by Rich Leder
“Maybe he’s not dead, Carol. Maybe he’s out there alone, waiting for you to find him.”
“I’ll never find him.”
“Yes, you will. I’ll help you.”
“What will we do?”
“We’ll make flyers and posters and tape them up all across the Valley. We’ll put his picture on milk cartons and on TV. We’ll start a Facebook page and a Twitter account. We’ll rally your reading group and scour the neighborhood.”
Years ago, he couldn’t remember how many now, he had stopped paying for her plastic surgery. She’d found Harvey Mineral and borrowed and pawned them into trouble. His practice suffered, and his income declined, and he drank and blew coke, and then he’d borrowed from Harvey too. As she transformed into a plasticized remnant of a human woman and he became a stick of a broken-down dentist, his friends said she was crazy. “Fuck you,” he’d told them. “Fuck all of you.”
He held onto her legs, lifting her up, and she looked down at him, her eyes clouded with pain and suffering and Percocet and vodka.
“Do you think he’s alive, Donald? Do you really think Chachi’s alive?”
He glanced over at the garbage bag on the floor and then met her eyes. “Yes. I’m sure he is. Chachi is alive, and we’re going to find him.”
“Get the chair,” she said. “I’ll call the girls.”
He pulled the chair over with his leg and let her down slowly until her feet landed on the seat. Then he pulled another chair right beside her, climbed up on it, and lifted the rope off her neck and over her head. While they were very close, she looked at him and said, “If we don’t find him, I’ll kill myself and leave you here alone. You’ll have no one, not me, not Chachi, no one.”
She knows me so well, he thought, she knows me too well. We are the sad and sorry definition of co-dependent. Yes, he was addicted to cocaine and Tanqueray, but he was mostly addicted to her. She was the best and worst and strongest drug he had ever taken. He could quit coke and gin if he wanted to (he didn’t want to), but he couldn’t quit her if his life depended on it—or, especially, if hers did. “We’ll find him,” he said.
When she left to call the Seuss women and put together a scouting party, he picked up the bag and walked out of the room. Just like he didn’t have the heart to tell his wife the truth about Chachi, he also didn’t have the stomach to bury his best buddy in the backyard. So he put the bag in the garage freezer, where he knew she’d never find it.
LAUGH A MINUTE
As Gary pulled the Impala into the Pacoima Pawn and Loan parking lot, he ate his eighth Oreo of the day, finishing off his second four-pack, and thought about his parents, Jack and Sharon Shuler, who had as much to do with his addiction as Nabisco, which had started making the habit-forming, cream-filled, double-chocolate-cookie drug in 1912.
Gary grew up in Chula Vista, California, a sun-splashed San Diego city of two hundred fifty thousand scenically set between the coastal mountain foothills and the San Diego Bay. His parents were public school teachers—Jack taught middle school chemistry, and Sharon taught third grade. They had a tidy house on a tidy street and all signs pointed to a tidy life, until Gary got to elementary school, where his path as an Oreo-addicted comedian cop was set in motion.
On the first day of first grade, all the kids had to stand and say their names out loud for the rest of the class. Gary stood and said, “Gary Shuler,” and a smart-ass kid said, “Gary Shuler Vista,” and the name stuck like Gorilla Glue.
Everyone in the city of Chula Vista, the city of San Diego, and the greater San Diego metropolitan area called him Gary Shuler Vista and only Gary Shuler Vista. Every kid, every teacher, every coach, every friend, every friend’s family, even his own sisters, even his own parents called him Gary Shuler Vista—never Gary, never Shuler, never Gary Shuler, always Gary Shuler Vista.
“Now batting for Eastlake,” the high school announcer would say over the loudspeaker, “number five, Gary Shuler Vista, number five.” When his friends would greet him in the halls during the day, they would say, “Hey, Gary Shuler Vista, what’s up, man?” When he graduated and was called to receive his diploma, he was announced as Gary Shuler Vista. When his San Diego City College girlfriend, who became both his first wife and his first ex-wife, Maryanne McCarthy, would have sex with him in her family’s darkened basement TV room after criminal justice class, she would say, “I love you, Gary Shuler Vista, I love you so much.”
Early on, when he was six, seven, and eight years old, when he was hurt and confused because he was the one and only child who was addressed by his full name plus a name that wasn’t his name, his parents had pacified him with tall cold glasses of milk and stacks of Oreo cookies. The cookies became physically, emotionally, and intellectually synonymous with safety and comfort. He ate them constantly throughout his life. He couldn’t stop eating them. At the same time that they were feeding him Oreos, his parents also recognized there was nothing they could do to stem the Gary Shuler Vista tide, so they taught their son to ride those waves with laughter, to be in on the joke instead of being the joke.
Oreos and comedy became the subconscious pillars upon which his life was built. He became the class clown in every class and carried an Oreo four-pack everywhere he went. He was popular and smart and a good athlete. But he was also a bit offline, not your normal everyday kid. He saw the world at odd angles. He was an odd angle himself. “He’s a good guy, Gary Shuler Vista,” people would say, “but he’s a strange bird.”
He went to college, studied criminal justice, and landed a position with the LAPD. He had inherited his father’s scientific mind and his mother’s comedic timing, so he was a natural at police work. He was promoted to detective and made a name for himself by solving weird crimes. He was drawn to them. He thought they were hysterical.
He married Maryanne—Do you, Gary Shuler Vista, take Maryanne McCarthy to be your lawfully wedded wife?—but the marriage didn’t last. She’d wanted some semblance of normalcy. “I want us to play tennis, Gary Shuler Vista,” she’d said to him, but it was too late for tennis. Someone had sawed six inches off all the chairs at an LA comedy club, like that episode in Cheers, and Gary took the case and found stand-up comedy and knew it was his destiny. “I love you, Gary Shuler Vista,” Maryanne had said as she was leaving him, “but you’re even weirder than the crimes you solve.”
Am I weirder than the crimes I solve? As he sat in his unmarked Impala parked across the lot from Pacoima Pawn and Loan looking at the Lexus (parked next to the black Range Rover) that had been speeding down the 101 when the cokehead dentist’s poodle was tossed out the rear window into traffic, he considered the possibility. It’d be funny if it were true, he decided. He could put it in his act.
He turned off the car and opened the Impala door and was mauled by the one-hundred-seven-degree heat. It was astonishing how overpowering the San Fernando Valley weather had become. It was as if the air were on fire. The entire city of Los Angeles seemed to be burning. Everyone was on edge. Laid-back Los Angelenos weren’t meant to live in Amazonian temperatures. It felt like hell. Or Phoenix.
Greenburg had been no help. After saying he had pawned the Lexus in Pacoima, he’d coked out and clammed up, afraid to say anything more. When Gary had asked him what, exactly, he was afraid of, the dentist sucked up a long line and said, “Dying.”
Gary opened the door, walked into the pawnshop, and let the scene wash over him. It was so brightly lit that it took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and the air conditioning was set so low that he thought his skin might crack like glass that goes from too hot to too cold too fast. To his right, a Hispanic pawnshop clerk behind the counter was negotiating with a black woman who was holding a Civil War sword to her breasts as if she would never let it go no matter how much money he offered her. She could hide the clerk in her cleavage.
He turned to his left and saw a giant human dressed in black slacks and a black silk T-shirt hurtling toward him like a mountain landslide. The giant had a long
black ponytail and the remains of terrible teenage skin. His hands and feet were enormous. His ears and nose and teeth were larger than life. He had diamonds in each earlobe. There was a gap between his two front teeth. His eyes were the color of charcoal. Gary considered reaching for his gun, which he kept in a belt holster above his backside, hidden by his sport jacket, but he didn’t have time. The giant was here, and he was laughing for some reason.
“I know you,” the giant said.
“You do?” Gary said.
“You’re the cop comedian. Hey, look who’s here,” he said to the counter clerk and the black woman with the sword. “Detective Gary something, the laugh-a-minute guy. That’s who you are, right, Detective Gary something?”
Like most everyone else on the comedy club circuit, when Omar said the word Detective, he put it in air quotes. No one believed Gary was an actual cop. The truth, Gary realized in that moment, was that it was getting harder for him to believe it too.
“Shuler,” Gary said. “Detective Gary Shuler. Who are you?”
“Omar Creech,” Omar said, putting his massive hand out. “We saw you at Flappers in Burbank. You told that story about the dumbest bank robber in the world, the moron with the plastic gun and the blonde wig and the fake boobs who clipped four banks in one day and wrote the robbery notes on the back of his personal checks, then went home and made a YouTube about the stick ups, fanning the cash in front of the camera.”
Gary shook Omar’s hand and, like a switch, flipped from cop to comedian. “I knock on the guy’s door, and he lets me in, and I arrest him and show him the video, and he says, ‘Not me.’ So I point to his video camera on the couch, and he says, ‘Not my camera.’ So I point to the stolen cash next to the camera, and he says, ‘Not my money.’ So I point to the fake tits next to the cash next to the camera, and he says, ‘Those are my girlfriend’s tits; I was just using them.’ So I said, ‘Using them for what?’ And he says, ‘Disguise for the bank jobs.’ It’s a laugh a minute out there.”
Omar cracked up. Something about Gary’s delivery was hilarious to him. The clerk and the sword woman looked at Omar and Gary with confusion, the humor lost on them. “What are you doing here, Detective?” Omar said. Again, he used the air quotes.
“Working on a new routine,” Gary said. “This one starts with a silver Lexus LS 600h L that someone pawned in Pacoima. I mean, come on, there’s a silver Lexus LS 600h L parked right out front. What are the chances?”
Omar cracked up again and said, “I got to take you to Harvey. He won’t believe it’s you.”
Still laughing, he grabbed Gary by the elbow and led him across the store. Gary couldn’t have shaken loose if he’d wanted to, and he did want to. They went through a gateway cut into the counter and walked to double oak doors set in the rear wall. Omar knocked once, opened the doors, and led the comedian cop into the twilight zone.
OMAR, FEED THE FISH
Harvey Mineral’s private office was nearly the width of the store, about fifty feet, and close to thirty feet long. To Gary’s left was Harvey’s large desk area with four fancy leather chairs in front of it. Behind the desk was a long row of low file cabinets. A full kitchen dominated the far left corner. Straight ahead in the middle of the space was a living room area with two leather sofas and two recliners facing the far wall, where an entertainment unit included a seventy-inch flat-screen television and enough add-on electronics to make Best Buy green with envy. Holy moly, Gary thought, it’s the Pawn Palace, and he made a mental note to add the Pawn Palace to his act.
To the right was a three-thousand-gallon freshwater aquarium that made Gary’s eyes pop. It was at least twelve feet long by six feet wide by five feet tall. It was softly lit and had a jungle of plants inside. There were more than one hundred fish in the water, all the same kind, all eight to ten inches long, all with red bellies. Uh oh, he thought.
But what he noticed most of all was the well-dressed dwarf standing on the three-foot raised platform that encircled the tank, holding a live mouse by the tail over the edge above the water, just now ready to drop it into the drink.
“Harvey, you can’t believe it. Look who’s here,” Omar said, still laughing.
Harvey turned from the fish tank, saw Gary, and started to laugh like Omar. “It’s a laugh a minute out there,” he said, dropping the mouse into a box of mice by his feet.
“He’s working on a new routine,” Omar said, holding Gary’s elbow and guiding him to the fish tank. “It starts with a silver Lexus LS 600h L that someone pawned in Pacoima. He saw the one parked outside the shop. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Hysterical,” Harvey said. “Detective Gary something, am I right? He put Detective in air quotes.
“Shuler. Detective Gary Shuler,” Gary said.
The dwarf and the giant, both of them laughing, looked at each other, made air quotes, and said at the same time, “Detective.”
Harvey wore gray Armani slacks and a blue Armani sweater. He had little black cowboy boots and a gold Rolex. He was immaculate. “How does your routine go after the Lexus?” Harvey said. “I can’t wait to hear it.”
“It’s a work-in-progress,” Gary said, “but it goes like this: a cokehead dentist goes for a ride in the Lexus on the 101, and his white poodle flies out the back window into speeding traffic, like it suddenly thought it was a bird…a little white poodle-bird. You can’t make this stuff up.”
Harvey and Omar both laughed out loud. Everything about Gary and his routine was funny as hell to them.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Omar said.
“Poodle-bird…you’re killing me, Detective,” Harvey said—with air quotes.
“So the poodle-bird, because it has no wings, is smashed forty feet in the air to the side of the freeway. A woman speeding by in the other direction sees the airborne pooch and calls 9-1-1. Highway patrol collects the canine and gives it to me, Detective Gary Shuler.” He put air quotes around Detective, and Harvey and Omar roared.
“Here’s where it gets good,” Gary said. “The dog tag has the owner’s name and address, and I go see him, dead dog in a bag, and he’s a cokehead dentist, and he tells me, between the lines, pardon the poodle pun, that it’s his dead dog.”
Harvey and Omar could hardly catch their breath, they were laughing so hard.
“Between the lines,” Omar said.
“Poodle pun,” Harvey said.
“He says he pawned the car in Pacoima, so I go looking for it because you know why?”
“Because it’s a laugh a minute out there?” Harvey said, about ready to crack a rib.
“Yes,” Gary said, “and because it’s against about a dozen laws, including the laws of humanity, decency, and civility, to throw a dog out a speeding car window into freeway traffic and also because I’m trying to keep the routine going because if I had this routine and an agent, I could get on Jimmy Kimmel.”
“We know an agent. Let’s get this guy on Jimmy Kimmel,” Omar said to Harvey.
“Let’s feed him to the fish first,” Harvey said.
Still laughing, Omar grabbed Gary’s arms from behind, pinning them to Gary’s sides, and stepped up on the platform next to Harvey, lifting the detective as if he were made of paper mâché and forcing him down on his knees so that he was facing and flush up against the tank, the surface of the water just below his chest, not far from his face.
“This is a shoal of two hundred red-bellied piranha,” Harvey said. He turned Gary’s head so that it faced him, and they were eye-to-eye. “They’re dangerous to all creatures, including man, when they’re hungry, which they are because I haven’t fed them because I like them to be famished when I do feed them; the carnage is spectacular.”
Gary looked into Harvey’s eyes and thought, What a goddamned handsome dwarf! “It’s against the law to own piranha in California. I’m a detective; I should know. I’d put air quotes around detective, but I can’t feel my arms.”
“Can’t feel my arms, that’s hysterical,�
�� Omar said, cracking up but crushing Gary’s arms like a vise, not letting him move one inch.
“I don’t precisely own them,” Harvey said, laughing. “They were pawned to me by an Asian man from Calabasas. They’re the collateral property of Pacoima Pawn and Loan. You can’t arrest me for piranha I don’t precisely own.”
“If Omar lets go of my arms, I could arrest the Asian guy,” Gary said. “Where is he?”
“Fish food,” Omar said.
“Eaten by his own piranha,” Harvey said. “Spectacular carnage.”
“Laugh a minute,” Gary said, and Harvey and Omar kept laughing.
“Let’s give Detective Gary Shuler an up-close-and-personal look at our carnivorous friends,” Harvey said. “I imagine he’s never seen teeth like this.”
Almost without effort, despite Gary’s resistance, Omar bent him forward so that his face was two inches above the water line. The shoal swam into the jungle, skittish, hungry, and momentarily fearful.
“I want to help you with your flying-poodle routine, Detective, but I don’t think I can,” Harvey said. “Certainly, you noticed the Lexus was without license plates, so there’s no way you can be sure it’s the car in your story.”
“You could open the door. I could check the serial number, collect some flying-poodle DNA, maybe lift some fingerprints,” Gary said. “That would be funny.”