I remember the case well, although I had nothing to do with it. At the time I was a twenty-two-year-old rookie working Wilshire Patrol. To unwind after work, I would go with patrolmen friends to bars to booze and trade war stories. One night after Thanksgiving ’68 I was riding around with another rookie named Milner. Somehow, we ended up at the soon-to-be-famous Club Utopia. We were sitting at the bar, and the man sitting next to me got up suddenly and spilled whiskey all over my expensive, newly-purchased white cashmere sweater. He was a thin, Semitic-looking man in his fifties, and he apologized effusively, even offering to buy me a new sweater. I good-naturedly shrugged it off, although I was pissed. The man left after several more apologies.
I have something close to total recall. I never forget a face. It had been over a decade, but I was certain: the man at the bar that night was Sol Kupferman. He had barely aged. A strange coincidence that probably meant nothing. If I ever got to speak to Solly K, I would ask him “What were you doing in a crummy bar on the south side in the fall of ’68?” And he would very rightfully look at me like I was insane and say, “I don’t know” or “Was I?” or “I don’t remember.”
I considered my options. I could wait around and tail Kupferman after he left his office, or I could take off and resume my surveillance the next day. I decided to head toward the old neighborhood to see my friend Walter.
3
Western Avenue between Beverly and Wilshire and the blocks surrounding it constitute the old neighborhood. Situated two miles west of downtown L.A. and a mile south of Hollywood, there is nothing exceptional about it. The prosaic thrust of the ordinary lives lived there produced nothing during my formative years but an inordinate amount of male children, a good portion of whom assumed roles emblematic of the tortured 60’s: Vietnam veteran, drug addict, college activist, burned-out corpse. The neighborhood has changed slightly, topographically: Ralph’s Market is now a Korean church, old gas stations and parking lots have been replaced by ugly pocket shopping centers. The human core of the neighborhood, the people who were in early middle-age when I was a child, are elderly now, with resentments and fears borne out of twenty years of incomprehensible history.
And that makes the difference. The library on Council and St. Andrews still has the same librarian, and the bars on Western still supply Wilshire Station with an extraordinary amount of drunk drivers. But it’s different now; it’s a middle-American graveyard inhabited by the malaise of my past, and I feel chills of doom whenever I drive through it, which I do frequently.
I got out shortly after my parents died, as did most of the guys I grew up with. But my friend Walter is still there, ensconced at the old house on 5th and Serrano, with his lunatic Christian Scientist mother, his TV set, his science-fiction books, his records, and his Thunderbird wine. He is thirty-two years old, and we have been friends for twenty-five. He is the one person in my life I have loved unequivocally. I do not judge his inertia, his self-destructiveness, his complex relationship with his mother, or his incipient psychoses. I accept his oblique love, his self-hatred, and anger. Our relationship is twenty-five years of shared experience: together and in our separate solitudes; books, music, films, women, my work, and his fantasy. Here Walter has the upper hand: he is far more intelligent than I, and in the fifteen years since high school his sedentary lifestyle has afforded him time to read thousands of books, from the profound to the trivial, to assimilate great music into the bedrock of his consciousness, and to see every movie ever to pass the way of the TV screen.
This is an extraordinary frame of reference for an agile mind, and Walter has taken fantasy into the dimension of genius. His is pure verbal fantasy: Walter has never written, filmed, or composed anything. Nonetheless, in his perpetual T-Bird haze he can transform his wino fantasies into insights and parables that touch at the quick of life. On his good days, that is. On his bad ones, he can sound like a high school kid wired up on bad speed. I hoped he was on today, for I was exhilarated myself, and felt the need of his stimulus: the power of a Walter epigram can clarify the most puzzling day.
I stopped at the Mayfair Market to pick up three chilled short dogs. Walter works best when inspired by the right amount of T-Bird. Too little invites peevishness, too much, incoherent rambling. T-Bird is Walter’s drink of choice because it is cheap and easily obtained by threatening his mother, ripping off her purse, or mowing the lawn for a few bucks.
I went around to the back yard, where Walter’s room jutted out from the house proper onto the dead brown grass. Walter is a lousy gardener. I could hear the TV going inside. I rapped on his window. “Yo, wino Walt,” I said. “I’m here. I brought gifts. Come on out.” I walked back into the yard, pulled up a lawn-chair, popped a can of ginger ale for myself, and arranged the three short dogs symmetrically on the old metal table beside me.
Walter shuffled out five minutes later, wearing cut-off jeans and a Mahler sweatshirt. He is about 5'11‘ with curly light-brown hair and extremely light-blue eyes. Though not fat, he tends to waddle.
“Welcome, Fritz. You did bear gifts. How thoughtful.” He sat down beside me, grabbed a short dog, and drained it in one gulp. Color came into his face, his eyes seemed to expand and his whole body gave a slight twitch. He was on his way. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, lit one, and inhaled deeply. I wondered what direction our conversation would take. “You look pensive, Fritz. Troubled also, somewhat. Thinking about your future again? You look like you could use a drink. I know you won’t go for it though; only half of you wants it. Whether or not it’s your better half, I can’t say. I only know you better than anyone, including yourself.”
“Fuck you. You’re right, though, I have had my future on my mind. It’s been a strange day so far. A crazy caddy is paying me a hundred twenty-five dollars a day plus to dig up dirt on some rich guy his sister is living with. He looks like a bum, but he carries a six-thousand dollar roll. Crazy, Daddy-O!”
“You’ll do a good job. You’re a born dirt-digger. You have no morality whatsoever. A boyish-looking shark. We are the same age, and you look twenty-five while I look forty. This I attribute to your refusal, even at your most desperate, to drink cheap wine. Fritz, who do you really think killed the Black Dahlia?”
I groaned at the mention of this mutual obsession from our boyhood drinking days. “I don’t know. And you know what? I don’t care. Change the subject, will you?”
“Okay, for now. Toss me another dog, will you? I’m thirsty.” He downed this one in two gulps. His face was downright florid now. His eyes were getting maniacal, and I knew he was going to start talking either science-fiction or his mother. The two are more or less synonymous.
“The old girl has finally reached her zenith, Fritz. She’s senile but cagey, and still a master game player. She intends to live forever and is on the lookout for new victims. My father, God rest his soul, and I were just the beginning. She’s been prowling these senior citizen’s dances and she’s picked up this fruit vendor, a dago, kind of semi-rich — he owns about a dozen produce stands out in the Valley. And I think the old girl is going to marry him! Seventy years old, hasn’t fucked since I was conceived, and now this. I can’t believe it. He can hardly talk, he just grunts. He’s got emphysema, he carries around a little oxygen shooter — it looks like a raygun. Jesus! She’s set financially; she doesn’t need his dough. I’ve told her that within five years the antimatter credit card will be in operation, that all she’ll have to do is walk up to any bank, lay her rap into the loudspeaker, insert her card and get all the bread she needs. Within eight years we’ll all be transported to the sublunar void, where the controlled environment will enable us to live for centuries in perfect health. The dumb cunt can’t see it coming, and she’s going to throw it all away for some wop fruit vendor. She’s afraid to be alone. You know that, don’t you, Fritz? When she’s got the wop sewed up, she’ll give me the boot, like she did my old man, and I’ll have to get a job. I still can’t believe it.” He reached for the last bottle, but I grabbed it first.