Crime Wave

My life went waaay bad. I gave up fifteen years to booze, dope, petty crime, and insanity. I rarely thought about John Burroughs Junior High School. I stumbled past it and never acknowledged it with affection. I never thought about my stooges or Jay Jaffe and the Great Berko. I carried snapshots of the girls in my head and loved them in place of real women.

I almost died in ’75 and cleaned up in ’77. The act was reflexive and instinctive and tweaked by ambiguous forces that I didn’t comprehend in the moment. It was a blessed non sequitur. I didn’t dissect the act or question its componentry. I didn’t want to look back. I wanted to write books and look forward.

I did it. I moved east to expedite my forward momentum. I shut my unacknowledged Camelot in a time-locked vault and forgot the combination.

A series of external events clicked into place and inspired me to reinvestigate my mother’s 1958 murder. I spent fifteen months in L.A. and wrote a book about the investigation. It forced me to walk backward in time and linger in Camelot.

My time lock blew. All the old players flew out of the vault.

There’s Howard Swancy. There’s Berko and Jaffe. There’s the girls I stalked and all the Naked and the Dead in a jumble of faces and voices.

My memoir was published in November ’96. I spent ten days in L.A. on the publicity tour. Kosher Canyon and Hancock Park took on a wild new sheen. I drove byJ.B. every chance I got. I sent up prayers for the faces and voices every time.

I designated J.B. as a formal phenomenon. I developed narrative lines on the players and began to view them as kids and middleaged men and women. They wore interchangeable masks. They moved between then and now in unpredictable ways. I fashioned their masks from memory and flattered them with their presentday faces. I did not know what they looked like now. I granted them beauty as a way to say, Thanks for the ride.

A year passed. My memoir was published in paperback. A tollfree number and e-mail address were listed at the back of the text. They were there to solicit leads on my mother’s murder.

An old J.B. classmate read the book and contacted me. His name was Steve Horvitz. I didn’t recall him. He remembered me vividly. He ran down a list of my antics and detailed his own life then to now.

His parents were L.A. kids. His old man came out of Boyle Heights, and his old lady went to Le Conte and Hollywood High. They broke up in ’55–the same year my folks split the sheets. Steve lived at Olympic and Cochran. He hung out with Ron Stillman, Ron Papell, and JayJaffe–all lawyers now. Jaffe moonlighted as a TV pundit. He worked the Oj. Simpson trial for KCBS.

Steve went to San Francisco State. He stalked Jill Warner in Frisco–more successfully than I stalked her in L.A. He graduated and sold insurance. He went into his old man’s wholesale candy and tobacco biz. He made a mint off high-interest CDs in the gogo years and bought a car wash and a marketing business. He did custom framing for model homes and design work for restaurants and coffee shops. He went into the sports lithograph field and lost a mint in the Bush recession. He was working on Mint #2 now. Credit card processing was hot, hot, hot. He had two sons–one from Wife #1 and one from Wife #2. Wife #2 had a son from Husband #1. Wives, kids, mints–life could be worse.

Steve and I became friends. We shared a similar take on Camelot and rehashed the time and place in two-hour phone talks. We debated John Hunt as sadist or man-on-moral-mission. We dissected “Kampus King” Tony Shultz and Tony Blanldey–now a big cheese with Newt Gingrich. Steve stayed in L.A. He didn’t lockJ.B. in a time-vault. He retained a few friendships and had a handhold on the slenderJ.B. grapevine. He provided rumors and facts and a necrology.

Howard Swancy–allegedly a cop. Jamie Osborne–dead in Vietnam. Mark Schwartz–dead–possibly a dope-related homicide. Eric Hendrickson–murdered in Frisco. Laurie Maullin– dead of cancer. Steve Schwartz–heroin O.D. Steve Siegel and Ken Greene–dead.