This is my story, and I swear it’s all true. As night fell, the day’s heat lingered and rippled on the asphalt of the narrow mountain road. Mosquitos spun lazy circles over still puddles of sprinkler runoff, not quite awake enough and not quite hungry enough to go looking for food just yet, still finding their wings after the stillness of another hot afternoon. At the dog end of a summer’s day, the night creatures stirred to consciousness, emerging from their dens and warrens, to seek out whatever treats the night had to offer. A coyote gamboled onto the warm road, sounding quiet yips and barks to the others, that the time to hunt had come, that the night was theirs. It was to be a good night for pack hunters, those too cowardly, too weak, to prowl on their own.
Far below, down in the valley, lights flickered on and the city came to life, reborn, shimmering, as the night shift knuckled the sleep from of its eyes and came out of the houses and apartments, down from the trees and up from the sewers, predators and prey alike, all seeking that elusive something that made this town, this city, the destination of dreams and the depositor of nightmares.
The city erupted into life; radios blared from open windows and doors, as neighbors gathered in yards and garages, unfolding lawn chairs and cracking open beers, to meet and talk and laugh and love and hate and fight and fuck and live…and die. This would be a night that, once over and done, would never be forgotten, a permanent stain on the still-idyllic city that had already known more tragedy than any hundred others.
Down the road a piece, a family-friendly haunted mansion greeted guests for the first time while, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Four Horsemen were photographed at a zebra crossing; a momentous day for all, in a year that saw the ascension of King Dick, Chappaquiddick, Woodstock and Altamont, the return of Elvis and the departure of Brian Jones, the rise of the Weathermen and Zodiac, Kissinger’s failure to broker peace in Vietnam, and the reappearance of the draft.
From out of the desert, chugging along lazily, a ‘59 Fairlane rambled up the highway, dinged and dented, its original cream color bleached by the harshness of the Santa Susana sunshine, fenders mismatched and spotted with rust and primer, creaking with every shimmy and shake of its beat-down frame, its occupants tripping balls on some high-power lysergic nightmare fuel, three girls singing and one boy driving, passing a joint back and forth, without a care in the world. They were the masters of the universe, those four; they were legion, and their names would soon become the stuff of legend, such was the divine mission upon which they had been sent, from God’s mouth to their ears, from the low desert to the high mountain, on a quest to slay dragons.
Young demons, sent to do the devil’s work.
ONE
August 9, 1969
I woke up in the canoe that Doug and Mary had kept in the pool at Pickfair, half-in and half-out, with a mean motherfucker of a hangover that only worsened as the rising sun hit the water, the brilliant splashes of light drilling a hole straight into my brainpan, like those nasty worms that sit at the bottom of the ocean, waiting, just waiting, for some dumbass fish to swim along and then they strike, strike like lightning, and then it’s so long sucker, your dance card just got punched, and you’re on the way to the big empty, baby, no-tomorrow-style.
From the chapel, the big bells rang, so loud they damn near cracked my melon, my eyes squeezed shut against the pain of the newborn day.
“Sunday morning, praise the dawning, my ass,” I grunted, struggling to pull myself out of the pool, green water sluicing down the legs of my torn and dirty jeans, my feet filthy as though they hadn’t been left soaking for god knows how many hours. I crawled out of the canoe, and onto the cement that lined the pool, leaning back against its coolness, in the quiet peacefulness of the valley, where so many good memories had been birthed. I guess that’s why I ended up here, of all places, after a long night’s wickedness.
“Morning, Doug,” I said, wiping a weary hand across my brow, feeling in my skin that it was going to be another hot one, just as it had been yesterday, and last night. So goddamn hot. The sound of sirens in the distance pricked up my ears, the tattered remnants of my conscience hinting that I might have had something to do with whatever Johnny Law was up to on this fine and sunny Summer morning. It felt like his ghost was looking down at me, in that haughty way that a person might look down upon an old friend who’d just awoken in the swimming pool of their home, and may or may not have pissed in it. Probably by accident. Whatever; not remembering gave me plausible deniability. The sirens rose and fell, rose and fell.
“Well don’t look at me,” I laughed sheepishly. “Ain’t any blood on my hands.”
And then I saw the blood on my hands.
Shit.
“What’d I do this time, Doug?” I asked, feigning exasperation. “Jesus, I can’t take my sorry ass anywhere!” I crawled back down to the pool and washed the blood off, noticing chunky bits of something beneath my fingernails, pulling embedded hairs from the open cuts on my knuckles. Whatever I’d done, I’d had a hell of a time. Good for me.
I shambled back down to Hollywood Boulevard as a matching set of rollers roared up Gower Gulch, their sirens tearing my mind to shreds, so bad that I screamed in pain, howled at the sound of them, so weird to hear so many on a Sunday morning, even here in the City of Angels, where Satan kept a penthouse suite on the Miracle Mile, and dreams died, strangled by bedsheets at the glorious old Roosevelt. When I stopped, my head was clearer, and it started coming back to me.
Two
I’d hitched up with the little guy a few months earlier; he’d been busking at Hollywood and Vine, playing for pennies from Minnesota tourists who still bought into the dream that their fabulous La-La Land vacation would actually have them rubbing elbows with all the bright, shining stars in this most mythical of locales, the reality being much more earthy, and by ‘earthy’ I mean dirty, filthy, scabrous, hooked on goofballs and probably carrying a weapons-grade case of the clap.
So there he was, like a pint-size Jesus with a beat-up old six-string, three hippie girls kneeling on the sidewalk, singing backup to whatever song he was mangling, suede hat upturned on the sidewalk, optimistic in its purpose as a tip-catcher, nothing but a tattered dollar bill inside, and me giving even odds that he’d put it there himself as a cue to the passers-by, as if they’d have no idea what to do with an empty hat in front of a grubby little troubadour at the most famous corner in the world.
Some ridiculous lyric about garbage dumps came out of him, like a caged cat that couldn’t wait to get free and about as tuneful, eyes wide and unblinking, trying to lock on to each who passed with what I’m sure he thought was wholesome, heartfelt intensity but which, in reality, came off as kind of sad and made him look more than a little retarded.
But the girls, that’s what really turned me on. They were hot, sexy in the way that lady down the street with all the cats and the living room filled with newspapers was sexy: dangerous, strange, possibly demented, and absolutely unhygienic. When Cat Lady stood on the front porch and yanked up her tattered skirt while screaming at airplanes about Communists and Kennedys and submarines you didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see, but you completely had to look, and in doing so you died a little, part of your soul lost to something so awful and profane that you wanted to go to church and bathe in holy water and dry-hump the confessional until the priest clubbed you over the head with Hail Marys just to get your nasty ass out of there, but damn son, you’d look again when the opportunity presented itself, sure as shit.
And yeah, I’d gone back and looked again, I sat on her porch and got a good, close-up look at both doors and brothers and sisters, for my sins, she took my bad self inside and did unto me things that would have made Caligula blush, and I barely minded the next day when it felt like I was pissing napalm because when you get the chance to take a walk on the wild side with a bonafide, card-carrying agent of terminal madness, you climb on top of that pile of garbage, you strap in, and you take that goddamn ride.
The girls were kneeling on the sidewalk, clapping in time with the music or at least giving it the old college try, which was about as close to college as any of them would get, aside from getting g-banged by the chess team, their white girl’s sense of rhythm mercilessly wrecking a simple four-four beat, tunelessly chanting along with Wee Jesus, looking for all the world like castoffs from some low-budget prairie movie, like the crap that rolled out of Monogram or Republic back in the old days, the better days.
They were dirty, unkempt, unwashed, uncultured, and uncivilized, with smudges and streaks of dirt on their faces and fur on their calves, and my surprise that they were capable of human speech was genuine, so convinced was I that these were prime examples of feral womanhood, raised by wolves, brought up bad to be treated worse, and yet I will admit there was something about them, each of them separately, all of them collectively, that made my nether parts go all aflutter, twitterpated, as it were. I believe, in hindsight, I may have a thing for filthy women. I don’t know where it comes from, or why it’s there, but there it is. You can have Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, she’s all yours; for me, the wild-ass barnyard halfwit is the one that makes my compass go full magnetic north.
That’s why Doug and I got along so well; we were attracted to polar opposites and never once in competition for the same piece of strange. He had Mary, America’s Sweetheart, and I was gutter diving for trashcan tramps. I couldn’t see the fun in virtue any more than he could see the attraction of going a-hoggin’. To each their own, yeah? Anyway, Doug’s dead and Mary’s drunk and angry, making a hermit of herself up at the main house, releasing the hounds at me for simply dropping by to say a quick hello and pass out in her pool. Hell, I’d even brought a bottle to accompany the one I’d already drank, but she’d have none of it. Still pissed about that thing back in ’33. Wasn’t even my fault, that time. I think.
I miss Doug. He was a good guy, and a hell of a friend. Thirty years gone, and I still miss him.
Fuck, where was I?
Right, dirty filthy hippie chicks.
Two
So one of them eyeballed me and I was done for; her eyes dropped to my belt buckle or thereabouts, and I looked at Little Guy, and he just grinned and nodded, and that was that. I loitered until they finished, having made little more than the dollar that was already in the hat, but looking like they’d just conquered the world over a couple bucks in spare change. Something’s better than nothing when nothing’s all you’ve got.
So we got to talking, and it was clear from the get-go that theirs was a man’s world, and the Little Guy was the world to them, as evidenced by their constant fawning over him, touching him, smoothing his hair, stooping a little so that he appeared taller than them, but that was all part of the gig. For as often as they called him by name, they also called him Jesus, and he really got off on that, believing as he did that he was the Son of Man. He told me his name, and I told him mine.
“Now we know each other’s true name, brother,” he said slyly. “A bond is formed, and ain’t nothin’ any man can do that’ll break that bond.” Oh little Charlie, I thought to myself. If only you had the real measure of me; if only you knew half of what you think you know.
They had a beat-up old school bus parked around the corner and as we rode out of town, he laid down his quasi-hippie rap, us all being God’s children, what’s mine is yours, and on and on, as we left LA and made our way to the desert. They had a commune, he told me, a place where they could groove on nature, without the constant hassle of the pigs, because although every single person on Mother Earth loved him, the pigs, man, those damn pigs just loved to bust up their beautiful trip, because they felt threatened by him, his essence, his reality.
The more he talked, the more he lapsed into yardbird jive, bad English and colored slang, peppered with jailhouse posturing, so I balled up and asked him straight out.
“Where’d you do your time, man?” I asked casually, hoping to express my sincere curiosity without any tone of judgment.
“Shit, man,” he replied with a laugh, high and reedy, “You went straight to it, didn’t you? Well that’s okay, my brother, for as I am all things, so too am I a charter member of the brotherhood of the unjust, the hopeless, wretched, tempest-tossed, and ain’t no man alive who can say I ain’t done my time.
“I been in one kind of jail or another since I was a kid, and my mama traded me to a pervert kiddie-fucker for a pitcher of beer. She was a whore, you know, so it was just business, and that’s a business I know a lot about, learned what I learned from my man Karpis up at McNeill, now I’m runnin’ my own stable, these girls’ll do any goddamn thing I tell ‘em to, and they come back to me every time, wantin’ more.”
So he reckoned himself a pimp, catering to a base that wanted them young and stupid, lost, dirty in every way. Fine by me, I thought, so long as I got to take a run at them when we got to wherever the hell we were going.
Turned out we were going to an old ranch out in the desert, a place I knew well from the old days, back when they were shooting Westerns at a furious pace. This old coot owned the place, made up to look like an old west town, and the surrounding land had stood in for just about every part of the geography of Hollywood’s version of the cowboy days. Only thing is that now, they’re not making many Westerns anymore, and when they do, they’re going out to real locations, rather than a run-down, bullshit, plywood version of it. These days, they needed authenticity to sell the fantasy.
So we hop out of the bus, and Little Fella struts around like he owns the place. He points out the kitchen, the nursery, the buildings where they lived, and barks out a command for one of the girls to go fetch the rest. That’s the funny thing about communes: no matter how much they preach about love and equality and freedom, it always comes down to one guy who tells everyone else what to do.
And ‘The Ranch,’ for as much as he built it up on the bus, was dilapidated, falling apart, its best days so far behind it that it isn’t so much as a speck of dust in the rearview mirror, and this idiot is casting himself as the Messiah for what turns out to be a couple dozen drifters and runaways, half-wits with one foot in the sewer and the other in the grave, just one or two bad decisions away from making fuck flicks in the Valley for a sawbuck or a couple tabs of window pane. Or, as I saw it, a fertile field for a special sort of chaos.
Go ahead and cast that first stone, if it’ll help you sleep at night.
Three
That night, the Family, as they called themselves, laid out their version of a feast, food scavenged from only the finest dumpsters and trash bins of Los Angeles, poorly cooked or re-heated, all the girls grooving and doting on Charlie, all the boys digging the girls’ scene. Though most of the ranch hands didn’t truck with the hippies on their claim, a couple were there, passing around joints of Mexican stink weed, the cheapest shit around. A few bikers rolled in after dark, obviously there for a quick hug and tug from the girls, payment directly to the Son of Man by way of crank and acid.
I kept an eye on Charlie, watching his deliver his jailhouse-pimp-hippie screed about how the age of materialism had created a void in human consciousness, how the fathers and grandfathers had stripped women of the life spirit and all he wanted was to show the women how to love and be loved and find their place in this awful world of men. It was his divine mission, telling women what to do, in order for them to find their place in the world, as he explained exactly what that was.
Inwardly I laughed. You don’t last long in this world without a decent bullshit detector, and mine has been honed and tuned a lot more than most, although to be fair, a blind and deaf six-year-old could catch the curve of his rap from a mile away. I saw Charlie slipping his ‘family’ tabs of acid before diving headlong into his messianic, I’m-gonna-save-you-from-The-Man-by-being-The-Man boogie, and I figure why not, when in Rome, you know?
So I drop acid with them, and soon enough, his church service turns into a full-on orgy, only Charlie’s directing everyone who to partner with and he’s just sitting back, watching the whole thing, leering at the writhing, sweaty, fucked-up mass of humanity he’s created, chanting some shit about how they’re all his children, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, all that is is as it was, all that was will be again, surrender the soul, cease to resist, cease to exist, and on and on, incomprehensible hippie nonsense and it’s all I can do to not bust a gut and laugh at him, but I’m more concerned with laying some pipe with this trippy brunette who calls herself Sadie, and finally getting an answer to my lifelong question about how it would be to get it on with a real life, fire-breathing psychopath, and I cannot lie, it was fucking amazing. I really can’t recommend it highly enough, even if you have to steal a helicopter and freefall into a lunatic asylum with a backpack full of Thorazine and Everclear.
After a while, all the grunting and moaning and wheezing and panting and wailing starts to die down, and they all fall asleep then and there, without worry that they were cementing themselves together with all their spilled fluids. I extricated myself from the mass, and sat on a table, looking down at them while I thumbed a match and lit a cigarette. It was then that I looked up and there’s Charlie, staring at me with that same, beatific grin, trying to look friendly but the smile not quite reaching his eyes in which, I now saw, a fire burned.
Honestly, he made me uneasy and that, my friend, is not something that happens every day. I reckoned he’d learned how to hide emotions from a lifetime in jail, that to show weakness, especially for someone as small as he, would be a death sentence. I quarter to no one, but in this strange little man, despite his swaggering, I saw a child, lost and alone, desperate for love and acceptance, demanding it, and building a world for himself that, however dirty, however pathetic, was his, where he was important, loved, worshiped. I saw a fertile field, into which I could sow my seeds of chaos.
“Charlie, let’s take a walk,” I said quietly.
Four
Under the blue light of a full moon, we walked around the property, Charlie back in convict/preacher mode, talking big about his music, how everyone loved it and how the Beach Boys wanted to get him in the studio to cut an album, telling lies about how he played The Whiskey and The Troubadour, how he’d been in Laurel Canyon and jammed with Stills and Nash and Joni and Cass, how his music would ‘heal’ the terrible rift between parents and children, and that’s why he took them in, his precious girls, because their mommas and daddies threw them away, abused and discarded, and he found them, picked them up, and became their friend, their confidant, their parents, their God.
“Ain’t no one been there for them, but me,” he said, shuffling his feet on the hard-packed dirt, sounding for all the world like the Good Samaritan, benevolently taking in society’s castoffs, misfits, and disposable innocents, giving them all the food, love, and shelter that they never had before, and never asking anything in return, except maybe their love, their loyalty, their admiration, their worship, and their bodies, but only if they offered. He talked as though I hadn’t just witnessed him getting them all high and making them have sex with whoever he desired; I admired this quality in him, this ability to cast and re-cast himself as the moment required, without a shred of self-consciousness.
“I just need to get into that damn studio,” Charlie said, with desperation in his voice. “I figure once I get that record cut, we’ll be on easy street. I’ll buy me a big ol’ house up the canyon, I been to one where the record producer lives, big place just like that, with room for all my girls and friends and a studio in the garage to make my music.”
Talking like that, he sounded like a child, voice full of innocence and big dreams, tinged with resentment at those who had it better than he did which, truth be told, wasn’t much of a challenge. I’d been in some serious shitholes in my time, and while Spahn Ranch hadn’t been the best of places even in its heyday, it had gone to serious hell in its decline. The owner was half-dead, the property occupied by squatters, left behind to rot, just like so many people and places, as the big American Dream Factory chewed them up and spat them out, again and again.
The more he talked, the more bored I became, because there’s only so much that can be said on any subject before tedium sets in. So I tuned out, switching channels to things I liked better, things that appealed to me, but still nodding and responding to whatever the shit he was saying, as though I were still enraptured by the sheer strength of his personality. It was in the midst of this that the probing roots of a plan emerged.
Quietly at first, I began to explain to this little hillbilly how a war was coming, that it would be bigger and more important than his dreams of stardom, and that he could be the true Messiah, so much more so than he was already playing at, that a time of great darkness was coming, and he could be the one, The One, to come to bring humanity out of the darkness and into the light. I helped him understand that he already knew these things, that I only saw them in him, and by and by, he accepted the reality I was pitching, and made it his own. Just that fucking simple.
Five
Weeks passed strangely at the ranch; usually too damn hot to do much in the daytime, Charlie sent the girls out into the city to forage for food and handouts, leaving a couple behind to keep the property owner occupied while he went into Hollywood, plunking on his guitar and playing the part of the ersatz folk singer and hippie Jesus, but at thirty-five, he was almost closer in age to the parents they had fled than he was to his flock.
Nights were spent with the Family all together, unless Charlie decreed otherwise; there were all night ‘jam sessions’ where he played the same feeble folk songs over and over, while the girls giggled and sang backup, but there were also nights where he would make a girl, usually one of the shy or self-conscious ones, strip naked in front of the entire commune while he simultaneously praised and ridiculed her, to free her of negativity and doubt, to encourage the hive mind of the Family.
Then there were nights were he would preach for hours, and that’s when the shit got entertaining. He would rail about the pigs and their hatred of him, how the cops feared his light and essence; he would rant about the mistreatment of, as he put it, the ‘coloreds,’ and how in his vision for the world, there would be no segregation, no hatred, just him and his cosmic Family, of them disappearing into the desert while urban blacks rioted against the pigs, looting white businesses, burning cars, taking what was rightfully theirs. Then, when all the bad white people were gone or enslaved, America would become a black nation. I had only given him the rough framework; he filled it in with his own jailhouse wisdom and prejudices.
The problem, as Charlie saw it, was that blacks couldn’t do a damn thing without a white man telling them to, and so after the riots, the race wars, he would have to emerge from the desert and run the world for them, but that was the burden he would happily take on, selfless messiah that he was. The little fella was getting brain-baked out in the desert, contradicting himself left and right, but no one gave a damn, so long as the drugs kept flowing (for the girls), and the girls kept giving it up (for the boys). Honestly, I was impressed; the little shitheel had one badass imagination.
At some point, the old man got tired of all the garbage and squalor, and kicked us all out. We headed east, landing at Barker Ranch, which Charlie claimed to have known about from his prison days. Now, even more remote than before, they all went even more nuts, which has got to be a stretch for even the wildest of imaginations. At my urging, they started stealing cars and modifying them for desert use, per a plan that I’d been quietly planting in their heads, that it would be really handy to have a fleet of dune buggies real soon. Nothing solidifies the madness of a cult than the idea of surviving Doomsday, except maybe making them the deliverers of Doomsday itself.
After months of false promises and run-around, Charlie finally got wise that he was not going to become the next rock star, that the pros were just using him for the drugs and the girls, and the especially nasty news that his demo tape was making the rounds as an example of just how bad music can get, something for the swells to laugh at while partying it up. It was then that I saw the opportunity, the window, and I just went for it.
Look, sooner or later you’re going to ask the big question: Why?
Because fuck you, that’s why. I groove on the chaos, and the Big Fear hadn’t visited town in quite some time. The gig in ‘Nam was going robustly sideways, kids were marching in the street against the war, the South was erupting in racial lunacy, again, and there was no way in Hell I’d go back there, we’d just walked on the goddamn moon, Brian Jones was dead, and America was tearing itself apart, even as the Summer of Love rolled peacefully onward.
Six
“Here’s what you do, Charlie. You remember that house where you met that bigshot producer?”
“Yeah, up in Benedict Canyon,” he replied, sullenly, his eyes red, as though he’d been crying, which struck me as funny. You’d expect the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of Man, to have more balls. In the passing months, I’d come to see him as he really was, that for all his macho swagger and jailhouse posturing, there wasn’t much to him.
In prison they’d have called him a weak sister or a sissy, a little bitch, putting on a big show around others but when you got him alone in the shower, mano a mano as it were, he’d bend right over and offer it up without a fight, and would do so with a smile, and offer to rinse you off when it was done. I’d seen my share of punks like him and had availed myself of their hospitality more times that I can be reasonably expected to recall.
“Okay. Go up to that house, barge in the front door, and tell that son of a bitch that no one, and I mean, no one, pulls shit like that and walks away clean. You make him pay. You dig me?”
“Pay?” he asked. “Like money?”
“Pay, Charlie. Really and truly pay. Like, with blood,” I said softly. “You have to make a statement, take a stand. You cut him down, and take his ass out. Do it well. Make it witchy, make it send a message: their time is over, and your time is now, the rap you’ve been laying down all this time. Blame it on the darkies, kick off the race war that will put you, Charles, in the driver’s seat.”
“But…”
“No buts, Charlie. Do him and anyone else at that goddamn house, and do ‘em bad. Make it messy. Make it a nightmare in the City of Angels and better still, send some of your girls up there to do it. Hell, I’ll go and help out, because I believe in you, I believe that you’re the one to lead us into a new American age, that your songs will become our battle hymns and our anthems, that your name will be on the lips of every goddamn person on this goddamn planet. Are you with me?”
In the end, he was.
Seven
I was at Cielo before the kids arrived; I found myself a nice seat on the low-hanging branch of a tree in the backyard, where I could oversee and guide the evening’s festivities. The games were about to begin, and in earnest. Even in my best of abilities, I can’t describe the feeling of anticipation I was feeling that night. The last couple of years had been exciting for me, watching the country tear itself apart over the changes that were coming, digging on the older generation’s hatred for and fear of anything that wasn’t an old white man or old white man-related, grooving on their utter, confused revulsion over the idea of peace and love, responding by throwing their aggression at the little savages in their black pajamas, in that faraway land no one had even heard of ten years before.
That’s what I love about Americans: their ability to hate and fear so completely, defying reason and sanity, fighting so hard to preserve and conserve what was rotten from the start, terrified of progress to the point that they’d gladly throw their own children to the wolves if it meant another year of their black-lynching status quo. They came by their hatred honestly, or so they told themselves, claiming to follow the word of the god they’d created, the god who hated all the same things they did, conveniently enough, and without a trace of irony.
The kids parked the Fairlane down the street and slipped into the black clothes they’d been instructed to bring. He was already on the property, sitting in a tree in the backyard, silently watching the three people inside the house, a man and two women, enjoying a quiet Saturday evening together, while a second man dozed on a couch. One of the women was pregnant, really pregnant, positively radiant with the expectation of motherhood, and I knew that this was too good to pass up. It was time to make a statement.
Walking in the shadows, the boy climbed a telephone pole and cut the line, so no calls for help could be made. A car turned into the driveway, driven by a young man around their age. Startled and with a pistol in his face, the driver begged for his life; for this, the boy slashed at him with a knife, opening a gash in the palm that tried to defend him, before putting four rounds in the young man’s chest. The sound of the twenty-two caliber pistol barely sounded down the canyon; what little sound it made was quickly lost in the night. The party then climbed the fence, stealing onto the property with creepy-crawly stealth, just as they’d been instructed.
Once inside the house, the boy saw a man asleep on a couch; as he awakened, the boy kicked him in the head, stunning him. The kids had been given clear instruction on how to handle the scene, and I aimed to be sure that they would run it by the numbers.
The four confused occupants were rounded up and brought to the living room. Eyes wide with fear, trying to make sense of the shouts of the intruders, barking conflicting orders, trying at once to comply with too many instructions. Absolute, delectable chaos.
They tied the pregnant woman and one of the men together at the neck and tried to hang them from the exposed beams in the ceiling but couldn’t manage the rope they’d brought; it kept slipping through their hands, their steady diet of garbage food and low-grade acid leaving them somewhat to the left of physical fitness. The couple was too heavy, and they couldn’t make the woman stop screaming, pleading, to spare her for the baby, the sake of the baby, didn’t they know who she was? And that tore it. I pushed Sadie, pushed her hard, and she waded into that nice pregnant lady but good. One of the sexiest damn things I’ve ever seen; that bugshit girl earned the sobriquet in a high style that night.
The man tried to defend his pregnant friend and was shot for his admirable efforts. The boy set on him with his knife, and made short, awful work of him. He died in the living room, rope around his neck, his purple shirt stained deep red. In the confusion, the other woman panicked and escaped out a window; her fleeing form, wrapped in a white dress, looked almost ghostly to the man in the tree, but her sprint for safety was short-lived, as she was taken down in the yard by the boy and one of the girls, tackling her by the pool and stabbing her twenty-eight times, and as her life ran out of her on the grass, saturating the earth, some of it falling into a storm drain near her head, the last thing she saw was the waning moon overhead.
The other man, the one from the couch, put up a strong fight, but in the end was stabbed fifty-one times, pistol-whipped, and shot twice before he went down, not far from the woman in the dress. That goddamn Polack was like a Timex; he just kept on ticking, despite the most hellacious licking he was taking. He died whimpering, as even the toughest of men will, and though they had begun the evening together, each of them died terrified and alone.
It was on Sadie to cut the baby out of the hysterical pregnant woman, as a sign that they had fulfilled their mission of doing something ‘witchy’ at the scene, plunging her knife deep in the woman’s abdomen, but in the end she couldn’t do it, opting to stab her multiple times, despite her begging to be left alive for the sake of the unborn baby, while great arcs of arterial spray painted the room. It was a stroke of genius, and while I’d love to take credit for it, Sadie made that choice all on her own.
She died in front of the couch, the back of which was draped with a blanket version of the American flag which was, appropriately, upside-down. Unintentional yet blindingly symbolic, the flag, along with the lives lost, sent a clear signal to the rich, the famous, the powerful, the Hollywood elite: No one is safe, death owns the night. In the days and weeks and months that were to follow, fear rippled down the hills and into the valleys, across the flatlands to both desert and ocean, and the Summer of Love began its death spiral.
When the dark work was done, I hopped down lightly from my perch and walked into the living room, breathing deep the coppery stink of death, mixed in with everything else that had been released into the carpet. I cracked my knuckles and set in to add my own flourishes to the scene. Nothing flashy, mind you – just a little extra mess, to let Johnny Law that he no longer owned the night.
I departed the scene, taking great care to not step in any puddles. I hiked down the dark canyon to the streets below at a casual pace, found a suitably decrepit bar, and drank a great many toasts to myself, while I waited for the shit to hit the fan.
Eight
“So, damn, Doug, it’s not like I actually killed anyone, you know?”
The brass silhouette on Doug’s crypt just sat there passively, like a big metal pain in my ass, while the town stirred and the sun growled even more menacingly in the sky. I soaked my aching feet in the reflecting pond in front of Doug’s tomb, that gorgeous slab of marble where he was finally laid to rest, stained as it was with the lipstick traces of so many admirers. Even now, I could feel Doug with me, quietly calling me the asshole I knew I was, but doing so with the style and great good humor that had made him the King of Everything.
It took a few hours for the scene on Cielo to break but when it did, holy shit. You’d have thought it was the end of days. Famous people, rich ones, got killed, and nothing kick-started the fear machine into high gear more than that. People got killed in East Los every damn day; Watts had burned for six days, just waiting for someone to take notice and give a damn. It was a weird day indeed when those places didn’t rack up body counts and, along with the nightly parade of death from ‘Nam, Angelinos accepted that the city required a blood sacrifice for its continued prosperity, but let that shit happen in Echo Park or Silverlake, if it’s all the same to you.
Hell, go downtown and watch life get primal; pick up a whore and hope her dick doesn’t pop out before you finish. Get drunk and wander down Skid Row with a twenty-spot pinned to your shirt, take a dump in front of Graumann’s – it’s all part and parcel with living in the greatest city on Earth – so long as the crime doesn’t reach into the realm of the beautiful, the worthy, the moneyed, especially when it’s as horrific as what happened up the Canyon. That kind of deviancy is the music of the streets, not the song of the stars. They can sit up on the mountainside and consume themselves in any and all possible ways, but don’t ever bring the street to them, oh no, that’s when the important people well and truly lose their collective marbles.
I reckoned my part in this was not unlike giving Dumbo a feather; those hippie wastrels were already strung out and crazy. They already had the madness: all I did was give them direction. Their sad little leader, Charlie, was never going to be a recording star, not even if he holed up in Laurel Canyon with two hundred pounds of blow for everyone to jump on. He wanted fame, he was starved for it, desperate for it. He was ready to sell his soul and the souls of his ‘family’ to get there, too. By the end of the year, the whole world would know his name, and I made that happen. The little turd never even thanked me.
When the news finally broke that afternoon, I’d shaken off most of the hangover from the night before. Doug still wasn’t talking to me, and I didn’t want to chance Mary again; word had already filtered down that the rich and fabulous were in full freak-out mode, and I was like the plague to her on even the best of days. Wandering into an exclusive neighborhood like that, on a day like this, could likely get me shot, and that would be damned inconvenient. It could also land me in jail, which would provide its own buffet of fun possibilities, but I really wanted to be outside for this one. With all this in mind, I decided to lay low, to walk the Boulevard and get a feel for the sweet, delightful tension that had the entire town on eggshells, as if it were all built of kindling, just waiting for that one spark to set it ablaze.
Strange days in the City of Angels, but delicious. I cruised the streets as the sun set, savoring the richness of the city’s smells; the scent of food carts and spilled beer, the coppery tang of blood and the acrid stink of piss, the mélange of sounds coming from open windows and doorways, radio in a dozen languages, down here the fear wasn’t as strong as it was up in the hills and the better areas; down here, we weren’t protected from the wildness, the savagery, that was just part of the landscape. In the flatlands of downtown, you hid fear, because if you didn’t, the animals, the two-legged ones that came out at night, they would smell it from a mile away, and they’d fall upon you like a plague, real biblical.
I walked a lot of miles that night, taking care to be seen in various places, and studiously avoiding Los Feliz. That area was going to get all kinds of famous tonight, and I didn’t need to be anywhere near any of that. Tonight’s plan was to make an even bigger statement than the night before, and after it was done, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Hell had come to Hollywood. I’d fed Little Charlie a laundry list of instructions for this one, since the kids had done such a half-assed job the night before. I mean, it was a slaughter, but it had no style, no panache. Hell, the man they’d gone there to kill wasn’t even living there anymore (of course I knew, which made it more fun for me), but those knuckleheads didn’t know their asses from their elbows, and it was time for the game to be seriously ramped up. Tonight, there would be a bloodletting, there would be terror, there would be brutality and heartbreak, but there would be no mistakes.
Nine
I have to give those kids credit, because they really cranked it up at Waverly: as I understand it (having been nowhere near the scene, of course), their work, our work, made a couple of cops flee the house and lose their lunches. If I can make a cop puke, I know I’ve done well.
Waverly, maybe even more so than Cielo, solidified the Big Fear and truly set the gears in motion, a clarion call that you didn’t have to be beautiful or famous to get deadly attention. Anyone and everyone was grist for the mill, regardless of their station in life. War had been declared, in ways that were loud, proud, and endlessly profane. Waverly was no simple break-in; it was a butchering, and I made damn sure that the victims would walk those now-hallowed grounds forevermore, a mute reminder for those attuned to such things.
The pressure cooker that was La-La Land was now shrieking at a deafening pitch, swelling and threatening to explode. I walked the crazy streets of the desperate areas, inciting bums to beat each other to death with just a glance, painting random swastikas on Jewish businesses, tossing firecrackers onto the porches of Watts in the middle of the night just to watch the residents come spilling out with guns drawn and violence in their eyes. I chucked rocks at soldiers returning from ‘Nam; I spread rumors that our glorious American fighting forces were killing babies and raping grandmothers, that what had happened a year before in My Lai (yeah, that was mine) was but one of a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, transgressions committed in that most unholy of wars.
I passed out sugar cubes in Elysian Park, telling the kids it was LSD when it was really a megadose of horse trank, eagerly anticipating the freakouts and superhuman strength that the cops, those poor saps, wouldn’t be expecting and wouldn’t know how to react, wanting to keep the peace and not provoke, not knowing until exactly too goddamn late that they were going up against Superman.
I kept busy, waiting patiently for tensions to reach a boiling point, and then I tipped the bulls about a bunch of hippie car thieves out in the desert, to ratchet up tensions not just with Charlie and the Family, but also with the squares, adding fuel to the fire of their hatred and distrust of the kids. To be honest, I was hoping the cops would fuck it up and not make the connection to the murders but Sadie, that adorable half-wit, ran her fool mouth about the killings to cellmates and then the beans spilled all over Hell and gone, and that’s all she wrote baby, the cow’s out of the barn and Katy bar the door, we’re in for one motherfucker of a ride.
I planted the seeds of Helter Skelter in the minds of Charlie and that idiot prosecutor, whose lust for fame clouded his already questionable judgment; together, they built a doomsday cult out of a bunch of fucked-up kids and carved a messianic hippie Christ out of a petty criminal and wannabe pimp.
It was all too beautiful.
A once-fabulous mansion in decline, its worn vestiges of better times heartbreakingly reflected in the deep shadows of its spider-webbed corners. A large 1930s home in a quiet, upscale suburb, hiding a lifetime of pain and dark secrets. The sprawling landscape of Hollywood is littered with broken dreams and ruined lives; the never-were scrambling for a chance at making their mark, while the has-beens fall into obscurity, earning, at best, a footnote in the clutter of contemporary American culture.
Against this dark and emotionally brutal background, director Robert Wiene unleashed The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), the story of a traveling carnival, and one of its attractions, a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) who can answer questions about the future while in his sleepwalking state. Cesare is controlled by the mysterious Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss), whose motives may be far more sinister than providing mere carnival tricks. Cesare ventures out into the world at the hypnotic behest of his master, performing whatever tasks are demanded of him. It is within these scenes that Caligari is at its most masterful; surely, the idea of being completely controlled by another person, while in a sleeping state when one is at their most vulnerable, has been the subject of countless nightmares for untold generations, and calls to question the very sanity of existence. Indeed, insanity is a significant component not just in Dr Caligari, but in many films of the German Expressionist era.
Nosferatu (1922), FW Murnau’s film about a vampire was almost lost to history; the story was taken from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Stoker’s widow went to court to have the film destroyed. All prints were burned, save but one, which had been traveling abroad. Without that single print, the film would be a mysterious footnote in history, not unlike London After Midnight (1927), all prints of which are believed to be lost.
In 1924, Robert Wiene and Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) re-teamed for The Hands of Orlac, which tells the story of a concert pianist who loses his hands in an accident, only to have them surgically replaced with the hands of an executed killer. Orlac (Veidt) cannot play the piano with his new hands, but soon learns that the hands still carry their previous owner’s urge to kill. The feeling that one no longer has control over one’s own body or mind, coupled with advances in medical science, fueled fears over the loss of self in the midst of a changing world over which the individual had no control, are archetypal of the era. Orlac, while an Austrian production, is nonetheless considered an important film of the Expressionist movement.
While wealthy industrialists and their children live and play in aboveground luxury, the masses toil below, working at the machines that provide power for the city, in subhuman conditions. To die from exhaustion is a common occurrence, but a minor inconvenience, as there are always more ready and willing to enslave themselves to the machines. A chance occurrence leads a young man of privilege to see the world that exists just beneath his feet and it is from this revelation that the young man fights to bring the rich and poor together.
1933: Fritz Lang, acclaimed director of Metropolis (1927) and Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922) finds that his latest film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, has been banned by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda under Adolph Hitler, stating that the film would be a menace to public health and safety, because it “showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence.” Goebbels was, however, impressed enough by Metropolis that he extended to Lang the opportunity to make films for the Nazi party, which caused him to flee to Paris that night, according to Lang, although this accounting has been questioned.
FW Murnau, director of Nosferatu, immigrated to the United States and was immediately put to work directing the silent masterpiece Sunrise, A Song of Two Humans (1927), which is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, winning three Academy Awards in the Academy’s first ceremony. Sunrise makes use of the mise-en-scene, a common element of Expressionist cinema, to ‘bring’ the audience into the picture, utilizing all aspects of the shot, from sets, composition, costumes, music, and performances, all carefully composed to convey a specific message; in this case, the mise-en-scene takes the viewer into the heart and mind of a man and woman’s affair, which may lead to a devastating outcome.
Of the homages to the German Expressionism movement, particular attention must be paid to Theodore Roszak’s 1991 novel Flicker, which takes the art of the era to a sinister level. Flicker is the story of Max Castle, a fictional German filmmaker who immigrated to the United States, making Poverty-Row movies, few prints of which still exist. Castle’s films utilize the darkness of shadows and the gap between frames (the ‘flicker’) of motion picture prints to install subliminal images that could, if the lost and missing films are seen, bring about tragedy of an apocalyptic scale, perhaps echoing the concerns of those who sought to ban such ‘subversive’ films in real life. Meticulous in detail and message, Flicker is a dense, disturbing, and fascinating look at the power of filmmaking, and an absolute must-read for any enthusiast of cinema.
In his epic 1978 novel The Stand, Stephen King killed everything. An intensely aggressive form of influenza is accidentally released from a government research facility and one panicked guard escapes before quarantine is initiated. The guard spreads the plague, which grows exponentially, until 99.4% of the population is dead. Those who remain are alone or in splintered groups scattered across the United States, with a common thread. Many of them begin to have dreams: some dream of a kindly old woman in Nebraska, while others see a dark man in Las Vegas. Drifting aimlessly around the corpse of America, the paths of survivors eventually intersect and when it is realized that they are having the same dreams, the groups decide to travel to one of the two dreamed-about locations. The battle lines are being drawn; the time has come for humanity to make its stand, in the final war of good against evil.
There is a special kind of magic when a guy gets his first car; it’s a feeling of liberation, of freedom, to climb in and just take off. The mysterious allure of the open road, the siren song of several hundred horses under the hood and a tiger in the tank, rocketing into the future without a care in the world. There is a darker side as well, that of squealing brakes and crushing metal, the bitter sting of humiliation, shattered dreams, and innocence torn asunder. Of love betrayed and forever lost.
The Cannon Group. To those who were of a certain time, in a certain place, mere mention of The Cannon Group conjures giddy images of days spent in second-run theatres with sticky floors and scratchy prints. When the lights went down and the Cannon logo appeared on the screen, the audience knew precisely what to expect: low budgets, second-tier stars, improbably laughable scripts, and cheesy special effects. Cannon was for the 1980s what American International was for the 1960s: a reliable workhorse that churned out B movies with an ethos that quantity was far more valuable than quality. And yet, for those devotees in the dark, Cannon signified nothing less than magic.
American Death Trip 