon fucked up his back during an operation – so he insisted – and then he was home all the time, drinking and going crazy. His pride took a hit, because Mom had to pay the bills, working double-shifts at Denny’s. So he started hating her as much as he hated me.
There were days you could feel the violence on him throbbing for an outlet, throbbing off his belly and the backs of his hands, like heat rising off a pavement. One night Mom made a sharp remark about how tired she was, and could a man who sat home all day maybe fix his own goddamn grilled cheese for once? He sprang out of his recliner and pushed her head into the wall, and I watched her sag to the floor. I was 17, small but stocky, with strong legs and biceps that I built with weights in the garage; by then Big Hal was fat and weak, with that gimpy back. I don’t remember how it happened exactly, but I found myself on top of him, pinning him to the floor, whaling on him, whump, whump, whump, whump. It wasn’t me doing it, really. Some reptile part of my brain had seized the controls. We were all alone, myself and my thrashing, suddenly helpless stepfather: the world had contracted to this blindingly bright tunnel in which there were just our two bodies, his meat and my meat, and even my mother’s screams in my ear belonged to some dream.
I must have known that if I hit him one more time, I wouldn’t quit until
I killed him.
There was no choice after that: I had to leave. Mom gave me what she had – 65 bucks, three days’ tips – and told me to call when I could, and to come by the restaurant when I needed a meal. She was crying, but there was really nothing she could do. She loved Big Hal.
For weeks I slept in Laundromats or movie houses and by night I roamed Sepulveda Boulevard, keeping company with winos and tweakers at bottle clubs and all-night donut joints. For a while the tweakers were my family: an ever-changing succession of drop-outs and runaways and lost kids like me who snorted or swallowed anything on hand. They taught me to turn a $50 brick of pot into $200, to cook up meth in a Motel 6 sink, to scale the ladders behind strip malls for a patch of roof to crash on. At Thrifty Drugs I slipped Marvel and DC comics into my cargo pants, gravitating mostly to lone-wolf heroes like Batman and Wolverine and Conan the Barbarian, the noble bad-asses who smote the evil and protected the weak and didn’t need anybody. Certain superhero teams like the Fantastic Four and the Avengers fascinated me in a different way, the ones who loved to gather family-like around big tables in their mansions and deluxe secret lairs. Like all families, these heroes had their feuds, their ego-clashes, their sibling spats. Big, bright-clad shoulders chock-a-block across the page: heat rippling off the close bodies so I could almost feel the family warmth of the room, even as I huddled alone against the wind on top of a Burger King or Dunkin’ Donuts. I ruined a lot of comics, crying on them. After a while it was just my gut heaving up and down, and nothing at all coming out of my eyes.
Daytime was easier. I killed afternoons in the library at Van Nuys Community College, passing myself off as a student, hustling a few bucks off kids at the upstairs chess table. Through the window I watched bleach-blond surf boys and tanktopped girls with fine copper fur growing all over their legs kicking around hackey sacks in the grass quad – an idiotic game – while the California sun worshipfully came on their golden heads. To make my fake identity convincing, I memorized all kinds of random data: geographical facts, precipitation rates, lengths of archipelagos, dates of wars and assassinations, endless vocabulary lists – particularly those. The world is full of people who like to make you feel like an ignorant motherfucker. They love to whip out words like ‘lagniappe’ or ‘canard’ on you, watch your face fill with panic and bewilderment. It’s the petty pride of the tollbooth lady who refuses to let you pass if you’re a nickel short: she lives for it. I decided not to give this breed a second’s satisfaction at my expense. If some college cocksucker tried to drop the hammer on me with ‘lagniappe,’ I’d fire back with ‘epistemological,’ and if he hit me with ‘canard,’ I might unleash ‘anaphora’ or poleaxe him with ‘perspicacious,’ to demonstrate that I was not his punk. Of course I suspected that all the ‘knowledge’ I crammed into what I was already calling my Memory Palace didn’t add up to any kind of education, just as the fragments of a man’s personality, when you try to fit them together, never really seem to add up to a whole person. But I learned to fake being educated, the way a world of amalgam-men fake being real people.
At the library I met and befriended a man named Ray Castle. He was a retired ancient-history professor from Kentucky, divorced, graying; he was beanpole-skinny with large, bony, liver-spotted hands. I called him the Professor. He wore V-neck sweaters that reeked richly (and, I thought, wonderfully) of menthol cigarettes. He kept taking me to Beef Bowl and Arby’s for lunch, and I couldn’t afford to say no to such a kindness. Voice trembling with emotion, he told fabulous stories of Greeks hacking up other Greeks, of the Spartans at the Hot Gates, of the love between Achilles and Patroclus, and particularly of the bravery of the 300-man Theban Sacred Band, the most feared of warriors, undefeated until they died to the last man – here tears always shone on the Professor’s sunken cheeks – at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. At museums he flew into red-faced rages at the sight of fig-leafs on statuary; it was an unforgivable affront to decency, he explained, to blight beauty. He offered to let me crash on the couch of his small, dusty, book-cluttered apartment until I figured out my next move. I read to him after dinner, though I didn’t grasp most of the stuff he liked: Plato’s Symposium, Mann’s Death in Venice. He called me a seedling that had been stunted by the rocky soil of my upbringing; all I needed were some cultural nutrients, the water and sunshine of mentorship, and I would blossom. I came to love him. At night he drank bourbon, and I’d wake on the couch to see his shadow framed in the doorway of his bedroom, his hair wild and his cigarette-scarred robe hanging slightly crooked off his gaunt shoulders. He’d watch me while I pretended to sleep; sometimes noises came from his chest that sounded like whimpering. Neither of us would mention this the next day. One night, after I’d been on his couch two or three months, he couldn’t stand it anymore: I woke with his whiskey breath on my cheek and a bony, shaking hand suspended an inch from my thigh, trying to close the final distance. I reached into his robe and pumped my fist a few times. He grimaced at the ceiling, as if asking God for forgiveness, while mewling-dog noises came out of his throat. Afterward he didn’t say anything, just shuffled back to his room. Next morning I was gone. The last time I saw him, he looked like a very old man, stooped and pouch-eyed and utterly defeated as he stood before his violated Buick, where I’d put rocks through the windshield and spray-painted ‘FAGGOT!’ across the hood. I loved that old man.
Soon after I got unbearably lonely and I walked four or five miles to Denny’s, where Mom worked. It was a chilly night, late. I stood across the street and watched her seating people through the restaurant window. Finally I went inside and saw her sweeping around a corner with three plates in each hand, headed to a booth full of boisterous men. She didn’t notice me. I sat by the pie case until she did. She took me to a booth and brought me a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon and biscuits, and when she got a break she came and sat across from me and stroked my hand and cried. She told me Big Hal had been going out nights looking for me with his .22, and she couldn’t make him listen to reason. Otherwise, their relationship had really improved since I’d been gone. It had become clear to her that I had been a lot of the problem.
She brought me an old leather suitcase full of my clothes and comics, which she’d been keeping at the restaurant in case I dropped by. My throat was thick as I took that suitcase on my lap. It was like being handed my own coffin. Entombed inside were 17 years of my life: my boyhood, my home, my innocence, what little I’d ever had of family.
I wouldn’t cry, though. I’d be goddamned if I did.
I told Mom not to worry about me. I was doing fine. I was going to be a police officer and I was going to do a lot of important things and help a lot of people and have a lot of adventures. I’d wear a uniform and badge, and I’d have a squad car and a utility belt and a radio, and they were going to teach me all the special codes. I said I’d already been accepted at the LAPD Academy. ‘How in hell did you swing that one?’ she said. She just couldn’t believe I was bright or coordinated enough for such a job. I said I had a guy on the inside I’d paid off. She smiled, proud. The smile said, An idiot like you might just survive in the world. Maybe you’ve picked up a thing or two about how it works. She brought another waitress over to share the good news. Her boy had snuck his way into cop school!
So I went out into the night, carrying that suitcase full of my dead youth, leaving my mother with that lie. Until she died she thought I was LAPD.
I fled south to Orange County, where the rent was cheap and there was a lot of beach and restaurant work and I knew Big Hal wouldn’t find me. I got my GED and washed dishes and dealt some pot and crystal on the side and lived with five or six other guys in someone’s basement. Starsky and Hutch reruns made me cry, reminding me that I had wanted to be a cop for as long as I could remember. As a kid I had lugged the hardware everywhere – that grab-bag of cheap cuffs, painted wafer badge and plastic gun; the walkie-talkie with the decorative knobs I adjusted feverishly in conversations with imaginary fellow eight-year-old cops. (At times the
trusted partner I imagined on the other end, working some other sector of the city, calling me ‘buddy,’ was my father, a wise, faceless, older cop named Sgt. Bunt.) I loved the way people looked at cops when they walked into a room, like: As long as the boys are here, nothing too bad can happen. And how everybody wanted to buy them a cup of coffee. And how they could tell chicks, ‘You’re safe now – you’re with me,’ and it wouldn’t be a con, it’d be true. A thousand hours of TV had implanted indelible notions of cop camaraderie. At the heart of the coolest shows were always two men, riding toward action, two capable men who knew each other’s measure, who loved each other and would die for each other, but would never, ever betray the understanding between them by saying so: Starsky and Hutch, Ponch and John, Crockett and Tubbs, later Bayliss and Pembleton and Kelly and Sipowicz. (If any of them had wives, I can’t remember. On the job I bet they couldn’t, either: a man’s real life, any of it that was worth recording anyway, happened with the dude riding shotgun. They were only ‘cop dramas’ in name, actually. It took me years to realize it, but the good ones were always love stories.)
I was not fit material for police work. They didn’t even want me as a dispatcher or a clerk. Not the LAPD, not the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, not the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, not the California Highway Patrol, not the FBI, not the Newport Beach or Costa Mesa PD. The shrink screeners found me an unstable, deceptive personality with issues of unresolved rage. The polygraph machine didn’t like me, either, especially when I was asked if I’d broken any laws.
Now and then I’d see some sorry-looking cop, and felt myself go sick with bile, thinking, How could those scamps think I couldn’t carry a badge better than that?
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