Dead Extra

by Sean Carswell

“Take me back to the two months,” Wilma said. “What paper says two months?”

  White Coat One dug through a briefcase that sat on the seat between him and the driver. He found a file with only a few sheets of paper in it. He extracted a carbon copy from the file and passed it back to Wilma. She read the form.

  It was a notice of commitment, a California 5150. According to the paper, Wilma had waived her right for an arraignment. She refused to speak on her behalf in front of the judge. The judge sentenced her to two months rehabilitation at the Camarillo State Hospital. The arraignment and trial were recorded as happening while Wilma and the white coats had been driving up Ventura Highway. “Look at this time,” Wilma said, pointing at a line on the form. “The judge signed this order at noon today. It won’t be noon for another half hour, at least.”

  White Coat One took the carbon copy from Wilma. He read the judge’s orders. “Well, I’ll be.” He turned to the driver. “We better drag our feet dropping this one off.”

  “You feel like grabbing lunch?”

  White Coat One shrugged. “Why not?”

  White Coat Two steered the sedan off Ventura Blvd. and into a little roadside café near the St. Mary Magdalen Church in downtown Camarillo. He reached under his seat. White Coat One provided the running commentary. “We’re going to duck in for a sandwich. I hope you understand that you can’t join us.”

  Food was the least of Wilma’s concern. The booze from her four-day binge had been draining out of her liver since she’d gotten into the car with these white coats. The thought of taking a bite out of a sandwich, chewing, and swallowing it made her even more nauseous than the snowballing hangover she’d been trying to ignore. “It’s all right. I’ll stay in the car.”

  “Of course you will. And we’ll make you comfortable. Just you sit tight.”

  White Coat Two took the jacket he’d pulled out from under the seat and came around to Wilma’s door. He opened it. He rolled down the window. White Coat One opened the other door and rolled down that window. “You’ll get a nice breeze,” he said.

  “And just to make you comfortable and warm, we’ll loan you this lovely camisole,” White Coat Two said. He guided her out of the sedan. Wilma stood in the alcove between the car door and the backseat. White Coat Two instructed her to raise both arms. He slid the sleeves down her arms.

  “Wait a minute,” Wilma said. “You’re putting this on me backwards.”

  Just as she said this, she realized there was no opening at the end of the sleeves. Her hands were trapped. White Coat Two stepped closer, yanking Wilma’s hands behind her back before she could think to resist. White Coat One had already slid across the backseat behind her. He buckled the straightjacket in place. The two men forced her down into her seat. They shut the sedan doors.

  “We won’t be long,” White Coat One said.

  “No more than an hour and a half, two hours,” White Coat Two added.

  “Can we get you anything?” White Coat One asked.

  “A coffee, at least,” Wilma suggested.

  To his credit, White Coat One did return about fifteen minutes later with a mug of coffee for Wilma. He explained that he didn’t have time to hold it for her while she drank, and he couldn’t take off the camisole. So he put the mug between her knees. “Just you balance it there,” he said. He went back inside the café.

  Wilma spread her legs. The mug tumbled to the floor. Coffee soaked the bottom of her housedress, her nylons, and her mules. The coffee itself stunk like it had been filtered through gym socks. Wilma couldn’t take it. She leaned as far forward as she could and vomited everything that was left from her final party with Tom Fillmore: the martinis from the Players, the Formosa Café liver and onions, the red wine to top off the night. It puddled on the floor with the dirty roadside coffee.

  Wilma leaned her head against the back of the seat and breathed through her mouth. She waited for some kind of air to move somewhere, for that promised breeze to blow.

  The white coats dropped the comedy act on the final seven- or eight-mile drive to the hospital. They left her in the straightjacket and didn’t speak other than to curse the stink of coffee and vomit, which had gotten worse over the two hours they spent in the café. Wilma tried to ignore them and angle her head to catch the wind rushing through the back windows. She watched the rows of lettuce and onion and celery crops angle toward her, then straighten, then angle away from her. This nuthouse was in the middle of nowhere. She’d have to be Pheidippides to get away from this joint by foot. And, as well as she could remember, the story hadn’t turned out well for him. The way things looked from her backseat perch, Wilma was going down for two months. It was time to reconcile herself to that fact.

  When they got to the main building of the hospital, the white coats dropped her off with a burly woman dressed like a cop. The woman wobbled like she’d been thrown off balance by the armory of keys on her belt. A couple of the keys looked big enough to fit the kind of doors you’d find at the top of a beanstalk. She didn’t speak. She just pushed Wilma toward a door with a little less iron than your typical bank vault. One of the giant keys opened the door. Wilma had the sense walking through the doorway that she may never walk back out.

  A nurse on the inside checked Wilma in. The only words she said were statements of facts, like, “alcoholic” and “two months.” She gave Wilma’s name as Wilma Chesley. This seemed further proof that the old man had pulled strings to set up this commitment. Not that Wilma needed further proof. Not that it took a lot of pull to get a woman committed these days.

  The nurse led Wilma down a long hall. Each door had a sign painted on it. “Dental Clinic.” “X-Ray.” “Diet Kitchen.” “Electroshock.” “Secretary.” When they reached the door labeled “Hydro,” the nurse extracted a key from her giant key ring, unlocked the door, and led Wilma inside.

  A row of baths stood along the left side of the room. A woman lay in one of the baths. Heavy rubber blankets covered her body. Only her head rose out of the water. The tips of her hair were soaked. A fuzzy patch of dry hair rose from the top of her head. She rolled her eyes slowly in Wilma’s direction. The eyes focused on Wilma for a split second, then slackened into an unfocused stare. Whatever the woman saw at that moment, she saw it without the use of her eyes.

  Wilma had seen some sad women in her time, but this woman was the saddest. Her sallow skin and rubber blankets and empty eyes were enough to make Wilma forget that she was wearing a straightjacket. Someone always seems to have it worse.

  The nurse had apparently forgotten about the straightjacket, also. She told Wilma to strip.

  “I’ll need a little help with that,” Wilma said.

  “Are you too drunk to undress yourself?” the nurse asked.

  “Honey,” Wilma said, “if I could’ve unbuckled myself from this straightjacket, I would’ve gotten out of that car and found a safe place to hide hours ago.”

  “Oh.” The nurse considered Wilma for what looked to be the first time. “Right.” She unbuckled the back of the jacket. Wilma shook herself free. Another woman—a secretary, judging from the formless dress and cracked-leather mules and clipboard in her hand—came into the room. She sat on a bench along the wall opposite the tubs. Wilma stripped to her slip. “Down to the bare skin,” the nurse told her.

  Wilma took the rest of it off, remembering, oh Christ, her foray the night before with Tom Fillmore. Surely, they’d be able to tell what she’d been up to. Surely, that was one more humiliation waiting to happen.

  The nurse led her to the scale and checked Wilma’s weight. “One twenty-eight,” she called to the secretary. Wilma double-checked the weights. Not bad. Say what you will about these benders, they always brought Wilma’s weight down a few pounds. The nurse checked Wilma’s height next. Wilma stood tall, stretching her spine as much as she could. The nurse called out, “Five-four.”

  “And a half,” Wilma added. “Don’t forget the half.”

  “Five-four,” the nurse called.


  “Are you sure you can see all the way up to the top of the ruler, Shorty?” Wilma asked.

  The nurse shot her a look. She called out to the secretary, “Five-three and a half.”

  “Oh, now you’re just lying.”

  The secretary asked Wilma a litany of questions: birthplace, place of residence, father’s name, mother’s name, mother’s maiden name, occupation, religion. Wilma figured that the State should have all this information anyway, and if they were going to rob her of two months of her life and an inch off her real height, she was going to make up all her answers. So she did. Birthplace: Kalamazoo. Place of residence: The Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills. Father’s name: Culbert Olson. Mother’s name: Joan Olson. Mother’s maiden name: Crawford. Occupation: hand model. Religion: pagan.

  At the end of this charade, the nurse pushed Wilma into a tight shower stall. The nurse took a step back and turned on the water. It felt like it was about two hundred degrees, and it pummeled Wilma from three directions. The nurse tossed a bar of soap and a rough washcloth into the mix. Wilma twisted and contorted, trying to pick up the soap and cloth without getting her hair wet. “What the hell are you doing?” the nurse asked.

  “You didn’t give me a shower cap,” Wilma said.

  “Get your hair all the way under,” the nurse said. “Soap it all down.”

  After dipping her head, the hot water felt all right. She scrubbed her skin until it was rosy pink, clearing all the crust and old makeup off her face, scouring away any traces of her previous night’s transgressions, even opening her mouth to the jets and letting the water wash her teeth and rinse out her mouth. She kept turning and running the cloth over her until the nurse had enough and turned the water off.

  The secretary tossed Wilma a towel that wasn’t much bigger than the washcloth. It was soaked through before she was done with her hair, much less drying her skin. The nurse pointed to a metal table near the scale. “Hop up,” she said.

  “I’m still dripping,” Wilma said.

  “Hop up,” the nurse said.

  Wilma climbed onto the table. Her dripping skin made it slick. The metal sucked the last traces of warmth from her. The secretary handed the nurse a magnifying glass. The nurse inspected Wilma. She combed through Wilma’s pubic patch, parting the wild red hair, checking the roots, pushing Wilma’s legs open wider, viewing more of Wilma than Wilma could ever see of herself. The inspection was remarkably and painfully thorough. Had any lice or worms or bacteria found refuge between Wilma’s toes or under her arms or within any other crevice, the nurse would have found it. The whole thing seemed to last for weeks. Wilma wondered if maybe this would be her whole two-month stay at the asylum.

  Finally, the nurse told Wilma she could stand. Wilma asked, “Are you sure? You may have missed a freckle somewhere on my ass.”

  “Enough, Lady Chesley,” the nurse said. She pointed to a shapeless cotton dress that must have been hospital property when the joint opened in the thirties. “Put that on.” Wilma climbed into the dress. It was big enough to fit the fat lady in a sideshow act.

  “Am I supposed to wear this or build a tent with it?”

  The nurse hadn’t gone for any of Wilma’s jokes and wasn’t going for this one. She just said, “Wear it.”

  “Can’t I wear my dress?”

  “It has coffee and vomit on it,” the nurse said. “You’ll get it back after it’s been laundered.”

  “Can I at least have something that Dumbo didn’t wear in the movie?”

  The nurse didn’t respond. She walked out of the hydro room. Wilma followed, her bare feet slapping against the cool concrete of the hospital floor.

  The nurse rushed down one hallway and into another. Again and again. Wilma trotted to keep up with the nurse’s long, purposeful strides. She tried to make note of how many turns she’d taken and which way she’d gone. There was no hope. She was irretrievably lost in the madhouse maze. Some rooms she passed had names of doctors or signs saying things like “Surgery” or “Music Room.” Many were dorm rooms. She passed cavernous spaces with thirty or forty beds. Next to them were rooms the size of closets with bunk beds inside. What little daylight snuck into these rooms seemed a cruel mockery. After what felt like a few miles, the nurse stopped at a small room with four beds. “Welcome home,” she said.

  No patients were in the room. Each bed housed the exact same style of bland brown satchel. Peeking out of the top of each was a pitiful collection of hairbrushes and photographs and combs and lipstick and paperbacks and knitting needles and yarn. Worn purses and splintered sewing boxes. One bed was empty. Wilma would have to write to Gertie and ask her sister to bring a new collection of sad little lifelines to fill her state-issued satchel. At least one of Wilma’s new roommates had a pencil and a notebook there.

  The nurse turned to leave. Wilma quick asked, “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Wait. We’ll call you for supper in a few hours.”

  The thought of being alone in this tiny room was too much. “Can I at least have a smoke?”

  The nurse took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her scrubs and handed it to Wilma. Wilma shook one cigarette loose, stuck it between her lips, and handed the pack back. “Come on,” the nurse said. “There’s no smoking in the rooms. I’ll take you to the Section and light that for you.”

  The hospital had been so beautiful from the outside. It struck Wilma initially as more of a Santa Barbara resort than a bughouse, with its red tile roofs and iron balustrades and wide, sunny balconies. Wilma pictured the smoking room to be some kind of veranda or garden, like the ones she’d known at Union Station. She couldn’t indulge in this fantasy for too long, though. The Section was three doors down from her own. And it was the restroom. The nurse led her inside, lit the cigarette, and left without a goodbye. There were no seats in the restroom, save the toilets and the floor. Wilma chose the floor. The cool tile pressed against the prodigious folds of her cotton dress. She leaned against the wall, legs splayed out in front of her, and sucked in the tobacco.

  Two months.

  JACK, 1946

  JACK SPENT the afternoon at the central library, digging up all the news he could on Wilma. Her death was barely a blip. The Los Angeles Times had a brief mention: “Local Starlet Dies in Tub.” The cub reporter who typed it up made a meal out of the handful of movies you could find Wilma in if you squinted at the right time. They were all B pictures with tiny budgets. Gertie would drag Wilma to the set on Wilma’s days off and remake her as a nightclub patron or a pedestrian or a Martian or a doll who elicited a wolf whistle or the world’s only red-haired Indian. There’d been one movie Wilma practically carried Jack to so that he could see her perform an actual line. Some mug with makeup for a beard got chased down the street by a dashing fellow. The mug crashed into Wilma. She said, “Saaaay. Watch it!” Jack applauded in the little theater off Figueroa. Someone in the back pelted him with peanuts and told him to can it.

  The Times thought those movies the key to Wilma. They mentioned she’d been in over a dozen films prior to getting drunk and falling in her tub. There was no mention of her husband who, at the time, was believed to be dead in Germany. No mention of the book she wrote or her family or anything. All of that came out in the second piece Jack found about her. The obituary that Gertie had obviously written. Gertie would’ve paid by the word for that obit. She’d splurged the extra couple of pennies to add the words “beloved” and “cherished.” They caught Jack right in the back of the throat.

  Other than the blurb and the obituary, there was nothing. No mention of a murder, an investigation, of questions raised, of neighbors concerned. Nothing. Just a dead extra and yesterday’s news.

  Her book was in the racks. Jack climbed four flights of steps and wandered through a maze of shelves before finding the dusty copy. The card inside showed it hadn’t been checked out since September of 1944. He climbed back down the steps, brought the book to circulation, and checked it out.

&n
bsp; He left the library and headed across downtown toward Cole’s. He would have to catch the interurban there and head back this way, past the library again and onto another car up Figueroa, but he needed a walk, some time to think, and maybe some luck at Cole’s. He strolled under the shadow of the Biltmore. Somewhere above the high arches and concrete balustrades were the rooms the hotel gave over to officers back from Europe—not the ones with bombardier badges like his. The ones with brass stars. The ones so far away from the action that, if you ran into them, you knew you’d retreated all the way back.

  On the next block, he cut across Pershing Square. His father would talk about this being a meeting ground for fairies back in the ’20s. If the old man was paid to track down a hood or a thief light in the loafers, he’d come down to Pershing Square and start busting heads until he banged into one with a mouth that talked. By the time the war rolled around, the park was a patriotic site. He’d actually been hooked here, walking a downtown beat, pausing to stop under a palm and take in the statue of a soldier from the Spanish American War. A recruiter found him there, told him that his time with the force would count in his favor if he enlisted. He could be a sergeant, dropping bombs out of planes, fighting fascism and taking furloughs on the beaches of southern England.

  Well, most of it was a sales pitch. The part about dropping bombs out of planes was true. And he had been a sergeant, for whatever that was worth.

  When he reached the Pacific Building, he checked the counter inside of Cole’s, looking for a bare head with a bald spot the size of a yarmulke, looking for an arm stuck to a coffee cup that had been refilled a half-dozen times. This was the time of day when he could always find his old partner Dave Hammond here, like it was his office or something.

  Jack didn’t see him at first. The place was buzzing. Customers flitted around from tables and stools like hummingbirds on bougainvillea, waitresses swooped in with food and out with dirty plates. Jack weaved through the tables to the counter, the place with the only open seats in the joint. A few gray-haired gentlemen lingered over their conversations there. And sure enough, though his arm had grown thin and the hair around the bald spot had turned white, Hammond couldn’t be mistaken. Jack took the stool next to him.