NINETEEN
A stretch of Sunset Boulevard, just as you get into Beverly Hills, used to be called “Dead Man’s Curve” because fatal wrecks happened there all the time. Before they installed the raised center divider, and without the steep velodrome cant it has today, the Curve was a lode of gory still photos, the kind they showed us in high school driver’s ed, in an attempt to scare us wild teens into driving safely. Some behavioral hack probably got a federal grant to develop the crude aversive technique, but it had a flaw. We loved the photos. A pretty deb impaled and hung out, like wet wash, on a telephone pole spike; Mom and Dad and Skipper and Babs in what was once a sedan, a scene that more closely resembled a melting chocolate sundae than a family on an outing: We would have paid good money to see this stuff. We never associated the dead meat in the pictures with ourselves.
My father broke the law at the Curve, on a clear, wind-blown fall Sunday, ten years before my high school driver’s ed class. We were on our way back from my weekly pony ride by the big Owl Rexall in West Hollywood. I was eating Lik-M-Aid in the back seat, pouring the powder onto the saliva-sticky back of my hand and licking it off slowly, absorbed in the simple joy of its sweet-sour grainy roughness. I wasn’t paying attention to Pop’s driving. I was barely grown enough to see out the window.
Pop must not have been paying attention, either. He said, “Godfrey Daniel, what now?” when we heard the siren behind us. We pulled off Sunset and onto a side street overhung with trees. Leaves brushed past my window.
A tense silence in the car. The officer’s heavy bootfalls outside the car got louder and then stopped. Pop rolled down his window. The cop said, “Can I see your license, sir?”
While he fumbled in his coat, Pop asked, “What did I do, Officer?”
“You crossed the double double line, sir.”
I was barely old enough to read my own name, let alone study the motor vehicle code, but it was clear my father had broken someone’s rule. Pop had always been the summit of authority figures, and I never considered that someone might hold a rank superior to his. This sudden role reversal hinted at a world without absolutes, where power currents can change direction capriciously, like dry leaves in a santana. The new perspective was unacceptable to me. A kernel-sized “No!” took root in my solar plexus, grew in intensity and pitch as it reached my larynx, blossomed into a ululating drop-drill wail of deafening volume by the time the policeman handed Pop’s wallet back to him.
The cop craned his neck around the window-post and winked reassuringly at me, which caused me to go into convulsions and make hideous choking noises. I spilled my Lik-M-Aid on the seat cover.
Undaunted, the cop said, “Wait a second.” He dug his hand into a trouser pocket, then reached out and dropped a quarter onto the upholstery beside me. From my vantage point deep in tantrum, the coin seemed somehow out of place, like a tiny silvery cruiser from another galaxy. Its incongruity worked to cut me off in mid-mewl; after all, twenty-five cents can buy you a rapturous afternoon with two Scrooge comics and money left over for a righteous Lik-M-Aid bender. I pocketed the cash.
The cop tore the citation from his tablet and gave it to Pop, who was smiling now, no doubt relieved that he wouldn’t have to drive me to the Kaiser clinic to have my voice-box cauterized. As Pop started the Buick’s engine, the policeman gave me these final words of advice: “Keep an eye on that father of yours. If he crosses the double double line again, you give me a call. You’re on the Department payroll now.”
Cheap but effective PR. For two bits the L. A.P.D. had bought themselves a supporter for life … or at least until my college days. And even in those progressive, loving early seventies, when everyone wanted to Off The Pigs, I remained a loyal ally of L. A.’s Finest—that is, until the night two redneck patrolmen pulled me out of Thrasher’s old Austin America with the multicolored shelf-paper flowers pasted on the door panel, tore apart the interior of my roommate’s car looking for drugs, and when they found none, nary a roach nor a seed nor a stem, pushed me hard across the hood, my feet spread-eagled on the asphalt, and said, “What’s this?” They had uncovered the small ratchet wrench Thrasher and I used to tighten the Austin’s fan belt, which was always slipping.
I started to answer, but one of them said, “Shut up, you little longhair fuck. We found this under the front seat and damn if we’re not going to have to cuff you and take you in for grand theft auto and driving with a concealed weapon.”
The unprovoked cruelty of my former brothers in crime prevention, along with an instantaneous vision of the holding area at the Garden Heights jail—the reverberating concrete austerity, the appalling acrid stench of vomit and urine in the drunk-tank drains and filthy unshaven churls giggling sadistically as they turned me out—gave rise to an unpremeditated response in me. A kernel-sized “No!” took root as it had years earlier, only on this occasion, by the time it blossomed in my larynx, I was already in convulsions and making hideous choking noises. The incongruity of a full-blown fit of weeping hysteria in a physically mature man daunted the deputies. I must have appeared close to a massive stroke which they’d have to explain to their captain at the station, “Gee whiz, sir, we were just havin’ a little fun with the hippie, heh-heh, we never thought he’d go and die on us …”
They let me up, saying, “Go on, get out of here, you fuckin’ little fairy crybaby.” and gunned off into the early morning darkness. I sat in the borrowed car and shook, and I shook all the way home.
The socket wrench incident undermined my early reinforcement with the quarter and left me with some new and ugly preconceptions about cops, which still weighed heavily when I met Sergeant Freitag after my bedroom almost blew up. It didn’t help that his face was in perpetual grimace, as though he smelled fresh vomitus wherever he went. I fully expected him to whip out his riot stick without warning and start clubbing me across the back of my neck while he accused me of trying to gas myself so that my mother would look incompetent as a child-raiser. But when Sergeant Freitag turned out to be courteous, attentive, soft-spoken, direct and intelligent, my initial attitude toward him changed, as did the way I perceived him physically. Over the course of our initial meeting, his grossly heavy eyebrows took on a fierce and determined set, his upturned nose a noble Saxon pride, his red complexion a ruddy glow. You couldn’t help but like the guy, or at least feel sorry for his face.
Sergeant Freitag said, “You’d better start from the beginning. I need as much information as you can give me if we’re going to find out who did this. Do you know anyone who would want to kill you … or give you a good scare?”
“Can I sit down?” I asked. “This could take a long time.”
“Certainly, sit.”
I collapsed into a chair by the dining table and shoved aside the pile of books and papers that had been sitting there, untouched, for weeks. Sergeant Freitag commented, “Student?”
“Perpetually.” I said wearily. I briefed him on grad school and my problems with my dissertation.
“You’re fortunate.” he said, “and I don’t just mean by avoiding the gas explosion. To have a job where you get paid for reading …” he picked up a volume of Browning from the table and held it in front of him, “real literature, like ‘The Ring and the Book,’ that’s a life very few …”
“You know Browning?” I broke in, forever amazed at the way life reveals porkers to be poets, but more often vice versa.
“The Victorians are my specialty—or were. I was an English major once, too, and I was planning on going to grad school, but Uncle Sam kind of interrupted my plans.”
They nabbed him in ’67, he said, and he came back from Southeast Asia three years later with limbs intact but a fractured soul. “I was in what they called ‘pacification,’ which meant I’d kind of tag along with medics and do what I could to help. I guess they figured since I had been in college before I got drafted, that’s pretty close to being a doctor.”
“There’s a certain logic ther
e.”
“Yes indeed, the army is well known for its lucid reasoning. It’s called, ‘Do it my way, grunt.’ We used to ride around in this armored personnel carrier, tearing up paddies and irrigation systems that probably took generations to build with hand labor, and then we’d go and mop up after some major operation—a euphemism for bombing villages with no thought to the lives that might be wasted in the process. I personally never fired a round, never dropped a bomb, but I saw enough suffering to last me several lifetimes, and that kind of experience can’t help but have a lasting effect on you. After my discharge I knocked around, tried school for a while, but English didn’t get it anymore; it seemed like beauty and truth got burned out of me in those villages and fields. I needed a job, and the Department was recruiting. Overseas I developed skills that kept me alive and relatively sane-composure in the face of chaos, an ability to submit to authority figures without respecting them or taking them seriously, physical stamina, a thick skin and an acute sense of justice—but none of these was marketable or even appreciated back home. Police work was the first thing that demanded some of the same qualities as the service, with one exception: On the streets right and wrong are much clearer than they were in the jungle.”
I used to harbor a surpassing contempt for those who had had neither the moral fiber nor the courage to resist our little illegal police action in Vietnam by whatever means necessary—emigrating to Canada or joining the Quakers, going underground or to jail, starving or doing so much acid and crank that one appeared at one’s induction physical as a dangerous psychotic unsuitable for the courtly complacencies of the military. But time—along with the compelling firsthand horror stories of returned vets who had been pressed unwillingly or inveigled unwittingly into the war at the urging of over-thirty parents, hawkish politicians, American Legionnaires and media which at best told a highly selective version of the whole story—moderated my rigidly antipathetic stance. Besides, the truth is that I got lucky: Because of my age I missed the government’s early, wholesale pooling of young blood by a few years and eventually escaped serving entirely by no other virtue than the number 323—my position in the draft lottery. Freitag, one of the less fortunate many, clearly had not gone over with the intention of killing babies or sacking villages and was genuinely appalled by the senseless violence of which he was forced to become a part; his experience seemed to have sickened and scarred—and also strengthened—him in ways I could scarcely imagine. I therefore extended to Freitag a gesture of empathic fellowship, kidding, “Malaria is probably much rarer in L. A., too.”
“True.” he said. “Being on the force hasn’t been a bad job, but even though my love for literature has gradually regenerated itself, like a fractured limb, I don’t have much time for it … a real waste. Back when I was in school I even had a topic I wanted to pursue: how the Victorian poets revise the whole idea of truth, a constant reminder that throughout history the poet has been the source of truth, and not history itself. It’s like …” He stopped and looked around the room, and his eyes lit on my ceramic drinking mug, a cheapie Japanese import decorated with a print in which blue fishes were dissolving into diamond-shaped negative space while diamonds of white negative spaces were evolving into fishes. “It’s like … do you know Escher?”
“Sure, I’m familiar with his work.” I had a blacklight poster of some lizards in a castle when I was younger.
“Browning here.” he said, raising one of my library books above his head in the manner of a demolition worker hefting a sledgehammer, “does to the whole notion of truth and authority what an artist like Escher does with fishes.” His eyes focused, unblinking, on a point in space somewhere between his face and mine. “The author becomes the truth, and the truth becomes its creator. They are inseparable. You can see the same thing happening all through nineteenth-century letters, and not just in poetry …”
Sergeant Freitag was talking nonsense, but it was legitimate academic nonsense, the same pure-land critical speculation with which I had been trying to approach George Eliot for months, and failing. He had seen in Browning the very inseparable melding of aesthetic self-consciousness and art that I was trying to point out in Eliot, and he was extemporizing with a passionate clarity that had long since been wrung out of me, in meetings with the members of my dissertation committee, each of whom had a different philosophical slant. Sergeant Freitag may have lived through firefights in Vietnam, but he had not yet been used as a battleground in departmental holy wars, trampled and scorched by factional scholarly crusaders, and so he yearned for nothing more than to pursue the very life I have come to detest.
I observed, “Strange situation. Fraught with ironies. You want to do research more than detective work, and I’m doing detective work to avoid literary research.”
“You’re doing a damn poor job of it, too, if you don’t mind my saying. At least Browning won’t get me killed.”
“Give him time.” I said. I wondered for a moment if Freitag’s Vietnam rap was a subtle psychological technique he used routinely to distract crime victims from their hysteria, in the same way that a good parent might use an Aesop’s fable to soothe a child awakened by nightmare. Whether a conscious ploy on his part or not, it worked: My extremities had stopped their violent trembling, and I was able to carry on a conversation without having continually to oppose a surging tidal bore of bile and gastric juice in my gorge. “Look.” I said, “I’ll make you a deal. You help me out of this mess I’m in, and I’ll help you get into grad school. I’m a powerful man in academic circles.”
“I can imagine.” he commented skeptically. He reflected for a moment. “I don’t know, it’s been five years since I got back, maybe I’m ready for a career change now. We’ll see … but first, let’s get your life saved.”
“Admirable imprimis!” I exclaimed, showing off the delightful inflated vocabulary that grad school imparts. “I know I’m not going to be able to sleep at all tonight, knowing they might come back.”
“First of all, I wouldn’t worry about this place getting hit again. It’s extremely unlikely that they’d try anything here, because they’ll assume we have the place under surveillance.”
“Surveillance?” I said, liking the sound of the word. It had a certain Francophonic austerity, connoting anti-fascist underground workers with a romantic commitment to righteousness, or gendarmes with crisp uniforms and no-nonsense attitudes. “You’re really going to do that for me?” I was feeling better about the cops all the time, almost ready to put a “Support your local …” on the bumper of the family Volvo.
“No. Unfortunately, we don’t have the manpower for that.”
“Oh.” I said with disappointment infusing my voice. Scratch the bumper sticker. “So what happens in the ‘extremely unlikely’ event they do come back, what do I do then? Check out that window, the frame is all bent. Anyone could stick a hand in there. There’s no latch left. My phone’s right next to the window, so if some murderer was right outside he’d be able to hear me call.”
“Common sense.” Freitag said. “Just dial nine-one-one and then whisper into the phone.”
“I’m scared they’re not going to be outside, they’re going to be inside already.”
“You might stack up some Coke bottles or something like that by the window. They’d have to make so much noise getting in, over the stereo and everything, they’d wake you up.”
“Terrific. Coke bottles. Is this the latest advance in crime prevention technology?”
“No, but with a place as small as yours, a couple piles of bottles usually work better than those electronic setups people pay thousands of bucks for. Criminals can disable an alarm system with one snip of a wire, if they’re pros. And your criminals are definitely pros.”
“You have a way of putting a guy at ease, Sarge. I guess I’d better start drinking Coke.”
“It’s the real thing.” said Sergeant Freitag.
TWENTY
Beyond his ticky-ta
ck soda-pop security measures, Sergeant Freitag had little to offer in the way of immediate plans. There wasn’t much to go on, he admitted, with the information and evidence we had so far. He said that I should continue my conversations with Lissa in order that I might find out more about the Sterne-Syntax connection, and then, when we had gathered as much information as possible, we should take the offensive. “It’s like with snipers in the jungle. If you sit around waiting for them to come out into the open, eventually they’ll pick you off when you’re relaxed and off your guard. So you have to figure out their movement patterns, and then flush them out before they get you first.”
“I thought you never shot at anybody.”
“I didn’t, but I hung out with plenty of people who did. They would have been dead otherwise.”
Besieged as I was by murderous absences on whom I was impotent to vent my fury, the prospect of going on the attack appealed to my sense of soddisfazione if not my sense of propriety. Medical research has found vengeance to be the best prevention against malignant intestinal polyps—which, Liz tells me, are just concentrations of repressed rage—and becoming aggressive was certainly better than waiting around for someone to terminate my marvelous existence. Besides, Pineapple Hold-’em teaches this lesson: After careful, disciplined preparation, when you combine ruthlessness with blithe abandon, you turn the odds in your favor. I needed some favorable odds in a hurry; I’d be dead otherwise, too.
Sergeant Freitag said I should be in touch in a few days and, after I thanked him, left. I went back into the big house, locked the windows, bolted the doors and fell asleep on the living room sectional, with half-formed images of myself, Mafioso-style wolfgun resting in the crook of an elbow, holding hooded assailants at bay and blasting their knees to Spam if they so much as twitched. I slept fitfully the rest of the morning and all afternoon.
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