“We’ve got no business being in Vietnam unless we’re willing to win — and that means dropping the hydrogen bomb”;
“If God didn’t want man to eat pussy, then why’d he make it look like a taco?”
And on and on. He was lonely and filled with guileless goodwill. His lack of mental resourcefulness and need for a constant audience disgusted me, and I dreaded his knocks on my door. But I kept still. Above all else, I knew the value of silence.
The new neighborhood was distressing because of its lack of silence. There was the constant nighttime roar of cars headed for the Boulevard, and heavy foot traffic, shoppers returning from the all-night markets on Sunset, and furtive hippies making dope buys in side-street shadows. Even the visual quality was noisy. The neon haze that blanketed the sky seemed to crackle and hiss with intimations of the sleaze it was heralding.
After five months in Hollywood, I gave up on neighborhood prowls and spent all my nights in my room, screening brain-movies. Sometimes Walt Borchard came over and insisted on talking; I tuned him right out and continued the show. More and more, the scenario revolved around the triad of Shroud Shifter, Lucretia and me, plundering in our brushed-steel car, seeking invisibility. The scenes became almost multidimensional — the feel of myself pressed between the super-criminals, the scent of motor oil and blood, the gurgling sounds our victims made when we attacked their jugulars. As an internal cinematographer I had improved greatly over the years, and now my prowess had grown to incorporate all the latest technical developments. My brain was equipped with deluxe color, wide screen, stereophonic sound and Smell-o-Vision. Had I been able to charge tickets for admission, I would have become a millionaire.
In April of ’66 I turned eighteen; in June, I graduated high school. I was now technically an adult, and could leave Walt Borchard’s care. Having no money and no job, I pondered my options. Then Uncle Walt told me I could stay for a nominal rent payment, and he would even help me find a job. The pathetic motive behind the offer was obvious. No one had ever listened to him so attentively as I had, and he couldn’t stand the thought of losing such an excellent audience. The symbiotic aspect of it all appealed to me, and I agreed to stay.
Borchard got me a job at the Hollywood Public Library, on Ivar just south of the Boulevard. My duties were to shelve books and walk into the Men’s Room and clear my throat loudly every half-hour — a strategy aimed at disturbing homosexual assignations. The pay was a dollar sixty-five an hour, and the work was tailor-made for me — I screened brain-movies all day
One evening in June I came home from the library and found Uncle Walt cleaning out the garage in back of the building. Late sunlight was glinting off a collection of brushed-steel implements that he was wrapping in an oilcloth. The tools looked mean — like something Shroud Shifter would own. “What are they?” I asked.
Borchard held up an instrument that looked like a scalpel. “Burglar’s tools. This baby’s a lock pick and a gouger. You use the flat edge to slip the lock, and the sharp edge to whittle doorjambs. These other babies are a window snap, a push-drill and a chisel pry. Big daddy at the end is a suction-cup glass-cutter. What’s the matter, Marty? You look jittery.”
I took a deep breath and feigned indifference by shrugging. “Just a headache. Why do the handles have those deep brush marks? For a grip?”
Borchard hefted the chisel pry. “Partly, but mostly the ridges are there to prevent fingerprints. See, possession of burglar’s tools is a felony, and if a burglar gets caught with them it’s a bust, and if he gets caught with them inside a pad he’s burglarizing, it’s an extra charge. But these heavy brush marks won’t sustain fingerprints. So if he’s inside a pad and we nail him, he can stash the tools and say ‘Those things ain’t mine,’ even though it’s patently obvious they are. The ridges also make a good backscratcher.”
I smiled while Uncle Walt poked at his back with the handle of the chisel pry; then I said, “If they’re illegal, how come you have them?”
Borchard draped a fatherly arm around my shoulders. “Marty baby, you’re a smart kid, but a trifle naive. I was a burglary detective for three years before I joined the Speaker’s Bureau, and you might say I managed to acquire a few things at a five-finger discount, if you catch my drift. Tools are a good thing for a man to have, and I use the gouger-pick to play darts with. Tack a picture of L.B.J. or one of them other liberal chumps to my wall and let fly. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Come on, let’s go up to my pad. I’ve got a couple of frozen pizzas yelling ‘Eat me!’ ”
That night I kept Borchard’s monologues pinned to one subject: burglary. I did not have to feign rapt attention: this time it came of itself, as if the projector I used for brain-movies were on strike and I had found something better. I learned the practical uses of the beautiful brushed-steel tools; I picked up the rudiments of nullifying burglar-alarm wiring. I learned that dope addiction and a propensity for bragging about their exploits were the most common burglar downfalls, and that if a thief wasn’t too greedy and rotated his target areas, he could elude capture indefinitely. Criminal types imprinted themselves in that part of my mind where only the logical lived: pad crawlers who stole cash and loose jewelry they could swallow if the cops showed up; credit-card thieves who ran up a string of purchases and sold the stuff to fences. Watchdog poisoners, rape-o burglars and brazen smash-and-grabbers joined Shroud Shifter in my mental entourage.
Around midnight, Borchard, groggy from pizza and beer, yawned and steered me toward the door. On my way out, he handed me the chisel pry. “Knock yourself out, kid. Tack up old L.B.J. and nail him a few times for Uncle Walt. But try not to hit the wall, that beaverboard’s expensive.”
The steel ridges seemed to bum themselves into my hand. I walked back to my room knowing that I now had the courage to do it.
6
The following night, I struck.
My day had been nothing but furious brain-movies and external shaking, and the head librarian twice asked me if I felt “under the weather”; but when dusk hit, a long-buried professionalism took me over, and my mind honed in on the exigencies of the job at hand.
I had already decided that the dwellings of solitary women would be my “meat,” and that I would only steal what I could reasonably carry on my person. I knew from previous Walt Borchard monologues that the area just south of the east Griffith Park Road was relatively cop-free — it was a low-crime middle-class neighborhood that required only cursory patrolling. Holding that inside information in front of my brain’s viewfinder, I walked there after work.
The streets off Los Feliz and Hillhurst were a mixture of stucco four-flats and small houses, narrow and broad front lawns. I circled the blocks from Franklin northward in a figure-eight pattern, checking for cars or the absence of them in driveways and for flimsy doors that looked ripe for prying and whittling. The pick-gouger rested in my back pocket, wrapped in a pair of rubber gloves I had purchased during my lunch hour. I was ready.
The sun started setting around seven-thirty, and I got the feeling that the driveways that were still empty would stay empty — there had been a big crush of people returning home for work between six and seven, but now incoming traffic was dwindling and I was seeing more and more dark houses bereft of cars. I decided to wait until full darkness hit, then move.