Entering a room, Gus instantly altered the energy in it. There was a great collective clenching of sphincters. You were never sure what kind of mood he was in or what kind of drugs he was on; I had seen him ingest coke, pot, ecstasy, crystal, Percocet, Viagra, and rainbow handfuls of capsules I couldn’t identify, but which I suspected were psychotropic medications. Nor could you predict how he might try to humiliate you. He was good for lots of laughs, provided you were not the one singled out for treatment.
He nearly killed Sal Chamusco, for instance. As part of his secret Special Forces training, Gus explained, he learned to inflict death with his bare hands in such a way that permitted him to escape before the victim even suspected anything amiss. This was useful when the target was a heavily guarded foreign dignitary or military leader who could only be approached, say, over hors d’oeuvres at an embassy function. It was achieved by the legendary Dim Mak ‘delayed death-touch’ technique, which could be mastered only after exotic Shaolin training, requiring a great deal of meditation and, to preserve the all-important chi, a full year’s excruciating abstinence from ejaculation. With no more than a brush of the palm, the killer wreaked havoc with the flow of the victim’s yin/yang circuits, inducing fibrillation, uncontrolled sweating, and violent trembling. Death followed hours or even days later. It was all very scientific, as Gus put it, involving electrical impulses and complicated ‘circadian and topological’ equations.
‘Hey, Sal,’ Gus said, having caught the skepticism in Sal’s pinched, frowning face. ‘You got a guinea name. Come be my guinea pig.’
‘That’s alright.’
‘You think it’s bullshit, what’re you scared of?’
‘I ain’t scared. Do Benny. You never do Benny.’
‘But I’m asking you.’
‘It just ain’t funny, Gus. You can’t fuck with people all the time.’
‘Okay,’ Gus said, spreading his hands pacifically. ‘You’re right. I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. I’ll buy you one.’
‘No sweat.’
‘I push it too far sometimes, asshole that I am.’
A few drinks later, rising to claim the ashtray in front of Sal, Gus bumped him from the side so that startled Sal slipped from his stool. Gus braced him, and they stood facing each other. Sal looked down in horror at the fat hands pressed flat against his ribs, like a man suddenly realizing his tango partner had the Black Death. He flinched away. Gus sat down, and, a few drags into his cigarette, casually said, ‘You just been Dim Makked, brother.’
Sal went pale. His attempt to smile, through all the perspiration suddenly slicking his face, including the bare pale spot over his lip where his mustache refused to meet, was a painful sight. He spilled his lighter into the sawdust and spent about a minute trying to pick it up. By now the whole bar was laughing. Hand against his chest, he emitted a high-pitched croak of surrender: ‘Am I gonna buy it?’ Whereupon gracious Gus, with a series of brisk acupressure manipulations, reversed the fatal process and bought Sal another drink. Cheers!
Gus spared me this treatment. Benefits of being the class bully’s best friend. I suppose I validated his self-image. I treated him as he wanted to be treated – as a great, dangerous, tragically ruined man whom the world had sorely screwed and who was justified in whatever rage he harbored against it. At the library I found an art book with a reproduction of The Dying Gaul and photocopied it. I gave it to Gus and told him it was how I saw him. His scummed fingertip traced the lines of the soldier’s rippled, Olympically tendoned body through which death invisibly stole, and Gus began to nod slowly. ‘You’re right,’ Gus said. ‘That’s me. A battlefield casualty. Sent by his masters to fight and die because he knows nothing else. Yes. I’m Greek fucking statuary.’ Within the week he had commissioned a small tattoo of The Dying Gaul on his lower back.
As a show of friendship, one night, he peeled off his cammie jacket, the raveled one with the Airborne patches, and said, ‘I want you to wear my bad-ass jacket, Benny.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Now you’re an honorary PTSD-crazed tripwire combat vet.’
So I started wearing it around. I liked the respectful looks I got in it. I walked into all the bars on 19th and Harbor, bars like the Biker Pit and El Cholo’s and Stooge City that I was normally afraid to enter, and just sat there in it, drinking silently, a quiet, troubled bad-ass who looked like he had killed some people and could probably kill some more if he was given any shit.
On weekends Gus and I frequented the beach dives and, blind drunk, headed out onto the sand in the dark with an ignitable log, singing and drinking ourselves unconscious like a couple of pirates. We hit a lot of Saturday afternoon flea markets, prowling for treasure. For me it was old comics, model trains, Hot Wheels and action figures. For him it was Time Life war books, commando novels, battle memorabilia, and materials with which to make birdhouses, mostly wood planks and sheets of corrugated tin.
Through the night he built these birdhouses in his room, one or two a month, with hammer, nails, and a little miter saw, patiently smoothing the edges with a square of sandpaper in the palm of his lumpy hand, his Sony AM/FM tuned to talk radio. Sometimes he gave them away. Once he got drunk and worked up enough courage to haul a few to Home Depot. He walked up to the manager with three hanging from each hand and asked for 10 bucks apiece – they could be easily marked up double or triple, he explained – but the store couldn’t use them, even after he lowered the asking price to five. Then Gus tried to get Telly Grimes to unload a few, since he had connections, but Telly told him there was no real market for black-market birdhouses in Orange County. It was the first time I heard Telly say there wasn’t a market for something. Besides, Telly said, examining one of the birdhouses, pretending not to know who made it, the workmanship wasn’t so hot: you could tell the guy that made it was drunk. ‘Tell whoever did it he should try something he’s good at,’ Telly told Gus. Gus told him to fuck himself and, his bottle swinging at his hip, stumbled back to the solitude of his broom-closet.
So the birdhouses just collected in Gus’s van and cluttered his room. Once he spoke of finding a big back yard where he could put out 50 or 60 of them and spend all day watching the thrashers and waxwings, the robins and bluebirds, the sparrows and goldfinches and grosbeaks alight like broken-off pieces of a rainbow. ‘Girl of mine,’ he drunkenly replied, when somebody asked for whom he was building them. People figured he must have a lady somewhere, though he never talked about her. They were okay-looking birdhouses, too. Respectable. Telly was wrong: you really couldn’t tell the guy that made them was drunk.
Once or twice a week, with Jesse James asleep back at the Greasy Tuesday, Gus and I hit the cineplexes. Aside from the sounds of his aggressive mastication – Gus went through three heavily slathered hotdogs in the course of a 90-minute feature – he observed great decorum at the movies, harshly shushing gabbers like myself. It was a holy place, he said. It was church. It didn’t matter if it was a comedy or a cop drama or a war movie: Shut up. Before long I too found myself seriously irritated with the gabbers, shushing them and scowling threateningly in my Army jacket.
We caught old movies at the revival house in Corona del Mar. He knew the Nam flicks backward and forward, of course. He emerged always with the same complaint: the filmmaker had shown a deficiency of ball-sack, of first-hand experience, in depicting the horrors of that war. He admired Full Metal Jacket and Platoon and Apocalypse Now for technical reasons, but they were essentially ‘soft-and-pink chick flicks’ that did not capture even one-millionth of the misery he had seen. At times he fantasized about making the ultimate Nam movie, one so raw it was conceivable viewers would have to be hospitalized. He’d call it The Devil’s Asshole, because it had been the worst place on earth.
Donna acquired the habit of assaulting me with airborne appliances whenever I was home – she disapproved of all the nights I was out with my mysterious new ‘asshole buddy,’ a phrase that made me twitch with rage – and found excuses to berate
me. Consequently I returned home as little as possible; the thought of being there brought a terrible tightness to my chest, as of a hundred hair- choked drains. I didn’t tell Donna much about Gus Miller, and I took pains to hide the jacket from her. I harbored the guilty feeling that I was cheating on her. After a while I began to half-forget I was married.
For a couple of years now, I told Gus, I had fantasized about getting on my bike and going wherever the road took me, in any direction that didn’t lead home – beginning again somewhere else, as someone else.
Gus told me I was a coward trying to live the life everyone else wanted me to live rather than the one I wanted to live. He said it was perfectly clear that when my mom died, I went looking for another crazy bitch’s troubles to saddle myself with. As was the case with most men, my true, free, outlaw nature terrified me. ‘Which is why you’re so lucky to have found me,’ Gus said. ‘I’m here to school you in Life 101. Your problem is you tolerate boredom. Me? I gotta real low threshold for it. Boredom’s violence. Boredom’s tyranny. Makes me wanna hit back. Maybe I’ll take you on the road with me one day, show you some real shit.’
He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by ‘real shit,’ but I had vivid buddy-flick visions of long open highways and sweet sagebrush deserts sailing past, the tough big guy and the trusty little guy heading toward some Vegas kingdom of neon and wickedness; I pictured us holding up Brinks trucks and stagecoaches and trains and equally ridiculous things, and dying spectacularly in a shootout with the authorities, as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
At the Newport jetty, one sunset, we shared a spliff while a guy played with his little boy in the sand nearby. The kid kept hurling handfuls of sand into the wind, and wailing in shock when it blew back into his face, which got me laughing. Gus didn’t laugh. He was silent for a long time, looking off with those crooked glasses, and it was as if I could see a darkness stealing over him. ‘Really too good for this goddamn sewer,’ he said. ‘You know what it’s like when your kid puts her arms around you? Game over, man. You’re ruined.’ He pulled up his shirt, over his familiar showcase of scars, up above his gigantic man-tits, to reveal a tattoo I hadn’t seen before. Over his heart, framed by a border of roses, was the face of a pretty young girl with golden curls, no more than two or three years old.
‘I got this inked on me from the one picture I had, ’cause I was afraid I’d lose it, ’cause I mislay things, which is just what I fuckin’ did. Somewhere in Austin. Mislaid it, I mean, just like I mislaid my family.’
Being stoned, I feared I was missing the tenor of what he was saying, missing the subtext, missing what he wanted from me. The big man’s pain made me very uncomfortable. It seemed of a different order than the suffering he usually gassed on about, something too dreadful even to utter. It was a story he actually did not want to tell.
I offered the joint; he declined it. Waves built, crashed, foamed; built, crashed, foamed; and Gus seemed to sink deeper into the darkness that had come over him, way out of reach of anything I could say.
He and the girl’s mom had a doublewide outside Tampa, he explained after a while. He had steady roofing work. He had a family. What he’d dreamed of, all that time in lockup. ‘The first time – the only time – I had my shit together enough to be mistook for an ordinary, non-substance-abusing American,’ he said. ‘Put my ear against that little girl’s heart and told myself, “This is just the ultimate.” You know? “There’s no way I’m gonna fuck this up.”’
He would carry the girl to the park and point out the birds to her, and the songs from the trees transfixed her. He bought her bright books of bird pictures. He imagined she might grow up to be a scientist. He built her birdhouses, to attract finches.
After a brutal workday he had come home, stepped inside the door, and felt his heart pounding in panic. The stacks of diapers, the ranks of bottles, the piles of baby-food jars, the smell of sour regurgitated milk, the supermarket coupons, the clutter of toys, the riot of hair-curlers, the mounds of laundry, the ironing board, the day’s iron-ruined dress, the kid screaming, his wife screaming, the whole place a berserk, boisterous, womanly mess: it all conspired to frighten him, all melded into the shape of banal confinement no less terrifying than a bamboo cage. He looked into the life he was building and saw a strange, pinkish prison pod where he would grow flabbier and squishier, where his hard body would grow tits, his balls would shrivel and drop off like a poor penned bull’s, where his prison-guards would yell ‘Fetch the Kotex, hon!’ and he would jump – Right away, hon! – and over the years he’d turn into a shapeless, sinewless jelly-thing like something washed up on a beach. And Jesus, if the day had been a little kinder, if the sun had been just a little less punishing on the roof where he’d been spreading tar all afternoon, he might not have needed a little air just then, he might not have needed a drink. Two full years sober, the two best years of his life, and – just like that – nothing mattered but finding that drink. His wife calling from the kitchen, ‘Is that you, hon? Can you give me a hand over here? Are you there?’ And Jesus Christ, if he hadn’t just turned around, walked right to the nearest pub, and before he knew it – he didn’t even remember how – he was three states away, getting blown by a teenage Cajun hooker. A week later, still drunk enough to forget who he was, he was in love with her and trying to rescue her from her pimp, offering to kill him for her if she’d run away with him to California. He couldn’t even remember her name now. By the time he sobered up enough to long for home, he was already in lockup, and, having violated his probation, facing state time. In the woodshop at Starke he built his daughter birdhouses. A car hit her sometime in the third or fourth year. Her mom had been at the stove, distracted for just a minute, a minute or two, and the girl was supposed to be in front of the TV, ‘Sit right there,’ she’d told her, and then from the sidewalk there were screams, and a neighborhood kid who’d been gunning his Camaro was carrying her body to the sidewalk. Gus couldn’t really blame him. No reason to expect a toddler in the road. Yeah, plus Gus knew – no doubt at all in his mind, not a shadow – that the girl’s daddy had put her in the car’s path. They didn’t let him out for the funeral, and had to shove him in the hole for his rage.
She never got the birdhouses. When they let him back in the woodshop he just kept building them.
CHAPTER 13
One night, about six weeks after Gus Miller moved into the Greasy Tuesday, the talk along the bar turned to a story that had been all over the newspapers. A roofer named Chick Perrino was on trial for abducting a 21-year-old UC Irvine girl whose Acura broke down on the 405 freeway a couple of miles up the road. Perrino garroted her, dismembered her, and scattered her parts around Orange County. He must have wanted to get caught, because he left her parts in boxes bearing his company logo. Everyone agreed it was a seriously fucked-up business, and Perrino should die in a much nastier way than the law would allow. Gus said he’d like to disembowel him personally and feed him his own guts for doing such a thing. He should have done it, in fact, when he had the chance: he once met Perrino on a roofing job and found him a creepy, shifty-eyed piece of snot who looked just like the sick twist he turned out to be. Jesse James, ever sensitive to a man’s true nature, had wanted to chew off the man’s nuts, and Gus wished now he’d let the dog follow his instincts, because that poor girl might still be alive. Then, shifting from moral indignation to professional disdain, Gus said, ‘His own company’s boxes! Why not leave your wallet too, shitbird? Fucking amateur. I respect this guy on no level. I mean, go back to school, asshole. The only reason cops nail anyone, ever, is because people do stupid, irrational shit like this.’
‘If he was smart, he would’ve dropped her off the pier,’ Sal Chamusco offered.
‘Well, except the gas fills you up after a couple days, and you float,’ Gus said. ‘Way to get rid of your mess, you find a patch of woods. Between here and San Francisco there’s plenty of it. You’ve got your lime and your hole, maybe three to four feet deep, and tha
t lets the critters scatter what’s left in a hundred directions.’
‘But the water’s quicker,’ said stubborn Sal. ‘Put some concrete blocks on the feet – – ’
‘Then you’ve gotta carry the concrete blocks. You ever try that? And people hear the splash. The splash is what did in the guy in Atlanta, whatshisname – in the Eighties – did in all those people – – ’
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