Gil blows the motto a kiss. His eyes take on that “Don’t mess with me, I’m deep in a reverie” look. You see why people voted for the man. He cares way past the official boundaries of the job. Jacque says, “This job is still Disneyland to you, isn’t it?”
Gil tilts his chair back. “It’s not Disneyland when you get called out at 3 A.M., but when you get to the murder scene it’s like you’re coming up on Disneyland and you can see the Matterhorn ride in the distance. It’s not Disneyland when you see all the ugliness, but it’s Disneyland at the trial when the jury foreman says ‘Guilty’ and you break down crying just like the victim’s family.”
The holidays are long gone.
Dan Burt’s bulldog has gone back to his baseball cap.
Burt tosses a gun catalogue in his wastebasket. He’s a lifelong gun fancier pushed to the point of apostasy.
“My gun collection sickens me now,” he says. “It makes me feel like I’m part of some mass illness.”
Ray Peavy coughs. “We found Carlos Guevara’s car at the Greyhound Terminal downtown. The crime lab’s got it.”
Burt points to a sheet of paper on his desk blotter–a mock-up of the condolence letter the bureau sends to murder victims’ families.
“We can’t send that to Guevara’s wife, because she’s dead too. I guess all we can do is pray and work the case.”
While other cases accumulate.
July 1995
BAD BOYS IN TINSELTOWN
“L.A. Come on vacation; go home on probation.”
Somebody dropped that line on me twenty-five years ago. The line dropper was not an academic or a media pundit. A street freak or a honor-farm bunkmate probably shot me those words. He probably heard them on an old Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce record and passed them off as original wisdom. It’s a throwaway line with a rich historical subtext and snappy implications. It’s a travelogue ad for the hip, the hung, and the damned.
That line implies that L.A. is a magnetic field and that all L.A. migrations are suspect. That line indicts your desire to come to L.A. and categorizes you as an opportunist with a hidden sexual agenda. That line is a cliché and a prophecy. It foretells your brief sensual riches and your grindingly protracted fall and retreat.
You can reinvent yourself en route. You can assume your desired identity and make attitude count for a thousand times its hometown value. You can live in a community of people who came to L.A. to be somebody else and envy the few who make money at it and blow you off as a loser. You can blame your fall and retreat on the city that magnetized you and duck the issue of your own failure.
People will understand and empathize. They know that L.A. is big, bad, and beautiful and full of the power to mortify. That power carries a built-in escape clause. L.A. rejects can cite it without the appearance of unseemly self-pity. The clause grants forgiveness through mitigation and holds L.A. up as a city beyond any individual’s control. There’s enough truth in the clause to keep anyone from questioning his desire to come to L.A. in the first place.
I’m from L.A. My parents made the migration and spared me the grief of making the jaunt on my own. I possess certain L.A. migrator tendencies. I migrated east to enact them. I’m sure that my parents would have understood the move.
My father arrived in the mid-‘3os. He was a tall, handsome guy with a gigantic schvantz and an inspired line of bullshit. He had won a few medals during World War I and hyperbolically embellished his exploits. He jumped on every woman who’d let him and firmly believed that every woman who didn’t let him was a lesbian. He landed in L.A. with a flash roll and some snazzy threads and gravitated toward the movie biz. His career as a Hollywood bottom feeder topped out in the late ’40s. He got a gig as Rita Hayworth’s business manager and allegedly poured the pork to Rita on many auspicious occasions.
My mother won a beauty contest and flew to L.A. in December of’3 8. She was a 23-year-old registered nurse from the Wisconsin boonies and the Elmo Beauty Products’ newly crowned “America’s Most Charming Redhead.” She toured L.A. with the most charming blonde, brunette, and gray-haired winners, took a screen test, and flew back to her job in Chicago with $i,ooo in prize money. L.A. kicked around in her head. She learned she was pregnant, aborted herself, and hemorrhaged. A doctor acquaintance fixed her up. She got the urge to start over in a sexy, new locale. She took a train back to L.A., found a pad and a job and met a schmuck who may or may not have been an heir to the Spalding sporting-goods fortune. She married the guy and divorced him within a few months. She met my father in ’40 and fell for his good looks and line of bulishit. My father deserted his wife and shacked up with my mother. They were married six years into their shack job and seven months before my birth.