Crime Wave

I hunched down and hunkered back to my hedge. I smelled Methedrine popping out of my pores–mixed with the musk of MONEY.

I needed names. I could B&E Johnny’s pad and boost a burglary list. I could bug the pad and bug Demon Don’s digs. I could tap their telephones and tape their talks and wire up the wetback wenches. I could impersonate an Immigration agent and intimidate them. I could contact the feckless fools that they flicked and feed them an ultimatum: Feed me in five figures, or I’ll tell your wife who you fucked one freaky Friday night.

Oooooh, Daddy-o!!!!! I was digging it all, delirious!

I hauled back to the Hush-Hush office. I had to hook my hands on a boss batch of bug shit.

The office was occupied. My crew was crapped out on the floor. They were blasted, blitzed, blotto, zilched, zorched, and zombifled. They’d gone off the wagon en masse.

They got tanked on Tokay and T-Bird. They got stinko on Sterno and got wiped out on White Port. Short-dog bottles shifted and shimmied on every spare inch of floor space.

I checked my equipment chest. All my bug mikes were bunched up, broken, frayed, frazzled, and fucked. My condenser cords were stripped and striated down to mere strips. My diode dials were ripped, rusted, and ratched to shit.

FUCK–

I had to find a freelance bug freak and co-opt him into my conspiracy. That meant pitching him a prime piece of my potential payout.

FUCK–

I called Freaky Fred Turentine. His wife said he was working for Whisper tonight. I buzzed Buddy “Bug King” Berkow. His wife said Ben Luboff just brought him in on a big bug job. I called Voyeur Vance Vanning. His wife said he was out on a wire job for Whisper. He left her a late-nite number: a pay phone at Wilshire and La Cienega.

It all congealed and constellated.

My tip to trap homo hunk Rock Hudson. The sweaty swish at Delores’s Drive-In. Ben Luboff poised to scale the Purple Parthenon.

3

It had to be huge. Three bug boys at twenty bucks an hour boded big. My bet: Ben wanted bug bits on the bun-boy biz–to buttress his hit on hunky Rock Hudson. He’d set some phone-tap traps and bug baits on the sweaty swish carhop and develop some derogatory dish on Delores’s Drive-In. A prick-tease prelude to priapic Rock and some prick-happy call boy.

I had to see it. It beckoned as big as the Bikini Atoll atom-bomb blast. A bifurcated motive bolstered my urge to merge with the moment. I wanted to boost a batch of Buddy Berkow’s bug gear for my gig.

I whizzed down to Wilshire and La Cienega at warp speed. I whipped by Delores’s Drive-In and dug all the dirty details.

The 2:00 A.M. tumult. Late-nite L.A. out for burgers, borscht, and bagels. Beatniks and beaten-down benny-heads in battered Bonnevilles. Cholos in chopped-down Chevys riding on cheater slicks.

Carhops rolling roisterous on roller stakes. All mincy males laid out in lacy lounge wear. Buddy Berkow’s bugmobile back by the men’s room. Beside it: Voyeur Vance Vanning’s van. Freaky Fred Turentine wolflng french fries at an inside counter.

I whipped back to Wilshire and parked. I brought my beady browns up against my Bausch & Lombs and went into ocular orbit.

Dig:

Sweat beads bipping off the brow of that too-tall carhop topping off the tape toward 68″. A sweaty swish with the shakes: His tray twitched and twisted and almost toppled two twincheeseburger plates.

He fed the food to two Filipinos in a Ford Fairlane. He flitted back to a little shack lit by floodlights. He stood by the door and chain-smoked two Chesterfield Kings.

Envy entered my heart. An enlightened sense of entitlement entered my soul. A cosmic course of covetousness covered my whole being.

This gig should be MINE. I was the scandal-scamming, skinny-skimming scopophiliac king. The scopophiliacal scope of this gig screamed GETCHELL!

I alakazammed to Allah, genuflected to Jesus, and called out to that cat the kikes call God. I said I’d keester communists and bash ban-the-bombers, and dig up dirt on that dowager dyke Eleanor Roosevelt. I’d donate dough to a Moslem mosque. I’d put in with Pat Boone, wear white buck shoes, and warble at a Billy Graham Crusade. I wouldn’t print my piece on Rabbi R. R. Ravitz and that Hebrew-school Hannah he humped last Hanukkah.