He arrived in Puerto Vallarta in his white Mustang. No one in the town had seen a car like that. First he stayed in the Rio Hotel, then in the Tropicana, which overlooked the beach, Banderas Bay. He could see the ocean from his room and, in the distance, the water shooting from the mountainous humps of the whales. The typewriter was on the backseat of the car. He was now a writer; an American author who probably came to Puerto Vallarta seeking tranquility, determined to finish his novel, perhaps a screenplay. He wore his hair slicked back, and gold-rimmed sunglasses. The Polaroid camera was always on his shoulder. He also carried the Super 8. The clicking sounds of the typewriter could be heard through the open windows and thin walls of the hotel. John Huston had directed The Night of the Iguana a few months prior in Puerto Vallarta. In the film, if you pay close attention, you can see for a few seconds the facade of the Rio Hotel and its sign.
* * *
He began to frequent two brothels in Puerto Vallarta: Casa Susana and Casa Azul. Casa Susana had a lounge with dirt floors, a bar, and a jukebox that played American hits from different decades. The vinyl would start skipping sometimes and you had to hit the machine on the side. Women fanned their faces while waiting for clients, glistening in the heat, their lips and eyes with heavy makeup, their legs open. Naked children and animals ran around the tables, pigs, hens, dogs. In Casa Susana he met a young woman who went by Irma, after the movie Irma la Douce. Her skin was dark, her hair was dyed blond. Her real name was Manuela Medrano Lopez. Irma later said that the American with the white sports car, Eric, would take her in the Mustang to secluded beaches and take photos of her, dressed or naked, sometimes in erotic positions. He had her sit on the passenger seat with her legs open and her skirt pulled up. He made vague promises about hiring her to star in the films he would be making for a pornography company he was starting in Los Angeles. Eric, the American, was quiet and never laughed. Sometimes he treated her to things, other times he haggled over payment for her services. He took his Polaroid camera everywhere, along with a small Spanish phrase book, though he could barely say a few words and could understand even less. He was very interested in learning Latin dancing. Occasionally he got in his car and disappeared. Manuela Medrano figured he was probably going to one of the plantations in the jungle to buy marijuana. One day he was very drunk at one of the tables in Casa Susana and asked her to marry him. She laughed and said no. How could she trust him, she said, if he was always walking away with other women. She said it in Spanish and a bit of English, with single words, and many gestures, pointing to one of the other prostitutes he had been with, perhaps to make her jealous, a girl with darker skin, younger and very petite, whom they called Chilindrina. He got very serious, pulled out his revolver, and pointed it between her eyes.
* * *
Women in Casa Azul waited for clients in narrow, horizontal cubicles positioned at different heights, like cells in a honeycomb. Hand ladders led to them. Cries, moans, and sighs filled the space and could be heard from outside, acting as an invitation, an aphrodisiac made of sound. They saw him go up and down the ladders many times: sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts, the skin so pale it did not even get red from the sun, refractory like lime or pumice stone.
* * *
The most secluded beach was in Mismaloya, fifteen kilometers from Puerto Vallarta. It had one bar in front of the beach. Few tourists ventured that far. The waiter from the bar recognized him months later when they showed him the photos, although he said he never knew his name. He recalled that the man would come in a dazzling white car and with a blond woman, that he would order a few drinks and go sit with her under the shade of the palm trees by the water. In The Night of the Iguana, Ava Gardner bathes in the beach of Mismaloya at night, drunk and carefree, in the company of two young men who later surround her playing maracas.
* * *
He left Puerto Vallarta on November 14, 1967. The night before, he had gotten very drunk at Casa Susana, talking to Irma or Manuela in a mumbled voice she would not have understood even if the music from the jukebox had not been so loud. He got in a fight with a black sailor, who was just as drunk, after the man bumped into him accidentally. The other man was taller and stronger, but froze after seeing the pistol. Looking for the right words in his Spanish phrase book, he told Manuela that he would come back for her after he resolved some unfinished business in the United States. With a stash of marijuana hidden in the spare tire of the Mustang, he drove along the highways on the edge of the Pacific all the way to Los Angeles.
He took his time. He enjoyed driving while drinking a cold beer and listening to country music. He liked the songs of Johnny Cash most of all. Sunglasses, shirt open at the chest, elbow resting on the open window, the moist ocean breeze blowing on his face—he saw himself as if from outside, in disbelief and admiration, like watching a movie or reading a novel where he was the protagonist, hitting the road, the Mustang roaring, the music turned all the way up.
* * *
On November 19, he rented an apartment in the St. Francis Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. It was an area with cheap hotels, liquor stores, and strip clubs. The St. Francis was mostly filled with retirees who received modest pensions, lonely old men, alcoholics, many of them with some kind of disability. There were also strippers and belly dancers who worked in the nightclubs nearby, places with names like the Fez, Seventh Veil, and Arabian Nights. On the first floor of the St. Francis, there was a dimly lit bar called the Sultan Room. The place was mostly frequented by residents, who sat at the bar for hours, sipping their drinks slowly. Across the street, on the corner, was the Rabbit’s Foot, which opened earlier—at six-thirty in the morning it was already serving alcohol. The neon signs of the Sultan Room and the Rabbit’s Foot glowed opposite each other, intermittently, with some of the letters missing. A waiter from the Rabbit’s Foot remembered him: the southern accent, the dark suit, a bow tie, the big ears, the furtive expression.
* * *
While living at the St. Francis, he bought a portable television set. It was a Zenith with plastic casing, a handle, and two directional antennas. In the Sultan Room he met Maria Bonino, one of the waitresses. She had been an exotic dancer and stripper under different stage names: Marie Martin, Marie Dennino, Mary Martinello, mostly in a nearby club called the Mousetrap. She introduced him to Charles Stein, an occasional songwriter who trafficked LSD and also consumed it. Stein was a bald hippie with a beard, beaded necklaces, sandals, and dirty feet. He said that after receiving the Christian faith, he was able to feel the vibrations of the universe. Next to Stein, Eric Starvo Galt stood out even more: dark suits, ironed white shirts, ties, shiny shoes. Stein always carried binoculars and a camera in the glove compartment in case he spotted a UFO. They traveled to New Orleans and back in the Mustang, more than three thousand miles in just a few days, to pick up Stein’s nieces. Sometimes Stein would brake abruptly as they drove through the desert at night because he was sure he had seen a UFO. Later he said that throughout the trip, Galt had made two or three calls from pay phones along the highway. Stein had woken up in the passenger seat, where he had been sleeping for a few hours, and noticed he was alone in the car, which was parked on the shoulder of a road near a gas station. It was four or five in the morning and he was shivering. In the distance, a phone booth glowed in the dark, and inside, Galt stood still, listening attentively. After hanging up, he returned to the car and drove off without speaking a word. Stein said he was certain the name was fake: his face did not look like a Galt, let alone an Eric; he was more like a Bill, or Bob, or Jim.
* * *
Christmas Eve, 1967, was the first one he had spent out of prison in eight years. Christmas, he later explained with some contempt, is a holiday for people who are close to their families. It meant nothing for a solitary man like him. “A night like any other to sit at a bar, then go to your room and drink a few beers while watching television.” He had forgotten what he did that night, though he did remember that on December 31 he drove through the desert to Las
Vegas. He wandered around the city for a while, and watched people play slot machines. He slept in the backseat of his car on a parking lot. At dawn, he woke up shivering and drove back to Los Angeles. The highway was wide and deserted. It was the first morning of 1968.
On January 4, he went to see the Reverend Xavier von Koss, master hypnotist, president of the International Society of Hypnotism, and, according to his business card, “a world-renowned authority on hypnosis, autohypnosis, and self-improvement.” The Reverend von Koss explained that in order to strengthen his self-esteem he had to set clear goals in his life. Von Koss said he tried to hypnotize him, but as soon as he asked him to close his eyes and focus on the ticking of the metronome, he noticed a very strong subconscious resistance.
At von Koss’s suggestion, he bought a few books: How to Cash In on Your Hidden Memory Power, by William D. Hersey; Self-Hypnosis: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living, by Leslie M. LeCron; and Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. A copy of the last one, quite worn and underlined in many places, was in his luggage when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport. Around that time, he also bought, by mail, several books about sex, perhaps in preparation for his project of producing pornographic films: Female Sexual Response, Sexual Anatomy, Unusual Female Sex Practices, Sexual Sensibility in Men and Women.
On February 26, he placed an order with a sex shop for a pair of Japanese steel handcuffs with velvet and lace. He also placed personal ads in the sex magazines that came to him in brown envelopes with no markings. The text was always the same: “Single man, white, 36 years old, looking for discreet encounter with married, passionate woman.”
* * *
He would stare at himself in the mirror for a long time, studying the features that would make him easier to identify, easier to remember. He took Polaroid photographs of his face from multiple angles and under different lights, and compared them. Almost everything about his face was unremarkable. Dark straight hair, blue eyes, a slightly cleft chin. He had a small scar on his forehead but it was barely visible. The real problem was the nose and ears. The tip of the nose protruded too much. The left ear was larger than the right one, it stuck out more and the earlobe was longer. He sent some of the test Polaroids to women he corresponded with through pen pal clubs.
* * *
In his book Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon and professor of plastic surgery at the University of Managua and the University of El Salvador, explains that the human mind works like an electric brain: it programs itself to achieve certain objectives. An electronic brain determines the time of launch, the trajectory, and the target of a nuclear missile; similarly, the electronic brain of the human mind determines the life trajectory one must take to achieve a certain objective, which is equal to success: the success of a car salesman who gets ahead of the competition, an athlete who gets to the finish line first or earns the highest score, a worldly man who wants a good job, the skill to be a great dancer and seduce the most attractive woman at a party. The information an electronic brain needs to function adequately is provided by the programmer. A human being moves, feels, and acts according to information he assumes to be true about himself and his surroundings. If that information is wrong, the result can be disastrous.
* * *
On January 15 he began a bartending course at the Lau International School of Bartending, which lasted until March 2. According to the director of the school, “He was a nice person, with a slight Southern accent, very intelligent, with skills to thrive in this line of work.” By the end of the course he had learned to mix 122 cocktails. Another student recalled that it would take him a while to understand directions and even longer to learn them because he was always nervous. He heard him say that he had been a head chef on a merchant ship. Others remember him being left-handed: this student was certain he was right-handed. He was not a smoker, though another student was sure he had seen him with a cigarette between his nervous fingers and well-groomed nails. On the last day of the course, he showed up with a waiter jacket and bow tie he had rented. Every student got a photo with the director of the school handing them the diploma with a big smile and shaking their hand. He closed his eyes right when the photographer snapped his portrait. He said he was leaving Los Angeles because he had been hired to open a cocktail bar in New Orleans.
The human brain programs itself based on a specific self-image. Autosuggestion and hypnosis can be powerful aids. In support of his thesis, Dr. Maxwell Maltz cites research by Dr. J. B. Rhine, director of the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, where it had been experimentally shown that humans have access to knowledge, ideas, and events that do not come to them through the channels of rational intelligence. Man creates a mistaken self-image and condemns himself to failure. He sees himself as ugly or awkward or not attractive to women, and that image is transmitted extrasensorially to them, thus making them see him the way he sees himself. But thanks to autohypnosis, the brain can be reprogrammed to counteract those negative images. It is in this way that the true power of the mind can be revealed, says Dr. Maltz. Dr. Theodore Xenophon Barber had conducted extensive and rigorous research on hypnotic phenomena at Harvard’s Laboratory of Social Relations.
A man programs his brain so he can see himself as a winner and a seducer and the miracle happens, provided the mind has visualized the objective down to the smallest detail, over and over, preferably in a dark room, with eyes closed. Golf champions have confessed that the most fundamental part of their training is the meticulous visualization of every play, including the final trajectory of the ball toward the hole, the friction from the grass, the light dew, the exact amount of pressure one must exert on the golf club. Salespeople who would end up surpassing their company’s goals saw themselves approaching a client with a big smile, their hands ready to shake with just the right amount of force. It’s not enough for dancers to rehearse the same steps again and again, they must also program their minds, psycho-cybernetically, to see their bodies sliding across the dance floor, effortlessly hovering over it.
* * *
In December, he signed up for a rumba class at a place called the National Dance Studios. It was a sad, cavernous place, hard hit by the decline in popularity of ballroom dancing, frequented mostly by lonely people. The class was intensive: twenty-five hours of group lessons, then another twenty-five of individual tutoring. “He looked like a southern gentleman,” said one of the female instructors.
* * *
On March 5, he had the tip of his nose shortened in a surgical procedure performed by Dr. Russell Hadley, on Hollywood Boulevard. Two days after the surgery he returned to have the doctor remove the bandages and evaluate the healing. At his third visit, on March 11, Dr. Hadley removed the stitches. Months later, when plainclothes officers started coming to his office to ask questions and show him photos, Dr. Hadley was shocked he could not remember this patient’s face. In his book about psycho-cybernetics, Dr. Maltz claims that after undergoing cosmetic surgery in prison to correct their most unpleasant traits, hardened criminals had changed their behavior entirely, working for early release for good conduct, and later becoming good and useful members of society.
* * *
On Monday, March 18, he left Los Angeles. Now he was crossing the country from west to east, taking the long way through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and finally Memphis, Tennessee. He stopped an entire day in New Orleans on March 21. From there he drove to Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King was participating in various public events. Shortly before, King had been in Los Angeles. He drove to Atlanta from Selma, and stayed there five days. He always looked for the worst neighborhoods, places on the outskirts of the city, with bars and liquor stores that stayed open twenty-four hours, drug addicts and hippies, cheap dinners, pawn shops. The boardinghouse he found in Atlanta did not have a front desk. A man ran the place from a small room on the ground floor. He was so drunk he could not find the registration book or tell him
if any of the rooms were available. He had been drunk for fourteen days. Even so, he was surprised to see this well-groomed man wanting to get a room in his building. Perhaps he was an undercover police officer. On the passenger seat of the car sat a folded map of Atlanta with red circles around the places where King could usually be found: his home, his parents’ house, and Ebenezer, the church where he was pastor.
* * *
On Friday, March 29, he traveled from Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, where he had not been since October of the previous year. He checked into a motel using the name Eric S. Galt. A few hours later, he went to a gun shop to buy a hunting rifle and a scope. He said his name was Harvey Lowmeyr, or Lowmeyer. He did not have to present any identification. He told the clerks he was planning a deer-hunting trip in Idaho with his brother. They got the impression the thin, pale man did not know much about hunting, the outdoors, or firearms in general. He held the rifle awkwardly with both hands, while reading the instruction manual. He wore a pair of thick reading glasses and his nails were well-groomed. His suit seemed well-cut but was wrinkled, as if he had slept in it. The tie was lopsided. His breath had a faint smell of alcohol. He returned the next day, a Saturday, first thing in the morning, wearing the same suit, the same glasses, and said he needed a more powerful rifle. The one he ended up choosing had a firing velocity of nine hundred meters per second. This was a weapon that could kill a charging rhinoceros. He asked the clerks to install a scope on the rifle. They watched him leave the store and walk to his car, shoulders hunched, rifle case in hand, like a suitcase, feet turned out, one ear bigger than the other.
* * *
On Monday, April 1, he took a bag of clothes to a dry cleaner in Atlanta: four shirts, three pairs of underwear, one pair of socks, a towel, a blazer, dress pants, one tie. The woman behind the counter thought it was strange to see a man so well-dressed in such a poor neighborhood.
Like a Fading Shadow Page 13