The Dark Corridor

The Adventures of One-Eyed Johnson: Part Negro Blues Hollerer

2011-12-29T14:44:00.000-08:00

Blind One-Eyed Johnson 1 Wiseman

The Adventures of Blind One-Eyed Johnson:
Part-Negro Blues Hollerer

The blues: "a panhandling gimmick for alcoholics." -H.C. Speir, talent scout responsible for the recordings of many Delta blues artists.

How I Got the Acquaintance o’ My Pig, Po’kchot

The Mississippi Delta is home to a lot of things, mud particularly. I cracked a pained eyeball. I could see nothing. This was not unusual for a man of my habits, a profligate drinker of strong spirits and a chaser of most any sweet jellyroll that passed me by. It might be night. I might have eaten one of them jimson roots. I hope I hadn’t drank any methyl alcohol, though I wouldn’t put it past myself.
Seemed only one thing to do. I let loose with a hellhound halloo. “Az Gads, I’zzz bli-i-i-n- d,” I paused and thought. I’azzz blind-ed. Az poor an’ give inta my sins an’ fell afoul o’ the Lord and now he’s taken my sight....”
I thrashed my limbs about, hoping nothing was broken. My nostrils were hit by a noxious smell that made me heave. Then, I felt something nuzzling into my tallywacker. But, it wasn’t romantic and I feared for man rape. “Nooo, ah Lordy, no! Ah know az pretty, but I’m a God-fearin’ man who don’t hold with the Sodomitic practices!”
For my efforts, I got a banshee scream in my left ear that sent all my sinews into acting on their own and I shoved through some foul goo to see a fine little porker staring at me, with the clear light of morning shining behind him.
I was in shit. Pig shit. I had spent my repose in some mudhole that was comprised of two percent soil mud and 98 percent animal mud --particularly of the pig and poultry versions.
I peered either way and sat up in a wary crouch. I tapped and found I still had my lid, a man’s not a man without a hat, covered in feces or not. To my right, I spied my guit-box, still wrapped in my duffle, it’s head seemingly still aligned with the bulk of its body. If I broke that guitar, I’d be well and truly screwed. It was the instrument of my survival, for I was an itinerant bluesman heading for Clarksdale, Mississippi, the mecca of the blues.
Fact that I had only a passing knowledge of how to play the thing, that I didn’t know how to tune it, that I sang in a voice that only a mother could love and I could never remember lyrics worth a shit added up to me being about the sorriest bluesman managing to keep vertical a few hours of the day in the South or anywhere else for that matter.
You know that old Walkin’ Blues? “Woke up this mornin’, fumbled ‘round for ma shoes....” I’d learned, from my profligate ways, that such behavior in an itinerant bluesman, was a good way to end up in the dirt fulltime. Bogged in pigshit as I was, I saw light, a break of forest, my duffel, and the cutest little mud-covered pork roast you ever seen. Scrambling it all together, I grabbed my poke and the porker and knowing that no one would ever be able to remove me from my shoes without a buck knife, I lit into a shit-cakin’, hog squealin’, guitar bashin’ run for the forest.
And Lord be praised, if I didn’t make it well into the trees before I heard the first shotgun boom.

* * *

Man like me doesn’t spend much time wondering where he is. Where ever I find myself, there I is. However the peripherals make a magnitude of difference.
I’d obviously tied one on last night and through direction or my own non-existent navigation had spent the night in a pig flop. Worse had happened.
No more shots followed me into the woods, so I ran a crazy track for a good piece until I found some brush that I could settle in. Then I took off my jacket and rolled the quiet piglet into it. This was some pig, a little round baby, mostly belly, little screw tail and wet snout. Eyes that looked like they’d been open just a few days.
I set my hat out to dry and started scraping the mud off my trousers with a stick. I checked my neck and my Gammy’s hoodoo poke was still there. I moved all my fingers and joints, cranked my neck, popped my back. Nothing was broken, which was likely more as the result of my tender years, all 23 of them, than any lack of trying. When my face was scraped cleaner and the grit out of my teeth, I went into my duffle. My darling Bovrille, my prized six-string of no perceivable brand, still gleamed and was of a piece. I praised Lord Jesus, for his mercies, to my guitar, my fingers, my teeth and various other body parts as I felt around.
Best of all, I found my smoked black lenses were still of a piece. Those are very important to my sting. Took ’em off a blind man who no longer had any use for ‘em. Fear a bit of a curse for that.
I checked my bandit places, little sewn-in pockets in my duffel and pants-legs. I found a short dog of some evil-smelling liquor and that made me very happy. I found some scrap and some papers in my pant-cuff. So I rolled one and fired it up. I made water with no noticeable pain and got that fine warm feeling I always did when I felt the heft of my bad black boy. I started thinking about food, but not much, cause I always been skin and bone, a bit of muscle, too. But eating always came last to me after wang-dang-doodle and John Barleycorn.
I looked over at my coat and flung it open so that I could hang it over a branch to dry out. The poor little piglet rolled out, gave a weird grunt. I looked at this cute little muck-covered guy, or girl, I didn’t know which, and said, “Guess what Po’kchot, I don’t want to eat you, cause I got this rotgut here. Instead, you and me weez gonna be friends. And you’s gonna make me a wealthy itinerant bluesman.”
The pig made that noise again and I uncapped my bottle, ready for the adventures of a new day.

* * *

I set myself up on a street corner in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I’d dusted myself off, put on my smoked lenses and tapped my way over with my thin bamboo cane. I found a wood box down an alley without anyone really seeing what I was up to. I got comfy on my box and started banging on my guitar. I was a useless guitar player, but one kind fellow, on hearing how hopeless I was, had tuned my guitar to an open-G tuning. Thus, laying a finger aside any fret made a chord, and when I got out my pocket knife I could attempt to play a little slide guitar. The trick with the latter was to keep the vibrato going, so you never really landed on any particular note. It looked flashy and over time I had developed a few simple, workable slide solos. I had learned to tune my guitar from the top string down, but only into open-G. Ask me to return it to conventional tuning and I couldn’t do it on a bet.
I began plunking out a simple bass line with my thumb and used my fingers to get a bit of a rhythm pattern going. Then, I laid my knife along the strings and a metallic ring sung out of the box.

* * * *

Christmas in Clarksdale —1938

I’d pulled my coat collar up and pulled my hat down. Po’kchot, my piglet, was huddled in a blue flannel blanket in a wood box beside my bench. I’m a damn fine guitar player, but the cuteness of that pig makes us more money than my blues. So. I figure we’re business partners and I never scrimp when it comes to keepin’ her comfy or well fed. She’s been puttin’ on a few, too. Must be about 20 pounds now. I’ll never eat her. She’s my sweetie-pie. Kept each other warm during the autumn nights when I’d just wander into the woods after a day beatin’ the strings and settle down under a tree.

But, tonight was lookin’ to be a cold one. Couldn’t keep my strings in tune as the cold shortened them. Even when I lay the back of my knife on the strings they felt harder and there was a crisp raspiness to the friction and my notes had a certain eerie zing that I found appealing, even though when I played chords they sounded like a train wreck.

“Well, Po’kchot, looks like we’re gonna have to dip into the winter savings and get us a room for the night.” Here in Clarksdale there was the white-folks hotel, The Taft, the upper-class blacks hotel, The Lansing, and there was the Black Cat, a fine establishment if you woke up alive in the morn, but most of my fellow bluesmen stayed over at Jemima Belle’s rooming house. It was clean enough and sometime, when the weather was bad, a little jam session would get going in the back parlour. Trouble was, I’d never heard a policy on livestock. I didn’t know if Po’kchot would be a problem securing accommodation.

That I was sighted, though only in my right eye, was common knowledge among the bluesmen who populated the street corners of the town. Still, I wore my dark glasses hoping for a few sympathy pennies from the civilians. I’d walk around with my guitar slung across my back and my cane tapping out in front of me. I’d stuff Po’kchot in her warm blue blankie into my sailor’s rucksack and we could travel anywhere. She seemed to find it soothing and sleep-making to lay in the sack while I travelled. She’d been thrown into rail cars many a time and seem to roll with the impact. Hell, sometime I’d thrown her in before I got a good handhold and I’d be running fast alongside her car, grasping for a rung to pull myself in. I’d only lost her by a couple cars once. But I made the train and had to scramble across a few linkages to get to where I’d thrown her sack and my guitar. I found a white hobo feeling around her, when I walked in. So, I pulled out my signature Spanish Bowie —14 inches of blade and five of handle. Put the fear of the Almighty in the hobo rummaging through my stuff. As well it should. I’ve slashed a few bad men with that blade and stick it in to the hilt in a couple more. Lotta guys have guns now, stolen mostly from guys that didn’t know if a man is runnin’ toward you, you better shoot fast, because guys who are running at you are holding a blade and, in close quarters, I’ll take blade rather than a pistol any day. Quieter, deadler, less chance for a screw up. I got a gun, a beat-up derringer .25, handles shattered off it, just a barrel a firing pin and an trigger more or less. It’s in my sock and I know it might save me one day, but when all the chips are down, I’ll stay with the Spanish steel for getting the job done. Has a certain intimidation authority that is hard to beat, too.

I felt the cold wet slipping into my worn-out broguns. Newspapers had long been of use to me as insoles. I never read them much, but they folded up well and kept the rocks out of my shoes.

I saw the old harp player, Blind Boy Johnson, fumbling around on his corner. Sticking his tongue out to taste the snowflakes. A lot of us bluesmen are named Johnson. Robert, Tommy, Blind Willie, and so on. It ain’t no mistake. Some of us take the name to enhance our appeal, others just were inseminated by a lot of Johnsons. Others, like me, got the name from the ladies we bedded. Yes, I’m known for my skill with my knife, my fretboard and with the ladies. Been know to drink a few jars and remain standing and playing when others fell to the side, as well.

“B.B.,” I shouted. “It’s One Eye here. Wonderin’ if you could answer a question.”

Blind Boy stopped his fumbling about. “Well, I wish to tarnation that it would be any other brother than you, One Eye, but I’m not doing so well and I’m tired and wasted and can’t find my way home.”

This was heartening news. “So, I’ll help you back to Jemima Belle’s, sure enough. But I has the question.”

“No, I don’t has any whisky. I drank it all myself. No I don’t have any ’baccy. I need what I got to relax my frickin’ nerves. And, no, I don’t has any spare change cuz I never had any go flat. I need my hard-earned dough. But if you can get me back to Belle’s I would appreciate enough to give you a nickel for a beer.”

“Done,” I said. “Now, let’s get you straightened out here.” I took him by the shoulders and put him to sit on his barrel. I took the harp from his hand, a C# Hohner, I believe, and put it in his breast pocket among many others. “Okay, now you’ve got your instruments. Let’s see what else you need to take with you. His tin cup for offerings was at his feet and I warned him. “Keep those feet still, otherwise you’ll knock over your cup and all your day’s earnings will fall in the cracks of the boardwalk and we’ll never be able to get ’em.” I saw a sparkling dime in his cup and quiet as all heck I slipped it out without letting it rasp against the cup.

“What was that?” said the canny old buzzard.

“Nothing, I’m just getting you your day’s earnings, you old codger. Here it is in your favorite tobacco can, ya old poop. Now you’re squared away and I’ve gotta ask you a question.

He hustled the top of his ’baccy can on and gave it a stern twist then held it to his heart as if it were the Bible. “You sure you didn’t slip a few coins out of there?” He shook the can. “Seems like it might be a dime or a nickel light.”

“Look you old buzzard, I didn’t take a few of your coins. Now answer my question.”

“You can see.... You’ll take advantage of a blind man like me....”

“Look... well actually that’s not a good term, but I got one eye, scarred across the eyeball, the world looks like it’s got a piece of lumber in the middle of it, so don’t give me your abuse, you old hunk of lkeather. Looks like you got about ten bucks in your ’baccy can, so you can afford another bottle and some rent if you don’t get lost and robbed. I’m here to keep you from getting lost and robbed you dumb galoot.”

“Blind leading the blind....”

“Yeah sure, that’s sparklin’ witty, but what I have here is, y’know, my piglet Po’kchot?

“Mmm, that one’ll look good on a spit some day....

“Look you drunken coot, that piglet ain’t nobody’s meal, but she is my meal ticket. She’s what gives me the sympathy that you and your damned blind eyes got.” I gathered my breath for another barrage. “And if you weren’t too stupid to drink methyl alcohol, you would still have your eyesight. Ya dumbo tosspot.

“What I want is to get this piglet into Miss Belle’s But piglets need to shit and piss in the middle of the night, when you’ll be wrestlin’ with the devil taking your soul and I’ll be sleeping the sleep of the righteous.

“Now, how can I get this piglet in and get some kinda smell-proof accommodation made up?” I grabbed him by the throat and pulled his round brim down his nose

“Well po’k smells like po’k, no matter what you do. You can’t put that little one in with the big ones in a pen, they’d eat her within a minute”.

Vancouver Punk 1978 by Les Wiseman

2010-06-25T13:51:00.000-07:00

Due to the revival of interest in all things Vancouver Punk engendered by the showings of Susanne Tabata's feature-length documentary Bloodied But Unbowed, there has been unprecedented public demand for access to Les Wiseman's ephochal and earth-scorching article Punks on Parade, which first appeared in Vancouver magazine's September 1978 issue. Herewith, a link to that fabled document provided by El Dub himself.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/33565094/Vancouver-Punk-1978

Excelsior,

Les. Wiseman

Stillwater: A Memoir of Boyhood Part 6

2010-03-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

King Tut’s Mummy

(for Chris Sherwood)

I remember a time, so long ago, that affected me for the rest of my life. I was about nine years old. The Tutankhamun exhibit came to Vancouver. We lived in Squamish. I was this beautiful blond lad with a brylcreem flick at the front of his hair, large front teeth, the future world my oyster. I was going to become an archaeologist. (There’s a bright idea --actually no dumber than what I ended up doing with my life, truth be told.) My parents always being supportive, said, we had to go to the exhibit of the treasures of the boy pharaoh’s tomb.

It was in downtown Vancouver, what is now Skid Row, but was then the home of Woodward’s, the town’s biggest department store, which also had a major food floor and hence was a very decent area. My dad, Charlie Wiseman, only went to Pierre Paris on Hastings Street for his shoes and I believe he ordered the caulked boots for the M&B logging camps and was thus a somewhat important fellow to Mr. Paris.

In those days, there were no more drunks than a usual downtown, a few junkies, but they were quiet and sophisticated and hung to clubs like the Smilin’ Buddha. Most of all, there was no crack and what that causes, and no crystal methedrine.

Every Christmas, we’d drive Highway 99 to Hastings Street and park the green Mercury Montclair in the fabled Woodward’s parking lot (on the enclosed downward spiral Dad used to like to lay on the horn and delight me with the echoes, while my mother gave him the evil eye) and go visit Woodward’s proscenium. This was the seasonal stroll of young Vancouver and by young, I mean children. Woodwards had a walk-through that had huge Christmas displays behind glass. Fake snow, big sleighs, polar bears, penguins and reindeer - plus a Santa - that moved. In these days of CGI, that might not seem like much, but robotic marionettism in 1961 was quite the crowd puller.

Mom, in her gloves and fur coat, that I nestled in to sleep on so many car rides, would move me awestricken from giant window to giant window along with most of Vancouver and its whelps. Dad, with his fedora and pipe smoking, sportjacket and open collar, would stride along -in Pierre Paris shoes, no doubt. I felt so secure. (I recall that 20 years later I told my mother that I had a perfect life as a child, “And it wasn’t until I moved out on my own that my life went for a total shit.” Language aside, it was an anecdote my mother would often bring up, vindicating her upbringing skills.)

Another sidebar: At Krak-A-Joke, purveyors of fine plastic dog doodie and vomit, in the 500-block Seymour Street, my dad, brother and I had found a plastic pipe -black stem and brown bowl, just like Dad’s.

While we would walk the street, I’d ask Dad to fill up my pipe with smoke. Which he would do, covering the bowl to not allow the smoke to escape and handed it back to me. Then, two roués on the town we would walk the street. I was always heartily pleased when proper ladies would look shocked and lift their gloved hands to their lips in shock as this insouciant youngster puffed his old briar while perambulating with his obvious corrupter. Dad enjoyed it, too. All ladies wore gloves in those days.

But, back to the point. On one of our trips to Vancouver, we went to see the Treasures of Tutankhamun exibit, which was housed in the Carnegie Centre. Through high-ceilinged corridors cordoned with scarlet velvet ropes, we walked and peered at gold and stone sarcophagi, hammered gold necklaces and bracelets and all manner of Egyptiana. Yessir, this was to be my destiny, to roam the sands of Egypt, to enter the chambers of the pyramids that no one had entered for thousands of years. My destiny, face to face.

We came to the mummies and they really looked like hell, all wrapped or partially unbound to reveal sepia and black leathered skin. Their eyeless, noseless faces grinned in a dehydrated rictus, their teeth charred stumps. I knew what I was getting into; one day I would be unwrapping these guys myself.

Then we saw the mummified remains of a baby laying in a rotted wooden coffin. I remained cool, but something inside me snapped quietly. Oh God, the poor little thing was all wizened with a bald head barely the size of a hardball. Small shreds were torn out of the scalp revealing the bone beneath and little whisps of reddish hair sprouted haphazardly from its head. The same leathery smile as all the others on its black, torn lips.

I was quiet on the drive home. Just snuggled into Mom’s fur coat and watched the raindrops on the windshield race and merge.

That night, snug in my bed, my faithful stuffed lion, Lambert, and his best friend an ocelot named Simba, tucked in my arms I drifted off to a place that would never be the same again.

I was running along the twisting corridors of Carnegie Centre. I was alone and it was dark. Behind me came the click clop of something following. That dead leathery baby, its arms unswaddled and reaching out for me. The coffin clomping along the floor, swaying from side to side as one would presume the standard form of locomotion for vertical square-bottomed coffins in a hurry. I knew its touch would instantly tranform me into something similar, tight, black, knotted skin tugging at my bones. I could feel the tension of my skin pulling tighter into strands and blackening, dying. No moisture, only eternal darkness, trapped within that little immobile body, stuffed under thousand of tons of stone for millennia. Shoved in a slot, stone on all sides, tight as a bullet in a barrel, there to hear my mind scream for all eternity. Urgently, that little child was trying to catch up with someone to be its friend, to keep it company in the dark where it was trapped, afraid, desperate.

Night after night, though I’d struggle to stay awake, that child would chase me down those darkened halls wanting me to join it in its forever damned fate.

I overheard my mother once recounting to a friend about the exhibit, “The mummy of the baby quite disturbed Leslie.”

And it still does, it still does. To this day, I can hardly look at that page in the souvenir book that we bought at the exhibit. Like the mummified child, that book lies packed deep in boxes, surrounded by masses of other books, pounds and pounds of books, paper, screaming to get out, wanting me to open it to its page and share its horrible fate. It waits in terror and desperation. Waiting for me.

Epilogue: A few years back, I was recounting this tale to some of the ladies in the art department where I worked. My friend Chris Sherwood listened intently and with brow furled, said, “You know that mummy from the Tutankhamun exhibit is at the Museum of Man at UBC. It stayed here. If you wanted to go out and see it....”

Truly, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I felt dank, entombing blackness pour into my skull. It hadn’t left. It was waiting still.

-- 30 --

The Great 1971 or 1972 Pink Floyd Caper

2009-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

The Great Pink Floyd Caper

[This is dedicated to Randy Dahlquist, who also snuck in and was dealing with his own set of circumstances.]

I was in first-year university. Age 17 or 18. Didn’t have tickets for a band we loved called Pink Floyd, who were playing at the PNE Gardens auditorium. Creedance Clearwater Revival was filling the Pacific Coliseum with soon-to-be rednecks that night. So, I went in the back door of the Gardens about 3 p.m., said I was with the band. Had long hair, got waved through (just like an Obama event). I sat -zen like- onstage, under the piano, until a roadie asked me to help set up the gong --yes, the gong (that launched a thousand trips) on the back of Umma Gumma. Helped the guys out with various things, finding groupies to mend their trousers, which were those thin things Brits called loons. Roger Waters came out and nodded to me and sound checked One of These Days. When I nodded that it was cool, he nodded back and walked off.
Then they let the crowd in and I was standing centre stage and in walked the most beautiful hippie princess I loved from UBC.

She saw me.

It was awesome.

Finally, someone said, get off the stage and I went down and saw the Meddle show, with speakers 360 degrees (unheard of at the time) at the Vancouver Gardens. Mindblower. Floyd had strippers for the encore. I was about 18; I didn’t know that a large part of my life would eventually revolve around naked women. (It was a different time, you laughing fkrs.)

Couple nights later, the hippie princess is working the commisary in residence. I buy a chocolate bar and she says, "Hey, I saw you onstage with Pink Floyd the other night."

My chest and other parts grew large. "What did you think," I asked, referring to both the Floyd and myself. "I fkn hate Pink Floyd," she said. "I only went because my boyfriend said he'd cut me off if I didn't go."

I went back to my small Place Vanier room and thought a lot. There was a great lesson to be learned there. And oh how I learned it year after year after year....

--30 --

Stillwater: A Memoir of Boyhood Part 5

2009-08-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

The Beatles Come to Stillwater:

I remember a summer game of tag on a big lawn beside a house that overlooked Stillwater’s main industrial area. Below where we played, a tiered set of sun-faded,grey, wooden stairs led down to what was essentially a marshalling yard. The big old building where my Dad worked as a personnel man and timekeeper was on the left side as you looked down. Logging trucks were parked on the right by a huge airplane hangar-like corrugated-aluminum machine shop like the top half of a giant culvert. Arc-welding constantly flashed through the doors. The rest of the land was dust, bordered by tall alders. An ancient wooden dock stuck into Stillwater Bay and, from about forty feet out, it was all log booms from one side of the bay to the other. Boom boats, those stubby little cartoon ships, bumped and rocked and shoved the booms around into some sort of order. Men in caulked boots ran along them with pike poles and pickaroons. Dust roads ran off to tattered residences converted from old bunkhouses along the shoreline.

There was a sort of gravel pit along one of these roads and it was full of trimmings from the alder trees that had overgrown the logging roads. It was a massive pile of small-cut branches and leaves maybe twenty feet tall. We could climb up the shell of this sort of amphitheatre and, huffing and puffing at the effort, could stand at the top of the precipice and with a hop, skip and jump go soaring through the air to land on our bottoms twenty-five-feet below on a soft cushion of flora. Today, the very idea makes me sick to my stomach. The potential for a stick prodding through somebody was there, but no one got hurt. Despite repeated attempts. It was one of those mystical, blessed summers.

Anyway, safe on the lawn of the foreman’s white picketed yard, overlooking the dustbowl and the bay, we were in a tizzy. All week, the TV was promoting the appearance of this group that all the bigger kids were listening to on their radios. They were called The Beatles and at The Hudson’s Bay in downtown Powell River, you could buy grey Beatles sportsjackets with black velour collars and even Beatle wigs. It was rumored that one of the big kids who went to high school in Powell River was actually sighted buying one of these toupees.

And this musical combo was to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, this night, Sunday. We were all crazy for it, especially the girls. We constantly quizzed each other on the four bandmembers’ names. Ringo was the flat-out favorite throughout North America and so he was with the girls in our crowd. He shook his hair a lot, girls screamed and gave those of us who would grow to be big-beaked a lot of hope. (Especially years later when he married the luscious Barbara Bach.)

As the appointed hour neared, we spun madly around on the lawn, even the simple rules of tag forgotten in our excitement. I would yell out the word, “Ringo!” and Mousie and Penny would scream. Then they’d regroup and tell us how they were going to do exactly that when they watched in their living rooms tonight. We -me and my buddy Kimbo- in no way thought that was excessive. With the small bit of testosterone that a nine-year-old lad has, I felt I might make a peep myself.

Eight o’clock and we were all ushered into the living room of the foreman’s big house. Stilted Ed murmured a few things about having met these “fine young men.” He’d been around the entertainment scene as the Talk of the Town columnist for eons before he unexpectedly became the biggest thing on television. He knew that long hair and loud music was to be tolerated and that, if it drew in an audience, he only stood to win.

Looking back on those performances of She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand, I can see how much appeal that band had. I can’t really listen to them anymore as I’ve heard all the songs ad nauseum. But when I was researching this piece and watching that performance on YouTube, there was definitely some great music and incredible charisma and magnetism. The New York audience screamed themselves silly, as did Mousie and Penny. I was charmed by the lads, never realizing their later songs Revolution #9 and Good Night would be the only songs of theirs I could tolerate, some forty-five years later.

A few weeks later on the Sullivan show, I saw a band that I knew would make everyone forget about The Beatles, they were just so much better: The Dave Clark Five.

Stillwater: A Memoir of Boyhood Part 4

2009-08-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

The over-rated science-fiction author Harlan Ellison has always had some pretty good things to say. One of them was: “Mothers are meant to do three things: love you; feed you and give away your comic book collection.”
This is my tale of that.
I had ‘em all: Avengers #1, X-Men #1, Fantastic Four #4, Daredevil #1, Marvel Tales #1, The Hulk when the Hulk was grey, Tales to Astonish with Ant-Man, Journey into Mystery with that early Kirby or Ditko Thor.
And, lo, there came to be a thing called a rummage sale at Stillwater Community Hall. My mother, though I had proved to her that reading comic books gave me superheroic grades in reading in school, decided that my comic book collection was a waste of space. And, after all, you’ve read them, they’re finished. My mother, one of the great readers of all time, could not understand the joy of rereading or collecting. Not getting collecting, I sort of understand. We were always surrounded by what would now be called tchotckes -beautiful figurines of birds and courtly ladies and gents. Mom presents. I’ll never forget, one time, breaking something and my Mom just sitting down and holding her head and saying, “I’ll never have one good thing, kids keep breaking them. Everything I’ve got has been glued together.” It was a horrible moment. Certainly I didn’t break much. I remember years later when I broke something and she said, “Don’t worry about it.” And years later when she broke a Persian glass goblet, one of a pair I had given her with a bottle of Kahlua for us to toast a lonely Christmas, alone together, I remember telling her, “I didn’t give you those to cause you any pain. It’s gone, let’s just be happy we have each other and don’t have to worry about it.” A few years later she knocked over a brand-new television, but that wasn’t her fault. She had her routine for going to bed and drawing the curtains around the house and suddenly this new thing was in her way, not on a proper stand. Ah breakage, it all comes down to it doesn’t it? Breakage of spirits, of bodies, of lives. Such loss. Life, it isn’t for the faint of heart. Life, it doesn’t end well.
Mom’s favorite book was Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. If you’ve read it that explains much.
Anyhow, the comics were donated under much duress and, likely, tears. That night, at the same hall incidentally as the unfolding of the Tale of Hot Dog Suit (see further back in this blog), my friends swarmed me. It was a wilding of sorts. “Man, get over there, there’s all these great comics and they’re all in PERFECT CONDITION. And, the lady there is selling them for A NICKEL EACH OR THREE FOR A DIME!”
My stomach and nuts descended that night to levels that I’m not sure they’ve ever recovered from.
While my Mom was compis mentis, I would recount this tale to her. She would always look guilty and say, “I didn’t know!”
“Those comics are worth $200,000 each now, Mom! I could’ve been a millionaire.”
When she had lost her mind, I still occasionally muttered it to her.
Now, I’m a semi-pro comic dealer. I’m not a millionaire. Though, Mom, I could’ve been.
And, yes, she loved me and fed me. She gave away my comic collection. She was a great Mom.

Stillwater: A Memoir of Boyhood Part 3

2009-07-22T18:32:00.000-07:00

My Mom and I were sitting in the Westview Mall at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where they had that awesome grape pop bubbling away in some plastic vat and fairly palatable burgers. She said to me, “What do you want to go as for Hallowe’en.” Ever the freak, I looked around me and said, “A hotdog.” Never one to be daunted, Mom said, “OK.”
So, my dad, my brother, and my Mom got some chicken wire and formed a hotdog bun, my size from knee to neck. Then my Mom got some vinyl of a hot-doggish brown color. From this, she made a semi-elliptical skirt to my knees and a helmet, with eyes, of course. She covered the chicken wire with an old sheet that she died bun brown, and to make the edges authentic, she couldn’t spring for yellow paint, so we used French’s mustard. Nobody in our staid British family ate anything as spicy as French’s mustard except my bro, so he was SOL and Mom used up the jar. Right before we had to go to the town hall for the Halloween, she slathered my sides with French’s. Naturally, with any sort of mask, you lose a certain portion of your vision and with this mask a major portion. Also, because of the vinyl hood, hearing was highly impaired as well. Still, Mom, God bless her, had given me what I wanted, despite the patent absurdity of the concept.
Proud as Punch, I waddled out to the car and everyone got in. But me. This was a problem we had not considered. I could not bend, plus I was massive. I believe, because of the masses of French’s mustard that I was wearing, someone fetched a tarpaulin and covered the back seat. Then my brother and father tipped me over and, getting French’s mustard all over their shirts, loaded me horizontally in the back of the 1960 green Ford Mercury Montclair.
The ride to the town hall was reminiscent of Edgar Poe’s Premature Burial. I couldn’t see, hear or move. And I was particularly concerned that my chicken wire exoskeleton was denting out of bun perfection.
Eventually, we got there and I was unloaded in complete indignity, rather like a log being pulled off the greenchain. So, thus discombobulated, with only the most rudimentary vision and virtually no hearing, I went in to the gala event.
Of course nobody recognized me and I couldn’t eat or drink anything, so I just wobbled around. Some girl kept coming up and trying to be lovey-dovey to me and I kept telling her to leave me alone. It was the next day that my parents told me that the girl was my friend Reg. I don’t know if Reg carried on with his cross-dressing practice in later life, but he certainly had talent.
Then there was the judging of the costumes. I couldn’t tell this was going on as I was deaf and half blind, but someone shoved me in a ring and I shambled around in circles. The system was that they would call you out as you were eliminated, but since I was effectively removed from communication with the rest of the world, someone eventually had to grab me by the shoulders and lead me away from the competition. I hope the fkr still smells of French’s mustard to this day.
To say that the hot dog-costume episode was a disaster would be understatement. I eventually got removed from the iron-lung-like apparatus so I could enjoy the party. But, I was one tuckered little cowboy by then and all I wanted to do was go home to bed and take comfort with Lambert my lion.

* * * *

Stillwater: A Memoir of Boyhood Part 2

2009-07-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

I remember the day John Kennedy died. (And I love the Lou Reed song of the same name) November 22, 1963. I was in fourth grade. The teachers were called to an emergency conference. Me, being a little keener (suck was the term used in those days) was told to look after the class of mixed grade fours and fives. When Mr. Cooper, our teacher, came back to the room I immediately started launching in to various indiscretions committed by my classmates. He told me that wasn’t important right now. That the president of the the United States had been fatally shot. And we were going to get the afternoon off. Parents were being called and anyone who couldn’t be picked up could be billeted for the afternoon with friends. They were working the phones.
My brother, being in the Canadian Navy, had instilled in me a hatred for everything Yank. I was cavalier, came home to Mom and told her that I was glad we got the day off and didn’t care about John Kennedy whatsoever. Realizing she would be talking to an idiot, she told me he was a good man, that nobody deserved to be assassinated and to be a bit respectful.
When my brother came home from working at the Powell River pulp mill, I laughed about Kennedy being shot. He just looked at me strange and said it was no laughing matter. So, I stayed quiet the rest of the day and spent it reading The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animals, one of my favorite books, which I still have in the bookcase beside where I write, today.
Maturity gave me some perspective on the Kennedy tragedy, as did the Lou Reed song. Twenty five years later, noir novelist James Ellroy also made me realize I wasn’t a hundred percent off track with my feelings. Jack the Haircut.
They say everybody remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot and that’s my recollection. I’m not proud of it, but I was a kid.
In the early 1980s, I visited Jack Kennedy’s gravesite and leaped over the chain fence to light my Kool 100, just so I could say I did it. Pretty near lost the front of my hair and the guards at Arlington were not impressed. Neither were the United States Travel Service when I recounted the incident in a Vancouver magazine article called Bell, Book & Scandal. To his credit, my editor, Mac Parry defended the onslaught of letters by saying that many readers had written in to observe that my article was “brilliant.” Whether they did or not, I dunno. But I owe Mac for that one --and many others, but those are different tales.

* * * *

Stillwater: A Memoir of Boyhood

2009-07-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

In many meditation techniques you are told to remember a place where you were happy. This always leaves me pondering and ignoring any further instruction. One day, after hundred of hours of thought, I finally realized the one place I was truly happy. What follows and will be continued daily is my memory of those days when I was nine and lived in Stillwater, B.C., near Powell River. It should be considered a meditative blog. I hope it takes you away from your problems for a moment each day and that it will conjure up your own special place/time.

Stillwater: A Memoir of a Boyhood

I remember back when I entered fourth grade. I would have been eight years old, nine in October. The year 1962.
My father worked for MacMillan Bloedel and we were used to being transferred around the province. This would be my fourth school in four years. The House the Company provided us was, in a word, spectacular. And it was there, in Stillwater, seventeen miles south of Powell River, that I had some of the happiest times of my life.
The house itself was really something. It seemed huge and antebellum to me. It was white frame or shiplap, had two stories and a veranda. One entered via a boardwalk through arbors covered in hops vines. Immediately one was in the living room and, oddly, off the living room there was a paneled door to the master bedroom. To the right through a coved archway was the dining room with a bay window facing the front yard and again, oddly, there was the door to the smaller bedroom which was to be mine --occasionally to be shared with my brother, Stan, when he returned from the sea.

This house would be responsible for some major obsessions in my life that would result in --with all due modesty-- a mind obsessed with the bizarre, macabre and morbid.
My parents were older. In 1962, my dad would have been 61, my mother, 51. I recall being obsessively afraid that they would die. I once horribly startled my mother by awakening her by placing a hand over her nose to see if she was still breathing. Man, was she freaked out and who could blame her, she probably thought I was trying to smother her. But, I was totally terrified that IT had happened and here I was left alone in this scary house. And it was a scary house. But to that later.
My fear of my parents demise instilled in me a fear that I could only take to God, and so each night I would pray: “Please God and Jesus: Please let my parents live to be well over 100 years old and at least please don’t let them pass away until I’m at least 21 years old.” At 21, you were supposed to be a grown-up and be able to handle whatever life handed you.
I was also plagued by nightmares and I would pray myself to sleep each night asking the Lord and His Son, to allow me not to dream. And I could not recall any of my dreams again until I was in my mid teens.
The house was stone scary. It seemed to me to be the archetypal haunted house. Prayer and my faithful, strong and true, stuffed lion, Lambert, were my protectors. Thirty-eight years later, I am still plagued by nightmares of haunted houses. I was afraid to get out of the sheets at night to use the toilet. However, I was able to hold on through the night until someone got up in the morning. Then, I really had to go. However, if someone was in the bathroom I was at my wits end. My mother would direct me outside. But, being a proper little boy, I would not just go in the wilderness. No, I had to have a wide-mouth Mason jar in which to micturate and then bring the product back into the house to be flushed down the toilet. A couple of times, I recall having to use the same method when I had to move my bowels. This did not particularly please my mother, who would just be handed the jar to dispense with.
When my brother stayed with us and he slept in the bottom bunk, I rested much easier.
My brother would have been 22 or so in 1962 or 1963. While sharing a bedroom was fine for visits, he required his own room when his term in the Navy was complete and he reentered civilian life. He took the second floor, which was accessed by a weathered, grey, wooden staircase at the rear of the house. There was a doorless doorway dividing the space under the peak of the roof in half. His room was at the front of the house and on the otherside of the doorway was a storage area with two beds covered in toys and camping equipment under the angled ceiling flanking the passageway to his room. In that half, I could play quietly, protected, as he slumbered in the next room, resting from the young man’s excesses that would see him join a twelve-step program twenty years later.
My parents had instilled in me a prodigious ego. I was generally the top student in my grade and they always assured me that I was incredibly intelligent. This, combined with an obsessive reading of super-hero comic books conspired to give me a sense that one day, I might become super-intelligent, like many super heroes, including Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic of Marvel Publishing’s Fantastic Four.
I used to perform experiments. One of these involved a dart gun game, I had been given. In those rougher days, a dart gun was a metal pistol with an incredibly strong steel spring. You inserted a dart with a suction cup on its end down the barrel until it locked. Then you had a fully loaded weapon that could actually put someone’s eye out. If you took the suction cup off the dart, you were essentially in possession of deadly force. As a paranoid kid, I usually went around armed, with a loaded dart gun, no suction cup, or a sword. Anyhow, the other component of this dart game was a target that featured a cardboard stand-up of an airforce commander urging me to shoot and a circular piece of cardboard featuring a UFO that was supported on a piece of spring steel. You set it in motion and it swung back and forth. If you hit the UFO, it fell over backward and the lever action pulled up a sign on the stand-up that said you had scored 100 points for the good guys.
Okay, so I had this disk that would swing back and forward. Hypnotically. Given my assumptions about my ability to become a mad scientist and rule the world, I covered the disk with shiny aluminum foil. Then I set the device on the table in front of my brother’s window so that it would catch the sunlight. Then I woulld set the amazing hypno-machine in motion, emanating its mesmerising, mind-crippling rays on the populace of Stillwater, B.C. I thoroughly expected that I would soon see the populace, blank eyed and drooling lumbering up the dirt road to converge on our front lawn to await instruction from their master --me.
I spent a lot of time keeping that disk waving back and forth and waiting to no avail. I also often tried a more close up application for the amazing Hypno-machine. I tried to hypnotize all my friends, Kim, Mousie and Penny, to bend them to my will. Sometimes they reported feeling somewhat odd after staring at the disk for five minutes or more. Kim had some vague idea that if we could hypnotize the girls, we could get them to take their clothes off. But, that was a bit advanced for one such as I who simply wanted to rule the world.
What a maroon!

Anyhow, on either side of the upstairs rooms, there were hatchways leading into... I never new what. But it was dark and dusty. My brother would terrify me with speculation that there might be rats or bats in there. I more favoured arcane trunks filled with evil and possibly small homunculuses, warped and malevolent. As you can see, I was like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s characters trapped in an ancient New England house while other worlds swirled about my perceptions full of forces and creatures out of space and time.
Now, I see that this fear of alternate dimensions coexisting with our reality is the primary theme in my fiction writing. Stillwater is certainly where some of it came from. Certainly my Christian upbringing was another source. And also at that time a show came on television that seemed directly for me. Its name was The Outer Limits.

* * * *

Out back there was an old ramshackle double car garage and workshop. The garage had a dirt floor. The shop was a place where my brother made cannons. He would take old pipes or rifle barrels and cut them off, put them in a handmade caisson, put in gunpower and wadding and a ball bearing and then he would call me in for the ignition. He would have drilled a fuse hole and then he would light it. Fkn thing would go off like an atomic bomb and blow a hole right through the walls of the old shop. The kickback would also blow the caisson back through another wall. We would stand there and stare at each other. I think that may be where I first hear the phrases, Holy s***, Holy fk, Fk me, and other such epithets. Shortly, Stan realized that if he put the barrel of the cannons in the workbench vice, it would make for less mayhem and he began blowing out the other wall of the shop. Serious chunks blew out of those walls, but behind us was only a compost heap and then acres of forest. Lord knows, there are probably a few alder trees still there with ball bearings deeply embedded in their trunks.
My brother was also notable for several other matters that are indelibly scorched into my brain. First, I have to say that my family was not into hockey or football. We watched All-Star Wrestling, which originated from CHEK studios in Burnaby, with congenial host Ron Morrier, ads done live with “your haberdasher, Fred Asher.” Thus, we were all conversant with the figure-four suplex, the flying dropkick, the claw, the sleeper hold and such. So, once when we were playfighting in the front yard, I, thinking I pretty much had the same fighting skills as Batman, Spider-Man or Thor, at very least Gene Kiniski, Whipper Billy Watson or “The Mormon Giant” Don Leo Jonathan, assaulted my brother with the aforementioned flying dropkick. Now, I was not a particularly long legged nine-year-old, so when I launched both my feet in the air with all my might, I became a horizontal missile aimed at my brother’s chest just as I had seen dozens of time in the squared circle. However, I had underestimated those fine grapplers and their strength. Thus, I became about a 90-pound missile vectoring right to my bro’s nards. I had launched myself full out and he went down like a stone. And he didn’t move. I freaked and tried to get him to speak. He didn’t speak. And he lay there like silent death for the longest time. I had killed my brother. How would I tell Mom and Dad this?
My brother lay there in a fetal position. I sweated, as far as that is possible for a nine-year-old. I cursed having spent so much time reading Bruce Tegner Teach Yourself Karate books. Eventually, I think my brother managed to croak out, “Go away.” Which I did -with dispatch.
I’ve never really found out what happened that day. I believe I was too afraid to ask him about it until another 15 years had passed. By that time he couldn’t even recall the incident. Thank God for small infirmities.

* * * *

Another time I was annoying my brother somehow and he suggested I go fishing. Sounded good, so off I went with a chunk of wood with some fishing line around it and a hook. I put a few worms from the compost heap in an Old Chum tobacco can. My dad was a pipe smoker and hence we always had tons of tobacco cans around. As a consequence, everything was much better organized in those days: checkers, marbles, bolts, screws, worms.
It can hardly be overstated how idyllic our setting was in Stillwater. Facing the house, the lot to the right had an old abandoned house on the back of the lot. The yard was essentially chest-high hay with a few massive blackberry brambles around the edges. A pipe had broken in the yard somewhere, so there was always a puddle like a small pond in the middle of the yard. No one would have ever thought of fixing it. It was only water in those days. I believe there was some sort of wire fence that was easily vaulted and the house stood unlocked and we kids would play there all the time. A real house for a playhouse.
Past that yard was woods. Just raw, untamed forest, primarily alder and bracken and sawtooth ferns. In those days, you would just tell your Mom, or whatever adult, that you were going to play in the woods. You would plunge into the forest and resurface for lunch and dinner. The rest of you time you were on your own and no one was ever afraid. There were cougars and bears in those woods, but we never saw one. One kid did see a bear when he was walking to school, but he just abruptly turned aboutface and walked home. The bear was never seen again. Though we were all warned that if we saw a bear cub that it’s mother was surely around somewhere and that we should get away. Scientists said to back quickly away while trying to make some loud noise. Loggers told us just back away and then run like hell. We figured the loggers had the more practical method.
And no one was worried about tramps or sex perverts in the woods. If we came across where someone had made a fire or a camp, we just gave them their privacy; there was lots of woods to go around. As for us being out there and our parents concerned about perverts or kidnapping, I think those things were just never even considered in 1962. We didn’t have the media coverage in those days. TV was Fun-O-Rama and bolo-bat championships. If you could hit the ball with you bolo bat 30 times you signed an affadavit to that effect and sent it on to KVOS-12 and in about six weeks you got a badge that said, “Bolo Bat Champion,” which you could wear proudly to all occasions but church.
So, off in the woods, there was an underground creek. Now, someone had dug a hole to reveal the creek and they had handily built a square frame from sticks to hold the hole open and you could lie on the forest floor and watch little trout from minnows to nine-inchers swimming down the creek. I dislike killing things, but in those days I toed the line and fishing was allegedly cool. So, I wormed the bait on the hook dropped it into the water and watched a nice little trout take it. Pulled him out and, as I was taught by my mother, I grabbed a stick and clubbed him on the head until dead. I did this twice more and walked back home. I brought the three fish up to my brother, who was working on his 57 Chevy. “Here,” I said. “I’ve been fishing. Now what should I do?”
I had been gone ten minutes.

* * * *

As you faced the house, to the left was an orchard of cherry trees, then a wall of blackberry brambles completely isolating us from the next door neighbors. At the very back of the yard, bordered again by interminable forest, was an old chicken coop. My father and brother cleaned it out and it became my fort. It had big doors that opened out, so it was a rather welcoming fort and soon it was coopted by my friends, the sisters Penny and Mouse. I can no longer remember their family names, but they lived up at the top of a big gravel-roaded hill. They were such good friends, that I used to knock on their door after dinner to ask if they could come out to play. Being an incredibly shy child this was some measure of how much I liked them. Penny was large-boned, round jawed with dusty-colored wavy hair kept close to her face. She always had a bit of a double chin and this may have contributed to her somewhat grumpy disposition. Mouse, whose real name may have been Joanne, however was a stone beauty. In those happy days, before puberty threw a spanner into the works, one could acknowledge the beauty of another kid without even conceiving of jumping their bones. She was thin and had long blonde hair, seemingly always tanned and was a tomboy. In other words, you could hang out with a sylphen beauty, a wood nymph if you will, and in the forest there was never the slightest brainflicker of impropriety. While you gain so much with the onset of sexuality, you also lose much -and looking back fondly from having passed the lion’s share of my allotted four score and 10, I wonder which was the happier state. I seem to be writing about this one.
I remember once climbing the hill and going to the door and asking for Mousie. She came to the door and said, she’d be a few minutes. They were just having dessert. “Minute Rice,” she said, “and you know how that only takes a minute to eat.” She was so pretty, so fun, that such a little joke as that has stuck to me throughout my life. It should be noted as well that dietary habits were much different in the early 1960s. White rice was often served as a dessert, topped with white sugar and milk. Maybe a few raisins. As an entrée or sidedish, it would not catch on for a few years. Fried rice was available at Chinese restaurants, but was frowned on as a bit of a waste of money. After all, it was only rice.
Anyhow, Penny soon commandeered my fort into a tea room. Little plastic cups and saucers started appearing, an old beat-up tablecloth, some comics.
What to serve though? We never for an instant considered real tea. And the idea of kids with kettles of boiling water was unsound. What we did have was a vast resource of blackberries. Great roiling walls, eight feet high of blackberries. Enough for our parents to make jams, jellies, pies and tarts to circle the world if laid end to end. And there were still more, great heavy vines, more like boughs, laden with the blue-black fruit.
Penny, being the practical one, got some clean cloth and we squeezed the fruit into juice, which went in to the tea pot and was then doled out in tiny cups by Penny the teamaster.
It wasn’t particularly thirst quenching, but that summer we were part of a secret society known only by the purple rings around our cupid’s bows and the purple fingers and palms we sported for the day, those summer days.

* * * *

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 33

2009-04-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

On the drive home, I voiced my thoughts to Lex. “Maybe I could get a book out of this story. Even if no one believed Ste. Germaine’s story as nonfiction, it wouldn’t matter. The lunatic fringe would slurp it up, as fact and the relatively sane would find it a compelling tale regardless. A bit of a world history through one man’s eyes and because of Ste. Germaine’s memory I can avoid the shitloads of research that such a book would normally entail. What d’ya think, Lex, my man?”

He lay on the passenger seat, for once not rubbernecking the passing sights. His eyes were half slits, just an occasional glimmer of emerald catching an overhead streetlight. I thought his reunion with Ste. Germaine must have spawned many thoughts and memories. They say a cat’s brain is about the size of a walnut, but this cat was doing some heavy thinking —and I was certain there was more to Lex than was contained in the confines of his hide. His tail quivered and whipped back and forth, smacking the dusty upholstery. Turning to me, he let out a squawk.

“That’s an awful squeak coming from such a big boy,” I said. He yawned, showing a brilliant pink healthy mouth and needle-sharp fangs. Then he put his head between his paws and unleashed a loud sigh. He’d had enough for tonight. His tail twitched a few more times, then I heard a few preliminary snorts and his chainsaw snores fired up.

When we got home, I carried him out of the car and plopped him onto my bed. He looked up at me, released a guttural squawk and fell once more into the caress of sleep.

* * * *

Next day, Jayne came with me to the library, where we looked up anything we could on the Mandylion. Most people would not expect it, but Jayne was a bear for research. Because she was famous for her body and the roles she landed were less than cerebral, she enjoyed any chance to learn about things that would give her something intelligent to think and talk about. Of course, explaining to Mickey how popcorn works would probably wow that audience for days.

We were deep in the theology section and Jayne struck gold first. “Hey, y’know the Mandylion isn’t the only cloth with the face of Jesus.”

“There’s that shroud thing in Italy, right? Full length, supposed to be his burial shroud that Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Him in as he lay Him in his own tomb.”

“Okay,” she said, dubiously. “But there’s also this other one of just His face called the Sudarium. And given what you’ve told me about Ste. Germaine’s run in with Him, I think it might be germane —if you will forgive the pun.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Okay, but this could be important. At the same station of the cross where Christ stumbled and Ste. Germaine, known as Caraphilus then, yelled at Him to get moving, a woman who came to be known as St. Veronica took pity on Him and stepped up and wiped the grime and sweat and blood off His face. After she stepped back into the crowd, she noticed that Christ’s face had been imprinted on her handkerchief. Allegedly, this vera icon or true icon is in the Vatican and is one of three true relics that are brought out at special ceremonies in St. Peter’s.”

“So, this cloth really exists?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard the Vatican has Jesus’s foreskin. Do you believe that?”

“That does sound a bit suspect, but then again, they don’t bring that one out like they ostensibly do with the Veronica.”

“If they did, it doesn’t sound like it would be terribly impressive.”

“Don’t talk like that. It’s ... sacreligious or something....”

* * * *

The research corroborated Ste. Germaine’s story. The Mandylion had disappeared in a raid of cursaders on Constantinople. When Jayne and I broke for coffee, we tried to suss out Ste. Germaine’s story. If this Hoxhok character was so stoked on being a North American native wizard, why would he get involved in something from the ancient Middle East.

“Well,” said Jayne, “I think it all has to do with the Easter period. Y’see, Mormons believe that after Christ died on the cross and when he was resurrected, he was seen in North America by native people and that this knowledge was given to the church founder John Smith and that he then received the Book of Mormon and formed the Church of Latter Day Saints based on Jesus’s brief visit.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

She tapped her temple and grinned. “Kidneys, man, kidneys.”

“So you think Hoxhok can increase his power here in the New World by accumulating Old World talismans that relate to the period between the crucifiction and the resurrection.”

“From what you’ve told me, Ste. Germaine was rattled. I don’t take him for the needlessly nervous type. So, yeah, that’s what I think. He’s worried that someone —Hoxhok— is going to accumulate a psychic power that we haven’t seen in a couple thousand years.”

“Jesus....”

“Precisely.”

* * * *

2009-03-15T10:47:00.001-07:00

A Cat's Christmas on Mars

2008-12-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

A CAT'S CHRISTMAS ON MARS

Deathdogs, flamingos and flying bisons soar over immense herds of wildebeests. The animals of the plain flock together forming a phalanx as the page is turned.

The cat, a golden tabby, looks up and flips another page with its paw. Casting a wary glance at its masters who doze turkey-sodden by the Christmas tree in the adjoining room, the cat moves its paw into the picture and with a quick claw movement plucks out a wildebeest. The beast frets. Its heaving chest pulsates as the cat flips it into the air, then holds it to the carpet with one paw as it looks away seemingly disinterested. The panic-spawned bellows are as the sound of gravel rolling on tiled floors. The cat lifts the bovine creature to its eyes and sniffs the smell of the high grass and terror-induced sweat. The cat's eyes widen as its paws squeeze imperceptibly causing the animal's shrieks of panic to turn into moans of death agony. The tiny ribs creak and bend and finally break until the small bit of fur vomits and excretes bits of blood and waste over the floor. With a sniff, the cat bats the crushed, mutilated carcass back into the confines of the photograph. The two-dimensional universe is returned to normal as a pack of jackals, spurred on to unnatural voracity and courage by the smell of blood, disperse the herd of stunned wildebeests, and leap with maddened blood hunger on the carcass.

The gift books scattered about room show pictures of a place called Earth that over the centuries had suffered such radiation degradation that it had to be abandoned. New mutations were cropping up constantly. Few realized that mutations could be psychic as well as physical.

The cat thrusts its muzzle into another photograph and grabs an elephant between its teeth. Looking around guiltily he runs to a corner to masticate his prey.

The cat notices the boy, tow-headed in a new blue cardigan, come into the room and kneel over a book. With tweezers the boy pulls an air bison from the pages. The bison flits frantically on the tweezers while the boy inspects the beast. The child's grip loosens however and the bison flies irratically around the room. The cat leaps and within seconds is crunching bones between his teeth. "Good Kitty," laughs the boy and pats the cat's head.

"Here Kitty, you'll like this," the boy says. He opens a book entitled The World of Disney and reaching in with tweezers he pulls out a black bipedal mouse wearing white gloves and red shorts with large black buttons. He drops the mouse to the carpet and it scurries toward a corner. But the cat is immediately upon it.

The boy laughs and picks up another book. Its title is The Night Before Christmas. The boy turns to a page showing a jolly, fat man in a red suit. The cat looks on hungrily.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 32

2008-08-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

Next morning, I was up early, nursing a post celebratory hangover. I hadn’t celebrated with anybody but Lex, who had joined in with three dishes of beer before falling into a noisy snoring sleep. I was downing coffee and aspirin when the phone rang. It was Pat Kennedy. He was on the boil.

“Of all the irresponsible journalism you’ve ever foisted on your reading public, this has got to be the worst,” he barked.

“I didn’t know you read The Inquistor,” I said, cheerfully.

“Well, a copy ended up on my desk this morning and I couldn’t believe the puke I was reading. How dare you speculate on all these loose connections.”

“I’m betting there’s more than a grain of truth to what I wrote,” I said.

“Betting is for the horsetrack, not for speculation on unsolved felonies. You’ve set our investigations back weeks, not to mention abusing the public trust.”

“The public trust is something that should not exist. Everyone should question what they read. And I have no doubt that if you follow up on what I’ve theorized in my piece that your investigation will accelerate toward confirming what I’ve speculated.”

“You seem awfully sure of yourself.”

“Maybe I’m not publishing such unfounded speculation after all.”

There was a dead silence. Then, “Who’s the movie producer?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said. “I’ve got to see what kind of death threats I get today, then maybe I’ll slip that to you.” I hung up.

* * * *

The phone was still warm when it rang again.

“Good day, Mr. Holcomb. I read with interest your story in today’s Inquisitor…”

“Who’s calling please?”

“My name is Ste. Germaine.”

A wave of hangover nausea swept through me and I sprang sweat all over my body. “How may I help you Mr. Ste Germaine.”

“I would like to meet with you to discuss some matters that might interest you.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Ste. Germaine, but I make it a policy never to meet with readers. It’s just a matter of personal security.”

“Put Lex on the phone.”

My sweats notched up a few pints per second and my knees threatened to give out. “How do you know about Lex?”

“Lex and I have known each other for years, Mr. Holcomb.”

“What? You want me to put a cat on the phone to you?”

“That’s correct. His conversation is more intelligent than most humans I have met. Plus, I think he is one of the few character references you would believe.”

I felt as if I had just swigged a bottle of bourbon and it was rolling into my head.

Lex was staring at me. Hell, why not? I put the receiver to his ear. I could hear muttering over the line then that gutteral snore that was Lex’s purr rolled through the room. He languidly closed his eyes and his paws started to make the milking motion in air that cats make when they are luxuriant.

I pulled the earpiece back to my own head. “You seem to have a friend.”

“And, I’m proud to say, I have had for a number of years. We must get together and you must bring Lex.”

“It’s easier if you come over here, Lex can’t really sit in a café. Or we could come to wherever you live.

“When you have lived as long as I have, you find that you need no residence, no fixed address. Why don’t we meet in Griffith Park?”

“Uhm, well, because last time I was to meet somebody there, they ended up dead and I was attacked by coyotes.”

“I can assure you, Mr. Holcomb, that when you are with me, no one will be in danger. Still, I can understand your caution. There is a pull-off about 17 miles south of Venice Beach. There is a path down the cliff to some rocks known as Devil’s Dive. Meet me there at eleven tonight and bring Lex.”

The phone clicked off before I could whine about the inconvenience. I let out a sigh and grabbed the bottle.

“Lex, you better be a good judge of character, otherwise your Dinty Moore gravy train could come to an end.”

Lex turned his rear end and flipped his tail at me, then went to his dish to prepare for his morning nap.

* * * *

He sat hunched on a rock. The wind rippled a dark scarf and longish white hair. As I got nearer, I saw a gaunt face leathered by too much life. He turned to me and smiled. He was smoking a small cigar and smoke plumed from his nostrils. His eyes had huge bags under them Great parentheses carved around his mouth. His nose was rough, pitted, pebbled, his forehead crosshatched. In the wind, his hair whipped around this face of faces. When he spoke, there was more whiskey and smoke in those pipes than in the roughest Mississippi Delta blues singer.

I held Lex in the chest of my windbreaker. As cats will do, he poked his head out and back like a furry cobra, sniffing the salt air, peering at the apparition before us.

“Mr. Ste Germaine....”

He glanced at me. “Lex how are you, old friend?”

Lex squirmed in my jacket and leapt out to the jagged rocks at my feet. He ambled over to Ste. Germaine and sat, the perfect image of those Egyptian cats, Baal or Bastet or something. Ste Germaine made no move to pet him, nor Lex to brush against him.

He stared at Lex, their gazes locking. He ignored me. Every few seconds, one of their heads would nod. There was a communication going on there that I would never be able to unscramble. After about five minutes of this, Lex’s tail lifted and he scampered up the rocks and faded into the twilight.

“Lex, come here,” I shouted.

Ste. Germaine looked at me and waved his hand in dismissal. “Do not concern yourself, Mr. Holcomb. Lex can take care of himself while you and I converse.”

“Mr. ....”

“Actually, it’s Comte. But just call me Ste. Germaine,” he said, pronouncing it Sinjermin. C’mere Lex.”

Lex stayed where he was, but his head bobbed forward and back and he closed his eyes sniffing the winds. “That’s right, Lex. I smell old. It happens.”

“Comte...”

“Ste. Germaine,” he said, with that strange pronunciation. “Like when they name a kid St. John and they pronounce it Sinjin. It’s easy. Sinjermin.

“Cigar?” He held one out. It seemed to materialize in his hand.

“What the fu...,” I said. I took it, put it in my mouth and it was lit. I puffed on it. I was’t much of a smoker. But, I was getting used to the top of my head flying into the stratosphere. So might as well shoot the moon.

“How may I help you,” I asked.

“Holcomb, I believe I knew your great-great-great-grandfather. He was a moderately successful pig farmer in Essex in the 1700s.”

I was impressed. “That’s correct. We can trace my family back seven generations.”

“Share a glass?” He held out a snifter of brandy.

“You’re good,” I said.

“Not really,” he said and pulled back the heft of his coat to reveal a heavy bottle half full and another glass resting on a flat piece of rock.

I tugged on the snifter. “Well...”

“I read the papers the other day after I heard some conversation in a restaurant. I never read the papers because I consider them all too impossibly stupid and biased.”

“You must love my career...”

“Some of your work is amusing.”

“Gee, thanks. What’s the upshot?”

“The point I wish to make is that I am tired, Holcomb. That I wish to do some good before I give up this game.”

“Good? I’ve heard you are evil incarnate.”

“Yes, I’ve done more evil than probably any man on this planet, but that was a long time ago and the difference between good and evil is that good has less consequences to answer for. I’ll defend every child I killed in its crib, every family I left fatherless, every man whose mind I left destroyed. Yes, I can conjure daemons. Yes, as Crowley bragged, I have passed to the other side. But Crowley was not around long enough to gain true understanding.” He flipped his hand, banishing the matter.

Lex wandered back and stood sniffing the tidal scents beside where I sat. “So if I were to believe what I’ve heard of you, I take it you’re two millennia old.”

“And not in bad shape for my age,” he said, baring teeth the color of mahogany.

“I suppose the question to ask someone of your age is if you believe in a God.”

“Yeah, that’s always a popular question.” He sat and smoked as the silence wound out like silken kite cord.

“Well?”

“Of course there is a God, Mr. Holcomb. It was his Son who cursed me with this life. I was a Jewish doorkeeper in the judgement halls of Pontius Pilate. I witnessed the trial of Christ. My name was Caraphilus. I went out to see the spectacle when Jesus carried his cross to Calvary. When the poor man stopped to rest I stepped up to him and told him to hurry on to his punishment, mocking him as King of the Jews with his crown of thorns.

“The Messiah, the most powerful man to ever live and I, in my ignorance, mocked him on his way to his unjustified execution.” Ste. Germaine shook his head. “I had never seen eyes like those, full of pain, disappointment and, yes, Christ knew vengeance. His eyes flared and in them I could see the fires of Hell and he snarled at me. “I will go now, but thou shalt wait until I return.” He shouldered his bloody cross and the centurions shoved me back in the crowd.

“I watched the crucifixion for an hour or so, but got bored and wandered away to my wife and son. Christ took six hours to die. And the skies darkened in midday. And we all knew that justice had been miscarried that day and that there would be Hell to pay. I feared most of all for myself because of my stupid arrogance and cruelty.

“I was 45 years old then. I watched my good wife grow old and die. I watched my son grow from 10 to 80 and die. And I remained for all visible purposes 45 years old. Time had stopped for me and me only. Christ’s vengeance was that I should walk the Earth until his Second Coming. With those I loved gone and eternity staring blankly at me, I leapt from a tall building and dusted myself off, suffering no injury. I waded into the Sea of Galilee and washed ashore two days later, alive and well. So, leaving all that I had, I began to walk and became known as the legendary Wandering Jew. I found that I did not have to eat and, as the years went by, that I was accumulating vast knowledge. Having no question of Christ’s demonstrable power and hence little doubt of his Father’s existence, I spent years in monasteries, llamasteries, ashrams and the like.

Inevitably, I ventured into the occult knowledge of the ages and to accumulate power and wealth I became fully committed to the Dark Arts. Like accomplishing anything in life, the Dark Arts require sacrifice, though perhaps more extreme than less, shall we say, rewarding pursuits. I killed, I slaughtered with Vlad the Impaler. I plotted and betrayed. I destroyed lives with schemes. I grew wealthy and I kept all of my wealth in gems. In the court of Louis IV, I was well known. I was arrested for spying in London by Horace Walpole during the Jacobite revolution. I taught Mesmer the simple art of hypnotism....” His voice drifted off into the wind. “.... Yeah, yeah, I’m such a big deal, despised of Christ. And as to your earlier question, I am entirely convinced of the truth of God and the reality of eternal damnation.

“You see, Holcomb, God is order and everywhere this order is evident from a mother giving birth, to the eagle catching the salmon, to the baleen whale sifting kril through its ? Evil is disorder. Cancer cells multiplying too fast. An adult male who wants to force sex on a child. A mercenary killing for money.... Yeah, there’s a God and there’s a God damned.”

“And you’re him.”

“When you see, in reality, how tightly and inflexibly the string is drawn between what is good and what is damnable, you’ll know I’m far from alone. Although I’m sad to say I’m probably in the Top 40.”

“Which is why you want to help me...?”

Ste. Germain raised his eyebrows. “Come now, Holcomb. Do you really think I’m that altruistic. I’m not trying to save my soul. That was a lost cause long ago. I’m after vengeance and property.”

* * * *

Ste. Germaine had ugly eyes. He locked them into mine or looked away with equal power. One look was intimidation, the other, dismissal. Both modes gave me a low-grade nausea as if the pupils of those eyes might skin back and give me a glimpse into the fires of Hell. I felt soiled to be in this being’s presence. From behind me, I heard a rustling and Lex—big, healthy, good Lex—bobbed his head under my hand. It seemed entirely incongruous, as I was consorting with this paradigm of evil, that my cat wanted to be petted. And then I knew. Lex was my cat, always had been and always would be. And with him on my side, I need not fear the paractitioners of dark arts. I scratched behind his ears and he rubbed his head into my palm. I lifted my eyes to Ste. Germaine’s. That lizardskin face pulled into a semblance of a smirk. “I’m jealous, Holcomb. Lex is a wonderful friend to have and his obvious affection and stewardship for you reinforce my hunch that you are the one I need to partner with in order to retrieve my purloined property.”

“What did you lose?”

“Have you ever heard of the Mandylion?”

“Nope.”

“It is also known by the Greek name Achieropoietos.”

“You lost a dinosaur?”

Ste. Germaine smiled, weakly. “No. The Mandylion is the oldest known portrait of Jesus Christ. It means the little handkerchief. Achieropoietos means not made by human hands. There was a king of Edessa, now Urfa in Turkey, who was a leper. Hearing of the Christ’s miraculous healings, he sent a servant to Galilee to persuade Jesus to come to Edessa to heal him. King Abgar knew that his man, Hannan, might not be successful, so he asked the man to paint a portrait of Jesus, if that were all he could bring back. Being in awe of the great man, who was busy preaching to a large group, Hannan could not paint accurately. When he noticed the man’s distress, Jesus asked for water and washed his face and wiped it with linen that perfectly preserved his image. Hannan returned, Abgar was cured and the Mandylion was the city’s most precious treasure. When Edessa was under Moslem rule, the Byzantines stole the relic and took it to Constantinople.

“In 1204, an army of Crusaders plundered the city. One of that number was me. I had visited the city previously and went straight for the room where the Mandlylion was kept. Sometimes framed, sometimes rolled, it traveled with me for centuries—in saddlebags and steamer trunks. It decorated secret shrines in various of my residences. It gave me power. Power just in possessing it. Obviously, if a ritual required desecration, this icon would make it the most powerful spell ever. I respected it. I never abused it or used it in ceremony. It was for me alone to stare at the face of the God who was man who had set me on my bizarre and endless journey. That familiar face that had haunted my dreams for centuries.

“Then, in 1953, I was living in Buenos Aires, getting away from a conflagration in which I had taken part —you know the one. I was the subject of a manhunt and international persecution. I had gone for a brief pilgrimage to Macchu Picchu for restoration and meditation. When I returned to my castle-like mansion, I went to the shrine and the Mandylion was gone. I felt violated, raped and ruined. I had not left the relic unguarded and I knew that it could only have been taken by a master sorcerer. Psychic defenses had been contravened, guardian spirits circumvented. There was a pall of evil left in my house. My servants had been slaughtered, my beloved dogs eviscerated. I vowed vengeance, however my anger was tempered by pure fear, for whoever had the image would likely not respect it the way I had, but might use it for a spell so powerful it could crack the globe. To who knows what ends. I was terrified.

“When I had gathered my senses, I began to call in my resources, which over the years have grown to be considerable. I had, of course, heard of other immortals, but, call it ego, I had never sought any out. The few I had accidentally met were crazed vampires, or outsiders, little people and discombobulated spirits. All, incidentally, crazy as shithouse rats, not a rational man among them. I had heard inklings from the early part of the 18^th century of a brotherhood of illuminati who were trying to create what would now be called a database of the characteristics, powers, life histories and locations of these beings. In 1954, figuring I would be persona grata there, I contacted the organization, The Brotherhood of Thoth. They, quite kindly, though undoubtedly out of self interest, set one of their men on the trail of my Mandylion. Through a combination of his efforts and later through friends such as Crowley and the Golden Dawn, I heard by 1956 of a mad shaman and powerful sorcerer known as Hoxhok. Though, despite much investigation, he remained merely a rumor, a number of circumstances point to him as the most likely thief of my property. When you enquired of LaVey, saying that you had observed Hoxhok in an actual rite, I was notified. And now, Holcomb, how is it that you with your notepad and pen have located him and I with considerably more invested in scouring the earth for him, have not? Well, luckily, it does not matter, for I have located you and because of that brand on your shoulder and the protection it has offered you, I believe you owe me.” The corners of his mouth twitched up into his cheeks for a second, then fell back into his flat emotionless expression, the attempted smile’s purpose of demonstrating friendliness done.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 31

2008-07-23T15:54:00.000-07:00

In the morning, as I shaved, I noted with some satisfaction that my mustache might actually be called a mustache now. I felt a burning from my arm and noticed that my slave mark had reddened during the night. It was hot to the touch and I washed it with some alcohol and covered it with a bandage to avoid it chafing against my clothes.

I had no idea what I was going to do as far as this whole occult issue. But, it had been eating into my job hours. So, I did what any good journalist, even one of my caliber, would do. I went into the office, sat down at the typewriter and over the course of the morning wrote a three-thousand word feature on the issue, lashing together all my loose ends with the speculations that had been flailing around untethered in my subconscious. By noon, I had quite a story, involving an unnamed prestigious moviemaker who was a Satanist poohbah, his vampish moll, the ritual preparation for the Feast of Hermaphrodite, the abduction and branding of a young private investigator (I didn’t want to get myself involved), ancient lore requiring child sacrifice as an emollient to the daemons and the unidentified human remains found in a park at LaBrea and Franklin. And I implied that a reporter who had gotten too close to the source had ended up dead, as did his ex-ladyfriend. I mentioned no names. Just that Los Angeles should be on the look out for some secret ceremony somewhere nearby on the night of November 28th.

I handed it in to Hy and went across the street for a Reuben sandwich while he edited it.

As I was wiping my mouth, Hy sat down across from me. He ordered a coffee, folded his hands and stared across at me. I felt my stomach sinking. He was going to kill the piece. Too many informed sources, not enough proper attributions. Too macabre for even our audience. Too much speculation.

“What’d you think of your piece?” he asked.

“I thought it was a serviceable piece, exciting in its own way, the sort of offal that our shark readership would gobble up. Why, what’d you think?”

He stared balefully at me. And ran his hands over his hound-wrinkled face and sighed. “Y’know, you’ve been on waivers the last few weeks. I didn’t think your stuff had zap. I thought you were getting soft and complacent --sleeping with movie stars, farting through silk. But, this piece really hums. I think it’s the best thing you’ve done in years. We’re going to publish it page one tomorrow and L.A. is going to be quaking in fear. We’ll sell a zillion issues. I’ve added an extra press run. There’s real passion in that piece. I had to cut a bit that was litigious, but we’re running it almost full length as you wrote it, with me having turned your punctuation into something the rest of the world could understand, of course.”

I was bowled over.

“But, and this is a big but, you know that if this comes out, you will be putting yourself at risk. Even if you want me to kill your byline, it’s still going to rain shit on us for a while. Are you up to it?”

“Sure, I’ve been shit on by the best. I’m willing to take the chance.”

“Good. So am I,” he said, picking up my lunch bill. “Let me get this.” He got up, leaving me sitting there, shocked and elated. Wondering what can of worms would spring open tomorrow when the paper hit the streets.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 30

2008-07-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

Later that night, feeling metabolically mellow, but sexually frustrated, I wove my way home. Lex greeted me with a throaty arpeggio. He sniffed my torn pantleg and hissed. "Lemme tell you about a nasty female cat I met." Muttering out the story, I fixed him some Dinty Moore and poured him a saucerful of beer. I went out on the balcony to see if the girls next door were out. The brunette and the redhead were out smoking cigarettes. They had retired their bathing suits for the day and were dressed in pants and light sweaters.

I made some small talk, but I could feel the cocaine wearing off quickly, giving way to the wine in my system and the beer I was drinking. My knees were going soft on me and my lids were drooping. I went inside and stripped and dropped into bed. Lex came to keep me company and set himself on my chest for optimum petting. Then, as was his habit, he nuzzled his nose into my slowly returning mustache. I drifted into sleep with the odd sensation that I was inhaling his exhalations and he mine.

Blame it on the drugs, I suppose, but that night I had disturbing dreams. A man dressed in a long black trenchcoat walking through darkened streets of different cities, different centuries. A man laughing as he watched people in mortal conflict. His drawn aristocratic face etched with the character lines of cruelty. And flames, cities and homes burning. Their people crying out in despair and sorrow. The screams of children and mothers. Of fathers and husbands who had betrayed them. A phantasm of naked grotesque bodies, coiling and slithering, their loins burning with need, yet no cessation of yearning, no calm. And central to it all: this pallid sickly god thing, its priapic organ throbbing and surging, its vagina clenching and questing like a hungry sea anemone. Its head lolling weakly on its sloping shoulders. Its dugs, modest but so round and firm, sweat-shining nipples painfully arching upward. A thing whose sex parts were thriving while the rest of the body wasted. And coursing through the corners of my dream screen, the eternal man skulking, leering, gesticulating, urging me to join him. But, in that sourceless logic of dreams, I knew that if I went to him all would be lost. Yet the urge to abandon everything was intensely seductive. Abandon petty morality and convention and surrender to a never-ceasing abandonment to the sensual and sinful. And in that dream, I saw Lex, an emaciated, battle-scarred Lex, crying out in pain, but lunging through the flames to attack the eternal man who always seemed to recede just further in the distance. And Lex’s fur burned and his flesh bubbled and his head tossed from side to side in agony, yet he plunged on into the hell and snarled at the god thing that lay pustulent and beckoning in his path.

And I awoke, sweat drenched and nauseated. I flapped my hand around on the coverlet and found Lex snuggled in beside me. When I touched him, he let out a sleepy trill, wondering what was going on. I pulled his large muscular body to me and he began his reassuring purr. And I told myself, he’s only a cat, but that was enough at that moment. And I hugged him close and noticed that tears were falling from my eyes into his ebony fur. And he looked at me with those mysterious golden eyes and nuzzled into my sweaty neck and fell asleep again. As I did too, momentarily.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 29

2008-07-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

I decided to pay an unannounced call on Betty. The bookstore clerk’s comment about a star-quality woman with black hair and big sunglasses had set my cogs to turning. I had the smallest nub of a plan. I was going to bring up a story I was working on that Joan Crawford might be a hermaphrodite. The word hermaphrodite rhymes with bite, while the name Hermaphrodite has a long “e” on the end, like Aphrodite or Ol’ Blighty. If I kept gabbling on about hermaphrodites, maybe Betty would let on what she knew. If anything.

Betty’s lawn needed a trim and gave yellow evidence of not having been watered in a while. It didn’t surprise me. I hadn’t really pictured Miss Pain as much of a domestic type. What the hell did a domina do all day, anyhow?

The neighborhood was quiet, not a soul out in the sun. I knocked and heard a shuffling come from inside. The drawn venetian blinds clicked by the door. Then the door opened. Betty stood there holding what looked to be Lex.

“What are you doing with my cat,” I gasped.

She smiled. “This isn’t your cat. This little kitty’s name is Celine and she’s a she. C’mon in.”

“That’s a huge cat for a female,” I said as I stepped into the cool of her living room.

“Yes, she’s a big healthy kitty,” Betty said, nuzzling into the glistening black fur.

“Where’d you get the cat?” I asked as Betty set Celine down on the floor where the cat stayed, eyeing me with slitted orbs.

“A friend couldn’t keep it, so he gave it to me.”

“Who’s that?”

“Just a friend. I do have friends, you know. Now, would you like a cold glass of wine?”

“That’d be great.” As she walked out of the room, my eyes locked to the rear of her white shorts. I realized that angle of investigation had been summarily shot down. I reached out for the cat, who took a few sniffs of my hand then grouchily batted it away. “My cat, Lex, could beat you up,” I whispered to the cat. Its ears flew back and it hissed at me, baring an ample set of fangs.

“Leave the cat alone,” Betty giggled from the kitchen.

She reentered the room holding two tall glasses of white wine. She looked a wonder in a red and white checkered top tied above her navel. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Betty’s skin was creamy. “So, what are you doing out here in Mom-and-Pop land?”

I went into my spiel about working on the Joan Crawford story. I watched her eyes carefully as I used the word hermaphrodite. It did no good since she immediately started barking with laughter to an extent that I thought she was going to pass wine through her nostrils.

“Joan Crawford has a vestigial penis! Oh my, Danny, you have the job of the century. Where do you get this crap? Couldn’t she sue you blue over printing something like that?”

This wasn’t going the way I planned it. “Well, you know, it could be true. Such creatures exist.”

“I’ve seen just about every sort of messed up sex type in the world. Guys with little ones, guys with ones that are too big, girls who wish they were guys, guys who are growing tits, but come fucking on. Real hermaphrodites don’t exist. You’re too weird, Dan.”

“They existed in mythology.”

“So did dragons and unicorns.”

I panicked. “Well, there’s supposed to be some big Satanist shindig some time this month where they’re going to try and create one.”

“Get a date with Joan Crawford,” she chuckled.

“Have you ever been to the occult book shop on Wilshire?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s a guy there that looks just like LaVey.”

“Whoopee! They all want to look like him. I’ve got clients that look like him.”

“Hmmm, good wine. Let’s have some more, shall we?” I stood to do the honors and at that moment the damned cat leaped at my right ankle, burying her front claws in my leg and kicking frantically with her back claws. When I felt her needle-sharp teeth sink into my calf, I let out a yelp.

“Get this damn vampire off of me,” I shouted. Betty lurched and struggled with the cat to no avail until she threw her wine on it. Then Celine, hissed and bolted somewhere to the back of the house.

“That is a vile beast you’ve got there,” I sighed, looking down at the runs in my good pants. Then, lifting my cuffs, I saw trickles of blood. “Look what it’s done to me!”

“Settle down, I’ll get you a clean cloth and some Handi-Tapes.”

Betty ministered to my wounds, which were not as bad as they had felt. She tired of my deriding her new cat and soon we fell into a mellow silence, sipping our wine.

“Wanna fuck?” she said, out of the blue.

“I’m a bit strapped for cash.”

“Oh well, let’s drink our faces off then.”

“I wouldn’t want to bare my jewels never knowing when that cat might sneak up behind me and take a swipe.”

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea. Some of my clients might pay extra for that.”

“It’s all about money for you, isn’t it?”

“Yup, and don’t try to psychoanalyze me. I enjoy sex, but getting paid for it is an integral part for me.”

“You must have had sex without being paid for it.”

“Not satisfactory sex.”
“Ever?”

“Ever.”

“Might as well bring the bottle out here. Got any of that nose candy?”

* * * *

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 28

2008-07-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

I had noticed an occult bookstore downtown over the years. So, I drove over there. It was a typically gloomy place and the guy behind the counter obviously idolized LaVey and tried to look as much like him as possible. The walls were covered floor to ceiling with books and there was a central glass table with a locked glass chamber so you could look at, but not touch, the most prized tomes.

“Do you have a book here that would tell me about Hermaphrodite?” I asked the ersatz LaVey.

“Oh yeah. There’s been a real run on those, recently. Over here,” he said, getting off his perch. He led me to a corner and pulled out a volume called Hermaphrodite: Unbound by Shah Ali Madrain. “This is the most popular one,” he said.

“When you said there’d been a run on material on this subject, how many customers are we talking about?”

“Oh, a good couple of dozen.”

“Why would there be a run on this subject?”

“The Feast of Hermaphrodite is coming up, I suppose. These things come in fads. Before this season, we hardly sold any on this subject. Some months everybody wants something on Pan. Other times on Samhain. It comes and goes.”

“Anything you’ve noticed about any of these people?”

“Nothing in particular, though one dame came in here with a big hat and dark glasses. Could’ve been a movie star or something.”

“What color hair?”

“Jet black, knockout figure, spike heels, very nice,” he grinned a sickening faceful of leering man-to-man lust.

“Did a black guy come in and buy anything.”

“Now that you mention it, a black man did come in here and bought a very special old book on Hermaphrodite from the rare books case. Why are you asking so many questions?”

“I’m a screenwriter. I pitched a script based on Hermaphrodite to a studio. I’m just worried about people trying to steal my idea.”

He nodded. Well, that girl could have been in the film industry. A few muscle boys came in too. They might have been stunt men.”

“That black guy, what did he look like?”

“Oh I can’t remember that. Black as strong coffee, normal size, normal clothes. Obviously had dough though. The book cost five hundred bucks.”

“Must have been one hell of a book?” I gasped.

“All of them in the glass case are special.”

“Got another one?”

“No.”

“What was it called?”

“Arcanium Hermaphroditus.”

“By who?”

“The Comte Ste. Germaine.”

“Who’s he?”

“He is a being who surfaced in the 16th Century. It is said he still exists, that he is the eternal man. The most powerful of the adepts.”

I thanked him for his time and bought the Hermaphrodite: Unbound edition. “You really look a lot like Anton LaVey,” I said as I left. He blushed and tried to stifle a pleased grin.

* * * *

I called LaVey from a payphone at a nearby tavern. I asked him if he had the Comte Ste. Germaine book. He did and said I could have the rare privilege of studying it in his library.

I whipped right over.

From LaVey’s demeanor, I knew a great honor had been bestowed upon me. We sat at the library table and, with suitable pomp, LaVey opened a wooden box and withdrew a leatherbound tome. “This edition is far more valuable than the one they had in that shop,” he announced. “Turn its pages with care.” He handed me a pair of thin cotton gloves.

“Mr. LaVey, who is this author, Ste. Germaine? The clerk gave me some cock-and-bull story about him being an adept who has lived for centuries.”

Steepling his fingers, LaVey looked down the sharp planes of his cheeks at me. “I have little doubt that, in a nutshell, that is true. There have been many reliable reports of Ste. Germaine surfacing. The one I put most store in is Lex’s. He claims to have crossed paths with Ste. Germaine, several times. I would say that man, or whatever he may be, would comprise one of the few chinks in Lex’s armor of fearlessness. A man of consummate evil, Ste. Germaine has been at the root of many of the great horrors of the last four centuries. There have been reports from, as those in your craft say, informed sources that have placed him at the Ford Theater on Abraham Lincoln’s fateful night and there is a great deal of information that he was a close associate of Hitler and Krepps. He walks the world with all the leisure of an immortal and what unholy pacts he has made with the great forces to ensure his longevity can hardly be dreamt. I have never, ever, claimed to have met Satan face to face and, perhaps, I have never wished for such. However, legend tells us that Ste. Germaine has, in fact, had that honor.”

“Would he be what they call the antichrist?”

“No. That would be too flashy a position for him. He prefers to work behind the scenes, setting the clockwork gears in motion for men to sow their own damnation and agony. The antichrist, who knows who that is? Some believe he already came in the mid first century, as the Emperor Nero. Others believe he was Napoleon, some even believe he is me. According to the Bible, the third red heifer must be born in Jerusalem before the antichrist can be born. And, as yet, there have been only two such births in the centuries since Christ’s death. The antichrist remains, to my knowledge, something of immediate interest only to southern Baptist preachers. I have studied the matter intensely and feel that we have nothing to worry about until the year 2012. And you and I will be gone by then. If suddenly we are wrenched from our graves to face the Final Judgement, I only hope we get a few years rest with the worms before having to toe the line again.

“Ste. Germaine, however will be there in full bib and tucker, you can bet your soul. What makes Ste. Germaine so horrifying is his connection to humanity, his lack of supernatural birth. Some feel he is the only existing bridge between here and there. I have been called the world’s greatest sinner and the most evil man alive, Mr. Holcomb. Still, I would certainly rather meet Ste. Germaine than be him should the energies between the worlds be coursing through him constantly.

“Now, I have some experiments to work on. Please feel free to stay here as long as you wish to study this book. If you need anything, call Serena.” Then he turned and added, with a bibliophile’s petulance. “Although, I’m afraid I will not have you eating or drinking near that book. And put the gloves on now.”

“Of course,” I said, and that seemed to please him.

In the course of the next hour, I learned of horrors the like of which I had not in my thirty-three years imagined. I felt fearful just being in the vicinity of the tome, which seemed, after I gained some familiarity with it, to emanate vapors of yellow sulphorous evil. The cult of Hermaphrodite could rival the Aztecs for sheer ritual bloodshed. Hermaphrodite was a lesser god, hence, presumably, more amenable to communication with humans. As the creature possessed the attributes of both sexes, it was to represent symbolically the polarity of the cosmos, good and evil, wisdom and ignorance, heat and cold, life and death and, most importantly, matter and spirit. No wonder Ste. Germaine had been interested in it, for as LaVey had said of him, Hermaphrodite seemed a bridge between this world and another unseen. And it seemed that bridge was constructed out of human bone and blood and suffering.

The Comte Ste. Germaine recounted innumerable atrocities that he himself had committed to reach Hermaphrodite, however each attempt seemed to be doomed to peculiar failures. However, I noted, the book was dated 1759. An attempt since then may have met with success.

Wearily, I rubbed my forehead and thought how screwy my brain had gotten. I was now openly entertaining belief in alternate worlds, necromancy, daemons and a four-hundred-year-old mage. And, though I had been in seedier places, I was sitting alone in the library of the world’s leading Satanist surrounded by one of the world’s largest collections of spook books. Recently, I had contemplated shooting a man. Occasionally, I slept with the world’s preeminent sex goddess. I had a crush, maybe more than that, on a hooker who serviced the fetish trade. Plus, I had a four-hundred-year-old cat who swirled into black mist and killed people. As the cream on those strawberries, I made my living abusing the public trust and publishing patent lies about the rich, famous and beloved.

I could live with the last part, but the rest was starting to rankle on me.

I had grown used to seeing various renderings of this horrific god-thing with its legs splayed, showing both enormous male genitalia and a horrendous gaping female orifice, but when I turned the page, what I saw shocked me even more.

There was a vile etching of what I could only think of calling a baby tree. It was a huge oak, its branches twisted and contorted with some sort of innate malignity. From dozens of the branches hung the bodies of infants, their skin streaked with trails of blood that dripped to the ground to be absorbed by the gnarled roots of this misshapen tree. I quickly flipped the page to get this atrocity out of my sight, but what I found there was worse still. A sketch of a bearded, sinister looking man with several babes stuffed under one arm while his other swung a child by its legs to smash its head on what appeared to be a rock altar.

When a knock came at the door I almost leapt out of my skin. LaVey glowered through the crack of the doorway. “You have been at it for over an hour. I was wondering how you were doing.”

I licked my lips to get some moisture back into my mouth. “I, I’m horrified. The rituals for calling up this hellspawn are savage beyond all reason.”

LaVey moved into the room and took his favorite black leather armchair. As was his custom he steepled his fingers and stared at me before saying anything. “Yesss,” he sighed. “My Satanism is more of a philosophy. But there are those who will stop at nothing. My philosophy recognizes that there are standards and conducts that must be abided by, a fierce morality, if you will. But, there are others who believe even crimes against the race of humanity can be perpetrated with impunity as long as the ultimate end is power. Power is all, to them. My views place a higher importance on understanding and tolerance.” He paused, and pondered whether to say more, but decided against showing more of this softer side of his persona.

“It is a disturbing volume, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Horrible.”

Again, LaVey merely blinked slowly and let his silence speak its truth.

“Would you think someone would go to these ends to conjure up this Hermaphrodite.”

LaVey nodded. “I believe that it has been done previously, and that it will be done again.”

“Could Hoxhok be Ste. Germaine?”

“Ste. Germaine has always been white. But, if Hoxhok is planning a rite to call up Hermaphrodite, he may well be attempting to recruit Ste. Germaine. If that is the case, we have, and indeed the world has, something to seriously worry about.”

“What would happen if you contacted Ariana and said you’d gotten wind of this big ceremony and wanted to be part of it?”

“After an all-out war had been declared between our camps?” he scoffed. “After he abducted my woman? Ridiculous and impossible.”

“Surely, you must have someone in your congregation who could infiltrate his little bun-toss.”

LaVey stroked his beard in thought. Then, our eyes met and we said as one: “Jayne.”

* * * *

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 27

2008-07-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

His car was a Rolls Royce. I followed it out of the studio lot. It took a predictable route to Scream’s mansion. But, instead of turning right into Scream’s driveway, it went two driveways past it and turned left into a walled driveway that led to a mock southern gothic mansion. I cruised past and headed back to the office. What did I know about Bluestein? His licence number. Incredibly successful. Didn’t limp previously. No scandals. Married to Anastasia Donovan, a starlet a number of years younger.

* * * *

In the office, I called Jayne. “Sandor Scream is Bunny Bluestein,” I piped excitedly into the phone.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally, “Could be. Same build.”

I explained about the limp.

“Holy-y-y,” she said. “I wonder how many other people know this? It’s definitely news to me. Bluestein is known as a devout Jew, who gives enormous amounts of dough to the synagogue.”

“Maybe he’s hedging his spiritual bets by playing both sides of the fence.”

“So, presuming you’re right, what are you going to do with this info?”

“That’s a poser. I still don’t have anything connecting Scream/Bluestein with any of the viscera or the deaths of Al Stirling or Bianca Hughes. I guess I’ll just sniff around.”

“Well, keep Lex with you. He’s a handy kitty in a pinch.”

* * * *

I went to my files and pulled what I had collected over the years on producers and found some scraps of information on Bluestein. Nothing illuminating. He kept a low profile and his nose clean.

I hammered out my story on Bean and Mitchell, then went home. As far as I knew Jonny Fine was still unidentified meat.

It was midnight when I got home. I was greeted effusively by Lex and I petted him as I got his can of Dinty Moore stew ready. I cracked a beer and poured some in a dish for him. He lapped it up, let out a couple of cat-sized burps, which I did not know the species was capable of, and curled up on my lap as I mulled over what use my new discovery was to me.

* * * *

In the morning, I headed over to City Hall. I asked to see Merlin Chambers’s holdings disclosure. My hunch was rewarded. Mr. Bluestein was listed as an executive officer on a holding company called Beaufort Holdings. Unfortunately, because he did not hold any public office, I could not check Bluestein’s holdings.

If they had an alliance above board, I wondered how many were hidden. It would be a handy teaming. Bluestein had tons of dough and Chambers could green light development and revenue projects, though naturally his name could not be associated with them because of the conflict of interest with his civic office. But I had no doubt he was in there like a dirty shirt.

I went to licences division and they told me that Beaufort Holdings handled several manufacturers of fine furniture, cedar lawn chairs and tables, prefabricated fireplaces and mantles. Homey stuff.

What was I doing? I was not interested in making some business bust. I wanted to figure out how these guys were connected with the taking of lives. They could be audited from here to Thursday and I wouldn’t care.

* * * *

When I got back to the office, there was a message that LaVey had called. I rang back. “There is definitely something going on between Hoxhok and Ariana,” he said in that sinister voice that always made me think he could have been a great radio announcer. “I think it will be a grand conjuring, a summoning of an extremely powerful spirit. One that they feel can give them something. Power perhaps, or something more tangible. Treasure perhaps. A supernatural ally. Something.”

“Hmmm, when on the occult datebook would be a good time to do something like this?”

“The feast of Hermaphrodite is upcoming. Because that old god embodies the characteristics of both male and female, the partnership of Hoxhok and Ariana would make sense.”

“Why wouldn’t she just hook up with Scream?”

“That is a good question and one that I am unable to answer at present. Perhaps, Hoxhok originated the plan.”

“How would they go about calling up this spirit?”

“Hermaphrodite is more than a mere spirit. He, she, it, whatever, is one of the old gods. Blood must be shed in order to call up Hermaphrodite. Blood as a burnt offering. In short, Daniel, if they are planning on doing this, I would suggest murder will figure into the equation somewhere.”

“Mr. LaVey, you’re a great help and you’ve always treated me well. So let me tell you this bit of information. I believe Sandor Scream is the movie producer Bunny Bluestein.”

There was stone silence on the other end. I ran down how I had reached this conclusion. Then, “Thank you, Daniel. I will take your suspicion under advisement. I must ring off now. I must think. Good day.”

I hung up wondering what sort of vendetta I might have unleashed.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 26

2008-07-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

“Whether you believe me or not, you have seen that Lex can come in handy and is a good defender. That is all you need believe.”

“I heard from the medical examiner that there was a series of puma attacks a few years back. That the victims were found missing their eyeballs.”

LaVey’s eyebrow arched. He sucked his cheeks in and ran his forefinger and thumb along the outsides of his Vandyke. He locked his eyes with mine. “So?”

“Well, I noticed that Lex likes eyeballs.”

“Yech!” piped in Jayne.

LaVey waved his long fingers in a dismissive figure eight. “Cats of all kinds eat the soft tissues first. Surely, you’re not suggesting that Lex went on some sort of killing spree.” It was not a question.

“I suppose not. I don’t find it any harder to believe than what you’ve just told me....”

“Lex is a good cat. That is all. Now, you had some other matters to ask me about.”

And the matter was terminated.

“Yeah, I snuck out to Zuma Beach the other night and saw a little ceremony that Scream also attended. The newly resurrected Ariana was there too, dancing around and eventually boffing the presiding emcee, a negro fellow in a Pacific Northwestern Indian mask.

“Ah, Hoxhok,” sighed LaVey. “A piker, a charlatan, but a very dangerous psychotic, as well. A believer in cannibalism, based on the Kwakiutl mythology of the Pacific Northwest. He takes his name from the cannibal raven god. He claims to be working on some transubstantiation of the human body to godness. A mere criminal, I can assure you.”

“But what is the significance of him pouring the pork to Ariana?”

“There may be little meaning to it. Sexual congress has always played a major role in pagan rites. Or, they may be trying to meld their powers in order to perform an extreme spell. Ariana is a very powerful woman, far more powerful than Hoxhok. She may just have wanted to sample his wares, as it were. Maybe she is excited by the exhibitionism of the act. Or she may believe that Hoxhok is more powerful than I have expressed. If it is the latter, then there is likely a reason for that. Let me look into it and get back to you.” With that, he stood and the interview was over.

* * * *

Out in the car, Jayne spoke up. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. But there was some suspicion that Lex was involved in those puma attacks.”

I nodded. “I figured LaVey might be hiding something.”

“The people who were killed were low echelon Satanists who used animals in their rites. There was talk of... bestiality... being involved in the rituals. They were horrible people. They wanted to feel an animal die while they were having sex with it. They thought they could absorb the creature’s essence or something stupid like that. Anyhow, Lex got loose for a few days and various of these people turned up dead. Doesn’t seem hard to make the connection.”

“Sounds like they had it coming.”

“Fucking right. I hate people who harm animals.”

Jayne had pets at home that needed to be groomed and kids that needed to be looked after. But she did not have any of her whirl of appointments today, so I persuaded her to take an hour off and go to the beach with me.

We drove to Venice and she tied up her hair in a kerchief and popped on big bug-eye shades. She rubbed her lipstick off and she borrowed an old windbreaker I kept in the car. Try to keep the boys from attracting too much attention. There was a nice breeze blowing, which kept the lovely sunshine from becoming unbearable.

We walked to a little cantina and ordered beers and hot dogs. Because of her physical attributes, a lot of people did not give Jayne much credit for brains. She actually had an IQ of 163 and had studied at Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Austin and UCLA. She, spoke five languages, and was a classically trained pianist and violinist. She was very funny and witty and a great gal to chat with. “Where do you get that amyl nitrite stuff?” I asked her. “Seems to be a lot of it connected with this case. I realize you probably get the ampules from a doctor or a pharmacist, but some of the people involved in this cult business have big bottles of the stuff. Where would they get that?”

“There’s a lot of chemists around town that make stuff like that, amphetamines too. But the main guy is called Mr. Roderick. He’s a swish that has a storefront on The Strip. He makes beautiful sexy lingerie that he sells off the rack, but he also sells stuff from his back room. If you want a catsuit made out of black rubber, he’s your man. Want a foot-long dildo, or an artificial pussy, a man or woman doll with serviceable orifices, a special lubricant with Spanish fly mixed in it that will keep you hard for hours, or enough poppers to supply your next orgy, then he’s the man you go to see.”

“Illegal drugs, heroin, cocaine?”

“No. Strictly stuff for sexual purposes. He figures you can get your own illegal stuff. What he does is relatively within the law.”

“So if I went in there, would he sell me what I wanted?”

“Sure, he’s not a crook.”

“Does he make the poppers?”

“Yeah, he makes it at home in his basement. Some people make wine.”

“Still, if they lit a cigarette, wine wouldn’t blow up half a city block.”

“Some of the vino I’ve tasted sure would.”

It was a pleasant idyll, but Jayne had to get back to her kids and menagerie. She gave me a kiss redolent of beer and hot dog and sun-warmed woman. I dropped her off at her car.

Then I headed over to Mr. Roderick’s of Hollywood.

* * * *

The shop was all glass and chrome with mannequins in feisty lingerie crowding the window. Each appealing ensemble spurred me to reach for my wallet in order to drape Betty in its enticing texture. But, I was aware that I’d blown too much dough on her recently.

The swish behind the counter wore a blond rug styled in a Liberace pompadour. He had one of those pencil-thin mustaches that always made me wonder how guys trimmed them so perfectly. Maybe it was drawn on with eyebrow pencil. His shirt was a satin blaze of pink carnations and his trousers were white and tight. His physique was sylph-like. He smiled like a frog about to tongue a fly.

“A buddy of mine, Johnny Fine, said I could buy some amyls here,” I opened.

He nodded and reached beneath the counter bringing up three sizes of vials. “Personal size, party or orgy?” he asked.

“Party,” I said pointing to the middle bottle.

“That’s four dollars,” he said. “Will there be anything else?”

I handed him the bills. “I’ve been looking for Johnny,” I said. “He doesn’t answer his phone, these days. Any idea of where he might be found?”

“You a cop?”

“Nah, just wanted to get together with Johnny for some good times.”

“I see. Well, I don’t know that Johnny has many good times. He keeps pretty much to himself. I know, he sometimes stops over at the Hellfire Club to stare at his idol.”

“You mean Ariana?”

He looked surprised. “You do know our Johnny. Yes, I think his life revolves around Miss Ariana’s scraggy butt.”

“You sound like you don’t like her much.”

His brow knotted up into burls of skin. “I deal in fantasy,” he said. “There’s some people who don’t know where fantasy ends and step over the line and try and make their reality fantastical. Those sorts of people are out of their minds. Ariana takes fantasy too far, from a little harmless whimsy into a twenty-four hour a day lifestyle. No, she’s not one of my favorite people. I think she’s dangerous. Anyhow, now she’s dead.”

“Wasn’t she part of some witchcraft cult or something?”

“Yeah, a bunch of sickies. I wouldn’t go near them.”

“Another buddy of mine, Ted, big muscle guy says he gets his pops from you. I think he works for Ariana....”

“Yeah, I know Ted. What’s your point?”

“Just seems that Ariana’s people use a fair bit of your product.”

“Well, as you well know,” he said, pointing to the bag he had handed me. “Andybody who’s had sex with pops ain’t going back to normal sex. It’s just too good to step back.”

I nodded, with what I hoped was credibility. “Anyhow, on to other topics. Do you know a dame who goes by the name of Betty Pain? I was wanting to get ahold of her for a stag I’m throwing for a buddy. This looks like the sort of place where she’d shop.”

“Sure, I’ve made custom stuff for Betty. Leather stuff. She’s a great gal, life of the party. If she comes in, I’ll let her know you were looking for her. Have you got a number you can leave with me?”

“Is she expensive?”

“Very.”

“Maybe I better look for something a little more affordable. Keep Betty for my dreams.”

I could see the disgust and suspicion rise in his eyes. “Yeah, well, enjoy your poor man’s cocaine.”

I nodded and headed out the door. I went down the street to a tavern and ordered a beer while I wondered what I’d learned, if anything, from my conversation with Mr. Roderick.

I went back to the office. The editor told me it was time for an on-set piece. I phoned around and sussed out who was amenable to a reporter showing up on their set. A few seemed okay with the idea. There was a horror flick being shot over at Santana Studios. It starred Shannon Mitchener, a good-looking young guy who was taking his career places and Blondie Bean, a ditzy young comedienne who was spectacular looking and was seen to be a smart cookie who was really going to make something of herself.

On-set interviews are a pain in that nobody is ever on time for their appointments because the schedule is always behind. I have waited eight hours only to have five minutes with some thespian before they are called back to the set. It’s quite frustrating, so I always take along a book and a pint of whisky for nips in the bathroom. I made an appointment with the unit publicist and set off prepared for a dull afternoon.

* * * *

Santana Studios was not a major, but I had to give my name at the security kiosk just past the pearly gates. I checked in with the administration office and the publicist, a drab woman who probably made a pauper’s wage but whose elbow rubbing with stars had given her an imperious mien, came out to escort me to the set.

The movie was called The Dark Corridor, something about a dumpy cop, played by the great Kenneth McMillan, who was trying to track down a murderer, played by Mitchener, who was making himself crazy with drugs. The object of his homicidal obsession was a hometown cheerleader who was the belle of the gridiron played by Bean. McMillan had declined to be interviewed by me. He had read my work.

I was escorted to a chair by the craft services tables where I could see into a kitchen set where Mitchell had kidnapped Bean and was going through some insane-person rant. McMillan stood nearby, occasionally raising a paper cup of coffee to that terrific bulldog face. I got a glass of soda and excused myself into the bathroom where I knocked back a stiff highball.

Watching acting is one of the more painful experiences one can have. With all the repetition and retakes, I remain constantly astonished that movies ever actually get made. I sat where I was told and cracked a book. It was a good one, the new Steinbeck.

* * * *

Time finally came when the director called a break and I was escorted over to a dressing room to interview Blondie Bean. When the publicist left us alone, I was momentarily stunned by the woman’s beauty. The camera did not do her justice. She had long wavy blonde hair framing an incredibly cute All-American girl face: big eyes, turned up nose, lush lips and a golden tan. Her body was tanned and toned, set off by a simple white T-shirt and shorts. She padded around the dressing room barefoot.

We started with the basics: what she thought of this role, what it would do for her career, how she came to the current level of her career, what she aspired to. Then I got personal. Any boyfriend? No. The studio set her up on dates for appearances at premieres and parties. Didn’t she want a boyfriend? Yes, but there wasn’t much time for that sort of thing. Blah, blah, blah.

When I got to talk to Mitchener, it was the same thing.

Journalism is like baseball, the legs go first. After a while, you have asked the same old questions so many times you can predict the answers. You just can’t get it up for research anymore. Which was why I appreciated the creative aspects of my paper. By next issue, Bean and Mitchell would be in a simmering cauldron of passions birthed on the movie set. They would not be offended. Any publicity is good publicity, as long as their names are spelled right.

The publicist had left for the day by the time I wrapped up. I swilled the last of my flask in the washroom and, feeling like I had done a good day’s work, I set out in the twilight wandering among the studios and sets. Runners ran script sides onto sets from the hovels where writers were holed up. Gaffers and grips ran chunks of boats and buildings from carpentry shops to soundstages where facades were being built. Actors in monster suits, carrying their heads under their arms, shuffled past, their energy for the day gone, with hours of night shoots before sleep. No security guards were hustling around being efficient. It was a magic time in a place that made magic. I felt mellow as a warm cat.

I was walking past a huge airplane hangar, when a side door burst open and several men in expensive suits burst out in a blather of arguments and cigar smoke.

One of them used a cane to help him hobble along. He was heavyset and bald. The familiarity of his gait, the physique.

I watched the men walk away and round a corner. Then I stepped into the soundstage they had just left. I nabbed the first workman I could see. “Who’s that exec who just left? Bald, uses a cane....”

The guy nodded. “That’s Mr. Bluestein, the producer.” My head spun. Bunny Bluestein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood was quite possibly Sandor Scream.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 25

2008-06-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

I went home and hid my recent acquisitions in the false ceiling of my closet that actually was the access to the attic. I swallowed a couple of the benzedrine and thanked Mr. Fine for giving me enough of a stash to start a serious drug addiction. I took two more. When I looked at the camera, I saw that it had five exposures left. So, I shot the remainder of Lex as he slept, woke, ate Dinty Moore and eventually posed for what was going to be a portrait that I was looking forward to seeing.

When I got to the office I checked the police bulletins. Nothing yet about a body found on the I-? 5 Then I headed for the dark room. Under the red light I printed the roll. The nineteen shots that Fine had taken looked like surveillance photos. I was shocked to see three of Al Stirling and two of Bianca Hughes. What most intrigued me though were the shots of Lex. In the one of him asleep there was another image of him floating above the main one. The ones of him waking and eating were normal, but the portrait in which he was looking directly into the lens was odd in that there was a bristling simulacrum surrounding him, spiking out as much as three inches in places. I was definitely going to have to ask LaVey about that cat.

I took the prints back to my desk and thumbed through them. What could I figure from this. Fine was Scream’s hired gunsel? And maybe a bit of a detective? Perhaps an assassin?

As I was fiddling around, the report finally came in. White male found on the side of I-?, four miles east? of the entrance to Zuma State Park, face and neck slashed by a wild animal presumed to be a puma. No ID. Lee called over to me to run the standard check with Dom Simone to see if it could be anyone of interest to our readers and to also scramble up a story on wild animal attacks.

“I haven’t seen anything like it for years,” said Simone. His voice had some quality in it that a pro observer such as myself knew was worth probing.

“What do you mean in years?”

“Well, there were a series of these attacks about five years ago in the hills. Savage attacks attributed to a rogue puma. No spoor, only some fur, unusually black, strange for a puma. The victims were all low-life types, dealers and such. We questioned zoos and movie animal wranglers, but nobody was missing anything. Even talked to that LaVey guy you wrote about, because he keeps a panther, but it was locked inside when any of this happened. Weirdest thing, no tracks or puma crap, no wildlife seems to have been killed. And the animal didn’t feed on the corpses, except it seemed to have a taste for the eyeballs. The corpses were all found missing their eyeballs.”

My stomach dropped about five floors. I made some calls and got the dope on wild animal attacks and lashed them together with some ardent speculation about the return of Bigfoot, references to lycanthropy and possible UFO involvement. I did not want to imply any personal knowledge and I certainly did not want to implicate my pet. I threw the copy into Hy’s in-basket, then I dialed Jayne. She said we could meet at Ciro’s.

* * * *

No surprise, she looked radiant in a pink mohair sweater and white pedal-pushers that you could not have slipped a dime in as she slid into the booth. She ordered a strawberry milkshake with a double shot of white rum. I ordered a martini and a corned beef sandwich. “That’s a hell of drink,” I said.

“Papa suggested it for me. He called it a velvet daquiri.”

“Papa Who-I-Think-You-Mean?”

“Yup.”

I was seriously impressed and would have like to have heard about that meeting. Then I decided Jayne would not have let that knotch on her garter belt slip by, so I did not ask. “So, Jayne, have you ever been to one of Scream’s weenie roasts at Zuma Beach Park?”

“No. I don’t go places where situations can get too outside.”

“Ever hear of one of Scream’s associates who wears a Pacific Northwest Indian mask? Black guy?”

She stopped stirring her drink. “Whoa yeah? Hoxhok. He’s one bad negro indian. Claims that he’s part Haida from up in Canada. His name comes from the cannibal crow of the mythology up there.”

“Who is he really?”

“Whoever knows with these masked men? Clayton Moore in blackface? I dunno. Could be a pimp or a doctor in real life. He’s no one to mess with though. I think even Scream gives him a wide berth.”

“Scream was hobbling around Zuma while Ariana and Hoxhok bumped uglies in the middle of some ceremonial shindig that involved barbecuing a skinned dog.”

“Fuckers, I hate anyone who would harm a dog.”

“Me too. And speaking of pets. What’s the lowdown on Lex?”

“Why?”

“He saved my life the other night. At great cost to the person who was going to harm me.”

Jayne’s penciled eyebrows arched into twin inverted Vs. “Uh oh,” she said. “As I understand it, Lex wouldn’t hurt anyone, at least not just hurt someone.”

“What’s the story, Jayne?”

“We better let Anton tell you that. Order me another drink, no milkshake this time, just soda and ice. I’ll ring Anton and see if he’s up for a visit.”

* * *

LaVey served tea that tasted like someone had dropped cigarette butts in it. The cups were black bone china, of course. Serena came into the sitting room to thank me for my efforts. She had managed to scrub most of the blue dye off, though she still had a vascular pallor. She was dressed in black cotton lounging pajamas and wore a tight black turban on her head. She looked like she was nursing the tail end of foul hangover.

“Tell me Lex’s story,” I asked LaVey.

He smiled and put down his teacup. “You won’t believe me,” he said. “But, Lex was always meant to be yours, at this time. He is very old. He was born in a monastery in northern Italy. The monks were a rebel sect, the Catharists. They claimed to be descended from the Crusaders. Their beliefs mixed Christian doctrines with many of the pagan beliefs brought back from the East by the Crusaders. When the papacy learned of their practices, they were deemed heretical and an inquistion ruled that they should be destroyed. Many were burned at the stake, many drowned in dunking trials. Those who saw the end coming, dispersed throughout the countryside and traveled to France England and Turkey. Lex was smuggled to England with a Brother Constantine who fell in with the heretical cults abounding in those parts. Lex was six years old at that time, in his full maturity, his prime of strength, health and wisdom. He was accepted into the cults with Constantine and soon became a sort of mascot for the Brotherhood of Samhain. He took part in many ceremonies. He tasted human blood. He had congress with a human woman. He stared daemons in the face. He grew canny and physically superior. He became a favorite of the dark forces from the other side. They bestowed gifts upon him. He ceased to age. Certain humans came to be able to understand his language and he theirs.

“In an imbroglio, Constantine fled to France and he became a consort to Marie Antoinette. You have undoubtedly heard the tale of the Maine Coon cat....”

I shook my head.

“When matters went sour for Marie, she planned to escape to America. A ship was prepared and her five favorite Persian cats were stowed aboard. Unfortunately for Marie, she was imprisoned before she could get to the ship. Learning of her imminent demise, the captain set sail. The ship landed in Maine. Now legend has it that the Persians were set free in the forest and that they mated with racoons and the offspring became what are known as the one true indigenous American cat, the Maine Coon. Scientifically, this is impossible. However, how did these strong, hardy, self-reliant, twenty-pound cats with persian fur and mottled herring colored markings come to be? Constantine was aboard that ship when it sailed. With him was, of course, Lex. I put it to you that Lex was the nigger in the woodpile, if you will, that he is the father of all Maine Coons, that all are his progeny and his blood runs in all their veins. These were cats that lived in the forests and fended for themselves, fought off savage enemies many times their size, hunted for their sustenance and survived the hardships of harsh winters on their own with only their thick coats and signature ruffs and snowshoe paws to protect them from the elements.

“Constantine grew old in Maine and his name can be found in the records of the witch trials. Happily, he eluded the persecutors and died peacefully abed with Lex purring him on to the other side, chanting his soul to another plane.

“At this time, Lex moved in with a witch named Hyapatia from whom he learned much and taught much. She had children and, when she died, Lex was handed down to the new generation. One of these children grew up to be a very wealthy man and Lex was taken with him into Boston society.

“There Lex became an initiate in the court of the Golden Dawn and,when his master died, Lex became the mascot of that gentlemen’s club. He was a favorite of the frequent visitor Alastair Crowley, who it is said saw Lex and immediately sat down and had a two-hour conversation with Lex to the exclusion of all other gathered to meet the great man. Crowley came away from the meeting quite shaken but formidably impressed. From then on, whenever he entered the club he immediately asked for Lex.

“It is said that when Crowley died, Lex mourned for a week. When the Golden Dawn club had to be closed because of public suspicion, I had already become a member. I asked for and was awarded custodianship of Lex. I was required to take a solemn oath of fidelity to the cat, enforceable by death. And so Lex came to California and became a part of my home and The Church of Satan for eight years now. But I always knew he was destined for another. Jayne had told me about you and without reason, I knew that you were the chosen one. Lex came to you for he was always destined for you. Just as he was destined to save your life the other night.”

I was aghast. “So how old are you saying Lex is?

“Perhaps six hundred years.” LaVey leered over his teacup, obviously gleefully enjoying my shock and disbelief.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 24

2008-06-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

I blessed the day that I had picked a house with an enclosed garage. I spent the rest of the night wiping out the back seat and hammering down the jagged metal edges where the bullet had torn through my roof. Tomorrow I’d get some Bondo, then I would have to ante up for a paintjob. Maybe I would get a contrasting color so I would not have to pay for the whole car. Now I only had to figure out what to do about the powder-burned hole in my ceiling upholstery before I took it into the paint shop.

As for Lex, he fell into a contented sleep.

The sun was coming up as I finished my cleanup. I put on a pot of coffee, showered, shaved leaving my mustache stubble alone, changed my clothes and grabbed a fresh towel from the linen cupboard. I spread the towel on my bed and unloaded my jacket pockets of the thug’s possessions. Driver’s license said he was Johnny Fine, thirty-two years old, resided at apartment 103-1263 LaBrea. Business cards said he was a security consultant -self-employed, so that was no help. Sixty-two dollars in cash. His watch was a Lumina, no inscription. He had worn a gold Masonic ring with a small sapphire and silver ring in a celtic design with a small cross on it. Gorgons flanking the cross indicated that the cross was upside down. The pistol was a .38 Colt Detective Special, ordinary ammo. Handkerchief, pocketknife, brass Zippo lighter no engraving, black pocket comb, keys to a Chev and probably his apartment and post box. A half-full pack of Luckies. A full bottle of benzedrine tablets.

I did not give a shit that he had died. He was a man who tried to hurt me. Bravo Lex.

I called the residence number on his business card. No answer after a dozen rings. If I got over there pronto. I could probably get in, check his apartment all before the body, which had by now probably been reported and picked up, was identified and before he was noticed missing at work at nine or so.

Leaving Lex to slumber. I hopped in the car. I parked two blocks from the apartment building. I let myself into the building and up the stairs to his apartment. No one was in the halls. I jimmied the lock and entered the apartment.

What kind of screwball lived here? I thought, switching on a light.

The entrance hallway was lined with religious icons. Dark things, featuring monks in varying settings of penance and self mortification. The livingroom was dark until I found a lamp. In the light, I could see that the windows had all been papered over. The decor was early horned masks. African masks, Mexican, North American, all depicting horned mythological entities. There was a cheap black sofa and a black wooden coffee table. In the kitchen, there were pots in the sink. I pulled on gloves and opened the refrigerator. There were three bottles of Budweiser. I opened one and took a swig, felt the bubbles burn down into my empty stomach.

I went into the bedroom. Here, another decor predominated. Black and white, eight-by-ten pictures of Ariana, framed in cheap black document frames. She was solo in all of them. Dressed as a high priestess, as a domina, smiling poolside in a black bathing suit. In some, she looked beautiful, in others, disconcertingly bizarre. Fine’s bed did not look posturpedic. It was a wooden pallet with a single gray flannel blanket thrown over it. Beside the bed was a candle in a holder, a full ashtray and a tube of Vaseline. The place reeked of incense that could not quite conceal the scent of body sweat. I got the impression that whatever obsessed Fine did not allow him much peaceful sleep.

I lifted the pallet and there was a manila envelope. Sex pictures of a man I presumed to be Fine being dominated in all ways by Ariana. Girl got around.

In the bathroom, I found a bottle of Seconal, probably to offset the bennies’ jitters. I sipped my beer and looked around. There was another bottle, liquid, I opened it an whipped my head away before the amyl nitrite knocked it into another dimension. Jeez, was I the only one who did not think this stuff was real healthy? I put both bottles in my pocket.

Back in the livingroom, I noticed a small bookshelf. All occult arcana. That was about it for the apartment. As I was leaving, I checked the hall closet. I thought that his bedroom closet had been overstuffed. In here stood a metal file cabinet. It was locked, but I appropriated a butcher knofe from the kitchen that I used to pry open the drawers until the latches torqued out of their settings.

Files, just like the ones in Scream’s office. I grabbed a few and noticed duplicates of the ones on me, Betty, Chambers and LaVey. I saw some more names I recognized and pulled them. In the bottom drawer, I found a good Leica camera, some Zeiss binoculars, some ammunition for the .38. I knew if I started going through files, I’d end up with far too much to feasibly smuggle out. I didn’t know what to do with the beer bottle so I put filled it with water and put it back in the fridge. I put the camera and binoculars around my neck, the bullets and files in my briefcase and I got the hell out of there. It was six-fifteen when I stepped out through the apartment building’s doors without having seen anyone.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 23

2008-06-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

When I opened the car door, Lex was nowhere to be seen, but I heard a trill from the hidey-hole. Then, I felt a circle of cold metal pressing into my neck.

“Don’t try anything tricky.” The voice was high and wispy, but definitely male. “Now, what are you doing out here?”

I swallowed. “Nothing wrong with a guy taking in the air.”

“Entering a state park at this time of night is illegal.”

“What are you, a park ranger?”

“Very funny.”

I felt a hand in my hip pocket. “Take the money. Just don’t shoot me.”

“Maybe I’ll do both. But mainly I’m just interested in who is out here watching things he shouldn’t be. Daniel Holcomb of The Hollywood Insider. Hmm, Scoop, I don’t think we’re looking for any coverage of this evening’s gala.”

“Leave me alone and I promise I won’t write a thing.”

“Well, I’d say we’ll have to go see our press relations director about that. Open the back door.”

I complied and then he told me to get behind the wheel. He got in the back. “Don’t be looking in the rear view mirror. You don’t want to know who I am. Now drive back to town.”

I fired up the car and pulled a U-turn and headed back down the highway. “You can put some gas into this thing,” came the voice behind me. “There’s no cops out here this time of night.”

No cars, either, I thought, hoping to see some headlights that I could swerve in front of, or a car behind that I could stomp on the brakes for. But my headlights were the only holes in the darkness. “Who are we going to see?” I asked.

“A person with a passion for privacy. Now, keep your mind on your driving,” he said.

The silence spun out like silken kite cord as we raced back to L.A.

Then, he yelped. “What the...?” And a yowl drawn from damned soul filled the car. Where before all had been stillness, the back seat was now a flurry of activity and horrible sound. Lex’s battle cry cringed my nards into hitherto unknown heights.

I stomped on the binders and tried to get the car over onto the highway shoulder without fishtailing out of control. The thug was screaming horribly. When I finally got stopped I leaped out of the car.

What I saw then, I can hardly believe now. Lex was a black blur seemingly triple his usual size. In the moonlight, I saw his eyes glint and saber-like claws flash. Flailing again and again over the gunsel’s face. The noise was so horrible my hand flew to my ears. Then a shot went off and the roof of my car exploded. Then there was silence. “Lex!” I screamed.

My heart was doing a Mexican hat dance in my chest and I pulled open the door with hands that were jittering out of control. The gunsel’s body slumped out onto the road. His face was slashed beyond recognition and where his eyes had once been, were now only raw bleeding holes.

Peering into the back seat, I saw Lex gobbling down what appeared to be an eyeball. He turned toward me and snarled, his ears back, fangs bared. Then as he finished his gory mouthful, his ears came back up and he looked at me, his pink tongue lashing around his gore soaked muzzle. Then he arched his back and raised his head to me and that macabre purr began again. “Lex,” I said. “Good fucking cat!”

Lex lifted a bloody paw and began to lick it. Then he stopped and cocked his head and looked me in the eye. Now it may have been a digestive noise, or a cough, but I’ll swear to my dying day that the noise that came from his mouth was a victorious “Hah!”

Though my mind was trying to mesh, the normal Lex before my eyes and the huge swirling dark form of vengeance, I thought I had seen in the struggle, I had bigger fish to fry. My cat killed a guy, I kept thinking. That, and I better get the fuck out of here.

I pulled the body around the back of the car and grabbed everything that was in his pockets. I took his watch and rings, and gun. Then, I dragged the body into the ditch. It rolled into some knee-high weeds. That would have to be good enough.

Back on the shoulder, I looked at the ruined roof of my car and figured it would take a pound of Bondo to fix it up, not to mention how I was ever going to clean the back seat. Lucky it was vinyl. When I slammed the back door, Lex was in the passenger seat. I jammed the car into gear and we headed off down the highway, fast at first, then slowing to the speed limit after a few minutes. “Thank you, Lex,” I finally said. “But we’ve really got to have a little talk one day soon.”

* * * *

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 22

2008-06-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

I phoned Dr. Alex Grant’s office. His secretary said that he had left for the day, but that I could make an appointment for Thursday if it would wait, or she would give me the number of the nearest hospital emergency room if I required it. I took the Thursday appointment under the name of J. Gatsby. I said the J. stood for Jay.

Then, I drove back to the Insider office. I returned some calls and checked some contacts on various film shoots. Got some good leads that I could turn into tales of dissension on a couple of sets. Then at five, I headed out.

I drove over the Club Demon and cruised down the back alley. There was a back door and a stairwell to a basement. I found a parking spot where I was not too conspicuous and could vaguely see around a dumpster to watch whoever might be coming and going from the club’s rear. Lex made a good companion, but got bored after an hour and shuttled back to his hidey hole. Shortly, I heard a faint echo of his snoring.

I wondered how long Ariana could keep herself away from her favorite haunt. How long would I be wasting my time sitting here? About 8:30, a van pulled up and three obviously drunken sailors poured out. At nine, the van pulled up again. This time three women got out. Judging by their apparel, I’d wager they were hookers. At ten, a limousine pulled up. A man about Scream’s height and build got out and held the door for what could only be the wraithlike form of Ariana. She wore a leopardskin coat, high black boots and big black sunglasses. The guy who might be Scream had his collar pulled up and his fedora pulled down. He too wore oversized sunglasses.

The chauffeur angled the limo into a park job between the club and the alley and then he cut the motor. Then he got out and lit up a cigar. I did not recognize him as one of the security goons from the party.

I got quietly out of the car and put the leash on Lex. Then I opened the pint of Old Crow from under the seat and took a healthy swallow. Then, without closing the car door, I set out for a stroll down the alley.

The chauffeur looked me over as I approached him. I came to a halt. “Nice night for a stroll,” I said. I took a swig and offered him the bottle. He looked me up and down then reached out for the bottle. He took a good swig. “Much obliged,” he said. Jeez, I thought, does he get his dialogue from westerns? “Don’t usually see many people walking their cats around these parts.” These parts? Yep, fancied himself a cowpoke alright. Giddalong, liddle Caddy, yeehah!

“It’s all in how early you train ‘em,” I said. “They’ll be obedient as a dog, if you start ‘em out about three weeks old. Here, I’ll show you Lex’s tricks,” I said handing him back the bottle, urging him to have another drink.

I bent down and whispered to Lex, then unclipped the leash. “Watch this,” I told the chauffeur. Then I stepped in front of Lex and tapped my shoulder. Lex quivered in preparation, then he leaped to my left shoulder, making a perfect four-point landing.

The guard stepped back, shocked. “Whoa, that’s got to be handy,” he said and took another swig off the neck.

“Watch this,” I said. “Lex, foe!” Lex arched his back, bared his fangs, raised a clawed paw and hissed a horrid yowl. The chauffeur actually jumped back this time. “Lex, friend!” I said. Lex settled right down and rubbed his head against my neck and kicked over his unholy purr.

“I reckon not many dogs chase that cat,” drawled the Caddy jockey.

“None that want to keep their eyes,” I chuckled.

“Jeez, that’s some cat.”

We talked easily after that icebreaker, passing the bottle back and forth until it was gone. “I hear there’s some pretty strange stuff go on in that club,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s a club for rich folk to come down and act weird in the company of their own kind.”

“Good place to buy some reefer?” I asked, conspiratorially.

“No doubt there’s lots in there, but you gotta be a member to get in.”

“Strange that it’s for rich folk, place is an absolute shithole on the outside.”

“It’s not much better on the inside, but they want to keep what goes on in there pretty low-key.”

“You mean like sex stuff?”

He eyed me and then looked at Lex who perched contentedly on my shoulder. “Somethin’ like that. You sort of ask a lotta questions.”

“Just passin’ the time, maybe looking for a bit of reefer. This ain’t no police dog on my shoulder.”

I could feel Lex’s claws dig into my shoulder and his fur bristle against my neck. Then, the club’s back door squeaked open. Quickly, I said, “Well, looks like you’re back on the job. I’ll see you around.” With that I turned around and wandered back down the alley. I walked past my car and around the corner onto the adjacent street. Looking back, I could see the lights of the limo come on. When it started off the lane away from me, I doubled back and got in my car. “We’re on the chase, Lex.”

I managed to keep the limo in sight and followed it as it maneuvered out of the city onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

After the first half-hour I knew we were in for a long one. We motored on, into the night. Lex’s eyes glowed in the lights of oncoming cars.

The limo picked up speed and after we passed Malibu, I figured it might be heading for Zuma Beach. Sure enough, it pulled off into the state park. I pulled the car over to the shoulder before I got to the park turnoff. I debated whether or not to take Lex with me and decided I could not risk it, despite his obvious desire to go.

I took my penlight and my gun. Then I started down the dark road to the park. It was pitch dark and I turned on the penlight every hundred feet to catch my bearings. Vaguely, I heard the sound of drums coming from my left, quite far away. When the road opened up to the parking lot, I saw about a dozen cars in the moonlight, including the limo. The chauffeur was sitting in the car with the inside lights on.

I hunched down and skirted the lot, finally finding a path through the woods that veered off in the direction of the drumming. I could smell a fire. Eventually, I could see its flickering light through the trees. When I could see the actual fire and people standing around it I left off the path and circled around through the woods. Hunkering down, I looked at the various individuals. I could recognize only Ariana with her long hair billowing in the wind, and Scream, now wearing his mask.

The man who was at the center of the ceremony was wearing a traditional Northwest Indian mask with dark eyeholes, a prominent bird beak and hair and ruff of what was probably shredded bark. Before him was a wooden altar, about waist high. He was chanting and before him on a wooden platter lay the body of some sort of skinned animal, probably a dog. In the firelight, I could see it was the shimmering viscous crimson gray of freshly killed meat. Whooo boy, I thought. Fido kebabs?

The gathered all joined hands and they started swaying to the chant. The sound might have been mesmerising if I hadn’t been scared spitless of getting myself caught.

Ariana broke from the circle and disrobed by the fire and then she began to dance around the blaze. I had seen the magnificent body in Al Stirling’s photos. She annointed her body with some dark grease from a chalice on the altar. Her skin shimmered in the firelight, but to me she looked like she was covering herself with crankcase oil. My mind hitched when I realized there was probably blood in the grease. Then she bent over the altar and the man in the native mask shed his robe and penetrated her. His chants became louder and more frenzied. Two other women came up and took some grease from the chalice and began massaging it in to his thrusting body. Ariana moaned and growled like an animal in heat. Then the others disrobed and came to the couple. With no apparent regard for gender protocol, the assembled began to caress the couple. Some fell to their knees and licked the copulating forms, reaching for their thrusting genitals, lifting Ariana so they could suckle her breasts, kissing her face and shoulders. This went on for a long time. The guy was obviously quite a swordsman and his thrusts indicated quite a sword. Ariana seemed in the grips of orgasm several times. When he climaxed, a couple of the women captured his jetting essence in a chalice. Men and women serviced his organ to get the last drops. Then Ariana raised the chalice to her mouth and drank. All this time Scream had stood impassive and clothed, only observing the orgy.

The naked leader then sliced the meat of the dog and handed some to each participant. Raising the carved dog over his head, he hurled it into the fire. It must have been stuffed with gasoline bags, because when it hit the flames it sizzled for just a few seconds before bursting into a billowing full flame.

Then naked and half dressed, the participants left quickly up the path for their cars. After a few minutes, I could hear engines starting. I stayed hidden and quivering as the dark man, still in his totem mask stepped by my vantage point and walked to the parking lot. When I heard his engine start, I cautiously stood.

What the hell had that been all about, I wondered. I would certainly have something to ask LaVey about. I waited there in the darkness for a quarter hour. Then I made my way out of the park.

* * * *

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 21

2008-06-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

Next day, I was tired, yet elated, as I drove down the highway to the Santa Monica Free Press. Lex was a worthy copilot. His black fur bristled with health in the morning sunshine and he poked his head out the window enjoying the breeze for brief periods. His head zigged from side to side as he observed all the passing traffic. Every once in a while, he would look over at me and meow and I would fill him in on the events of the previous day. When I told him mano-a-gato about Betty’s lessons in lust, he started to purr and bobbed his head. Unnerving little guy.

Terrance Weigel was at his desk. I wondered if roots had grown into his chair yet. I told him that a satanist honcho had been shot, but that he had not been hospitalized. “No story there, then,” he said. “If there’s anything on the wire we’ll pick it up.” I was sorta miffed that he didn’t want any of my sterling prose, but I had other matters that concerned me.

I asked him what he knew about Merlin Chambers. “Good looking son-of-a-gun,” he said. “About forty. Beautiful wife named Bunny. About thirty. They both come from old money, heritage families. One kid named James, about sixteen, bit of a delinquent, I hear, but his dad keeps the reins on him. Been on council for six years. Up for reelection year after next. He’s known to be a friend to developers. Probably has some dough in development as well, but likely well hidden to avoid conflict-of-interest allegations.” He sat back in his typists chair. “There. Need his shoe size or inseam?”

“You’re a good man to know,” I said. “Any rumors of impropriety in these development deals?”

“Nah, every one of those sons of bitches has something crooked going on sub rosa. As long as they don’t get caught with their pants down, no one makes a fuss. Plus, they hide things pretty good through holding companies, making distant relatives the signing parties and such.”

“But, since he’s a public official, I could get a list of all his holdings at city hall. It’s all public record.”

“Certainly, you could see the ones directly attached to him. But, if he’s smart, which he is, you’d never connect the hidden properties to him without a paper trail like a labyrinth.”

“But his IRS records would show something, wouldn’t they? Cash income?”

“Only if he cashed something in. Maybe a small bit of capital gains. But if he was smart, he would pay the taxes for his puppet executives and let profits be registered to them. When there were significant profits, he would quickly put them into other real estate.”

“Like, maybe, Szandor Scream’s mansion.”

“Possibly. You could work backward from the registered owner of the house and see if it led you to Chambers, but it would be a bitch of a job. Besides, what would that get you? So what if he owns it?”

“Probably nothing.” But Bianca Hughes worked in records and maybe Al Stirling was tracing down satanist land holdings and stumbled onto something.

* * *

Lex and I stopped for a burger on the beach before heading back to the city. Lex enjoyed some hamburger patty, a small french fry and a drink of vanilla milkshake. On the way home, he contentedly let fly with that buzzsaw purr of his.

I pulled to a drugstore where I checked the gymnasiums in the area surrounding Scream’s home. The one closest was an upscale health club called Arnold’s. I drove there and went in. I said I was thinking of joining and a strapping lass called Jeri gave me all the sales dope. Then she allowed me to look over the workout floor from the little health food snack bar mezzanine. Immediately, I recognized “Muscles” from Scream’s security staff. What I was really looking for was someone who might be Ambrose Lynn, Scream’s beefy lieutenant. Any number of the dozen or so muscleheads who were working out fit his description.

I told Jeri that I recognized Muscles from somewhere. She told me his name was Ted and that he was a bouncer, like many of these guys. He worked at a nightclub on Sunset, called Dino’s. I said that must be where I had seen him before.

I sat in the car and petted Lex while I waited for Ted to leave the gym. When he did, he hopped in an old Ford sedan. I trailed him back to a bungalow on South Fairfax. I waited and eventually he came out wearing his working clothes: black T-shirt and beige dress slacks.

Again, I followed his car and this time it was obviously headed to Scream’s, so I doubled back and returned to the bungalow.

I parked down the street and wandered up the quiet residential street. I let myself in the back door using a slim-jim. The kitchen counters were covered in large vitamin bottles and jars of protein supplements. Ted obviously spent large amount of jack on his body. Not so much on his surroundings, which were meticulously clean, but spartan. In the single bedroom there was a bed and bedside table. Under the bed, I found stacks of bodybuilding magazines including a number of male nudist magazines that looked particularly well-thumbed. In the bedside table, I found some lubricants and a box of amyl ampules. Also a glass bottle containing a liquid that when I sniffed it sent my head skyrocketing. Pure amyl nitrite in liquid form. Funny how everyone seemed to use amyls. Jayne, Chambers, now Ted.

Pulling myself together as the amyls wore off, I searched the dresser and found some pay slips. Black River Holdings and Dino’s Supper Club were the names of the issuers. Ramsey was Ted’s last name. I copied down the bank and account number of Black River Holdings as well as the signatory who was someone named S. Mitchell. Then I slipped out.

I drove to the Insider office and was immediately handed an assignment on a pair of star sisters who were rumored to be lesbos. I spent an hour making phone calls and cobbling together some ill-founded rumors and insinuating speculation. I think it was one of my better works.

Then I got on the phone and managed to jump through hoops to get to Pat Kennedy at Hollywood homicide.

“I’ve got some leads for you,” I opened.

“Was it you who tried to blow off Szandor Scream’s nards last night?” asked Kennedy.

“No, though I’ve heard the gossip. How’d you hear about it?”

“Stuff comes around,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Any word on the Hughes killing?”

“Nope. That one seems to have gotten away clean. But, of course, we’re still working the suspects.”

“How about the mutilations?”

“We’re not doing so well there, either.”

“Have you ever heard of Black River Holdings?”

“No, who is that?”

“I think it might be Scream’s company.”

“How so?”

“I found out that one of his freelance muscle men, Ted Ramsey, works for Black River.” I was as much as admitting to a break in. “Maybe you could check on this Ramsey fellow.”

Kennedy wrote the name down. “You think he shot Scream?”

“Might have, but I think he’s just hired muscle. What I want to find out is who Scream really is. Then I think a bunch of things will fall into place.”

“For you or for me? I don’t recall getting a directive that the LAPD was now the research department for errant reporters.”

“I just think the Hughes homicide is connected to the Stirling homicide and that somehow they are connected to Scream and that he somehow has something to do with the mutilations.”

Kennedy sighed, noncommital. “I’ll check out Ramsey and get back to you if I find anything.”

“No wonder you’re a legendary deductive detective.”

* * * *

The receptionist at the West Hollywood morgue didn’t despise me as much as most cops did. I was a regular down there and brought her a kruller and a coffee. She was impressed that I knew celebrities -some in the biblical sense. She was not bad looking and good for my ego. Her name was Lacey.

After a few minutes of largely fabricated celebrity gossip, I wandered down to Dom Simone’s domain.

The coroner was in the lab, or the chop shop as it was known. I wandered in, grinning endearingly.

“What the hell you doin’ here,” asked Dom as he looked up from some naked human that I kept my eyes well off.

“I just wondered how sure you were about that Ariana Blaquelord.”

Simone hitched slightly, then put his tools down and stared at me. “How sure about what? She sure was dead. I’m sure of that.”

“A friend of mine went to a Satanist shindig last night and saw Ariana alive and well, glowing with health you might say.”

“The hell you say?”

“Yup.”

“She’s six feet under.”

“And handily cremated, so we can’t check out the body.”

Dom was a great guy. Not much escaped his scientific gaze. He and I had worked closely before. He often gave me the inside track when some star punted. Nothing that wouldn’t be released a few hours later. Just stuff that might get me the jump on the other papers. I’d wangled him some tickets to events and premieres and he had met some of his favorite celebrities. Dom was stone crazy for the movies and the stars were like gods to him. I guess he needed some glamor in his life to offset his days immersed in the gruesome.

“She was IDed by her doctor. She had no next of kin and no registered address. She had no employer. She was a persona non grata, but her doctor was the only one with any links to her. There was no need for a dental records check or anything like that. I mean she was messed up pretty bad, but she was identifiable to someone who knew her.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“No need.”

“I’m getting a pain. I think I need to see a doctor. Know of one offhand?”

* * * *

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 20

2008-03-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

With the camera crew, I moved to the stage. Ed was pointing the two cameramen to their POVs. They panned over Betty in her magnificence. I held a mini-spotlight and held it on Serena, who waved inebriatedly in its glare. Fumbling around, I managed to get the pistol in my hand. I kept my eyes on Scream, who stood with his arms outstretched presenting thiswretched tableau. The Japanese drumming pounded in my ears. This was it. I laid down my spot and stepped toward Scream. The pistol was concealed in the folds of my cape. I was going to put the gun to his head, tell him to call it off and hope for the best. It was the best I could come up with, and I realized as I moved that it had been my plan all along.

Ed would just have to disavow any knowledge of my intentions. Tom and Pete would get us to the van and we’d have to take it on the lam.

Scream’s mask turned to me, his arms faltering in their invocation. Then his arms clutched at his crotch. I did not know what he was trying to indicate. When he raised one of his hands, I saw it was stained with red. On his gold lamé, a stain appeared. Then he dropped his hands again to his crotch and sagged to the stage floor.

Ariana, in her glowing garb ran to him. Only now was the crowd starting to notice. Their eyes had been trained on Betty as she had been sweeping her bullwhip around Serena, drawing nearer, building anticipation for that first bite of leather into flesh.

I stepped backward and made like I had not seen and was merely adjusting a light. I jammed the gun back into my pants. Only then did the crowd noise register above the music. Costumed men leapt to the stage as Ariana’s cry rose above the din. A stampede surged toward the back door.

I grabbed Ed. “Okay, Ed you stay here with Betty, me and Tom and Pete are going to get Serena and fuck off.” He nodded.

* * *

Tom started the van. “What the fuck did you do? Shoot the guy in cold blood?” he yelled as he checked behind us and gave the van the gas.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said shaking my head and wrapping Serena in my cape. “Now get us the fuck out of here.”

“Where to?” he shouted.

“Bleeker and 13th,” I said. We had no stronghold, but I figured LaVey would be prepared for most anything. I kept waiting for the sounds of police cars or an ambulance, but I heard nothing but the rush of cars beside us.

* * *

As soon as we pulled up in front of the Lavey’s black gate, the house door was thrown open and LaVey ran out. We got the wasted Serena out of the back and hustled her into the house. I shoved some cash at Tom and Peter and told them to ditch the van in an alley at least a mile away, then make themselves scarce for a few days.

With the door bolted behind us, LaVey ignored me while he hugged and kissed Serena and put her to bed with a dose of Thorazine. I made my way to the bathroom and got the makeup off my face. I’d had the presence of mind to stash some spare clothes in the van and got out of the ridiculous vampire getup. When I came back to the living room, LaVey had regained his imperious composure although he was pacing the floor, not perching in his throne like usual. “Thank you, Daniel,” he said. “How did it go? Did she escape unsullied?”

“It was the craziest thing,” I said. “I was just going over to put a gun in Scream’s face and suddenly, he went down. Someone had shot him in the crotch. We just seized the moment in all the confusion and scooted Serena out the back way. We didn’t do sweet diddly.”

“Did anyone recognize you?”

“No, not with all that makeup on. Ed will be in a bit of trouble, but he’s just going to tell them that the other guys and I were just some rummies he picked up and that he doesn’t know an address.”

* * *

I caught a cab home and Lex seemed particularly happy to see me. I called Betty’s number, but she wasn’t home yet. Then I called Ed. It sounded like there was a party going on there.

* * *

“There’s a party going on here,” Ed yelled into the phone.

“What the hell are you partying for?”

“Because we got some money,” I gave one of the honchos the gears about paying for rented equipment and said we weren’t leaving until we got it and everything was in such a state of confusion that he whipped out his wallet and gave us $200 and gave Betty even more. Whoohoo, party time.”

“Ed, who shot Scream?”

“Who shot Liberty Vallance? I dunno. It wasn’t you. Your conscience is clear. They didn’t even peg you for taking Serena. They lay all the blame on Tom and Peter, who I said I didn’t really know. They can’t call the cops and report the kidnapping of someone they already kidnapped. As far as I can see you’ve come out of this scot-free. C’mon over and party. Bring the blue chick if you want. She looks like a good time.”

“Yeah, right, Ed,” I said. “Anyhow, I might be along in a while. How’s Betty doing?”

“She’s lit up like a house afire, havin’ a hell of a good time.”

* * *

I hung up from Ed and dialed up Jayne. “Any word on what happened to Scream?” I asked.

“Sadly, whoever shot him missed his knackers,” she sighed. “There were some doctors there and word was that he was shot cleanly through his upper right thigh.”

“Will he be going to hospital?”

“I don’t think so. He would obviously try to avoid being traced. So it doesn’t look like you’re going to reveal Batman’s secret identity tonight, Scoop. For a second there, I thought you were going to pop him, but the shot definitely came out of the audience.”

“Did anybody see who did it?”

“Are you kidding? In all that turmoil and argybargy? There were people having sex without anybody noticing.”

“So what did you do after it happened?”

“I just went and found Mickey and we waited about ten minutes to get our car and then we buggered off and got home and into some sensible clothes.”

“I didn’t know Mickey was going?”
“Well, you weren’t going to be my date and I didn’t want to go unchaperoned.”

I thought of something. “What did Mickey go as?”

“He was great. You should’ve seen him. He was Julius Caesar, with his hair all combed forward and a brass breastplate and one of those little skirt things that barely covered his business, sandals with thongs up his legs, a real sword and this great red cape that almost strangled him while he was driving. He got so pissed off he threw it out the window on our drive home. We got all the stuff from the Fox costume department. They’re going to be pissed when I say Mickey lost the cape.”

“Sounds hep,” I said. “Which way did you come home?”

“We just zipped along Sunset, missed all the traffic and everything. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering. I got stuck in traffic.”

“But you got Serena, didn’t you.”

“Yeah. She’s at home with Anton now. He’s probably trying to wash that blue crap off her.”

“That’s super. She sure looked messed up. I wish Scream had been shot in the nuts.”

“Me too. Then he would have had to go to hospital and I could trace him down. Anyhow, I think I’m going to head over to Ed Wood’s and have a drink. He’s having a party because even in the eye of the maelstrom, he managed to get paid.”

“Is she going to be there?”

“Who?”

“You know, the Bettie Page lookalike that you’ve been porking.”

“Is that the green-eyed monster I hear?”

“Just don’t give me a dose next time we get together,” she said and hung up.

I sat back and stroked where my mustache used to reside. Lex jumped up in my lap and I stroked his lustrous black fur, feeling its crackle of electricity. Brass breastplate. A perfect place for concealing a pistol. A big cape. Perfect for concealing the shot. Then discarded to get rid of the bullethole. Mickey had motive. He wasn’t with Jayne when the shot was fired. I figured there were pretty good odds that our man Mick was the one who saved my bacon by taking the initiative.

Enough detective work for one day.

I got up and quickly typed out five hundred words on the party and its upset. I felt like a drink or six.

I dropped off the copy at the paper and picked up my messages, then I skedaddled before anyone tagged me for an assignment.

* * *

When I got to Ed’s it was like a scene from Satyricon. Betty shone like some heavy-lidded goddess of dissipation among the gargoyles that were Ed’s social circle. Even the fortifying effects of wearing ladies clothing seemed to have failed Ed as he staggered from guest to guest proclaiming his genius and pontificating on new projects and the stupidity of the Hollywood moguls who refused to finance them.

Trixie, the daemon film student, came up to pour me a drink. Wasted, she looked even more terrifying, but she kept pushing her ample chest against my arm and I felt myself warming to her.

Betty emerged from the bathroom, her nose a fetching red. I excused myself from Trixie and went over to see Betty. The dagger eyes I received from dismissing Trixie sent chills through my groin.

Betty had managed an interesting look with baggy harem-style sweat pants pulled over her garters and nylons, her feet were in running shoes. However, on the top, she still wore her leather corselet. Her black hair was wild, the room’s humidity having returned some of its natural curl. A sweat-damp forelock fell over her forehead where before there had been perfect bangs. The goddess reserve was gone, too. She shrieked when she saw me and barged through the crowd to throw a hug around my neck that almost snapped it. Her leather-clad breasts almost poked holes in my chest.

“Watch it or you’ll hurt somebody with those,” I gasped.

She pulled back with an ear-to-ear, rubber-lipped grin. “Oh Danny, we did it,” she giggled.

“Or, at least, somebody did it,” I said.

* * *

“Let’s get out of here and go back to my place,” Betty slurred. “I’ve still got some nose candy left and I feel in the mood for fun. The ogres around here look like they’re going to start throwing up soon.”

We gathered up Betty’s stuff and said good-bye to Ed, who was barely registering social interaction by this point. As we exited, I looked over at Trixie who stuck out her tongue at me. This would have been unremarkable, but for the length of the appendage. It dropped past her chin and then the tip curled toward me and waggled independent of the supporting tissue. I knew that picture would stick unbidden in my mind for far too long.

I was the envy of anyone who looked in the car as I drove to Betty’s. She could not sit still and was dancing around in the car to little pop tunes that she was humming. She looked wild, dangerous and delicious.

When we got back to her place and I was dragged into the bedroom, I became a man of the world. Every which way from Tuesday.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 19

2008-03-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

“I think it’s Serena,” Betty whispered. “But she’s so out of it and Scream wouldn’t let me alone anywhere near her to ask. They’ve shaved her bald and, dig this, they’ve dyed her blue.”

“Blue?”

“From head-to-toe, Daddy-O. Blue as a vein.”

“Yoiks!”

“And what she’s whacked on, who knows, but she ain’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“Will we be able to get her out of here?”

“If you can get at her, it’s just a matter of hefting her over your shoulder. She has no idea of where she is, or even that anything is wrong. And she’s bald and has blue skin, mind you. You won’t get any cooperation from her, she’s so zoned that Scream had to take a leak, told her to open her mouth and he used her like a urinal. I’m in the degradation business and that was the weirdest, I’ve seen.”

“So what about the snatch?”

“How fucked up are you? It’s shaved, too.”

I rolled my eyes. “No, you nitwit, getting her out. Can we do it before or during?”

“Before will take some doing. During, I could say we need more drugs or she’s going to barf, actually that wouldn’t stop anything. They’d probably like that. But it might work.”

“Where’s Scream now?”

“He’s gone back to the main house to get dressed.”

“Then take me back.”

“Can we risk it?”

“I’ll take some electrical cable with me, and some tools, and you be ready to drop the bathrobe if anyone sees us.”

“Why?”

“Distraction. I suppose you know this, but you look so gorgeous I’d crawl over broken glass to lick your kneecaps.” Which gave me an idea.

* * *

The walls were simple gray concrete and there was no use slithering along them. If I was caught here, we would have to tapdance fast with the excuses. Betty took off the robe and I was mesmerized by her tiny waist cinched into the sleek leather corset, her hard butt bobbing along with only a whisp of panty making it a panty at all. Her legs were long and beautifully muscled shining in black silk stockings. Her heels clicked abominably loud in the hallway. She looked over her shoulder at me and laughed as she caught me ogling her butt. I quickly held a finger to my lips. She was persona grata here. I was the one who was where I shouldn’t be.

As we walked along she suddenly stopped dead, reaching back with black satin-gloved hands. I immediately saw what was happening. A light was growing larger at the intersection of our corridor and the next. “Stay!” I whispered in her ear and hunching low I shuffled back as quickly as possible. My knees creaking and my running shoes squeaking like hungry gulls. I didn’t think I’d make it, but I got back to the previous intersection and whipped around the corner. Then I sank to my knees and peered around.

Betty was leaning against the wall, one stockinged ankle lifted, inspecting the buckle on one of her shoes. Then the light flashed down the corridor and I pulled back behind the corner. A deep voice rumbled out, “Ah Miss Payne, having a problem. Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

Then Betty’s voice, “Not unless you can design more comfortable high heels. I’m fine, you’re just getting a behind the scenes shot of the glamour. The star getting a blister.”

“Can I get you a small bandage.”

“I have some in my dressing room, thank you. I’m just taking a load off for a second. Please, carry on.”

“As you wish. I’m very much looking forward to tonight’s performance.”

“Thanks, I’ll try to give it my all.”

The light faded from the hallway and I waited a few seconds and peaked around. Betty was waving come on.

I hurried back to her. “That guy, whoever he was, will probably be coming back shortly, let’s get to the dressing room.” She peaked around the corner to make sure he was gone and we shuffled back up the way he had come. Finally, we got to a closed door and Betty opened it. I was pulled in to a room about sixteen feet square. It had a plain dressing table with mirrors against one wall, a couple of chairs and a couch and carpets on the floor. A small icebox stood in one corner and a door led to a toilet cubicle. Betty bolted the door behind us and turned to grin at me. “So far so good,” she said. “Time for a little lash.”

“Don’t joke, Betty. I don’t want to be whipped right now.”

“I like the emphasis on ‘right now,’” she said, with an evil cock of her eyebrow. “But what I meant, was the white lady.” She lifted the lid off a butter dish and there, layed out, were a dozen little rows of white powder about the size of small drinking straws. She produced a short glass tube and put it in one nostril and closing the other nostril with a finger, she snuffed up one of the rows into her nose, then she moved the tube to another nostril and inhaled another row. “Your turn...” She held out the glass tube.

White lady, cocaine, but I was no dope fiend, so I waved it away. “We don’t have time.”

“How long did that take, ten seconds? Do it,” she said, “It’ll make your senses sharper, give you more energy.”

“I don’t want to get woozy,” I insisted.

“It doesn’t work that way. Just do it. You won’t regret it.”

I didn’t have time to waste in an argument, so I did like she showed me. No big deal, but then I felt a gagging sensation at the back of my throat. Maybe I’d ODed. I asked her about it and she said that was normal.

“Okay, I’ve indulged you,” I said. “Now where’s Serena?”

“She’s down a couple more intersections. But how are you gonna get in?”

I held up my lockpick, which had come in handy over my career. “I hope this will work.”

* * *

She wasn’t there.

“Did Scream say anything about moving her?”

“Not to me.”

“Then where the fuck is she?”

Right then though we heard some voices coming down the hall. I pulled the door shut and we hustled back to the first intersection and ducked into the shadows. “Quick,” whispered Betty, get down on your knees.

“What?” but she shoved me down and pulled me to her crotch, grinding into my face. Just then a light flashed on us. “Ah Miss Payne,” then the light traveled down to illuminate me as I got the idea and labored on.

“Get the fucking light off me,” shouted Betty and then moaned, “I’m gonna come, so leave us alone.” She bucked and quivered and let out a a series of moans. Then her woice rang out again, “I told you to get fucking lost. Now do it, you fucking pinhead!” Through slitted eyes, I saw the light move away. “Sorry, Miss Payne.”

“That’s Mistress Payne to you, you peeping-tom piece of shit, now run!” And I heard hustling footsteps receding.

She gave me a final grind in the face and pulled me up. “Quick thinking,” I said.

“Yeah, as a domina you learn to be a bit of a drill sergeant. Nobody fucks with me. Especially when I’m having sex.”

“Who was it?”

“It was that muscley thug. Anyhow, I think we better get you back to the show. They know someone is down here with me and that can’t be good.”

I could hear the blood rushing in my ears and I was torn between my sudden arousal, the dope in my blood and fear of being caught. “Let’s get back to your dressing room.”

Inside the room, Betty grinned, “You’re going to have to redo your lipstick.” I looked in the mirror and saw that my red mouth was smeared all over my upper lip and chin.

“I’ll scout around, try and get in the main house” and report back to you.”

Betty walked me back to the stage and I saw Muscles giving me the eye and then shaking his head in congratulation, as much as disbelief, at what he’d just seen. Betty glared at him imperiously then winked and broke out laughing as she turned her back and disappeared into the catacombs.

* * *

My senses seemed unusually sharp as I pressed myself against the wall and sidled toward the sound. The music was from those pan flutes that I had seen in National Geographic. Eerie stuff with strange shrilling harmonics that oscillated against each other. Easy listening music for vampires, I mused. The surroundings seemed a bit familiar and it struck me that the room I was approaching was the one where I’d been with Ariana before when Scream had left us to go have his way with Jayne.

A purple light filtered into the darkened hall from under the door. The noise of the flutes covered any sounds I might make and I turned the knob and cracked the door slightly. The whole room was lit in an unearthly violet. Inching the door open, I felt like I had been hit with a mallet. Standing in profile in front of a metal stand holding a smoking incense burner was Ariana. My heart had stopped because every inch of her from her white floor-length gown to the lengths of her hair had a slightly green irradiance. Her arms floated delicately through the incense smoke and, although I could not hear it over the pipes, she seemed to be chanting. She was staring at a goat skull that was glowing with the same unearthly light and seemed to be floating in mid air about three paces in front of her.

A ghost? I’d never seen anything like it. I wondered if that white lady that I had snuffed up my nose was making me hallucinate. I watched her sway and gesticulate. What the hell was this?

I’m not much of a believer in ghosts, but since I’d associated with LaVey, my convictions about matters supernatural were being eroded. Whatever the apparition was, it was not helping me with my quest. I skittered out the door and shut it as best I could. My nerves were jangling like I’d bitten into an electrical cable.

I slithered along the walls wishing I had a vampire’s powers and could crawl along the ceiling. When I came to another door, I cracked it and, checking that it was vacant, I slipped in. Here again was another desk and although the room was much smaller than Ariana’s lair, it had a more businesslike air. Filing cabinets were along one wall. No occult knickknacks. This was probably where Scream did business. The doors to the other rooms could be shut and this would be where guests from the straight world would be met. I hurriedly closed the door behind me and flipped the deadbolt.

I opened the desk drawer first. Standard stationery supplies. Then I went to the file cabinets. Manila folders were neatly labeled and as I thumbed through them I recognized the names of prominent businessmen, city council members, even cops. This was the motherlode. Cracking a file open I saw that there were ledger sheets and photos of a particular councilman in a dark robe engaged in some witchcraft ceremony. There were also handwritten notes. A cursory scan of these indicated that this councilman favored drag queens as dates and poppers as his drug of choice. There were files on Al Sterling, Jayne, the mayor, LaVey and myself. I grabbed what I thought would be a concealable number of files and shoved them into my cape’s pockets. You hear about detectives rummaging through someone’s files until they find something that will solve a case. Well, I had found something, I did not know what, but I did not have the guts or nerves to stay in the room. Any minute someone could come in and find me and then where would I be? I shut the cabinet and took the egress.

Feeling the files flap heavily against my body, I lurched for the way back to the dressing rooms.

When I knocked, Betty opened the door and I could see she was on her way to Slursville. Unfortunately, that merely made her more attractive. Her eyes glittered mischievously, their lids slightly heavy. Her face was flushed, her lips seemingly poutier. She giggled at my undead appearance.

I shoved the door shut and swung my cape off. Then I pulled out the files and started going through them. “Betty, we have something here. I dunno what, but it’s something.” I told her about the various honchos mentioned in the files. I handed her a file with her name on it. Meanwhile, I checked my own dossier. I was referred to as “a muckraker, hatchet man and career assassin.” My esteemed publication was denominated “the city’s top asswipe.”

Betty hissed at references to her as twenty-buck whore and has-been never-was with a remarkable resemblance to a former celebrity. She read to me that it also claimed she would be easily manipulated through supplied drugs. I shrugged and looked meaningfully at the mirror of white powder on her dressing table. She curled her lip at me.

I opened a six-by-eight envelope and the world dropped out from under me. I refused to look at more than the first couple of photos. My lost evening had been graphically documented and what I saw was enough to build my rage to a level where I wanted to burn this fucking house down to the ground. But I could not process that right then.

With hands that I hoped Betty would not see trembling, I shoved the envelope back into the folder and tried to concentrate on the next file. It was not hard when I saw the name Merlin Chambers, a top attorney known for his ability to get celebrities off their legal troubles. I think he’d been the first choice for defending Mitchum on his gage bust, but someone else was chosen and Bob went to the crowbar hotel, albeit briefly. I called Chambers’s office regularly for details on stories. At first, I was put through to the man himself and his response was always the same: “Fuck off.” These days, I got no further than his secretary and she had picked up the same refrain.

I found it hard to hold a contiguous train of thought. My concentration kept flickering with images of what was in my personal file. But I kept on with Chambers’s file when I saw the notation, “Magik name: Yog Saltar. Third ring of daemons. Grand master. Familiar: Golem. Vices: gin and erotic asphyxia.”

Betty tossed her folder over to me. “What’d it say about you?” she asked.

“That I was a loathesome hack who enjoyed destroying careers. But, more interestingly, Scream seems to have some fairly powerful associates involved in his little coven. He’s also taken the time to list all their naughty little secrets. So these will be very helpful. Trouble is, they don’t do us much good right now. By the way, I saw Ariana’s ghost.”

“What?” Betty shrieked incredulously.

I told her what I’d seen and asked her if the drug might have caused me to hallucinate. “Not unless you’d been awake for four days doing tons of it,” she assured me.

What the hell had I seen?

A knock came on Betty’s door. “Entrance in 30 minutes, Miss Pain.” said a voice. Betty yelled that she would be ready.

“I’d better be getting back then,” I said, secreting the files back into my cape. I still don’t know what we’re going to do. I certainly don’t want you doing what Scream wants to Serena.”

“That makes two of us. Think fast.”

I nodded and headed out the door.

* * *

The room had filled substantially. Probably three hundred masked revelers thronged the area. No one in our crew would be construed as even remotely out of place. There were vampires and Vampiras, daemons and dominas, sorceresses and mages. The predominant motif was black. The favored jewelry the inverted cross so favored by Satanists. LaVey told me that he thought the symbol was stupid since it had been a Christian symbol, the cross of St. Peter who had requested to be crucified upside down in order to appear lower than his Lord. LaVey disdained sham.

Ed was running things expertly. I could not get over how, when he put on women’s clothes, he immediately ceased being quite such a screw-up.

He pulled me over into a corner and asked, “What’s the play, Shakespeare?”

I felt horrible; I did not know.

There were torches everywhere and I briefly thought I should just set the place on fire, but that seemed too broad a stroke. Making off with Selena somehow was the only way. I went over to one of the klieg lights and untaped it. I put the .32 in the back of my waistband.

The music was some weird recording of a Japanese drum ensemble, very hypnotic and complex. It was also giving me a throbber of a headache.

A nubile nymph, the fairy kind, in a diaphonous body suit came up to the stage holding a tray of drinks. Some were shotglasses of mushroom tea, but I avoided those. I helped myself to two glasses of rose champagne. The nymph pointed to the little crusted sugar skulls and dropped one into my champagne. It fizzed and she made a motion to drink it right down. It was quite delightful. Ed made his way over and tried the champagne with a skull. He too found it pleasing and gobbled two more glasses in short order. Then a fey young man dressed in a winged helmet and a loin cloth, and holding a caduceus came by with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. The crew descended and the tray was picked clean in short order. With a raised eyebrow, Hermes skepped back through the service entrance.

Though I had not seen it, there must be a kitchen back there somewhere.

Suddenly, the drumming ceased and there was a peel of trumpets. Spotlights flashed the main stage and the twin beams crossed to cause a brilliant X on the wide altar-like podium at the center of the stage. I checked the ceiling and saw on either side, projection booths set in the upper walls.

I was expecting a theatrical entrance and I was not disappointed. With a concussive boom, the altar exploded in an arc of golden sparks. From our vantage point, we could see what the audience could not. Scream raced out from a concealed doorway at the back of the stage. When the flares abated, he stood there glorying in his cheap trick, his arms raised. He wore his daemon mask as always and a pleated gold lamé robe that, with his arms outstretched, looked like an inverted Japanese fan.

The crowd erupted into applause and hoorahs at the sight of him. “Flashpots,” said Ed, beside me. “They’re rigged on the floor behind the altar. Gunpowder and smoke compound, set off electrically. I’ve used them in a couple of films.”

I nodded. My vision still bore the blue arcs imprinted on my eyes by the flashes. I was glad I had not had any mushroom tea or my brains would be melting out my ears.

Scream’s amplified voice cut through the cheering. “Welcome disciples of darkness. Tonight, we gather in celebration of Samhain, the feast of the elder gods. Tonight, we pay obeisance to Lord Satan and thank him for the success and wealth he has given those of us who have been faithful and devout in our worship.

Amid cheering, he continued. “We who worship him know that some of life’s greatest pleasures are those that conventional society is too weak to grasp. Tonight, we will celebrate our Lord with revenge. There are those who claim to be our brethren, yet who actually oppose us and hinder our cause. Tonight, they will feel our wrath. Bring out the infidel!”

Two muscled goons brought a naked Serena onstage. She was not resisting. Her eyes were almost rolled up into her head and her steps were faltering. Betty came up beside me. “Well, what’s the plan? I don’t think we can hesitate any longer.”

The audience gasped at Serena’s bald and blue appearance.

Then Scream said, “And to oversee the penance for those who oppose us, I conjure up one from the nether realms. The lights went out for a second and the flashpots flared again causing some of the more timid princes of darkness to let out feeble shrieks. And through the darkness onstage a greenish white blur appeared. As it moved toward the front of the stage and became gradually distinguishable the audience gasped as one. There stood Ariana, regal and haughty. And glowing like a lightbulb. As the lights came up, she seemed to solidify and gain a more corporeal form.

A chant began. “She is risen; she is risen....” I heard Ed’s voice beside me. “Phosphorescent skin paint. I’ve used it in a couple of my films. Pretty impressive. They’ve impregnated her clothes and her hair, the whole ball of wax. But, uhm, who’d they pull out of that car wreck?”

“Beats me,” I whispered. “But it was obviously a plant. Which means that murder can definitely be connected to Scream.”

“Not materially,” said Ed.

“No, not yet.”

“And now, the high priestess of pain, Miss Betty Payne. Betty slunk onto the stage to applause and gasps. She looked spectacular in her shimmering leather, her hair glistening, her eyes made up wildly in shades of red and purple. In one hand, she carried a bullwhip that she cracked over the heads of the audience. Still, she kept glancing furtively over at me, wondering what to do.

Steve Marriott the great!

2008-03-16T13:17:00.001-07:00

Rediscover this legendary musician.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 18

2008-03-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

From their caverns in his skull, LaVey’s eyes lit up when he saw Betty. “My Lord, Miss Payne...,” he stammered.

Betty held out her hand as he ushered us into his living room. “How do you figure into this mess?” asked LaVey.

“I better field that one,” I said, as we took seats. Lex slid out of my arms and scuttled off to see Zoltan. “We think Scream has Serena. Betty and a friend went over to meet him in regards to filming part of his Halloween party.

“And the party’s centerpiece is to be the sexual humiliation of a woman. I think it’s probably Serena and that Scream wants to film the act so he has something to lord over you, to keep you in your place.”

LaVey stood, barely containing his fury. His shoulders trembled with rage. “I’ll kill him,” he shouted. “I’ll destroy everything he’s ever loved. I’ll see his eyes plucked out and his teeth smashed down his throat. I’ll burn his house to the ground.”

“We have a way of infiltrating the party, Mr. LaVey,” I said, trying to calm him. “We’re in charge of the film crew that’s been hired to document this and Betty has been offered the job of dominatrix. She’s on our side, a key operative.”

LaVey stroked his beard. “So what the hell does that get you? You have access, then what do you do?”

I felt myself flush. “I don’t know. Presumably, we infliltrate the place, ascertain that it is Serena, get to a phone and call the cops. We have possession of the film, so Scream doesn’t get it and the bulls bust him for kidnapping.”

“That house of Scream’s has dozens of hidden chambers,” said LaVey. “Serena would be secreted away at the first sign of trouble and no one would ever find her. Then, he would know that someone was working from inside and the most obvious shills would be your filmmaker and Betty. They wouldn’t get out alive.”

“What’s the alternative? Do we go in armed and try to hold an entire party and his security goons at bay while we nab Serena?”

“You couldn’t get guns in the house, his security goons would check everyone extremely well. He’s known for that.”

“What about a curse,” I asked.

Betty guffawed, “A curse.”

LaVey stared at her for a moment, then turned back to me. “A spell would take too long to take effect. The concerns of mere mortals are not a top priority for the unseen ones. We don’t have time to wait on the whims of a lesser demon.”

“Well then what?”

“Let me think....”

* * *

I let Betty off at her house. “Would you like to come in?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, then joked, “but I don’t have much cash left after the other night.”

She locked eyes with me and unleashed a glorious smile. “Oh well, some other night then.” She turned and headed up her walkway.

I was devastated, but started up the car and drove away. Was this how it always was with her? Hell, Jayne Mansfield found me attractive enough to boff without being paid. Then I started wondering about that. Jayne got paid in publicity. Was I deluding myself? Did women only see me as a means to an end? Betty’s quick remark had thrown a wrench into my self-esteem.

I drove around and cruised hookers for an hour and talked to Lex who moved into the passenger seat, fascinated with the smells coming in through my window and with the glittering lights of Hollywood Boulevard.

I wracked my mind for a plan.

* * *

Chapter

Ed and the camera crew arrived two hours before the party was to start. When I had left him, he was done up like a ten buck hooker. Blonde wig, mint green angora sweater with impressive falsies, calf-length gray gabardine skirt, black high heels. Betty had done his makeup, so he looked good --as drag queens go. Somehow his gear loosed him from the binds of something that always distracted him and he was all business, more professional than I’d ever seen him before. Betty was in a plain black sweater and pleated slacks, her leather and silver domina gear folded in her overnight bag.

Ed’s crew were two young rummies, Tom and Peter, that had been warned to be on their best behavior with the promise of a bottle each at the end of the night. A UCLA film student named Trixie Thomas was handling continuity and setups. This was a bit of a joke, since how much continuity could there be in a straight one-camera loop? But Ed liked her and wanted to milk Scream’s pocketbook. Trixie was a rough piece of work. She made her tuition by hooking. I thought she looked familiar, as if I’d seen her on the street. She was blonde and stacked and had a hatchet face, all sharp angles and nasty looking eyes under tarantula lashes.

Ed had stashed my gun and another .38 I’d picked up in the body of a tower lamp. We’d wrapped them in insulation to keep them from getting too hot and to hide them even if someone happened to open the light. We’d use it as an extra and just have it lying on the floor. I’d removed the screws on the lamp’s backing and held the back on with gaffer tape for quick access. It didn’t look out of place with the rest of Ed’s well-used equipment.

Jayne had been advised of the guns’ location as well, in case anything happened to me.

Betty the beautician had done a good number on me as well. I was pretty confident of my disguise. I’d shaved my mustache. With a Beethoven-length black wig, slick white pancake makeup over my face and my eyes and lips made into black holes, I was a fearsome vampire. I also had a cool cape and Ed advised me that if I felt my disguise slipping, just hold the cape over my face. “It worked for me in Grave Robbers,” he said, completely unaware of how that gambit had not worked for him in Grave Robbers.

To give the crew continuity, the light and sound men were given the vampire treatment too. They didn’t get swell capes though.

Betty backcombed Trixie’s hair and sprayed it with temporary flame red. Then she dabbed her with pancake white and made her eyes up in red and black, with black strokes outlining her lips and pulled down at each corner to give her a perpetual frown. It worked spectacularly with her own face’s contours and she looked remarkably like some insane banshee fresh from the fires of Hell. Her costume was only a red body suit that showed off her awe-inspiring figure. Sex and damnation embodied. I thought she was giving me the eye, but in that getup, I didn’t want to meet her eyes. Too damned scary.

Vampire Tom drove the truck over to Scream’s and, as instructed, we pulled around the back to the service entrance. Two muscle boys patted us down for weapons and showed us where the action would take place. It was where the ceremony that Jayne and I had attended had been held. The sex thing was set up in a slightly raised alcove to stage left from the podium. There were two bondage crosses, Christian and inverted. There was a stocks. Chain manacles had been attached to the rear wall. A tubular metal harness chair was shoved against one wall. At the back of the stage was a black leather chesterfield and a couple of giant mirrors, one angled over the stage to give a bird’s-eye view to the audience. The alcove was about ten feet deep with exits to backstage and the dressing rooms on either side. Lord knows what sort of tableaux had been enacted here before, but this was a serious setup. A black velvet curtain could be drawn across the front of the stage, which was why I had not noticed the area on my previous visit.

Tommy asked where the power was and one of the muscle boys showed him an outlet, but, as we had planned, Tommy shook his head and threw a coil of electrical cord over his shoulder. “We’ll have to see the fuse box,” he said. “To see where your 220 volts comes out. We might have to run a line from the stove or hot water tank outlet.” It was complete bafflegab of course, designed to get us familiar with the house layout. “You there,” Tommy yelled to me. “Come with me.”

The goon looked doubtful, but shrugged and we went backstage, past the dressing rooms and down a corridor. I recognized a furnace room and a laundry, but it was a labyrinth down there. Finally we came to the end of a dark hallway and Muscles stepped up a flight of wooden stairs to a platform landing. He opened a door there and the outside light came in. “You need some light to see things,” and he showed us the fuse box and beside it the massive breaker for the whole house. Tommy looked things over and then pointed to the wall. “That’s your 220 right there,” he said. “Perfect.”

“You’re not going to fuck anything up, like the lights or the kitchen or anything are you. The boss would get fairly shirty if that happened.”

“Hell, no. The 220’s on a whole different circuit. There’ll be no problems.”

I looked out the opened door and saw there was a stairwell running up to ground level. I ran up the stairs and saw the truck and the service entrance. “We’ll probably have to go in and out here a bit to get set up, saves us traipsing through the house, okay?”

Muscles shrugged, “Just stay on the pathway or you’ll get lost down here. And a lot of the rooms are off limits so don’t go snooping. Everything valuable’s locked up anyway.”

“We’re not thieves; we make movies; we’re respectable.”

“The fuck you are, Muscles laughed. “I know what you’ll be filming tonight and it ain’t fuckin’ Ben Hur. Besides I’ve seen a couple of that Wood guy’s movies at the drive-in. They’re the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, regardless, we’re not out to steal nothing, this could work into a regular gig for us and the bread is good, so we’re not going to fuck it up.”

“Okay, pay attention on the way back.”

“I’ll just run the cord back,” said Tom and he plugged into the 220.

Always good to have 220 volts at your disposal, I figured, though I hoped no one would plug it into anything, it would fry any of our equipment.

When we got back to the stage, Peter and Ed were setting things up. I nodded to Betty and she and Trixie grabbed Muscles and set off to find out about Miss Payne’s dressing rooms and the modicum of cocaine, reefer and champagne she had demanded in final negotiations. Presumably Scream was going to put the moves on her and he wanted her as whacked as possible. Betty was also to ask for a glimpse of her submissive and then be able to tell us definitely that it was Serena. Once Betty had engaged Scream’s attention, he would be easily maneuvered away from me, who stood as the only real liability in this crew.

Betty buttonholed Muscles and he was happily led away when she asked where she could change into her costume and lifted a corset out of her bag. Muscles waddled as fast as his musclebound thighs would allow him, waving Betty to follow.

I fell back into the sidelines with Peter and we made chalk marks on the floor, marked spotlights and essentially did nothing stuff under Ed’s watchful eye.

* * *

When Betty returned, she wore a black satin kimono over her gear, though her hair shone and her face was done up in extreme dominant makeup. Even without her body exposed, she was the ebony glass of sex.

She cocked an eyebrow at me and made a motion for the curtains to be drawn and I shouted, “Rehearsal, please.”

Paranoid (Supernaut Intro) - Black Sabbath - Pittsburgh

2008-02-26T16:24:00.001-08:00

Tommy's good tonight!

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 17

2008-02-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

We should probably have turned the whole thing over to the police and if somehow Scream wanted to blackmail me with some photos, I should just start sending resumes to New York and forget all about this sun-baked burg where the heat boiled everyone’s brains and they became pawns of their every urge. Satanists, sex clubs, dominatrixes, transvestites, alcoholics, dope fiends, and gossip columnists; what a sorry lot we were. The real Bettie Page had the right idea: come out here while you’re young, have some fun and split back to the real world before this freak show breaks your ass.

While I’d been mulling this over, Ed had persuaded Betty to let him have a look at her outfits. You could see he was in seventh heaven running his fingers over the satin and leather, discussing corsets and high heels. From the way Ed was looking at her I knew he was no nance. He mentioned that he had a still camera for taking continuity shots for his films. I was amazed he had not hawked it for a bottle along the way. He asked Betty if he could take a few shots of her. She said that she usually charged ten bucks an hour for the privilege, but she relented when Ed gave her the puppy-dog eyes.

I could tell she loved being admired. “Before I get my pictures taken though, I like to have some of this,” she said, and pulled a brown reefer out of her purse. Ed and she smoked it. I declined. I’d had reefer before and I didn’t like the sensation. Pretty soon, they were giggling like schoolgirls, while I felt outside of some special bubble they were in. Ed was rambling on about how a man could get great pleasure from wearing a woman’s clothes and how it was unfair that men had to wear such dull, lumpy clothing when, in nature, the male of the species was the flamboyant one, the peacock.

I felt like getting out of there, but when Betty stood and started posing for Ed, my interest was piqued. When she started modeling, her silliness fell away and she was the serious, statuesque poser. After a couple of shots in her sundress, she asked me to undo her dress and she slipped out of it revealing a white half-bra and a white garterbelt and panties and black nylons. I couldn’t help but stare. She was magnificent and substantially bustier than the real McCoy. She scorched the camera with her stern gazes and Ed clicked on until he ran out of film. She seemed disappointed when it came to an end, but showed no sign of getting dressed. The sun was pouring through the window, glinting off her slick nylons and the straps of her garterbelt, highlighting her hair and the silver hoop earrings she wore. She stalked around the room as she sipped her drink, always aware of our eyes on her, glorying in the attention. She was magnificent. If Scream’s mind could be boggled by female pulchritude, she could do the job.

The reefer and the booze had climbed all over Ed and he was soon smiling sleepily in a chair. My fondest hope was that he would pass out and get some sleep to be in shape for tomorrow’s meeting with Scream. Ed in the throes of hangover was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I asked Betty if she needed a ride home and she said she had taken the bus down, so she would appreciate it. She got dressed and maybe because she was high, she did not bother hiding her bangs under her hat.

* * *

I drove her to a little bungalow in an older neighborhood. It was very quiet, sedate. On the way over, we had talked about her life and how she had become an expert on Bettie Page, how she had learned to capitalize on it. All afternoon I had wondered if she hooked on the side. She invited me in and I was powerless to refuse.

Her place was spic and span, a nice airy place with a few framed photos of her on the walls, all very conservative. She made us gin rickeys, which I thought was not such a bright idea on top of the bourbon. She asked if I wanted to see her modeling portfolio. She brought it out and we sat on the couch. The pages were arranged from her in dresses through lingerie, nudes then stuff of her in bondage and on to her as a domina over trussed up women, spanking them. When we reached the end there was a large white envelope. She looked up at me and there was hunger in her eyes. I was obviously aroused. She opened the envelope and brough out a series of her dressed in a leather corset. She was with some young muscle boy. He was nude and aroused. She spanked him and lay her riding crop across his genitals. The final shot was of her on her knees peering at the camera, she was holding the guy’s erect cock.

I looked over at her and she was flushed and breathing hard. There was an imploring look in her eyes. “You are so gorgeous,” I said and pulled her face to mine plunging my tongue into her mouth. She gasped and pulled away for air. “It’s thirty for regular, more if you want special outfits or to play games.”

I was surprised, but not much. I had almost hoped it would turn out this way. I stood and opened my wallet, dropped fifty on the coffee table and she pressed her face into my trousers and purred.

* * *

Next day at work my mind kept wandering. I was working on a story about a country club that certain stars belonged to. Certain, non-Jewish stars. I had this whole story worked up about stars and prejudice. I was investigating the Masons too. It would be a good piece if I kept my mind on it. I tapped the keys until lunch break. Then, I went out to buy a gun.

It was a beauty. I had gone to Remo’s Firearms and given him my budget, substantially reduced after last night’s dalliance, and for thirty-five bucks I got a grey snub-nosed thirty-eight revolver and a clip-on holster suitable for wearing at the back of my pants. A good reliable gun, nothing fancy. A killing machine.

When I got back to the office, I called Ed and he seemed compis mentis. He understood he was to call me as soon as he finished with Scream. I spent the next few hours working fitfully on my stories. After two, I kept visualizing Ed and Betty across the desk from Scream. Negotiating who knew what.

At 3:30, I filed my copy and went home to wait for the phone to ring. Lex seemed to sense my tension and curled up in my lap, allowing me to listen to his throaty, calming song. When the phone rang, it shocked me from a faraway place where the texture of the world was shimmering with energy, where there were no decisions to make.

“Well, he’s quite a feller. We’ve got an assignment.” Ed started in on it, but I cut him off. “Where are you?”

“We’re at a bar called Darrien’s.” I said I’d meet them there in twenty minutes. In recent weeks, I’d improved Lex’s automotive digs and he never seemed to object to the car. I did the typical pet-owner “Car-ride” falsetto and Lex lifted his chin and trilled his eerie “yes” sound. I clipped on my gun and threw on a jacket. With Lex in one arm, I took the egress.

* * *

Wood and Betty were hunkered in a corner and engaged in conversation. Both smiled as I sat down and Betty sidled her hand over to my knee and gave it a squeeze.

“Well, Szandor went ape-shit over our Betty,” said Ed. “Was beside himself. Wanted a go right then and there, I think.”

I foolishly felt a twinge of jealousy. “What does he want you to do at the party?”

“He’s got this whole B&D, S-M scenario worked out,” said Betty. “He wants me to bullwhip this chick in the middle of the party. Then, I dildo rape her and then she’s thrown open to anybody who wants to bang her.”

“And he wants me to record it for posterity on film, plus he wants a still photog there, too.”

I let out a low whistle between my teeth. “It must be Serena. He doesn’t want to kill her, but he wants to degrade her and humiliate LaVey. And he wants a record that he can use if LaVey ever steps out of line or threatens him. He’s obviously clued that LaVey’s hex was behind Ariana’s death. What the hell did you say to his proposition?”

“I asked if the chick was willing,” said Betty. “And how much?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“He said she was into it, but would pretend not to be because that’s what got her off. And a hundred-fifty bucks.”

“What about you, Ed?”

“Document it for a hundred-fifty, plus expenses, seventy-five bucks for the photog. All you can drink and eat and a thrash at the chick if I felt like sloppy fifteenths.”

“And you said?”

“I said, I’d do it, because that’s what the plan was. But Betty said she’d need to think it over for a night, which I think was a pretty cagey response.”

“Did he tell you how many guests were coming?”

“About eighty,” Wood said.

“Well, we can’t just go in and start shooting people, much as I’d like to. I think we have to turn this over to the cops.”

We finished our drinks and walked to a liquor store where I bought Ed a bottle of bourbon and sent him on his merry way. Then I offered Betty a ride home. “Ah, the day is still young,” she said. “I’ve done enough business for one day. You want to do something?”

“I’ve got to do something first. Want to meet the High Priest of Satan?”

“Why not?” she said.

“Okay, I’ve got to call LaVey, then maybe we can go over.” I located a phone and told LaVey I had news. He said to get right over.

Jayne & the Satanists --Chapter 16

2008-02-15T14:21:00.000-08:00

LaVey was in a state. He had no hair to be in a mess, but his already gaunt face looked more worn and weary. He wore a shabby black cardigan that seemed a touch avuncular for a Satanist.

He was in a position of weakness. For someone who preached selfishness as the ultimate goal of life, he was torn with concern and fear for his Serena. He may have like to feign an askance distance from the rest of stinking humanity, but like us all he required a support system of at least one person to be close to him. Without Serena, he wasn’t lean and fearsome, he was wasted and haunted.

He didn’t have to persuade me. I felt his ache. He gave me a couple of photos and told me she was dressed all in black with a kaftan-type cloak and large plastic sunglasses. I lit out. Jayne stayed with him. Her visibility would only hinder the search.

Not that I anticipated searching for people who had seen someone who looked like a blonde vampire to be too tough.

It wasn’t. The little chinaman who ran the fruit stand, IDed her at the first flash of a photo. From his mangled pidgin, I figured out she had been shopping right here and had carried on down the street and all seemed well.

I got the same response from various merchants down the street. All was fine apparently. Until she got to the butcher. He told me that she had been in line in his shop but had kept looking out his window at the street. Then, obviously agitated, she dashed out his door. He had other customers in line, so he didn’t think much more about it.

I stepped back onto the street and saw a little easement alley between shops. Peering down there, I saw a rummie in dirty clothes sitting on the asphalt. He was up to his nose in a half a canteloupe. He looked up at me as I approached, deciding whether to scram or not. His hand moved to shove a grocery bag behind him.

“Where’d you get the bag?” I took four bits out of my pocket and hunkered down in front of him. “I don’t want your fruit, I just want to know where you found it.”

“Right here,” he said. “Just a while back.”

“Did you see who left it?”

“Nope, never look a gift horse, myself. Largesse from God, I suppose.”

“Well, here’s some more,” I said and gave him the coins. “You didn’t happen to see this woman, did you?”

He squinted at the photo I held out to him and shook his head. “Can’t say as I did, but I like to pay my way. Since I can’t help you out would you like an apple?”

“Thanks, pal. Not hungry right now.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged. “How ‘bout a nice pair of sunglasses?”

* * *

I brought the glasses back to LaVey. He identified them. We could only assume she dropped her groceries and the shades as a result of being forced into the alley. Someone had got to her, but there was no way of knowing who.

LaVey was sick with worry. I left Jayne with him and said I’d hit the newsroom and see if there were any leads. I spent the rest of the afternoon working the phones. Then the evening cruising the streets and querying bartenders. I drove past the Demon Club and shuddered with nausea. At midnight, I headed home. She was gone. The trail was cold.

I checked my apartment, it seemed undisturbed. I called LaVey and gave him the discouraging update and told him it was time to call the police.

LaVey thought the force would not do him service. He felt he was a target for the police because of his religion.

I didn’t know what I could do. My sleep was a morass of badly edited scenarios involving LaVey, Ariana and Lex.

Next day at work, I felt like someone had removed part of my IQ. I bashed out retrograde copy while drinking enough coffee to turn me green by lunchtime. Whenever I answered the phone, I hoped it wasn’t a story. Jayne called and she had some info. “I got an invitation today. I think it was hand delivered. Anyhow, it’s for a wake for Ariana, to be held at Scream’s pad on Friday.”

“We’ve gotta be there. You’ve got an invitation, but I’m a known undesirable. But I’ll figure out a way, knock on wood.”

* * *

I sat with Ed as he made the call to Scream. He politely expressed his condolences re Ariana. He also said he was hoping that he had not screwed up their working relationship. And in that Ed-Wood, ever-optomistic way of his, he mentioned that he had discovered this Bettie Page lookalike, Betty Payne, and that Scream might be interested in meeting her. Perhaps making a film for his own pleasure. When Ed waved at me and waggled his eyebrows I knew that Scream had taken the bait. Ed talked with him for a few more moments and ended, “I’ll call her up and see if she can make it.”

Ed rubbed his hands in glee. “He wants to meet her to see if she lives up to his expectations. He also mentioned that he was planning a special wake for Ariana and that a film might make a nice commemoration. He said he had a special sexual event he was going to stage in Ariana’s honor. He wants to meet at two tomorrow afternoon.”

“That’s worth two drinks Ed,” I said and uncapped the bourbon. “Now all we’ve got to do is get Miss Payne.” Ed slammed his shots and worked the phone. He got her and laid out the drill. She said she could meet with us in a couple of hours. Now all I had to do was keep Ed sober for that period. We had two more shots with the promise of another in an hour and then Wood took me downstairs where he had a projector set up. He spooled up a couple of the loops he had been doing: women wrestling in satin undergarments and a couple of more hardcore epics with guys wearing socks and fedoras and nothing else servicing weedy-looking bleach blondes. We killed an hour and then went up for a drink and Ed explained the story of The Sinister Urge to me. The only thing that could distract him from booze was film. He had some great stories too, mostly sad ones, tales of Lugosi and commercial failure. He kept stopping to make notes for a new book he would write in the next few weeks. He was inspired by our little caper.

* * *

At four, there was a knock on the door. Ed stood aside to let her in. She was wearing big dark glasses, a white dress patterned with black roses and a white sun hat that rode low down to the glasses. “Hi, I’m Betty,” she said and held a hand out. I noticed black nail polish as I took it. I introduced myself and Woody stood speechless. She was a knockout, pale white skin, lips a burgundy red. A figure to make the knees of strong men tremble. She doffed her hat and shook out her hair: the trademark short rounded bangs and lustrous black waves. When she took off the glasses, I was staring at Bettie Page.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re a dead ringer,” I gasped.

She smiled and said, “Yep, we’re pretty much two peas in a pod except I’m an inch taller and two inches bigger in the bust.” She motioned to a black overnight bag, “I brought some outfits if you’d like to see, leopard-print bikini, black satin corset, garter belts --white and black, fishnets and some stilettoes.”

“I’d like to see that,” enthused Ed.

“I’m sure you would,” I said. “But we’ve got more important things to consider. Sit down., Miss, er, Payne. Should I call you by your real name?”

“Betty Payne is fine,” she smiled. “The less people who know my real name the better, in this business.”

“Okay, Betty. Here’s the drill. We want you to work for us. You’re going to see Szandor Scream tomorrow and he’s probably going to want to hire you for this shindig he’s having in a few days. The details of that are between you and him. However, we want you to remember that you’re working for us. You keep what he pays you and we will add to that for doing what we want while you’re at Scream’s little soiree. You would come out of this with a fair bit of dough, two pay packets for one job. Does that sound good to you?”

“Definitely. What’s your angle?”

“We want to find out who Scream is. He wears a mask all the time and we believe he is connected with some criminal activities, but we can’t take action against him until we know who he is, legally.”

“What’s he done?”

I didn’t want to scare her off with tales of baby death and rape. “We think he’s got a grudge against a friend of ours and that he has kidnapped his ladyfriend. We want you, as subtly as possible, to find out about this girl, her name is Serena and this is her picture. If you see her when you are behind the scenes, let her know that we’ll get to her. If, some way, you can get any documents that might say who Scream is, something from his wallet or his desk drawer, then that’s exactly what we want. Do you understand?”

She nodded. I wondered how bright she was. Her income basically revolved around a coincidence of birth that made her look like someone who had become famous because of her looks. “Are you going to be there?”

“Yes, it’s a costume party so one of Ed’s makeup people is going to make me unrecognizable. Though I’m not going in drag as Ed suggested.”

“But you can rest assured that I’m not going to pass up such an opportunity,” Ed gloated.

“What if I get caught?”

“Don’t. But, Ed and I will be on the same case. Maybe you’ll just be a distraction for Scream so that I can get away. We’ll just be playing it by ear. Whatever opportunity presents itself we’ll take. Maybe none of us will get a chance. But if worse comes to worst, we’re hoping that your beauty will provide you with some latitude. Scream is a major Bettie fan. We want you to demand a dressing room. He’ll have to rig something off the main ballroom and hopefully you’ll be able to sneak away and get into the main house at some point.”

“I don’t like the sounds of that.”

“Well, Ed will have a camera crew there and they’ll be running around with cables and lights. So there will be a lot of moving around beyond the main party. In the confusion you might be able to slip away. We want you to try and seduce Scream into taking off his mask.

When we’d agreed on the ground rules, I offered Bettie a drink. “Sure, I don’t have anything to do tonight.” I slid the bottle over to Ed who poured with a vengeance. I took a long pull on mine. Revealing how jerry-rigged our plan was had unnerved me. As Ring Lardner would have said: plan, there was no plan.