Lauri returned to Denmark in April of ’69, and Carol Ginzburg threw a brunch in her honor to celebrate her return to her homeland. I was distressed to see her go — and angry at myself for not having solved who she was — but with her departure came a diminuendoing of my nightmares, and I was able to put the riddle she represented out of my mind.
So I continued to watch and steal, until the hope of ever again feeling what I did on June 5, 1968, died from too many turgid bed performances, toe many pathetic expressions of loneliness. With my disillusionment in watching came a concurrent new joy in stealing, and I ran up eleven straight scores, pawning the loot to Cosmo Veitch, reveling in the fact that although he finally figured out I wasn’t a policeman, he at least was heartily afraid of me. From the late summer of ’68 to the midsummer of ’69 he paid me a total of seven thousand two hundred dollars for the goods I stole. I kept the cash in a steel safe-deposit box at a bank on La Brea, holding it for the time when I would quit my library job and move out of Walt Borchard’s lowlife building.
But in August of ’69 a series of events coincided to temporarily halt my criminal career. Sharon Tate and four others were butchered at her Benedict Canyon house, and when coupled with the similar La Bianca slayings on the other side of town in the Los Feliz district, the murder spelled panic and created a boom in all manner of security devices and services. Angelenos were buying guns and watchdogs, and were buttressing themselves against the still-uncaptured killers in specific, and the 1960’s in general. Burglary was getting to be a riskier business.
And Carol Ginzburg, finally put two and two together and connected the trick-pad robberies to her stolen “John” book. I listened at the Sunday restaurant brunch as she told her girls “coincidence, shmoincidence, something strange is going on.” She described her theory of a very cool robber who only hit intermittently out of caution, and how she was hiring a private detective to look into things. I paid my check and left the coffee shop as she spoke.
With watching and stealing gone, all that was left of my trinity were the nightmares. Even with Lauri gone, they came back, whispers taunting me between peals of thunder. I did not know what they were saying, but when I woke up, I could taste blood.
10
Without limbs to propel me and sight to guide me, my dreams became excursions into weightlessness. I was the prey of noises that tossed me about like a rag doll; I was at the mercy of thunder that singed my body. Only an undercurrent of consciousness kept the lid on my nightmares and saved me from the ruination of terror-induced insomnia. I knew, during the worst of the buffeting, that feeling the thunder-heat meant I could not possibly be disembodied. When I awoke each morning both refreshed and filled with a residue of fear, I knew that I possessed an automatic-pilot device that would always keep me short of the edge.
Yet, still I dreaded sleep, and sought to postpone it through the pursuit of utter exhaustion.
With my bank account as a cushion, I quit the library job and spent my days expending physical energy. I joined a gym in West LA. and lifted weights for two hours daily; in the course of a month my lean frame started to cord over with muscle. I ran the Griffith Park hills until lightheadedness made me collapse and hot showers at home felt like benevolent heat. Then, at night, I disembodied others.
It was a ritual spurred by awareness of my own body and driven by a desire to quash the nightmares. I became a trawler after human beings in their most prosaic poses, a brain-movie director adept at improvising drama out of street passersby and their throwaway gestures. Night after night I cruised the slow lanes, watching. I saw hands pluck at trouser legs and hemlines and knew how those people took their sex; neon lights shimmying across gang boys in tank tops told me why they did the things they did. My brain camera had an automatic slow-motion lens, and when beautiful bodies demanded an extra-close scrutiny to yield the truth of their poetry, that device clicked in and let me linger on all the lovely swells and junctures of flesh.
After a few weeks of mobile watching, my nightmares de-escalated, and I went from movie director to surgeon in an effort to kill them off altogether. My experimental surgery involved cross-gender limb transplants — men’s legs to women’s torsos, women’s faces to men’s bodies, with special attention pa id to the mental incisions that made the grafts possible. Driving close to the curb. I would take a bead on a hand-holding couple, then slow down until we were moving at the same speed. When streetlights illuminated their faces, I amputated limbs and heads and rearranged the parts; effortlessly, bloodlessly. And although unable to express the meaning of the act in words, I knew I was evolving three-way symbiotic unions that transcended sex.
The combination of daytime exertion and nighttime brain-movies finally brought my dreams to the point where they were no more than an occasional nuisance. As a precaution against their recurring in force, I slept with the light on, and if I happened to awake during the night I would walk to the full-length mirror on my bathroom door and stare at my own body. I was strong now, and getting stronger, and when I touched probing fingers to my muscles I felt an almost electric charge. The charge would run down to my groin and end at a verbal terminus: the word burglary.
I succeeded in pushing the word and its giddy connotations aside for weeks, until, in early October, a series of bodies stirred the old embers, and fate supplied the wind that forced me into a brushfire.
I was driving north on Pacific Coast Highway at dusk, wending my way toward the Topanga Canyon turn-in, the Valley, and watching. It was unseasonably warm, and groups of surfers crowded the blacktop that paralleled the beach. Male and female, they were all young and lithe, and my foot eased off the gas involuntarily. A foursome caught my eye: two boys, two girls, all sleek brunettes. My mind went into a pre-surgery “prep,” then went blank. I could not improvise with their bodies, and I knew it was because they were too perfect.
Although I made every effort, my mental scalpel would not descend, and the quartet grew more and more lissome. Car horns honked behind me; I saw that I had stopped dead and was holding up traffic. I started to get scared, and checked my brain arsenal for brushed-steel cutlery to maim the four with. Then, against my will, the brunettes turned to blonds, and the boys were kissing the boys and the girls the girls, and a car brushed my rear fender, the driver yelling, “Get a license, you faggot!”
I punched the gas reflexively, and my old Valiant tore across a busy intersection against the light, narrowly missing an old woman pushing a baby carriage. I took my eyes from the road and glued them to the rearview; the four perfect ones had vanished. I drove slowly out to the Valley, knowing it was only a matter of time until I would break, enter, watch, steal and come — regardless of the risk.
Full darkness brought an awful boredom. The only people out were flaccid and homely, unworthy of my machinations, and the beautiful brunette/blondes wafted inside me like a mental musk. I switched from commercial streets to residential, knowing full well my ultimate intent, and the houses I passed were uniformly brightly lit — bastions of cheap, incomprehensible happiness. My only alternative was to eat, go home and hope for a dreamless sleep.