Steve Crane did his duty and duped Yolanda Paez into my plan to play out here at Rock’s playpen. Said plan: to plant Yolanda and Rock in the sack and sock in a prank prowler call to my plant with the LAPD. The plant plants calls to his private press contacts– prowler prowls at Rock’s Roscomare rancho right now! Blackand-whites bomb to Bel-Air! Reporters run to Rock’s ranch! I fire shots out a back bedroom! Cops kick the door in and find Rock and his Mex mama flicking feverishly! Reporters find them and flood them with flashbulb flares! I sell my pre-shot sex shots to Randy Rothstein at Rave and Terry Tompkins at Tattle. Ben Luboff gets skinned alive and scooped by the scoop of the scopophiliac century: ROCK HUDSON IS STRAIGHT!
I yanked Yolanda to the playpen and played her through rehearsals with the richly reluctant Rock. The Rock’s live-in lover took it all horrifically hard. He drank himself into dramatic hysterics and hurled hate hexes at me in a slithery and scintillating silence. I had constellated his self-contempt and crisply crystallized it. He hated himself for his love for hunky hound dog Hudson. He’d sweated the sweaty swish story out of the Rock. Rock’s call-boy carousing blistered and blackened his heart. He was afraid that Rock would renounce his rump-happy ways with a real revisionistic yen for Yolanda. He blamed all this multiplied mishigaas dead on me.
Rock promised to drop some graft gelt and glom Yolanda a green card. Yolanda laid out some lurid Lana-Johnny tales of late. Lana and Johnny were wrapped in a ripe roundelay of sex and self-hatred. Brazen brawls and licentious language. Lana was ready to cut the cord and juke Johnny out of her life. Yolanda said she’d pay prime pop to liberate her love letters. I called Lana and laid out a deal. I said I’d latch onto the letters. She said she’d lure Johnny to her lair and call Yolanda at Rock’s rancho. I’d run to Johnny’s pad and pounce on her packet of purple prose then.
I set the date for the prowler-prowl press gig: 4/4/58.
Good Friday. A good day to crucify and crush the rumor that Rock ran the Greek way. A good way to resurrect him and hail him as heterosexual.
We waited. We worried details. Rock and I belted bonded bourbon and bullshitted our way down to D-Day.
Rock psyched me out and psychoanalyzed me. I told him about my chickenshit childhood in Chillicothe, Ohio. I told him how my meshugenah mom mistreated me. She only let me read one book: a thick thesaurus. Rock bestowed a bourbon-bombed benediction on me. I told him that Hush-Hush would always run and rag him as a raging pussy hound. I think we might have hugged once–but don’t tell anyone.
8:10 P.M., Friday, 4/4158. The lilac-colored carpet on Rock’s living-room floor.
Rock jumped out of his jockey shorts. Yolanda yanked off her dress and stamped herself with the stations of the cross. I bored my eyes in on her and buzzed the fuzz.
My cop buddy caught the call. “Los Angeles Police Department. Sergeant Helgeland speaking.”
I said, “Prowler at 841 Roscomare, Bel-Air. Shots fired.” I hung up, hauled upstairs, and smoked two Smith & Wesson rounds out a rear window. I heard the live-in lover boohoo and beat his fists on the bed he bounced on with the Rock. I bounced back downstairs and went big-time bug-eyed.
It was supposed to be a faux-fuck. It wildly and willfully wasn’t. Rock had Yolanda priapically pinioned. She had her eyes shut. She couldn’t catch Rock surreptitiously centered on a malecenterfold spread.
The phone rang. Yolanda yelped and rocked off of Rock. She said, “It is Good Friday. I have a premonition.” She pounced on the phone. I perched by the earpiece and heard what she heard– hissingly Hush-Hush.
“Johnny. . . hitting me. . . I’m so afraid. . . .”
Yolanda wrapped herself in Rock’s robe and ran out the door. She ran to Rock’s lavender Lincoln and raised rubber. I ran out and tailed her in my coon coach. We passed a big bevy of blackand-whites rolling toward Rock’s rancho.