If Lissa was telling the truth, and I no longer had any reason to believe she wasn’t, then the organization she was describing might have been directly or indirectly responsible for two serious attempts to terminate my precious self, not to mention Ernst’s blindness, my missing heirloom, and the suspensory, which I had finally healed enough to discard. Nevertheless, the idea of a paraliterary cult that enshrined some of the world’s worst poetry was preposterous—so preposterous that only a fool or a habitual reader of fiction would be able to suspend disbelief so efficiently as to take it seriously. I therefore made light of her warning. “No problem.” I said. “Beyond good spelling I believe in nothing unquestioningly. And in the end, nothing wins. Ask any physicist or Buddhist, or a poker player who can run a good bluff.”
We were both shivering from the cold now, and I had the information I needed. It was time to go. I reached out to embrace Lissa, but she backed away, saying, “Don’t, Harmon. Let’s keep it clean and painless.” Behind her, I saw Ernst appear at the far end of the hall, striding purposefully in bedroom slippers, a magazine under his arm.
I suppose it should have struck me as odd, a blind man with a magazine, but I dismissed it as one of those all-too-human quirks. We all have them. I, for instance, invoke the memory of Newton Minou, my former striped tabby (long defunct since her run-in with a diesel street-sweeper), if I’m overcome by a burst of manic joy during a Laker telecast.45 There’s no logical reason for my calling my cat’s name; she never truly appreciated televised sports. Nonetheless, I always squeal “Neeeewtn!” at certain epiphanic moments, as when Kareem makes a soaring rockabye double-clutch reverse slamajama in the face of a player from a particularly hated opposing squad, like Boston.
I stood, struggling to fight off the harrowing intuition that I was leaving her for good. Irrational, absurd. I’d be back, and everything would be all right. The rock beat thumped on spiritlessly,
Takin’ it to the streets,
Takin’ it to the streeeets.
Loud as the music was, Ernst must not have heard us talking, because he disappeared into the bathroom.
I turned and went.
TWENTY-TWO
After being put on hold and transferred a few times, I reached Sergeant Freitag at the county jail in Garden Heights. He said he was interviewing inmates as leads in an armed robbery he was investigating. “I should be through by noon. I’ll have a free hour before I have to go out on a case. Meet me here at the jail.”
I used to drive through Garden Heights to get to the legal draw-poker clubs in Gardena, and it’s neither high nor verdant. 103rd Boulevard runs the whole level length of South Central L. A., from Redondo Beach where they tum the city’s sewage into drinking water, past Gardena where the putty-faces congregate to push poker chips around tables and blow cigar smoke, to the tragic urban decay of Compton, Watts, and Willowbrook. At the Heights, between Gardena and Compton, 103rd runs through hurricane-fenced expanses of tarry dirt littered with otherworldly gas-storage spheres, twisted gray pipes, and a multitude of dormant oil-well pumps that look like the remains of an infestation by gigantic locusts. South, at the base of Beacon Hill, refinery smokestacks issue forth wisps of steam that marble the dirty air briefly and are then subsumed by it.
The correctional facility—the jail and honor farm—shares a tract of government-owned land with the county dump. As I parked and got out of my car, the smoke from incinerated refuse made my sinuses swell up and my eyes sting. Lured far from the ocean by the promise of an easy feed, gray-smudged seagulls massed and screeched over mountains of bulldozed garbage.
Sergeant Freitag met me in the courtyard in front of the jail. He made an expansive sweep of his arm. “I know it’s not much, but I call it hell.”
What struck me was how surprisingly little like hell this part of the jail was. Between two immaculate brick sidewalks, rose bushes were pruned to a uniform domed shape, and wherever a branch had been cut off, there was a neat daub of black tree-surgeon’s tar. The blooms were profuse and radiant. “Hell.” I said. “This place is nicer than some front yards I’ve seen in Beverly Hills.”
“The honor farm guys keep it up. See those bricks? They have to get down on their hands and knees and scour the grouted spaces with a toothbrush and Ajax. Somehow I have trouble appreciating a place that’s tended by forced labor.” It occurred to me that anything you might call labor is by its nature forced, whether you’re a single mom keeping the kiddies in Swanson chicken pies by soldering microcomputer parts for minimum wage, or you’re a Hollywood producer supporting a two-hundred-dollar-a-day nose by pandering to the popular taste, or you’re a graduate teaching assistant, as I am, force-feeding free verse to a generation of bookkeepers. But I kept my mouth shut. Nobody likes a guy who’s always critical.
At the glass-enclosed reception desk I signed in and got a plastic-coated visitor card to clip on my shirt. I followed Sergeant Freitag down a hallway of offices filled with uniformed men and women hunched over clattering typewriters and adding machines, to a solid metal door with a round brass key-fitting and an iron handle. Sergeant Freitag pressed a button on an intercom by the door and said, “Three-six-eight.” The intercom buzzed, the latch on the door snapped loudly, and he pulled the door open. We walked through, and the door slammed shut behind us.
We were in another hallway with still more offices, but these were empty, and already there was an oppressive change, as though inside the building a cold front had dropped the barometric pressure suddenly. I shivered. At the end of this hall was another metal door, also shut. On the other side, said Sergeant Freitag, were the “tanks.” rows of multi-occupancy suites which housed the inmates.
“What do they call them?” I asked.
“Call what?”
“The multi-occupancy suites that house the inmates.”
“Tanks.”
“You’re welcome.” I said waggishly. Jejune, but it always catches them off guard. It kills them. Sergeant Freitag looked at me as if I should be locked down in solitary. I said, “Just trying to lighten the mood. This place makes me nervous.”
“You get used to it.” he reassured me.
“I don’t think I want to.”
He motioned to a room at the end of the hall, on the left.
“We won’t be disturbed here. It’s an interview room: cops investigating cases, psychiatrists writing up reports, lawyers, priests.”
“How do inmates get out here from the tanks?” I asked.
“From the what?”
“Don’t start with me.” I said. Freitag caught on fast.
“You give a note to one of the deputies at Inmate Records, that window where you signed in and got your badge. A guard takes the note to the inmate and brings him here. Inmates call the procedure ‘flying a kite,’ I guess because the note disappears into thin air for a while. Sometimes it diasppears permanently, like a kite with a snapped string.”
“Lively convict metaphor.”
“Indeed.” he said.
The interview room, like the rest of the jail, was painted the color of last weekend’s guacamole dip. There was a cheap braided throw-rug over the concrete floor, a metal table with two metal chairs in the middle of the rug, no windows, flickering overhead lighting. We sat down.
“I hate fluorescent light.” I said. “Do you know that if a fluorescent lamp flashes at the same speed as your brainwaves, it can throw you into a grand-mal seizure?”
“Then it’s lucky for us the med-tech’s office is next door.” he said. “They have plenty of epilepsy medicine. The inmates fake seizures and save up their meds to get high.”
“Sounds like my kind of evening … Jesus, what’s that?” I was distracted by shouting and laughter coming from across the hall.
“The property room.”
“It sounds like some serious partying.”
“Property’s where the new admissions come after they’re booked. They sign over their clothes and valu
ables, take a shower, get their uniform. Fumaroli’s the deputy in charge. He’s notorious for being abusive to every inmate who comes through.”
Deputy Fumaroli’s voice echoed through the hall, so that unless you shouted, as Sergeant Freitag did, you couldn’t hear anything else. “Jeez, Rick.” Fumaroli said to his assistant, “look at the nightstick on that big nigger. Hey, Amos, you ought to have a permit to carry that thing around in your pants.” He laughed at his witticism and then started singing, “Strangers in my pants.” and farting at the end of every bar. Rick laughed. “Here, Amos, drink this, it’s your vitamins.”
A high-pitched voice whined, “Doesn’t taste like no vitamins.”
“Don’t drink that, you dumbshit. He believed me. That’s shampoo, dumbshit, to kill the crabs. He really drank it. What a dumbfuck.” Rick laughed. “Here, take another capful, and use it on your dick this time.” Fumaroli started singing and farting again.
“I can’t believe this.” I said. “Are all the guards sadistic redneck bigots?”
“Are all the professors in the English department pompous asses?”
“Yes.”
“That was supposed to be a rhetorical question, to which the correct answer was supposed to be ‘no.’”
“Sorry, but I can’t lie, not even to an officer of the law.” I lied.
“Well, most of the bulls are OK, but unfortunately Fumaroli is the first one inmates meet.”
“Sets a nice tone for their stay.”
“It doesn’t get much better, either.” He got up and shut the door. “Listen, it’s really swell having you drop by the country club for a visit, Harmon, but we’ve only got an hour.”
“Right.” I repeated what Lissa told me, about how Sterne periodically holds Combist League meetings in which he presents his lame demonic theories. “He doesn’t care how many people get offended and walk out. He recruits from the ones who stick around.”
“Hmm, bizarre concept, literary gangsters.” Sergeant Freitag mused. “At this point there’s not much I can do legally, Harmon. We need concrete evidence before I can go in there with a warrant.”
“So what do we do?”
“We have a couple of choices. We could just sit and wait for them to come after you again and then try to catch them in the act. Or we can go on the offense.”
“Like your army buddies and the snipers.”
“Right.”
“Why do I get the feeling this is going to involve more ‘me’ than ‘we.’”
“Because you’re a sharp guy, a regular Einstein. Officially, my hands are pretty much tied; I can’t even offer you an official recommendation. But off the record, if I were you I’d find a way to infiltrate, you know, get in with the Combists.”
“Of course you would. You’re a battle-crazed vet with delayed-stress syndrome and a serious death wish. What am I supposed to do once I get in there?”
“Play it by ear. Take a little tape recorder and tape conversations. Look for your stolen Doctor Syntax. Find evidence of other crimes. That way you can get the police involved. Of course that’s only what I’d do. What you do is up to you.”
“Oh good, I can view this as an opportunity for personal growth. Liz says I need to practice taking responsibility for my own actions.”
“Who’s Liz?”
“My shrink, sometimes.”
“Ah.” he said. I might have been overly sensitive, but his tone seemed a tad patronizing to me.
“What does ‘Ah’ mean?” I demanded.
“Nothing, just ‘Ah.’”
“There’s no such thing as just ‘Ah.’ You meant something by saying ‘Ah.’”
“I certainly wasn’t implying anything critical by saying ‘Ah.’ We’ve all done our time on the couch at one time or another.”
“So you admit you have, too.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed about, for godsakes. These are the seventies.”
“Does that mean yes you have?”
“Yes, it means yes I have.”
“Ah.” I said.
“But that was a long time ago.”
“Asshole.”
“No thanks, I’ve already got one.” he said in equally infantile repayment for my “tanks” crack.
“Funny.” I said. “You kill me, Freitag.” I picked up the dangling thread of our conversation, “Anyway, I agree with you that anything, even going to their meetings, would be better than waiting around for the Combists to come and kill me. But the problem is, they know what I look like. They’d recognize me as soon as I walked in.”
“Have you ever done any acting?”
“I played Cabeza de Vaca in a Cub Scout Explorer skit. I had one line: ‘So thees is the Nuevo World.’ Should I try to pass myself off as a conquistador?”
“You want to get them arrested, not slay them with mirth.”
“My cousin Bradford was an actor. Maybe he could help me come up with a disguise.”
“Much better idea. Just keep it simple. It’s amazing how little you have to change your appearance to throw people off. And keep me posted.”
“Okie doke.” I said, trying to sound casual. In reality the prospect of going on the offense mortified me. My skin felt too tight for my ribcage. I had trouble taking in air.
“Oh … listen.” I said between shallow breaths. “I told Lissa you’d come around to make sure she and Ernst are safe. I’d really appreciate it …”
“I can do that. But, Harmon … remember: You’re just there to look around, gather information, find clues. Don’t do anything crazy.”
I croaked: “Hey, this is Harmon Nails you’re talking to, not some green kid. Would I do anything crazy?”
“Ask Liz.” he said.
PART FOUR
MASTERS OF ILLUSION
TWENTY-THREE
Bradford lifted the hem of a hanging garment. “This place brings back some memories.” he said. “Did you know I played Lady Macbeth one time, when the lead got sick?”
“Save your confessions for temple, Dame Woodlawn. I need a convincing persona of my own, and I need it now.”
We were poking around the dressing area of Bradford’s former repertory company in Venice. Originally a warehouse, the building had been divided into two separate walled sections. The section closest to the street had been converted to a kind of amphitheater, with a semicircular plywood stage, shake-shingled in front, and surrounding seats. The rear half of the building hadn’t been much altered. It had high brick walls smoothed out by decades of enamel in various pastel hues, exposed plumbing and electrical conduit, and heavy wooden rafters ornamented here and there with long-vacant birds’ nests. Props and sets from previous productions were massed in loose organization, like piles of raked leaves that the wind keeps messing up. I recognized the cardboard rhinoceros heads and one huge dummy rhino from the Ionesco play Brad had been in, among other pieces incongruously heaped together: a ship’s wheel, papier-maché trees, drawing room furniture, a worn-out western saddle, toy guns, a rowboat.
Costumes, including the Lady Macbeth getup Brad was currently fingering nostalgically—a shapeless crimson gown of a roughspun silky fabric—hung from long racks assembled out of galvanized plumbing pipe. Against the building’s rear wall, behind some head-high bamboo screening, ran a long workbench built of two-by-fours laid and lag-bolted across sawhorses. There were a few mirrors for applying makeup, and some folding chairs. I straddled one of the chairs backward, bronco-buster-style, with the metal back-support against my belly.
Picking up a plastic pot of rouge and brandishing a small sable brush, Bradford said, “So what kind of look did you have in mind?”
“What do I look like, Vidal Sassoon? That’s what you’re for. Any actor who could pass for Lady Macbeth without shaving his beard must know some swell disguise secrets.”
“I did have to shave, and … hey, that’s perfect, you’re a genius.”
“I know, a regul
ar Einstein.”
“It’s true, you are: Shaving’s a great idea. Whacking your mustache will make all the difference.”
I seized Bradford by the wrist. “No one touches the ’stache. I’ve had it since I could shave. It’s part of … it’s like hair growing out of my soul.”
“That’s disgusting.” He wrenched his arm free. “That’s also the point of disguising yourself. To hide your most distinctive features and substitute new ones.”
“Couldn’t we just put some greasepaint or latex or something over my upper lip, like they use for fake bald heads on TV?”
Brad rummaged in an antique wooden orange crate and pulled out a barber’s electric clipper. He said, “Close your eyes. This will only take a second.”
The clipper snapped on and hummed. As Brad passed it across my lip, it made a business sound, like freshly cut redwood trunks being forced across a bandsaw. Two passes, and Brad said, “Done. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Here, take a look.” He handed a round mirror to me. The face in it was lopsided. It reminded me of police composites of serial murderers, grainy blowups of faces whose right and left halves didn’t match up. My upper lip was a waxy, embalmed-corpse white, like those albino ivies that grow in the dark, under houses.
“I look like a pervert.” I moaned. “Like I’ve been pressing my face up against windowpanes watching people undress.”
“Good, your appearance finally matches your personality.”
“Not amusing.”
“Look on the bright side. You’ll fit right in at the Combist League, if they’re as weird as you say.”
“I guess that’s something. What else can you do to humiliate me?”
“How about glasses?” He brought out a pair of thick black plastic frames from a shoebox. “Try these on.”
I looked in the mirror. “Gee, I could carry my Strat to the meeting and go as Buddy Holly.” I was of course referring to my vintage mid-fifties Fender Stratocaster, the most soulful electric solid-body guitar ever made and the axe I used to play in bands around town before the English department wrung every last ounce of creative joy out of me.
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