by Ron Carpol
“Thought he was in a rest home in Arizona with Alzheimer’s.”
“That’s what he told us. Sad though. Ovary’s note said that a pledge swiped the letter from under his mattress. Then they Xeroxed it for everybody to read.”
“Why’d he say a pledge did it?”
“Actives don’t go in the pledge dorm. And if one did, why’d they reach under his mattress and take the letter? And why’d they distribute it?”
“Good point.”
“Yeah. When the paramedics got upstairs, all Ovary’s things were packed in a box. The note was taped on top of it. That’s when he must’ve taken the pills.”
“Really?”
“Really chickenshit is what it is. Ovary was a decent guy. Had his problems like everybody else. If we catch the pledge who did it, it’s going to be more than just their ass. We’re going to turn him in for attempted murder.”
I swallowed hard. “We should.”
_____
Later that night Holmes approached me in the back yard while I was smoking a joint. He looked around furtively, like he was trying to make sure he wasn’t overheard and whispered, “Lyman says you did it to Ovary.”
I flinched. “Why would I do that?”
“So there’d be one less pledge. Up your chances to beat The Rule of Eleven.”
“Then every pledge has the same reason.”
“Nope,” he said smugly. “You got five million more.”
My heart lurched, like a guy taking a lie detector test and seeing the examiner’s face when the needle jumped a mile. This fucker caught it too.
“What’re you talking about?” I asked slowly, trying to keep my voice even.
Holmes’ lips were beginning to break into a sneer. “Lyman told me and Watson about the will. He swore us to secrecy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled feebly, not even convincing myself.
“Me and Watson,” he continued, “we kept asking Lyman what the hell were the two of you were doing here. Finally he told us. Him we believe, especially with all those pills he takes everyday for stress and anxiety and everything else that freaks him out. But you? You’re nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“You can tell Lyman for me that he’s full of shit. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He told me and Watson a lot about you. We share an apartment, remember?”
“I’m telling you, he’s full of shit. What else did he say?”
“That you’re ruthless, vindictive, and real trouble. That you’ll turn on anybody. In fact, your aunt and uncle told Lyman, when they drove him to the airport to come to school here, never to have anything to do with you.”
“I don’t care what he says, I didn’t do anything to Ovary and I don’t know nothing about any will.”
“Yeah, well, don’t be surprised if you get a call from the police. Lyman told me that he might turn you in. And that the cops would find all kinds of shit in your apartment if they searched it for evidence.”
_____
The next night was Halloween and I was in jail.
Except for Lyman, who flew to Texas to try to find the woman who replaced his mother as his nursemaid/my grandfather’s housekeeper, me and the rest of the pledges drove down to West Hollywood in four separate cars to harass the gays that were all over the area. After drunkenly making fools of them for hours, we were heading back to the house. I was zipping along Santa Monica Boulevard, weaving through traffic in the 4Runner with Vysell riding shotgun and Batman, Rainey and Watson in the back seat. Lil’ Kim’s voice was blasting from the speakers, rapping about being sucked off in an orgy, while all five of us took shots from the last of the five one-pint Jagermeister bottles that we started with.
As usual, the cops were anxious to bust guys who had better cars than they owned, so near UCLA I got pulled over for DUI. All of us reeked with the smell of this licorice-tasting cough syrup and our lips were even thickly coated with that black crap. As soon as the cops got me out of the car I couldn’t stand on my wobbly legs and fell down, banging my forehead against the side mirror. I was arrested on the spot and the other four guys got nailed for public drunkenness. And to make matters worse, some guy whose last form of transportation was a fucking burro, even towed my truck away.
We were taken to the West L.A. jail. I was the first one to wake up from sleeping on one of the cold, cement benches pressed against the three, scratched-up jail walls. A husky jailer who looked like a champion body builder, with biceps that were ripping the sleeves of his short-sleeved uniform shirt, was staring at us from the good side of the bars on the fourth wall, sitting behind a desk.
I approached him, leaning against the bars, and spoke in a soft voice. “You let me go if I tell you who provided the other guys liquor since they’re all under twenty-one?”
“Yeah. Who was it?”
I pointed to Watson who was sleeping on his back, snoring the loudest. “The guy with the glasses.”
He nodded. Then he unlocked the cell door with a foot-long, dark-gold key that must’ve been molded in the middle ages.
He opened the jail door and approached me inside. “Come here,” he said, grabbing my right arm below the elbow tightly, almost paralyzing me. He shoved me in front of him in the cell until we got to where Watson was still imitating a buzz saw.
Hercules lightly kicked Watson’s shoulder, waking him up.
“You furnish these guys alcohol?” the cop asked, pointing around to Vysell, Rainey and Batman.
Watson rubbed his eyes. “Huh?”
The other three guys awoke quickly and stared at me, probably guessing what I was up to.
“You furnish these guys alcohol?” the cop repeated to Watson.
“Hell no.”
I quickly blurted out, “I never said that guy! I said the Rasta guy at Ahmed’s in Brentwood!”
The cop pointed to Watson. “You said he did it.”
“You’re crazy! He’s a fraternity brother!”
The cop let go of my now-useless right arm and walked out of the cell. He clanged the door shut as he snorted, “Some fraternity.”
Watson’s face was flush and his breathing was in spurts. “Everybody knows that you’re the guy who stole Ovary’s letter,” he snarled. “No thanks to you, he didn’t die. Then this shit. I’m warning you right now that I’m helping Lyman get rid of you. And so are most of the other pledges.”
_____
The four guys who were arrested with me were lucky. Unlike me, they were released in the morning without being charged. When I got to court about a month later, because my only witnesses were my drunken pledge brothers, the Public Defender made me plead guilty. I got three years probation, ten days in jail suspended, and a fine of about thirteen hundred dollars that I didn’t give a damn about since the court took American Express Cards. Even though I lost my drivers license for a while I still drank and drove. What was I supposed to do? Drink on the bus like a wetback while my truck smiles at me from the bus stop?
Luckily the Don’t-Drink-and-Drive classes near Marina Del Rey that I had to attend weren’t a total waste; I scored X from a guy there. And at the weekly AA meetings that I had to go to at the Public Health Center on Lincoln, I met a couple of young, world-class lesbian sluts: Tiffany and Amber, they claimed their names were. As soon as I told the girls about my inheritance—leaving out the part about Lyman—and described my favorite sex act, they couldn’t hand me a razor fast enough before spreading their ass cheeks in my apartment that night.
_____
Lyman was beaming when he got back to town a few days later.
“Traced my old nursemaid from Fort Worth to a mobile home park outside Oklahoma City,” he told a bunch of us one afternoon at Tito’s Tacos on Washington in Culver City. “She said my mother called her all the time from Hawaii where she was working in a hospital.”
“How long ago was that?” Rainey asked.
“Over seventeen years ago.”
“What’re you going to do now?” Dung asked.
“Have the search people check out all the hospitals and other public records.”
“This woman in Oklahoma,” Zoom asked, “she tell you why your mother stayed in Hawaii all this time and never came back for you?”
He shook his head. “No. Just that she couldn’t come back.”
_____
Now and then I thought about Ovary; that if he died maybe I could’ve been arrested for causing it. But he didn’t die. So what was the big deal about the whole episode anyway? Still, it surprised me that I was a little sorry about the way I got rid of him; but not sorry that he quit.
Even Vysell and Batman asked me if I had anything to do with Ovary. Naturally I denied everything. How dumb could I be after that coin flip? I didn’t want to lose these two guys as the only friends I ever had.
It was a completely new experience to share exaggerated, funny stories with these guys even though almost everything I told them was bullshit. But what’s the truth got to do with anything anyway? Especially when you’re starting to make friends.
Surprisingly, and it was a surprise, hanging around with these two guys more and more started meaning a lot to me. Naturally, I still tried to use people to get what I could out of them; that’s human nature. My dad taught me that a long time ago. But this new feeling of belonging or even being associated with this fraternity was definitely different in a good kind of way. Something I never experienced before.
_____
About a week before Christmas we had a great holiday party at the house. Most of the guys stayed in town since the winter weather here was warm and sunny, pot was everywhere, the beer never stopped flowing, and the girls radiated sex.
A couple hundred people were at the party, with different people coming and going all night long. Other fraternity guys were there, a lot of sorority girls, and a bunch of neighborhood Venice sluts who thought that fucking college guys would give them a step up out of the gutter.
Instead of the pledges providing the entertainment like we were told to do, me and the other pledges hired Tiffany and Amber to perform their lesbian act. For more money, guys oil-wrestled the girls. Later upstairs in the pledge dorm, the girls gave blowjobs for fifty bucks. Funny though, even for all the hundred dollar offers, neither girl would let a guy fuck them. That’s where the Venice sluts came in handy.
Doc, the usual DJ was there, wearing his one-piece, black vinyl, body stocking that made him look a nigger’s dick. People were wall-to-wall, sweating, dancing, getting high from pot, booze, meth, X, and probably coke even though I didn’t see anybody using it. The noise and the music was getting louder and louder as the night wore on. Even the back yard was jammed with drunks. It was really a great party. What proved it was that nobody there could pass a field sobriety test if their life depended on it.
Richie LeRoy, with his 35mm camera constantly flashing, was snapping shots of everybody for the house scrapbook.
But a little after twelve-thirty, five uninvited guests showed up, all dressed alike.
“Shit,” Vysell mumbled between his teeth to me and Batman, “Porky and the Pigs.”
The clothes on all three of us stunk so bad of pot that somebody would’ve thought that a marijuana field was on fire and the wind blew in our direction for hours.
“Party’s over!” a short, butch-looking cop who might’ve been a transsexual, yelled in an unusually deep voice for a female.
Her four dumb male helpers all gave us the evil-eye, trying to look mean.
Doc hurriedly changed songs, this time playing the theme song from Cops, with all of us joining in on the chorus.
The dyke bitch, wearing sergeant stripes, flicked the living room light switch up and down continually for about thirty seconds, like at a Pink Floyd concert, until Doc finally stopped the music.
“ID everybody!” this questionable woman ordered. “Party’s over!” When she turned around, she had thick, stringy, brown hair that looked like the ends of a wet mop and an ass as broad as a bus.
In the next hour the five cops must’ve gotten wrist cramps writing a citation to most of the people there for chickenshit crimes like false ID, minor in possession of alcohol, under the influence, possession of under an ounce of pot. Unfortunately for the out-of-state people without California ID, they got taken into custody and had to bail out of jail. No doubt serious violent street crime in Venice must’ve drastically dropped that night during the time the cops raided the party.
Luckily for Tiffany and Amber, who swallowed enough sperm to float a battleship, when the cops went upstairs, they were between customers, pressed against each other’s naked body. But when the cops checked their ID through the station’s computer, both of their fake licenses were revealed; Tiffany was seventeen and Amber was sixteen. Both girls were taken into custody for curfew violations.
My souvenir from the cunt cop was a citation for under an ounce of pot when three joints fell out of my wallet when I showed her my ID that was probably the only legitimate one there. Unfortunately Lyman, Headlights, and Frizzhead left about fifteen minutes before the cops arrived. Me and everybody else had to appear in West L.A. Court on January 14.
The next day, even though I wasn’t there, some cops served a search warrant on the fraternity house, kicking everybody off the second floor. They said they were looking for evidence of a rape. I just laughed, thinking of all the idiots who paid Tiffany or Amber or any of the dozen neighborhood pigs for sex, probably carelessly leaving a cum spot on the bed sheet which I heard is the same as leaving your name, address, phone number, photograph, and fingerprints.
_____
By Christmas, things were falling into place pretty well. Ali Reza had been e-mailing me my school assignments regularly. All I had to do was show up in class once in a while and read a little which I mostly did while sitting on the toilet.
_____
The day before New Year’s Eve, sometime after two in the afternoon, Lyman ran down the back stairs into the yard and told me and the other dope-smoking pledges in an ecstatic voice, “I found my mother!”
“Where?” Dung asked.
“Honolulu Memorial Hospital. She works there. I’m flying out this afternoon.”
_____
With less than a month to Hell Week, and still eight pledges too many, I decided to stop drinking and smoking dope so much and spend more time figuring how to get rid of the extra baggage; especially Lyman.
Unfortunately, Lyman had the same idea, but acted first. Besides scamming me out of the will money, his plans for me also included prison.
8
DIRTY HARRIET
Thursday, January 2, 2003
1:30 P.M.
“EVERYBODY’S ON THE RAPE LIST!” Froggy sputtered, with a terrified look on his face. He grabbed my forearm as I entered the front hallway of the fraternity house. “Look on the pledge bulletin board!”
He pulled me into the kitchen and up to the bulletin board where I got the shock of my life! A computer-printed page in bold type read:
RAPE INVESTIGATION:
ALL PLEDGES BE IN
THE HOUSE AT 3:00 PM
TODAY OR YOU’RE OUT
OF THE PLEDGE CLASS!
JACK CHRISTIANSON
“Even a cunt investigator,” Rainey said, pointing to the bottom of the of the page where a white push-pin stuck through a business card that read in part:
LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT
Det. Sue Montelino
Sex Crimes
Under the card somebody scrawled in red ink PUSSY POWER.
It was impossible that the cops found my private video collection. Hell, even the girls I fucked didn’t know they got fucked. But since I never use rubbers, maybe one of them got pregnant and the cops are trying to get DNA from every guy they knew. But why are the other pledges involved? It didn’t make any sense. I’ll bet this bitch cop was just fishing around, probably following up some twat’s fantasy that she g
ot gang-banged somewhere like they always show in porn movies. Yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I knew this investigation wouldn’t amount to shit.
I swear I heard Dung’s heartbeat as he stood next to me and squeaked in a cracked voice, “What the hell is this? I never fucked any girl anywhere.”
“Then your unbroken hymen on the end of your dick will prove it,” Wide-Load snickered.
Rickshaw Boy could barely clearly speak either. “Do you think it’s some girl from high school whose parents called the cops after she got pregnant?”
“No,” Grossberg interrupted. “Christianson said some girl got raped here by at least one of us pledges.”
“Rape?” Rawlings muttered. “Who needs to rape anybody? I get more pussy than I can handle.”
“Me too,” Castle murmured, probably convincing nobody.
“Who’s the victim?” Grossberg asked. “That’ll tell us a lot.”
“Who knows,” I answered, checking my watch. “But in an hour and a half we’ll find out.”
_____
Like ants, all of us were fidgeting around in the living room at 2:45, too scared to sit still, waiting for the lady sex cop. She got there at 2:55, carrying a black attache´ case in her right hand and a big, brown, knock-off Louis Vuitton purse in her left hand. The fake was easy to spot; the hardware was orange instead of gold. In her mid-30s, she was about five-eight, thin, with frosted, shoulder length, brown hair partially covering her dangling, gold earrings. She didn’t waste any time with false charm.
“I’m Detective Montelino,” she mumbled in a monotone through a nearly-closed mouth, doing a pretty good job of mimicking Clint Eastwood’s cop character Dirty Harry.
Her large, hazel eyes were as alert as a preying hawk’s, staring at each of us, one-at-a-time. Her matching black pants and black jacket over her black sweater didn’t exactly soften her appearance either.
“This is the procedure. Wait here. When I’m ready for you, I’ll talk to each of you individually in the yard. When we’re done, wait upstairs. And don’t discuss our conversation with each other. Then I’ll talk to everyone as a group.”