The Choirboys

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Alexander Blaney was known by Rampart Juvenile officers because since the age of fourteen he had come to them with complaints about men who allegedly accosted him in MacArthur Park where he had played as long as he could remember. Alexander, an only child, had usually played alone. Since the neighborhood around Alvarado Street was predominantly white with a sprinkling of Cubans and Indians, it was not considered a ghetto. His parents never knew about the halfway houses nearby or of the number of men frequenting MacArthur Park who had spent years behind bars buggering young men who were not half as handsome and vulnerable as Alexander Blaney.

  This is not to say that the neighborhood made Alexander Blaney what he was. No one, not even Alexander Blaney, knew what made him what he was. What he was not was the golden young conqueror his father had read about in his salad days when he dreamed of being more than a semi-invalid elevator operator. But if the lad had never acquired his namesake’s taste for battle and glory he had developed the sexual preference of the Greek warrior. For Alexander Blaney was, at eighteen and a half, a rubber wristed, lisping, mincing faggot.

  While Alexander Blaney began getting accustomed to being gay and could not fool anyone by trying to hide the fact, Harold Bloomguard, nearing the end of his two weeks of vice duty got drunk and came to the same conclusion.

  “You’re what?” Sam Niles asked as he and Harold sat alone in a vice car on a nighttime whore stakeout after having drunk six pitchers of beer in a beer bar they failed to operate effectively.

  “I’m afraid I’m turning homosexual, Sam,” said the beery choirboy. “And I’m terrified. I’m probably going to shoot myself or go to live with my mom in the funny place!”

  “Oh please! Why me? Why me?” cried Sam Niles, slumping down in the car seat and pushing up his steel rims, so he could look at a heaven he did not believe in, to a God he knew did not exist. “All right, let’s get this over with. When did you discover you were gay?”

  “Just this week working the traps. You see, I started to wonder if a guy couldn’t begin to identify what with seeing that all the time, and with identifying comes acceptance and then… well, once I wondered if I might get a blue veiner watching that stuff sometime, and if I did it would mean I’m turning. And I’d have to kill myself.”

  “And did you get a blue veiner?”

  “Well no, but maybe it’s only my straight inhibitions stopping it. See what I mean?”

  “I see,” said Sam, lighting a cigarette. “And what’s your next move? Gonna shoot yourself over on Duck Island?”

  “I don’t know,” Harold belched. “You know how insanity runs in my family. I’ll probably end up with Mom no matter what.”

  “You know, Harold, I think having you around might be more effective than electroshock. Your mother’ll probably cure herself just to get away from you.”

  “Don’t get testy with me, Sam. You’re the only real friend I’ve got. I’m a sick man.”

  “You’ve been a sick man since you joined my fire team in Nam! You’ve been a sick man all your life, I’m sure. But somehow you survive all this by telling me all the screwy loony goofy neurotic fears you have THAT I DON’T WANNA HEAR ABOUT! I tell you I’ll be the one doing the nudie tap dance with your mom in the state hospital!”

  “Sam, you can tell your problems to me. I’d love to hear about your fears and…”

  “I don’t want you to be my confessor. I don’t need a confessor, Harold.”

  “Everybody should tell his problems to someone, Sam, and you’re my best…”

  “Don’t say it, Harold,” Sam interrupted, trying to calm himself. “Please don’t say I’m your best anything. We’ve been together a long time, I know. God, how I know.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll never burden you again,” Harold said boozily.

  “Oh yes you will. In a day or two you’ll tell me you’ve discovered you’re a sadist and you want me to keep an eye on you in case you start sticking pencils in somebody’s eyeballs.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I never meant to be a burden.”

  They sat quietly for a moment and then Sam said, “Harold, did you ball Carolina Moon Tuesday night at choir practice?”

  “Sort of, but only because I was drunk. And first.”

  “Well anyone who likes pussy enough to screw that fat bitch can’t be a fruit, okay?”

  “You know I never thought of that!” said Harold Bloomguard, brightening. “I never thought of that! Thanks, Sam. You always come through for me. If it weren’t for you…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” said the bored and disgusted Sam Niles.

  Then Harold Bloomguard thought a moment and said, “How do I know I’m not bisexual?”

  Harold Bloomguard’s fears of being a bisexual were soon displaced by a more pressing fear when he decided he had cancer. Harold’s discovery of the cancer came as a result of Scuz giving them the vice complaint against the Gypsy fortune teller, Margarita Palmara, who lived in back of a modest wood frame cottage near Twelfth and Irolo. The tiny building had been painted a garish yellow but was otherwise not unlike other homes in the area. The residence of Margarita Palmara was a garage apartment which had been converted from a chicken coop. The husband of Margarita Palmara literally flew the coop one day and left Mrs. Palmara to fend for her five children which she did in Gypsy fashion by con games, shoplifting and fortune-telling to supplement the welfare check. But then she had the good luck to tell a woman thought to be dying of a radium treated cancer that she would soon get well, and lo, she did. From then on Margarita Palmara was called upon by neighborhood women, who hailed from a dozen Latin countries, to cure anything from acne to leukemia. Just prior to the Wilshire vice detail’s receiving a complaint from a disgruntled patient, Mrs. Palmara had quickly earned more than ten thousand dollars from the Spanish speaking women of the neighborhood. Never one to overdo a good thing she was thinking it was time she flew the coop herself before the cops heard about her.

  But she waited a bit too long and the cops did hear about her. A middle aged Mexican-American policewoman named Nena Santos was ordered to pose as a neighborhood housewife and attempt to operate Margarita Palmara to get a violation of law.

  “I see you will soon be cured of that which you believe to be cancer in your breast,” the Gypsy said in Spanish to the undercover policewoman. “And this thing which is not a cancer, but an evil visitation, will leave your body. And you will feel twenty years old again and enjoy your man in bed as you have never enjoyed him before. And your luck will change. Your husband will find a better job that will pay as much as twelve thousand dollars a year. All this will happen if you keep the charm I am going to give you and if you faithfully say the words I am going to teach you and if you donate three hundred dollars to me which I shall use to support the orphans of my native land.”

  But instead of crossing the Gypsy’s palm with three hundred scoots, Nena Santos crossed the Gypsy’s wrists with sixteen bucks worth of steel, and Margarita Palmara was busted.

  Harold Bloomguard and Sam Niles were only two of the vice cops detailed to the stakeout across the street, and after getting the signal from Nena Santos, they went inside to meet the Gypsy and drive her to jail where she would be booked and released on bail that afternoon. Ultimately she was made to come to court and pay a fine of 150 dollars before she moved to El Monte, California, where she was able to make fourteen thousand dollars telling fortunes before being arrested again. It kept her and her children in fine style even after an angry judge then fined her 250 dollars to teach her a lesson.

  But before she was taken from the house that day she left a curse or two behind.

  Harold Bloomguard, along with Sergeant Scuzzi, Sam Niles and Baxter Slate, was roaming around the Gypsy’s chicken coop waiting for the woman to make arrangements with a neighbor to take care of the children until she could bail out. In a little bedroom of the chicken coop the officers found a frightened seven year old Gypsy girl in a Communion dress.

  She was a husky child, wit
h a broad peasant face and black hair which grew too far down her forehead. Her skin was so dark it made the antique Communion dress look marshmallow white to Harold Bloomguard.

  “Cómo se llama?” Harold Bloomguard asked with an atrocious accent which embarrased Sam Niles and made him snort in disgust.

  In fact every time Harold made a good natured attempt to speak Spanish to people it embarrassed Sam Niles who said he knew enough Spanish to keep his mouth shut by not trying to speak it.

  Sam argued with Harold Bloomguard later when Harold claimed the homely little girl was beautiful and that her dress was charming, when Sam could see it was a hand-me-down and almost gray from so many washings. Sam said that she was nothing but an ugly little thief who would grow up to be an ugly big thief like her mother.

  As they were leaving the house the angry Gyspy turned a sagging chamois face to the gathering of vice cops and said in English, “You believe I not have power? That I cheat people? Very well then. I prove you are wrong. I can cure. I can make sick. You!” And the golden bracelets clanged as she pointed a scrawny finger at Harold Bloomguard. “You shall get the sickness!”

  It was a terrified and bleary eyed Harold Bloomguard who was in the district attorney’s office the next day nervously blowing spit bubbles as he filed a complaint against the Gypsy for grand theft. He was absolutely certain that the prosecution of the Gypsy would seal his fate.

  It was actually weeks before Harold stopped asking other choirboys to feel his breasts for suspicious lumps he knew lurked beneath the flesh. He only desisted when one night at choir practice Spermwhale Whalen agreed to feel the left one and got Harold in a headlock and stroked his tiny nipple lasciviously and said, “Harold, this’s givin me a blue veiner!” And threw Harold down on the grass, dropping on top of him, making the little choirboy scream for help. After that Harold suffered in silence and never asked anyone to feel his breasts.

  Alexander Blaney didn’t know he was going to be an admitted homosexual and arrested at age eighteen and a half, when at the age of fourteen he started noticing the cruel looking men with pasty jailhouse complexions who would stare at him in the park rest rooms. But he became aware early on that MacArthur Park was more than a place for old men to play at lawn bowling or for immigrants to kick a soccer ball or city dwellers to sit on the grass and picnic, throwing crumbs to the ubiquitous ducks in the large pond.

  Alexander saw and understood the eye signals, the furtive smiles, the men who met and paired off to disappear in the bushes at night or to meet and join inside the rest room where vice officers often arrested them and sometimes got in bloody fights before the eyes of the boy.

  The lad was once reading a book on the grass by a park rest room when he was startled by the noise inside and saw a huge ex-convict they called The Hippo crashing through the door, beaten to a bloody pulp by a cursing, burly vice cop whose lip was split and hanging loose and who was playing catchup on The Hippo with a sixteen ounce sap.

  Alexander Blaney saw far more than that in the same park rest room. He once saw a young man masturbating at a urinal and watched in fascination until the young man stepped away and ejaculated against the dirty tile wall between the urinals and toilets only to have a white haired man with flesh like onionskin and arms like pencils get up off the toilet and wipe the semen off the wall with his fingers and put it in his mouth. He smiled at Alexander Blaney and sickened the boy.

  And it was about that time that Alexander Blaney became known to Rampart Juvenile officers. The boy would come in at least once a month to report a lurid sex act he had observed in MacArthur Park. Once he claimed to have seen a big man sitting on the toilet with his trousers at his ankles stuffing his penis in his own rectum. And then there was the hermaphrodite who found Alexander Blaney lying on the grass composing madrigals to his music teacher. Alexander was fifteen and the busty hermaphrodite showed the boy her undeveloped penis and said she liked women not men, having been given male hormone shots since birth. And when darkness fell proved it was a lie by attempting to rape Alexander.

  And all of the lad’s stories were more or less taken with a grain of salt until at sixteen he finally came to the Juvenile sergeant and said that a handsome young man had dragged him away into the bushes and made Alexander Blaney orally copulate him and in turn forcibly performed the same act on Alexander. When he was finished with his account, the Juvenile sergeant said, “Is this the first time, Alexander?”

  And Alexander Blaney cried and said yes and he wanted the police to arrest the young man but didn’t know his name. The Juvenile sergeant bought the boy an ice cream bar and walked him to the door and told Alexander he wanted to talk to his parents.

  When the boy was gone the sergeant said, “Well, Alexander finally turned himself out. We won’t be seeing him anymore.”

  And the sergeant was right. Alexander Blaney came out of the closet at that time and was promptly beaten bloody by a high school friend whom he made the mistake of propositioning and who had hitherto liked and befriended him.

  Alexander, who had always been a sensitive, nervous lad, then began getting even thinner than usual and suffered from insomnia as well as weight loss and spent many tearful evenings with his mother and father saying over and over, “But I don’t know why I’m gay I just am.”

  His mother wept and his father pleaded with him not to be what he could not help being. Finally, after many homosexual encounters, most of them in MacArthur Park, which terrified, excited, degraded and confused the boy he was arrested by a Rampart Division vice officer.

  The vice officer was to Alexander Blaney not unlike the first young man whom he had reported to the police for dragging him unwillingly into the bushes. The vice officer was tall and clean, and Alexander, not knowing he was a vice officer, was unable to control the tremble in his voice when their eyes met. They sat not far apart on the grass where Alexander tossed popcorn to the ducks, some of which he actually knew one from the other.

  But the vice officer was not anxious to work fruits and wanted Alexander Blaney to get on with an offer so he could bust him and go to a favorite bar to shoot snooker for the remainder of his tour of duty.

  Therefore when Alexander said shyly, “I don’t meet too many people here,” the vice cop replied, “Do you have something in mind or not?”

  And Alexander, startled by the young man’s boldness, almost decided to say “No, no I have nothing in mind,” but he was afraid to lose the young man who looked so clean and decent.

  Alexander said, “Well, I thought we might go to a movie and get to know each other.”

  The vice cop sighed impatiently and said, “Look, do you suck or not?”

  Alexander felt like crying because this one would be no better than most and probably even more cruel than some. Alexander arrogantly replied, “Yes, I’ll do that. If that’s all you want. I guess I can do that all right.”

  The vice officer whistled for his partner who was hiding behind the trees and showed his badge to Alexander Blaney and looked disgusted when the boy lowered his head to weep.

  The vice cop later wrote in his arrest report: “Defendant stated: ‘I’ll suck you or do anything you want. I guess I can do that all right.’”

  Alexander pled guilty to a lesser misdemeanor after the city attorney dropped the lewd conduct violation in the plea bargaining session, and Alexander Blaney had a police record. But the thing which he could not forget, and which made him burn with humiliation, was that the vice cop didn’t seem to care one way or the other what happened to him. If he had hated homosexuals and beaten him up Alexander would have found it more tolerable. It’s just that he was nothing to the policeman, and even in court the vice officer didn’t seem to recognize him and just shrugged when the city attorney asked him if he had any objection to Alexander’s lawyer getting the charge reduced and pleading him guilty.

  • • •

  The tour on vice for the three choirboys ended on an unsuccessful note in that a call girl they had been staking out
never took the bait which was a phone call from Baxter Slate who was given a duke-in name of Gaylord Bottomley. A snitch said Bottomley was a savings and loan executive who had introduced certain circumspect friends to the exotic call girl.

  The snitch was a paid confidential informant who belonged to Pete Zoony and the moustachioed vice cop jealously guarded his informant’s identity. Real policemen, unlike movie cops, actually cherish and protect a good informant as they would a sibling. Informants are people to be bribed, threatened, cajoled, but above all protected. It was not uncommon for a policeman to guard the identity of a good snitch even from a partner he rode with nightly.

  As Pete Zoony said, “I never gave a snitch’s righteous name since I been on the job. Once we ripped off some dopers and some stupid cop calls me on the radio and gives the snitch’s name right over the air! But we always used a code name and he didn’t get a rat jacket behind it. Nobody knows my snitch’s name, not even my lieutenant. Nobody.”

  Pefe’s informant told them about Gina Summers who lived in a thousand-a-month apartment near Wilshire Boulevard. Allegedly she was a specialist in applying just the required amount of imaginative punishment to genteel but eager customers who paid from fifty to five hundred dollars for her unique services.

  Sam and Baxter had watched one man and sometimes two a night come and go and often saw the voluptuous brunette herself leaving and entering the apartment. None of the vice cops had been able to operate her successfully. The informant had told them that the vivacious girl had a chamber of horrors in her bedroom closet which included ancient thumbscrews, brands, scourges and other collector’s items. Actually most were seldom needed. Customers could usually be satisfied by less painful acts of degradation such as a urine shower. And often an ordinary spanking with a leather belt would do them just fine.