SYNOPSIS  (2 pages)        

                                                                      TAR 

                                                                     a novel

                                                  by   Patrick  Breheny        pjbreheny@hotmail.com

     He was in love. His life was simple. And he didn’t want anything to change.

     But of course  it did. Fabulously. Without seeking it, he became wealthy and famous.

     That was not what he wanted. That was not what he and Allison should get. He knew

it, but he couldn’t stop it. Good fortune was on him as relentlessly as a terminal illness.

     He saw the La Brea Tar Pits as a symbol for Hollywood the geographical place. The

Tar Pits are a great North American fossil site, where the remains of mammoths, saber

toothed tigers, giant wolves and birds with enormous wing spans have been discovered

and displayed in spectacular exhibits in the adjacent Page Museum. The large mammals

were trapped by tar onto which they had unwillingly ventured---just passing through L.A.---

and to Damien the Tar Pits were a metaphor for the fate of all the lost dreamers, the film

extras and wannabe rockers, stuck in the mire today. 

     Even with money and notoriety, he finds himself still in that quicksand too. His recent

past haunts and pursues him in the incarnation in flesh and blood of a fictitious name he

made up to run a business ad, back before fame and fortune came. He is stalked by a

“left-out”, a crazy who feels that if Damien used his name, he is entitled to share Damien’s

life, first vicariously and then literally.

     He is not sure that previous, apparently spiritual insights were not euphoric symptoms

of madness. With the unwanted changes in his life, and the ensuing ordeal of being

hunted, come paranoia, suspicion and hallucination, until he doubts his own perceptions

and sanity.

     He is ultimately captured and forced into a life or death struggle with a man who

wants to kill or be killed, a man who believes that either way he lives, either way he dies,

because he’s Damien.

     His appreciation for what he has, especially his relationship with Allison, is joined

by an acute awareness that all things are temporary, nothing lasts forever, and the

blessings of life must therefore be cherished all the more, in the moment, as we have them.

     (While I don't think this tale is without humor, I have diffficulty conveying that aspect in outline, out of the context from which it arises.) 

                               novel text begins on the next page

                                                          TAR

                                                       a novel                             pjbreheny@hotmail.com

                                                           by

                                                  Patrick Breheny

                                                  CHAPTER ONE

      He was in love. That was the most important thing to him, the most important thing anybody would have to know about him.

     Everything else, all the wonderful things, were incidental, because even before they happened, she was there and his life was the best it had ever been. Truly, if the other good fortune never happened, he wouldn’t have cared. Even if he had know, he wouldn’t have cared, because---well, he hadn’t wanted anything to change. He woke every morning beside her, so intoxicated by her presence, so content to be in the bed with her, he didn’t want the day to begin. Never mind the sex, which was so exquisite that immediately afterwards he would look at her and become aroused again. Feel aroused, even if the equipment wasn’t operating yet. He didn’t want them to get up and go their separate daily ways. He wanted them to be curled next to each other through endless time, stirring only for love making or eating or necessary toilet trips. He wanted the experience of waking up beside her to be a freeze frame in reality, a moment held forever as a living snapshot, with breathing human beings inside the borders of the photo, hearts pumping warm blood to their bodies.

     On Saturdays and Sundays, they often did stay in bed half the day (“they” because, lucky man, Allison was also in love with him), sometimes stayed in bed all day, with the telephone disconnected (but sure, with the radio or TV on) trying to make a weekend last if not an eternity or a millennium, at least as long as it could---the entire weekend.

     Allison had grown up in Connecticut, and was now a substitute teacher in L.A. secondary schools. Subbing in public school meant she worked most of the time. She had been his neighbor, and they’d met in the laundry room of the apartment building. What was she doing in L.A.? What was he? What was anybody doing here? It seemed everyone in Hollywood was from somewhere else. Why did they come?  Some were actors, some were rock musicians, some were speed freaks (One category didn’t necessarily supercede another.) Some came on planes, some on busses, some hitchhiked. Damien had once heard the analogy of the United States as a flat surfaced map held up at an angle, with L.A. .at the bottom in the southwest corner, so that everything loose fell into it. If so, in Damien’s case, Canada was at the top, so he had slid a long way down.

     Allison was a dancer, but she could be a dancer in New York. She had been a dancer in New York, and actually worked there at it once in a while. Here, as there, she made her living primarily as a teacher. Small boned and appearing delicate though she was toned and strong, with her long black hair brushed straight on her shoulders and back, and her slender Asian features, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. That perhaps not everyone would perceive her that way was a blessing, because he truly believed that if all men did, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

     Eventually, of course, they did have to get out of that bed and do things. No fantasy wish of Paradise would concern itself with the root of all evil, but in the world-after-weekends, the rent still had to be paid and the food bought.

     He wasn’t doing bad. Not great, but not bad either. He was a furniture mover in Hollywood. Not any furniture mover, mind you---he had his own business built on referrals from realtors and word-of-mouth references from his customers, such satisfied clientele being none other than the elite of Mulholland  Drive and Nichols and Laurel and Benedict Canyons and Outpost Drive, and other canyons and hillside roads running off of or intersecting those, winding their spider web patterns of curlicues and mazes in the world of twisting rustic streets above the city.

     He was doing alright for a Canadian without a green card, operating a moving business with rental trucks and without the required license. Ah, but you could do that then, and in the way that everything changes, and sometimes very quickly, already you couldn’t do it. Not easily. The Public Utilities Commission, the agency in California that for some reason regulates furniture moving, a private enterprise, was cracking down on small  unlicensed movers (as it was letting the state’s electricity go to hell). Damien had no doubt that some of the big licensed companies didn’t like that a considerable portion of  their potential business was going to movers like him.

     Damien had tried to get a mover’s license, or at least get information about it. A phone call to the PUC was like calling the L.A. Police Department at the Hollywood Station to inquire about dealing drugs. The PUC treated you like a criminal and wanted to know who you were. They didn’t believe that you weren’t already operating (okay, he was), and if their rudeness didn’t immediately discourage you, they began talking about application fees and exorbitant bonds. They wouldn’t mail an application. You had to go in, show ID and pay the two hundred dollar fee just to get the form. There was everything in their tone that indicated you were not welcome and would not get any more cooperation in person.

     He wasn’t actually moving furniture anymore. As he told customers when he did in-person estimates, he’d rather look at it than carry it. His living room was an office, and the business volume had reached a point where he would lose jobs if he wasn't there to book them, so he had guys working for him. If a job was going long distance, however, he had to work. He couldn’t afford a driver’s salary and expenses to another city, and the only way he could pay the charges for a long distance truck rental and gas, and still make a profit, was to go himself.

     He often just passed distance jobs along to other movers, who would pay a commission for the referral, but if the customer was one he knew and wanted to keep, he was on the job to load the truck (he didn’t trust anyone else to pack tight enough for the road and wanted to know where the delicate items were) and take it where it was going. He always hired help for unloading at the destination.

     His customer one day was Nick Morrissey, whom Damien knew as a repeat customer who had given him referrals to lots of other clients in the hills, and who was a movie and TV producer. Mostly Damien knew him as “Nick”, everybody in L.A. being on first name basis regardless of station or age or bank balance.

     Nick was moving several rooms of furniture to a vacation house in Tucson. Nick’s L.A. palace was off Mulholland Drive, on a street called Ridge Crest Trail, which was one of those tortured, wound spring shaped doodles in the pages of the Thomas Brothers Street Guide that manifest in reality with curves over precipices every bit as perilous as foretold by the map, especially for a twenty four foot long moving van.

      Morrissey owned  lots of properties that Damien had shuttled furniture between and among, but he had not been to the main house, chez Nick, before. Damien was driving, with his helpers---Ken next to him, Bob at the window---looking for street numbers on garbage pails, stencils on the ground and mailboxes often obscured by bushes and trees along the narrow lane. The last address showed they were getting close, so at the next driveway, Damien parked on the road to let Bob out for a look.

     He checked the mailbox on a post in the driveway, then reported, “This is it.”.

    Damien and Ken got out of the truck also. If the roads would barely accommodate a truck, sometimes the driveways couldn’t at all. Morrissey’s driveway was very steep, starting at a sharp angle to his street. The back of the rental truck hung low to the ground, and had a welded trailer hitch that dangled and seemed destined to get caught at the beginning of the driveway.

     Damien was thinking, ‘This won’t do, I have to get another truck’, when, from out of the shrubs along the side of the driveway, where there was apparently a foot path coming down from the house and hidden by growth, Nick Morrissey appeared like a commando. A ranger by virtue of his surprise advance on them, this guerrilla was dressed for tennis in a T-shirt and shorts, sweating as though he’d just been playing a game or doing some sort of strenuous activity. Nick Morrissey was a man of middle height with a carefully developed body, a devotee to the movie industry’s philosophy of “winning”, which of course also included his physical conditioning. He had been around so long as an entertainment figure, since Damien was a child, that he had to be sixty, though he seemed much younger. That was no doubt a result of facial surgery, but with his self assurance and physique, he hadn’t done anything about his white hair, no doubt aware that it embellished his demeanor with the additional  honorifics of patriarch and sage.

     He was maybe thirty feet above them, and cheerfully called, “Good morning” as he walked down the driveway. “I was coming down to meet you, but I see you found the place alright, Damien.”

     Damien hated to let the helium out of his balloon, but he might as well know right away.

     “The trailer hitch is not gonna clear the driveway. I can’t use this truck.”

     Nick said firmly and with finality, “I have a schedule,” as though if necessary the laws of physics could be changed to conform to it.

     He sauntered down to the road and, with Bob and Ken, examined the hitch from every direction. It was then that Damien began to realize there was a counter argument emerging, from Morrissey and his own helpers, that if the hitch could just clear the first few feet, the truck would probably make it all the way up. Right. And if President Kennedy hadn’t been shot the first or second time, he probably wouldn’t have died. Damien was sure it would not clear. He wanted to return the truck and exchange it, even though, yes, the truck rental place was in Hollywood in the flats, forty five minutes from the job site, and forty five minutes back, so everybody would be sitting around doing nothing, and he would have to pay his crew for that hour and a half. And they were funny about that. They didn’t like it. They had plans for after work, Ken especially. They had too much energy for sitting. And there was Morrissey, antsy about his appointments, business he had to take care of before he flew to Tucson that Damien knew involved more money than Damien made in a year.

     “Go slow,” Morrissey said. “Back up easy.”

     Helper Ken knelt beside the truck, leaned forward on his hands, brought his head down almost to the concrete as he twisted his neck so he was looking level up the angle of the driveway.

     “I think it will make it,” he said.

     When Ken wasn’t moving furniture, he smoked a crack pipe. That was a literal truth, because when he smoked he didn’t sleep. When he worked, he was the best mover Damien had, but when he got paid, he was gone. This was his first day back at work. Ken had been off it maybe since last night, maybe only since he started work this morning, and he was making a judgment call.

     “It’s not gonna make it,” Damien told all of them.

     “Try it,” Morrissey declared with his confident authority.

     Damien knew you never go against your instincts, he knew it wouldn’t clear, he was pissed off that Ken had given Morrissey encouragement, but he started thinking that maybe if he did back up slowly enough, he could stop at the first sound of contact, prove to Morrissey he was right, and then go and exchange the truck. If he didn’t make the effort, thanks in no small part to Ken, Morrissey was going to freak over the delay.

     He tried it. He got in the truck, started it, stepped on the clutch pedal, put the stick in reverse, eased up on the clutch and pressed lightly on the gas. The truck lurched for a milli-second, then he evened the pace.

     He knew, could see without seeing them, that Morrissey and Bob were on one side of the truck, Ken on the other, all eyes on the trailer hitch and the driveway. He heard simultaneously two sounds: The CRUNCH and three voices screaming “Stop!”

     He had agreed to Russian roulette and lost. They spent another half hour trying various ways to drive forward and get the truck unstuck from the driveway. They tried placing wood and cardboard under the wheels as it the problem were mud. Morrissey and his helpers tried to lift the trailer hitch with Damien driving, but they couldn’t, not even with Morrissey’s muscles. The weight of several thousand pounds welded it to the pavement. Now they not only had to change trucks, they needed a tow truck too, and, as he soon learned, not just any tow truck, but a heavy duty one. Most shops had regular tow trucks that couldn’t do the job.

     All this took more time as he called around on Morrissey’s house phone from the kitchen, using the yellow pages. He’d expected Morrissey to have an aneurysm, what with his pressured commitments of, one could imagine, power lunches and con fabs and pow wows or whatever, but instead he actually became calm and seemed accepting of the situation. Maybe because he knew it was his fault.

     When Damien first went into the house to make the calls, Nick’s wife was in the kitchen. Jeannie Figueroa, a former Miss Universe, former Miss Argentina, was a blonde beauty who, he really couldn’t help but notice, was still  looking  good in her mid-forties. She was a local evening talk show host on Channel 11, so maybe was at home because the show didn’t tape until afternoon.

     At some point while Damien was stressed making his calls, he realized she was no longer in the kitchen. He finally found a heavy duty tow truck guy located near them on the west side who could get there within a few minutes, and would move it for a hundred dollars as long as he didn’t have to tow the truck more than a few feet.

     He had actually been using the phone for a half hour. As he hung up, Jeannie Figueroa re-appeared with an early lunch of burgers and fries from McDonald’s for her, Nick and the crew.  If they were going to have to wait, they might as well eat.

     They were all---Damien, his helpers and the Morrisseys---sitting around on the outdoor furniture of the redwood deck chomping when the tow truck driver beeped his horn to get somebody down to the road.

     As Damien stood up to go down the driveway, Ken and Bob started to move too, but he signaled with his hand for them to stay and eat. But Nick he asked,, "Can I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Morrissey?" and with his chin indicated the road. Morrissey seemed confused that Damien wanted him along, but got up and went with him.

     The free lunch was prodding Damien to press Morrissey’s generosity a bit further. Halfway down the driveway, he put Southern California’s populism to the test, turned to the burley producer, and asked,

     “Will you split it with me, Nick?”

     “What?”

     Did he think he was talking about the last hamburger?

    “The tow charge.”

    “Why should I?” he growled. Morrissey looked genuinely astonished at the gall. Brought from his lunch for this!

      Damien tired to keep the anger out of his voice, tried to remember what a good customer Nick Morrissey had been.

     He said, “Because there was a chorus calling to me to try it, and your voice was among them.”

    “In my business,” Mr. Morrissey said, “I’m the captain. I have to live with my decisions. You’re the captain here.”

     There was a glimmer of put-on, though, in his green eyes to accompany that remark, and Damien thought---not sure he wasn’t imagining it---a hint of respect. Rare indeed would be those “in the industry” who’d talk back to this man.

     A little quick math told Damien he would still be making a satisfactory profit driving to Tucson, and he forced himself to think about the repeat customers Morrissey had sent him and all the good jobs he’d done for Nick himself. He’d have to do this one too without bad feelings getting in the way. He decided not to mention the tow again, nor to let it be an issue in his dealings with Morrissey the rest of this day.

     Five minutes after it arrived, the heavy duty tow truck had the rental truck off the driveway. Damien exchanged the truck in Hollywood, then came back and loaded Nick Morrissey’s furniture.

     Loading a moving van with household goods is an obscure and esoteric art form known only to its practitioners., and can be a pleasant mental exercise like solving a math problem or doing a puzzle, except that, with the combined factor of physical exertion involved, there is an endorphin high that accompanies the gratification. Actually, more than resembling a puzzle, it is a puzzle, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and the  pieces are in the customer's house. The driver, as crew supervisor, decides how the truck will be loaded, and what will fit where. The objective is to build a wall from the front of the truck back, keeping the tiers as even as possible for as long as possible. For example, a king sized box spring and mattress first, with any flat glass tops or pictures in frames in between. On top of the bed sections can go light boxes. For the next tier, maybe two dressers across, with wardrobes boxes or small light rectangular items that will not cause damage on the dressers. The furniture is cushioned with heavy protective pads that also help to pack it in, and the load proceeds like that that until the end, when the plants and hoses and garden tools and trash cans go on, and, well, nobody can keep it even forever. A tight load is a marvel of improvisation and arguably a creative work. Like a stage play, or sand castle, It can't be kept and viewed later. You can take a photo to remember, but once experienced, it is gone.

     When his project was complete, Damien paid his helpers and got ready to go. Morrissey had a Tucson phone book, and again let him use the kitchen phone, this time for long distance, waving away Damien’s offer to pay the charges. Damien called a couple of Tucson moving companies and told them he was a long haul driver in need of a helper that evening.  The places he contacted told him he was arriving too late to have a helper waiting, but one dispatcher suggested he call the Arizona Department of Economic Security's casual labor office, and gave him the number. Through DES, the state's unemployment benefits office, he arranged to have someone waiting at 9:00 PM and promised to be generous to him for working the late hour. He gave them Morrissey’s address and phone number in Tucson, and in the afternoon began driving toward Arizona on I-10 from the Sepulveda Boulevard on-ramp in West L.A., where 10 is known as the Santa Monica freeway.

      He got off the freeway at La Brea Avenue long enough to drop his helpers off where they could catch a bus to Hollywood, then got back on and went downtown. From downtown, I-10 goes east into the San Gabriel Valley, then out past Riverside and San Bernardino into the desert, through Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs and eventually Blythe. (Or is that Blight?) Blythe, pronounced "Bly", is a California town far into the desert, right at the Arizona line, that has discovered where the middle of nowhere is and paved it. It consists almost entirely of motels, fast food restaurants and gas stations, and it's your last chance to fill up on anything. Sleeping, eating and gassing seemed its raisons d’etre. After Blythe, there is a hundred and fifty miles of desert and nothing but until you get to Phoenix.

                                          CHAPTER TWO

       At Phoenix, Highway 10 changes direction and goes south to Tucson. He was in Tucson at  twenty minutes to ten. Morrissey had flown in in the early evening and would be waiting for him. By the time Damien found the address, it was after ten. That’s how the time seems to go when you’re driving a truck. Stop for gas and you lose a half hour. Park for coffee, forty five minutes.

     Morrissey’s house was on a narrow paved country lane lined with wooden stake fences around the yards to keep the horses in. The white fences reflected the light of a three quarter moon that revealed the yards to be desert, with scrub no horse would eat, so the enclosures were for containment and space to move, not for grazing. This house was modest compared to Morrissey’s Mullholland digs, though definitely not a cabin or a trailer. It was a one story house, three bedrooms Damien guessed from the outside, a wooden A frame building in suburban Tucson, if Tucson could be said to be urban.

     Actually, he knew it was Morrissey’s house BEFORE he saw the address, because his help was waiting. There were three of them, not one, three scruffy white guys in

 jeans and sneakers and boots, one with a cowboy hat, passing a bottle of wine. They were waiting in front of the garage beside the house, where a bold spotlight had captured them in a circle of illumination, not, Damien thought, by accident. Even from a distance, he could see they had ground at least half a pack of cigarette butts into the white gravel stones on the dirt driveway.

     Watching them from behind a fence in the yard, where the light from the spot was a decreasing spill, was a creature Damien had never seen before. About five feet high, It looked like it had been drawn with a pencil, all black lines in the darkness, something resembling the skeleton of an ostrich, and it began walking to take them in, bending its thin legs at exaggerated angles as if being manipulated by puppet stings. Yet, as it moved, it kept its head straight and high in a dignified manner, as if to say it might look and walk funny, but it was keeping its cool, and don’t you dare mess with it. It looked like it was from another planet, and in its demeanor was the implied potential menace of something you have no experience with and don’t understand.

     Like his waiting crew. Damien was still in the cab of the truck. As if also sensing the unpredictability of drunken people, the thing in the yard turned and strutted way from them, crossing the yard with that crazy long legged gait, out of the residual light from the driveway and into shadowy moonlight.

     As Damien got down from the cab, Morrissey came from the house to meet him. Damien wanted to ask him what it was, and if it was a pet of some kind, or just got into the yard by itself, but his drunken potential helpers approached too, shouting welcomes.

     He responded by saying, “I only asked for one guy.”

     “Just pay for one. We’ll all work,” the one presently holding the bottle slurred. “Save you money.” He smiled to convey I Come In Peace, revealing that he was missing a few front teeth. Damien also noticed he had a deep scar under his chin. Probably not always such a diplomat.

     Damien said to Morrissey,  “It’s been a long ride. Can I use the head?”

     The trio from the casual labor office became very animated at that. If they had been drinking as long as their cigarette butts indicated, they must have been urinating somewhere too. Damien was pretty sure Morrissey didn’t want them in his house. So how could they be his movers? They couldn’t. It was out of the question. They’d just damage Morrissey’s expensive furniture.

     “Me first, guys. Wait here.”

     He let Morrissey show him into the house, to the living room, and once the door was closed, he said, “I don’t need the bathroom. I have to get rid of those guys.”

     “Yes, you do.”

     “But I don’t know where I’ll get a helper tonight. I might have to unload in the morning.”

     “No good. I have a 7:00 AM flight to L.A.”

    “I can’t use any of them. They’ll break everything.”

    “I’ll help you.”

    “No…”  But who else was there? “Are you sure?”

    “I’ll help you.”

    Despite his age, Morrissey played sports and looked like he still lifted some extreme weight in the gym, so he should be in condition for this, but he could turn out to be a very expensive helper if it meant he’d want to renegotiate the bill. Damien was still feeling tender in the area of the tow charge.

    “I usually pay a helper ten dollars an hour.”

    Once he’d said that, to this producer, it sounded ridiculous, but on the other hand, Morrissey would figure a buck was a buck.

     Morrissey said, “Don’t worry about it. Just take your time getting rid of those bums out there. They’re driving that jalopy out on the street. I’m calling the police so they don’t kill somebody in it.”

    Damien nodded and went back outside to appease and stall his labor crew. As he walked to them, one hurriedly finished relieving himself beside the garage.

    “We asked,” he explained as he zipped up.

    “Yeah. It’s getting too late to unload tonight, guys.”

    The former diplomat grumbled, “What about our time, our gas money?”

    “A short dog, too,” the fly tugger added.

    Damien knew a  “short dog” is a small bottle of rotgut port wine. He knew that from his authority on such street jargon, Jerry, the balding middle aged manager of his apartment building and prolifically self proclaimed recovering alcoholic.

    He noticed a dilapidated brown van now under a street light on the other side of the road. It was in front of somebody else’s house, which was why he didn’t register it when he first arrived. It had curtains in the windows like somebody was living in it, maybe all of them.

    “So what would be fair?”,  Damien asked them.

    At that, they huddled and consulted with their backs to him. If they didn’t ask for something ridiculous, maybe he’d give it to them. He didn’t have to pay a helper now. At least he hoped he didn’t.

     They came out of conference, and the guy with the missing teeth, who was becoming apparent as their spokesman, said,

    “We’ve been here two hours. What about ten dollars?”

    “You haven’t been here two hours.”

   “Close.”

     “No you haven’t.  Too much for doing nothing. How about three?”

     “Each?”

     “NO!”

    They all laughed, and the statesman said, “Nah, we mean between us. Doesn’t hurt to try. But three?  Hey, come on.”

    Damien had bills in his pocket, but he didn’t know if he’d delayed them long enough. He said, “Wait here.”

    He went back to the door, rang the bell, and Morrissey let him in.

    “There’s a police car on the street watching the van. They’re waiting for them to try driving it.”

    Damien was beginning not to like that he was part of this, and thought about warning them. They could walk away. But they’d probably come back later for the van, just as drunk. And it they knew Morrissey had called the police on them, they might be bent towards retaliation. Nick was living vulnerably here among the locals, unlike at his L.A. crib. Nick, after all, just didn’t want them wiping somebody out on the highway.

    “How’d they take getting fired?” he asked Damien.

    “They want money. They think three dollars isn’t enough.”

    “You gonna ask me to split it with you?”

    Nick was helping him unload for free, so Damien could afford a chuckle with him. He said, “I can stiff them, but you’ll have to go out there and help me face them down.”

    “I’m always ready for some action. The cops are here.”

    ”I led them to believe they’d get something.”

    “It’s your money.”

     Damien was beginning to realize Nick was one of those people who could keep you wondering if he was joking or not. When he went back outside, he did think about not giving them anything. What had they done? Pissed, drank wine and stomped on cigarette butts. And there was that police cruiser out on the street. Give them a kick in the ass goodbye.

       In deference to Morrissey’s well being, he took three dollars from his pocket.

       “This is all I can do, guys”

       “The money man says that?” the chief groused.

        “I say that.”

        There were more mumbles and gripes, but the ringleader reached for the bills.

        “Let’s get out of here”, he said to the others, disdain in his voce for “here”, this well-to-do, upper middle class neighborhood.

       They left and went out to the van. The one who’d done all the talking got into the driver’s seat. The old starter was a scraping intrusion on the quiet street. The motor shuddered and grumbled and needed to warm up, but the van started off anyway.

       They had gone no more than ten feet when it stalled out, but they weren’t going any further. A Tucson police car sailed smoothly behind them, its roof lamp churning out arcs of flowing red and orange light like a UFO into the cool desert night, buzzing with the complaints of insects..

       While the police were detaining them, Morrissey came out again, and said, “Let’s get this shit off the truck so I can go to bed.”

       They started to unload. The police didn’t arrest them, but Damien saw the honcho hand over the keys, and the police send them walking in the direction of downtown with final instructions to get the keys back tomorrow sober and move the van, or lose it to the tow yard.

        Morrissey was as good a helper as he looked to be (though he was no Ken his first time out) and they had everything off the truck in a couple of hours. Jeannie was in Tucson too, and provided cheese and crackers and iced decaf as he settled the bill in the dining room with Mister M. The total had been agreed to before the job, so it was just a matter of writing a check for $1400, unless Nick started negotiating.

       The check Nick handed Damien was for $1500, and it wasn’t a mistake. When Damien glanced at him, Nick nodded. He was paying for the tow, all of it.

       “That’s for your temperament,” he told him. “It could have got ugly. With me on Mulholland, with the winos here. You have a level head.”

       Not so level , Damien thought., but he felt better about this job and Nick Morrissey now.

       The Morrisseys had a guest house in the back, and insisted he stay there instead of at a hotel. Jeannie even made him a reservation for the same flight back to L.A. with Nick in the morning.

       He took the truck downtown to a Load 'n Drive office and dropped the keys in the night slot. The charges would be entered in the computer in the morning and deducted from his deposit in Hollywood. He’d had Nick sign a statement that there was no visible damage to the truck to cover himself in case of any allegations like that.

        After he dropped the truck off, he took a taxi back to their house from the rental agency, and when he got there, all the lights in the front house were out. They had given him a key to the rear house, he’d already left his backpack in there, and there was a globe lit over the door for him.

       As he walked up the driveway, his heels crunched on the stones and crusted dirt. He looked over the white fence’s triangular stake tops into the yard beside the main house, wondering if the creature was still around. Bright moonlight and a dazzling canopy of stars were generating eerie shapes and shadows, but he didn’t see anything like that on its legs. It could be lying on the ground somewhere. How did it sleep? Did it fold that angled body up somehow like a sectioned yardstick? He sensed the desert was full of things he didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand---rattlesnakes, spiders, killer heat, cactus with needles that stabbed and marvels like the ostrich skeleton that he couldn't identify. It was a forbidding and mysterious place, and yet at this cool time of year, in the night under flashing galaxies, it was undeniably beautiful.

       He went into the bungalow, which was one room with a good sized up and down window and a bathroom. He turned off the outside light, but didn’t turn any on inside. The shade was down on the window and he raised it. There was no need for a light in the room then. He lay down on the made bed with his clothes on, head on the pillow, and listened to his own breathing. It was astonishing how deeply he could fill his lungs, and how effortlessly. In L.A., he always seemed to be gasping, sucking the air in, and could only take shallow breaths. He felt a peacefulness from the simple realization of life and health, and from where he was lying,  watched the celestial light show. He felt so alive, he couldn’t sleep. And yet it didn’t matter. He was resting, he was regenerating, in a way he never could in the smog. The desert, as ominous and unforgiving as it could be, was also a healer.

       He didn’t know how long he lied there grateful to be alive, it seemed like a very long time, but he knew he fell asleep eventually because the stars had been replaced by a bright dawn that woke him up, the consequential side of leaving a shade up all night. It was time to get up anyway. Nick knocked on the door within a few minutes, and told him to come up to the house for a quick cup of coffee, and then they’d have to go to the airport.

       They went by taxi to Tucson Airport, Damien and Nick, Jeannie staying behind for reasons not divulged to their furniture mover. Their flight was at seven, and at seven forty five they were circling the Burbank Airport. Damien was sitting at the window, Nick on the aisle, with a vacant seat between them. As they got ready to land, Nick kept glancing at Damien. Damien knew it wasn’t a come-on, and it didn’t make him uncomfortable,  but Nick seemed to be making an  evaluation of some sort that he  tried to cover  now with small talk.

       He said, “It looks like the Santa Anas are blowing.”

       True enough, it did. Instead of being obscured by the usual haze, Burbank strutted hues and contrasts and grooved detail, its brown hills of chaparral now lush, even olive in places, in the clear, clean airbrushed terrain below them. They had brought the desert back with them. Damien was about to say that, but instead asked, “What, Nick?

       Nick seemed confused and also said, “What?”

       “Nothing.”

       Maybe it was just Damien’s imagination, or the producer’s idiiosyncratic way of observing people, but he hadn’t noticed it before. And then Nick said, “Sorry”, and though they continued to talk and make eye contact, he stopped scrutinizing.

       When the plane landed, they got off, shook hands and went their separate ways..

       It was still morning when Damien got back to his apartment building on the residential part of Hollywood Boulevard at Poinsettia Avenue where he and Allison lived

 in 109 at the rear of the building. Jerry the  manager was vacuuming the rust orange carpet., and with the overhead dim-when-they-were-on-anyway neon lights off in the daytime, the beige walls hovered in almost colorless shadows. Damien nodded to Jerry as he went back to his apartment. If he didn’t know exactly where the door key went, he might have had trouble fitting it in the lock in that light

       Once inside, he didn’t need light. In the living room, the Venetian blinds were open, and the white transparent curtains allowed the bright day in from the street.

       Bright was not what he wanted, however. In the bedroom, the blinds were still shut, the room in darkness. Allison, hurrying to work, had left the bed invitingly unmade. Though he’d felt he was rejuvenating lying awake last night in that guest house with the desert for a back yard, he had in reality not had much sleep Also, back in Hollywood, even with the air clean today from the winds, he felt heavy and tired.

       Allison was teaching school and wouldn’t be home for several hours. So why not take a nap?  The answering machine was clear, which meant Allison had checked the messages and called any current or prospective customers back. He could do likewise if anyone called while he was sleeping. Sure, you can lose jobs that way, no doubt about it, but at the moment he didn’t care. He pined for that delicious decadent irresponsibility of daytime sleeping, the I’m-a-night-person-because-I-don’t-have-a-life abandon he used to know so well. He could still indulge once in a while. Today. Now.

       He got in the bed, closed his eyes, and parachuted down to slumber. When he woke up two hours later, he could only vaguely remember a dream where he was driving his truck around some place like Tucson, but  couldn’t get clearance to go in. That’s what he needed, clearance, so he had to keep circling the perimeter, and an alarm bell kept ringing.

     The alarm was really the telephone, the telephone in Allison’s name, the one they used as a personal phone that wasn’t at the moment set for an answering machine to pick up. Allison’s  phone was in the bedroom, so its ringing had jarred him from his exile in a truck along roads on the edge of someplace. Sodden with drowsiness, still in a dream trance, with a mouth as dry as sagebrush, he picked up the phone and tried to talk. His parched tongue managed to approximate the pronunciation of “Hello”

     “Is Damien there?

     “Sss Damien.”

     “It doesn’t sound like Damien.”

     Damien recognized the voice now. It was Nick Morrissey. Nick had the home number because he’d complained about getting the answering machine when he wanted to talk to someone NOW.

      “I was ‘sleep, Nick,” he confessed, and wondered if Morrissey could even relate to such sloth.

     “Well have some coffee and call me back. I want you to be awake.”

     “Okay.”

     But he didn’t get up immediately. First he lied there and thought about the concept of making coffee. He had to prepare psychologically for the action of putting his feet on the ground and physically moving into the kitchen

     Allison had left her trace in the bed. Her scent,  memory prints of her were in the loose but cozy pouch between the sheets, had warmed and consoled him as he slept.

    She’d grown up in Canbury, a suburban Connecticut town just a few miles north of New York City.. Her mother had been a high school English teacher (like mother, like daughter to that extent), then a principal, now  Assistant Supervisor on the Board of Education. Her father was a banker. Not bad doing for an American G.I. and a Korean bar maid in Seoul, which is what they were respectively when they met, shortly before Allison came along. Ah, but they weren’t just any G.I. and bar girl. They were Allison’s parents. Her father was the youngest sargeant .in the U.S. Army, and made all the duty assignment for new troop arrivals. The colonel who officially assigned soldiers simply wrote his signature on the forms that were handed to him. He recommended her father for Officers Candidate School when his Korean tour was up. That was in 1975.  Allison’s mother had finished high school, and even then, spoke English well enough to pass proficiency exams. With the help of Allison’s father, she enrolled in an American university that offered classes on the army post. That was the beginning of her advanced education, which now included two master’s degrees

     Damien thought again of his dream about being held outside a town indefinitely in the limbo of a rental truck cab, but that association with sleeping made him drowsy again, a little nostalgic for blooey, and he had to wake up  and call Nick back.

     He pushed the dream away and thought instead about his life here and how he came to be in L.A. What he did to survive was anarchistic, had an element of thrill because it was illegal and he had to always be on guard. The enterprise and logistics of renting trucks, hiring crews, meeting them at rendezvous and avoiding capture by the P.U.C. kept his adrenaline surging and almost obscured a realization that without those aspects his business might be pretty mundane. .Likewise, reluctant as he was to consider it, and as incredible and splendid as the match was, without their intensity of passion, he and Allison’s lives could also be viewed as very ordinary.

      He had never set out to be a mover. Damien Rennard was born in Montreal, the third of five children in a French Canadian family, stuck in the middle agewise, getting a little less attention than the older two, a little less sympathy than the babies. He was only born in Montreal, barely ever lived there. His father was in construction, an iron worker who walked the high girders, and moved his family around a like a carload of tinkers and a trailer, following tall building rises from Toronto to Detroit to Chicago to New York.

     When Damien was seventeen, they lived in The Bronx, and his father went to work one day in Manhattan and never came home. He was killed in an accident, the kind of accident you might expect in his line of work, forty stories up on a windy day. Damien’s way of dealing with the horror he knew was lurking below his awareness was to not talk about it, to not think about it.

     The family had been living in the northwest Bronx, the Mosholu Parkway-Bainbridge section, on Valentine Avenue at  201st Street, and there they stayed, at 2775 Valentine in Apartment 5E (yes, on the fifth floor of a walk-up)., mostly because Damien’s mother went into a permanent state of grief and shock, and it fell to Damien’s older brother and sister to take care of the family, not economically but emotionally and logistically. (The financial part was taken care of by insurance and a settlement with the construction firm.)  Damien, a senior at St. Matthew’s, the neighborhood Catholic high school, finished and graduated in June, three months later. He  found himself in a position then like his elder siblings, that of not having a green card, and therefore being ineligible to work legally in the U.S.

     He found work through older Irish friends he met in the bars (though he was not old enough to drink in bars yet). He’d known lots of Irish Americans at St. Matt’s High School, they had given him his unshakable Bronx nickname “Frenchy”, but the Irish he began to hang around with in the bars were immigrants, overstaying visas and working illegally. Donny, his brother, had introduced him to a lot of them..

     Though most were educated, the work they got for him was free lance carpentry, construction (no high girder walking for him), bartending, moving furniture. Because their incomes were limited, the illegals often had a lot of people living together, and Damien began to hear resentment expressed toward them, comments about them sleeping in shifts and taking jobs away form everybody else. Regardless of nationality, “Frenchy” was one of them, and knew the attitudes were directed as much at him as them.

     The younger kids managed to grow up, Damien’s older sister Michelle married an American and became a U.S. citizen and big bro’ Donny went back to Toronto. Damien eventually got a B.A..from Hunter College, taking classes sometimes full time, sometimes part time while he lived at home and got by on cash employment..

     Once he was a college grad, he wasn’t doing any more manual labor. (Ha-ha; at least not for a while.) He found an employer who didn’t care about a green card, a rep who was recruiting in New York for teachers to go to the Korean countryside and teach English as a language.

     He did it for a year, then homesick for the place he’d spent his teens and early twenties,  the place he knew best and where his family and friends were, he went back to New York. (That he had been in Korea and that Allison was half Korean American were mere coincidences, or seemed to him to be.)

     Back in NYC, he was confronted by the same restrictions on his employment prospects. He had a friend, Frank Larkin, who had gone to L.A. Frank was one of the  illegals, and said L.A. was better for work, there was less municipal oversight and fewer restrictions on everything, and invited him to go out there. He could stay with Frank until he got settled.

     Damien went. Frank was in Primal Therapy, with the screaming meemies as Damien thought of them now, living in Santa Monica, L..A.’s beach, which was the primal therapy center of the planet, a magnet for Europeans and Canadians seeking that particular treatment. None of them could work legally, and they had started underground businesses, in particular moving companies because, well, for a while you could get away with that. Before going on his own, Damien had slaved for a German screamer in Venice whose operation he carefully observed and then used as the paradigm for his own business.

     That was three years ago. Now, like everyone else in Hollywood, he was stuck in tar. Tar is the thing that holds people in L.A., mires them, will not release them. His business was tar. His apartment was tar. .Even Allison, though he had no objection to it, was tar.

     What is tar? Just south of Hollywood, at Wilshire Boulevard, in a section of the city called Hancock Park, in the park itself, are the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, ponds of water above soft asphalt deposits that long ago trapped giant animals in the muck and held them until their recent discovery in the present age.. It is a great North American fossil site, where the remains of mammoths, saber tooth tigers, wolves and large birds with enormous wing spans--- mammals dating from the last Ice Age--- have been found and reconstructed in spectacular exhibits in the adjacent Page Museum. Where bones were missing, prosthetics were substituted in the displays

     To Damien, the tar pits were L.A. The first big critters, the mammoths and the others from the last Ice Age, must have ventured onto trick ground, terrain that appeared firm to them beneath the ice, and the species from later periods were perhaps getting a drink or a bath in water that sits deceptively above the pitch today. All were just passing through L.A. or where L.A. is now, then sank into a pond with a tar bottom, became stuck in the mire, and either died of suffocation, starvation or the attacks of  predators that also came unwittingly to stay 

     There is a later arrival too, a woman from the Stone Age, who ended up there by other means. She was killed by a blow on the head, and one would assume, dumped in. Though her actual bones are not used in the display, she is replicated to approximate size and features in the museum inside a glass case, a short, petite fragile looking woman who appears to be Native American or Asian or Hispanic, with a pretty face and a startlingly contemporary braided hairstyle. Except that Allison is taller with long legs, the lifelike figure reminded Damien of her, and on the tour he was on, the museum guide jolted him by describing her, with the cynical humor of a contemporary American big city dweller, as the Wilshire district’s first unsolved homicide.

     So L.A. was the pits. L.A. sucks (you in). L.A. was tar. The Eagles called it the Hotel California.. L.A. claims as prey all who dare to venture on its ground. Shake loose and slide down from somewhere for a while, and you can’t get out.

      And he and Allison? Their relationship seemed destined, as though it were somehow ordained that they be together here now in this time and place, because they were. If tar had kept them here, maybe some tar was good. Dare he be so capricious about his lot as to allow the next association that came to him: Holy tar? Best discarded from his simile immediately.

     When it came to Allison his memory was fallible and inadequate. Memory could only hint at the surge of love and lust he felt in her presence. Thought was too abstract, too vapid, to conjure her spirit or vibrancy or beauty. Only SHE could do her justice. And yet., she was not extraordinarily beautiful. Pretty, yes, with a pixyish face and that limber, exercised dancer’s body. But her appearance could not account for her affect upon him, nor could their rapport. What he felt for her resulted from something even more intangible, from that thing the songs call “chemistry”, a blending of attractions, scents, needs, shapes, fantasies, something operating invisibly beyond sensory perception like radar or television waves, only transmittable to a compatible receptor (like a radar screen or a TV set or another human being).

     Some might call it addiction, but where was the research on that? Where was the secret mission to harness it? Therein lay control of the world. “Love Potion Number 9”. Did the CIA have a handle on it?                     

     The phone was ringing again. Nick getting impatient, Damien was sure, thinking Damien should have finished that coffee by now.

     He picked it up on the third ring. “Hello”

     It was Nick. “Are you awake now?

     “I’m awake.”

     “I’ll get to the point,” Nick said, but then didn’t. He paused (Damien thought, for some reason, as though trying to carefully script his next phrase). When it came at last, it was a question: “Have you ever done any acting?”

     Hadn’t everybody in L.A.? Damien had taken a few classes. He’d been in two stage plays. He’d never spent money for pictures, never saw casting directors, never taken it seriously. He almost thought of it as a hobby..

     This was Nick Morrissey asking him if he’d ever done any acting! Damien saw again, like an instant video replay on his inner screen, Nick observing him on the plane.

     He knew his pause was too long when Nick asked, to see if he was still there or had passed out, “Hello?”

     “I’m here. A little, Nick. Not much.”

     “”Do you have an agent? Are you in the unions?

     “No. Neither.”

     “It doesn’t matter. I just need to know. Can you come in tomorrow for an interview?”

     “Yeah…What for?”

     “You’re the character I’m looking for. I just need to have you read a few lines of script and put you on tape for the client.”

     “Okay. Are you going to tell me what this is about? Maybe I can prepare.”

      “I don’t want you to prepare. .I’m where I am in this business because my intuition never fails me, and I’m going to direct.you. But I’ll tell you what it’s about.”

     And he did.

     The Base Camp, which could best be called a new clothing store chain with an upscale grunge line, needed a spokesman. They wanted an unknown, who would become identified solely with their stores, some tall, lanky, ruggedly handsome outback sort of bloke with an Aussie or Kiwi or even South African accent, to sound a little Brit-tinged exotic to Americans. Damien knew he fit the physical mould Nick was talking about, spent just enough time outdoors still for the buffalo hide complexion, moved enough furniture for muscular definition, and at a wiry 6’1” and 185 pounds, had the rough Calgary cowboy good looks even if he was from Detroit and Toronto and New York. And hell, he would put a little English on those Canadian inflections of his that always used to have New Yorkers asking him where he was from, some thinking it was from “the old country”, by which they meant Ireland. His mother was half  Welsh, so he had the Gaullic dark hair with blue eyes and a fair complexion. It was a features color combination a lot of the Irish sported, so he could see why Irish Americans who didn’t know him, didn’t know he was “Frenchy”,  could hear him speak and mistake him for one of their own.

     Nick Morrissey was a TV and film producer and didn’t usually make commercials, so this was hybridding or crossing over, or however Damien would like to describe it, but he was casting and shooting this series of commercials because The Base Camp was buying space from the network on his big hit TV show The Family Way, a “Truman Show” imitation, but a fictional comedy, about a very dysfunctional family that didn’t know its life was being taped and shown every week. The Base Camp was willing to spend mega-bucks to have Nick Morrissey produce the commercials also, with them becoming the show’s exclusive sponsor when hiatus ended next month.

     Nick told him to relax, go back to sleep, don’t get stressed. It was as good as done. Taping him tomorrow was a formality. The casting would be Nick’s decision. The client would defer to him. They just wanted to FEEL they’d been involved. .Damien was perfect as their spokesman.

     They agreed on Damien’s appointment for 11:00 the next morning, and Nick gave him the address in Hollywood. Then he was off the line, gone, and Damien sat on the bed holding the phone, gripping it tightly and looking at it to confirm its true existence. This phone call HAD taken place. Incredibly, he did feel sleepy again. He felt exhausted, as if he had moved furniture for twelve hours. He found himself taking Nick’s advice. He went back to sleep.

     About four o’clock (he knew because that’s when Allison came home), he heard the key turning the lock., then the door opening and shutting. She came in with a sigh, and that meant it had been a long day in a substitute classroom without air conditioning. (No  L.A. schools had air conditioner costs in their budgets since Proposition 13, though the schools were operating year round.)  And she hadn’t fixed the air conditioner in the car because the weather wasn’t hot until today. He heard her drop her beige canvas book  bag with the apples stencilled on it, then knew she’d seen his backpack on the floor when she said, “Oh, you’re back. How was Tucson? Are you up, Damien?”

 .    .And he was totally, instantly awake, energized by the memory, which had never left as he’d slept, the recollection of his unbelievable phone call from Nick.

     He got up and went toward her, reaching the doorway of the bedroom at the same time she did from the hall. He said, “Oh, sweetheart” and pulled her into his arms. The back of her cotton turquoise blouse was damp where she'd sat against the cloth seat

cover over the vinyl upholstery in the car. Under his hand, her ribs expanded with her breath. Now, yes, they loved each other intensely, yet except for Damien’s infrequent of-of town moving jobs, the saw each other every day, and Damien had only been gone overnight. They hugged when they saw each other, but Allison was just a bit bewildered by this sudden passionate embrace, as though he’d been gone six months.

     “Damien? What?”

     :””I have something to tell you.”

      “What?”

     :”Eedee-wha” (“Come here” in Korean) That was part of the limited Korean vocabulary they sometimes used. Though Allison was born there, she’d left as a baby, and her mother rarely used Korean at home. As with this relationship, her father had been the one who sometimes used it for effect, or (not like this relationship) an attempt at clarification. Though she knew a little of the language  (jo-kume), she was learning phrases from Damien.

     She was laughing now, a kid getting a surprise present, but not sure there isn’t a joke somewhere. He took her hand, led her back into the living room, sat her on the sofa., then knelt in front of her.

     “You know I love you?”

     “Nothing I would take for granted, but you’ve told me."

     When he didn’t continue right way, she misinterpreted his pause and smiled. “Of course, honey. But I want to take a shower and have a salad first. For energy.”

     “No, no,  I  don’t pester you for that.”

     “You don’t have to.  What’s my surprise, Damien?”

     Then she seemed to see, for the first time, that he was on one knee beside her. He realized, at the same moment, what was formulating in her mind. He had knelt to tell her about the Base Camp, but in the traditional position of proposal for marriage. He thought suddenly, It was a mistake to tell her like this, she thinks I’m proposing, then thought, No it’s not a mistake, I am proposing, I just didn’t realize I was going to.

     She said, “You know the answer to anything you ask me is always “yes””

     “And I’m going to ask you. I just have something to tell you first.”

     “What, Damien? Tell me.”

     “Nick Morrissey offered me a commercial. A spokesman. I have to read for it tomorrow.”

     “What?  How?

     Her confusion was genuine and understandable. Damien wasn’t an actor. That wasn’t how things were done.. He hoped she wouldn’t feel cheated. Allison was the one in show biz. She did have head shots. She was in the unions. She did read for minor roles occasionally, and sometimes even got them, those rare calls when they were looking for an Asian actress or a generic dancer.

     He said, “I don’t know how. I guess because I moved his furniture.”

     Allison laughed, and he knew that as always she was on his side.

     “You see him tomorrow?”

     “To put me on tape. He says it’s locked up.”

     “What kind of commercial?”

     He filled her in on all the details Nick had given him about The Family Way, the Base Camp, and the unprepared reading in the morning.     She said, “That’s fantastic. INCREDIBLE and fantastic. And I know it will happen… Now, Damien, not to change the subject, but what’s that question you were going to ask me?”

     He took her hand in both of his and looked into her eyes, the way he imagined it should be done.

     “Allison, will you…”

     “Yes.”

     “Will you…”

     “Yes.”

     “Will you let me finish?”

     “I will.”

    “Will you marry me?”

    “Yes, Damien, I will.”

    She said she would marry him, and she gave her support one hundred percent to his interview with Nick. He had no doubt about her love, but she was only human and he could not let anything taint this  moment. He had to know her true sentiments.

     “Allison, I don’t really know if I’ll get this thing tomorrow.”

     “You’ll get it. I feel it.”

     “I can’t be sure.”

    ”You’ll get it. He said you would.”

    “Look, baby, you’re the actress. How do you feel about this?”

     “I’m not an actress.”

     “Of course you are.”

     “No, honey. I’m a dancer. And that’s what passes for rebellion if you’re Korean American. As you know, nothing I ever did was quite good enough for my mother. Dancing was something I chose that she was against, and couldn’t prevent when I got older. The irony was that she had me taking tap and ballet when I was eight, so she’d brought it on herself.”

     Damien knew the reason she came to LA was to put three thousand miles between her and her mother. Her mother had been an orphan of the Korean War, and all her life seized opportunity with a fanatical drive to overcome and achieve. The cruel circumstances of her childhood did not make her a good mother, although she believed she was one. Allison understood that her mother had nothing to model parenting on, and was so enraged at the unfairness of her own tortured early years that she couldn't be otherwise. And yet, she was on the school board in Canbury, she conducted seminars on child abuse, as she pushed her only child to succeed by ANY means and used cajoling, sarcasm and physical punishment as motivation. Her mother could not leave behind memories of hunger and abandonment, the desperation of a childhood spent first  in  inadequate institutions run by American missionaries (where she did somehow, despite everything, excel in school), and later on the streets of Seoul where, in the poverty and chaos of the years after the war, she survived by begging, stealing, and, Allison suspected, prostituting. And she was intelligent enough to understand always exactly what was happening to her. As Allison put it, she wasn't crazy, she was stark raving sane. In contrast to her own ordeal, her mother felt she had given Allison the life of a princess, and was frequent in her reminders about that.

     Her father, the ex-GI, was an obsessive attainer also, a man who kept his distance emotionally and literally, who, as Allison put it, "came home late, left early, and didn't talk on weekends." He too had come from early deprivation, but not in the extreme of her mother. He was from West Virginia coal and timber country, Appalachia, and stayed in the Army eight years, until he had a Master's Degree in Management. Then, though he was a Special Forces Captain, he left the Army after his last enlistment and went to New York with his family to pursue his real ambitions, eventually settling in Connecticut.

     Seeming  a  non-sequitur, though it wasn't in context of their conversation, he said  “You love to dance.”

     “Yes. At first, I was just resisting the Dragon Lady’s iron will, but I was good at it, and  I really love dancing. Acting went with it in L.A. If you’re in show business at all in this town, you have to have pictures like the actors, so you might as well let an agent send you on those interviews too. I’m a dancer and a teacher, Damien. I never chose acting.”

      “Neither did I.”

      “You’ll get that part.  Don’t think like that. Ever. Not with me. And now I’m going to take that shower.”

     He knew what was promised after that. She got up and moved, but halfway across the living room stopped, turned back and said,

     “I know your proposal was spontaneous, baby,  but I do want a ring.”

     A ring? Of Course! A ring.

     “Of course,” he said.

     And that’s how Allison Clay became his fiance. Allison Kim Clay. Her middle name was her mother’s surname.. Her mother never learned it her parents had been killed or had deserted her, but family lineage is paramount to Koreans, and she was willing to err on the side of saints. Though she had tried to find them, Koreans have an expression equivalent to “looking for a needle in a haystack”, which is “looking for Mr. Kim in Seoul”. Additionally, during the war thousands of people disappeared, most of them killed, many buried in unmarked graves. If they were alive, she had not been able to trace them, and preferred to believe they were innocent war casualties. That was less painful than the knowledge of deliberate abandonment, though either way the consequences were the same.

         That night Allison coached him on cold reading, and he went on the interview the next day. Even though Nick had told him it was decided, and Allison offered  reassurances,  driving  east on Hollywood Boulevard to the studio lot after ten o’clock he could taste fear in his mouth It almost made him gag, its bite as pungent  as a gulp of ocean water. Allison  told him stage fright was normal,  even good because it could work in your favor by bringing up your energy, but as he got closer to the destination, he could tell his lips were visibly trembling. He hoped they weren’t purple. He didn’t want Nick Morrissey to see  fear. Damien still believed this was an audition, that he could blow it, not matter what Nick told him. Nick couldn’t be that certain. What if Damien was dyslexic? What if he was illiterate? What if he was scared shitless?

     Being noticeably nervous, intimidated by the experience, was the very thing that could undermine him. Nick knew him to be confident and competent, that’s what he was expecting, that’s what he wanted to put on tape.

     Wilton Studios, where The Family Way was taped, was at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Regency Place. He got to the gate in his  Mustang (powder blue with a beige hard vinyl top, plush bucket seats and power steering, an oldie but a goodie), and told the uniformed guard his name and where he was going. He was given directions to Stage 4, told to park in one of the visitors’ spaces, then waved through.

     Wilton was a complex of two story beige colored stucco sound stages and offices used for the taping of TV shows. Damien found Stage 4, parked his car, then went in through a glass door marked GENERAL OFFICES. When he told the receptionist who he was, she asked,

     “Did you bring any pictures?”

     “I don’t have any.”

     “No problem.

      She called someone and told Damien to have a seat. In a moment, an energetic enthusiastic kid, a girl about nineteen, came out and asked him to follow her. She led him to a waiting room that was set up with photographic lights and a red cushioned armchair. There was a guy with a camera standing across from the chair.

     The page said, “This is Joe Bauer, our photographer.”

     Joe grinned, shook his hand, and said, “Nice to meet you, Damien. Mr. Morrissey wants some pictures for the client. Have a seat.”

     Damien sat and it was done in a matter of minutes, twenty four clicks on a Nikon, preceded by simple directions ( “Smile”, “Look a little intense now”, “One with a frown.”) and shot from various angles as the photographer moved around him.

     The photo session was for the simple reason that he didn’t have pictures. Nick knew, setting an appointment for him only yesterday, that if he didn’t have some already, he wouldn’t have time to get any. Damien remembered the questions: Are you in the unions? Do you have an agent? Hollywood had its protocol, it’s standardized procedures. Even Nick Morrissey would have to submit him to the client with a picture. Damien wondered if Nick would bother with a resume. Damien had been in two flops at a theater that no longer existed. Would Nick do with Damien’s resume what so many beginning thespians did with theirs, and pad it? Two Equity productions in NYC, produced by Joseph Papp at the Lincoln Center.?

     The picture taking had distracted him, and he realized he was relaxed. The fear was gone, off of him like fatigue after a good rest. Joe finished, took his lights and camera and left. The ingenue, whose name he now knew was Tina because Joe had called her that, brought him coffee and pages of a script, “sides” as she called them.

     Before he had a chance to read through once, another woman, this one in her thirties, came into the room and introduced herself as Carolyn Hayes, a Casting Assistant. She had him go with her to Nick Morrissey’s office.

     Nick, dressed regally, was sitting behind a huge oak desk. The walls of his office were filled with framed posters of movies he’d produced and/or directed, various plaques and awards, and pictures of Nick with other celebrities who’d inscribed best wishes on the prints. His Emmies were on individual shelves like pedestals. Bookcases were filled with scripts, and Nick, in a tailored three piece dark blue suit, looked like a downtown attorney. Damien had expected him to be casual. His attire and his office conveyed power, wealth and the conducting of serious business. In one corner of the room, there was a video monitor and camera, and what appeared to be Joe’s lights.

     Nick got up, and despite the formality of his appearance, addressed Damien in his usual familiar manner.

     “Find us alright?”

     “Yeah. The guard gave good directions.”

     “Have a seat, Damien. You’ve read the script?”

     “Didn’t have a chance yet,” he said, as he sat.

     “Don’t worry about it. Just cold read it to me now.”

     There wasn’t really much dialogue. The action told most of the story, deliberately laden  with cliches. A shipwreck survivor is on a desert island, and finds a treasure chest. In the chest are new duds from the Base Camp. The survivor is not Damien. Damien is the spokesman, who makes various humorous comments about the shipwreckee’s plight off camera, until he appears at the end to make a statement about what a cool dude the survivor is, now that he’s dressed for the occasion.

     For thirty minutes, Nick had him read it over and over, at first with the script, then gradually  without it. Damien knew enough (because of Allison's script reading lesson)  to glance up from the page, make eye contact with Nick as he kept his place with his finger, then glance back at the text..

     When they first went “off book”, Nick had him improvise, but then got him back to reading from the script until Damien knew the lines as well as he knew The Act of Contrition by the time he’d finished the first grade at St. Francis Assisi Grammar School in Toronto. Then, when he was satisfied with the result, Nick taped it, using the camera himself. One take only. To keep it fresh, he said.

    Nick gave him a contract. Then he said, The job is yours. You’re going to have a lot of money. He said, Read it, sign it, bring it back to me. If you want to throw your money away, you can talk to an agent. It’s up to you. He said, Don’t worry, go home

    Damien did. This time he believed it was real.. He would have a lot of money. His life was changing. It was exhilarating, but he wondered if that was what he and Allison really wanted.

CHAPTER THREE

       The first commercial, or Damien’s part of it (voice-overs throughout and his appearance on camera at the end), was not shot at Wilton Studios. Wilton was used exclusively for TV shows,.but  Nick owned an independent film production company , Nimor Productions (Ni-Mor as in U-No-Hu), on Melrose near La Cienega, and they used those facilities.

     Nick didn’t direct, which surprised Damien. He wasn’t even there. John Dannon, whom everybody at the location referred to as “the best in the business” was the director, and from that arrangement, Damien surmised this: Nick was the producer, Nick had cast him, Nick had directed the audition taping, Nick directed and produced movies and TV shows, Nick was a megalomaniac, but he still deferred directing commercials to someone he considered better at it. Damien saw it as an example of pragmatism and---well, humility?. No. Pragmatism and business.

     Damien never showed the contract to anybody but Allison. It was a hell of a lot of money, and if Nick Morrissey was taking advantage of him in any way, well, Damien could still be carrying Nick’s box spring out to his rental truck with Ken.

     The first commercial was done in a morning, and half that time was spent on makeup, hair, wardrobe, and a lot of sitting and waiting. The actual shooting, ten or twelve or more takes, took no longer than ninety minutes

     That was it. It was almost a let down, it had been such a piece of---well, pie, apple pie, nothing being more “American dream” than a ton of money, but where did the hard work part come in? Maybe he’d done that already.

     There was going to be some lag time before the commercial would start to air, and before shooting was scheduled for subsequent ones, and he had nothing else to do but continue running his business. He wasn’t a familiar face to anyone yet, and besides he only saw his customers if he went out to their homes to do an estimate. As for talking to people on the phone, even when the commercial got on TV, most people probably wouldn’t know the name of the Base Camp’s spokesman. Would they?

     So for a while life was just like it had been, except that there was the money, and an anticipation that somehow things were going to be different. It was during this transitory period that Nick called one day and told him that his tenant “at Malibu” (Nick referred to all his properties using the preposition “at” almost as a prefix---at Mulholland, at Tucson, at Malibu) was moving. The tenant was an actor Damien had moved into the house on Nick’s referral. He actually believed Nick was calling to have him move the guy out again. Damien could send Ken and a helper out there. He was the boss. That wouldn’t be too undignified.

     He said, “Sure, l can put a crew together for it.”

      There was an interval of silence before Nick replied, and then he said, “If you want to, but that’s not why I called.”

     “Oh…Okay…What? Why?”

     “Do you want to live in the house?”

     “What?”

     He had avoided thinking of anything yet he might do with the money because the          responsibility of it scared him.

     “Damien, you don’t want to be living in a Hollywood apartment when you get on television.”

     “Why not?”

     “Use your imagination, my boy. What’s your neighborhood like?”

     Hollywood. There was Hollywood-the-myth, Hollywood-the-industry and Hollywood-the-place. Nick was Hollywood-the-industry. Damien lived in Hollywood-the-place. Yes, there are the tour busses and the star’s handprints in the sidewalk at the Chinese Theater (that’s Hollywood-the-myth), but scrape beneath the tinsel and you’ll find, not real tinsel anymore, but a street life of crack addicts, dealers, hookers, homeless, smashed car windows, heroin, street muggings, stabbings, and shootings---things just not mentioned in the travel brochures that tout Universal Studios and trips to the stars’ homes.

     Nick seemed to be telling him that when you become ransomable you don’t want to be easily kidnappable. People would assume he had money if they saw him on TV. Nick was looking out for him. Or was he just protecting his investment? Pragmatism and business.

     Damien said, “Let me talk to my fiance. How much do you want for it?”

     “Come up and have a look. We’ll talk about it.”

     Damien had seen it, walked in and out at least fifty times, carrying boxes and furniture on the in trips. It was a fantasy of California goodlife, a house on stilts over the ocean in the Malibu colony, right on the Pacific Coast Highway.

     “When?”

     “It’s up to you. Talk to your girlfriend, then call me.”

     So they were going to Malibu, where the cliffs across the highway were ready to fall, and the ocean came in under the back of the house on a nice day. Well, they could always leave for a while if it rained. It wasn’t like they had roots there. And it was June. L.A. probably wouldn’t see a storm again until November. At the speed things were happening, who knew what five months would bring?

     The house was two levels. Upstairs was the living room, master bedroom and a smaller room they decided to use as a den and office. You entered the house at ground level from the narrow sidewalk along the highway into the garage, and from there a door opened into a hall off a large room, really a second living room, that they designated the rec room On that floor were also the dining room and a kitchen with a back door that led to a deck with a flight of stairs down to the beach. Because of erosion, the beach was only two feet wide between the posts supporting the seaward side of the building and the great Pacific when the tide was out, but it was their own beach. Two Foot Wide they named it, and there was just enough room to put down a towel or a folded blanket and sunbathe and look out at the ocean from it for a while every day.

     They hadn’t set a date for the marriage yet, but Damien got her a diamond ring from Crasson’s  jewelry shop in Beverly Hills. They were moving to Malibu gradually. Allison was still on call as a substitute teacher in L.A. Central, a LONG drive from the Coast Highway, and Damien was using the Hollywood apartment as his office, so they were sleeping there during the week and only spending weekends in the house at the beach.

     The only reason Damien operated the business at all now was that he knew his referrals and repeat business were worth money. He could sell them to another mover,

 whose phone number could be the forwarding number from Damien’s phone, but the business had to still be viable when he did that.

     The first commercial still hadn’t aired when they scheduled a shooting for the next one, this time over near Highland Avenue on another sound stage. Call time was for noon on Friday, just before the beginning of their third weekend in Malibu.

     This one had a lot more dialogue for Damien, and he soon learned that John Dannon was much more demanding than he’d had any indication of when he skated through the first one. Murphy’s Law also plagued the set that day. They had to replace a camera, had problems with the electricity, and finally it went so late they had to have a caterer bring supper.

     It was after nine o’clock when Damien was finished. He’d spoken to Allison and she’d gone out to Malibu. Before he headed out there, he thought he’d stop by the apartment, which was close, check the messages, and make sure Ken had a helper for tomorrow. Ken was off crack and clean for a while now, going to AA meetings with Damien’s building manager Jerry, who’d befriended and recruited him.

     About 9:30, Damien was in the apartment listening to phone messages, and none of them gave him a reason to write anything in the pad on his desk. The 11:00 A.M. customer called to see where Ken was, then called back to negate that, saying Ken had arrived. (Ken liked breakfast at a coffee shop, even if he was starting late like today, then worked all day until the job was finished.) There was a hang up at.3:12 P.M., and at 6:18. Ken called in to tell him the job was finished, he did have a helper for tomorrow,  and he was bringing the truck back to the rental place. There were two more messages indicated on the answering machine counter, but before he could listen to them, somebody rang his doorbell.

     Now lately Jerry  the manager and Art the old fart across the hall were doing that. To jawbone, ostensibly. Jerry was  ravenously curious about where Damien and Allison were going on weekends (Damiem hadn’t told his neighbors he was a star; he wished he could be there for their shock, but he did plan to at least come back and visit so they wouldn’t feel totally betrayed.) and Art was a baseball zealot, a lifetime Yankees fan. It helped that the Dodgers were in the other league, so he could root for them too. But those Angels…Since Damien, being from The Bronx last before he came to California, was also a Yankees fan, Art saw them as having a lot in common. And Art , of course, also sensed something up with Damien, and was on his own intelligence mission.

     So Damien opened the door, expecting a nosy neighbor, not showing good Hollywood street skills, but caught off guard. It was not a neighbor who was on his doorstep. A short stocky guy with a crew cut was standing there, and he said, with a dense New York accent (not The Bronx, thicker, maybe Brooklyn) “You Harry Hartman?”

     Harry Hartman, the fictitious name he was using, with a made-up P.U.C. registration number, to advertise in the Hollywood Commercial, a free-to-the reader advertising newspaper.

     “No.”

     “Do you know him?”

     How did they find this address? The paper didn’t have it. Could he say Harry Hartman didn’t live here? That he didn’t know him? Here in this apartment was the very phone connected to Harry Hartman. Was this guy a cop?  An agent for the P.U.C.? Worse, from Immigration or the I.R.S.? He’d heard of the P.U.C. setting up stings, calling to book a moving job, then arresting movers on the job site, even if the were only employees. Damien didn’t know what answer to give to the question, so he asked one of his own.

     “What do you want?”

     “I have something for him. You know him?”

     That question again. Ask another one.The one he should have asked immediately.  

     “Who are you?”

     “Sarge.” Pronounced to rhyme with “massage”.           

     They had an injunction or something like that, like a restraining order against a business. Maybe an arrest warrant for Damien. They had to get the name Harry Hartman from the newspaper office.. They were looking for Harry Hartman, not Damien Rennard. These thoughts, unconnected by logical progression, were like moths blindly bumping a wall in panic. If somebody had snitched on Damien, they’d be looking for Damien not Harry Hartman, but a snitch could have given them the address. Maybe they were pretending to look for Harry Hartman as a ruse. Or maybe they’d traced the phone number here. But the phone was in Damien’s name, so they’d be looking for Damien. Okay, here’s what he had. They were looking for Harry Hartman, had to be, could only be, because that’s the name the paper gave them. He had no idea how they made the link to this address.

     He wondered how long it would take him to get everything out of this apartment. It was time to put the moving business behind him. The hell with what it was worth. He had money. This chapter in his life, charming as it had been since Allison, was over. It was a wrap. Shooting at Hollywood Boulevard and Poinsettia was finished. He and Allison were going on to the new location. At Malibu.

     This ridiculous “Sarge”, this goon of a process server for the P.U.C. or whatever agency sent him, with his military haircut and scruffy build, didn’t know who Damien was. Sarge thought he was an employee, possibly the manager of the business, covering for Harry Hartman, or thought he WAS Harry Hartman. (Well, actually, he was.)

     If he had the weekend, that would do it. He could have all their books and CDs and clothes, every business file and crappy piece of furniture still here packed and gone by Sunday night.

     “You smoking funny cigarettes? I asked if you know where Harry Hartman is?”

     That might be a tool of the trade, a trick question. Sarge had only asked Damien if he KNEW Harry Hartman. No matter. He thought he had the right answer now.

     “He went to San Francisco for the weekend.”

     “What’s your name?” the Sarge asked.

     He opened a manila folder and shuffled some official looking papers that stuck out from a horizontal pocket. It occurred to Damien that he might have been a little stupid after all admitting he knew Harry Hartman. Could Sarge leave the summons or subpeana or warrant or whatever the hell he was serving with Damien? Could that count as service? Well certainly not if he didn’t know who he gave it to.

     “What’s your name?” Sarge growled this time.

     Not sure what reaction to expect, but sounding as cool as he could, Damien said,

     “None of your business.”

     “You have some ID?”

     Damien asked the following question as respectfully as he could in case the answer was yes.

     “Are you a police officer?”

     Sarge’s tone was belligerent now. “I’m an officer. Do you have ID?”

     But he had emphasized “officer”. What kind of officer?

     “Do YOU have ID? A badge?”

     “Show me yours first.”

     “Nah, not tonight.”

     Damien slammed the door. Sarge’s shoe was on the door jam, but he banged the door shut hard enough to push it out. Then he turned the deadbolt.

     “Scum bag,” Sarge grumbled from outside

     “Get the fuck out of here.”

     To his surprise,  Sarge didn’t bother responding to that. He didn’t leave either, or at least Damien didn’t hear him leave. He supposed he could tape his papers to the door and claim he’d served Harry Hartman..

     Damien didn’t hear him doing anything He ventured a glance through the door peephole. In the circle of distorted visibility the dooreye permitted, like a reflection in a fun house mirror, he saw Art’s apartment door across from his, and three stairs leading to the second floor. Sarge was not in sight.

     That didn’t mean he wasn’t still there, but Damien decided not to worry about it, and went back in to finish listening to his messages. There were two left, and they, like the one at 3:12, were hang ups. A pattern of hang ups. Sarge calling to see if someone was here?

     There was a cardboard box in a corner, about six inches tall, six inches wide and eighteen inches long. Allison had used it once to bring a couple of potted ferns home. The plants were already in Malibu, and Damien took the box now and filled it with CDs and paperback books That was all the packing he could do tonight without more boxes.

     When he was done and ready to take the box with him, ten minutes after he’d peeped, he heard from outside his door:

     “When’s this asshole coming back?”

     “You’re trespassing. I’m going to call the manager.”

     Which he started to do. When he picked the phone up, Sarge persisted, “When’s he coming back?”

     Damien didn’t answer. He was still listening to the dial tone, but he said, “Jerry, can you come down to my apartment? I have a problem.”

      .”I’ll be back Monday.,” Sarge said.

      This time Damien heard him leaving, sounding like a large, ungainly waddling creature (a baby mastodon?) heavy enough to be leaving tracks in the oft-vacumned carpet.

     So long, shmuck. Monday will be just fine.

     Damien had to scour this coating of Hollywood Boulevard from his soul, like showering jailhouse crud off after a weekend in the County lock-up (where he had spent one weekend after a drunken and disorderly Friday night when he first came to L.A., back when Frank  Larkin was trying, not without reason, to rescue him into Primal Therapy, back before Allison).

     He had to swish vigorously with a strong antiseptic mouthwash, something as strong as Listerine or Proxide (or maybe even Clorox) and spit Hollywood out. Shed those serpentine scales right now and leave them here on the floor in Apartment 109 of the Poinsettia Arms. The phone gets disconnected with no referral number. from the moving company. He could let Ken or Frank Larkin have benefit of their number given as a forwarding number, but then Damien would be traceable. No, this was the end. His customers could look for a mover in the Yellow Pages. The P.U.C. could have Sarge ring his bell until he looked like the skeleton of a blind man wearing sunglasses and selling pencils, with a bony finger on the bell of a door with a sign reading School for The Deaf, that from a drawing Damien had seen in a collection of Gahan Wilson cartoons that appeared in Playboy magazine in the 1960s. Gahan Wilson was from before political correctness, as was Playboy.

     He’d have everything out this weekend.

CHAPTER FOUR

     The important things to know about him now are that he is in love, he is grateful for the good things in his life, and he intends to go give back.  

     On weekend mornings, when Allison was off, they would find some time to lie on their little piece of God’s sandy earth where it meets the Pacific Ocean, such a decadent rich man thing to do just once in your life, to have a private beach of your own where nobody else can go without your invitation (or so the Malibu citizenry would have them believe). And he shouldn’t be able to afford it. He didn’t make THAT much money. Nick practically gave it to them he rented it so cheaply, for not much more than they’d paid in Hollywood. Damien wondered why Nick was being such a benefactor, but decided, Why question it.

     They could also jump in Damien’s new car now, a red (as in cherry) Corvette, and in a very few minutes be at one of the great sea food restaurants that dot the Pacific Coast Highway. It was just so good it didn’t seem it could get any better.

     Except for a few annoying prank calls at night. Damien solved that problem for a while by disconnecting the phone when they went to sleep, but after a while there were hang ups during the day when they were home, or waiting for them on the answering machine when they got home.

     Well, they hadn’t had this phone very long. They could pass a new number on to friends and associates, so they had their phone number changed once again.

     But life was becoming all weekends for Damien, now that his business was gone. He looked into being an actor. He paid Joe Bauer for negatives from the pictures Joe took the day of his interview at Wilton, and had head shots and composites made.

     He didn’t know what to do with them. Under the contract for the Base Camp commercial, as their spokesman, he couldn’t appear in any other commercials or advertising. As for theatrical work---TV and films---Damien wasn’t an actor. He had no experience, no credits. Because the first commercial still hadn’t aired, the theatrical agents didn’t even know who he was, and wouldn’t necessarily be interested when they did. Without signing him, one agent accepted his pictures, “In case something comes up.” Nothing had so far.

     When he told Nick Morrissey what he was doing, Nick said, “Be patient. I have something else in mind for you.” Nick wouldn’t specify what, but with nobody calling Damien anyway, it wasn’t hard to be patient.

     Nick and Jeannie were also extending themselves to them. He and Allison were invited up to Mulholland for parties, but they really just felt uncomfortable, irrelevant in the conversations of these high rollers, and after a couple of times, started making excuses not to go.

     Damien was beginning to feel like he had retired too young, like a pensioner with much time,  no purpose and lots of energy. Nick had gotten the green card for him, so he could work legally now, he could teach ESL as he had done in Korea, he could do anything, work suited to his education, but there was this vague promise from Nick that he would soon be very busy working for him.

     One day when Allison was subbing at a middle school in Woodland Hills (she’d switched availability now from L.A. Central to the West San Fernando Valley), Damien took a ride into Hollywood. About 11:00 o’clock, he stopped for coffee at formerly Rock and Roll Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard. Rock and Roll Denny’s. Because it was located just a half a mile form the Sunset Strip, where all the famous rock clubs are located---the Whiskey, the Starwood, the House of Blues---for a while it became a hangout for rockers. It was a cultural marvel, a fusion of leather. rhinestone flash, and purple hair with vinyl, Formica and Xeroxed coffee shop cuisine. Who would ever have thought Denny’s could become hip? And then,  just as suddenly, the mad and beautiful were gone. No reason was apparent, and certainly none was ever given. The hipsters just weren’t there anymore, and it went back to being one of Hollywood’s Denny’s, with  weird garrulous bachelors at the counter and hookers on a break in the booths.         

     Damien had his coffee at the counter. His mission this morning was at Annunciation Roman Catholic Church, also on Sunset, eight or ten blocks east of Denny’s. He’d driven into Hollywood on Sunset all the way from the beach, so Denny’s had been on the way.

     When he finished the coffee, as he was about to pick the check up and leave a tip, getting off his stool, he smiled at the waitress who was standing in front of him. Then, through the mirror behind her, he noticed a man in a booth, alone, reading a newspaper. He was directly behind Damien.

     It was Sarge. He didn't in any way indicate that he had seen Damien, or that he was watching or following him. Damien took the tip back, and instead placed a five dollar bill on the counter. He whispered to the waitress,

      "Take care of this at the register for me and keep the change. I'm in a hurry."

     Of course he'd surprised her, and she said brashly,

     "Thank you!"

     He slid off the stool, and headed for a side door exit to the parking lot. As he went out, he glanced back at the booth. Serge was still nose and eyeballs in the morning paper.

      Back on the street again, he went over toward Highland Avenue, watching his rear view mirror for anybody who might be tailing him. Somebody in any of ten cars behind him could be, but Sarge hadn't left the restaurant by the time Damien drove out of the parking lot. There wouldn't be much chance he could catch up in the Hollywood traffic. Had he been following him?  Was seeing him at Denny's just a coincidence? Possibly. Sarge was a Denny's kind of guy.

      Annunciation looked much like any average size Catholic church with a school, which is to say it occupied much of a block.It was on the other side of the street, and after he passed it, he turned left off of Sunset at the next intersection, then went up that street. There he found an entrance to a parking lot and pulled in.

     At the end of the parking lot by the church, he saw a black latticed wrought iron gate leading to an alley that ran along the back of the church, parallel to Sunset Boulevard, separating the church proper from a group of smaller brick buildings behind it. The gate was unlocked and partially ajar, and he thought he’d find offices in there. He went in, and halfway down the alley, to his right,  encountered another shorter alley, also with a black iron gate, unlocked. In there were a courtyard and doors to red buildings with rectangular mazes of beige mortar between their bricks .He decided the largest building with the biggest door  had to be the rectory.

     He went into the courtyard and rang a large, round old fashioned bell at the brown, varnished front portal. After a minute’s wait, the door was opened by a young sandy haired woman without a trace of makeup, plainly attired in an ankle length cotton house dress, who was wholesomely pretty.

     She asked, “Can I help you?”

     “I want to find out about volunteering. You have a homeless program, don’t you?”

     He knew that they did because Ken had told him. He’d eaten there..

     “We do, yes. Just a food program. We don’t have housing. Do you want to talk to Father?”

     “Yes.”

     She moved back from the doorway and led him to a sparse waiting room. She said, “Wait here. I’ll get him”, and left.

     Damien went in and sat on one of the black, wooden hardbacked chairs with ornate arms of protruding knobs and nubs that resembled an elaborate three dimensional doily pattern. To his surprise, the chair was comfortable, the contours of his back fitting against the curved cushioned spine of the chair The ridges of the seat were also cushioned, and  kept him from feeling (unpleasantly)  the wood under his rump. A gradual slope at the edges prevented any right angled dig under the thighs. Being no authority whatsoever, except that he’d moved a lot of them, he though the chairs were antiques. The room itself seemed old world to him, a European church room maybe in France or  Spain, too authentic for Hollywood. This room didn’t seem like a set. Over the floor boards, covering most of the room,  was a faded and immaculately clean hand woven rug of various subdued brown and tan shades. He had no qualifications (again) for making a determination, but he KNEW the rug was hand made.

     On the walls were pictures of former pastors, the old ones in black and white, the more recent in color, leading up to the present pastor, whose name was Father Patricio Morales. There were other pictures too, very colorful pageantry photos, with lots of Catholic reds, greens and whites in the vestments on the priests, of celebrations and processions. There were two crucifixes in the room also, a large black one on the wall facing him, and a smaller one, brown, mounted on a plaque fixed to an office desk in a corner

     Why was he volunteering? It wasn’t that he was atoning for sins or crimes, because he didn’t see that he had committed many. He might be guilty of some prosecutable pragmatism, sure, but what was he supposed to have done, starved? That grimy stuff sticking to him like tar was simply his past. Everything that ever happened happened. That was a wonderful and terrible truth. Time etherealizes incidents into memories, then blurs them as it simultaneously takes each and isolates it like a snapshot from all the attendant conflicts and dynamics and distractions that had to also have been present, and though the principals in any memory are not immediate, they’ve dispersed or died or haven’t thought about it for a very long time if the ever did at all, still the mummies are where they were placed. and ships from the time of the Vikings lie at the bottom of the sea. Everything that ever happened happened.

     Maybe returning his fortune in a small way would act as a talisman against some sort of cosmic revenge for not deserving what he had. But why didn’t he deserve it? “Why me?” was supposed to be reserved for a terminal illness. And the cynical answer was God saying, “Why not you?” You weren’t expected to ask “Why me?” when good things came your way, but if you were going to, why not say then also “Why not?” Why not Damien? Why not? There was no reason why not. If anyone knows of a reason, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. So why was he volunteering?

      With his rented house in Malibu and his new bucks, he was getting stuck even more like the mammals at the Tar Pits. And yet, their fate in the gook really hadn’t been forever. Though they had no awareness of the prospect eons ago when they were trapped, and certainly had none when they were discovered, they were nevertheless remembered. They were famous. When he lost Frank Larkin once because Frank had moved without a forwarding phone number and didn’t tell anybody where he was, Damien looked for him via computer. He wasn’t too familiar yet with how to use them, and searched under FRANK LARKIN, which gave him a few hundred pages of people with the first or last name Frank, and about several hundred more pages of Larkins. He did browse through a few Larkin pages, and found a listing for a marriage announcement dated 1837 of a Dan Larkin to a Veronica Casey in County Galway. An aspirate prayer came almost unbeckoned out of Damien’s mouth at that poignant reminder of the hopes and dreams for the future of people long dead, people who never imagined electricity, airplanes, TVs, cars, telephones nor computers, but who are immortalized in this electronic information machine chain beyond the imagination or prophecy of anyone of their time. And it seemed to him an invasion too to put them in it, in that  we don’t know if they would consent, and it somehow violates their dignity and simplicity.

     So maybe tar isn’t the end. In what unthought of way might Damien be memorialized in future centuries or milleniums? Dan Larkin and Veronica Casey probably never went to L.A., it was VERY far away, and they would have been astounded in 1837 to know that someone in L.A. in the twentieth  and twenty first centuries could be reading their marriage announcement. Everything that ever happened happened. That implied an accountability, but maybe also a reward for things done right. .

     All at once, Damien was enveloped in this room by an overwhelming euphoric intoxication, immersed in it the same way that he was within the earth’s atmosphere. He had no words to describe what he was happening to him. He was high on…something. He’d felt it before in other places (once at his father’s grave), but only one time before was it this intense, and that had been in Korea at an old Buddhist temple high on a wooded and secluded hillside.

     He realized the young woman had returned and was speaking to him from the doorway.

     “Father will be with you in a moment. He asked what your name is.”

     Damien heard his own voice as if from a tape recorder as he replied, “Damien Rennard.”

     ”Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Renoir.”

      He didn’t remember getting up, but sure enough he was standing.

      “Okay. Thank you.”

     “Are you alright? Would you like a glass of water?”

     “No, nothing. I feel terrific. How about you?”

     If she was feeling like he was, she’d say so. She didn’t answer, but stood watching him, apparently waiting to see that he sat before she left.

     As he sat back down in the same chair, he asked, “Do you feel anything?”

     She was regarding him now with misgiving, possibly remembering this was Hollywood, and thinking that, church or not, they  probably shouldn’t  give everyone such free access to the rectory.

     “It won’t be long,” she said, and was gone. So she wasn’t feeling what he was, but she did, after all, have a reason for working here. Maybe she felt it sometimes.

     Damien tried to comprehend this---what?  Spiritual rapture? Endorphin  crescendo? It would  be enough for now to accept it, experience it, even as he knew it would not last. If he never left this room, it wouldn’t last. What was it? He didn’t know. He was pretty sure it was God, and surely God would accompany him when he left this room, but He wouldn’t be with him this way. Was it God?  The God of this Church, whose rectory he was in.? The Catholic God of his childhood was never explained to him as Santa Claus and didn’t dispense good feelings or “highs”. He was a God of  accountability, of toil and suffering in “this vale of tears”,  and the Church gave moral support for a hard life that could be endured virtuously through grace, and would be rewarded in eternity. Hard lives should be rewarded, but was there any reason God wouldn’t occasionally manifest Himself with an inkling of what it’s like to be in His Presence, the promise, after all, of Catholicism’s Heaven? And if God subscribed to the Catholic doctrine of Baptism of Desire (as Damien thought He did),  the Catholic teaching  that states that believers of all religions who are sincere practitioners of their faiths and who live righteous lives are among the saved,  baptized by their intention to serve God, then why wouldn’t Damien feel what he felt now also at a Bhuddist temple?

     It was soon after he’d arrived in the country. He was working in a province in the center of South Korea from north to south, along the west coast. His English students were themselves Korean English language teachers, and it was a very hot July day, so ditching the classroom for an excursion became the requested afternoon program.

     He rode as a passenger in a car with several of them, in a caravan of three cars. A dirt road, barely wide enough for the vehicles, ran up a hillside beneath a green panoply of  summer filled branches that permitted only speckled sunlight into the shade. Eventually they came to a clear spot with several tombs, explained to Damien as belonging to an ancient scholar and his family. Then they climbed higher again along the wooded road, the car Damien was in bumping hard in ruts and skidding on loose gravel, until they reached another cleared and somewhat level place,  which was the site of the temple.

    First encountered was a crude unpaved parking lot, or at least an area they used as such, and from there they had to walk along a gradually inclined footpath. The path ended at a well, where there were wooden cups and ladles  on pegs hammered into one of the inner stone walls of the well The short foot climb was enough on this blistering day, with the tree shadows vanishing in the clearing, to make everybody thirsty, and all, including Damien, had a drink

     Only a few feet farther was the temple and a traditional pagoda style house, both  with  grooved, concave, ceramic shingled roofs, the type of  Asian architecture that is a rarity now in Korea because virtually all the buildings in the country were destroyed or damaged during the Korean War, and what remains have become protected treasures.

     The temple was small, as was the house. There were a woman, a young girl about three years old and a robed monk on the grounds outside. Damien didn’t think monks married, but they seemed to be a family.

     He had ridden in the car driven by Mr. Ko, a young (as most of them were) teacher about thirty, so Ko was beside him when he walked to the temple entrance. There and then he felt it, the same current of ecstasy.

     The door of the temple was open, and inside he could see lit candles and a statue of Buddha. It looked very peaceful and welcoming in there, and Damien moved toward the entry, but Mr. Ko stopped him by asking, “Do you want to go inside?”

     “Can I”

     “Let me ask. Wait a minute.”

     Ko summoned the woman (the monk had gone in the house or somewhere), and she was presently beside him.

     She said, in English that didn’t sound like she knew much of it, “You can go inside if you can say ‘I accept the Buddha’”.

     How could he say that?  He didn’t know what it meant. He savored his communion and stayed outside in the doorway, knowing HE was right: Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with dogma, with what he accepted or didn’t accept.

     There was some conversation among the Koreans, and Damien was told they were going to sit. They went back in the direction of the well, then to a spot beside the house where there were two long wooden picnic tables with benches, in the shade of a tree. Damien, with seven or eight Korean teachers, sat at the tables, and the woman brought them oranges.

     When she left, the monk joined them. .Damien didn’t understand anything the monk said, and he never addressed Damien nor introduced himself, speaking only to the teachers. He had a physicality and manner that seemed very un-monk-like, powerfully built with a deep voice and an aggressive demeanor, and within a few minutes it became clear to Damien, without speaking the language, that he was berating the teachers about something. He became more forceful, and finally had them silent, looking away from him or at the ground, very uncomfortable, probably especially the men, who must have felt they should have stood up to him (as Damien felt, though he had language incomprehension and being the stranger as excuses). Damien would never ask what it was about, because he knew he wouldn't  be told.  Koreans didn’t discuss such matters with foreigners, though it was certainly a scenario he’d seen played out in the U.S. and Canada  too. Whatever the issue here, he believed it had to do with doctrine and self righteousness. When the monk was through, when he was satisfied that he had belittled and humiliated them, he walked away, victorious. He had ignored Damien as though anything he might think would be insignificant.

     This monk, who was the caretaker of this temple, was in direct contradiction to the feeling Damien experienced. He couldn’t reconcile the differences, but he attempted explanation: God is, and people aren’t (God). When things are going great, they’re about to go wrong. Not Murphy’s Law exactly (If Anything Can Go Wrong It Will) but Damien had his own, close to Murphy’s: Every Situation Has Its Asshole. Every job. Every apartment building. Every revolution. Every laundromat. Every bingo game. Every orgy. Assholes know no boundaries of race, gender, nationality or religion. In every group of people there is at least one asshole. Sometimes, yes often, there are several. It’s the asshole factor, the asshole premise: Some P (People) are A(Assholes).

                            (pie drawing)

     Now of course defining assholism is subjective (for instance nobody thinks he’s one), so it can’t be proven empirically. But, he thought, you know it, I know it, everybody knows it: There are assholes everywhere. Thus, when things are going great, they’re right on the verge of getting all fucked up. Just when you’ve found God, you’re going to start thinking there isn’t one.

     Most younger people in Korea are Christian. The older more traditional folk, especially poor farmers in the countryside, are Buddhist, but it turned out that Mr. Ko was a Buddhist. He began showing Damien the beads, explaining that each bead was a Buddha, representing a hundred and one Buddhas or something like that. It was enough to cause brain damage. A hundred and one Buddhas or trombones or Dalmatians, it was dogma. It reminded him of going to Mass, as he occasionally did, where he felt during the Consecration that he was truly present at a miracle. He didn’t know if he believed in the Divinity of Jesus anymore, yet he had no doubt that by the intention to summon Him God was present in the Communion. God, whatever  It’s true essence, was pleased at the attempt by humans to seek and know Him. God WAS, and was for everyone.

     But the mood spoiled when the priest stopped the Mass and HAD TO get up to the pulpit and talk. His speaking banished all sense of spirituality. Why couldn’t they all just shut up and leave it alone? The Korean monk, the priests with their moralizing, Mr. Ko. Even when they weren’t trying to, they were filling the asshole equation.

     Well, they were serving up the same ecstasy here today at Annunciation Church. Another possible explanation for this phenomenon occurred to Damien: A trick of the Devil. But this sense of spiritual communication was too beautiful and benevolent to be demonic. The Devil couldn’t have it in him. A fish smells like a fish. However the Devil might disguise himself, he couldn’t masquerade as God. That was a given, a guarantee of Catholic theology. Santa Claus gifts, material distractions (like his job and his Corvette and his house and Allison?) might be tricks intended to divert, but to divert from what? Damien was not being seduced from a former life of piety and service. Why would the Devil bother? Temptation wasn’t necessary to keep Damien from following his namesake, Father Damien de Veuster, the  Belgian missionary who’d devoted his life to the care of patients exiled in a leper colony. This Damien was no candidate for sainthood. Why would the Devil bribe HIM?

     More than a devil’s trick, good fortune, in it’s fleeing, could be a message from God that  this is a temporary world and ALL things go. Abrupt endings might be a slap on the head, a rough wake-up call

     He was back in the reality of the rectory as a very energetic priest about forty years old suddenly entered the room, a glowing Latin man dressed halfway in transition between vestment garments for serving Mass and casual attire.

     “Would you join me for lunch?” he asked.

     Feeling now that he was imposing, Damien said, “Oh, I didn’t realize it was lunch time.”

     “We eat meals early here. Come with me.”

     Damien followed him and was taken to a small dining nook off a pantry and kitchen, where he again saw the housekeeper.

     “One more for lunch, Bridget” the priest said, then addressed Damien once more. “I’m Father Pete. Pete Morales. I hope you like Mexican food.”

     "Yeah, of course."

     Patricio  to Pete. He didn't want to be Pat. The wrong ethnic for "Going My Way."

     “Enchiladas today. Let’s sit.”

     Though Father Pete himself seemed to carry a trace of what Damien experienced in the waiting room (maybe was responsible for it), the intensity was dissipating, as he’d predicted it would. It wasn’t gone with the ugliness of the scene with the bullying monk, but leaving nevertheless. He would stop in the waiting room again before he left, but it wouldn’t be as strong. He had returned to the old  Korean temple, and though it was pleasant and peaceful the second time (and neither the monk nor the woman nor child were in sight)  he experienced a mild serenity which he felt  even now from Father Morales.

     Why did he feel it? He asked the Korean teachers that day at the temple if they felt anything, and they didn’t (so it wasn’t anything in the well water either). Mr. Ko of course assumed he was seeking instruction, which was as bad as the Catechism or the sermon at the Mass. It wasn’t about ideas, any of them, in any temple or church, and yet it was in those places that Damien felt It. If he felt it and other people didn’t, why was that? Was he to somehow act?  If he knew what to do, maybe he would. But he couldn’t preach because he had no sermon. The religions were all right and they were all wrong, and worst of all, they were too often killing each other. He knew the existence of God, but didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe there was nothing to do but accept it. And give something back for his fortune. At Annunciation’s food program. As good a place as any. Father Pete was a good man. Bridget was a good woman. Good, but not perfect, because they were only people. But they were trying, and he could too.

     Bridget brought the food in, set it on the table, then sat down with them. As they ate, Father Pete asked, “Do you know what KP is?”

     “I’ve heard of it.”

     “Never been in the military?”

     He’d thought about joining after college. That would have got citizenship for him, but the job in Korea came along instead. Somehow he thought the Army would have sent him to Korea anyway. He believed he would have gone there one way or another.

     “I’m not American.”

     Father Pete looked surprised, probably because he thought Damien looked like an American. “I was an Army chaplain. KP is kitchen police. Hard work and not very glamorous. Unless you can cook.”

     “Not for more than two people at a time.”

     The priest had a good laugh about that. “You’ll definitely be a grunt then.”

     “I’m no stranger to hard work,” Damien said..

     Father Morales said they could use him starting today, around four o’clock to set up for the serving at five or five thirty. That gave it the hard structure of the small maple table they were eating at, transforming his nice platonic idea to a looming reality. The priest accepted his offer, and actually wanted him to work, almost immediately. Defenses started shooting up spikes around the moat: “I have to prepare myself for this”,  “Allison doesn’t know and expects me home at dinner time”,  “I’m tired” (I only slept till ten today.)

     But he knew he wouldn’t feel any more like it tomorrow, and agreed to be back at four o’clock. He could call Allison and kill some time at the Goldwyn Library on Ivar Avenue.

     The inexpensive but wholesome Mexican meal he’d just had, of enchiladas, refritos, tortillas and rice, was ironic contrast to what he’d be serving tonight, which the pastor told him consisted of a main staple of brown beans cooked in a big pot, stewing as they spoke, with lettuce salad, coffee and  super- market- contributed bread too old to sell.

     Damien did call Allison, and then went to the Samuel Goldwyn branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, specially funded by the Goldwyn family, in all ways a  well resourced  public library, but also emphasizing the Hollywood film industry.

     And it’s in Hollywood, so being a public place, the public comes in, among them senior citizens, students, thespians and hobos. A preview, if one was needed, of who he’d be encountering tonight, was in the restroom, two guys bare to the waist, taking an improvised bath at the basins, stinking worse than skunk spray and rotten eggs. He supposed the good news was they cared enough to wash.

     After that encounter, he went upstairs and browsed the fiction stacks, settling finally on an anthology of Stephen Crane novellas and stories, that he took to a table to read. The first piece was "Maggie: A Girl of The Streets."  Astounded at the similarities of the life and characters of lower Manhattan in the 1890's to what he had known in the Bronx of today, Damien glanced up, reflecting on that. As he did, he looked into the eyes of a fat man at another table. The eyes seemed intense and angry, but the contact with him was for only a moment. Damien thought somehow he'd been watching him, but how could he know?  Damien had looked at him too. Maybe they'd looked at each other simultaneously, inadvertently. The man looked away and paid no more attention to Damien. It was probably nothing. The anger could be unrelated, over anything, maybe even just imagined.

     When he went back at four o’clock, Bridget introduced  him to Cliff, who supervised the shebang. Cliff was a guy of medium stature who could only be in his early thirties, but who at first appraisal appeared middle aged because he had a gut (maybe a beer belly) and combed  his thin hair back in a way that actually accentuated the encroaching baldness in the cowlicks above his eyes. Cliff was every insurance company’s coffee guy, every shipping clerk’s supervisor, and the way he told it, they really only needed a new cook, they had plenty of other servers, but one more pair of hands couldn’t hurt for setting up and cleaning up. He had Damien thinking he was a burden, one more uncalled for responsibility

     After the set up, which WAS fast and simple, Cliff had Damien watch. It was like he was an extra server, a “stand-by” or “on-call”. Cliff wanted him to see how serving food was done, so he’d be ready. He was beginning to feel that his being used even for set-up and clean-up was irrelevant, but that Father Pete hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings nor quaff his good intentions (the road to hell being paved with them if they aren’t acted upon.)

     The message Damien was getting was that he was the true recipient of his philanthropic effort. Now he had known that to be true from the beginning, but their acceptance of his offer without really needing him was focusing the point just a little too clearly.

     He watched the serving. The homeless shuffled in, their plastic bags and rucksacks left outside on a patio. They took trays and passed in a cafeteria style line. They were smelly and angry and dangerous, and those that weren’t completely deranged were half crazy.

     And then, for a moment, he thought one of them was Frank Larkin. Frank was a BIG man, as was this gentleman, the left side of whose face was so bruised and swollen it was not only black and blue but purple and pink.Because the bashed face made his features almost unrecognizable, for one heart thumping second, Damien was sure he was Frank.

     Just as he realized he was wrong, the guy noticed him gaping and said, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

     Damien said quickly, “I thought you were a friend of mine.”

     “I don’t have no friends. Neither do you.” His drawl was Deep South, maybe Georgia.

     “I just…”

     “Think about it. Would this old boy die for you? I look like somebody you KNOW, that’s all. Nobody has no friends.”

     To Damien’s relief, having made the point about his philosophy of life, he continued through the food line. Got his beans, lettuce (today with donated French dressing), black coffee and stale bread, and went in to feed his face in the dining area, which was set up with card tables covered by real Italian restaurant style tablecloths.

     Clean up was actually work. He had to bus and wipe tables, tote a bucket, swing a heavy mop, and scour and clean the big cooking pot, the serving pots and the eating trays. And the Big Pot was the monster. The bean scum had been cooked into it for many hours, and adhered like a coating of resin that had to be scrubbed to break up like sanded plaster on a wall, then scraped off. It was KP requiring mighty efforts of elbow grease, whatever Cliff has said about his not really being needed.

     Then, when he was finally finished, Cliff asked him to come back tomorrow. Cliff, in his peculiar way, had tested him and Damien had passed. Put another way, maybe Cliff just liked to break chops.

     He got home to Malibu after ten thirty, and trying to explain to Allison what he was doing and WHY made him feel unaccustomedly self conscious, even embarrassed. And this time she wasn’t supportive. She didn’t say, “I’m behind you, baby, whatever you do.” She got up at five thirty, and with Damien getting home this late, they wouldn’t have evenings together. She would suffer for Damien’s volunteerism, and what was the point? The food program had been operating yesterday, without Damien.

     That night he had a dream. Cliff had promoted him from extra server to actual server, and the big guy with the rainbow face came through again, only this time he WAS Frank Larkin.

     Damien asked, “Frank, what happened to you?”

     What he meant was, What happened to your life? How did you get like this?, but Frank thought he was talking about his face (about which, yes, Damien was also curious.)

     Frank said, “Jigs.”

     At least half the people in the line were African American and men. Damien said a precautionary, “Frank”.

     “Jigs.”

     A black guy right behind Frank said,

     “Jigs. Irish dancers. They riverdanced his face.”

     From further back in the line, somebody said, “Frankie  has to be mad at somebody. Look at him. Anyway, we call him ‘Harpie’”

     Somebody else said, “Paddy.”

     Another said, “ Mick”

     Frank smiled and said, “See, they’re my friends.”

     But nobody has any, Frank. You said so last night.

     To get in the spirit of this whatever-it-was that was somehow making ethnic slurring fun, a word game show, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune combined, with the subject Political Incorrectness, Damien said, “Just don’t call him ‘Donkey’”, which was a particular derision Frank abhorred.

     So of course, someone said “Dong- Key.”

     .Frank said to Damien, “Fuck you, Frog -Gee. Madame Le Farge.”, but he wasn’t mad, he was  smiling on the right side where he could still move facial muscles, because they were all getting prizes somewhere for this and everybody should be jumping up and down right now and trying to have orgasms. (That would be Wheel of Fortune; Jeopardy tries to be dignified.)

     Knowing he was probably spoiling the whole mood, Damien said, “Frank, I have a place you can stay.” He left out “in Malibu”.

      “What about these guys? They need a place too.”

     “They understand you’re my homeboy.”

     “No.”

    “I’ll give you my phone number. Let me help you.”

     “You can’t help me. I have to help myself.”

     And Frank looked at him with that right eye, the left one swollen shut, the right side of his face as stern as a scolding high school principal’s, the left half treated now with some kind of white salve that made that side look like a cream cheese and jelly sandwich on white bread, using plum and strawberry flavors.

      Frank said with disgust, “How can you do this?”

     Damien knew, yes, Frank was angry that somebody witnessed his plight, that somebody was superior enough to feed him, that better off to be able to, but more than that, his disdain was for Damien’s purpose, his mission. What he meant by “How can you do this?” was, How can you stoop to altruism?   Don’t you have anything better to do?  Volunteers should get a life so real people can have their jobs and get paid. Maybe some of us could pass out those farty beans. So what if Annunciation is a poor parish and has no money? We could call donors. There are lots of rich Catholics. And that bunch in the Vatican has lots of money.

CHAPTER FIVE

     The dream didn’t keep him from quitting, but it gave him more perspective on his volunteerism, presented views of it from other angles (like Allison’s). He was actually heart broken that she hadn’t pretended to approve, but she was honest, and that probably meant all her other support was real. He should quit for her (it would seem like that was the real sacrifice, spending the evenings with his beautiful fiance), but he felt he’d committed to it. He did make a compromise to her and to himself though. He’d do it for a while, until he was on TV, and then he’d donate what Father Morales needed far more than any labor Damien could give,  los  dollars Americanos.

     On Saturday morning, which was about ten days after Allison had called the phone company for the number change, they were outside on the deck having late breakfast and planning to go down to their little beach, where sand that had been underwater a few hours ago was baked dry by early afternoon June sunlight that reflected garlands of silver tinsel on the black and blue cast ocean. Two Foot Wide was looking mighty enticing when the phone rang in the house.

     Allison, who was closest to the stairs, darted up them and into the kitchen where the extension was. She came out the door again in a moment and said, “For you.”

     “Nick?”

     “Not Nick. I don’t know.”

     Who would be calling on precious weekends, when all had been told not to? For a moment, merging dreams with reality, or remembering the dream, he thought of Frank Larkin.  Frank was down in Huntington Beach now, doing fine as a licensed mover, an agent for one of the big long distance companies. And Frank was a writer too. Damien had known him to be a dabbler and scribbler, an open mike poet, but began to see his byline lately in Elay Week, and even an article by him in Westwood Magazine.  Distance was the reason they weren’t in touch with each other much, but Damien did plan to talk to Frank soon and fill him in on his doings.

     The white telephone hung on the wall papered with a white, lilac and purple columnar pattern  (Allison was the designer, and Damien, with time for it, was doing the labor).

     He picked up the phone, and still at peace despite an intrusion, said buoyantly, “Hello?”

     No answer.

     His spirits would not be so easily banished.  With continuing enthusiasm, he said,

     “Good morning…afternoon.”

     There was still no immediate answer, until he was about to move the phone from his ear to hang up, when a male voice said, “I’ve been calling you all night. Don’t you answer your phone?”

     The phone WAS pulled out last night because they’d been…well. His bon vivant was being tempered just a bit now by this juvenile prank. What imbecile..?

     “Who is this?” Damien asked impatiently.

     “Is Harry Hartman there?”

     The voice was  nasal, midwestern sounding,  Bob Dylan turned stalker. It couldn’t be Sarge, not even with his voice altered. Sarge was too deep and gravelly, and he wouldn’t be able to disguise that quality, any more than he could change his  Brooklyneese to Nebraskan.

     “Is he there?”,  the caller asked again.

     Damien thought, Just hang up. Don’t let him put a hex on the day. But he wanted to consider the implications of this call before he did ANYTHING, so he replied, “You have a wrong number.”

     “No I don’t.”

     If he hung up, this dickhead would just call back again. Sometime. He had to resolve it.

     “Look”, he said, “Let’s cut the shit, okay?  Who is this, and what do you want?”

     Silence.

     Damien continued, “Hey, maybe you think I did something I shouldn’t have, but don’t handle it this way. Don’t harass me.”

    “Are you Harry Hartman?”

     “No!”

      “Then you didn’t do anything to me.”

     “He doesn’t exist.”

     “Yes he does.”

     Damien had money to pay off any fines, he could plea bargain an arrest for operating an unlicensed moving company and probably do community service. What he was doing already at Annunciation would probably count. The business had been a phase of his life mired in the tar of financial desperation. He wasn’t moving furniture anymore, so the big companies wouldn’t care. They couldn’t want revenge.

     He said, “Harry Hartman was a name I made up to run an ad in the paper. If there’s really somebody with that name, probably somewhere there is, it was unintentional.”

     There, that was said.

      “You were listing his P.U.C. license number.”

     “I made that up too.”

     “License 846791?”

     He knew that number by heart, he had seen it so many times in the paper. It had brought him good luck, so he bought lottery tickets with combinations of those numbers, and even occasionally won a few bucks.

     What had he said now? He’d just admitted fraud to this anonymous caller. It was one thing to operate an unlicensed business, which was possibly legally defensible on the basis that the licensing and rate schedules were an infringement on free enterprise, but making up a license number to run an ad in a newspaper was, well, fraud, even if it was the PUC requiring the newspaper to run the license number in the ad.

     “I can’t talk to you anymore,” Damien said.

     “846791 is Harry Hartman’s PUC number.”

     That couldn’t even be a coincidental possibility, but he didn’t want to keep self incriminating. He said, “You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, you know.”

     Then he added, “I have to go now. I have to talk to my lawyer.”

     “A lawyer can’t help you.”

     “Can’t hurt.”

     “Tell Harry I want to talk to him.”

     “Sure. Who are you?”

     “Just tell him he had a caller.”

     He hung up

   . What would happen now? Was Harry Hartman going to call in and ask if he had any messages? Was this an elaborate prank? Somebody from the PUC who learned about his success and was having a little fun? Maybe Ken or one of his other helpers, or Lou , the guy he used to rent trucks from?  Somebody who knew him then, and knew about now. But he hadn’t given any of them his phone number, and he wasn’t listed.

     Allison had come in, almost unnoticed, but now she pulled the straps of her one piece black and yellow bathing suit down to examine a mosquito bite in her flesh on the right side at the big rib just below her breast. A red welt with a white head at the point of the bite was contrasting her smooth pale skin. She had a tube of salve in her hand, and she squeezed some onto a finger, and applied the ointment. Damien wanted to help, though there wasn’t any help needed. It had only required a dab, but he wanted to spread cream. Never mind last night---this was a new day.

      Allison saw the look in his face and moved closer. Two Foot Wide Beach could wait this afternoon, and if the tides came back in, well, they’d go out again. Bizarre phone calls from nut cases receded to insignificance. Right now there was him and Allison, and really, none of the rest of it, good or bad, had ever mattered.

     Later, when conversing became an option again, Allison remembered to ask him who called when they were on the deck (where, they realized, the brunch dishes still were, no doubt providing a feast for the big beach dragonflies.)

     They were in the bedroom. They’d made it there, though they’d dallied in the living room for a while. Allison had no angle either on who the prankster might be, but she thought he was probably no real threat or he wouldn’t be doing something so impotent as nuisance calling. His payoff was getting Damien’s goat, and the way to handle it was to simply hang up any time he called again. They resolved to do just that.

CHAPTER SIX

     There were no more calls. A month passed, the commercials were on TV, Damien was now a recognizable face in America, and he was getting residuals on top of the basic fees Nick had paid already paid him. Then came the fruition of Nick’s promise. He wanted to bring Damien into “The Family Way” as a character. Good for ratings and great for the sponsor, who was willing to pay $$ Even-More if their spokesman was in the show. And it meant Damien would now be very busy.

     Things were no so fantastic, life was so wonderfully unreal, Damien was afraid his brain might explode. It just couldn’t be this good.

     And then he started having the dreams about the tar figures. They were clawing their way out of the pond at the Tar Pits at night and making their way up Wilshire Boulevard between the tall office buildings. They looked like large versions of Uncle Remus’s tar babies in Disney’s “Song of The South”, bigger creatures than Br'er Rabbit or Br'er Fox, but definitely not mammoths or saber toothed tigers or wolves. They were more the size and shape of people, not a species without precedence, remember, in the guck at Wilshire and Cochran.

     Black gobs of tar with heads and limbs, adult sized melted rubber embryos, were crawling up,  lumbering over the park gate into Wilshire Boulevard, then staggering along on the sidewalk and in the street, some bent at the waist, lurching toward the ocean in a formation that was like the end of a marathon race for the undead. If there was motor traffic, but they seemed oblivious to it, and it to them. His dreams didn’t deal with explanations of how or why. 

     Among them, he knew were all the L.A. dreamers mired in their fantasies, the wannabe stars who could only be extras, the crazies from earlier periods  who were still a part of contemporary L.A., still as loony and delusional as their predecessors. In recent decades they had been joined by new Hollywood dreamers, slicker, who came to be rock and roll stars, the old hope addicts crowded in by new hopers, who were often addicted also to heroin or cocaine or AA coffee.

     Rockers and supernumeraries alike had been trapped up to their necks, then over their heads.  And there with them were Damien and Allison. Like the mastodons before them. Though never background extras nor guitar dudes/dudettes, he and and Allison were also stuck, had been for some time, even before the success came. L.A. did that to you, whoever you were.

          Damien’s dreams sounded a trumpet to all the lost dreamers bubbling in their frustration and rage below Hollywood-the-place, and in the real world, the tar in the big pit bubbles. There were others interred there too, he knew, those who came and  willingly dove like lemmings into the tar (though no actual lemmings have so far been found),  people who arrived without even the delusions of the rockers and “atmospheric background”, who at least still believed in something, however self deceptive. The divers had no hope at all, and they gave rise to that mean, retaliatory conservative streak that forged city politics of old in personifications like Mayor Sam Yorty, Howard Jarvis of Proposition 13 fame, and Police Chief William Parker. Damien had read city history. Jarvis and Yorty and Parker weren’t among the ghouls in his dreams because the Tar Pits are in Hollywood, or close to it for a stickler, and not downtown. But their constituency was being exhumed, their supporters, who had been fossilized, and metamorphosed in the present as people like the tour bus operator who proclaims himself the Mayor of Hollywood and current members of the Redevelopment Commission.   

         He knew there were other folks represented too, marching to the end of the continent, forebears of  street people on the Boulevard today, right now, who will TELL you they are vampires. If you doubt it, go and ask. Hollywood Boulevard, around Cherokee or Las Palmas, after dark. Be careful.

         For the hopers, his vision was a summonsing to a Hollywood Judgement Day, a last open casting call---we’re looking at basted mummies this time---aspirants dredged up in their asphalt shrouds only to be told once again that many are called but few are chosen. For hopers and hopeless alike, the whole stumbling parade was a zombie resurrection of the misfit and overlooked, from the grave into which they had leapt or wandered, after sliding from the northern and eastern forty seven and Canada, leaving behind as they did those essential human tethers of community and family, to become outcasts and self banished souls who hadn’t escaped anything after all because it was the tar of their pasts, that tar, that had driven them into the pit, to tar everlasting. Tar to tar as dust to dust. Remember man that thou art dust, but tar you shall accumulate and maybe strangle on.

    Recurring dreams are confusing. Damien was not sure if he had a lot of dreams about the licorice  Gumbies, or only had two or three, but dreamt in them that he had a lot of dreams. In that regard (uncertain repetition), the tar dreams were like his flying dreams, two specific recurring dreams that contradicted each other, at least in his

 interpretation of them. In Flying Dream 1, he is going to New York holding on to the wing of an airplane. It’s cold, his hands are slipping and the plane just took off from L.A.. He can’t hold on for even a few minutes, much less several hours. As his fingers lose their grip, he wakes up with the window open or the covers off.

     In Flying Dream 2, he is back in Korea. In this dream, HE flies, goes cruising at night in his body across the rice fields and hills and lighted nighttime roads of the countryside, with a sense of the greatest exhilaration and freedom (and power because only he can do this nocturnal flying, no one else even knows about it, and he probably could rule the world with this skill if he thought long enough about how.)

     In one dream he is impotent, going someplace he can’t or shouldn’t go, and dying for his effort. In the other, he can go anywhere, he is the freest of humans. (Maybe not anywhere. He only flies in Korea, and close to the ground to see everything. He senses he probably can’t make the long jaunt across the Pacific, and wouldn’t be inclined to. His excursions are joy riding. Airline routes are work, and so far he hasn’t taken any passengers. He’d like to take Allison for a spin, but she hasn’t visited that dream yet, though it does seem it began after he met her.)

     He thought the tar dreams had to be connected to the visit by Sarge and the harassment calls. Things were going so well it was causing him insecurity. He remembered other intervals in his life, good moments that in no way matched what he had today, but that were always demolished somehow by an indifferent reality or the asshole equation.                

CHAPTER SEVEN

     Damien had been incorporated into The Family Way, and when he went to work one Monday at Wilton Studios, the halls were teeming with uniformed cops, stage ones that looked very real for something that was being done on an adjacent set. He wasn’t in the scene that was being rehearsed at the moment, and was relaxing by himself in his dressing room going over lines  when this tall guy appeared in the mirror above the make-uo table, standing in the doorway. He looked like one of the network honchos who stalk around in suits but never introduce themselves and he stepped into the room. Damien thought it peculiar he would ask, as if he didn’t know,

     “Are you Damien Rennard?”

     “Yeah. Of course.”

     “My name is Ward McFarland. Can I talk to you for a moment?”

     “Sure.” Damien moved over on the sofa to make room.

     Ward McFarland took out his wallet and showed a big gold badge that read Los Angeles Police Dept, then sat next to Damien (so he apparently didn’t expect him to be a problem). They were eyeball to eyeball in that uncomfortable space violation of two people in an on-camera close-up.

     He said, “I just want to ask you about something.”

     Detective McFarland was being very polite and very respectful and had eaten pepperoni pizza for lunch.

     “What?”

     “A Missing Person’s report. Do you know someone named Harry Hartman?”

     Damien smirked. On the set! Come on. They had lots of props here, fake badges, idle actors hanging around with too much time on their hands.

     To get away from the pizza aftertaste aroma, Damien got up suddenly, and it caused McFarland to bolt to his feet also, almost alarmed.

     Damien said sarcastically,  “I think he owned a moving company.”

     “A movie company?”

     “A movie company, a moving company, what the fuck is the difference?”

     “His father thought you might know where he is.”

     “I only take messages for him.”

     “When did you talk to him last?”

    “Jesus! I’m getting ready to go on camera, you know? I don’t need this. Did Nick put you up to this?”

     “Nick?”

     “Nick Morrissey. The producer. You know, our boss.”

     “Mr. Rennard, when did you speak to Harry Hartman last?”

     “I have never spoken knowingly to Harry Hartman in my life.”

     McFarland took out  his wallet again and presented a business card with a logo of his badge that indeed stated he was a detective. So, another prop.

     “If you think of anything that might help us, any information, call me.”

     Damien pointed an index finger at  him and said, “April Fool.”

     “It’s July, Mr. Rennard.”

     A rhyme from his childhood, taught to him by the good Sisters of Mercy at St. Francis Grammar School in Toronto, came to him and he recited it now for the actor/cop Detective McF.

     “April Fool’s is past and gone, And here’s the fool who’s carried it on.”

     McFarland was squinting now, scrutinizing him intensely through narrow eye slits.

     “Do you have any mental problems?” he asked.

     “Not until this moment.”

      “Drug use?”

      “For the record, No. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell a cop, would I? Who’s writing this material?”

      McFarland was shaking his head. “Because there’s help, you know. Your behavior is very peculiar. I’m here because a man’s father filed a Missing Persons report with us.”

     “And sent you to me?”

     “Yes.”

     “Well, where is his father, so I can set him straight?”

      “He went back to Omaha this morning.”

     Bingo on the accent. Damien picked Nebraska for the caller in Malibu. Why wasn’t Damien filing a report?

     “That’s convenient. I thought people get to confront their accuser in this country. This great democracy.”

     “No one’s accusing you of anything.”

     That reminder actually took some stress away. “That’s true, isn’t it?”, he said. “So how did I do?”

     “What?”

     “On this improv. Do I pass?”

     “You say some odd things.”

     “No more than you.”

     “We just hope you’ll help us.”

     “Sure. I’d love to.”

     “We won’t, we can’t, force you to do anything, but I want you to feel free to call me anytime. Maybe we can help each other.”

     Damien wasn’t quite sure what that latter meant, but he thought it was a reference again to his mental health and/or drug use.

     McFarland went to the doorway, then stopped. How cliched. A “Colombo” thing to do. At least he didn’t point like Peter Falk, and his suit didn’t look like he’d slept in it

     He said, “It’s not a joke, Mr. Rennard”

   . Then he left.

     Wasn’t this a prank?  He took McFarland’s business card, went to the phone, dialed 9 for an outside line, then the number on the card, 483-5302.

     He got McFarland’s voice on tape saying he was a detective and asking him to leave a message. He hung up, then called again, only this time dialing 483-5300, which sounded like a main switchboard number.

     At first he got a recorded menu for the Los Angeles Police Department, and when he pressed 0, a female voice answered live, “ Desk, Seargant Stearns speaking”

     No, it wasn’t a prank

     He hung up again.

     Damien had a sudden urge to release this burden. He wasn’t a terrible person. He had just done a few practical things that some people might construe as wrong, or at least illegal. If McFarland was looking for the truth and Damien told him, maybe then they’d just leave him alone.

     He dialed the number on the business card once again. This time he waited out the beep, then left a message.

     “It’s Damien Rennard, Detective. This is what I know about Harry Hartman, and all I know. I made up that name and a PUC registration number with it so I could run an ad as a mover in the Hollywood Commercial. It was a total fabrication. If there’s a real person named Harry Hartman, it’s just a coincidence. I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t know he existed.

     “If you need to talk to me more, please call me at home, not at work. I’ll be there after ten tonight.”

     Then he left his home phone number on the recording.

CHAPTER EIGHT

     With a regular role in The Family Way, he really didn’t have time anymore for the food program. The money he was donating was of course far more beneficial than any cathartic sweat he could produce, and he wouldn’t miss that he could no longer experience the odor and menace of the street people, witness the immediate tragedy of their lives, be present for their suffering in the manner of the Damien his mother had named him after, the missionary priest who ministered to lepers and became one himself.  This Damien was relieved that his schedule excused him and conceded that he’d never wanted to do it, especially scrubbing that bean pot. He’d just liked the idea.

     It was a week since he’d left the voice message for McFarland, and the detective hadn’t called him back. He began to quit worrying that he might get arrested over the advertising or the business. He’d told McFarland everything, there was no reply, so maybe now the entire hassle would just go away.

     Suddenly, Allison and Damien wanted to get married. No matter that they’d had all this time when he was doing nothing and she could have taken time off from subbing. It just hadn’t occurred to them that that was a good time. NOW was a good time, except they had none.

     They had to do it on a Saturday morning at the Malibu courthouse, where they moved to the front of a long waiting list with but a word to the Court Clerk from Mr. Morrissey’s office. Damien wouldn’t ordinarily want to be bumped ahead of other people, but when he considered that he was jumping line on some of the colony’s finest and flashiest, it just seemed alright. Nick needed him to be available Monday, this had to be done, and that was that.

     So he and Allison were married by a judge. Nick and Jeannie were their witnesses, and took them to Sea Shells on the highway for lunch, after which they drove down to Ensenada in the Corvette for their overnight honeymoon.

     The road between Tijuana and Ensenada is spectacular, like Big Sur without the redwoods, treeless along Mexican desert bluffs over a panorama of the Pacific from cliffs high above the water. North America has its rivieras, Big Sur in Northern California for one, and this road to Ensenada another, but come next hiatus, Damien vowed he would  take Allison to the European ones.

    As they came into Ensenada, the road became a traffic circle, with a kiosk in the center, and the cars spun out as if by centrifugal force onto streets that were like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The kiosk, in the center of the traffic round, was a drive-by information center for tourists, with two uniformed officials, a man and a woman, inside, and a counter outside filled with glossy brochures and stapled stacks of  memeographed  pages.

    Allison said,  “Let’s get a map.”

    Damien stopped at the window, and she grabbed from several of the piles. As he pulled away, she looked through the papers.

    “We have a map, something about insurance, and a bunch of ads.”

    She continued reading while he drove, and then said, “When you have a chance, you need to read this insurance pamphlet. Mexico has Napoleonic Law.”

    “Napoleonic Law? The burden is on the accused to prove he’s innocent.”

     “it says if you have an accident, you’re assumed at fault, and have to pay for any deaths or injuries or property damage until you can prove in court it wasn’t your fault. If you don’t have money, you stay in jail without bail until your trial. Unless you have insurance. They sell it by the day to tourists. Let’s find an insurance office.”

    “Check in first?”

    “Insurance first, Damien. Don’t risk it.”

    So they drove around a little in the downtown streets, and then, in the distance, saw a huge billboard with red letters against a white background, saying in English, AUTO INSURANCE----TOURISTS.

    He drove towards it, but it turned out to be deceptively farther away than it had appeared. The sign was higher than the roofs of all the one and two story buildings, and it also misled them into thinking it was straight ahead. Eventually, Damien realized he would have to turn right, but when they reached its approximate coordinate that way, they had to turn again, in the direction they had initially been going. That street began to curve, however, so they turned left onto a tangent street. They were soon making rights and lefts at every block, trying to get to the sign they were close to but not AT yet

    By the time they found the insurance office, they didn’t know where they were. Their only reference point, the only thing they knew of Ensenada, was the traffic circle and kiosk, which were “back that way”. Maybe.

    They had the map, but no landmark or building noted on it was in sight to serve as a guide. Well, did it matter? Nick had suggested a hotel and they had reservations. It was a four star and prominent on the map, so if they asked, they should find it, but if not, they’d find something. Damien had done a good job of obscuring himself today---black sunglasses, a blue Dodgers cap turned backwards, and a week-old black haired moustache, grown especially for this trip, that was, with his blue eyes covered, making him look just a trace Mejicano. They’d  blend, they could stay anywhere.

    The insurance office was a bungalow, staffed on this late Saturday afternoon by a professional looking and somewhat elegant bilingual woman in a tailored business suit who explained the details of the policy, which sold for five dollars per day.

    They got two days worth of coverage, and asked her where the Sherbourne was. She told them she didn’t speak English well enough to tell them exactly how to get there, but went outside with them, pointed, and said if they went that way, they’d see signs for it. Not find the Sherbourne---see signs. Ask again.

    If there were any signs, they missed them. What they found was a residential area, away from the downtown bars and shops, dusty streets that were at first poor, but soon became more like a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, except there were no gas stations, 7-11s or fast food joints, if anyone who knows Southern California could imagine Van Nuys or North Hollywood like that. They were in a middle class section, definitely, with stucco and wood houses, houses much smaller than in L.A., like downscaled replicas, but HOUSES, with paved driveways and grassy front yards. And there were cars and SUVs and boats on trailers in the driveways.

    The street ended and they had to turn right. They were now parallel to the ocean, one block away from it. Through the spaces between houses, and at intersections, to their left  (which meant they were probably driving north now---unless the coast sloped west, as it does between Santa Monica and Oxnard), they saw the beach, the water blue and lovely, the beige sand laced with pebbles twinkling like flecks of diamond in the sunlight. They got glimpses of bathers and blanket potatoes and surfers, and along the water’s edge saw people riding horses.  But on the horizon, the sky was dark. It looked like Santa Ana effect in L.A., when the cleansing westerly winds from the desert blow the smog out over the ocean, where it hovers, waiting for the ocean breezes to strengthen and bring it back in again. There were some sort of clouds out there, and Ensenada was more humid than he’d expected it to be, but none of that was influencing beach activities on this otherwise beautiful day.

    Suddenly (sudden because it was on the only street they came to now that went toward the ocean, so they hadn’t seen it while approaching) a wide two story building appeared to their left like a mirage. It had a Spanish courtyard that opened facing them, so they could see the interior of it. The walls and ground were paved with tiles of multiple colors, and though the patterns didn’t quite comprise a mural, they outlined Aztec symbols and warriors. The scene was breathtaking.

   Allison was the first to acknowledge that with a simple, ”Wow!”

    It was a motel! Above it was a sign that said MOTEL, and a name, MONTEZUMA’S PLACE, by an owner with a sense of humor and a flair for American English  (unless, as often happened in Korea with attempts at English, it was a mistake by somebody along the way to making a sign, and the intended name had been MONTEZUMA’S PALACE. Just a thought Damien had.)

    Allison said, “Damien, we don’t need the Sherbourne.”

    “No”, he agreed.

    It almost seemed sacrilegious to drive over the tiles, but as like at most motels, you parked vertically in front of and under the rooms. The thing was, there were only two other cars. Hardly anybody was staying here. If they were employees cars (they weren’t bad but they weren’t new), nobody was staying here. Was it that far out of the way?  If so, how could they stay in business?  This was a Saturday afternoon.

    They went into the office, to a young man about twenty, a desk clerk who greeted them in a friendly manner, but seemed shy (afraid they’d talk to him in English?)

    “Are you open?” Damien asked.

    “You want room?”

    “Yes.”

    The clerk extended a registration form and they began to fill it out. The rent here was not so cheap. Not four star, but he couldn’t have afforded it in the old days.

    Allison asked, “Where is everybody?”

    The boy smiled. No comprende.

    Damien said, “You know ‘guest’?”

    “Guest?. Si.”

     He seemed to be acknowledging that they were guests. Well, he understood that.

    “Guests where?”

    “Room 120.”

    “No, no, Why no guests?”

    “No guests?”

    “Yes. Why not?”

    “Ahh…Tropical, Senor.”

     "Que?"

    "Tormenta tropical."

    The young man took the key to 120 and showed them to their room. Tormenta tropical? It was hot and humid today alright, but the tropics were still a thousand miles south. What did he mean? That Ensenada was so unpleasant in July, Californians so tormented by it, they weren’t going down there on weekends now?

    The ground floor room (which he moved the Corvette close to but not in front of, to keep an eye on without making the car a neon sign saying RICH AMERICANO STAYS HERE) was a motel room with a door that opened from a sidewalk around the inside of the courtyard. This wing of the building faced the ocean, and the bathroom was directly behind the room. From the bathroom, there was a back door leading to the beach, and also a window. Both the door and window locked securely, the door with a deadbolt, but Damien didn’t much like that there was entry from the beach, where there was no fence separating the motel from public use areas.

    Allison didn’t seem to share his concerns.. She said, “We’ll be alright. It’s beautiful. Nobody can come in without making a lot of noise. Break a window. Kick a door down. We could run out the front.”

    The bathroom had two doors, the back door and one from the room, which only locked inside the bathroom. They wanted to sleep for a while, so he took one of the two dining chairs in the room away from the small round wooden table, and braced it at an angle under the bathroom doorknob. It held like a New York “police lock.”

    Securely fortressed like that (except that Allison moved the chair to take a shower and didn’t put it back---he did), they lied down and took a nap. Didn’t even have sex. They did a lot of that, and it had been a long afternoon of driving.

    When Damien woke up, the chair was gone again from under the door handle. He might have to forget it is she wasn’t taking it seriously---he was starting to feel like a wimp. Allison was breathing softly, and somehow whistling, though she couldn’t whistle when she was awake. Strands of her black hair were on her face, sticking to her cheeks, which were perspiring a little despite the air conditioner, which was working, but puquito, and not doing anything about the humidity. What had awakened him was a persistent knocking at the back door, the one to the beach. It was not the knock of fingers from a closed hand, but the irregular banging of an ill fitted door against the jamb. And now, beyond the drone of the air conditioner, he heard a pelting rhythmic onslaught like wood chips hitting the wall at the back also, and metallic pinging like hail against the window, though it was much too hot for hail.   

    He got up and went into the bathroom. He separated the green plastic curtains on the window, which was steamed and looked like the windshield of a fast moving car between wipes of the blades in a downpour. He brushed away the moisture and fog with his hand, and outside, through a blur of water, saw huge waves rising along the shore and  rain cascading on the window.

    He said, “Holy shit!”  Tropical, Senor. How dumb could they be? A tropical storm.

They should watch the news once in a while. Couldn’t Nick and Jeannie have warned them? Was Nick supposed to take care of everything for him? The Morrisseys obviously hadn’t known either.  The kid in the motel office must have thought, Stupid gringos, don’t they know enough to hunker down away from the ocean?

    When he went back into the room, Allison was awake---either became aware of his movement, sensed his absence in the bed, or just heard the door banging also.

    “It’s raining?” she asked.

    “A monsoon.”

     Where had it come from so fast? The day had been humid and sunny. Just those smoggy clouds loitering at the horizon.   It wasn’t even dark yet---no, it was dark, it just wasn’t nighttime yet---and they had a car, so they could get away from the beach.    Where had it come from so fast? The day had been humid but sunny. Just those They thought about that, but who wanted to drive in this? The gloomy daylight and the gust driven rain had decreased visibility to about half a block.  They still didn’t know their directions, so they wouldn’t know where they were going, and might not find their way back to Montezuma’s Place if they left.  They had shelter here.  Probably as good as anywhere in a beach town right now.  The ocean wouldn’t reach them unless there was a tidal wave, and he’d never heard of tropical storms causing that.

     They agreed to staying. Allison reassured again. “We’ll be alright.” How did she know? Was she psychic? This was the second time since they checked in that she said that. She’d said, “You’ll get that part. I FEEL it.” And always, when she said those things, he believed her.  What about when the transmissions bore bad tiding? Did she withhold information? Paranoid, Damien.

     They were hungry now and could see that maybe that was going to be a problem. They got dressed and went out front to check on the accommodations, running through the rain to the desk. Here was the situation: The bar was open, would be all evening, the kitchen was closed, but the office had a big commercial refrigerator box stocked with pre-prepared food and a microwave.

     So the office food it would be. There was the stuff you’d expect, even in Mexico---egg sandwiches, ham sandwiches for the touristas (which touristas would those be?) --- and lots of Mexican food. They got two big chicken burritos, had them heated by Luis, the same young clerk whom they had now introduced themselves to, and took the burritos back to the room with a large bottle of Pepsi.

   
     The electricity had not been effected (yet anyway) and they turned the TV on. Yeah, the local stations in Spanish were giving a lot of attention to the “tropical”, though there wasn’t much show yet---just the high surf Damien saw from the back window, and a checkpoint somewhere now back towards the U.S. border where the Mexican police were turning cars around. So did that mean the storm wasn’t buffeting California too? What was happening in Malibu? For a moment, he had an image of their house crushed under a giant boulder, though there was no giant boulder over the house. (There was one north of their house, though, responsible for the vision, right over the highway, and he made a point of rarely driving far enough up the coast to have to go under it.)

    The burritos, under the circumstances, were exquisite, and even Pepsi had a previously unnoticed tangy flavor. They soon got tired of watching on TV what they could see mainly from their window, and most of the channels were covering the event. There was, however, a cable channel showing movies in English with Spanish subtitles, now broadcasting the later version of “Cape Fear” with Robert De Niro, maybe perversely selected by someone to accompany this tempest (and Damien’s phobias), but more likely synchronistically and ironically previously scheduled, because the station was listing movies to come for the entire week.

    Damien and Allison might be getting cozy, but this big blow was intensifying whether they chose to ignore it or not. By the time the psycho was trying to kill an entire family on a boat in a maelstrom, it was beginning to sound in Room 120 like the door to the beach really was going to come in, which would have caused their quarters to become just a bit drafty.

    Allison went into the bathroom with one of the dining chairs, and did what Damien had done earlier against the inner bathroom door. Bracing it against the doorknob

Actually eliminated some of the clattering in the frame. Damien had considered doing that an hour ago, and didn’t because, well, he’d done that twice inside, but he felt redeemed now of her earlier rejection of his effort. Was it rejection if she used the bathroom and forgot to put his security back? Yes! She didn’t take seriously an outside threat from possible intruders, but at least she was using his method against the elements.

    “Cape Fear” was followed by “Sleepless in Seattle”, which they’d both seen, and, as good as it was, they didn’t think of it as much of a “watch again” movie when you knew the story, and it was a little too fantasy sweet for their current predicament.

    The bar was open all evening. The bar was on the street, at the front of the motel, with most of the building behind it toward the sea. The bar was brick enclosed with no windows. The bar had karaoke. The bar had people. The bar sold alcohol. The bar was the place to go, for a variety of reasons.

    Before they left, just in case, feeling vindicated now, Damien also braced the inner bathroom door one more time with the other chair. There. That was done. They had done everything they could. It was all in God’s hands now.

    Damien wasn’t drinking, but Allison ordered “Kahlua and leche”, which she could drink until the half full quart sized carton of milk was gone. The Kahlua bottle was almost full, however, and  Illiana, the middle aged woman tending bar, poured Allison’s drinks generously. The karaoke machine was on loud, but even so, over the music, there was an intermiittent rumble like the sound a subway train makes below the gratings of New York streets as it goes through the tunnel. Between songs, without the

 blare of noise covering it, it sounded more like the echoing roar on the station platform as a subway train rolls in. The heavy varnished front door of the tavern shuddered and creaked at those moments, and outside things banged and rolled and clattered around.

    Besides Damien and Allison, the other people in the bar were the bartender Illiana,

liberal with the drinks tonight, Jose and Maria, another newly married young couple, the desk clerk Luis, who had closed shop and headed for safe ground also, and two other men, Jose Too, a computer programmer about fifty, and Hector, in his thirties, who spoke good English. These people, Hector told them, were regulars, storm or no storm. They lived nearby and this was their only neighborhood bar. Hector didn’t take the tropical seriously. “It’s not a hurricane. It’s a tropical storm. We get them all the time. No sweat. This isn’t Florida.” But after he said that, the train came into the station again, and he glanced nervously toward the door. Damien thought maybe there were tropicals and there were tropicals.

    Illiana had stretched the milk out to give Allison five righteous drinks that were mostly Kahlua, but the carton was empty now. It was 11:45.  Kahlua is not a high proof drink, but it is alcohol, and five good ones are five good ones, so Damien could see she had a buzz.

    Now she ordered a Long Island. Earlier, she had conversed with Illiana, who was drinking screwdrivers, through the bilingual Hector, but now that the bartender was blotto herself, they just talked to each other in their respective languages, didn’t understand a word the other said, but laughed anyway. It was great chemistry Allison and Illiana had. Sister rapport. “People who need people”, as Allison was singing this moment.

    The Long Island. Made with a lot of alcohol. She finished the song, drank a couple of more sips, then asked Damien to have some.

    “I don’t want to drink.”

    “Why not?”

    “I’m driving.” His usual excuse.

    “Very funny. You have to help me.”

    He took a sip through the straw. It tasted so good, set off such an instant craving, he wanted to suck the entire drink into his mouth and swallow it all. He stopped because that was exactly what he would do. And then order another.

    Allison was into the karaoke. She had an angellic voice, as most Koreans do, and by now everyone was encouraging her to sing everything, to be the entertainer of the evening .Earlier, the locals had sung the Spanish songs, but now they wanted songs in English. She sang "Let It Be" and  “Wonderful Tonight”, but also "Living La Vida Loca” and “La Bamba” (she didn’t forget she was in Mexico) and down through the listings to even “Green Fields” and Elvis tunes. She sang on request any song anybody wanted to hear, if the machine was programmed for it. She was oblivious to the elements. They all were, except Damien, because they had drank themselves courageous.   

    Allison kept singing. She mostly ignored the Long Island, but not entirely. From time to time, as the karaoke machine was making another selection, and the engine of the D train was pulling ten subway cars into the station  (nothing  loose left blowing around outside now though), she’d take another little sip. By 2:00, she had finished the Long Island. Not fast drinking, but high octane drinking. Then she ordered a Black Russian, another knock-you-off-your-barstool drink.

    Hector had told them they weren’t stupid  (thank you, Hector), the storm caught everybody by surprise until today. It was supposed to miss Baja. Hector lived in San Diego, but grew up in Ensenada. Though the electricity was working, the phones were down, so he didn’t know what was happening in San Diego. “Montezuma’s”, as Hector put it, was his “folks’ place”. Damien asked about the name. Hector laughed.

    “No, man, it was intended as Montezuma’s Place. Just a little joke.”

   “ Why don’t you have customers? Just the bad weather?”

    “We never get booked full because we’re word-of-mouth. The people who come here like it that way, that it’s secret. That’s our charm, and why we charge a little more. We don’t advertise. Movie stars used to stay here. My grandfather knew Erroll Flynn.”

    When Damien marveled about the tiles, Hector beamed. Damien thought the pride for Montezuma’s Place was also ethnic.

    “Are you Aztec?”

    “A little, but I laid those tiles. Those are my designs.”

    “You’re an artist.”

    “I try.”

    About 4:30, Hector started hinting at closing the bar. It was way after legal closing time, but who’d be checking tonight, and he had let Illiana keep the party going. Even if the police did come, the emergency would be justification. Besides, a little tip to the boys anytime, and they’d be on their way.

    Allison was on her second Black Russian, and had drank a quarter of it,  but now that Hector  announced “Last Call”  California style for the folks from L.A. (except Hector was allowing as much time as needed to finish that last one) she put the glass to her lips and downed half of what was left.

    Hector was staying at the motel himself this morning, and any of the regulars who didn’t care to go into the howling jeopardy had a room for free until things cleared. Regarding the safety of the rooms themselves, he told Damien his philosophy on life, borrowed from Hemingway’s “ The Sun Also Rises”

    “You know it?” he asked.

    Damien nodded.

    “You know the character Jake who had his balls blown off in the war? He has some bad nights, right, and one time he says to himself, ‘The day is the same as the night,' but then he thinks about that and says, 'The hell it is.’

    “Well what I say, live by---I could make this sound like a Mexican saying to give it power, but its not, its mine---I say, ‘When you made it through the night, you’re going to be okay.’  This tropical has been blowing all night. It’s running out of breath now. Gonna give it a rest soon.”

    Then, just to let everybody know he really would be closing sometime before noon today, he turned the karaoke off.

    Damien tried to start sopping Allison up, and as it became apparent they would soon be leaving, Hector came back to their spot at the bar and said to Damien,

    “Good move, the Montezuma. Everybody thought you’d be at the Sherbourne. Damien, my oldest boy loves you. Can I get your autograph for my kids?”

    Now Damien had actually introduced himself as Damien, because he’d had to register using ID, so it wasn’t such a surprise that despite his effort at concealment Hector knew who he was. But, Everybody Thought You'd  Be At The Sherbourne? Whoa! What?

    “What are you talking about?

    “Bro’, with that red Corvette, you can’t disguise yourself looking like a blind baseball player with his head on backwards. My kids think you’re so funny. They’ll’ be thrilled.”

    “I’ll give your kids an autograph, Hector. What do you mean, everybody thought I’d be at the Sherbourne?  What about the red Corvette?  There are lots of red Corvettes.”

    “Not in Ensenada.”

    “So what/”

    “Do you read the National Enquirer?”

    “No.”

    “You should. You and Allison got married in Malibu this afternoon, right?”

    “Yeah!”

    “Congratulations, mi amigo. Senora.”

    Hector raised his glass in toast, and so did Allison. He was as reverent as if he was going to make the Sign of The Cross in front of a church. Damien’s coke glass was only ice, but he raised it to be polite. Hector took a gulp of his drink, and Allison sucked up the remaining Black Russian until she was straw  slurping.

    Hector said, “To a good life”, then continued to Damien, “At the courthouse. And you drove down here in your trademark red Corvette, and were booked for tonight at the Sherbourne.” He sounded like a Latin Perry Mason.

    “That was in the paper?”

    “Earlier this week. You have no secrets anymore, bro’. Don’t worry, I won’t blow your cover while you’re here. I want you to come back. Tell your TV friends. But let’s keep it discreet. For the rich and famous, right, like the old days. My grandfather said W.C. Fields once stayed here too. But you can take the shades and cap off now. These people only speak Spanish, and they don’t get American TV. Cable movies, yes, TV no.”

    “Was Erroll Flynn here the night W.C. Fields stayed?”

    “I dunno.”

    “That would have been a night of drinking to rival tonight.”

    “Yeah…How come you don’t?”

    “I’m crazy.”

    Hector seemed to both accept and comprehend that. Damien thanked Hector on the confidential scoop on his wedding, courtesy of the Enquirer. He was not only in a program that modeled itself on “The Truman Show’, his life was “The Truman Show.” He wrote four autographs, fond wishes personally addressed to each of Hector’s kids, chronologically by age being Guadalupe, Maria, Hector, Jr. (finally got to carry on that Lopez line----he would be the oldest boy, who loved Damien), and Pepe, who was Pedro.

    They all said goodnight, and when Damien got outside, he grabbed Allison  (who was singing “Aye, aye, aye, aye”)  by the arm and ran like hell with her against the wind and rain back to their motel room.

    The back door and window had held. The room was fine. .Dawn  was coming in weak and densely filtered, but there’s no stopping that rotation of the earth. Daylight was almost upon them, but not quite, would maybe be not quite all day, but it was looking as if Hector’s interpretation of Hemingway was right for this morning That faint visibility seemed to calm the ocean. The gusts were still shaking the back door, but had ceased to shout  “I huff and I puff and I’ll blow your house down”, and the rain now only beat against the roof and window and door and did not masquerade as the crest of a wave. The weather was still ferocious, but because they would live, it was atmosphere now, not an imminent threat, and there is nothing like mortality giving you a good stare in the face (and then looking away) to put your priorities in order. For Damien, right now, while it was still dark and stormy enough for “the mood”, but bright enough to see her, it would have been to “consummate”  their honeymoon  (which would only be to do something they did at least five times a week already, but THIS was special)  but that wasn’t going to happen because she was intoxicated now, and later she’d probably be sick.  But she was with him and that WAS the important thing. About that there was no question.

    And what was RIGHT NOW for Allison?

    Well, she was crying.

    Guys, have you ever had a night like that with a woman?

    Ladies, come on….

    Crying!

    She had been having SO much fun. She sang, she laughed, she drank. It was the alcohol, of course. Unpredictable alcohol. Unpredictable women.

    He tried to console her, tried not to be so condescending, even to himself, that he would dare think he was humoring her. Not Allison. Too sensitive, too intelligent, even drunk, for that. But what was wrong?

    He asked again, hands on her shoulders, her bobbing, sobbing head bumping on his chest, moving almost like a junky’s nodding. Her face was contorted, wrenched into a mask of anguish from her struggle to control the tears, and her body trembled convulsively. This was no time for patronizing. Never with her. Maybe never time with anybody. No.

    He asked yet again, “What is it, Allison?”

    “I’m not worthy.”

    “What are you talking about?”

    “I don’t want to live.”

    “Allison!”

    Remember, now, honeymoon. Survived the beast. Night of fearlessness and revelry. This magic moment.

    “We don’t deserve what we have.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “That’s how I feel. I’m riding on your coattails.”

    WE don’t deserve.

    “I’m riding on my own coattails. I thought we understood that. The money is a gift, pure luck.”

    “I never earned anything. Everything was given to me.”

    “That’s not true. You’re a hard worker.  A good  teacher.  A good dancer.”

    “I wasn’t entitled to the education it took to get them. I didn’t suffer like my mother. Children begging on the streets in Cambodia don’t become teachers or dancers or TV stars.”

    Now what was happening was that he had gone from being close to, almost (to be truthful) patronizing a drunk, to hearing a truth spoken that could only be negated by an arsenal of rationalization. The biggest, most tempting, most convenient was Why Shouldn't I Have It?  (followed by the assertive Fuck Them), but Allison had fired a direct buckshot volley of Damien’s motivation for the volunteer work at Annunciation which he’d quit in despair of  human beings, throwing money as he fled at the pastor, who was at least committed and trying.

    But it had been too much hard work. For bums.  Fuck them. Father Morales didn’t scrub the bean pot, Fuck him. But somebody did it. Maybe even Cliff, a Damien-declared, clearly obvious, overt asshole. Cliff couldn’t be where he was today if he hadn’t scrubbed the big pot sometime. When he broke Damien in, he was an older doctor with the callouses of experience observing an intern go through basic training, the Lakers coach not making it easy for a rookie who has to play against the Chicago Bulls.

    On the very first night, Cliff had given Damien two messages: 1) You’re irrelevant,  and  2) I’m going to work your irrelevant ass off without acknowledging your effort (yet). Humility and Service. In dismissing Cliff, could Damien have missed that he might be a master teacher? He’d forgotten Cliff was a volunteer himself.

    Cliff probably saw those impulse do-gooders all the time. Flakes. Mother Teresa for a night. Better to find out right away if they had any steel in them than have them quit just when you came to rely on them.

    Allison was relaxing in his arms, and in response to her comment about the children of Cambodia, he said in a soothing voice, in a tone intended to convey, I’m Not Challenging You, I’m Just Being Reasonable:

    “Half of America could say that, Allison”

    She muttered,  “And maybe should.”

   Napoleonic Law applied to both of them. Guilty until proven innocent. Paul Simon sang,  “I would not be found guilty/ By a jury of my peers.”  Damien and Allison would be convicted by a jury of their peers. No wonder they were together. Their bond, what they had in common, was seeming less and less glamorous.

    Maybe his last few gentle words served as a lullaby, or maybe she just passed out, but she’d fallen asleep. They were sitting on the bed, and he eased her down and got the pillow under her head. Her breathing was deep, and she snored loudly, something she didn’t ordinarily do. He lay down beside her, both of them dressed, put a hand on her shoulder and tried to go to sleep himself. The daylight beyond the window, in the spots where the curtains didn’t quite cover, was the dull steel gray of a moving truck loading ramp.

    She might not even remember her words in the morning, or the scene would be blurred, and she’d be apologetic with hangover remorse. But she’d said what she said, and Damien would remember, remember the virisimilitude of it, but also that she had for the first time since he’d known her expressed doubts about her self value.

    He knew that was a message her mother had imprinted, but had believed also she’d  left it behind. Just shrugged it away and it was gone. Moved three thousand miles to get away, and no more Mom. No more scar tissue from years of scalding ridicule, bullying and beatings.

     That was what he’d liked to believe. He didn’t want her burdened, he wanted her free, and of course she instinctively knew that. No new age chick hang-ups, no angst. He remembered again the words from one of the Elvis songs she sang tonight, smiling at him lovingly all the time: “Any way you want me/ That’s how I will be.”

    They woke up about mid-afternoon, and Sunday was cloudless and beautiful, not a trace of the previous night in the sky, though on the ground there were lots of fallen roof tiles, and the signs that said Montezuma’s Place and Motel had disappeared. Trash of all sorts, from candy wrappers to detergent boxes, plastic soda bottles to condoms, litter that must have travelled hundreds of miles before blowing in off the ocean, finally rested when the wind ceased in the courtyard of the Montezuma.

    Allison was sunny too, no sign of a hangover, but unlike the leftovers at the Montezuma, her debris was buried again

    As with references to her mother always, last night’s tears were only acknowledged with glib humor.

    “So, I was bombed and had a crying jag. Don’t make too much out of it, Damien. ‘Everybody must get stoned’. Sometime..

    “Why?”

    She paused to answer, but never let up her lightheartedness.

    “Because they’re scared of a hurricane. Beause they’re happy and its their wedding night. There are two good reasons. Lighten up, Herr Freud. We have a long day of driving ahead of us again.”

    Well, even Freud couldn’t treat a patient who wouldn’t talk. He did have lots of hours of driving to face, so let the matter go for now. And of course he’d be more comfortable going back to the way things were. Maybe the way she told it was right---just a jag. A variation on Sinatra singing “One More For The Road.” Another drunk, another bar, another sad tale to tell.

    When they got back on Sunday night, the back railing of their deck was broken and dangling like a see-saw toward the sand. Two Foot Wide Beach was now more like eight inches, they had no electricity, and the ocean had flooded the deck, taking a couple of beach chairs for souvenirs, though no water seemed to have entered the house.

     The phone was still working, and Damien called up to Mulholland. Jeannie answered, and when she heard his voice said,

     “Damien! You’re back?”

     “Yeah. Is Nick around?”

     “He’s not here. He had to turn your power off. He was afraid of a fire. You must have got the weather in Baja  too.”

     “A little. Not too bad.”,  he lied

     “Well, it wasn’t too bad here either,” she lied back, “But it doesn’t take much out in Malibu anymore. We have a guest room here you can use.”

     I’m a MOVER, Damien thought. I can turn the electricity back on.

     “Thanks, Jeannie, but I just wanted to see if there were any problems I didn’t know about.”

     “None I’m aware of, but mi casa es su casa. You and Allison come up and stay here”

     He knew she meant well, but it almost sounded like an order. It was the way people of her position were accustomed to telling others what to do.

     “We can manage here if it won’t fall into the ocean.”

     “It might fall into the ocean. You kids are always welcome.”

     “I appreciate that, Jeannie. Tell Nick I called.”

     “Damien?”

     “Yeah/”

     “Nick will have to talk to you. The show is in trouble.  He couldn’t tell you yesterday at lunch. Not on your wedding day. Do you know about it?”

     “I’ve read the rumors in the trades, sure. I didn’t give them much credence.”

     “That free million dollar lottery on CBS is taking our ratings. Hard to compete with that much cold cash, but we have a great show, so we’ll make some adjustment. Do talk to Nick, though.” 

     “Will do, Jeannie.”

     They said goodbye, and Damien set about turning the lights back on and inspecting the house for water damage. None was apparent, though on the other side of the highway, the Department of Transportation had taken about forty 4" by 8" planks, fourteen feet long, and placed them vertically against the hillside, the bottoms of the boards dug deep into the bank of the road. If the hill collapsed and succeeded in flattening the boards, which it looked like it could, it would absolutely crush any vehicle passing underneath, but Damien calculated that it would not land on his house. Some of the scattering debris might smash a few things shatter windows, but he and Allison would not get killed in an avalanche. The other good news was that this storm was atypical, and it really would probably not rain again until November, three months away. The bad news was that it would rain in November.

     So the house was a love nest, it was temporary. That it was doomed gave it a greater charm and vitality, intensified their sensual vibrancy in that live-for-today-because- there- is- no- tomorrow atmosphere in which to party unto death like the haunted revelers from the musical “Cabaret”. Like their weekends in the past on Hollywood Boulevard, this couldn’t last, but nothing could be better while it was happening. Who needs a future when you have a present?

                                                  CHAPTER NINE

     A few weeks after his first visit, Detective McFarland came back to Damien’s dressing room, this time accompanied by Nick, who seemed bewildered and was uncharacteristically subdued. McFarland did the talking.

     “I spoke to your producer, and he can spare you for an hour or two. I need you to come with me.”

     “Where?”

     “McArthur Park. We just pulled a body out of the lake with Harry Hartman’s wallet in a pocket.”

     Damien didn’t even think to object. Calling an attorney didn’t occur to him. He wanted to know where this was going now, and was eager to go with McFarland.

     They rode in McFarland’s car, a Buick Electra about two years old, a blending  middle class/blue collar vehicle, an undercover car if ever there was one, with two guys in civvies riding around inside.

     The car had power, and McFarland used it. Unlike his cool manner, his driving was fast and aggressive, and he maneuvered back and forth between traffic lanes like a quarterback seeing an opening.

     As he drove, he said, “We don’t think the body is Harry Hartman. This was a derelict.”

     “How do you know Harry Hartman wasn’t a derelict?”

     “Not the way his father described him.”

     “What do you want me for?”

     They reached the freeway entrance at Sunset, and McFarland drove into the on-ramp.

     “Just to take a look.”

     “At what?”

     “The lake. The body.”

     “We’ve had this conversation. I don’t know Harry Hartman… Didn’t know. Whichever.”

     McFarland didn’t say any more, and when they got on the freeway he accelerated and was over in the fast lane in seconds, passing on the right if a car ahead wasn’t moving fast enough for him. A cop would have given him a ticket. His driving got a pang of adrenaline flowing through Damien’s stomach, and he looked around hoping he might see a Highway Patrol cruiser. But you know you never can find a cop when you need one. A highway officer probably wouldn’t cite another cop, but it might have slowed McFarland down a little.

     Damien sat captive in the front passenger seat (the d seat). He hadn’t put the seat belt on when they’d started (neither had McFarland, though its use is a California law---but then so is driving below the speed limit and not passing on the right) and now he tried to tug it down and latch it without McFarland knowing because he realy believed the detective’s objective was to scare the shit out of him. He never succeeded in getting it on, and after ten mniutes of terror they got to the Benton Way exit in Silverlake and got off the freeway. There were several more minutes of erratic street driving, and then they were at 6^th and Alvarado, the southwest corner of McArthur Park.

     Jerry, the building manager at the Poinsettia Arms on Hollywood Boulevard, used to live around McArthur Park, and had told Damien a little about the recent history of the area (and in the process about himself).

     Jerry, a true tar baby, had arrived in L.A. one day in June of 1966 after hitchhiking from St. Louis, and “settled” in the McArthur Park section, which is to say he found a job where he worked for three hours every afternoon bussing dishes at a retirement hotel in return for two daily meals and a bed in dormitory style housing, with no dollar salary.

     According to Jerry, the area was already in decline in the sixties, when it was a neighborhood of social security hotels (“Just sign that check over to us, and we’ll leave you enough for cigs and bus fare”) and other cheaper hotels for transients. The streets then were dominated by the hotels, liquor stores, pawnshops and bars, with the down and out huddled in doorways.

     Today, the wine bottle is mostly replaced by the crack pipe, and the tenants in the hotels and dilapidated apartment buildings are dealers, addicts and impoverished Latino families, though some of the old time winos never did find the better part of town.

     McArthur Park is generally known in Hollywood, by users and non-users alike, as a place to score crack or heroin. The body of an alcoholic or addict in the lake, whether by accident, foul play or suicide, unless it was someone like a Kennedy, really couldn’t be a big item to the police or anyone else. Damien was sure DOAs were a regular occurrence. Nevertheless, the police would sill have to set up shop and go through the drill.

     Seeking  a place to park, McFarland drove to the west end of the park, to Lakeview Avenue at 7^th Street, and parked across from  the graffiti scarred old Otis Art Institute building, its hulk abandoned and looking war ravaged.

     Damien and McFarland walked across Wilshire Boulevard, then entered the park and went down a wide, graded concrete walkway with wooden benches between grassy slopes. The lake was ahead of them. In front of it were at least twenty uniformed LAPD officers and a bunch of other guys wearing shirts with the word POLICE on the back. There was yellow crime scene tape around the entire lake, and a white sheet was covering what was obviously a corpse lying on the dirt lake bank, where most of the activity was taking place. They were measuring something, making chalk lines, and searching in the grass and nearby bushes. A dark gray van, with the words Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office printed on the side of the cab door, was  parked on the paved path.

     Damien didn’t have to look at the body. McFarland showed him Polaroids of a skinny man in his thirties or forties with a bloated face circumferenced by a halo of red hair and beard that made his head reminiscent of the planet Mercury His blue eyes, despite their ironically appealing tint, stared like the eyes of a fish, the only other dead eyes Damien had ever seen. They were as shining, blind and colorful as marbles, connected to no thought center, processing nothing.

     Damien felt weak in his stomach and limbs, the way he’d once felt from food poisoning, but without the nausea. He was also beginning to feel abused and violated, unfairly impugned, and said  to McFarland,

     “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?”

     “This is a homicide and you were using the name we found in his wallet.”

     “I’ve explained that…A homicide?”

     “I didn’t show you that picture. There’s a gash on the back of his head. The coroner has to make the determination, but either the blow to the head killed him, or he drowned in the lake after the blow.”

     Like La Brea Woman, Damien thought. He also thought now about a lawyer

     “Am I a suspect?”

     “Not at the moment, but I feel there’s something you’re not disclosing to us.”

     “I told you everything. You guys think nobody is disclosing everything."

     "Nobody is."

      Well, sure, that was true, but it had nothing to do with this.

      "You don’t know the man in the pictures?” McFarland asked.

     “No. Why don’t you get his father for an ID?”

     He’s coming this afternoon. A formality. We know this is not his son.”

     The coroner’s van drove down to the lakeside now. A man and woman got out, raised the body onto a gurney with the assistance of two police officers, then wheeled the gurney to the back of the van and slid the corpse inside.

     “Can I go back to work?” Damien asked.

     “You have nothing else to tell me?”

     “What else could I possibly tell you?”

     McFarland looked at him with a knowing disdain and said, almost begrudgingly,

     “Yeah, you’re free to go.”

     Now Damien would never get into a car again with McFarland at the wheel unless he was in handcuffs, but this was just one more transgression and injustice, a matter of principal.

     “You’re not gonna take me back?”

     “I have work to do, on the taxpayer’s dollar. You can catch a taxi up on 6^th Street.”

     There's not much point in fighting for something you don't really want, so Damien left the park by the entrance at the northwest corner of 6^th and Lakeview. Away from the photographs and the body and the crime scene, he still felt sick, but somehow hungry also, as if refueling his body might restore him.

     Across 6^th Street, in front of the Department of Public Social Services building, the welfare office for McArthur Park, Hollywood, Silverlake, Echo Park---the areas to the west of downtown--- there was a lunch wagon parked. He had missed lunch at the studio, and decided to get a quick snack from the truck before going back to the set.

     He crossed the street to the food van, and got a chicken burrito with, despite the hot day, a cup of coffee. For energy renewal. There was no place to sit except at the bus stop bench, so that’s where he went. He sat leaving a space between himself and the other two occupants of the bench. An obese black woman, whose age he would not be able to guess because of her weight, was talking about a methadone program to a toothless middle aged white guy with a Leon Redbone hat that almost hipped up the rest of his drab Salvation Army street duds.

     She was saying, “Slim, I was as thin as you before methadone.”

     Slim, whether that was his nickname or she’d just dubbed him that, said, “Yeah, and I had all my teeth before I started shooting speed”, and broke into a raucous laugh that she joined with glee at his quick repartee, and the stone cold truth of it all.

     Slim now noticed Damien, took him in for a moment, then said, “Duane. Aint you Duane?”

     Duane was the name of his character in The Family Way This was his first stroll among the common folk since Ensenada, his first encounter again with fame, and his improvisational skill surprised him as he said, with a country drawl, “Nah. I’m startin’ to get that shit all the time now. I’m on GR, man.”

     “You look just like him.”

     The woman started giggling at Slim and said, “What would he be doing here?”

     “Ypu coming from the GR office now?” Slim asked, still suspicious.

     “Going.”

     “This late? You better finish that burrito and get in there. They lock the doors at 2:00”

     “I’ll make it,” Damien said. He consciously kept himself from glancing at the Benrus watch on his wrist, which he had started sliding his shirt sleeve over.

     A bus was coming, and the pair got up.

     “They must give you a good clothing allowance,” Slim said.

     “Better times,” Damien said.

     The bus stopped, the front door opened, and they got on, bidding gregarious farewells to him.

     Damien quickly finished the burrito and coffee, then stood up to look for a taxi. He didn’t see any, but there was yet another bus at the next bus stop east at Alvarado. He was thinking about taking it just to get out of the neighborhood when somebody in the doorway of the GR office shouted, “Hey, Damien Rennard!” Damien was sure it wasn’t an old friend, and to dispel the caller’s delusion that he had seen Duane from The Family Way, he laughed, shook his head, pointed at the bus when it arrived, then boarded it.

     What made him thing the bus was a sanctuary? As soon as he sat, in the only vacant seat, a high school aged Latin kid directly across the aisle said, “Hey, are you Duane?”

     Damien said, full of put-on, “Yeah, I’m Duane. You want my autograph?”

     The kid laughed. “No, you aint Duane. On an MTA bus?”

     “Yeah, I’m Duane.”

     “You sure look like him. Hey, if you’re Duane, what’s your real name?”

     “Damien something.”

     “Yeah, Damien something. Ha-ha-ha. You should be his double. Like Jack Nicholson has this dude who goes to Lakers games and pretends to be him.”

     “But Nicholson goes too sometimes.”

     “Yeah. Got them all confused. Is it Nicholson or his double?”

     “Maybe I’ll look into it.”

     “Yeah. Hey, are you really him?”

     “What would I be doing on a bus?”

     “Maybe your car broke down.”

     “He’d take a taxi,” Damien said, deliberately getting away from referring to himself in the first person.

     “Can’t find one in this neighborhood.”

     “You have a point.”

     “Nah, you’re not him.”

     When Damien went back to the set, the phrase “Nick is in meeting” was being whispered in the corridors, green room and dressing rooms with the gravity and reverence people use to refer to someone who has just lost a family member or has a terminal illness. Damien never had that conversation with Nick Jeannie had suggested because he didn’t think it was his place to initiate it, and Nick hadn’t called him. But everyone knew The Family Way was having serious ratings problems now. Who Nick was in-meeting with were the executives of the network and The Base Camp., who were losing their following in a very popular and funny show to one that was giving away a million dollars every episode.

     John Mann, a colleague and friend of Nick’s, rehearsed the episode in the afternoon, and Nick finally appeared  toward evening. Mann left then, and Nick assembled the cast in the green room, shooing away everybody else---all the grips, techies, make-up people, script folk, even the A.D.---until there was nobody in the room but himself and his actors. Though he looked haggard, Morrissey didn’t have the demeanor of a doctor about to give news of a terminal condition.

      “We’re just going for a time change,” he said. “To get away from that lottery slot.”

      A Time Change of course meant replacing another show, and everybody wanted to know What show?  What day? What time?

     “I don’t know,” Nick told them. “Prime time, of course, but they haven’t decided yet. Let’s tape a great show tonight. We were Number One, and with the right schedule, we will be again. They want to keep us. They know we’ll get the ratings back.”

     Indeed, after the pep talk, the taping of the episode, with Nick taking over but essentially leaving John Mann’s blocking and direction alone, did have the spirit and enthusiasm of a stage opening, things taken for granted and almost lost always cherished more.

     When they finished, Damien was in his dressing room, using cold cream and Kleenex to get the make-up off his face, when the phone rang.

     It was McFarland. He said, “You showed ID from Harry Hartman when you first ran the ad in the Commercial.”

     “No I didn’t.”

     “I talked to the Classified Ads Department, and they said you have to.”

     “That’s not true.”

     “You have to show the PUC registration when you place the ad.”

     “I didn’t show anything. I placed the ad by phone and told them I was Hartman’s employee, paying with a money order. I didn’t want to use my own personal checks. They made me wait a week after they got the money order, then they ran the ad. I paid it like that every time.”

     “Their policy is verification of the mover’s  license.”

    ”Ask them to show that to you then. There isn’t any.  I guess the gal wanted her commission.”

     “Harry Hartman’s father gave a positive ID.”

     “ I DON’T CARE.”

     “You were in Scream Therapy a couple of years ago.”

     “No. I stayed with a friend who was, and I worked for a bunch of them because they had cash businesses. I had no green card, remember? I told you all that.”

     “Something’s fishy.”

     That’s what he said. Something’s Fishy.

     “Well, that body was in the lake a while.”

     He knew instantly that was a dumb thing to say. McFarland responded reflex fast.

     “How do you know that?”

     “Oh, look! You showed me pictures. Go to the Commercial, ask them for the verification they say they have, check the number I gave them against any actual PUC  number, do your job right,  then prosecute me for anything I did and leave me alone with the rest of this.”

     Then he hung up. On a cop. But a cop who WAS fishing, to stay close to his own simile, a detective who just wasn’t doing all his homework.

                                                CHAPTER TEN

     Damien left the studio and drove across Sunset, which, on the west  side, becomes a  hilly and curving tree lined street, almost like a mountain road, but there’s no simple way to get to the Pacific Coast Highway from Hollywood.

     The western end of Sunset goes through the prosperous Pacific Palisades, then winds itself down to level ground at the sea. On the Coast Highway, he turned right to go north along the ocean, but didn’t get far. Halfway between Sunset and Malibu, part of a hillside, soft from the recent squall, had come down on the highway. It hadn’t fallen on anybody or anything just plopped in the middle of the road. A Department of Transportation crew clawed at the mess with earth movers, and one lane of traffic had been cleared, which meant cars going north went through, then cars going south, then the bulldozer squatted for a while in the free lane while everybody waited again.

    Damien had eaten on the set, and he was just going to have to be a little late getting home. He tried to call Allison on the car phone, but the line was busy, which meant the Call Waiting line was busy too. Time to sit and think. He could play a CD or listen to the radio, but didn’t.  Allison’s period was late by over a month. She was still embarrassed about her crying bout in Ensenada, and unwilling to address that she had anything whatsoever to discuss about her mother. When he pressed, she retreated into the Korean Mary Poppins.

     Was she pregnant? Sure, Damien wanted kids sometime, but wouldn’t THAT screw up their blue lagoon. And didn’t people with terrible legacies of their own (like Allison’s mother) keep bringing in more people to visit their torment on? Carriers. The chain of crimes, the Oedipus theme from the Greek tragedies, offspring paying for the “sins” of the parents. Was it not literally true? Look around. You didn’t have to be a dramatist or a psychologist to see it.

          Et vous, Damien? He wanted her to talk (now he did), but he’d never looked at his father’s death. What was there to see? A graphic vision of a man falling to his death. An impact. His death was horrible, but it had nothing to do with the man. That’s what he told himself. It had nothing to do with the relationship, with the son emulating the father. And everything. His father was a thrill seeker, an adventurer who hadn’t let a family stand in his way. He just quartered them in the troop tent, and when it was time to move out, took them along. Until the recent present, hadn’t Damien’s life been a lot like his father’s, at least metaphorically---rootless, precarious and always a moment from being blown off the beam.

     The bulldozer pulled out of the traffic lane, and the flag man was waving the northbound cars through. He almost got there before the guy put his hand up to stop traffic again. Damien was three cars back. He’d make it next time. He called home again, but the line was still busy. Was something wrong with the phone?

    Allison. She was once all he had and all he wanted. She was still all he wanted. If he could have the rest of it and not her, he’d take her and give everything else back.

     Whatever he’d stopped them for, the guy with the orange vest and orange helmit suddenly let the northbound cars through again. In a moment, Damien was between the earth movers and construction workers on the narrow dirt and mud strewn road where the hill had slid, then as quickly past them and out on open highway again.

    The line was stll busy. He drove as fast as traffic permitted, and when he got to the house, there were no lights on. He used the remote to open the garage, and the blue Mustang that he gave her when he bought the Corvette, and she sold the Dodge Dart, was in the car port. The only light on the premises was the bare dim bulb in the garage. It was early for her to be sleeping, but if she was, she’d have left something on. What was wrong with the phone?

    He pulled the Corvette in beside the Mustang. The house felt forlorn and abandoned,

and his heart pounded with the realization that something was not right here. His adrenaline surging, he unlocked the door from the garage to the house, and entered blackness. He felt his way along the entry corridor until he got to the foot of the stairs. The light panel there was marked by a dot shaped glow. He flicked the switch, and the stairs were lit from above.

     “Allison?”

     No answer.

     He went quickly up the stairs to the living room, and turned on a table lamp. The bedroom door was closed, not something usually done when she went to bed. He knocked softly. No reply.

     He opened the door. The room was dark, with vague shadows cast by the little bit of light from the living room. There was no overhead light, only the lamps on the bed tables, too far away to turn on. He saw her shape, head and all under the covers.

     He went in, then sat gently on the bed beside her. He said, “Allison?"

     When she didn’t answer, he put a hand on her shoulder.

     Not her shoulder! Not her! Cloth. A dummy of clothes and blankets. He had a mili-second flash of fear and clarity, and during that blink of a moment, something powerful, a big fist, hit the side of his head from behind. The blow simultaneously stunned him and knocked him off the bed. He somehow got back to his feet, but was looking now at his own pistol, the one he’d bought and kept in one of the bed end tables,  after the phone calls, for defense against something exactly like this. It was in the hand of a large man wearing a ski mask and jogging suit who was between Damien and the bedroom door.

     Damien’s words came from someplace unconnected to his mind, which was unconnected to his body. Everything in the room was out of proportion, and the floor tilted at a forty five degree angle. He was not here and this was not real, but a voice, his voice, said,

     “Who are you?”

     “I’m the Big Bad Wolf.”

     “Where’s my wife?”

     “You mean Goldilocks?”

     “She has…” Shut up!  He’d intended to say “black hair”. Maybe this thing didn’t know.

     “Yes?…Has what?” He laughed. “Porridge?”

     Damien recognized the whang, incongruous to a man this large. It was the voice of the caller that afternoon when they were ready to go down to the beach.

     “Where is she?”

     “Allow me to introduce myself.”  Then, as Damien had known for some time now somebody was going to say sooner or later, it uttered, “I’m Harry Hartman.”

    After allowing that it’s moment, he added, “Nice to meet you, Day-me-in”

      “Don’t call me Damien.”

      “No? How about Harry?”

     “No.”

     “What should I call you?”

      “Nothing. Where’s my wife?”

     “All things in time. So far she hasn’t been hurt. The rest depends on you. Your cooperation.”

     He switched the gun to his right hand, the one he’d punched Damien with. Coming from behind, the blow had been to the right side of Damien’s head, which ached now along the entire area above his right ear. It gestured with the left hand to the only arm chair in the room.

     “Sit down. Right there.”

     If cooperation really was, as it had said, the key to protecting Allison, Damien sat.

    “Turn the lamp on.”

     He did.

     Now Damien could see his captor was about 6’3’’, and looked soft and pudgy under the XXL jogging suit, which was Navy blue. He guessed his weight at over 300 pounds, and his breathing was coming hard through the filter of wool.

     There were a couple of glasses and a bottle of cognac on a dresser,  Damien’s glasses and bottle taken from the dining room highboy. The Mask took the cognac now and poured into both glasses, then came across the room with a drink. When he was close enough that Damien might be able to make a move for the gun, he put the muzzle to Damien’s head as he placed the drink on the night stand. Then he moved away again, out of grabbing-for-the-gun range.

     “I don’t drink,” Damien said.

     “Really? What was it doing in your cabinet?      “It’s for company.”

     “Thank you. But tonight you shall join me.”

     “I’m not in the mood.”

     “I want you to be social. Get to know me.”

     “No.”

     The gun went off, and a bullet whizzed by so close to Damien’s head he felt the breeze. It lodged in the other dresser, the one behind him.    

     The masked man said, “Remember, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. With guns. You will have a drink. Any more tantrums and I’ll shoot you in the leg. I think you’ll find it more congenial to share a bottle of cognac with me, MISTER Rennard, since you don’t want me to call you Damien.”

     Damien took the glass and almost dropped it he was trembling so badly. He had to hold it with both hands, and even then had difficulty keeping it from spilling. The fat thing raised the ski mask to drink, revealing that he was a white man with a jowly jaw and wet pink lips. Damien didn’t see enough of his face to ever identify him, but that shape was familiar. This was a larger version of Alfed Hitchcock’s famous outline, Alfred Hitchcock now as the psycho.

     The warm cognac was indeed a welcome guest on Damien’s tongue and in his throat, and he felt a glow almost instantly. Drinking as seldomly as he did left him without much tolerance.

     The buzz relaxed him enough to ask, a little more calmly,  “What do you want?”

     “You borrowed my identity.”

     “Yes. I didn’t mean to do that. I just made up an alias.”

     “You have no idea the problems you caused me.”

     At least it sounded like he wanted to talk. Talk was good. It was better than shooting, as all the international shuttle statesman like to say.

      “What kind of problems?”

     “I have my own moving company. In Panorama City.”

     Damien’s mind, looking for diversion, recalled a moving job to Panorama City. Out in the Valley. Way out. To the tune of “Kansas City”, as he drove, he sang, “I’m going to Panorama City, Panorama City here I come.” If there was a panorama there, the day he saw the place, it was obscured by smog. That THIS came from Panorama City seemed appropriate.

      Damien needed to get back to the bedroom, to be in the Now.

     Harman continued, “I was hounded by the P.U.C. over your advertising. They didn’t believe I wasn’t operating in Hollywood, just not using my own license number.”

     He was agitating himself, breathing with even more difficulty. Calm him down somehow. With more conversation.

     “You called me here one day.”

     “Yes.”

     “You said then we were using the same P.U.C. license number.”

     “I was messing with your head that day. Purpose of my call, you know.”

     “How did you find me here in Malibu?”

     “You made lots of trips between Hollywood and here. I followed you.”

     “And my phone number? “

     “I have a private investigator. Nothing is really secret. The phone company has to send you bills.”

     “Okay. How did you find me in Hollywood?”

     “I booked a job. Your driver went to an address where the people had already moved. I followed him back to the truck rental place, then to your apartment building. I didn’t know which apartment you were in, but you know, the manager there is the talkative type.”

     “Yes, he is. The P.U.C. could have found me too. They make busts, set up stings like you did.”

     “They didn’t bother because they thought I was doing it. They came after me. I had an IRS audit, and then the state tax board looking at my books.”

     The memory of these transgressions were causing him to hyperventilate. Weren’t they compensatory grievances? Maybe Damien could negotiate somehow, but lawyers should be doing that. What Hartman was doing was felonious, and he couldn’t not know that he was throwing away any redress he might get in a courtroom or from a settlement.

     He was getting crazier, gasping and sighing. Maybe (please) he would pass out.

     “When you found out who I was, why didn’t you notify the P.U.C.?”

     “The damage was done already. And then you did me an enormous favor. You became a TV star. I decided to handle things myself.”

     “Look, I do apologize.”

     “Apology isn’t enough.”

     “Okay. What then?”

    “You took my identity.”

     “Borrowed. And not intentionally. We’ve established that.”

     “Doesn’t matter. I want yours.”

     Damien laughed. To his surprise, he was able to. The cognac. He wanted more.

     “I’m a TV star, as you say. You can’t take my identity.”

     Silly  boy.

     “I was living your life vicariously. Now I really want to live it.”

     “Impossible.”

    “Not impossible. Necessary. I died last week.”

     “So I heard. How did you do that?”

     “I put my wallet in a bum’s pocket and dunked him.”

     “After you bashed his head in?”

      “I did him a favor. Ended his pain.”

     “The ID by your father?”

      “I’m the father, I’m the son. One and the same. Father, Son and…”

      If Damien was a Hindu, he thought he'd find this killer’s reference to himself as Divinity blasphemous. He interrupted Hartman before he could say it.

      “Who is Sarge?

     “Sarge?…Oh, that’s Benny. He’s an SFC now”

     “A what?”

     “Sargeant First Class. He got promoted. For his work with you.”

     “What was that work?  What was he trying to do that night?”

     “Nothing. Get some information. Harass you. He’s the private detective.”

      “Not a military man?”

     “Within my organization there is rank. With me, he’s an SFC.”

     “Oh?  You have an army?”

     “Yes, I do.”

     Hartman’s delusion was the flip side of schizophrenia’s plot phobias. He didn’t have an army after him; the army was his. If he were to actually believe what Hartman was telling him, Damien would be a paranoiac.

     Hoping there could still be some faculty for reason left, he explained patiently,

     “You can’t become me because everybody knows who I am.”

      As he said that, he realized Hartman might be planning to take his identity the way      Hartman said, "I want to live your life like you as much as I can, and what better way than conjugally?"

      "What did you do to her?"

      "She's fine. I wouldn't hurt my wife."

      "You son of a bitch."

       It was probably the cognac, but Damien's anger was once again surpassing his terror. Hartman cocked the gun and pointed it at him again.

     "Let's play a game. Multiple Choice. Choose from the following answers: 1) she's dead; 2) she's sleeping; 3) she's unconscious; 4) she's not here; 5) all of the above; or 6) none of the above.

     There was nothing to say to that, so Damien didn't say anything.

     Hartman continued, "Are there any more possible answers?  I think so. There could be 7),  for instance, she's here and conscious, but terrified. Like you. Can you think of any others?"

     Hartman waited. Damien didn't reply.

     "Pick one."

     He remained defiantly silent.

     "I asked you before which you'd enjoy more, a tumbler of cognac or a bullet in the leg. Similar options now."

     He decided on trying cooperation again  "She's unconscious. If she was asleep somewhere, we'd have woken her up."

      "Don't want to believe she's dead, huh? We are alike. Except I've never been married before. Women don't like me. They want guys like you"

     "What guys like me? "

     "NO. Don't pretend you don't know. Skinny guys like you. Lean, good looking, agile. Women don't go for big tubs like me. Hookers don't even want me. They want the money, of course, but won't let me get on them. They get on me. And I'm afraid of the shower and bathtub. I can hurt myself getting in, so I don't smell too good either."

    Damien had been too terrified to identify another unpleasant quality in the room. Now that it was being addressed, yes, there definitely was an obnoxious odor.

     Hartman went on, "You're answer is Number Three?"

     "I don't remember the numbers."

     "Number Three is 'Unconscious."

     "She's not here."

     "That wasn't a choice. Of course, it's logical. Especially if all you have to go on is hope "

      "It was a choice. It was Number Four."

      "I thought you didn't remember the numbers."

     "I remember that one."

     "No, you're wrong."

      "Not Here' was Number Four."

      "You're in no position to argue, Mr. Rennard"

      "What was four?"

     "I don't remember. Judges, shall we allow  that answer?  Why not?  Okay, 8) she's not here. Number Eight is your answer?"

     "What do I get if I win?"

     " A reprieve from a bullet in the leg."

     "If I lose.?"

     "Disqualification, of course."

     "Meaning what? I can leave?"

     The exposed pink lips under the bottom of the mask twisted into a macabre

parody of a smile. Damien's childhood nemesis, the original model for the asshole theory, was a big bully named Roy Crawford in Toronto. Could this be Roy Crawford? What would he be like today? Would he still be fat and bigger than Damien? Damien hadn't seen Roybo since they were eight and in grammar school, but Hartman was bringing him back, even the envy about Damien's looks.

     "The consequences of disqualification are secret, but you're no fool, Mr. Rennard. Your answer is, Not Here? Number Eight?"

     "Yes."

      "But Not Here was four."

     He began fixing himself another cognac. Damien quickly realized he wasn't  bringing the bottle over to him, nor intending to refresh his  glass.

     Hartman said,  "Okay, I can't be any more certain about the correct answer than you, so I won't disqualify you yet. We've just started having fun. Let's continue."

     "I want a drink."

     "No. I don't like the way it changes your personality."

     He came back close to Damien again, but with only the drink for himself.

     He said, "Choose from the following: 1) I will kill you; 2) I will rape your wife; 3) I will kill you and your wife; 4) I will rape you and your wife. Which, Mr. Rennard?"

     Damien couldn't respond to that and Hartman put the gun to his temple again. Now he was making a mistake though. Two mistakes, actually. Make that three. The first was that he had come too close and, despite pressing the gun to Damien's head,  had the glass in his other hand, and was distracting himself with his dribble. The second was that he had initiated Damien's craving for alcohol and was denying him a drink. The third mistake was that, with the other two, he simultaneously continued his depraved litany of options.

     "5) I will rape and kill you and your wife; 6) I will dismember you and…"

     Damien had very fast hands, and he had a chance, an only chance, he now believed. Seemingly as fast as light, so quickly he didn't see the motion himself, his left hand came up and grabbed Hartman's wrist. He pulled down so the gun moved between them as he got to his feet. It was still clenched in Hartman's big hand. He grabbed Damien in a headlock with the free arm, painfully squeezing his neck, the cognac dousing Damien's hair as the glass fell, but without being able to lock the fingers of both hands together, Hartman couldn't bring Damien down that way.

     Damien had the right hand free too, and got both hands on Hartman's wrist to keep the gun between them, the muzzle tilting in a little bit towards the soft belly. He had no contact with the steel, and Hartman's fingers were still firmly around the trigger. He brought his kneecap up with enough force to envision driving Hartman's testicles into his throat, and indeed on impact he felt the soft ping pong balls rise up into his genital pit, where a vagina would be if he was a woman. Damien thought and hoped he was on his way to becoming one.

      The gun discharged and Hartman screamed. He jerked backwards, the force from the bullet wrenching his wrist and the gun away from Damien as he fell. He went down like a circus elephant sitting, then rolled in an oval of back and ass that resembled the tipping of an egg or the curving motion of a rocking chair.

     When he stopped rolling, he sat up again, looking bewildered and waving the gun  in front of him in a cautious arc, the way an officer does entering an unsecured room.

     He had fallen too far away for Damien to try grabbing for the gun again. Instead, he dove head first across the bed and scrambled off it to the floor on the other side,

where he lay as flat as he could. He had no real cover, but he was out of sight. The bedspread on his side would hide him if Hartman looked under the bed. The last glimpse he'd had of Hartman showed blood from his stomach staining the blue jogging jacket.

    Damien was trapped. The door was on Hartman's side of the bed. There was a window, with a soft landing in the sand below it, but Damien would just be a big cardboard cut out to aim at if he went for that.

     Hartman was making gurgling sounds. Damien thought the bubbling was coming from his mouth, and it was as loud as a brook. He guessed he'd be vomiting blood.

     "You're badly wounded," he said. "Let me help you. If you put the gun down, I will."

     In response, Hartman fired again. Damien flinched, and the bullet hit a stud in the wall above him, then ricocheted around the room with a zinnng.

      Hartman was beginning to sound like a waterfall.

     "You need medical treatment. Throw the gun across the room."

     There was no answer. Damien didn't think Hartman could last much longer, but he might shoot under the bed next time. If he could stall him just a bit longer, maybe he'd succumb.

     He said, "I never meant you any harm. I didn't know you existed."

     That was a bad thing to say to a man who'd lost his identity somehow because  Damien used his name, or because he'd never believed he had an identity. Hartman groaned as if he'd been shot or kneed in the balls again. He emitted a yelp of anguish, and Damien cringed at the sound of the gun going off once more. Then the gargling ceased, and there was an incongruously gentle expulsion of air, like a sigh of contentment, and a creaking that sounded like Hartman rolling onto his back again.

     After that there was only silence.

     Damien waited motionless, without taking a breath. It seemed to be for days, but it was probably about two minutes, as long as he could go without breathing under these circumstances.

     Finally, of necessity, he gasped. Still he waited. It could be a trick. Hartman might be too injured to point or aim the gun for long, and baiting Damien to show himself.

     Damien slowly raised the bedspread on his side, and when it was up about three inches from the floor, glanced under the bed. He saw Hartman's unmoving prone figure with the Humpty Dumpty silhouette. He was profusely bleeding, the gun in his limp hand. The mask was still pulled up above his lips, and blood geysered from his mouth. The mask itself was bloody carnage, and Damien was grateful it covered most of his head, because it seemed that into his head was where Hartman had fired the last bullet.

     The blue jogging jacket was drenched in blood also. Nevertheless, Damien watched for any indication of life for a long time before starting to move. At last, he began creeping slowly, shifting his weight as he wiggled across the room to the door.  When he reached it, he raised a hand to the doorknob. The bedroom locked from the inside with a press lock, and as Damien opened the door, he pushed the lock in. If by any possibility this was pretense, Hartman couldn't open the door without that warning click from the lock.

     Damien took one last glance back. Could that be Roybo? No, only the prototype. He scrambled quickly to his feet and out of the room, slamming the door behind him as he did.

     He turned on every light upstairs. Where was Allison? He went to the phone, off the hook he now so, the reason he'd been getting the busy signal.

     He picked it up and depressed the dial plate. At first he got nothing, but after a few minutes of clicking, the tone buzzed in his ear. He started punching in 9-1-

     The downstairs kitchen door from the deck banged open, clapping against the counter so hard he heard glass breaking---a pane from the door, a drinking glass knocked to the floor, something.

     He heard a stumbling staggering movement, then Allison's voice, hoarse and slurry.

     "Damien?" she inquired.

     "Upstairs."

     He dropped the phone and raced down the stairs. Allison was disheveled and drenched, the back of her T-shirt and jeans caked with wet sand, her long wet hair hanging in a bird's nest of twists and curls and unintended braids. In a stupor, she

lunged  toward him, then stumbled and, reaching out with her hands as he caught her, fell into his arms.

     "What happened to you," he asked.

      "I so stupid."  She seemed to be choking on air.

      "Don't say that. What did he do to you?"

     She looked at him, uncomprehending. "Who?"

     She didn't remember? Did she see him? Was it trauma repression?

     "What's wrong, Allison."

     "Tried to die," she said.

      "What? …How?… Why?"

     "Big questions. Specially that last one. Want to sit." 

     She did by holding on to his shirt, then his pants, as she slid along his body to sit on the floor like a kid at a campfire.

     "Pills," she said. "Want to sleep."

     "No."

     "Sleep."

     She tried to lie down. He wouldn't let her. Sleep forever. He got her to her feet again. Treating it as an overdose, he began walking her.

     "Let me go."

     "I can't let you go. What did you take?"

     "Percoset. I took Percoset."

     A jar of it Percoset had been in their medicine cabinet for a long time, first in Hollywood, now here, since she pulled a ligament dancing about a year ago. She'd never taken them. He'd wondered why she kept them when they moved to Malibu.

      "I was sleeping on my back on the beach. Tide came in and the cold water woke me up." She seemed to find that amusing. " Should have passed out on my stomach."

     "Allison, I want you to tell me all the terrible things that ever happened to you."

     "What for?"

     "Because I love you."

     "Maybe love is a pathological delusion, Damien""

      "You don't mean that."

      "No…I've already told you everything." 

     "Not about how you feel"

     " We don't belong here, I was happy on Hollywood Boulevard."

      "No, that's not it. Talk to me."

      "I am talking to you. That is it."

     "I want to know. You can talk to me. You can get treatment."

     "You sound like that Leutenant McFuckland."

      For some incongruous reason, Damien said, "Detective.", then laughed at his absurd correction. "I don't know what his rank is."

      "Doesn't matter."

      "No."

     "Neither here nor there, as the New Yorkers say. And I got his name right. That's what matters in this town. You can't change the past, Damien. Everything that ever happened happened, as YOU like to say."

     "You can learn from the past."

     "I did learn. I survived."

     "Almost not tonight."

     "Almost not. I survived until our lives changed. You know, your friend saved me. That's what I dreamt."

     "What friend.?"

     "That big guy I met a couple of times who kept calling you 'Frenchy'. What a thing to call someone. I kept waiting for him to call me 'Kim Chi' or 'Gooky'. And he was always drunk."      

     "You dreamt Frank saved you?"

     "I was pulled out to sea in a rowboat by a Black Widow Spider Woman... I wonder who that was…hands tied behind my back. But when I was helpless and out on the surf, your pal---Frank?"

     "Frank Larkin."

      "He pushed the boat toward shore. He was standing, but somehow as we got closer to land, like he had been on a sandbar or something, the water kept getting deeper instead of shallower, until finally his head went under the waves, but he kept pushing until I was safe on the beach. Then I woke up, wet and sandy, lying on my back, but your friend was gone. Drowned, I guess."

     She thought Frank was a drunk. Come to think of it, he probably was shitface the few times she met him. That she maybe didn't like him much was disconcerting. His best friend. He thought they were better attuned to other people than that, but at least Frank had redeemed himself in her dream. Subconsciously, she must have liked him. As far as Frank calling him 'Frenchy', maybe you just had to be from the Bronx to understand that, though Allison was expressing a sentiment he'd heard also from his mother regarding that nickname.

     Allison, unaware still of the guest in their bedroom, smacked the tips of her fingers with her lips, then placed her hand over her vagina.

     "Kiss me here. I want to know I'm alive."

     "Sweetheart."

      "Sex is the life force. See. I want to live."

     "I know. There's something I have to tell you."

     "Later."

     "I can't"

     "Day-Mien!"

     He'd never before said  No to her to any request along those lines, nor she to him.

     "Allison, you don't know what's happened here."

     "I don't care."

     "You would if you knew."

     She giggled. "Then don't tell me. Eat my pussy."

     That was not something she would ordinarily say. She'd ask for it as she had, almost poetically: Kiss me there. Allison was in many ways a straight laced girl Though being of mixed heritage she wasn't  typical, she'd had lots of Korean American friends in high school, and her mother was active in that community. Yet she would only have heard that class of talk at home occasionally, from Mom, as crude humorous nostalgia with her ex-soldier husband to the old days in GI bars. But the educator and political appointee would never have permitted her daughter to use such language.

     Should he do it? There was a body in the bedroom, and the police hadn't been called yet. At least not by Damien. If someone heard the gunshots, the SWAT team might be around the house right now. And they thought the telephone was an interruption. "Come out now with your hands on your head." How about with a head in her hands?

     If nobody had called the police, if the shots hadn't been heard, when Damien did call, he'd have to account for the time between the shooting and the phone call, and his reason for waiting. McFuckland didn't work in Malibu, but he came to mind as one of the cops who'd show up at the house. Call it profiling. Well, my wife attempted suicide and she was horny. You know, it's the life force. I've heard that in the old days, people who were dying of TB had great sexual cravings---so I  (how would you say it for an official report? Not Ate Her Pussy. So I Kissed Her There? I Performed Cunnilingus Upon Her Person, officer, because that asshole in the bedroom was dead anyway, whether I did or not.

     Should he? Allison had all her clothes off already and was pointing it up at him. They could just accurately account for this time, that's all. There's no law (that's enforced) against two consenting adults, especially a husband and wife, doing that in the privacy of their own home, scene of one attempted suicide and one successful suicide or not. The police hadn't put yellow crime scene tape around Allison, saying DO NOT ENTER. (No, he didn't think he'd be able to rise to THAT occasion right now--- punny , huh Damien?)

     The hell with it, he did it. Somehow it didn't seem disrespectful of the dead, probably because he wasn't being selfish, and Allison didn't know what was in the bedroom. But that other act---well, even if he could get started, he didn't think he could keep it up. (He was full of puns tonight, like that Harry Hartman was a grave consideration.)  But doing that other, Fucking, WOULD seem blasphemous because that crazy cadaverous bastard bleeding all over their carpet had after all been a human being. Anyway, officer, I was just too distracted this evening for that other function.

     She came. It was fast because she was relaxed and uninhibited. He thought, as she gasped to orgasm, that he heard a click. From the bedroom door? No. No. No  way. He could see upstairs. Not as far as the bedroom, but nobody was in the hall.

     Allison opened her arms to welcome him on board, but it was time to tell her. Death was abroad. Death was starting to smell in the house. Rigor Mortis would be setting in. The corpse would be releasing the contents of its bladder. The cognac. Damien realized he hadn't wanted a drink since the struggle. The survival instinct had been stronger than the craving. THAT'S why people recovered from alcoholism and addiction. That was the real reason: Survival Instinct. The image of that body spilling out cognac and whatever else was in its stomach was also creating some aversion therapy: Damien thought he might never crave another drink.

     Allison had tried suicide. Seriously, or the Call For Help, he couldn't tell, but an irony enormous in its implications occurred to him: The suicide attempt may have saved her life, because she wasn't in the house when Hartman broke in.

     Allison just wasn't getting why Damien was such a morose fellow tonight. She said plaintively, "Make love to me."

     "We can't. Something happened here."

     If he was going to make them talk instead of sex, she had her own topic.

     "When we lived on Poinsettia, on the Boulevard, I loved our life. It was so simple."

     "We didn't have anything."

     "We had each other."

     "We still do."

     "I'm irrelevant here."

     "Television is irrelevant."

     "Oh, Damien. Shame on you. The money is NOT irrelevant, the fame is not irrelevant, and nobody in the business considers themselves insignificant, no matter what they say about the triviality of it all."

     "Would you want to go back?"

     "Why not? At the Poinsettia Arms, a teacher is a star---especially a young pretty one. A tall, good looking amiable guy who moves furniture is way up there in the ratings too. To Art the Fart and Jerry the Juicer---okay, ex-juicer---Damien and Allison were two splendid people, and really, on any religion's Judgement Day, would Art and Jerry be any more or less than Nick or Jeannie?"

     "No, but we moved on."

     "Yeah, didn't we."

     She was making it that her problems were circumstantial. She really seemed to believe that living in the right place, being with the right person, having the right friends, were the answer. Didn't everybody believe that? Wasn't it true? No matter how many angles Nick Morrissey and Damien's helpers looked at the trailer hitch that day on Mulholland, it wasn't going to clear the driveway. Was it not possible Allison  couldn't clear the driveway?  She knew the relationship with her mother, and no amount of examination was going to change the events of her childhood. Maybe she meant, deep within, what she'd said: I Did Learn. I Survived.

     "I never wanted this either, Allison. It happened to us."

     "Then let's undo it."

     He snapped his fingers. "Like that."

     "If you could, would you?"

     "How?"

     "Never mind, 'How?'. Would you?"

     Her question was hypothetical, but not his answer.

     "I would for you."

     She whimpered.  "Damien."

     The police had to be called. The body would be stiff. The smell of death was stronger. Was it death?  He'd never smelled death before. Was it…? It was Hartman! It was that foul body odor emanating from him while he was still alive.

     At that moment, upstairs, a door slammed. From one side of their kitchen, you could see up the stairs to the bedroom. He left Allison sitting, looking toward the sound, and went to the spot by the window where he'd have a sightline to their room..

     He saw nothing.

     "Allison, just stay here."

     "What?"

     "Trust me. Wait.."

     He moved quietly but quickly up the stairs, stopping at the top to peek around the wall.  No one was in the corridor. He went to the bedroom door. Locked. Did Hartman come out into the hall?  Had he been watching them? If the door clicked open, as Damien thought he might have heard when Allison climaxed, Harry Hartman saw a little T and A, but was too late for the main event.  He must have gone back into the bedroom and slammed the door locked again. But there was no blood anywhere. He would have left puddles of it.

     Allison had only heeded Damien for a moment. She was upstairs now beside him, still undressed. Have to call the police.

     "Allison, there is something I HAVE TO tell you."

     He brought her into the living room, and sat her on the sofa, listening closely for  another 'click'.

     He knelt beside her.

      "What, Damien? Tell me."

      The moment was reminiscent of their marriage proposal, and as difficult as he thought telling her was going to be, he was relieved that she'd at least understand then why he'd rejected her sexually. He didn't think she'd be feeling quite so erotic if she knew all the facts. She wasn't dying of consumption, after all.

     Anxious about whether Hartman was dead or alive in the bedroom, he told her as quickly and matter-or-factly as he could, and she took it much more calmly than he'd expected.

     Then he called the Malibu police.     

                                         CHAPTER ELEVEN

      The police arrived quickly, eight of them in four cars, and they ordered Damien and Allison (who had gotten dressed) out of the house with their hands in the air. Then several went in like commandos, covering each other, while others went down on the beach and aimed rifles at the bedroom window.

     Damien  offered them the key to the bedroom and they took it, but once they were in the house, he heard shouts to Hartman to surrender, then what must have been the bedroom door getting kicked open.

     Within a few minutes, a male and female officer came back out to join the officers watching Damien and Allison. The woman asked, with a smile that was not to be taken for flirtation,

     "Is this some sort of joke, Mr. Rennard?"

     "What do you mean?"

     "Keep your hands up,"  one of the male officers said. Damien had gestured.

     "Clasp your hands behind your neck," the woman said.

     He did, and she quickly frisked him. When she had finished, including a thorough grasp of his genitals, she asked, "Where is the gun?"

     "In the bedroom."

     "Show us. You go in first. Keep your hands where they are."

     With the police behind him, and others behind Allison, they were led back into the house. They took Damien upstairs to the bedroom, where the door was now ajar, without a handle.

      In the bedroom, there was no blood, no gun and no Harry Hartman, but there were bullet holes in the dresser and wall. How did Hartman get out? Damien looked at the window. With his intruder phobia, he always kept it locked with the curtains drawn, and now it was open, gaping at the sky.

       A tall male said, "The gun, Rennard."

      He saw again Hartman as he'd last seen him, the extended limp hand with the gun in it. Wasn't that hand actually…

     "It might be under the bed."   

     The woman said, "Could you turn toward the wall and put your face against it?"

     Though she phrased it as a request, he knew it was an order. Through peripheral vision as he greeted the wall, he saw her bend and look under the bed. Another officer was keeping a bead on him.

     "Yeah, it's here," she said. She didn't pull it out. She shouted, "Evidence bag."

     The tall male said to Damien, "Walk  backwards into the hall with your hands where we can see them."

     Then they brought Damien and Allison downstairs, and, with the fired gun recovered, allowed them to sit at the kitchen table, with their hands up.Two officers stood behind them, both men, one black, one white. The black cop asked Damien if he wanted to call anybody. Damien said Yes, and he let him go to the extension phone on the wall.

      He called Nick Morrissey.

     It was a busy night after that. Nick and Jeannie came with an entertainment lawyer named Rock McGill, wearing a navy blue yachting blazer with a purple silk  ascot, who was to be present during the questioning. A couple of detectives arrived also.  They brought Damien and Allison back to the bedroom, which now was packed with the five civilians, the detectives and lots of uniformed police. The detectives wanted to know: Why was Damien shooting? Who else had been here? Did he REALLY shoot anybody?

     Rock McGill, bleached blonde and pretty as a starlet himself, would never make much of a criminal lawyer, because he advised Damien, "Just tell them the truth."

     So he did. The plainclothesmen (condescendingly it seemed to him) reminded Damien that there was no blood, no body. They told him four rounds had been fired.

Tell me something I don't know, he thought.

     They did. They found two spent bullets, one in the dresser, and one, the ricochet that hit the wall, from under the bed. It had come that close to him. The two remaining rounds in the gun were blanks. And the two fired rounds that were not accounted for? The ones Damien believed, at the time, hit Hartman? They also found two fired blank wads. That would explain it, he thought. The first bullet, fired into the dresser, was real.  The second bullet, the one Damien had been sure went into Hartman's stomach, was a blank. The third bullet, that hit the wall and ricocheted, was real, and the fourth bullet, the one Hartman pretended to kill himself with, was also a blank. That meant Hartman brought his own blanks. The gun was always in the night stand top drawer, loaded with the safety on. How could he know it was a revolver, and the caliber and model number, to bring the right blank ammunition? Had he been in the house before? He could get the information out of gun sales records, through his private detective, from Sarge. As for knowing where Damien kept the gun, that wouldn't take Sherlock Holmes. Where do people leave a gun when they go to sleep? The washing machine might be a great hiding place, but it would be a little far to go if someone came in while you were sleeping.

     Allison knew where the gun was too. Why hadn't she chosen that way? She didn't want to die, he firmly believed. A few Percoset, yeah, but not the whole jar or she would have died. She was Crying Out.

       Hartman escaped by jumping out the window. Even he would have survived the fall to the soft sand, but he'd have left an impression the size of a meteorite. The blood was stage blood. They sold it at theatrical supply houses in Hollywood. What he got on the carpet, he must have cleaned up with solvent and rags he'd brought with him too.  And the gurgling was from a sound effects recording. He'd had a small tape recorder in his pocket with a cassette. This was an actor's town.  There was a little ham in everybody. Hartman brought his own props, did his scene, and left. He planned all of it, except getting his cookies crunched.

      Damien tried explaining these theories, but the police didn't seem even vaguely interested.

      Until he said, "He might have brought his own gun. I keep mine in the night stand."

     "You have another gun?" the same tall cop from earlier asked.

     "I only have one, but I'm not sure that's it."

     The uniforms had the contents of both end tables emptied out on the floor in seconds. There was no other gun, just KY jelly and bras and other assorted embarrassables displayed before this unwelcome assembly.

    "I guess that's my gun you have."

    With her incongruous smile again, the woman asked, " Do you have any other weapons, Mr. Rennard?" 

      "No."

       "None of any kind?"

       "No."

      "What about this pepper spray?" one of the uniforms asked.

     There it was on the floor in front of Allison’s night stand, a steel cylinder enclosed in a leather pouch, between the morning- after pills and the vibrator. He hadn't even thought of it when Hartman was here.

     "I forgot about that."

     "Sure you did.," the female said.

     "I did."

     "I believe you. It's alright. You didn't use it against us, and its legal. No problem."   There was amusement in her smile now. 

      They were planning to book him for discharging a firearm within the municipality without due cause. This being Malibu, and nobody dead or shot as far as they knew  (despite Damien's protests again to the contrary, at which point even Rock McGill became savvy enough to tell him to shut up) it was to all be arranged like a program. Damien would be arrested, Nick could bail him out, but the house was a crime scene and nobody could stay here tonight. Though they didn't credit his preposterous tale, the police didn't discount that he might have been firing at somebody.    

     As they were preparing to lead him out of the house, in handcuffs as a technicality, the female officer was close-by again.  Damien petitioned her to hear his argument.

     "The bedroom window was open," he reminded her.

     "Yes," she said, "And isn't it a lovely summer night at the beach."   

     "We always keep it locked," Allison protested.

     "Powder it for prints," Damien demanded.

     "DNA samples too," McGill said. Yeah, Damien thought, but McGill, his supposed friggin' attorney, was being sarcastic.

     Instead of taking him out through the garage, which was the front entrance, they went out on the deck, then down the stairs to the beach, and through sand that ran alongside the posts of the house. The point where the tide usually stopped coming in was about half the length of the house from the street, and there, where the house met the shore, the path became sand dunes.

     Allison, not in custody, was accompanying him, as was Nick, Jeannie and Rock McGill. The reason the cops were getting sand in their shoes was that there were so many police and civilian cars parked by the garage door it would not have opened, and there was just no place to move all those vehicles to. They could have gone out the front way single file through the narrow people door most of them had entered from, but that would have meant squeezing between and climbing over bumpers and fenders.

     They passed under the bedroom window on the way to the street, to the Coast Highway. They were already past the high tide line, on mounds of dry loose sand.

      There it was. Hartman Crater was shaped like a big valentine, so he had come down on his cushion. He had also left shoe tracks the size of Bigfoot's, going in the direction they were all heading now. Though there were cops on both sides to encourage him to move along, Damien stopped.

     "Don't you see the dent he made, his footprints?"

     "Let's go," the one on his right said.

     Now Damien didn't want to start indulging in plot conspiracy paranoia, but why were the police ignoring obvious evidence?

     Then Rock McGill, his barrister extraordinaire, his beautiful people show biz lawyer, said,  "All I see are patterns from wind erosion."

     The police dragged him along, stumbling and off balance in the sand, with his hands cuffed behind him.

     He was booked. Photographed and fingerprinted at the Malibu station. The police questioned Allison, but her account didn't make her a material witness. She was outside attempting suicide while her husband was shooting up the house. The way the police saw it,  Lifestyles of the…There being no dead body, they didn't have to get into those prickly details about their minor delay before making the phone call.

     Their house off limits, this time they accepted Nick's offer to stay in the Mulholland guest room, though Nick asked him also if he had any more guns. They were ready to leave the police station when, whoever had called him and whyever he'd been called, Ward McFarland appeared. If he knew, could the Enquirer be far behind?

     When he saw Damien, McFarland told him to wait in the lobby while he talked to the Malibu cops. Within a few minutes he returned, looking disgusted, and said,

     "Haven't you caused enough problems?"

     "This is my attorney," Damien said.

      McFarland looked at Rock McGill and laughed in his face. He said to Damien,

     "No one can help you unless you want to help yourself."

     This apparently sincere compassion from a police officer for the mentally ill was leading Damien to another theory, a disconcerting one: The Case of The Schizophrenic Cop. If so, God help us, what might happen if McFarland one day stopped taking his meds? There's a little schizophrenia in every population, as there is homosexuality and Parkinson's and left handedness. There are homosexual cops and left handed cops and cops who will get Parkinson's. There have to be schizo cops too, who'd  remain undetected for a while.

     Nick and Jeannie had come in their MG, a two seater. McGill had a Ferrari, with enough room for three, so Nick told him to take Damien and Allison up to Mulholland. That was no short drive, but the lawyer  'yes sir'-ed it at the police station.

     Once they started up Topanga Canyon, though, out of hearing of the boss, it became apparent Rock McGill had other plans for his evening than this imposition.

     "He feels sorry for you," he said. "You're such a loser."

     "What are you talking about? You were supposed to be representing me back there?"

     "Don't you get enough attention? Is that it?"

     "Hey!"

     "You're pathetic, throwing a tantrum like that."

    "You know what, fucker, you don't drive me and her up this canyon and then think you have a license to become an asshole because we're stuck in the car with you."

     "Get out if you don't like it."

      "Stop right now. Stop the car and YOU get out, because we're not getting stuck here."

     Instead McGill drove faster, the car whipping into the wrong lane in the dark on the constant curves.

     "Slow down."

     "Make me."

     Damien grabbed  the ascot and pulled on it, dragging McGill's head toward the passenger side as he cocked a fist back to slam him. Allison screamed, "Damien!" At least she wanted to live. MCGill's foot came down on the brake pedal, and the car screeched to a halt at the edge of a precipice.

     "Now get out with me and back up your mouth."

     "Oh, stop this macho bullshit, I have to take you up to Mulholland"

     "Then do it at a safe speed with your mouth shut."

      McGill, simultaneously backing down and sulking, whined, "It's not my fault the goddamn show was cancelled."

      Nick hadn't told them? Lied to the cast? Couldn't find the words? Didn't accept it himself? How did McGill know? He was the show's lawyer. He KNEW. Maybe Nick was hanging on to some hope, was in his own denial about it.

     It was a very quiet and gloomy ride the rest of the way up the mountain, and there were no thank-yous or goodbyes when McGill dropped them off. He didn't even go into the house, just drove away without a word. Whether he'd ever tell Nick about the altercation was up to him. Damien wasn't going to bother.

     Once in the house, Damien asked Nick directly about the show.

     Nick acknowledged, "That's what they said at the meeting. I'm trying to get other backers. We might do it, but Damien, when a show loses ratings, it's usually gone. It's the nature of the business. There are too many variables with a time change, too many uncertainties. People think Bad Investment, and they won't do it."

     They could stay with Nick and Jeannie until the police let them back in at Malibu. They could stay at Malibu rent free for as long as they needed to. Now Damien wasn't suddenly impoverished, and he didn't want charity, but he was getting a new take on Nick Morrissey. Nick really had been looking out for them. Nick and Jeannie  were decent folk, who genuinely liked them.

     Damien had to appear at an arraignment the next morning. The Enquirer, the LA Times and the TV stations were there, so maybe the cancellation wasn't news yet.

Nobody among the court, the police, nor the media gave any credence whatsoever to his absurd tale about an intruder (though he was sure The Enquirer would manage to squeeze a headline out of it.) Only Allison believed him. Though they hadn't approached the topic with him, he knew Nick and Jeannie were somewhere in line with McFarland in thinking he needed professional help.

                                          CHAPTER TWELVE

     They went back to Malibu for a while. Freeloading wasn't their style, so they continued paying rent, but that arrangement had been a part of the overall package for the show, and they didn't want to keep using Nick's generosity. They couldn't  stay much longer anyway. In a few months the winter storms would drive them out, and after several weeks, not surprisingly, Allison wanted to go back to the Poinsettia Arms.

     After the information Jerry gave to Hartman, Damien didn't want to talk to him, so Allison called. Jerry told her their old apartment was occupied, but Art had had a stroke, and was going back to New York to live with his son.  Art's apartment would be available, cleaned and ready at the end of the month, about ten days away.

     During the time they were waiting, Damien saw Frank Larkin’s byline again in  Elay Week and tried once to call him at his moving business in Huntington Beach. Frank wasn't there, and after a few days still hadn't returned his call.

     Was Hartman coming back? Damien should file a criminal complaint, but the police were convinced he was delusional and wouldn't take it seriously. The court had been lenient. In return for pleading guilty to a charge reduced to Disorderly Conduct, he got summary probation, with conditions that he see a court appointed psychiatrist and not own a handgun.

     He hired his own private investigator, a retired LAPD detective, but only for a consultation and some minor searching, because what he came up with had no promise. There was no moving company currently owned by Harry Hartman, but he indeed had one until six months ago that went bust. If, as Hartman had alleged, bureaucratic harassment brought him down, here indeed was a man who might feel a justifiable vendetta against Damien. As for fingerprints and DNA from Damien’s house, they'd be fruitless without a match to Hartman. There would be all kinds of those traces from former tenants and housekeepers, painters, carpenters, the owner. The bum from the lake with Hartman’s ID had been given a positive ID by HH Sr., and even if the police, led by McFarland, smelled “something fishy”, there had been no match from police files to the fingerprints of the deceased to dispute the confirmation. HH Sr. had shown sufficient ID.  As Damien knew (though his private detective didn't believe it)  Hartman had simply played his own father. Harry Hartman Jr. was officially dead.

     Early one morning the week they were waiting to move, the surf splashing with a monotony to meld with dreaming slumber, he woke up in their bedroom to see Allison, like an apparition, barely visible by the first trace of dawn light, looking out the window.

     She immediately bolted away, the thick curtains that surrounded her joining to darken the room again, and said, "There's a rowboat coming up on the beach." She was gone from the room before he comprehended.

     He sat up and stumbled into shorts and unlaced sneakers, then went downstairs and out on the deck. There it was, rotted and barnacled, Allison standing over it in a foot of surf, struggling to keep it from going out to sea again.

     Damien had kept most of his former moving equipment--- stuff like dollies, wardrobe boxes, furniture pads and long elastic straps---stored on the deck in a shed  he hadn't even bothered to padlock. The floor of the shed had been flooded during the storm, and the bottoms of the leaning cardboard wardrobe boxes soaked, the boxes unusable, though he never bothered to discard them. The refrigerator dolly and the flat four wheeled dolly survived, and he’d left them out in the sun to dry. The shed door had not been blown out but in, wedged at a forty five degree angle, and had served to protect his equipment from washing into the sea. After he put the dried dollies and boxes and movers' straps back, he had simply taken the door and forced it, warped, back into the frame. The fit was so tight it never banged in the wind, and he had not opened the shed since then.

      Now he kicked it in again. The little room smelled of rotten cardboard, the wardrobe boxes moldy and still soggy. He grabbed a couple of long elastic straps, then ran down the stairs to Allison. The rowboat had an anchor ring in the front, and he tied one strap into that, the other end of it to a post of the house. Allison took the other strap and tied it through one of the seats, securing it to another post.

     She didn't have to say it, but she did: "This is the boat your friend save me in."

     Damien got four more straps, and they tied that boat so securely to the house not even another " tropical" would take it away.

     It was then that he started seriously trying to get in touch with Frank Larkin. Frank, Damien now knew, had a receptionist name Betty, who did dispatch and generally ran the office. The first few times he called, she said Frank wasn't there and Damien left messages. He also tried Elay Week, but they could only connect him to a voice mail number, and he left messages there also.

     Frank never called back, and Damien began to think Betty was acting suspiciously. She'd say one time, He went away for a few days. Next time, she'd say, I don't know where he went. I don't know when he'll be back. Does he get my messages? I can't give out any information.

     Now of course Betty didn't know Damien, so if she was covering for Frank in some way, why would she reveal anything to him?

      But Frank would have called him back. Damien began to believe that, more than a dream, Allison had a psychic vision, and Frank was missing. Maybe missing and dead. In fact, Probably Dead.

     And there was somebody Damien wanted to inform about that.

     On the cusp of leaving fortune and fame (as opposed to expressing gratitude for them) he drove back into Hollywood one weekday afternoon just in time for the feeding at Annunciation.

     It was the cracker he wanted to talk to, and wouldn't you know it, the ne'er-do-well was still getting his vittles at the same place. To Damien's amazement, now that his face had almost healed, he looked even more like Frank. It's affect was to accentuate Damien's grief.

     Cliff was nowhere around right now, and there was only one food server, not the usual three. The server was a young woman, and new. The big guy hadn't reached the food pots yet, but was standing in line with his tray.

     Damien went over and stood beside him.

      He asked, "Do you remember me?"

     The guy looked down, glanced blandly at him, and said, "Nope."

     "I used to work here."

     "So?"

     "I said to you one night you looked like a friend of mine. You said 'Nobody has no friends."

     "True enough, aint it?"

     "You asked if he would die for me."

     "I don't remember you."

     "Well, I remember you. The answer is Yes. He did die for me. For my wife, so it was for me too."

     The big guy muttered, "I don't have to take this shit."

     "Your philosophy stinks, just like you."

     "This is uncalled for." His face was flushed with anger, but some fear of a set up kept him in check, sounding as if he might bring a lawsuit against the church. He was like a 7-11 clerk berated by an unreasonable customer, or an elementary school student unfairly chastised by a teacher. He was twice Damien's size, and even with notches on his belt for Harry Hartman and Rock McGill   (No, McGill DIDN'T count), Damien knew he was being a bit kamakaze. But confronted himself, the guy was almost meek. The  fact that Damien was doing it seemed to make him think there was something to be concerned about.

     Damien said, "You're a bum."

     Only stating the obvious. The guy shrugged , then, not to be distracted from his purpose, scooted away, got his staples, and went into the dining room with enough beans on his plate to explode a hydrogen bomb of flatulence in his britches. Tomorrow he'd be back again for a re-load.

     Damien shouted after him, "Why don't you get a job?" He was instantly embarrassed at the cliched triteness of his remark.

     "Why don't you?" the guy roared back.

     That question apparently did set off something in his dormant psychosis, or was just the last indignity he would tolerate. He was like a hungry bear taunted at his meal. The guy left his food and swaggered his shoulders back into the serving line room, apparently no longer worried about Damien having a gun, a knife or anything else. Rage had conquered caution. Damien thought a good survival strategy right now might be to just turn and run, but his former bravado kept him in place. Maybe he could bluff just a little more, fend him off with words.

     Before he could utter anything, the guy got his hands on him and picked him up into the air. Damien flailed arms and legs to no avail, and the guy prepared to dunk  him head first into the bubbling brown cauldron of bean crud.

     "STOP IT."

     Cliff had materialized from somewhere. Damien saw his face upside down.

     Inside the deranged mind of the derelict a survival chord played. Cliff's arrival seemed to remind him on which side his bread wasn't buttered, and where he got it. Annunciation was his bon vivant, his beloved nightly caf้e..  Damien was placed back on the floor, standing upright again, just a little dizzy.

     Cliff was regarding Damien with astonishment. The big guy hadn't moved. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of instruction.

     "Go in and eat," Cliff said, and the giant shuffled and fumbled and  left.     

    The  "Why don't you get a job?",  "Why don't you?" cadence was catching with these folks, who heard it all the time spare-changing, and they picked it up.

     "Hey, the volunteer's back. Almost got boiled in oil. Volunteer, why don't you get a job?"

     They asked each other, "Why don't you get a job?"

      "Why don't you get a job?"

     They asked Cliff, "Why don't you get a job?"

     Cliff said to Damien, "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

     That started another round:

     "Can I talk to you?"

     "Certainly. Can I talk to you?"

      Damien followed Cliff out to the patio, where the bags and packs had been left. Inside, the parody was continuing.

     "What's going on?" Cliff asked.

     "Just came to pay a visit."

     "I just got off the phone. Two of my helpers aren't showing up tonight. I need your help."

     "With them?"

     "Yes. You just do when you have something to be grateful for?"

     So Cliff knew of Damien's decent from the summits. By now, everybody knew. Damien thought, I never had any reason to do this. But Cliff was asking him. Could he just walk away, leaving him with one helper, and she barely more than a girl? Well, he could. Why not?  He didn't come here to work. But the commotion in the dining room, the satire, was not abating, and it was Damien's doing. Cliff had enough problems to deal with without that. And Cliff had saved his ass.

     He said, "Alright, but only tonight. Find somebody else. This doesn't have to be done at all."

     Cliff did something then that Damien didn't imagine he was capable of. He smiled.

     "Of course it doesn't," he said.

     He had something in common with Nick Morrissey too. It wasn't that he was another of those people who could keep you wondering if he was joking or not---Cliff wasn't a joker---but in a closely related way, Damien didn't know what Cliff's words and smile meant.

      When he went back inside, they weren't ready to give it up just because he got behind the serving counter.

     "Hey, you GOT a job."

     Apparently they did get to see the boob tube somewhere once in a while too, because he also heard,  "This the best you can do, TV Man?"

     "Hey, can I model some of them Base Camp clothes?"

     It was banter, though, not mean, and he realized they were being a little like they'd been in his dream about them and Frank Larkin. They were  crazy alright, but his subconscious had picked up something good natured in their group personality.

     Where was Frank?

                                          CHAPTER THIRTEEN

     Sucker! Cliff had him coming back the next day, and THAT was Moving Day, at least the first day of it, because after he brought a truckload, they'd still be running things into Hollywood in their cars for a while. There was no deadline imposed for getting out of Malibu, and despite Allison's enthusiasm for downward mobility, he needed to get as accustomed to that idea as he'd had to moving out there in the first place.

     There was a last minute switch too. They weren't moving into Art's old apartment after all, but to their own. The new tenants had suddenly left town. Jerry thought they were drug dealers who'd had a tip to vacate L.A., but whatever the reason, they were out, had left hastily without giving enough notice to use up their last month's rent or even get their security deposit back. They were just gone.

     Actually, once they got started, they got most of the stuff in the truck the first trip. All that was left in Malibu were a few miscellaneous items they’d get into a car in one more run. It was Allison who went back there while Damien went to Annunciation. He had arranged to meet her at the apartment at 8:00 to go out for their dinner, for convenience at that hour at ex-Rock and Roll Denny’s.

     She was there when he got home.

     “Did you get it all?”

     “I forgot my toothbrush. Can I use yours?”

     "No, Allison."

     “Your friend called. Frank Larkin."

     “Frank called? When?

     "I don't know. It was the last message left on the answering machine. I saved it for you. He said he'll be in his office tomorrow."

     They went to Denny's and had an unremarkable dinner. No Sarge there this time, though the same loud waitress he'd tipped five dollars to was, just to remind him. Sarge wouldn't be a player anymore. After Hartman's appearance, his cameos would be irrelevant.

       He called Frank the next morning. Betty answered the phone, and asked as usual who he was. When he told her, she said,

      “Hi. Just a minute, Damien.” She’d never been so friendly.

     He got Classic Surfer for two minutes, “Little Old Lady from Pasadena”, then a booming,

      “Frenchy!”

      It sounded like a pet family name to him. To Frank, to people in the Bronx, that was simply who he was.

     “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you”

     “I went to Belize. I intended just for a few nights, but I came down with something. I thought malaria, because I was sick out of my head with a fever for two weeks but the doctor told me later that’s not what I had. Maybe some kind of tropical food poisoning. Betty didn’t have a phone number for me. I was too sick to call here.”

     “Did you have any dreams?”

     “Well, yeah. Delirium.”

     “What did you dream about?”

     “I don’t remember. I had the horrors. Something about Good and Evil. A nice little cloud that was good, and a monstrous dark  cloud that was evil. The little cloud didn’t stand a chance.”

     “Frank, listen...”

     “Well, okay. I thought was”

     “Did you dream you were out on the ocean, pushing a woman tied up in a boat?”

     “Naw, they weren’t those kind of dreams, Frenchy. I was too sick, and I haven’t had them since I was thirteen. You know, once you discover you can do that when you’re awake, you don’t get them anymore.”

     “I’m serious.”

     “Me too. I dreamt triple X rated porno movies for two weeks. I want my disease back.”

     “Come on, Frank”

     “I don’t remember a fuckin’ thing except the terror and those clouds, and that’s vague. You’re a Bronx boy, Frenchy.  California sunshine is getting to you.”

     “I’m a Canadian.”

     “Yeah, that’s what it is. I KNOW you from the Bronx. They can’t take that away from you.”

     So Frank wasn’t going to put it together for him, but he had been delirius around the same time Allison dreamt she was in a rowboat and Hartman invaded the Malibu house. That didn’t put Frank in the ocean pushing a rowboat, and it didn’t put Allison in one, even if one resembling it did wash up on their beach. They had left it there, too, tied to the house supports, creaking and rocking at high tide, and there

it would stay until Nick or a new tenant claimed it or released it back to the sea.

     Frank was alive. Damien had confronted the big bum for nothing. No victory there. He was lucky not to have a face of first degree burns, but it was probably time somebody gave the guy an evaluation for Lifestyle.

     Damien was already having regrets. The guy didn’t show up last night. If he didn’t come back tonight, he would start asking the rest of them of his whereabouts, and keep going back himself to see if he returned. Taking  responsibility for him.

     “Your show got cancelled,” Frank said.

     “Yeah. I want to see you.”

     “Let’s do lunch.”

     “When?”

      “Next time I’m up there or you’re down here.”

     “You’re never coming up here, and I’m never going down there. “

     “Let’s meet in between. How’s your schedule?”

     “I have nothing but time.”

     “I do estimates for long distance jobs in the South Bay sometimes. I have an estimator, but I can’t send him that far, so I go myself. Next time I have one, I’ll call you.”

     “Okay, Frank,” he said, but felt he wouldn’t hear from him. They were too far apart now. “Don’t forget.”

     “Of course not. I’ve never seen a fallen star.”

                                         CHAPTER FOURTEEN

     They were in the Page Museum. Not on the official tour that you bought tickets for. They'd done that, just not recently. They pretty much knew which animals were represented here, and there were plenty of written descriptions inscribed at each  display.

     The biggest reconstructions, of course, were the mammoths, set up in approximately the center of the large hall, and that's where Damien and Allison were.

     Allison was snacking from a bag of chocolate covered peanuts. She'd never eaten chocolate or peanuts, but she had cravings now. From another exhibition close to them, one of the great birds flapped its wings and did a glide around the room, then flew over their heads as it came back and perched on its pedestal. Not bad form for a creature dead tens of thousands of years.  It had a mischievous smirk on its beak that indicated it knew that . Then Allison shrieked with glee, not because of the bird, but because a mammoth reached out its trunk for some Goobers.

     Being so close to so large a moving beast got them retreating, and they were back along the wall at the glass case enclosing La Brea Woman. She looked right at Damien, tossed her braids and winked. She was Allison, of course, but Allison was with him. Unlike living Allison, HER breasts were exposed at the moment, but the same as Allison's at home--- swollen and laden, the pointing nipples shaped like small pine cones. She also had the glow Allison had now, and under her hand woven, prehistoric pleated mini-skirt, the baby belly was visibly inflated. She smiled and said, "I'm the real one."

     In the other dreams, he always knew he was dreaming. This time he only knew when he woke up. Allison, sleeping on her side, sighed when he curled his body against her. She whispered from slumber with a thick tongue, “We have to think about names.” 

     Damien started a real moving company, with a PUC license, and bought two trucks. In L.A., there are a Celebrity Taxi Company, a Celebrity Airport Shuttle Van Service, a Celebrity Photos and a Celebrity Hotel, to name just some. NONE are operated by real celebrities, and few have ever had a real celebrity client, so who would be more entitled than Damien to use the name Celebrity Moving Company? He found a small vacant warehouse with a big back yard over near Normandie Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, and used it for office space, truck parking and storage services.

     His life was still great. He and Allison were in the market now for a two bedroom condo. One bedroom would have a crib. They’d wait until a month before the due date  to find out whether to paint it pink or blue.

      It was at his office that the nuisance calls began again. They were all hang-ups, but he had a new phone, and thought they were probably people calling a previous business number. Until the calls started at the apartment also. Hang-ups around midnight, 4:00 AM, then one morning , by the clock radio glowing red numbers in  the dark room, at exactly 5:02 AM. The ringer was off, and the answering machine got it, but the tape clicking and winding  woke them.

     Ten minutes later they heard the answering machine rewinding to take another message. Damien jumped from bed and grabbed the phone.

     “You fuckin’ asshole!”

     “Frenchy?”

     “Oh, shit. Frank.”

     “I’m calling too early. I’ll call back.”

     “No, no. I’m not mad at you.”

     “It’s five in the morning. I wasn’t thinking.”

     “I’m awake. Somebody else just called.”

     “I couldn’t sleep. I have to talk to you. I didn’t think of the time.”

     “It’s alright. Don’t worry. What’s wrong?”

     “I just started getting some recall from my bout with the fever. Unless you planted the  idea, I do remember a dream where I’m pushing this fuckin’ boat on a lake or water of some kind, with a lady inside, and I have to do it forever because I’m like fuckin’ Sisyphus.”

     “Why do you keep saying ‘fuck’, Frank?”

     “Why the fuck not?”

     “It’s distracting. Digressive.”

     “Fuck you. How the fuck do you know what I’m dreaming in a deranged nightmare in Belize? I died. I’m pushing this boat, and we’re going toward shore, but the water keeps getting deeper. The broad’s just sitting there like Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen, only with her hands tied behind her, but completely confident I’m gonna get her where she’s going. Finally the water is up to my mouth, then my nose, then it’s over my head, glug-glug-glug, but like an obedient slave I keep pushing the boat until I can’t breathe anymore. I drown. And then I wake up, or not really wake up because I’m in this fever twilight, but the reason I’m drowning is that I puked, and crazy sick as I was, I was able to get out of  bed and go into the bathroom to take care of that. So in its way, because it woke me up, the fuckin’ dream kept me from drowning in the vomit. You there, Frenchy?”

      “I’m here.”

      “How did you know that when I didn’t remember it myself?”

     “We need to meet. I have a lot to tell you about.”

     “You not gonna give me this California Psychic Express bullshit. You planted this.”    

     “Frankie, my mother knew when my father died before anybody called her. At three in the afternoon, she was asking why he wasn’t home and why he didn’t call, when he didn’t get home till four and never called from work.”

     “The Lord have mercy.”

     “Thanks, but this doesn’t come from me. That was Allison’s dream. She was the woman in the boat. The boat’s tied under the house in Malibu It washed up on the beach.”

      “Bullshit."

      "Not bullshit, Frank.”

      "I want to see that boat."

     “When?”

     “Today. I have an estimate in Redondo Beach at 1:00. Can we meet at the house in Malibu at 4:00?”

     Damien could take a long lunch. Ken was doing dispatch in the office now. He gave Frank directions and the Malibu address.

      “I’ll see you at 4:00.  In front of the house”

     He hung up. Allison was contentedly asleep again. It being only 5:20 or so, and his clock radio not set to go off until 7:00, he got back in the bed and followed her example.

                                            CHAPTER FIFTEEN

     This time he knew he was dreaming. The young nurse had a pretty face and a fair complexion, like Damien’s. Maybe also like him, she was French and part Welsh, or even English with that last name. She could  be Irish American with an English last name from somewhere back there. Her nameplate said she was Kim Allison. With her dark hair and brown eyes, she could be taken for half Korean. Though they weren’t present at the moment, he knew the regular doctors on this ward. They were McFarland and Morrissey. The Head Nurse was Jeannie Figueroa.The patient in the next bed was Hartman. And the overnight intern had been Rennard.

     Kim Allison said, without any real alarm, “Oh, no, Mr. Larkin, the night nurse forgot to give you your medicine again.”

     He took the Risporal  and Cogentin tablets she left, swallowed them with water, then went back to sleep. It was more peaceful this time.

     Damien gave Allison the Corvette to use today and drove the Mustang, pulling an open trailer eight feet long. Traffic was relatively light coming up on four o'clock, so he miscalculated the driving time to Malibu and arrived ten minutes early. Such promptness suited neither of them. He expected just being on time would mean waiting ten to fifteen minutes for Frank, but there was a red Volvo convertible parked on the sidewalk in front of the house. No Frank around, though. Damien parked his combo behind the Volvo.

     He had called Nick, and no one was living in the house. Nick used it on weekends, and Damien hadn't even seen him yet to turn in the keys. Nick told him he was welcome to use the house if he was meeting someone, and didn't comment on any speculation he might have about such a rendezvous. He did request that Damien dispose of the boat though, and not by pushing it back into the ocean.

     The tide was almost in, so the boat would be rocking in the encroaching waves. He didn't want to stand waiting for Frank, wherever he was, so he unlocked the shoulder high gate to the beach path that ran along the north side of the house  (from where he had been arrested), then walked through the sand. Hartman's ass and foot prints definitely looked like erosion now.

     From behind the house, he imagined the wind singing with its husky surf voice. As he got closer, he realized it was a human voice. There was a rhythm, but he couldn't make out the tune yet.

     When he got to the corner of the building, he could see the posts and the shifting boat. In the boat sat Frank on one of the benches, his back to him, singing in his deep voice. He had either reached the refrain, or was just starting his song over, giving a paraphrased rendition of a country western hit: "Mommas don't let your babies grow up to be mooovers..." Without turning around, he said "How you doing, Frenchy?"

     "How'd you know I was here?"

     "I heard you park, open the gate, and walk through the sand like a walrus. The rest was guess work."

     "How'd you get in, Frank?"

     "Over the gate. Who's that supposed to stop?"

     Who? Would it have stopped Hartman? He got in somehow. He jumped out the window. More limber than he looked. In fact, he'd have to have left over the gate. The thought that he might have come in that way and gone around the back of the house when Allison was unconscious was disturbing. What had he meant by “She’s my wife”?

     Damien took off his shoes, rolled up the legs of his jeans and left the shoes on dry sand.

     He said, “Its supposed to stop trespassers”, then went into the surf. Frank was shoeless too, wearing knee length khaki shorts and a white T-shirt with red letters that read ILLEGITIMUS NON CARBARUNDUM.

     The boat was rocking under a retreating wave that swirled as it was pushed in again by a stronger breaker. The opposing currents almost knocked Damien over. He lunged at the boat, and dragged himself into it. He had just got on the other seat, his back to the ocean facing Frank, ready to shift over to the center, but Frank's hand went out. He didn't need help now, so it must be a handshake. The boat tipped during the awkward grasp, and would have turned over were it not for the restraining ties.

     “We’re off balance, Frenchy. What the hell kind of sailor are you?”

     “You didn’t give me a chance to move over.”

     Frank laughed. He said, “Well do it now. They have any fish and chips around here?”  

     Damien answered as he slid toward the middle. “Sea food places. They sell french fries.”

     “We can do better than that.”

     “The nearest real fish and chips place is in Santa Monica on the pier.”

     “Maybe on the way back.”

     Damien wouldn’t be able to park a car with a trailer anywhere down there, and it was too far to go in Frank’s car and come back.

     “Does this boat bring anything back to you, Frank?”

     “A rowboat’s a rowboat. This piece of shit was in the ocean months, maybe years.”

     “I have to get rid of it today.”    

      They were shouting at each other over the surf.

     “What are you going to do with it?”

     “ Cut it loose. Right now.”

     Damien got back into the water, and started to undo one of the ties. Time and salt water had shrunk the knot, so that was no easy task.

     “You gonna send me into the ocean too?”

     They had to roar now to hear each other.

      “If you don’t get out I am.”

     “Frenchy, I want this boat. I’ll bring a truck up here to get it.”

     “I have a trailer.”

     “With you?”

     “Yeah.”

     “Why didn’t you tell me?”

     “You wouldn’t have helped me move it up to the road.”

     “You don’t know if you don’t ask.”

     “Will you, Frank?”

     “Let me come back and pick it up.”

     “The owner of the house wants it out of here today. I’ll take it to my yard. You  have visiting rights.”

     “Ah, Frenchy, I’ve had trouble with my back from all that lifting I’ve done.”

     “Okay.” The first difficult knot was almost free. He finished it. One down and five to go.

     Two left. Frank was riding in the almost freed boat like he was on the back of a bucking horse and almost went into the surf twice.

     He scrambled out of it.

     “Only because I’m hungry. We’re gonna eat when we get this beast to your trailer.”

     It was a work out, pulling and pushing and grunting, to get it through the sand, but after twenty minutes they had it in the trailer. Then they got in Frank’s Volvo and went to a restaurant on the highway.

     The restaurant had booths with windows looking out on the ocean at streaks in the sky that hinted of a violet and pink sunset in a few hours. There were also three  young women in bikinis on a blanket down on the beach.

     Frank said, “Nice scenery.”

    “Yeah. I’m a married man now."

    “So?  I’m engaged. Take the fantasy home.”     

     “I want what I have.”

      “That MIGHT be a good way to be. I’m not sure. .”

     “Who are you engaged to?”

     “You talked to her. Betty.She’s who I want too, but I haven’t died, Frenchy.

You sound like a nun I had in the 8^th Grade."

     The waitress came and they ordered the Fish ‘n Chips. She recognized Damien, smiled and said, “Sorry about your program.” She didn’t turn groupie, didn’t ask for his autograph.

     When she left, Frank said, “You know how it is in our business. You’re only as good as your last move. Damage furniture, have one of the crew or the customer having a bad day attitude, and you can kiss future jobs and referrals goodbye. If you get paid for the one you’re on. So, you want what you have?  But do you have what you want?”

     “Both.”

     "Well! We all want what we have. Who wants to give up anything? But to have what you want. That’s either the fulfillment of all greed, lust and envy, or some kind of enlightenment. Which, Frenchy?”

     “Fuck you.”

     “That’s more like it. Okay, I told you my delirium in Belize, and there’s nothing else to tell. I want to hear your story. After we eat.”

     “You going to write about it?”

     “Maybe. Elay Week might want it, if it’s interesting enough, and you consent. I don’t betray friends.”

     “Why didn’t you take Betty to Belize?”

     “We weren’t a couple yet. That happened since I came back.”

     When the order arrived, it was California red snapper with generous potions of large cut french fries. There were bottles of vinegar and tarter sauce on the table to conceal the greasy taste of the fried food.

     Frank said, “Frenchy, I think there’s enough cholesterol here to cause a heart attack while we’re eating, but clogged arteries probably won’t catch up with us for a

 few decades yet. Lots of time to repent gastronomically. Eat, Frenchy. What’s wrong?”

     “Can you call me Damien, Frank?”

     “What?”

     There was a full three second pause of shock.

     “Sure, Fre...Yeah, okay. I have to get used to that.  Damien. You never objected before. In fact, you told me that was your name.”

     “It never bothered me until today. You keep saying it.”

     “Okay...Damien...Look, I know, French is a nationality, Damien is a name, but I’m gonna make mistakes."

     “Just try.”     

     “Right. If I forget, remind me. Damien, let’s eat, and then I want to hear it, everything, from the last time I saw you to this very moment.”

     After the waitress took the dishes, they ordered coffee, and Damien talked. He told all of it, the details, the fame, Harry Hartman, the dreams, his paranoia, even the sex, feeling safe because he rarely saw Frank now, but asking him to keep that out of print. It was almost seven o’clock. The sky was spectacularly colorful around the orange ball approaching the horizon. The waitress was scowling and wouldn’t approach to pour any more coffee refills, of which they’d had three (four cups counting the first one). The restaurant wasn’t closing, and there were only a few more customers. She just seemed to feel they’d overstayed their conversation visas.

     Frank said, “Yeah, they'd take an article about this. Do you want me to do it?”

     The Enquirer’s last feature cover about Damien, their farewell boot in the rear,  read, ”Cinderfella Goes Home In A Pumpkin”, and though they didn’t endanger his life by printing his home address, they pictured the Poinsettia Arms on the front page. What would be the harm in somebody telling what really happened?

     “Do you believe me?”

     “I had that dream that more or less synchronized with hers. And that fuckin’ boat washed up. I’ll put that in too.”

     “If you believe me, write it. Nobody else does but Allison. Go ahead.”

                                       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

     What Frank wrote appeared two weeks later in an issue of Elay Week, a periodical of entertainment listings and articles about show biz and local politics.

A result of the publication, one Damien should have anticipated but didn’t until it was distributed, was that the new publicity got him spooked. Hartman’s name was openly mentioned, he was accused by Damien of invading the Malibu house and of murder in Mac Arthur Park, and would he not now re-appear somehow?

     Damien couldn’t legally own a gun, but the court hadn’t thought to place restrictions on other things. He took to carrying a buck knife in one front pocket, a can of pepper spray in the other.

     Other than that, he tried to get his life back into the “usual” track, usual before show biz and Malibu. That meant going to normal places, eating at Cantors and Rock ‘n Roll Denny’s and other coffee shops, going to dance clubs, going to the gym, going to movies. He would not be the only TV personality in Hollywood doing such things.

     It was in that spirit that they went to the Beverly Center shopping mall one Friday afternoon when Allison hadn’t been called to sub, went to see a movie and eat dinner afterwards.

     Allison had a hand phone now. Didn’t everybody but Damien? It rang as they were going up on the escalator between floors, and she answered it.

     “Hello...Who’s this?...I’m in the Beverly Center...You’re in the Beverly Center too?”

     Then she looked up, toward the top floors. Damien looked too. Who was in the Beverly Center? He couldn’t tell for sure where she was looking..

     “Who are you talking to?”

     “Nobody.” She hung up and turned her phone off. “It was a wrong number”

     “Who’s in the Beverly Center?”

     “Nobody."

     They were at level four, and would now have to do some walking to get a lift to six. Where they got off the escalator, there was a restaurant with tables and chairs facing the floors of the open mall below them. Standing in the restaurant doorway was a man about fifty holding a phone.

     Damien immediately approached  him and asked,

     “Did you just call her?”

     “Pardon me?”

     “If I thought you were following me around, I’d take care of it right now.”

     Allison threw her arms around him, their baby bumping against his stomach. She said, “Honey, stop it.”

     The man used that moment to signal for security.

      A male Latin guard  in uniform came over and asked,

     “What’s the problem?”

     “He’s threatening me.”

     Allison, releasing her bear hug on Damien, said,

     “It was just a mistake.”

     The guard asked Damien, “Did you threaten him?”

     “No. I thought he was calling us.”

     “I don’t even know them.”

     “Do you have any ID?”

     “Oh, look...”

     “ID, sir.”

     Damien took out his wallet and showed his driver’s license.

     The guard said, “It IS you. What going on?”

     “Nothing. We’re just going to a movie.”

      “That’s not what he says.”

      “Like she told you, it was just mistaken identity.”

     The guard glanced at the complainant, asking with facial expression how far he wanted to pursue this.  

     The man shrugged and said, “If he’s happy, I’m happy.”

     “Go to the movie,” the guard said. “Don’t bother him or anybody else.”

     “You got it.”

     They went on up to the sixth floor, and after buying movie tickets went to the concession stand. There Damien said,

     “Can you explain that phone conversation to me?”

     “There’s nothing to explain.”

     “But you said to some one, ‘You’re in the Beverly Center too?’”

     “Somebody had a wrong number, Damien.”

     “He was in the Beverly Center?”

     “No! I thought that’s what he said. He was repeating what I said. It’s noisy in here.”

     “Why did you tell him you were in the Beverly Center?”

     “Because he asked me where I was. I didn’t know who was calling and he thought he had somebody else. Can we enjoy this afternoon together? I get so few days off now.”

     “Yeah, okay.”

      But sitting in the theatre, he couldn’t. He couldn’t concentrate on the movie. He kept thinking about the phone call. He played it over and over in his mind, trying to gleam from each take the possible meaning and implications. Finally, he could sit still no longer, told Allison he had to use the restroom, and went back into the mall.

     He went down to the level that was below them when the phone rang, then rode up on the escalator. He made the trip up and down three times.

     He was riding between floors three and four. On four, above him going up, was the restaurant, which had a vantage point to where they’d been standing on the escalator.

     The last trip up, he got off the escalator at four and went back to the restaurant. The man with the phone was long gone. As Damien expected, from the restaurant railing he could see to the floors below, could see the people riding up on the escalators.

     The security guard noticed he was back, and started walking toward him. Damien retreated to the lift to go back up to the movie.

     There had only been a handful of people on this weekday afternoon in the small multi-plex screening room theatre, and Allison was no longer among them. He had been gone twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. He looked around carefully to see if she had moved, but she hadn’t. She was gone.

     He went back into the mall again and found a pay phone, but her mobile was still off. There was no point in calling home. She couldn’t get there yet.

     With nothing else to do but go home and see if she was there when he arrived, he left the mall and went down to parking. Maybe she’d be waiting at the car for him.

     The Corvette was gone. They both had keys to it. Had she left him here?  Had she been kidnapped?

     He went home by taxi, and when he got there, Allison was in the living room watching television. She did not greet him.

     "Hello", he said.

     He got no reply.

     “Why did you ditch me?”

     “I didn’t ditch you. You left me alone. I didn’t know where you went.”

     “Okay, look, you said the caller had a wrong number, but then why did you turn the phone off?”

     “So he wouldn’t call me again, and we were going to a movie.”

     “But when you said  ‘You’re in the Beverly Center too?’, you were looking up like you were trying to see someone.”

     “Damien! Stop it! I wanted to see where we were going. I was looking for the movies.”

     Now he felt a bit ashamed of his suspicions.

      He said, “Okay, that sounds plausible. I just needed you to explain it.”

     Allison began sobbing. She convulsed the way she had in Ensenada the morning after their wedding.

      She whispered to herself, not to him, “We’re going to have a baby. I need you, Damien. Don’t go crazy on me.”

     Damien’s company had become an agent for American Van Lines, but he still rented trucks from Lou at Load ‘n Drive if he had a long distance job going within California or to bordering states. He kept his own trucks in LA for local jobs. Lou cut him a great deal at fifty percent of the listed book price, which made the profit high enough to do those jobs himself.

     He had a house of furniture going to Monterey in central California, and he drove. As he had always done, he’d get his helper for unloading somehow up there. Usually, arriving at normal hours, that was simple. Another moving company had guys who wanted to work, or he’d go to a restaurant or convenience store and ask if they knew anybody who wanted to unload a truck. Often, teenage kids hanging around video games would take the work.

     This job was routine, he arrived in the afternoon, and was able to check the truck in before closing time at the Load 'n Drive office in Monterey. He spent the night at a cheap tourist motel, and flew back to Burbank in the morning.  

     He was still recognizable, so in a toilet stall at the airport, he switched to what Hector had called his blind-baseball- player-with-his-head-on-backwards mask. That was for the MTA bus ride to Lou’s Load ‘n Drive office in Hollywood, and his car.

     Lou was behind the counter taking care of another customer, a middle aged man with some kind of foreign accent. While he was waiting, Damien removed his disguise. Lou finished with the other guy, then started settling accounts with Damien.

      The first customer noticed him without the disguise and said,

     “Weren’t you in Monterey?”

     “What?”

     “You were in Monterey.”

     “How do you know that? I didn’t tell anybody here I was in Monterey. I didn’t say anything about Monterey.”

     “I met you there.”

     “I didn’t meet anybody in Monterey. Where did you think you met me?”

     “At the Load ‘n Drive office. Didn’t you go to Load ‘n Drive in Monterey?”

     “Yes, I did. But I didn’t talk to anyone. That’s really strange that you met somebody who looked like me at  Load 'n Drive in Monterey, and I went there too.”

     “My English. Not 'met'.  Not talk to you. I SAW you in the truck office in Monterey.”

     He tried to remember who the hell was in the rental office up there. There were a few people. This guy was as blending as an undercover cop.

     “So what are you doing here?”

     “I rented a truck to LA.”

     “You rented a truck to LA?  You saw me in the rental office in Monterey, and now you're here too? I have enemies. I have people who would hurt me, and I don’t know who you are."

      “Not follow you. I saw you two times, here and there. I am American citizen. I show you. Look. No problem. I have US passport, I have California Driver’s License.”

     He took out those documents and placed them on the counter for Damien to look at. Damien didn’t want to fall for a trick, get that close to him. His hand was on the knife in his pocket. He had practice taking it out and flipping it open with one hand.

     Lou said, “Damien, the guy just brought a truck in. He came from Monterey.”

     “Not follow. I came here before you.”

     That wouldn’t make any difference if he knew where Damien was going, but it could, might just possibly, be a coincidence. A coincidence somehow brought on, like the phone call at the Beverly Center, by Damien’s own errant driven energy.

     Lou said, “Here’s your deposit, Damien.”

     He had a standing deposit of $150 in cash left with Lou to have a truck or trailer reserved any time he knew in advance he needed one, and Lou was giving it back.

     “Keep it, Lou.”

     “Take your money. You want to rent something, call me. We’ll see.”

     The guy with the accent moved back as Damien approached the counter to pick up the bills. His passport and license were still there for his viewing.

     He said, “I never bother you. Not follow you. Have a good day.”

     Damien didn’t answer him, just gave him his best don’t-you-even-think-about-fucking-with-me look, but resolved as he was leaving that he was going to have to stop doing this. Somehow.

     Damien knew he was acting so peculiiar that people (like his wife) were starting to judge him. And yet, there was that guy sitting on a motorcycle in front of the house. What was he doing? Why would anybody sit on a parked motorcycle in front of an apartment building?  He’d seen him there three times.

     After the third time, he called the police. It was early afternoon. He had left Ken to run the office while he took care of some other business, then went home for a while to work on his books in peace.

     When he told the female officer he thought he was being stalked, she asked if he could see the man on the motorcycle now. He carried the phone to the living room window and looked out.

     “Yes.”

     “What’s he doing?”

     “Nothing. Just sitting there.”

     “How do you know he’s stalking you?”

     “I’ve had a lot of publicity. If he’s not stalking me, maybe he’s casing the building. He’s out there a lot.”

     “What’s he look like?”

     “A young skinny white guy with long brown hair.”

     “What’s he wearing?”

     “A purple sweat shirt and blue jeans. Boots.”

     “We’ll send a car, Mr. Rennard.”

     After hanging up, Damien watched from the window until a black and white LAPD car arrived. The officers parked behind the cycle, then got out and talked to the guy sitting there. They only talked for a few minutes, never asked for ID, then got back into the police car and drove away.

     Damien called again and got another officer, a man.

     He said, “If they left, it’s because he wasn’t doing anything.”

     “He didn’t LOOK like he was doing anything. That’s the problem. He’s always sitting out there doing nothing.”

     “What’s that address?”

     Damien gave it to him.

     “We have a busy department, you know. Hold on. I’ll find out the resolution on the contact.”

     If the police weren't going to do anything, maybe he should. Go out with the knife drawn, and if forced to, stick it in. Two motions, in and up. Cut him open like a fish, from groin to sternum. Teach that two bit Hollywood street mafia not to fuck with a New Yorker. Oh, Damien, where has sanity gone?

     While he was waiting on the phone, he watched from the window. A girl about sixteen, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, came out of the Poinsettia Arms and gave the guy a big hug, then climbed on the back of the bike. He now realized the cyclist was a boy himself, maybe eighteen. With his girlfriend behind him, holding on tightly already with her arms around his waist, her cheek against the back of his neck, he revved it up, then the bike reared and sprung forward, screeching as it sped away from the curb.

     Damien hung up.   

                                       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

     He was trying hard to reassure Allison now that behavior of the type she'd seen in the mall, and his suspicious interrogation of her, were an anomaly. They were a result of the stress he'd felt from the drastic changes in their life styles twice within six months, and the trauma of Hartman breaking into their home. He was doing his best to be sensitive with her.

     She didn't know, of course, about the scene at Load 'n Drive, nor that he'd called the police on a kid waiting for his girlfriend. She seemed to accept, because she wanted to believe it, that his problems were behind him. Her birthday came, and he took her to a restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was an uneventful evening.

     Early one evening, she told him the Mustang was overheating, and asked if he could take it to a garage the next day and let her use the Corvette. Damien needed to get to work in the morning too, though. With Ken in the office, if he took the Mustang somewhere tonight, he could drive her to work in the Corvette, then leave work early and pick her up after her classes.

     It wasn't 6:00 o'clock yet, so he called a repair shop near them where he'd had work done before. They were still open and told him to bring the car down right away and leave it.

     Allison went in to take a shower, and he left with the Mustang keys. The car was parked around the corner on Poinsettia.

      He unlocked it and sat in the at-once familiar and comfortable bucket seat, then put the key into the ignition. He allowed himself to relax for just a moment, in a sudden realization, brought on by this old friend the Mustang. of his happiness still, an awareness of all the joy and gifts in his life. He exhaled a sigh and the street dissolved with his burning tears.

     As he fully sobbed, a voice behind him said,

     "You really hurt me, Mr. Rennard."    

    It almost seemed like Hartman couldn't fuck it up. He tried to deny his existence even as he felt his panting breath on his neck

     That which he'd been afraid of was in the back seat. He had suffered from Hartmanphobia. The wrong number caller in the mall, the Load 'n Drive customer from Monterey, the kid with the motorcycle, some or all or none of them could have been Hartman emmasaries. Multiple Choice, Hartman style: "Which do you pick, Mr. Rennard?"

      " I hurt you?"

      "You did."

      "That's good. They weren't doing you any good anyway."

      As he said that, he recalled his speculation, the day he met Frank at the beach, that Hartman might have climbed over the gate while Allison was unconscious. He hoped they hadn't been doing him any good.

     Maybe not, because Harman moaned like a cow in a field, a creature that always sounded to Damien like its stomach hurt. Or did Damien  just happen by when they needed milking, and they complained to him because he was there?  He didn't know. He wasn't a farm boy. But Hartman went “Mmmmmmmmm”, just like them.

     Enough digression.  Back to the moment. Hartman was in the car, and had regained his composure enough to cock a gun behind Damien's right ear and say, in his windy way,

      "Put both hands on the steering wheel and keep them there. I have my own gun now, Mr. Rennard.  Also a revolver. I liked yours so much I bought one myself."

     "Full of blanks again?" Damien asked, though he put his hands where requested.

      "Not FULL of them."

      "Well, why don't you shove it up your ass then and fire till you blow your brains out."

     It was déjà vu. The gun went off and a bullet scorched the rim of Damien's ear on its way to punching a cylinderic perforation in the windshield.

     That gets adrenaline surging right away, and has a way of dumbing up a smart mouth.

     "Be nice, Mr. Rennard. I have more games for us.  Let's play Russian Roulette this time. I'll hold the gun of course, but you make the selection. Which will it be? Fire first at your head or at my head?"

     Damien held back saying, I Told You Where To Put It. If Hartman was using the same loading pattern as last time, the next round would be a blank. If…

     "Choose or I will," Hartman told him.

     A few more seconds of life were a few more seconds to think, a few more seconds of hope. Hartman knew if the next rounds were blank or real. He wouldn't shoot himself. Or would he?

     "Fire at yourself," Damien said.

     Hartman moved the gun away from Damien, whose hands were welded to the steering wheel. Damien turned his head enough to see him lean way back in the seat beyond grabbing range and place the gun to his temple. Even a blank, at such close range, could kill him.

      He watched the finger pulling the trigger until the gun went " CLICK".

       Not a blank. No round of any kind in that chamber.

     "Again," Damien said. "Fire them all at yourself."

     "That's not how Russian Roulette is played," Hartman explained patiently. "Don't they teach you anything in Catholic school? Turn your head back and look straight ahead."

      Just showing he'd done his research, Damien thought, as he looked out the windshield again. It was already dark. People walked by forty feet away on Hollywood Boulevard, noticing nothing. They might as well be extras on TV. If Hartman knew where Damien lived, what he drove, his phone numbers, maybe where he went to movies and which cities he rented trucks to, why wouldn't he know he'd gone to Catholic school? What He Drove. This was Allison's car. Hartman couldn't have known Damien was taking the Mustang in for work tonight. Was he lying in the back seat waiting for Allison to come back, even if that wasn't until morning? Did he really know who drove a car registered to Damien?  That might be giving him too much credit. It did seem Damien was the one he was after.

     As if hearing Damien's thoughts, Hartman said,

     "My wife is pregnant."

     Was he saying his wife was pregnant because in his deluded mind he believed he was Damien, or was he saying it because…? No, he couldn't even indulge that thought.

     "You're an evil scum bag," he told Hartman. He left out 'sick' because he was in no mode of excusing or forgiving.

     Maybe that was not a thing to say to someone holding you prisoner, but Damien believed Hartman was going to do whatever he'd planned, regardless of anything Damien might think or say.

     Which now was to press the muzzle of the gun to the back of Damien's head. Sitting as he was, immobilized by the luxury of the bucket seat, with his hands forward on the wheel and the gun completely behind his head, there was no opportunity to do what he'd done in Malibu.

     "In case this is it, and the gun goes off now, do you have any last words?"

     "I just said them”

     "Evil Scum Bag'? ' Would you like that quote attributed to you on a tombstone?"

      "I can't stop you, so do whatever you're going to do."

      “On three. One…two…two and a half…two and three…”

      CLICK

      " Oh, my, my, my,” Hartman said. “That was a quarter of a second too soon. I do apologize.”

      Damien had it. It didn't think it mattered whether the next chamber was loaded or empty, but he would let Hartman point the gun at himself first.

     When he thought Hartman had done that, he turned and looked. Hartman leaned way back again and was pointing the gun at his head. Were there any more bullets? Did he know where they were? Was he playing this game for real?  CLICK

      Damien executed his simple plan. He opened the car door, put one foot into the street, and prepared to run. Hartman lunged and grabbed him around the neck in a choke hold. He pulled him back into the car, then lifted and dragged him over the bucket seat. The car door was still open. Damien punched and wrestled and struggled, but it was pointless. Hartman pushed him to the floor on his back and sat on him. He wasn't even trying to restrain Damien's hands. Damien was afraid he'd crush his spleen. Hartman had both his hands free also, so the gun was somewhere in the back, on the floor or the seat. He thrashed his hands around on the floor trying to find it. His arms swept in arcs as far as he could reach. Hadn't anybody seen what was happening in this car? Maybe the police would come.

     Damien started screaming. Why didn’t he think of that before? That should attract some attention. Those people strolling on Hollywood Boulevard really weren't  stand-ins.

     “You fuckin’ zung sleezeball dickhead son of a whore rhinoceros, you’re squashing my internal fuckin’ organs, get off of me.”

     Somebody must have heard that. True to his M.O., Hartman had props again, this time including a clothesline rope and a roll of duct tape. First the duct tape, over what he must have thought of as THAT mouth of Damien’s, unrolled from the back of his head to his mouth, then continuing in a complete circle to his hair in the back , then around one more time, and one more, before Hartman tore the tape. He flipped Damien over face down, sat on him again with one of Damien’s arms under the weight, then grabbed the other hand just as Damien was about to start ripping tape off.

     Now he was ready for the rope. It had a choking loop in one end that he put around the wrist he was holding, then pulled on the rope, tightening the cinch to maximum squeeze. He forced that hand down to the arm he was sitting on, tied both hands together, and wound the rope around the wrists four times.

     Damien turned his head to look up and watched his capture. Hartman had a cutting blade too and sliced the rope. With the long remaining section, he tied Damien’s ankles together, then forced them back jackknifed toward his buttocks.

He cut the rope again, then at the new end made a hangman’s knot and put it around Damien’s neck. His legs and thighs hurt already, but Hartman pulled the secondary segment through the knot until Damien would choke himself if he straightened his legs. Any pull would make the loop tighter.

     Hartman got off him, tilted the front seat forward, and got out of the car.

     Damien knew he got in the front  because the bucket seat creaked in protest, then abruptly slid back screeching on its track as the door closed. Some jagged edge at the bottom of the seat, never anticipated by the designer for a situation like this, pinched his thigh and gouged it. Below the waist he was pinned between the front and rear seats. Because the front passenger seat was still forward, he had a couple of extra inches at the upper body.

     “Evening, Officer,” Damien heard Hartman gasp.

     “Everything alright?” a heavy male voice asked. “I stopped because I saw your door open.”

     “Just had to change a fuse. The bigger I get, the smaller this car is.”

     “Okay. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind showing me your driver’s license.”

     “No problem.”

     There were a few seconds of rustling.

     Ask Him For The Registration. Look In The Back Seat.

     The other voice said, “Is this your car?”

     “No, it’s my lover’s.”

     “I see. Do you have the registration?”

      YEAH!

     “It’s in the glove compartment. Under some tools. Do you want to get it, or shall I?”

     “You get it.”

     “Okay. I have to move a plyers and screwdriver out of the way.”

     “Go ahead.”

     Damien heard the front passenger's seat squeak and the tools clatter. Hartman must have done some snooping before Damien got to the car, because he knew they were there, knew where the registration was.

      Damien thought Hartman was spending too much time rattling the hardware around in the glove box. As his weight shifted back and caused the driver's seat to groan again, he heard him say quickly, with some panic,

     "That's why I TOLD you about the screwdriver and plyers, Officer."

     Damien imagined the policeman had drawn his gun.

      He heard, "Give me the registration."

     There was some more shuffling, and then that new voice, the cop, asked,

     “What name is it registered under?”

     “Damien Rennard.”

     “The TV star?”

     “The same.”

     If the cops read  Elay Week, Damien was saved.

     “What’s the address it’s registered at?”

     “7326 Hollywood Boulevard, Apt. 109. Right around the corner.”

     “Where do you live?”

     “The same address. I haven’t changed it on my license yet.”

     “Is Mr. Rennard home now?”

     “No. He’s working late. I’m going to pick him up.”

     “Okay, Mr. Hartman. I’m going to give you a warning ticket.  Leaving a car door open in a traffic lane on a dark street is a hazard. You don’t have to appear on the ticket, but if an officer stops you again for the same offense, or you’re the cause of an accident that way, there will be a record of a previous warning. You better tell Mr. Rennard to replace that windshield too. What happened there?”

     “Beats me. I think some brats through a stone at it.”

     Damien wanted to thump, but there was no part of his body he could thump without strangling himself. The only noise he could make was through his nose, from which he was getting air. He tried snoring. From where his face was, on the rubber floor mat, he sounded like a pig moving up on a trough full of fodder, but the noise didn’t seem to reach the officer. All Damien heard from him was the scribbling of a pen, then the tearing of paper from a pad.

     Hartman said sweetly, “Thank you for not ticketing me, Officer.”

     “Yeah. Have a good evening, sir.”

     In another few moments, the smooth tuned engine of the police car hummed, then diminished to nothing.

     Hartman chuckled, “How about that, Damien? Was that a con job, or what? You don’t mind if I call you Damien, do you? Considering our relationship?”

     Hartman laughed heartily, and started the Mustang.

     “You and me, we’re going for a little ride.”

     Damien’s thighs were cramping. They hurt as if being pounded by hammers. His tendons were on fire. When the pain seemed unendurable, his feet began negotiating with his throat.

     Can you stand a little tightness if I just straighten my legs a fraction of an inch?

     The throat said, No, because you can’t give back looseness. This is a noose. You take a tenth of an inch, if you can push your ankles back again, it’s too late. Giving back slack won’t loosen a noose. Distance given is distance lost.

     He tried shifting weight, to get help from gravity, leaning his weight as much as possible toward his face, grinding it into the smell of the rotting rubber mat.

     They must have been riding for an hour, but never got on the freeway, because the car stopped and slowed down periodically, and never sped up to highway MPH. Where would they be driving to for so long on the streets?

     There came finally a time when the car stopped, backed up, and the ignition was turned off.

     “Okay, Damien, I got you as close as I could. The car will probably get towed away here in the morning, but ces’t la vie, non?”

     The front seat tipped forward again, and Damien was picked up and taken out of the car. He was held between joined hands, supported against Hartman’s right hip, still facing down. They had only been riding around for ten or fifteen minutes, because they were on 6^th Street just west of Cochran Avenue, near the northeast corner of Hancock Park, site of the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits.

     This was an area inhabited mostly by Orthodox Jews, who lived in small two and three story stucco apartment buildings and private houses, and they had their religious schools and synagogues in the neighborhood. Surely, Damien thought, there would be vigilance here. No sign of it though.

     “You’re going home,” Hartman said. There was a ministering reassurance in his tone.

     Hartman carried Damien, like a long loaf of Italian bread used for those gigantic hero sandwiches, face down and backwards, through the grass and under the trees and across the paved paths of the park until they reached its south border at Wilshire Boulevard, where the biggest pit was.

     Around the pit was a meshed wire fence with forked jagged prongs at the top. A gate in the fence was locked.

     Both Damien and Hartman were startled by a voice under a tree that seemed, in the dark, to be coming from a long exposed root.

     “You guys got an spare change?”

     That was delivered aggressively, with more than implied menace, but then, as if suddenly seeing and comprehending the situation, the tone changed.

     “Ohh! Hey! I didn’t see nuttin’. Want me to leave?”

     He stood up to do so.

     Hartman said, “Get back down.  Don’t you think about going anywhere. Lie down like you were.”

     Lucky bum, Hartman had an immediate commitment. He went back to his previous impression of woodland growth.

     “Okay,” he said, “I’m going back to sleep. No shit. Got a few drops left in this ole jug. I din’t see you. Ever. I mind my own.”

     Hartman had his own entrance to the tar pit prepared, a spot where the fence had been sliced seven feet high. He didn’t even have to bend over, just push the fence aside and walk through with Damien.

     Damien’s legs were completely numb now, as were his buttocks and hips. He was afraid he couldn’t control his legs from straightening out and hanging him, but somehow he willed them to remain bent.

     Still being carried bachwards, Damien saw the bum, once he realized they’d passed through the fence, jump up and run away.

     Hartman heard him. He said, “He won’t tell the police, Damien, but even if he does, and they LISTEN to him, it won’t make any difference now. Somebody in those apartments on 6^th Street, somebody driving by, might have seen us. It’s too late. We’re here.”

     He placed Damien down gently on the dirt bank of the big pit, facing the dark and dense bubbling pond. The coldness coming off it shivered him, but the tar water bubbled as if it were boiling. It seemed to be a cauldron, a vat containing the chill of death with the heat of hell.

     Hartman said, “I’m taking the tape off now, Damien. It no longer matters if you shout.”

     He sounded kind, immensely considerate.

     “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? It was clear in that article. Baptism of Tar. Internment in tar. We’re going in together, you and me. Baptism and Communion and Last Rites all together. Maybe Marriage too. How many sacraments are there? Want to go to Confession? I’m killing myself, and you are me, so I’m killing us.”

     Hartman cut the tape in the back with the razor. If his new execution watch sensitivity was so genuine, why did he then RIP the tape from Damien’s face! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Lord have mercy on my soul, bring comfort to my widow and protect my unborn child, I only THOUGHT my legs had hurt!

     He was free to talk. He could scream, but he knew Hartman was right. Nobody could help him. They were here.

     “Damien,” Hartman asked in his almost convincingly soothing voice, “Do you have anything to say now? This time is real. Anything to ask me?”

    “Why the hell are you doing this?"

     There was a pause before he answered.

     “I read the article in Elay Week twice. Your friend put in all the details, all your ideas. I guess from your point of view, I’m every asshhole you ever met.”

     Somebody finally admitted it. STOP. Sarcastic humor wasn’t getting him out of here. Couldn’t hurt, though. Nothing was. Unless stalling would.

     "And what am I to you?"

     Hartman gave that careful consideration too.

     "You? " he replied, "You're the asshole who always got everything I ever wanted."

     "Explain that."

     "Nice try, Damien, but No. As the telephone operators used to say in the old days, You're time is up, Sir"

     Hartman picked him up again. He saw the ominous, blacker-than-night, primordial quicksand grave seeming to rise as he went toward it. To the touch, it was colder than Arctic ice, it was the devil’s deep freeze torture chamber. It was so cold he did scream. He couldn’t believe what he said, but his mouth had a mind of its own.

     “Wait. Wait a minute. Not yet. It’s too cold. Let me get used to it.”

     Talk to a tree trunk. He was under the surface, and as frigid as it was, he had other considerations now. Hartman didn’t lie. He went in too, on top of Damien, to insure he’d go all the way to the bottom.

     The pit was deep and they sank for what seemed to be a very long time, for minutes, and it continued to get colder. He could see nothing. It was as if he was  blind. He no longer knew how he kept from strangling himself. It no longer seemed to matter.

      The bottom was not a bottom at first, but a mucous and seaweed like substance, less dense than a sponge, which slowed their descent because they became entangled in it. They continued gradually through it for several more seconds, and finally, when they did stop completely, he knew he was in the tar.

     Hartman was still on his back, hands on his neck, using his weight and final strength to push his face further into the mask of pitch. The hands would not stop pushing him down until Hartman lost consciousness. If Damien outlasted him, he would be bound and trapped under a dead pachyderm

     He didn't pray now. He felt he was beyond the aid of prayer. Everything that had been done or not done was not done or done. Whatever they said about repentance, he had no inclination for an Act of Contrition, no time to examine and itemize. It was too late. Somebody else would have to count the tally, if anybody in Heaven or on earth cared to. Allison, the night she tried to die, proposed that love, romantic love, could be a pathological delusion. Couldn't the same be said of the concept of God? Maybe those euphoric revelations he'd had (imagined?) were only symptoms of his madness. But was he mad?  His paranoia had been well based.

     He was suffocating, drowning as Frank had in puke. He saw a light. It wasn’t the light at the end of a tunnel. He was staying in this tunnel. It was a light IN the tunnel, increasingly glowing brighter, beckoning him whence he cared not go.

It was a pre-Death hallucination, brought on by lack of oxygen.

     There were others. He saw that dark evil cloud Frank had mentioned, the one so much more powerful than the small good cloud. The hands that had been on his neck were on his shoulders now. They were gentle. Losing strength? They seemed to be bringing him up, not pushing him down. They were slender and smaller and much more caring. He was dying and denying it, believing there was a reprieve from the terrible thing that was happening to him.

     He heard Nick Morrissey. “Damien, can you swim? I’m making a movie about skin divers. Have you ever done any extra work?” That was followed by buzzing. Was Nick crazy? How could he do extra work? Everybody knew who he was. But what did a short circuited brain care about facts?

     His air was gone. Death was on him. These were final mirages. The hands were pulling him back. The light, now intense, hurt his eyes. It was just the survival mechanism, the wish and love for life.

     He heard Allison. She said,  “Honey, come back.”

     Her hands reached into the death mask and lifted his face from it. He was no longer smothering. He could breathe. It must mean he’d stopped breathing.

     The cruelty of illusion by the human mind! The will to live! The tar mask was a pillow. He was in his bedroom. The light source was the Venetian blinds that had been angled open, letting daylight slide in between the slats. With her back to the window, Allison’s head was encircled by a halo, like the saints in holy pictures. She was welcoming him---where? Somehow he had gone home, as Hartman had promised. Allison was as slim as she’d been before pregnancy. She wasn’t giving birth, he was. He said, “We have to give it a name.”

     She laughed and said, “You nut. When did you get back? Tell me about it. Did you eat Mexican food and go to sleep again? All those jalapenos and refritos raging around in your brain.”

     If this was real, he had so much to tell her about. If it wasn’t real, he had a lot to tell her. The important thing was, she was there. If it was all reality, or a lie, a vision, a delusion, a dream or a hallucination, she was there. She was there and he had what he wanted. This unique relationship, that could not be replicated again in the history of humanity. It was his. They were together. Nobody could take that away from him.  Ever.

     Could they?

     Had they?

.

                                                          TAR

                                                       a novel                             pjbreheny@hotmail.com

                                                           by

                                                  Patrick Breheny

                                                  CHAPTER ONE

      He was in love. That was the most important thing to him, the most important thing anybody would have to know about him.

     Everything else, all the wonderful things, were incidental, because even before they happened, she was there and his life was the best it had ever been. Truly, if the other good fortune never happened, he wouldn’t have cared. Even if he had know, he wouldn’t have cared, because---well, he hadn’t wanted anything to change. He woke every morning beside her, so intoxicated by her presence, so content to be in the bed with her, he didn’t want the day to begin. Never mind the sex, which was so exquisite that immediately afterwards he would look at her and become aroused again. Feel aroused, even if the equipment wasn’t operating yet. He didn’t want them to get up and go their separate daily ways. He wanted them to be curled next to each other through endless time, stirring only for love making or eating or necessary toilet trips. He wanted the experience of waking up beside her to be a freeze frame in reality, a moment held forever as a living snapshot, with breathing human beings inside the borders of the photo, hearts pumping warm blood to their bodies.

     On Saturdays and Sundays, they often did stay in bed half the day (“they” because, lucky man, Allison was also in love with him), sometimes stayed in bed all day, with the telephone disconnected (but sure, with the radio or TV on) trying to make a weekend last if not an eternity or a millennium, at least as long as it could---the entire weekend.

     Allison had grown up in Connecticut, and was now a substitute teacher in L.A. secondary schools. Subbing in public school meant she worked most of the time. She had been his neighbor, and they’d met in the laundry room of the apartment building. What was she doing in L.A.? What was he? What was anybody doing here? It seemed everyone in Hollywood was from somewhere else. Why did they come?  Some were actors, some were rock musicians, some were speed freaks (One category didn’t necessarily supercede another.) Some came on planes, some on busses, some hitchhiked. Damien had once heard the analogy of the United States as a flat surfaced map held up at an angle, with L.A. .at the bottom in the southwest corner, so that everything loose fell into it. If so, in Damien’s case, Canada was at the top, so he had slid a long way down.

     Allison was a dancer, but she could be a dancer in New York. She had been a dancer in New York, and actually worked there at it once in a while. Here, as there, she made her living primarily as a teacher. Small boned and appearing delicate though she was toned and strong, with her long black hair brushed straight on her shoulders and back, and her slender Asian features, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. That perhaps not everyone would perceive her that way was a blessing, because he truly believed that if all men did, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

     Eventually, of course, they did have to get out of that bed and do things. No fantasy wish of Paradise would concern itself with the root of all evil, but in the world-after-weekends, the rent still had to be paid and the food bought.

     He wasn’t doing bad. Not great, but not bad either. He was a furniture mover in Hollywood. Not any furniture mover, mind you---he had his own business built on referrals from realtors and word-of-mouth references from his customers, such satisfied clientele being none other than the elite of Mulholland  Drive and Nichols and Laurel and Benedict Canyons and Outpost Drive, and other canyons and hillside roads running off of or intersecting those, winding their spider web patterns of curlicues and mazes in the world of twisting rustic streets above the city.

     He was doing alright for a Canadian without a green card, operating a moving business with rental trucks and without the required license. Ah, but you could do that then, and in the way that everything changes, and sometimes very quickly, already you couldn’t do it. Not easily. The Public Utilities Commission, the agency in California that for some reason regulates furniture moving, a private enterprise, was cracking down on small  unlicensed movers (as it was letting the state’s electricity go to hell). Damien had no doubt that some of the big licensed companies didn’t like that a considerable portion of  their potential business was going to movers like him.

     Damien had tried to get a mover’s license, or at least get information about it. A phone call to the PUC was like calling the L.A. Police Department at the Hollywood Station to inquire about dealing drugs. The PUC treated you like a criminal and wanted to know who you were. They didn’t believe that you weren’t already operating (okay, he was), and if their rudeness didn’t immediately discourage you, they began talking about application fees and exorbitant bonds. They wouldn’t mail an application. You had to go in, show ID and pay the two hundred dollar fee just to get the form. There was everything in their tone that indicated you were not welcome and would not get any more cooperation in person.

     He wasn’t actually moving furniture anymore. As he told customers when he did in-person estimates, he’d rather look at it than carry it. His living room was an office, and the business volume had reached a point where he would lose jobs if he wasn't there to book them, so he had guys working for him. If a job was going long distance, however, he had to work. He couldn’t afford a driver’s salary and expenses to another city, and the only way he could pay the charges for a long distance truck rental and gas, and still make a profit, was to go himself.

     He often just passed distance jobs along to other movers, who would pay a commission for the referral, but if the customer was one he knew and wanted to keep, he was on the job to load the truck (he didn’t trust anyone else to pack tight enough for the road and wanted to know where the delicate items were) and take it where it was going. He always hired help for unloading at the destination.

     His customer one day was Nick Morrissey, whom Damien knew as a repeat customer who had given him referrals to lots of other clients in the hills, and who was a movie and TV producer. Mostly Damien knew him as “Nick”, everybody in L.A. being on first name basis regardless of station or age or bank balance.

     Nick was moving several rooms of furniture to a vacation house in Tucson. Nick’s L.A. palace was off Mulholland Drive, on a street called Ridge Crest Trail, which was one of those tortured, wound spring shaped doodles in the pages of the Thomas Brothers Street Guide that manifest in reality with curves over precipices every bit as perilous as foretold by the map, especially for a twenty four foot long moving van.

      Morrissey owned  lots of properties that Damien had shuttled furniture between and among, but he had not been to the main house, chez Nick, before. Damien was driving, with his helpers---Ken next to him, Bob at the window---looking for street numbers on garbage pails, stencils on the ground and mailboxes often obscured by bushes and trees along the narrow lane. The last address showed they were getting close, so at the next driveway, Damien parked on the road to let Bob out for a look.

     He checked the mailbox on a post in the driveway, then reported, “This is it.”.

    Damien and Ken got out of the truck also. If the roads would barely accommodate a truck, sometimes the driveways couldn’t at all. Morrissey’s driveway was very steep, starting at a sharp angle to his street. The back of the rental truck hung low to the ground, and had a welded trailer hitch that dangled and seemed destined to get caught at the beginning of the driveway.

     Damien was thinking, ‘This won’t do, I have to get another truck’, when, from out of the shrubs along the side of the driveway, where there was apparently a foot path coming down from the house and hidden by growth, Nick Morrissey appeared like a commando. A ranger by virtue of his surprise advance on them, this guerrilla was dressed for tennis in a T-shirt and shorts, sweating as though he’d just been playing a game or doing some sort of strenuous activity. Nick Morrissey was a man of middle height with a carefully developed body, a devotee to the movie industry’s philosophy of “winning”, which of course also included his physical conditioning. He had been around so long as an entertainment figure, since Damien was a child, that he had to be sixty, though he seemed much younger. That was no doubt a result of facial surgery, but with his self assurance and physique, he hadn’t done anything about his white hair, no doubt aware that it embellished his demeanor with the additional  honorifics of patriarch and sage.

     He was maybe thirty feet above them, and cheerfully called, “Good morning” as he walked down the driveway. “I was coming down to meet you, but I see you found the place alright, Damien.”

     Damien hated to let the helium out of his balloon, but he might as well know right away.

     “The trailer hitch is not gonna clear the driveway. I can’t use this truck.”

     Nick said firmly and with finality, “I have a schedule,” as though if necessary the laws of physics could be changed to conform to it.

     He sauntered down to the road and, with Bob and Ken, examined the hitch from every direction. It was then that Damien began to realize there was a counter argument emerging, from Morrissey and his own helpers, that if the hitch could just clear the first few feet, the truck would probably make it all the way up. Right. And if President Kennedy hadn’t been shot the first or second time, he probably wouldn’t have died. Damien was sure it would not clear. He wanted to return the truck and exchange it, even though, yes, the truck rental place was in Hollywood in the flats, forty five minutes from the job site, and forty five minutes back, so everybody would be sitting around doing nothing, and he would have to pay his crew for that hour and a half. And they were funny about that. They didn’t like it. They had plans for after work, Ken especially. They had too much energy for sitting. And there was Morrissey, antsy about his appointments, business he had to take care of before he flew to Tucson that Damien knew involved more money than Damien made in a year.

     “Go slow,” Morrissey said. “Back up easy.”

     Helper Ken knelt beside the truck, leaned forward on his hands, brought his head down almost to the concrete as he twisted his neck so he was looking level up the angle of the driveway.

     “I think it will make it,” he said.

     When Ken wasn’t moving furniture, he smoked a crack pipe. That was a literal truth, because when he smoked he didn’t sleep. When he worked, he was the best mover Damien had, but when he got paid, he was gone. This was his first day back at work. Ken had been off it maybe since last night, maybe only since he started work this morning, and he was making a judgment call.

     “It’s not gonna make it,” Damien told all of them.

     “Try it,” Morrissey declared with his confident authority.

     Damien knew you never go against your instincts, he knew it wouldn’t clear, he was pissed off that Ken had given Morrissey encouragement, but he started thinking that maybe if he did back up slowly enough, he could stop at the first sound of contact, prove to Morrissey he was right, and then go and exchange the truck. If he didn’t make the effort, thanks in no small part to Ken, Morrissey was going to freak over the delay.

     He tried it. He got in the truck, started it, stepped on the clutch pedal, put the stick in reverse, eased up on the clutch and pressed lightly on the gas. The truck lurched for a milli-second, then he evened the pace.

     He knew, could see without seeing them, that Morrissey and Bob were on one side of the truck, Ken on the other, all eyes on the trailer hitch and the driveway. He heard simultaneously two sounds: The CRUNCH and three voices screaming “Stop!”

     He had agreed to Russian roulette and lost. They spent another half hour trying various ways to drive forward and get the truck unstuck from the driveway. They tried placing wood and cardboard under the wheels as it the problem were mud. Morrissey and his helpers tried to lift the trailer hitch with Damien driving, but they couldn’t, not even with Morrissey’s muscles. The weight of several thousand pounds welded it to the pavement. Now they not only had to change trucks, they needed a tow truck too, and, as he soon learned, not just any tow truck, but a heavy duty one. Most shops had regular tow trucks that couldn’t do the job.

     All this took more time as he called around on Morrissey’s house phone from the kitchen, using the yellow pages. He’d expected Morrissey to have an aneurysm, what with his pressured commitments of, one could imagine, power lunches and con fabs and pow wows or whatever, but instead he actually became calm and seemed accepting of the situation. Maybe because he knew it was his fault.

     When Damien first went into the house to make the calls, Nick’s wife was in the kitchen. Jeannie Figueroa, a former Miss Universe, former Miss Argentina, was a blonde beauty who, he really couldn’t help but notice, was still  looking  good in her mid-forties. She was a local evening talk show host on Channel 11, so maybe was at home because the show didn’t tape until afternoon.

     At some point while Damien was stressed making his calls, he realized she was no longer in the kitchen. He finally found a heavy duty tow truck guy located near them on the west side who could get there within a few minutes, and would move it for a hundred dollars as long as he didn’t have to tow the truck more than a few feet.

     He had actually been using the phone for a half hour. As he hung up, Jeannie Figueroa re-appeared with an early lunch of burgers and fries from McDonald’s for her, Nick and the crew.  If they were going to have to wait, they might as well eat.

     They were all---Damien, his helpers and the Morrisseys---sitting around on the outdoor furniture of the redwood deck chomping when the tow truck driver beeped his horn to get somebody down to the road.

     As Damien stood up to go down the driveway, Ken and Bob started to move too, but he signaled with his hand for them to stay and eat. But Nick he asked,, "Can I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Morrissey?" and with his chin indicated the road. Morrissey seemed confused that Damien wanted him along, but got up and went with him.

     The free lunch was prodding Damien to press Morrissey’s generosity a bit further. Halfway down the driveway, he put Southern California’s populism to the test, turned to the burley producer, and asked,

     “Will you split it with me, Nick?”

     “What?”

     Did he think he was talking about the last hamburger?

    “The tow charge.”

    “Why should I?” he growled. Morrissey looked genuinely astonished at the gall. Brought from his lunch for this!

      Damien tired to keep the anger out of his voice, tried to remember what a good customer Nick Morrissey had been.

     He said, “Because there was a chorus calling to me to try it, and your voice was among them.”

    “In my business,” Mr. Morrissey said, “I’m the captain. I have to live with my decisions. You’re the captain here.”

     There was a glimmer of put-on, though, in his green eyes to accompany that remark, and Damien thought---not sure he wasn’t imagining it---a hint of respect. Rare indeed would be those “in the industry” who’d talk back to this man.

     A little quick math told Damien he would still be making a satisfactory profit driving to Tucson, and he forced himself to think about the repeat customers Morrissey had sent him and all the good jobs he’d done for Nick himself. He’d have to do this one too without bad feelings getting in the way. He decided not to mention the tow again, nor to let it be an issue in his dealings with Morrissey the rest of this day.

     Five minutes after it arrived, the heavy duty tow truck had the rental truck off the driveway. Damien exchanged the truck in Hollywood, then came back and loaded Nick Morrissey’s furniture.

     Loading a moving van with household goods is an obscure and esoteric art form known only to its practitioners., and can be a pleasant mental exercise like solving a math problem or doing a puzzle, except that, with the combined factor of physical exertion involved, there is an endorphin high that accompanies the gratification. Actually, more than resembling a puzzle, it is a puzzle, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and the  pieces are in the customer's house. The driver, as crew supervisor, decides how the truck will be loaded, and what will fit where. The objective is to build a wall from the front of the truck back, keeping the tiers as even as possible for as long as possible. For example, a king sized box spring and mattress first, with any flat glass tops or pictures in frames in between. On top of the bed sections can go light boxes. For the next tier, maybe two dressers across, with wardrobes boxes or small light rectangular items that will not cause damage on the dressers. The furniture is cushioned with heavy protective pads that also help to pack it in, and the load proceeds like that that until the end, when the plants and hoses and garden tools and trash cans go on, and, well, nobody can keep it even forever. A tight load is a marvel of improvisation and arguably a creative work. Like a stage play, or sand castle, It can't be kept and viewed later. You can take a photo to remember, but once experienced, it is gone.

     When his project was complete, Damien paid his helpers and got ready to go. Morrissey had a Tucson phone book, and again let him use the kitchen phone, this time for long distance, waving away Damien’s offer to pay the charges. Damien called a couple of Tucson moving companies and told them he was a long haul driver in need of a helper that evening.  The places he contacted told him he was arriving too late to have a helper waiting, but one dispatcher suggested he call the Arizona Department of Economic Security's casual labor office, and gave him the number. Through DES, the state's unemployment benefits office, he arranged to have someone waiting at 9:00 PM and promised to be generous to him for working the late hour. He gave them Morrissey’s address and phone number in Tucson, and in the afternoon began driving toward Arizona on I-10 from the Sepulveda Boulevard on-ramp in West L.A., where 10 is known as the Santa Monica freeway.

      He got off the freeway at La Brea Avenue long enough to drop his helpers off where they could catch a bus to Hollywood, then got back on and went downtown. From downtown, I-10 goes east into the San Gabriel Valley, then out past Riverside and San Bernardino into the desert, through Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs and eventually Blythe. (Or is that Blight?) Blythe, pronounced "Bly", is a California town far into the desert, right at the Arizona line, that has discovered where the middle of nowhere is and paved it. It consists almost entirely of motels, fast food restaurants and gas stations, and it's your last chance to fill up on anything. Sleeping, eating and gassing seemed its raisons d’etre. After Blythe, there is a hundred and fifty miles of desert and nothing but until you get to Phoenix.

                                          CHAPTER TWO

       At Phoenix, Highway 10 changes direction and goes south to Tucson. He was in Tucson at  twenty minutes to ten. Morrissey had flown in in the early evening and would be waiting for him. By the time Damien found the address, it was after ten. That’s how the time seems to go when you’re driving a truck. Stop for gas and you lose a half hour. Park for coffee, forty five minutes.

     Morrissey’s house was on a narrow paved country lane lined with wooden stake fences around the yards to keep the horses in. The white fences reflected the light of a three quarter moon that revealed the yards to be desert, with scrub no horse would eat, so the enclosures were for containment and space to move, not for grazing. This house was modest compared to Morrissey’s Mullholland digs, though definitely not a cabin or a trailer. It was a one story house, three bedrooms Damien guessed from the outside, a wooden A frame building in suburban Tucson, if Tucson could be said to be urban.

     Actually, he knew it was Morrissey’s house BEFORE he saw the address, because his help was waiting. There were three of them, not one, three scruffy white guys in

 jeans and sneakers and boots, one with a cowboy hat, passing a bottle of wine. They were waiting in front of the garage beside the house, where a bold spotlight had captured them in a circle of illumination, not, Damien thought, by accident. Even from a distance, he could see they had ground at least half a pack of cigarette butts into the white gravel stones on the dirt driveway.

     Watching them from behind a fence in the yard, where the light from the spot was a decreasing spill, was a creature Damien had never seen before. About five feet high, It looked like it had been drawn with a pencil, all black lines in the darkness, something resembling the skeleton of an ostrich, and it began walking to take them in, bending its thin legs at exaggerated angles as if being manipulated by puppet stings. Yet, as it moved, it kept its head straight and high in a dignified manner, as if to say it might look and walk funny, but it was keeping its cool, and don’t you dare mess with it. It looked like it was from another planet, and in its demeanor was the implied potential menace of something you have no experience with and don’t understand.

     Like his waiting crew. Damien was still in the cab of the truck. As if also sensing the unpredictability of drunken people, the thing in the yard turned and strutted way from them, crossing the yard with that crazy long legged gait, out of the residual light from the driveway and into shadowy moonlight.

     As Damien got down from the cab, Morrissey came from the house to meet him. Damien wanted to ask him what it was, and if it was a pet of some kind, or just got into the yard by itself, but his drunken potential helpers approached too, shouting welcomes.

     He responded by saying, “I only asked for one guy.”

     “Just pay for one. We’ll all work,” the one presently holding the bottle slurred. “Save you money.” He smiled to convey I Come In Peace, revealing that he was missing a few front teeth. Damien also noticed he had a deep scar under his chin. Probably not always such a diplomat.

     Damien said to Morrissey,  “It’s been a long ride. Can I use the head?”

     The trio from the casual labor office became very animated at that. If they had been drinking as long as their cigarette butts indicated, they must have been urinating somewhere too. Damien was pretty sure Morrissey didn’t want them in his house. So how could they be his movers? They couldn’t. It was out of the question. They’d just damage Morrissey’s expensive furniture.

     “Me first, guys. Wait here.”

     He let Morrissey show him into the house, to the living room, and once the door was closed, he said, “I don’t need the bathroom. I have to get rid of those guys.”

     “Yes, you do.”

     “But I don’t know where I’ll get a helper tonight. I might have to unload in the morning.”

     “No good. I have a 7:00 AM flight to L.A.”

    “I can’t use any of them. They’ll break everything.”

    “I’ll help you.”

    “No…”  But who else was there? “Are you sure?”

    “I’ll help you.”

    Despite his age, Morrissey played sports and looked like he still lifted some extreme weight in the gym, so he should be in condition for this, but he could turn out to be a very expensive helper if it meant he’d want to renegotiate the bill. Damien was still feeling tender in the area of the tow charge.

    “I usually pay a helper ten dollars an hour.”

    Once he’d said that, to this producer, it sounded ridiculous, but on the other hand, Morrissey would figure a buck was a buck.

     Morrissey said, “Don’t worry about it. Just take your time getting rid of those bums out there. They’re driving that jalopy out on the street. I’m calling the police so they don’t kill somebody in it.”

    Damien nodded and went back outside to appease and stall his labor crew. As he walked to them, one hurriedly finished relieving himself beside the garage.

    “We asked,” he explained as he zipped up.

    “Yeah. It’s getting too late to unload tonight, guys.”

    The former diplomat grumbled, “What about our time, our gas money?”

    “A short dog, too,” the fly tugger added.

    Damien knew a  “short dog” is a small bottle of rotgut port wine. He knew that from his authority on such street jargon, Jerry, the balding middle aged manager of his apartment building and prolifically self proclaimed recovering alcoholic.

    He noticed a dilapidated brown van now under a street light on the other side of the road. It was in front of somebody else’s house, which was why he didn’t register it when he first arrived. It had curtains in the windows like somebody was living in it, maybe all of them.

    “So what would be fair?”,  Damien asked them.

    At that, they huddled and consulted with their backs to him. If they didn’t ask for something ridiculous, maybe he’d give it to them. He didn’t have to pay a helper now. At least he hoped he didn’t.

     They came out of conference, and the guy with the missing teeth, who was becoming apparent as their spokesman, said,

    “We’ve been here two hours. What about ten dollars?”

    “You haven’t been here two hours.”

   “Close.”

     “No you haven’t.  Too much for doing nothing. How about three?”

     “Each?”

     “NO!”

    They all laughed, and the statesman said, “Nah, we mean between us. Doesn’t hurt to try. But three?  Hey, come on.”

    Damien had bills in his pocket, but he didn’t know if he’d delayed them long enough. He said, “Wait here.”

    He went back to the door, rang the bell, and Morrissey let him in.

    “There’s a police car on the street watching the van. They’re waiting for them to try driving it.”

    Damien was beginning not to like that he was part of this, and thought about warning them. They could walk away. But they’d probably come back later for the van, just as drunk. And it they knew Morrissey had called the police on them, they might be bent towards retaliation. Nick was living vulnerably here among the locals, unlike at his L.A. crib. Nick, after all, just didn’t want them wiping somebody out on the highway.

    “How’d they take getting fired?” he asked Damien.

    “They want money. They think three dollars isn’t enough.”

    “You gonna ask me to split it with you?”

    Nick was helping him unload for free, so Damien could afford a chuckle with him. He said, “I can stiff them, but you’ll have to go out there and help me face them down.”

    “I’m always ready for some action. The cops are here.”

    ”I led them to believe they’d get something.”

    “It’s your money.”

     Damien was beginning to realize Nick was one of those people who could keep you wondering if he was joking or not. When he went back outside, he did think about not giving them anything. What had they done? Pissed, drank wine and stomped on cigarette butts. And there was that police cruiser out on the street. Give them a kick in the ass goodbye.

       In deference to Morrissey’s well being, he took three dollars from his pocket.

       “This is all I can do, guys”

       “The money man says that?” the chief groused.

        “I say that.”

        There were more mumbles and gripes, but the ringleader reached for the bills.

        “Let’s get out of here”, he said to the others, disdain in his voce for “here”, this well-to-do, upper middle class neighborhood.

       They left and went out to the van. The one who’d done all the talking got into the driver’s seat. The old starter was a scraping intrusion on the quiet street. The motor shuddered and grumbled and needed to warm up, but the van started off anyway.

       They had gone no more than ten feet when it stalled out, but they weren’t going any further. A Tucson police car sailed smoothly behind them, its roof lamp churning out arcs of flowing red and orange light like a UFO into the cool desert night, buzzing with the complaints of insects..

       While the police were detaining them, Morrissey came out again, and said, “Let’s get this shit off the truck so I can go to bed.”

       They started to unload. The police didn’t arrest them, but Damien saw the honcho hand over the keys, and the police send them walking in the direction of downtown with final instructions to get the keys back tomorrow sober and move the van, or lose it to the tow yard.

        Morrissey was as good a helper as he looked to be (though he was no Ken his first time out) and they had everything off the truck in a couple of hours. Jeannie was in Tucson too, and provided cheese and crackers and iced decaf as he settled the bill in the dining room with Mister M. The total had been agreed to before the job, so it was just a matter of writing a check for $1400, unless Nick started negotiating.

       The check Nick handed Damien was for $1500, and it wasn’t a mistake. When Damien glanced at him, Nick nodded. He was paying for the tow, all of it.

       “That’s for your temperament,” he told him. “It could have got ugly. With me on Mulholland, with the winos here. You have a level head.”

       Not so level , Damien thought., but he felt better about this job and Nick Morrissey now.

       The Morrisseys had a guest house in the back, and insisted he stay there instead of at a hotel. Jeannie even made him a reservation for the same flight back to L.A. with Nick in the morning.

       He took the truck downtown to a Load 'n Drive office and dropped the keys in the night slot. The charges would be entered in the computer in the morning and deducted from his deposit in Hollywood. He’d had Nick sign a statement that there was no visible damage to the truck to cover himself in case of any allegations like that.

        After he dropped the truck off, he took a taxi back to their house from the rental agency, and when he got there, all the lights in the front house were out. They had given him a key to the rear house, he’d already left his backpack in there, and there was a globe lit over the door for him.

       As he walked up the driveway, his heels crunched on the stones and crusted dirt. He looked over the white fence’s triangular stake tops into the yard beside the main house, wondering if the creature was still around. Bright moonlight and a dazzling canopy of stars were generating eerie shapes and shadows, but he didn’t see anything like that on its legs. It could be lying on the ground somewhere. How did it sleep? Did it fold that angled body up somehow like a sectioned yardstick? He sensed the desert was full of things he didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand---rattlesnakes, spiders, killer heat, cactus with needles that stabbed and marvels like the ostrich skeleton that he couldn't identify. It was a forbidding and mysterious place, and yet at this cool time of year, in the night under flashing galaxies, it was undeniably beautiful.

       He went into the bungalow, which was one room with a good sized up and down window and a bathroom. He turned off the outside light, but didn’t turn any on inside. The shade was down on the window and he raised it. There was no need for a light in the room then. He lay down on the made bed with his clothes on, head on the pillow, and listened to his own breathing. It was astonishing how deeply he could fill his lungs, and how effortlessly. In L.A., he always seemed to be gasping, sucking the air in, and could only take shallow breaths. He felt a peacefulness from the simple realization of life and health, and from where he was lying,  watched the celestial light show. He felt so alive, he couldn’t sleep. And yet it didn’t matter. He was resting, he was regenerating, in a way he never could in the smog. The desert, as ominous and unforgiving as it could be, was also a healer.

       He didn’t know how long he lied there grateful to be alive, it seemed like a very long time, but he knew he fell asleep eventually because the stars had been replaced by a bright dawn that woke him up, the consequential side of leaving a shade up all night. It was time to get up anyway. Nick knocked on the door within a few minutes, and told him to come up to the house for a quick cup of coffee, and then they’d have to go to the airport.

       They went by taxi to Tucson Airport, Damien and Nick, Jeannie staying behind for reasons not divulged to their furniture mover. Their flight was at seven, and at seven forty five they were circling the Burbank Airport. Damien was sitting at the window, Nick on the aisle, with a vacant seat between them. As they got ready to land, Nick kept glancing at Damien. Damien knew it wasn’t a come-on, and it didn’t make him uncomfortable,  but Nick seemed to be making an  evaluation of some sort that he  tried to cover  now with small talk.

       He said, “It looks like the Santa Anas are blowing.”

       True enough, it did. Instead of being obscured by the usual haze, Burbank strutted hues and contrasts and grooved detail, its brown hills of chaparral now lush, even olive in places, in the clear, clean airbrushed terrain below them. They had brought the desert back with them. Damien was about to say that, but instead asked, “What, Nick?

       Nick seemed confused and also said, “What?”

       “Nothing.”

       Maybe it was just Damien’s imagination, or the producer’s idiiosyncratic way of observing people, but he hadn’t noticed it before. And then Nick said, “Sorry”, and though they continued to talk and make eye contact, he stopped scrutinizing.

       When the plane landed, they got off, shook hands and went their separate ways..

       It was still morning when Damien got back to his apartment building on the residential part of Hollywood Boulevard at Poinsettia Avenue where he and Allison lived

 in 109 at the rear of the building. Jerry the  manager was vacuuming the rust orange carpet., and with the overhead dim-when-they-were-on-anyway neon lights off in the daytime, the beige walls hovered in almost colorless shadows. Damien nodded to Jerry as he went back to his apartment. If he didn’t know exactly where the door key went, he might have had trouble fitting it in the lock in that light

       Once inside, he didn’t need light. In the living room, the Venetian blinds were open, and the white transparent curtains allowed the bright day in from the street.

       Bright was not what he wanted, however. In the bedroom, the blinds were still shut, the room in darkness. Allison, hurrying to work, had left the bed invitingly unmade. Though he’d felt he was rejuvenating lying awake last night in that guest house with the desert for a back yard, he had in reality not had much sleep Also, back in Hollywood, even with the air clean today from the winds, he felt heavy and tired.

       Allison was teaching school and wouldn’t be home for several hours. So why not take a nap?  The answering machine was clear, which meant Allison had checked the messages and called any current or prospective customers back. He could do likewise if anyone called while he was sleeping. Sure, you can lose jobs that way, no doubt about it, but at the moment he didn’t care. He pined for that delicious decadent irresponsibility of daytime sleeping, the I’m-a-night-person-because-I-don’t-have-a-life abandon he used to know so well. He could still indulge once in a while. Today. Now.

       He got in the bed, closed his eyes, and parachuted down to slumber. When he woke up two hours later, he could only vaguely remember a dream where he was driving his truck around some place like Tucson, but  couldn’t get clearance to go in. That’s what he needed, clearance, so he had to keep circling the perimeter, and an alarm bell kept ringing.

     The alarm was really the telephone, the telephone in Allison’s name, the one they used as a personal phone that wasn’t at the moment set for an answering machine to pick up. Allison’s  phone was in the bedroom, so its ringing had jarred him from his exile in a truck along roads on the edge of someplace. Sodden with drowsiness, still in a dream trance, with a mouth as dry as sagebrush, he picked up the phone and tried to talk. His parched tongue managed to approximate the pronunciation of “Hello”

     “Is Damien there?

     “Sss Damien.”

     “It doesn’t sound like Damien.”

     Damien recognized the voice now. It was Nick Morrissey. Nick had the home number because he’d complained about getting the answering machine when he wanted to talk to someone NOW.

      “I was ‘sleep, Nick,” he confessed, and wondered if Morrissey could even relate to such sloth.

     “Well have some coffee and call me back. I want you to be awake.”

     “Okay.”

     But he didn’t get up immediately. First he lied there and thought about the concept of making coffee. He had to prepare psychologically for the action of putting his feet on the ground and physically moving into the kitchen

     Allison had left her trace in the bed. Her scent,  memory prints of her were in the loose but cozy pouch between the sheets, had warmed and consoled him as he slept.

    She’d grown up in Canbury, a suburban Connecticut town just a few miles north of New York City.. Her mother had been a high school English teacher (like mother, like daughter to that extent), then a principal, now  Assistant Supervisor on the Board of Education. Her father was a banker. Not bad doing for an American G.I. and a Korean bar maid in Seoul, which is what they were respectively when they met, shortly before Allison came along. Ah, but they weren’t just any G.I. and bar girl. They were Allison’s parents. Her father was the youngest sargeant .in the U.S. Army, and made all the duty assignment for new troop arrivals. The colonel who officially assigned soldiers simply wrote his signature on the forms that were handed to him. He recommended her father for Officers Candidate School when his Korean tour was up. That was in 1975.  Allison’s mother had finished high school, and even then, spoke English well enough to pass proficiency exams. With the help of Allison’s father, she enrolled in an American university that offered classes on the army post. That was the beginning of her advanced education, which now included two master’s degrees

     Damien thought again of his dream about being held outside a town indefinitely in the limbo of a rental truck cab, but that association with sleeping made him drowsy again, a little nostalgic for blooey, and he had to wake up  and call Nick back.

     He pushed the dream away and thought instead about his life here and how he came to be in L.A. What he did to survive was anarchistic, had an element of thrill because it was illegal and he had to always be on guard. The enterprise and logistics of renting trucks, hiring crews, meeting them at rendezvous and avoiding capture by the P.U.C. kept his adrenaline surging and almost obscured a realization that without those aspects his business might be pretty mundane. .Likewise, reluctant as he was to consider it, and as incredible and splendid as the match was, without their intensity of passion, he and Allison’s lives could also be viewed as very ordinary.

      He had never set out to be a mover. Damien Rennard was born in Montreal, the third of five children in a French Canadian family, stuck in the middle agewise, getting a little less attention than the older two, a little less sympathy than the babies. He was only born in Montreal, barely ever lived there. His father was in construction, an iron worker who walked the high girders, and moved his family around a like a carload of tinkers and a trailer, following tall building rises from Toronto to Detroit to Chicago to New York.

     When Damien was seventeen, they lived in The Bronx, and his father went to work one day in Manhattan and never came home. He was killed in an accident, the kind of accident you might expect in his line of work, forty stories up on a windy day. Damien’s way of dealing with the horror he knew was lurking below his awareness was to not talk about it, to not think about it.

     The family had been living in the northwest Bronx, the Mosholu Parkway-Bainbridge section, on Valentine Avenue at  201st Street, and there they stayed, at 2775 Valentine in Apartment 5E (yes, on the fifth floor of a walk-up)., mostly because Damien’s mother went into a permanent state of grief and shock, and it fell to Damien’s older brother and sister to take care of the family, not economically but emotionally and logistically. (The financial part was taken care of by insurance and a settlement with the construction firm.)  Damien, a senior at St. Matthew’s, the neighborhood Catholic high school, finished and graduated in June, three months later. He  found himself in a position then like his elder siblings, that of not having a green card, and therefore being ineligible to work legally in the U.S.

     He found work through older Irish friends he met in the bars (though he was not old enough to drink in bars yet). He’d known lots of Irish Americans at St. Matt’s High School, they had given him his unshakable Bronx nickname “Frenchy”, but the Irish he began to hang around with in the bars were immigrants, overstaying visas and working illegally. Donny, his brother, had introduced him to a lot of them..

     Though most were educated, the work they got for him was free lance carpentry, construction (no high girder walking for him), bartending, moving furniture. Because their incomes were limited, the illegals often had a lot of people living together, and Damien began to hear resentment expressed toward them, comments about them sleeping in shifts and taking jobs away form everybody else. Regardless of nationality, “Frenchy” was one of them, and knew the attitudes were directed as much at him as them.

     The younger kids managed to grow up, Damien’s older sister Michelle married an American and became a U.S. citizen and big bro’ Donny went back to Toronto. Damien eventually got a B.A..from Hunter College, taking classes sometimes full time, sometimes part time while he lived at home and got by on cash employment..

     Once he was a college grad, he wasn’t doing any more manual labor. (Ha-ha; at least not for a while.) He found an employer who didn’t care about a green card, a rep who was recruiting in New York for teachers to go to the Korean countryside and teach English as a language.

     He did it for a year, then homesick for the place he’d spent his teens and early twenties,  the place he knew best and where his family and friends were, he went back to New York. (That he had been in Korea and that Allison was half Korean American were mere coincidences, or seemed to him to be.)

     Back in NYC, he was confronted by the same restrictions on his employment prospects. He had a friend, Frank Larkin, who had gone to L.A. Frank was one of the  illegals, and said L.A. was better for work, there was less municipal oversight and fewer restrictions on everything, and invited him to go out there. He could stay with Frank until he got settled.

     Damien went. Frank was in Primal Therapy, with the screaming meemies as Damien thought of them now, living in Santa Monica, L..A.’s beach, which was the primal therapy center of the planet, a magnet for Europeans and Canadians seeking that particular treatment. None of them could work legally, and they had started underground businesses, in particular moving companies because, well, for a while you could get away with that. Before going on his own, Damien had slaved for a German screamer in Venice whose operation he carefully observed and then used as the paradigm for his own business.

     That was three years ago. Now, like everyone else in Hollywood, he was stuck in tar. Tar is the thing that holds people in L.A., mires them, will not release them. His business was tar. His apartment was tar. .Even Allison, though he had no objection to it, was tar.

     What is tar? Just south of Hollywood, at Wilshire Boulevard, in a section of the city called Hancock Park, in the park itself, are the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, ponds of water above soft asphalt deposits that long ago trapped giant animals in the muck and held them until their recent discovery in the present age.. It is a great North American fossil site, where the remains of mammoths, saber tooth tigers, wolves and large birds with enormous wing spans--- mammals dating from the last Ice Age--- have been found and reconstructed in spectacular exhibits in the adjacent Page Museum. Where bones were missing, prosthetics were substituted in the displays

     To Damien, the tar pits were L.A. The first big critters, the mammoths and the others from the last Ice Age, must have ventured onto trick ground, terrain that appeared firm to them beneath the ice, and the species from later periods were perhaps getting a drink or a bath in water that sits deceptively above the pitch today. All were just passing through L.A. or where L.A. is now, then sank into a pond with a tar bottom, became stuck in the mire, and either died of suffocation, starvation or the attacks of  predators that also came unwittingly to stay 

     There is a later arrival too, a woman from the Stone Age, who ended up there by other means. She was killed by a blow on the head, and one would assume, dumped in. Though her actual bones are not used in the display, she is replicated to approximate size and features in the museum inside a glass case, a short, petite fragile looking woman who appears to be Native American or Asian or Hispanic, with a pretty face and a startlingly contemporary braided hairstyle. Except that Allison is taller with long legs, the lifelike figure reminded Damien of her, and on the tour he was on, the museum guide jolted him by describing her, with the cynical humor of a contemporary American big city dweller, as the Wilshire district’s first unsolved homicide.

     So L.A. was the pits. L.A. sucks (you in). L.A. was tar. The Eagles called it the Hotel California.. L.A. claims as prey all who dare to venture on its ground. Shake loose and slide down from somewhere for a while, and you can’t get out.

      And he and Allison? Their relationship seemed destined, as though it were somehow ordained that they be together here now in this time and place, because they were. If tar had kept them here, maybe some tar was good. Dare he be so capricious about his lot as to allow the next association that came to him: Holy tar? Best discarded from his simile immediately.

     When it came to Allison his memory was fallible and inadequate. Memory could only hint at the surge of love and lust he felt in her presence. Thought was too abstract, too vapid, to conjure her spirit or vibrancy or beauty. Only SHE could do her justice. And yet., she was not extraordinarily beautiful. Pretty, yes, with a pixyish face and that limber, exercised dancer’s body. But her appearance could not account for her affect upon him, nor could their rapport. What he felt for her resulted from something even more intangible, from that thing the songs call “chemistry”, a blending of attractions, scents, needs, shapes, fantasies, something operating invisibly beyond sensory perception like radar or television waves, only transmittable to a compatible receptor (like a radar screen or a TV set or another human being).

     Some might call it addiction, but where was the research on that? Where was the secret mission to harness it? Therein lay control of the world. “Love Potion Number 9”. Did the CIA have a handle on it?                     

     The phone was ringing again. Nick getting impatient, Damien was sure, thinking Damien should have finished that coffee by now.

     He picked it up on the third ring. “Hello”

     It was Nick. “Are you awake now?

     “I’m awake.”

     “I’ll get to the point,” Nick said, but then didn’t. He paused (Damien thought, for some reason, as though trying to carefully script his next phrase). When it came at last, it was a question: “Have you ever done any acting?”

     Hadn’t everybody in L.A.? Damien had taken a few classes. He’d been in two stage plays. He’d never spent money for pictures, never saw casting directors, never taken it seriously. He almost thought of it as a hobby..

     This was Nick Morrissey asking him if he’d ever done any acting! Damien saw again, like an instant video replay on his inner screen, Nick observing him on the plane.

     He knew his pause was too long when Nick asked, to see if he was still there or had passed out, “Hello?”

     “I’m here. A little, Nick. Not much.”

     “”Do you have an agent? Are you in the unions?

     “No. Neither.”

     “It doesn’t matter. I just need to know. Can you come in tomorrow for an interview?”

     “Yeah…What for?”

     “You’re the character I’m looking for. I just need to have you read a few lines of script and put you on tape for the client.”

     “Okay. Are you going to tell me what this is about? Maybe I can prepare.”

      “I don’t want you to prepare. .I’m where I am in this business because my intuition never fails me, and I’m going to direct.you. But I’ll tell you what it’s about.”

     And he did.

     The Base Camp, which could best be called a new clothing store chain with an upscale grunge line, needed a spokesman. They wanted an unknown, who would become identified solely with their stores, some tall, lanky, ruggedly handsome outback sort of bloke with an Aussie or Kiwi or even South African accent, to sound a little Brit-tinged exotic to Americans. Damien knew he fit the physical mould Nick was talking about, spent just enough time outdoors still for the buffalo hide complexion, moved enough furniture for muscular definition, and at a wiry 6’1” and 185 pounds, had the rough Calgary cowboy good looks even if he was from Detroit and Toronto and New York. And hell, he would put a little English on those Canadian inflections of his that always used to have New Yorkers asking him where he was from, some thinking it was from “the old country”, by which they meant Ireland. His mother was half  Welsh, so he had the Gaullic dark hair with blue eyes and a fair complexion. It was a features color combination a lot of the Irish sported, so he could see why Irish Americans who didn’t know him, didn’t know he was “Frenchy”,  could hear him speak and mistake him for one of their own.

     Nick Morrissey was a TV and film producer and didn’t usually make commercials, so this was hybridding or crossing over, or however Damien would like to describe it, but he was casting and shooting this series of commercials because The Base Camp was buying space from the network on his big hit TV show The Family Way, a “Truman Show” imitation, but a fictional comedy, about a very dysfunctional family that didn’t know its life was being taped and shown every week. The Base Camp was willing to spend mega-bucks to have Nick Morrissey produce the commercials also, with them becoming the show’s exclusive sponsor when hiatus ended next month.

     Nick told him to relax, go back to sleep, don’t get stressed. It was as good as done. Taping him tomorrow was a formality. The casting would be Nick’s decision. The client would defer to him. They just wanted to FEEL they’d been involved. .Damien was perfect as their spokesman.

     They agreed on Damien’s appointment for 11:00 the next morning, and Nick gave him the address in Hollywood. Then he was off the line, gone, and Damien sat on the bed holding the phone, gripping it tightly and looking at it to confirm its true existence. This phone call HAD taken place. Incredibly, he did feel sleepy again. He felt exhausted, as if he had moved furniture for twelve hours. He found himself taking Nick’s advice. He went back to sleep.

     About four o’clock (he knew because that’s when Allison came home), he heard the key turning the lock., then the door opening and shutting. She came in with a sigh, and that meant it had been a long day in a substitute classroom without air conditioning. (No  L.A. schools had air conditioner costs in their budgets since Proposition 13, though the schools were operating year round.)  And she hadn’t fixed the air conditioner in the car because the weather wasn’t hot until today. He heard her drop her beige canvas book  bag with the apples stencilled on it, then knew she’d seen his backpack on the floor when she said, “Oh, you’re back. How was Tucson? Are you up, Damien?”

 .    .And he was totally, instantly awake, energized by the memory, which had never left as he’d slept, the recollection of his unbelievable phone call from Nick.

     He got up and went toward her, reaching the doorway of the bedroom at the same time she did from the hall. He said, “Oh, sweetheart” and pulled her into his arms. The back of her cotton turquoise blouse was damp where she'd sat against the cloth seat

cover over the vinyl upholstery in the car. Under his hand, her ribs expanded with her breath. Now, yes, they loved each other intensely, yet except for Damien’s infrequent of-of town moving jobs, the saw each other every day, and Damien had only been gone overnight. They hugged when they saw each other, but Allison was just a bit bewildered by this sudden passionate embrace, as though he’d been gone six months.

     “Damien? What?”

     :””I have something to tell you.”

      “What?”

     :”Eedee-wha” (“Come here” in Korean) That was part of the limited Korean vocabulary they sometimes used. Though Allison was born there, she’d left as a baby, and her mother rarely used Korean at home. As with this relationship, her father had been the one who sometimes used it for effect, or (not like this relationship) an attempt at clarification. Though she knew a little of the language  (jo-kume), she was learning phrases from Damien.

     She was laughing now, a kid getting a surprise present, but not sure there isn’t a joke somewhere. He took her hand, led her back into the living room, sat her on the sofa., then knelt in front of her.

     “You know I love you?”

     “Nothing I would take for granted, but you’ve told me."

     When he didn’t continue right way, she misinterpreted his pause and smiled. “Of course, honey. But I want to take a shower and have a salad first. For energy.”

     “No, no,  I  don’t pester you for that.”

     “You don’t have to.  What’s my surprise, Damien?”

     Then she seemed to see, for the first time, that he was on one knee beside her. He realized, at the same moment, what was formulating in her mind. He had knelt to tell her about the Base Camp, but in the traditional position of proposal for marriage. He thought suddenly, It was a mistake to tell her like this, she thinks I’m proposing, then thought, No it’s not a mistake, I am proposing, I just didn’t realize I was going to.

     She said, “You know the answer to anything you ask me is always “yes””

     “And I’m going to ask you. I just have something to tell you first.”

     “What, Damien? Tell me.”

     “Nick Morrissey offered me a commercial. A spokesman. I have to read for it tomorrow.”

     “What?  How?

     Her confusion was genuine and understandable. Damien wasn’t an actor. That wasn’t how things were done.. He hoped she wouldn’t feel cheated. Allison was the one in show biz. She did have head shots. She was in the unions. She did read for minor roles occasionally, and sometimes even got them, those rare calls when they were looking for an Asian actress or a generic dancer.

     He said, “I don’t know how. I guess because I moved his furniture.”

     Allison laughed, and he knew that as always she was on his side.

     “You see him tomorrow?”

     “To put me on tape. He says it’s locked up.”

     “What kind of commercial?”

     He filled her in on all the details Nick had given him about The Family Way, the Base Camp, and the unprepared reading in the morning.     She said, “That’s fantastic. INCREDIBLE and fantastic. And I know it will happen… Now, Damien, not to change the subject, but what’s that question you were going to ask me?”

     He took her hand in both of his and looked into her eyes, the way he imagined it should be done.

     “Allison, will you…”

     “Yes.”

     “Will you…”

     “Yes.”

     “Will you let me finish?”

     “I will.”

    “Will you marry me?”

    “Yes, Damien, I will.”

    She said she would marry him, and she gave her support one hundred percent to his interview with Nick. He had no doubt about her love, but she was only human and he could not let anything taint this  moment. He had to know her true sentiments.

     “Allison, I don’t really know if I’ll get this thing tomorrow.”

     “You’ll get it. I feel it.”

     “I can’t be sure.”

    ”You’ll get it. He said you would.”

    “Look, baby, you’re the actress. How do you feel about this?”

     “I’m not an actress.”

     “Of course you are.”

     “No, honey. I’m a dancer. And that’s what passes for rebellion if you’re Korean American. As you know, nothing I ever did was quite good enough for my mother. Dancing was something I chose that she was against, and couldn’t prevent when I got older. The irony was that she had me taking tap and ballet when I was eight, so she’d brought it on herself.”

     Damien knew the reason she came to LA was to put three thousand miles between her and her mother. Her mother had been an orphan of the Korean War, and all her life seized opportunity with a fanatical drive to overcome and achieve. The cruel circumstances of her childhood did not make her a good mother, although she believed she was one. Allison understood that her mother had nothing to model parenting on, and was so enraged at the unfairness of her own tortured early years that she couldn't be otherwise. And yet, she was on the school board in Canbury, she conducted seminars on child abuse, as she pushed her only child to succeed by ANY means and used cajoling, sarcasm and physical punishment as motivation. Her mother could not leave behind memories of hunger and abandonment, the desperation of a childhood spent first  in  inadequate institutions run by American missionaries (where she did somehow, despite everything, excel in school), and later on the streets of Seoul where, in the poverty and chaos of the years after the war, she survived by begging, stealing, and, Allison suspected, prostituting. And she was intelligent enough to understand always exactly what was happening to her. As Allison put it, she wasn't crazy, she was stark raving sane. In contrast to her own ordeal, her mother felt she had given Allison the life of a princess, and was frequent in her reminders about that.

     Her father, the ex-GI, was an obsessive attainer also, a man who kept his distance emotionally and literally, who, as Allison put it, "came home late, left early, and didn't talk on weekends." He too had come from early deprivation, but not in the extreme of her mother. He was from West Virginia coal and timber country, Appalachia, and stayed in the Army eight years, until he had a Master's Degree in Management. Then, though he was a Special Forces Captain, he left the Army after his last enlistment and went to New York with his family to pursue his real ambitions, eventually settling in Connecticut.

     Seeming  a  non-sequitur, though it wasn't in context of their conversation, he said  “You love to dance.”

     “Yes. At first, I was just resisting the Dragon Lady’s iron will, but I was good at it, and  I really love dancing. Acting went with it in L.A. If you’re in show business at all in this town, you have to have pictures like the actors, so you might as well let an agent send you on those interviews too. I’m a dancer and a teacher, Damien. I never chose acting.”

      “Neither did I.”

      “You’ll get that part.  Don’t think like that. Ever. Not with me. And now I’m going to take that shower.”

     He knew what was promised after that. She got up and moved, but halfway across the living room stopped, turned back and said,

     “I know your proposal was spontaneous, baby,  but I do want a ring.”

     A ring? Of Course! A ring.

     “Of course,” he said.

     And that’s how Allison Clay became his fiance. Allison Kim Clay. Her middle name was her mother’s surname.. Her mother never learned it her parents had been killed or had deserted her, but family lineage is paramount to Koreans, and she was willing to err on the side of saints. Though she had tried to find them, Koreans have an expression equivalent to “looking for a needle in a haystack”, which is “looking for Mr. Kim in Seoul”. Additionally, during the war thousands of people disappeared, most of them killed, many buried in unmarked graves. If they were alive, she had not been able to trace them, and preferred to believe they were innocent war casualties. That was less painful than the knowledge of deliberate abandonment, though either way the consequences were the same.

         That night Allison coached him on cold reading, and he went on the interview the next day. Even though Nick had told him it was decided, and Allison offered  reassurances,  driving  east on Hollywood Boulevard to the studio lot after ten o’clock he could taste fear in his mouth It almost made him gag, its bite as pungent  as a gulp of ocean water. Allison  told him stage fright was normal,  even good because it could work in your favor by bringing up your energy, but as he got closer to the destination, he could tell his lips were visibly trembling. He hoped they weren’t purple. He didn’t want Nick Morrissey to see  fear. Damien still believed this was an audition, that he could blow it, not matter what Nick told him. Nick couldn’t be that certain. What if Damien was dyslexic? What if he was illiterate? What if he was scared shitless?

     Being noticeably nervous, intimidated by the experience, was the very thing that could undermine him. Nick knew him to be confident and competent, that’s what he was expecting, that’s what he wanted to put on tape.

     Wilton Studios, where The Family Way was taped, was at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Regency Place. He got to the gate in his  Mustang (powder blue with a beige hard vinyl top, plush bucket seats and power steering, an oldie but a goodie), and told the uniformed guard his name and where he was going. He was given directions to Stage 4, told to park in one of the visitors’ spaces, then waved through.

     Wilton was a complex of two story beige colored stucco sound stages and offices used for the taping of TV shows. Damien found Stage 4, parked his car, then went in through a glass door marked GENERAL OFFICES. When he told the receptionist who he was, she asked,

     “Did you bring any pictures?”

     “I don’t have any.”

     “No problem.

      She called someone and told Damien to have a seat. In a moment, an energetic enthusiastic kid, a girl about nineteen, came out and asked him to follow her. She led him to a waiting room that was set up with photographic lights and a red cushioned armchair. There was a guy with a camera standing across from the chair.

     The page said, “This is Joe Bauer, our photographer.”

     Joe grinned, shook his hand, and said, “Nice to meet you, Damien. Mr. Morrissey wants some pictures for the client. Have a seat.”

     Damien sat and it was done in a matter of minutes, twenty four clicks on a Nikon, preceded by simple directions ( “Smile”, “Look a little intense now”, “One with a frown.”) and shot from various angles as the photographer moved around him.

     The photo session was for the simple reason that he didn’t have pictures. Nick knew, setting an appointment for him only yesterday, that if he didn’t have some already, he wouldn’t have time to get any. Damien remembered the questions: Are you in the unions? Do you have an agent? Hollywood had its protocol, it’s standardized procedures. Even Nick Morrissey would have to submit him to the client with a picture. Damien wondered if Nick would bother with a resume. Damien had been in two flops at a theater that no longer existed. Would Nick do with Damien’s resume what so many beginning thespians did with theirs, and pad it? Two Equity productions in NYC, produced by Joseph Papp at the Lincoln Center.?

     The picture taking had distracted him, and he realized he was relaxed. The fear was gone, off of him like fatigue after a good rest. Joe finished, took his lights and camera and left. The ingenue, whose name he now knew was Tina because Joe had called her that, brought him coffee and pages of a script, “sides” as she called them.

     Before he had a chance to read through once, another woman, this one in her thirties, came into the room and introduced herself as Carolyn Hayes, a Casting Assistant. She had him go with her to Nick Morrissey’s office.

     Nick, dressed regally, was sitting behind a huge oak desk. The walls of his office were filled with framed posters of movies he’d produced and/or directed, various plaques and awards, and pictures of Nick with other celebrities who’d inscribed best wishes on the prints. His Emmies were on individual shelves like pedestals. Bookcases were filled with scripts, and Nick, in a tailored three piece dark blue suit, looked like a downtown attorney. Damien had expected him to be casual. His attire and his office conveyed power, wealth and the conducting of serious business. In one corner of the room, there was a video monitor and camera, and what appeared to be Joe’s lights.

     Nick got up, and despite the formality of his appearance, addressed Damien in his usual familiar manner.

     “Find us alright?”

     “Yeah. The guard gave good directions.”

     “Have a seat, Damien. You’ve read the script?”

     “Didn’t have a chance yet,” he said, as he sat.

     “Don’t worry about it. Just cold read it to me now.”

     There wasn’t really much dialogue. The action told most of the story, deliberately laden  with cliches. A shipwreck survivor is on a desert island, and finds a treasure chest. In the chest are new duds from the Base Camp. The survivor is not Damien. Damien is the spokesman, who makes various humorous comments about the shipwreckee’s plight off camera, until he appears at the end to make a statement about what a cool dude the survivor is, now that he’s dressed for the occasion.

     For thirty minutes, Nick had him read it over and over, at first with the script, then gradually  without it. Damien knew enough (because of Allison's script reading lesson)  to glance up from the page, make eye contact with Nick as he kept his place with his finger, then glance back at the text..

     When they first went “off book”, Nick had him improvise, but then got him back to reading from the script until Damien knew the lines as well as he knew The Act of Contrition by the time he’d finished the first grade at St. Francis Assisi Grammar School in Toronto. Then, when he was satisfied with the result, Nick taped it, using the camera himself. One take only. To keep it fresh, he said.

    Nick gave him a contract. Then he said, The job is yours. You’re going to have a lot of money. He said, Read it, sign it, bring it back to me. If you want to throw your money away, you can talk to an agent. It’s up to you. He said, Don’t worry, go home

    Damien did. This time he believed it was real.. He would have a lot of money. His life was changing. It was exhilarating, but he wondered if that was what he and Allison really wanted.

CHAPTER THREE

       The first commercial, or Damien’s part of it (voice-overs throughout and his appearance on camera at the end), was not shot at Wilton Studios. Wilton was used exclusively for TV shows,.but  Nick owned an independent film production company , Nimor Productions (Ni-Mor as in U-No-Hu), on Melrose near La Cienega, and they used those facilities.

     Nick didn’t direct, which surprised Damien. He wasn’t even there. John Dannon, whom everybody at the location referred to as “the best in the business” was the director, and from that arrangement, Damien surmised this: Nick was the producer, Nick had cast him, Nick had directed the audition taping, Nick directed and produced movies and TV shows, Nick was a megalomaniac, but he still deferred directing commercials to someone he considered better at it. Damien saw it as an example of pragmatism and---well, humility?. No. Pragmatism and business.

     Damien never showed the contract to anybody but Allison. It was a hell of a lot of money, and if Nick Morrissey was taking advantage of him in any way, well, Damien could still be carrying Nick’s box spring out to his rental truck with Ken.

     The first commercial was done in a morning, and half that time was spent on makeup, hair, wardrobe, and a lot of sitting and waiting. The actual shooting, ten or twelve or more takes, took no longer than ninety minutes

     That was it. It was almost a let down, it had been such a piece of---well, pie, apple pie, nothing being more “American dream” than a ton of money, but where did the hard work part come in? Maybe he’d done that already.

     There was going to be some lag time before the commercial would start to air, and before shooting was scheduled for subsequent ones, and he had nothing else to do but continue running his business. He wasn’t a familiar face to anyone yet, and besides he only saw his customers if he went out to their homes to do an estimate. As for talking to people on the phone, even when the commercial got on TV, most people probably wouldn’t know the name of the Base Camp’s spokesman. Would they?

     So for a while life was just like it had been, except that there was the money, and an anticipation that somehow things were going to be different. It was during this transitory period that Nick called one day and told him that his tenant “at Malibu” (Nick referred to all his properties using the preposition “at” almost as a prefix---at Mulholland, at Tucson, at Malibu) was moving. The tenant was an actor Damien had moved into the house on Nick’s referral. He actually believed Nick was calling to have him move the guy out again. Damien could send Ken and a helper out there. He was the boss. That wouldn’t be too undignified.

     He said, “Sure, l can put a crew together for it.”

      There was an interval of silence before Nick replied, and then he said, “If you want to, but that’s not why I called.”

     “Oh…Okay…What? Why?”

     “Do you want to live in the house?”

     “What?”

     He had avoided thinking of anything yet he might do with the money because the          responsibility of it scared him.

     “Damien, you don’t want to be living in a Hollywood apartment when you get on television.”

     “Why not?”

     “Use your imagination, my boy. What’s your neighborhood like?”

     Hollywood. There was Hollywood-the-myth, Hollywood-the-industry and Hollywood-the-place. Nick was Hollywood-the-industry. Damien lived in Hollywood-the-place. Yes, there are the tour busses and the star’s handprints in the sidewalk at the Chinese Theater (that’s Hollywood-the-myth), but scrape beneath the tinsel and you’ll find, not real tinsel anymore, but a street life of crack addicts, dealers, hookers, homeless, smashed car windows, heroin, street muggings, stabbings, and shootings---things just not mentioned in the travel brochures that tout Universal Studios and trips to the stars’ homes.

     Nick seemed to be telling him that when you become ransomable you don’t want to be easily kidnappable. People would assume he had money if they saw him on TV. Nick was looking out for him. Or was he just protecting his investment? Pragmatism and business.

     Damien said, “Let me talk to my fiance. How much do you want for it?”

     “Come up and have a look. We’ll talk about it.”

     Damien had seen it, walked in and out at least fifty times, carrying boxes and furniture on the in trips. It was a fantasy of California goodlife, a house on stilts over the ocean in the Malibu colony, right on the Pacific Coast Highway.

     “When?”

     “It’s up to you. Talk to your girlfriend, then call me.”

     So they were going to Malibu, where the cliffs across the highway were ready to fall, and the ocean came in under the back of the house on a nice day. Well, they could always leave for a while if it rained. It wasn’t like they had roots there. And it was June. L.A. probably wouldn’t see a storm again until November. At the speed things were happening, who knew what five months would bring?

     The house was two levels. Upstairs was the living room, master bedroom and a smaller room they decided to use as a den and office. You entered the house at ground level from the narrow sidewalk along the highway into the garage, and from there a door opened into a hall off a large room, really a second living room, that they designated the rec room On that floor were also the dining room and a kitchen with a back door that led to a deck with a flight of stairs down to the beach. Because of erosion, the beach was only two feet wide between the posts supporting the seaward side of the building and the great Pacific when the tide was out, but it was their own beach. Two Foot Wide they named it, and there was just enough room to put down a towel or a folded blanket and sunbathe and look out at the ocean from it for a while every day.

     They hadn’t set a date for the marriage yet, but Damien got her a diamond ring from Crasson’s  jewelry shop in Beverly Hills. They were moving to Malibu gradually. Allison was still on call as a substitute teacher in L.A. Central, a LONG drive from the Coast Highway, and Damien was using the Hollywood apartment as his office, so they were sleeping there during the week and only spending weekends in the house at the beach.

     The only reason Damien operated the business at all now was that he knew his referrals and repeat business were worth money. He could sell them to another mover,

 whose phone number could be the forwarding number from Damien’s phone, but the business had to still be viable when he did that.

     The first commercial still hadn’t aired when they scheduled a shooting for the next one, this time over near Highland Avenue on another sound stage. Call time was for noon on Friday, just before the beginning of their third weekend in Malibu.

     This one had a lot more dialogue for Damien, and he soon learned that John Dannon was much more demanding than he’d had any indication of when he skated through the first one. Murphy’s Law also plagued the set that day. They had to replace a camera, had problems with the electricity, and finally it went so late they had to have a caterer bring supper.

     It was after nine o’clock when Damien was finished. He’d spoken to Allison and she’d gone out to Malibu. Before he headed out there, he thought he’d stop by the apartment, which was close, check the messages, and make sure Ken had a helper for tomorrow. Ken was off crack and clean for a while now, going to AA meetings with Damien’s building manager Jerry, who’d befriended and recruited him.

     About 9:30, Damien was in the apartment listening to phone messages, and none of them gave him a reason to write anything in the pad on his desk. The 11:00 A.M. customer called to see where Ken was, then called back to negate that, saying Ken had arrived. (Ken liked breakfast at a coffee shop, even if he was starting late like today, then worked all day until the job was finished.) There was a hang up at.3:12 P.M., and at 6:18. Ken called in to tell him the job was finished, he did have a helper for tomorrow,  and he was bringing the truck back to the rental place. There were two more messages indicated on the answering machine counter, but before he could listen to them, somebody rang his doorbell.

     Now lately Jerry  the manager and Art the old fart across the hall were doing that. To jawbone, ostensibly. Jerry was  ravenously curious about where Damien and Allison were going on weekends (Damiem hadn’t told his neighbors he was a star; he wished he could be there for their shock, but he did plan to at least come back and visit so they wouldn’t feel totally betrayed.) and Art was a baseball zealot, a lifetime Yankees fan. It helped that the Dodgers were in the other league, so he could root for them too. But those Angels…Since Damien, being from The Bronx last before he came to California, was also a Yankees fan, Art saw them as having a lot in common. And Art , of course, also sensed something up with Damien, and was on his own intelligence mission.

     So Damien opened the door, expecting a nosy neighbor, not showing good Hollywood street skills, but caught off guard. It was not a neighbor who was on his doorstep. A short stocky guy with a crew cut was standing there, and he said, with a dense New York accent (not The Bronx, thicker, maybe Brooklyn) “You Harry Hartman?”

     Harry Hartman, the fictitious name he was using, with a made-up P.U.C. registration number, to advertise in the Hollywood Commercial, a free-to-the reader advertising newspaper.

     “No.”

     “Do you know him?”

     How did they find this address? The paper didn’t have it. Could he say Harry Hartman didn’t live here? That he didn’t know him? Here in this apartment was the very phone connected to Harry Hartman. Was this guy a cop?  An agent for the P.U.C.? Worse, from Immigration or the I.R.S.? He’d heard of the P.U.C. setting up stings, calling to book a moving job, then arresting movers on the job site, even if the were only employees. Damien didn’t know what answer to give to the question, so he asked one of his own.

     “What do you want?”

     “I have something for him. You know him?”

     That question again. Ask another one.The one he should have asked immediately.  

     “Who are you?”

     “Sarge.” Pronounced to rhyme with “massage”.           

     They had an injunction or something like that, like a restraining order against a business. Maybe an arrest warrant for Damien. They had to get the name Harry Hartman from the newspaper office.. They were looking for Harry Hartman, not Damien Rennard. These thoughts, unconnected by logical progression, were like moths blindly bumping a wall in panic. If somebody had snitched on Damien, they’d be looking for Damien not Harry Hartman, but a snitch could have given them the address. Maybe they were pretending to look for Harry Hartman as a ruse. Or maybe they’d traced the phone number here. But the phone was in Damien’s name, so they’d be looking for Damien. Okay, here’s what he had. They were looking for Harry Hartman, had to be, could only be, because that’s the name the paper gave them. He had no idea how they made the link to this address.

     He wondered how long it would take him to get everything out of this apartment. It was time to put the moving business behind him. The hell with what it was worth. He had money. This chapter in his life, charming as it had been since Allison, was over. It was a wrap. Shooting at Hollywood Boulevard and Poinsettia was finished. He and Allison were going on to the new location. At Malibu.

     This ridiculous “Sarge”, this goon of a process server for the P.U.C. or whatever agency sent him, with his military haircut and scruffy build, didn’t know who Damien was. Sarge thought he was an employee, possibly the manager of the business, covering for Harry Hartman, or thought he WAS Harry Hartman. (Well, actually, he was.)

     If he had the weekend, that would do it. He could have all their books and CDs and clothes, every business file and crappy piece of furniture still here packed and gone by Sunday night.

     “You smoking funny cigarettes? I asked if you know where Harry Hartman is?”

     That might be a tool of the trade, a trick question. Sarge had only asked Damien if he KNEW Harry Hartman. No matter. He thought he had the right answer now.

     “He went to San Francisco for the weekend.”

     “What’s your name?” the Sarge asked.

     He opened a manila folder and shuffled some official looking papers that stuck out from a horizontal pocket. It occurred to Damien that he might have been a little stupid after all admitting he knew Harry Hartman. Could Sarge leave the summons or subpeana or warrant or whatever the hell he was serving with Damien? Could that count as service? Well certainly not if he didn’t know who he gave it to.

     “What’s your name?” Sarge growled this time.

     Not sure what reaction to expect, but sounding as cool as he could, Damien said,

     “None of your business.”

     “You have some ID?”

     Damien asked the following question as respectfully as he could in case the answer was yes.

     “Are you a police officer?”

     Sarge’s tone was belligerent now. “I’m an officer. Do you have ID?”

     But he had emphasized “officer”. What kind of officer?

     “Do YOU have ID? A badge?”

     “Show me yours first.”

     “Nah, not tonight.”

     Damien slammed the door. Sarge’s shoe was on the door jam, but he banged the door shut hard enough to push it out. Then he turned the deadbolt.

     “Scum bag,” Sarge grumbled from outside

     “Get the fuck out of here.”

     To his surprise,  Sarge didn’t bother responding to that. He didn’t leave either, or at least Damien didn’t hear him leave. He supposed he could tape his papers to the door and claim he’d served Harry Hartman..

     Damien didn’t hear him doing anything He ventured a glance through the door peephole. In the circle of distorted visibility the dooreye permitted, like a reflection in a fun house mirror, he saw Art’s apartment door across from his, and three stairs leading to the second floor. Sarge was not in sight.

     That didn’t mean he wasn’t still there, but Damien decided not to worry about it, and went back in to finish listening to his messages. There were two left, and they, like the one at 3:12, were hang ups. A pattern of hang ups. Sarge calling to see if someone was here?

     There was a cardboard box in a corner, about six inches tall, six inches wide and eighteen inches long. Allison had used it once to bring a couple of potted ferns home. The plants were already in Malibu, and Damien took the box now and filled it with CDs and paperback books That was all the packing he could do tonight without more boxes.

     When he was done and ready to take the box with him, ten minutes after he’d peeped, he heard from outside his door:

     “When’s this asshole coming back?”

     “You’re trespassing. I’m going to call the manager.”

     Which he started to do. When he picked the phone up, Sarge persisted, “When’s he coming back?”

     Damien didn’t answer. He was still listening to the dial tone, but he said, “Jerry, can you come down to my apartment? I have a problem.”

      .”I’ll be back Monday.,” Sarge said.

      This time Damien heard him leaving, sounding like a large, ungainly waddling creature (a baby mastodon?) heavy enough to be leaving tracks in the oft-vacumned carpet.

     So long, shmuck. Monday will be just fine.

     Damien had to scour this coating of Hollywood Boulevard from his soul, like showering jailhouse crud off after a weekend in the County lock-up (where he had spent one weekend after a drunken and disorderly Friday night when he first came to L.A., back when Frank  Larkin was trying, not without reason, to rescue him into Primal Therapy, back before Allison).

     He had to swish vigorously with a strong antiseptic mouthwash, something as strong as Listerine or Proxide (or maybe even Clorox) and spit Hollywood out. Shed those serpentine scales right now and leave them here on the floor in Apartment 109 of the Poinsettia Arms. The phone gets disconnected with no referral number. from the moving company. He could let Ken or Frank Larkin have benefit of their number given as a forwarding number, but then Damien would be traceable. No, this was the end. His customers could look for a mover in the Yellow Pages. The P.U.C. could have Sarge ring his bell until he looked like the skeleton of a blind man wearing sunglasses and selling pencils, with a bony finger on the bell of a door with a sign reading School for The Deaf, that from a drawing Damien had seen in a collection of Gahan Wilson cartoons that appeared in Playboy magazine in the 1960s. Gahan Wilson was from before political correctness, as was Playboy.

     He’d have everything out this weekend.

CHAPTER FOUR

     The important things to know about him now are that he is in love, he is grateful for the good things in his life, and he intends to go give back.  

     On weekend mornings, when Allison was off, they would find some time to lie on their little piece of God’s sandy earth where it meets the Pacific Ocean, such a decadent rich man thing to do just once in your life, to have a private beach of your own where nobody else can go without your invitation (or so the Malibu citizenry would have them believe). And he shouldn’t be able to afford it. He didn’t make THAT much money. Nick practically gave it to them he rented it so cheaply, for not much more than they’d paid in Hollywood. Damien wondered why Nick was being such a benefactor, but decided, Why question it.

     They could also jump in Damien’s new car now, a red (as in cherry) Corvette, and in a very few minutes be at one of the great sea food restaurants that dot the Pacific Coast Highway. It was just so good it didn’t seem it could get any better.

     Except for a few annoying prank calls at night. Damien solved that problem for a while by disconnecting the phone when they went to sleep, but after a while there were hang ups during the day when they were home, or waiting for them on the answering machine when they got home.

     Well, they hadn’t had this phone very long. They could pass a new number on to friends and associates, so they had their phone number changed once again.

     But life was becoming all weekends for Damien, now that his business was gone. He looked into being an actor. He paid Joe Bauer for negatives from the pictures Joe took the day of his interview at Wilton, and had head shots and composites made.

     He didn’t know what to do with them. Under the contract for the Base Camp commercial, as their spokesman, he couldn’t appear in any other commercials or advertising. As for theatrical work---TV and films---Damien wasn’t an actor. He had no experience, no credits. Because the first commercial still hadn’t aired, the theatrical agents didn’t even know who he was, and wouldn’t necessarily be interested when they did. Without signing him, one agent accepted his pictures, “In case something comes up.” Nothing had so far.

     When he told Nick Morrissey what he was doing, Nick said, “Be patient. I have something else in mind for you.” Nick wouldn’t specify what, but with nobody calling Damien anyway, it wasn’t hard to be patient.

     Nick and Jeannie were also extending themselves to them. He and Allison were invited up to Mulholland for parties, but they really just felt uncomfortable, irrelevant in the conversations of these high rollers, and after a couple of times, started making excuses not to go.

     Damien was beginning to feel like he had retired too young, like a pensioner with much time,  no purpose and lots of energy. Nick had gotten the green card for him, so he could work legally now, he could teach ESL as he had done in Korea, he could do anything, work suited to his education, but there was this vague promise from Nick that he would soon be very busy working for him.

     One day when Allison was subbing at a middle school in Woodland Hills (she’d switched availability now from L.A. Central to the West San Fernando Valley), Damien took a ride into Hollywood. About 11:00 o’clock, he stopped for coffee at formerly Rock and Roll Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard. Rock and Roll Denny’s. Because it was located just a half a mile form the Sunset Strip, where all the famous rock clubs are located---the Whiskey, the Starwood, the House of Blues---for a while it became a hangout for rockers. It was a cultural marvel, a fusion of leather. rhinestone flash, and purple hair with vinyl, Formica and Xeroxed coffee shop cuisine. Who would ever have thought Denny’s could become hip? And then,  just as suddenly, the mad and beautiful were gone. No reason was apparent, and certainly none was ever given. The hipsters just weren’t there anymore, and it went back to being one of Hollywood’s Denny’s, with  weird garrulous bachelors at the counter and hookers on a break in the booths.         

     Damien had his coffee at the counter. His mission this morning was at Annunciation Roman Catholic Church, also on Sunset, eight or ten blocks east of Denny’s. He’d driven into Hollywood on Sunset all the way from the beach, so Denny’s had been on the way.

     When he finished the coffee, as he was about to pick the check up and leave a tip, getting off his stool, he smiled at the waitress who was standing in front of him. Then, through the mirror behind her, he noticed a man in a booth, alone, reading a newspaper. He was directly behind Damien.

     It was Sarge. He didn't in any way indicate that he had seen Damien, or that he was watching or following him. Damien took the tip back, and instead placed a five dollar bill on the counter. He whispered to the waitress,

      "Take care of this at the register for me and keep the change. I'm in a hurry."

     Of course he'd surprised her, and she said brashly,

     "Thank you!"

     He slid off the stool, and headed for a side door exit to the parking lot. As he went out, he glanced back at the booth. Serge was still nose and eyeballs in the morning paper.

      Back on the street again, he went over toward Highland Avenue, watching his rear view mirror for anybody who might be tailing him. Somebody in any of ten cars behind him could be, but Sarge hadn't left the restaurant by the time Damien drove out of the parking lot. There wouldn't be much chance he could catch up in the Hollywood traffic. Had he been following him?  Was seeing him at Denny's just a coincidence? Possibly. Sarge was a Denny's kind of guy.

      Annunciation looked much like any average size Catholic church with a school, which is to say it occupied much of a block.It was on the other side of the street, and after he passed it, he turned left off of Sunset at the next intersection, then went up that street. There he found an entrance to a parking lot and pulled in.

     At the end of the parking lot by the church, he saw a black latticed wrought iron gate leading to an alley that ran along the back of the church, parallel to Sunset Boulevard, separating the church proper from a group of smaller brick buildings behind it. The gate was unlocked and partially ajar, and he thought he’d find offices in there. He went in, and halfway down the alley, to his right,  encountered another shorter alley, also with a black iron gate, unlocked. In there were a courtyard and doors to red buildings with rectangular mazes of beige mortar between their bricks .He decided the largest building with the biggest door  had to be the rectory.

     He went into the courtyard and rang a large, round old fashioned bell at the brown, varnished front portal. After a minute’s wait, the door was opened by a young sandy haired woman without a trace of makeup, plainly attired in an ankle length cotton house dress, who was wholesomely pretty.

     She asked, “Can I help you?”

     “I want to find out about volunteering. You have a homeless program, don’t you?”

     He knew that they did because Ken had told him. He’d eaten there..

     “We do, yes. Just a food program. We don’t have housing. Do you want to talk to Father?”

     “Yes.”

     She moved back from the doorway and led him to a sparse waiting room. She said, “Wait here. I’ll get him”, and left.

     Damien went in and sat on one of the black, wooden hardbacked chairs with ornate arms of protruding knobs and nubs that resembled an elaborate three dimensional doily pattern. To his surprise, the chair was comfortable, the contours of his back fitting against the curved cushioned spine of the chair The ridges of the seat were also cushioned, and  kept him from feeling (unpleasantly)  the wood under his rump. A gradual slope at the edges prevented any right angled dig under the thighs. Being no authority whatsoever, except that he’d moved a lot of them, he though the chairs were antiques. The room itself seemed old world to him, a European church room maybe in France or  Spain, too authentic for Hollywood. This room didn’t seem like a set. Over the floor boards, covering most of the room,  was a faded and immaculately clean hand woven rug of various subdued brown and tan shades. He had no qualifications (again) for making a determination, but he KNEW the rug was hand made.

     On the walls were pictures of former pastors, the old ones in black and white, the more recent in color, leading up to the present pastor, whose name was Father Patricio Morales. There were other pictures too, very colorful pageantry photos, with lots of Catholic reds, greens and whites in the vestments on the priests, of celebrations and processions. There were two crucifixes in the room also, a large black one on the wall facing him, and a smaller one, brown, mounted on a plaque fixed to an office desk in a corner

     Why was he volunteering? It wasn’t that he was atoning for sins or crimes, because he didn’t see that he had committed many. He might be guilty of some prosecutable pragmatism, sure, but what was he supposed to have done, starved? That grimy stuff sticking to him like tar was simply his past. Everything that ever happened happened. That was a wonderful and terrible truth. Time etherealizes incidents into memories, then blurs them as it simultaneously takes each and isolates it like a snapshot from all the attendant conflicts and dynamics and distractions that had to also have been present, and though the principals in any memory are not immediate, they’ve dispersed or died or haven’t thought about it for a very long time if the ever did at all, still the mummies are where they were placed. and ships from the time of the Vikings lie at the bottom of the sea. Everything that ever happened happened.

     Maybe returning his fortune in a small way would act as a talisman against some sort of cosmic revenge for not deserving what he had. But why didn’t he deserve it? “Why me?” was supposed to be reserved for a terminal illness. And the cynical answer was God saying, “Why not you?” You weren’t expected to ask “Why me?” when good things came your way, but if you were going to, why not say then also “Why not?” Why not Damien? Why not? There was no reason why not. If anyone knows of a reason, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. So why was he volunteering?

      With his rented house in Malibu and his new bucks, he was getting stuck even more like the mammals at the Tar Pits. And yet, their fate in the gook really hadn’t been forever. Though they had no awareness of the prospect eons ago when they were trapped, and certainly had none when they were discovered, they were nevertheless remembered. They were famous. When he lost Frank Larkin once because Frank had moved without a forwarding phone number and didn’t tell anybody where he was, Damien looked for him via computer. He wasn’t too familiar yet with how to use them, and searched under FRANK LARKIN, which gave him a few hundred pages of people with the first or last name Frank, and about several hundred more pages of Larkins. He did browse through a few Larkin pages, and found a listing for a marriage announcement dated 1837 of a Dan Larkin to a Veronica Casey in County Galway. An aspirate prayer came almost unbeckoned out of Damien’s mouth at that poignant reminder of the hopes and dreams for the future of people long dead, people who never imagined electricity, airplanes, TVs, cars, telephones nor computers, but who are immortalized in this electronic information machine chain beyond the imagination or prophecy of anyone of their time. And it seemed to him an invasion too to put them in it, in that  we don’t know if they would consent, and it somehow violates their dignity and simplicity.

     So maybe tar isn’t the end. In what unthought of way might Damien be memorialized in future centuries or milleniums? Dan Larkin and Veronica Casey probably never went to L.A., it was VERY far away, and they would have been astounded in 1837 to know that someone in L.A. in the twentieth  and twenty first centuries could be reading their marriage announcement. Everything that ever happened happened. That implied an accountability, but maybe also a reward for things done right. .

     All at once, Damien was enveloped in this room by an overwhelming euphoric intoxication, immersed in it the same way that he was within the earth’s atmosphere. He had no words to describe what he was happening to him. He was high on…something. He’d felt it before in other places (once at his father’s grave), but only one time before was it this intense, and that had been in Korea at an old Buddhist temple high on a wooded and secluded hillside.

     He realized the young woman had returned and was speaking to him from the doorway.

     “Father will be with you in a moment. He asked what your name is.”

     Damien heard his own voice as if from a tape recorder as he replied, “Damien Rennard.”

     ”Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Renoir.”

      He didn’t remember getting up, but sure enough he was standing.

      “Okay. Thank you.”

     “Are you alright? Would you like a glass of water?”

     “No, nothing. I feel terrific. How about you?”

     If she was feeling like he was, she’d say so. She didn’t answer, but stood watching him, apparently waiting to see that he sat before she left.

     As he sat back down in the same chair, he asked, “Do you feel anything?”

     She was regarding him now with misgiving, possibly remembering this was Hollywood, and thinking that, church or not, they  probably shouldn’t  give everyone such free access to the rectory.

     “It won’t be long,” she said, and was gone. So she wasn’t feeling what he was, but she did, after all, have a reason for working here. Maybe she felt it sometimes.

     Damien tried to comprehend this---what?  Spiritual rapture? Endorphin  crescendo? It would  be enough for now to accept it, experience it, even as he knew it would not last. If he never left this room, it wouldn’t last. What was it? He didn’t know. He was pretty sure it was God, and surely God would accompany him when he left this room, but He wouldn’t be with him this way. Was it God?  The God of this Church, whose rectory he was in.? The Catholic God of his childhood was never explained to him as Santa Claus and didn’t dispense good feelings or “highs”. He was a God of  accountability, of toil and suffering in “this vale of tears”,  and the Church gave moral support for a hard life that could be endured virtuously through grace, and would be rewarded in eternity. Hard lives should be rewarded, but was there any reason God wouldn’t occasionally manifest Himself with an inkling of what it’s like to be in His Presence, the promise, after all, of Catholicism’s Heaven? And if God subscribed to the Catholic doctrine of Baptism of Desire (as Damien thought He did),  the Catholic teaching  that states that believers of all religions who are sincere practitioners of their faiths and who live righteous lives are among the saved,  baptized by their intention to serve God, then why wouldn’t Damien feel what he felt now also at a Bhuddist temple?

     It was soon after he’d arrived in the country. He was working in a province in the center of South Korea from north to south, along the west coast. His English students were themselves Korean English language teachers, and it was a very hot July day, so ditching the classroom for an excursion became the requested afternoon program.

     He rode as a passenger in a car with several of them, in a caravan of three cars. A dirt road, barely wide enough for the vehicles, ran up a hillside beneath a green panoply of  summer filled branches that permitted only speckled sunlight into the shade. Eventually they came to a clear spot with several tombs, explained to Damien as belonging to an ancient scholar and his family. Then they climbed higher again along the wooded road, the car Damien was in bumping hard in ruts and skidding on loose gravel, until they reached another cleared and somewhat level place,  which was the site of the temple.

    First encountered was a crude unpaved parking lot, or at least an area they used as such, and from there they had to walk along a gradually inclined footpath. The path ended at a well, where there were wooden cups and ladles  on pegs hammered into one of the inner stone walls of the well The short foot climb was enough on this blistering day, with the tree shadows vanishing in the clearing, to make everybody thirsty, and all, including Damien, had a drink

     Only a few feet farther was the temple and a traditional pagoda style house, both  with  grooved, concave, ceramic shingled roofs, the type of  Asian architecture that is a rarity now in Korea because virtually all the buildings in the country were destroyed or damaged during the Korean War, and what remains have become protected treasures.

     The temple was small, as was the house. There were a woman, a young girl about three years old and a robed monk on the grounds outside. Damien didn’t think monks married, but they seemed to be a family.

     He had ridden in the car driven by Mr. Ko, a young (as most of them were) teacher about thirty, so Ko was beside him when he walked to the temple entrance. There and then he felt it, the same current of ecstasy.

     The door of the temple was open, and inside he could see lit candles and a statue of Buddha. It looked very peaceful and welcoming in there, and Damien moved toward the entry, but Mr. Ko stopped him by asking, “Do you want to go inside?”

     “Can I”

     “Let me ask. Wait a minute.”

     Ko summoned the woman (the monk had gone in the house or somewhere), and she was presently beside him.

     She said, in English that didn’t sound like she knew much of it, “You can go inside if you can say ‘I accept the Buddha’”.

     How could he say that?  He didn’t know what it meant. He savored his communion and stayed outside in the doorway, knowing HE was right: Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with dogma, with what he accepted or didn’t accept.

     There was some conversation among the Koreans, and Damien was told they were going to sit. They went back in the direction of the well, then to a spot beside the house where there were two long wooden picnic tables with benches, in the shade of a tree. Damien, with seven or eight Korean teachers, sat at the tables, and the woman brought them oranges.

     When she left, the monk joined them. .Damien didn’t understand anything the monk said, and he never addressed Damien nor introduced himself, speaking only to the teachers. He had a physicality and manner that seemed very un-monk-like, powerfully built with a deep voice and an aggressive demeanor, and within a few minutes it became clear to Damien, without speaking the language, that he was berating the teachers about something. He became more forceful, and finally had them silent, looking away from him or at the ground, very uncomfortable, probably especially the men, who must have felt they should have stood up to him (as Damien felt, though he had language incomprehension and being the stranger as excuses). Damien would never ask what it was about, because he knew he wouldn't  be told.  Koreans didn’t discuss such matters with foreigners, though it was certainly a scenario he’d seen played out in the U.S. and Canada  too. Whatever the issue here, he believed it had to do with doctrine and self righteousness. When the monk was through, when he was satisfied that he had belittled and humiliated them, he walked away, victorious. He had ignored Damien as though anything he might think would be insignificant.

     This monk, who was the caretaker of this temple, was in direct contradiction to the feeling Damien experienced. He couldn’t reconcile the differences, but he attempted explanation: God is, and people aren’t (God). When things are going great, they’re about to go wrong. Not Murphy’s Law exactly (If Anything Can Go Wrong It Will) but Damien had his own, close to Murphy’s: Every Situation Has Its Asshole. Every job. Every apartment building. Every revolution. Every laundromat. Every bingo game. Every orgy. Assholes know no boundaries of race, gender, nationality or religion. In every group of people there is at least one asshole. Sometimes, yes often, there are several. It’s the asshole factor, the asshole premise: Some P (People) are A(Assholes).

                            (pie drawing)

     Now of course defining assholism is subjective (for instance nobody thinks he’s one), so it can’t be proven empirically. But, he thought, you know it, I know it, everybody knows it: There are assholes everywhere. Thus, when things are going great, they’re right on the verge of getting all fucked up. Just when you’ve found God, you’re going to start thinking there isn’t one.

     Most younger people in Korea are Christian. The older more traditional folk, especially poor farmers in the countryside, are Buddhist, but it turned out that Mr. Ko was a Buddhist. He began showing Damien the beads, explaining that each bead was a Buddha, representing a hundred and one Buddhas or something like that. It was enough to cause brain damage. A hundred and one Buddhas or trombones or Dalmatians, it was dogma. It reminded him of going to Mass, as he occasionally did, where he felt during the Consecration that he was truly present at a miracle. He didn’t know if he believed in the Divinity of Jesus anymore, yet he had no doubt that by the intention to summon Him God was present in the Communion. God, whatever  It’s true essence, was pleased at the attempt by humans to seek and know Him. God WAS, and was for everyone.

     But the mood spoiled when the priest stopped the Mass and HAD TO get up to the pulpit and talk. His speaking banished all sense of spirituality. Why couldn’t they all just shut up and leave it alone? The Korean monk, the priests with their moralizing, Mr. Ko. Even when they weren’t trying to, they were filling the asshole equation.

     Well, they were serving up the same ecstasy here today at Annunciation Church. Another possible explanation for this phenomenon occurred to Damien: A trick of the Devil. But this sense of spiritual communication was too beautiful and benevolent to be demonic. The Devil couldn’t have it in him. A fish smells like a fish. However the Devil might disguise himself, he couldn’t masquerade as God. That was a given, a guarantee of Catholic theology. Santa Claus gifts, material distractions (like his job and his Corvette and his house and Allison?) might be tricks intended to divert, but to divert from what? Damien was not being seduced from a former life of piety and service. Why would the Devil bother? Temptation wasn’t necessary to keep Damien from following his namesake, Father Damien de Veuster, the  Belgian missionary who’d devoted his life to the care of patients exiled in a leper colony. This Damien was no candidate for sainthood. Why would the Devil bribe HIM?

     More than a devil’s trick, good fortune, in it’s fleeing, could be a message from God that  this is a temporary world and ALL things go. Abrupt endings might be a slap on the head, a rough wake-up call

     He was back in the reality of the rectory as a very energetic priest about forty years old suddenly entered the room, a glowing Latin man dressed halfway in transition between vestment garments for serving Mass and casual attire.

     “Would you join me for lunch?” he asked.

     Feeling now that he was imposing, Damien said, “Oh, I didn’t realize it was lunch time.”

     “We eat meals early here. Come with me.”

     Damien followed him and was taken to a small dining nook off a pantry and kitchen, where he again saw the housekeeper.

     “One more for lunch, Bridget” the priest said, then addressed Damien once more. “I’m Father Pete. Pete Morales. I hope you like Mexican food.”

     "Yeah, of course."

     Patricio  to Pete. He didn't want to be Pat. The wrong ethnic for "Going My Way."

     “Enchiladas today. Let’s sit.”

     Though Father Pete himself seemed to carry a trace of what Damien experienced in the waiting room (maybe was responsible for it), the intensity was dissipating, as he’d predicted it would. It wasn’t gone with the ugliness of the scene with the bullying monk, but leaving nevertheless. He would stop in the waiting room again before he left, but it wouldn’t be as strong. He had returned to the old  Korean temple, and though it was pleasant and peaceful the second time (and neither the monk nor the woman nor child were in sight)  he experienced a mild serenity which he felt  even now from Father Morales.

     Why did he feel it? He asked the Korean teachers that day at the temple if they felt anything, and they didn’t (so it wasn’t anything in the well water either). Mr. Ko of course assumed he was seeking instruction, which was as bad as the Catechism or the sermon at the Mass. It wasn’t about ideas, any of them, in any temple or church, and yet it was in those places that Damien felt It. If he felt it and other people didn’t, why was that? Was he to somehow act?  If he knew what to do, maybe he would. But he couldn’t preach because he had no sermon. The religions were all right and they were all wrong, and worst of all, they were too often killing each other. He knew the existence of God, but didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe there was nothing to do but accept it. And give something back for his fortune. At Annunciation’s food program. As good a place as any. Father Pete was a good man. Bridget was a good woman. Good, but not perfect, because they were only people. But they were trying, and he could too.

     Bridget brought the food in, set it on the table, then sat down with them. As they ate, Father Pete asked, “Do you know what KP is?”

     “I’ve heard of it.”

     “Never been in the military?”

     He’d thought about joining after college. That would have got citizenship for him, but the job in Korea came along instead. Somehow he thought the Army would have sent him to Korea anyway. He believed he would have gone there one way or another.

     “I’m not American.”

     Father Pete looked surprised, probably because he thought Damien looked like an American. “I was an Army chaplain. KP is kitchen police. Hard work and not very glamorous. Unless you can cook.”

     “Not for more than two people at a time.”

     The priest had a good laugh about that. “You’ll definitely be a grunt then.”

     “I’m no stranger to hard work,” Damien said..

     Father Morales said they could use him starting today, around four o’clock to set up for the serving at five or five thirty. That gave it the hard structure of the small maple table they were eating at, transforming his nice platonic idea to a looming reality. The priest accepted his offer, and actually wanted him to work, almost immediately. Defenses started shooting up spikes around the moat: “I have to prepare myself for this”,  “Allison doesn’t know and expects me home at dinner time”,  “I’m tired” (I only slept till ten today.)

     But he knew he wouldn’t feel any more like it tomorrow, and agreed to be back at four o’clock. He could call Allison and kill some time at the Goldwyn Library on Ivar Avenue.

     The inexpensive but wholesome Mexican meal he’d just had, of enchiladas, refritos, tortillas and rice, was ironic contrast to what he’d be serving tonight, which the pastor told him consisted of a main staple of brown beans cooked in a big pot, stewing as they spoke, with lettuce salad, coffee and  super- market- contributed bread too old to sell.

     Damien did call Allison, and then went to the Samuel Goldwyn branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, specially funded by the Goldwyn family, in all ways a  well resourced  public library, but also emphasizing the Hollywood film industry.

     And it’s in Hollywood, so being a public place, the public comes in, among them senior citizens, students, thespians and hobos. A preview, if one was needed, of who he’d be encountering tonight, was in the restroom, two guys bare to the waist, taking an improvised bath at the basins, stinking worse than skunk spray and rotten eggs. He supposed the good news was they cared enough to wash.

     After that encounter, he went upstairs and browsed the fiction stacks, settling finally on an anthology of Stephen Crane novellas and stories, that he took to a table to read. The first piece was "Maggie: A Girl of The Streets."  Astounded at the similarities of the life and characters of lower Manhattan in the 1890's to what he had known in the Bronx of today, Damien glanced up, reflecting on that. As he did, he looked into the eyes of a fat man at another table. The eyes seemed intense and angry, but the contact with him was for only a moment. Damien thought somehow he'd been watching him, but how could he know?  Damien had looked at him too. Maybe they'd looked at each other simultaneously, inadvertently. The man looked away and paid no more attention to Damien. It was probably nothing. The anger could be unrelated, over anything, maybe even just imagined.

     When he went back at four o’clock, Bridget introduced  him to Cliff, who supervised the shebang. Cliff was a guy of medium stature who could only be in his early thirties, but who at first appraisal appeared middle aged because he had a gut (maybe a beer belly) and combed  his thin hair back in a way that actually accentuated the encroaching baldness in the cowlicks above his eyes. Cliff was every insurance company’s coffee guy, every shipping clerk’s supervisor, and the way he told it, they really only needed a new cook, they had plenty of other servers, but one more pair of hands couldn’t hurt for setting up and cleaning up. He had Damien thinking he was a burden, one more uncalled for responsibility

     After the set up, which WAS fast and simple, Cliff had Damien watch. It was like he was an extra server, a “stand-by” or “on-call”. Cliff wanted him to see how serving food was done, so he’d be ready. He was beginning to feel that his being used even for set-up and clean-up was irrelevant, but that Father Pete hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings nor quaff his good intentions (the road to hell being paved with them if they aren’t acted upon.)

     The message Damien was getting was that he was the true recipient of his philanthropic effort. Now he had known that to be true from the beginning, but their acceptance of his offer without really needing him was focusing the point just a little too clearly.

     He watched the serving. The homeless shuffled in, their plastic bags and rucksacks left outside on a patio. They took trays and passed in a cafeteria style line. They were smelly and angry and dangerous, and those that weren’t completely deranged were half crazy.

     And then, for a moment, he thought one of them was Frank Larkin. Frank was a BIG man, as was this gentleman, the left side of whose face was so bruised and swollen it was not only black and blue but purple and pink.Because the bashed face made his features almost unrecognizable, for one heart thumping second, Damien was sure he was Frank.

     Just as he realized he was wrong, the guy noticed him gaping and said, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

     Damien said quickly, “I thought you were a friend of mine.”

     “I don’t have no friends. Neither do you.” His drawl was Deep South, maybe Georgia.

     “I just…”

     “Think about it. Would this old boy die for you? I look like somebody you KNOW, that’s all. Nobody has no friends.”

     To Damien’s relief, having made the point about his philosophy of life, he continued through the food line. Got his beans, lettuce (today with donated French dressing), black coffee and stale bread, and went in to feed his face in the dining area, which was set up with card tables covered by real Italian restaurant style tablecloths.

     Clean up was actually work. He had to bus and wipe tables, tote a bucket, swing a heavy mop, and scour and clean the big cooking pot, the serving pots and the eating trays. And the Big Pot was the monster. The bean scum had been cooked into it for many hours, and adhered like a coating of resin that had to be scrubbed to break up like sanded plaster on a wall, then scraped off. It was KP requiring mighty efforts of elbow grease, whatever Cliff has said about his not really being needed.

     Then, when he was finally finished, Cliff asked him to come back tomorrow. Cliff, in his peculiar way, had tested him and Damien had passed. Put another way, maybe Cliff just liked to break chops.

     He got home to Malibu after ten thirty, and trying to explain to Allison what he was doing and WHY made him feel unaccustomedly self conscious, even embarrassed. And this time she wasn’t supportive. She didn’t say, “I’m behind you, baby, whatever you do.” She got up at five thirty, and with Damien getting home this late, they wouldn’t have evenings together. She would suffer for Damien’s volunteerism, and what was the point? The food program had been operating yesterday, without Damien.

     That night he had a dream. Cliff had promoted him from extra server to actual server, and the big guy with the rainbow face came through again, only this time he WAS Frank Larkin.

     Damien asked, “Frank, what happened to you?”

     What he meant was, What happened to your life? How did you get like this?, but Frank thought he was talking about his face (about which, yes, Damien was also curious.)

     Frank said, “Jigs.”

     At least half the people in the line were African American and men. Damien said a precautionary, “Frank”.

     “Jigs.”

     A black guy right behind Frank said,

     “Jigs. Irish dancers. They riverdanced his face.”

     From further back in the line, somebody said, “Frankie  has to be mad at somebody. Look at him. Anyway, we call him ‘Harpie’”

     Somebody else said, “Paddy.”

     Another said, “ Mick”

     Frank smiled and said, “See, they’re my friends.”

     But nobody has any, Frank. You said so last night.

     To get in the spirit of this whatever-it-was that was somehow making ethnic slurring fun, a word game show, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune combined, with the subject Political Incorrectness, Damien said, “Just don’t call him ‘Donkey’”, which was a particular derision Frank abhorred.

     So of course, someone said “Dong- Key.”

     .Frank said to Damien, “Fuck you, Frog -Gee. Madame Le Farge.”, but he wasn’t mad, he was  smiling on the right side where he could still move facial muscles, because they were all getting prizes somewhere for this and everybody should be jumping up and down right now and trying to have orgasms. (That would be Wheel of Fortune; Jeopardy tries to be dignified.)

     Knowing he was probably spoiling the whole mood, Damien said, “Frank, I have a place you can stay.” He left out “in Malibu”.

      “What about these guys? They need a place too.”

     “They understand you’re my homeboy.”

     “No.”

    “I’ll give you my phone number. Let me help you.”

     “You can’t help me. I have to help myself.”

     And Frank looked at him with that right eye, the left one swollen shut, the right side of his face as stern as a scolding high school principal’s, the left half treated now with some kind of white salve that made that side look like a cream cheese and jelly sandwich on white bread, using plum and strawberry flavors.

      Frank said with disgust, “How can you do this?”

     Damien knew, yes, Frank was angry that somebody witnessed his plight, that somebody was superior enough to feed him, that better off to be able to, but more than that, his disdain was for Damien’s purpose, his mission. What he meant by “How can you do this?” was, How can you stoop to altruism?   Don’t you have anything better to do?  Volunteers should get a life so real people can have their jobs and get paid. Maybe some of us could pass out those farty beans. So what if Annunciation is a poor parish and has no money? We could call donors. There are lots of rich Catholics. And that bunch in the Vatican has lots of money.

CHAPTER FIVE

     The dream didn’t keep him from quitting, but it gave him more perspective on his volunteerism, presented views of it from other angles (like Allison’s). He was actually heart broken that she hadn’t pretended to approve, but she was honest, and that probably meant all her other support was real. He should quit for her (it would seem like that was the real sacrifice, spending the evenings with his beautiful fiance), but he felt he’d committed to it. He did make a compromise to her and to himself though. He’d do it for a while, until he was on TV, and then he’d donate what Father Morales needed far more than any labor Damien could give,  los  dollars Americanos.

     On Saturday morning, which was about ten days after Allison had called the phone company for the number change, they were outside on the deck having late breakfast and planning to go down to their little beach, where sand that had been underwater a few hours ago was baked dry by early afternoon June sunlight that reflected garlands of silver tinsel on the black and blue cast ocean. Two Foot Wide was looking mighty enticing when the phone rang in the house.

     Allison, who was closest to the stairs, darted up them and into the kitchen where the extension was. She came out the door again in a moment and said, “For you.”

     “Nick?”

     “Not Nick. I don’t know.”

     Who would be calling on precious weekends, when all had been told not to? For a moment, merging dreams with reality, or remembering the dream, he thought of Frank Larkin.  Frank was down in Huntington Beach now, doing fine as a licensed mover, an agent for one of the big long distance companies. And Frank was a writer too. Damien had known him to be a dabbler and scribbler, an open mike poet, but began to see his byline lately in Elay Week, and even an article by him in Westwood Magazine.  Distance was the reason they weren’t in touch with each other much, but Damien did plan to talk to Frank soon and fill him in on his doings.

     The white telephone hung on the wall papered with a white, lilac and purple columnar pattern  (Allison was the designer, and Damien, with time for it, was doing the labor).

     He picked up the phone, and still at peace despite an intrusion, said buoyantly, “Hello?”

     No answer.

     His spirits would not be so easily banished.  With continuing enthusiasm, he said,

     “Good morning…afternoon.”

     There was still no immediate answer, until he was about to move the phone from his ear to hang up, when a male voice said, “I’ve been calling you all night. Don’t you answer your phone?”

     The phone WAS pulled out last night because they’d been…well. His bon vivant was being tempered just a bit now by this juvenile prank. What imbecile..?

     “Who is this?” Damien asked impatiently.

     “Is Harry Hartman there?”

     The voice was  nasal, midwestern sounding,  Bob Dylan turned stalker. It couldn’t be Sarge, not even with his voice altered. Sarge was too deep and gravelly, and he wouldn’t be able to disguise that quality, any more than he could change his  Brooklyneese to Nebraskan.

     “Is he there?”,  the caller asked again.

     Damien thought, Just hang up. Don’t let him put a hex on the day. But he wanted to consider the implications of this call before he did ANYTHING, so he replied, “You have a wrong number.”

     “No I don’t.”

     If he hung up, this dickhead would just call back again. Sometime. He had to resolve it.

     “Look”, he said, “Let’s cut the shit, okay?  Who is this, and what do you want?”

     Silence.

     Damien continued, “Hey, maybe you think I did something I shouldn’t have, but don’t handle it this way. Don’t harass me.”

    “Are you Harry Hartman?”

     “No!”

      “Then you didn’t do anything to me.”

     “He doesn’t exist.”

     “Yes he does.”

     Damien had money to pay off any fines, he could plea bargain an arrest for operating an unlicensed moving company and probably do community service. What he was doing already at Annunciation would probably count. The business had been a phase of his life mired in the tar of financial desperation. He wasn’t moving furniture anymore, so the big companies wouldn’t care. They couldn’t want revenge.

     He said, “Harry Hartman was a name I made up to run an ad in the paper. If there’s really somebody with that name, probably somewhere there is, it was unintentional.”

     There, that was said.

      “You were listing his P.U.C. license number.”

     “I made that up too.”

     “License 846791?”

     He knew that number by heart, he had seen it so many times in the paper. It had brought him good luck, so he bought lottery tickets with combinations of those numbers, and even occasionally won a few bucks.

     What had he said now? He’d just admitted fraud to this anonymous caller. It was one thing to operate an unlicensed business, which was possibly legally defensible on the basis that the licensing and rate schedules were an infringement on free enterprise, but making up a license number to run an ad in a newspaper was, well, fraud, even if it was the PUC requiring the newspaper to run the license number in the ad.

     “I can’t talk to you anymore,” Damien said.

     “846791 is Harry Hartman’s PUC number.”

     That couldn’t even be a coincidental possibility, but he didn’t want to keep self incriminating. He said, “You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, you know.”

     Then he added, “I have to go now. I have to talk to my lawyer.”

     “A lawyer can’t help you.”

     “Can’t hurt.”

     “Tell Harry I want to talk to him.”

     “Sure. Who are you?”

     “Just tell him he had a caller.”

     He hung up

   . What would happen now? Was Harry Hartman going to call in and ask if he had any messages? Was this an elaborate prank? Somebody from the PUC who learned about his success and was having a little fun? Maybe Ken or one of his other helpers, or Lou , the guy he used to rent trucks from?  Somebody who knew him then, and knew about now. But he hadn’t given any of them his phone number, and he wasn’t listed.

     Allison had come in, almost unnoticed, but now she pulled the straps of her one piece black and yellow bathing suit down to examine a mosquito bite in her flesh on the right side at the big rib just below her breast. A red welt with a white head at the point of the bite was contrasting her smooth pale skin. She had a tube of salve in her hand, and she squeezed some onto a finger, and applied the ointment. Damien wanted to help, though there wasn’t any help needed. It had only required a dab, but he wanted to spread cream. Never mind last night---this was a new day.

      Allison saw the look in his face and moved closer. Two Foot Wide Beach could wait this afternoon, and if the tides came back in, well, they’d go out again. Bizarre phone calls from nut cases receded to insignificance. Right now there was him and Allison, and really, none of the rest of it, good or bad, had ever mattered.

     Later, when conversing became an option again, Allison remembered to ask him who called when they were on the deck (where, they realized, the brunch dishes still were, no doubt providing a feast for the big beach dragonflies.)

     They were in the bedroom. They’d made it there, though they’d dallied in the living room for a while. Allison had no angle either on who the prankster might be, but she thought he was probably no real threat or he wouldn’t be doing something so impotent as nuisance calling. His payoff was getting Damien’s goat, and the way to handle it was to simply hang up any time he called again. They resolved to do just that.

CHAPTER SIX

     There were no more calls. A month passed, the commercials were on TV, Damien was now a recognizable face in America, and he was getting residuals on top of the basic fees Nick had paid already paid him. Then came the fruition of Nick’s promise. He wanted to bring Damien into “The Family Way” as a character. Good for ratings and great for the sponsor, who was willing to pay $$ Even-More if their spokesman was in the show. And it meant Damien would now be very busy.

     Things were no so fantastic, life was so wonderfully unreal, Damien was afraid his brain might explode. It just couldn’t be this good.

     And then he started having the dreams about the tar figures. They were clawing their way out of the pond at the Tar Pits at night and making their way up Wilshire Boulevard between the tall office buildings. They looked like large versions of Uncle Remus’s tar babies in Disney’s “Song of The South”, bigger creatures than Br'er Rabbit or Br'er Fox, but definitely not mammoths or saber toothed tigers or wolves. They were more the size and shape of people, not a species without precedence, remember, in the guck at Wilshire and Cochran.

     Black gobs of tar with heads and limbs, adult sized melted rubber embryos, were crawling up,  lumbering over the park gate into Wilshire Boulevard, then staggering along on the sidewalk and in the street, some bent at the waist, lurching toward the ocean in a formation that was like the end of a marathon race for the undead. If there was motor traffic, but they seemed oblivious to it, and it to them. His dreams didn’t deal with explanations of how or why. 

     Among them, he knew were all the L.A. dreamers mired in their fantasies, the wannabe stars who could only be extras, the crazies from earlier periods  who were still a part of contemporary L.A., still as loony and delusional as their predecessors. In recent decades they had been joined by new Hollywood dreamers, slicker, who came to be rock and roll stars, the old hope addicts crowded in by new hopers, who were often addicted also to heroin or cocaine or AA coffee.

     Rockers and supernumeraries alike had been trapped up to their necks, then over their heads.  And there with them were Damien and Allison. Like the mastodons before them. Though never background extras nor guitar dudes/dudettes, he and and Allison were also stuck, had been for some time, even before the success came. L.A. did that to you, whoever you were.

          Damien’s dreams sounded a trumpet to all the lost dreamers bubbling in their frustration and rage below Hollywood-the-place, and in the real world, the tar in the big pit bubbles. There were others interred there too, he knew, those who came and  willingly dove like lemmings into the tar (though no actual lemmings have so far been found),  people who arrived without even the delusions of the rockers and “atmospheric background”, who at least still believed in something, however self deceptive. The divers had no hope at all, and they gave rise to that mean, retaliatory conservative streak that forged city politics of old in personifications like Mayor Sam Yorty, Howard Jarvis of Proposition 13 fame, and Police Chief William Parker. Damien had read city history. Jarvis and Yorty and Parker weren’t among the ghouls in his dreams because the Tar Pits are in Hollywood, or close to it for a stickler, and not downtown. But their constituency was being exhumed, their supporters, who had been fossilized, and metamorphosed in the present as people like the tour bus operator who proclaims himself the Mayor of Hollywood and current members of the Redevelopment Commission.   

         He knew there were other folks represented too, marching to the end of the continent, forebears of  street people on the Boulevard today, right now, who will TELL you they are vampires. If you doubt it, go and ask. Hollywood Boulevard, around Cherokee or Las Palmas, after dark. Be careful.

         For the hopers, his vision was a summonsing to a Hollywood Judgement Day, a last open casting call---we’re looking at basted mummies this time---aspirants dredged up in their asphalt shrouds only to be told once again that many are called but few are chosen. For hopers and hopeless alike, the whole stumbling parade was a zombie resurrection of the misfit and overlooked, from the grave into which they had leapt or wandered, after sliding from the northern and eastern forty seven and Canada, leaving behind as they did those essential human tethers of community and family, to become outcasts and self banished souls who hadn’t escaped anything after all because it was the tar of their pasts, that tar, that had driven them into the pit, to tar everlasting. Tar to tar as dust to dust. Remember man that thou art dust, but tar you shall accumulate and maybe strangle on.

    Recurring dreams are confusing. Damien was not sure if he had a lot of dreams about the licorice  Gumbies, or only had two or three, but dreamt in them that he had a lot of dreams. In that regard (uncertain repetition), the tar dreams were like his flying dreams, two specific recurring dreams that contradicted each other, at least in his

 interpretation of them. In Flying Dream 1, he is going to New York holding on to the wing of an airplane. It’s cold, his hands are slipping and the plane just took off from L.A.. He can’t hold on for even a few minutes, much less several hours. As his fingers lose their grip, he wakes up with the window open or the covers off.

     In Flying Dream 2, he is back in Korea. In this dream, HE flies, goes cruising at night in his body across the rice fields and hills and lighted nighttime roads of the countryside, with a sense of the greatest exhilaration and freedom (and power because only he can do this nocturnal flying, no one else even knows about it, and he probably could rule the world with this skill if he thought long enough about how.)

     In one dream he is impotent, going someplace he can’t or shouldn’t go, and dying for his effort. In the other, he can go anywhere, he is the freest of humans. (Maybe not anywhere. He only flies in Korea, and close to the ground to see everything. He senses he probably can’t make the long jaunt across the Pacific, and wouldn’t be inclined to. His excursions are joy riding. Airline routes are work, and so far he hasn’t taken any passengers. He’d like to take Allison for a spin, but she hasn’t visited that dream yet, though it does seem it began after he met her.)

     He thought the tar dreams had to be connected to the visit by Sarge and the harassment calls. Things were going so well it was causing him insecurity. He remembered other intervals in his life, good moments that in no way matched what he had today, but that were always demolished somehow by an indifferent reality or the asshole equation.                

CHAPTER SEVEN

     Damien had been incorporated into The Family Way, and when he went to work one Monday at Wilton Studios, the halls were teeming with uniformed cops, stage ones that looked very real for something that was being done on an adjacent set. He wasn’t in the scene that was being rehearsed at the moment, and was relaxing by himself in his dressing room going over lines  when this tall guy appeared in the mirror above the make-uo table, standing in the doorway. He looked like one of the network honchos who stalk around in suits but never introduce themselves and he stepped into the room. Damien thought it peculiar he would ask, as if he didn’t know,

     “Are you Damien Rennard?”

     “Yeah. Of course.”

     “My name is Ward McFarland. Can I talk to you for a moment?”

     “Sure.” Damien moved over on the sofa to make room.

     Ward McFarland took out his wallet and showed a big gold badge that read Los Angeles Police Dept, then sat next to Damien (so he apparently didn’t expect him to be a problem). They were eyeball to eyeball in that uncomfortable space violation of two people in an on-camera close-up.

     He said, “I just want to ask you about something.”

     Detective McFarland was being very polite and very respectful and had eaten pepperoni pizza for lunch.

     “What?”

     “A Missing Person’s report. Do you know someone named Harry Hartman?”

     Damien smirked. On the set! Come on. They had lots of props here, fake badges, idle actors hanging around with too much time on their hands.

     To get away from the pizza aftertaste aroma, Damien got up suddenly, and it caused McFarland to bolt to his feet also, almost alarmed.

     Damien said sarcastically,  “I think he owned a moving company.”

     “A movie company?”

     “A movie company, a moving company, what the fuck is the difference?”

     “His father thought you might know where he is.”

     “I only take messages for him.”

     “When did you talk to him last?”

    “Jesus! I’m getting ready to go on camera, you know? I don’t need this. Did Nick put you up to this?”

     “Nick?”

     “Nick Morrissey. The producer. You know, our boss.”

     “Mr. Rennard, when did you speak to Harry Hartman last?”

     “I have never spoken knowingly to Harry Hartman in my life.”

     McFarland took out  his wallet again and presented a business card with a logo of his badge that indeed stated he was a detective. So, another prop.

     “If you think of anything that might help us, any information, call me.”

     Damien pointed an index finger at  him and said, “April Fool.”

     “It’s July, Mr. Rennard.”

     A rhyme from his childhood, taught to him by the good Sisters of Mercy at St. Francis Grammar School in Toronto, came to him and he recited it now for the actor/cop Detective McF.

     “April Fool’s is past and gone, And here’s the fool who’s carried it on.”

     McFarland was squinting now, scrutinizing him intensely through narrow eye slits.

     “Do you have any mental problems?” he asked.

     “Not until this moment.”

      “Drug use?”

      “For the record, No. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell a cop, would I? Who’s writing this material?”

      McFarland was shaking his head. “Because there’s help, you know. Your behavior is very peculiar. I’m here because a man’s father filed a Missing Persons report with us.”

     “And sent you to me?”

     “Yes.”

     “Well, where is his father, so I can set him straight?”

      “He went back to Omaha this morning.”

     Bingo on the accent. Damien picked Nebraska for the caller in Malibu. Why wasn’t Damien filing a report?

     “That’s convenient. I thought people get to confront their accuser in this country. This great democracy.”

     “No one’s accusing you of anything.”

     That reminder actually took some stress away. “That’s true, isn’t it?”, he said. “So how did I do?”

     “What?”

     “On this improv. Do I pass?”

     “You say some odd things.”

     “No more than you.”

     “We just hope you’ll help us.”

     “Sure. I’d love to.”

     “We won’t, we can’t, force you to do anything, but I want you to feel free to call me anytime. Maybe we can help each other.”

     Damien wasn’t quite sure what that latter meant, but he thought it was a reference again to his mental health and/or drug use.

     McFarland went to the doorway, then stopped. How cliched. A “Colombo” thing to do. At least he didn’t point like Peter Falk, and his suit didn’t look like he’d slept in it

     He said, “It’s not a joke, Mr. Rennard”

   . Then he left.

     Wasn’t this a prank?  He took McFarland’s business card, went to the phone, dialed 9 for an outside line, then the number on the card, 483-5302.

     He got McFarland’s voice on tape saying he was a detective and asking him to leave a message. He hung up, then called again, only this time dialing 483-5300, which sounded like a main switchboard number.

     At first he got a recorded menu for the Los Angeles Police Department, and when he pressed 0, a female voice answered live, “ Desk, Seargant Stearns speaking”

     No, it wasn’t a prank

     He hung up again.

     Damien had a sudden urge to release this burden. He wasn’t a terrible person. He had just done a few practical things that some people might construe as wrong, or at least illegal. If McFarland was looking for the truth and Damien told him, maybe then they’d just leave him alone.

     He dialed the number on the business card once again. This time he waited out the beep, then left a message.

     “It’s Damien Rennard, Detective. This is what I know about Harry Hartman, and all I know. I made up that name and a PUC registration number with it so I could run an ad as a mover in the Hollywood Commercial. It was a total fabrication. If there’s a real person named Harry Hartman, it’s just a coincidence. I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t know he existed.

     “If you need to talk to me more, please call me at home, not at work. I’ll be there after ten tonight.”

     Then he left his home phone number on the recording.

CHAPTER EIGHT

     With a regular role in The Family Way, he really didn’t have time anymore for the food program. The money he was donating was of course far more beneficial than any cathartic sweat he could produce, and he wouldn’t miss that he could no longer experience the odor and menace of the street people, witness the immediate tragedy of their lives, be present for their suffering in the manner of the Damien his mother had named him after, the missionary priest who ministered to lepers and became one himself.  This Damien was relieved that his schedule excused him and conceded that he’d never wanted to do it, especially scrubbing that bean pot. He’d just liked the idea.

     It was a week since he’d left the voice message for McFarland, and the detective hadn’t called him back. He began to quit worrying that he might get arrested over the advertising or the business. He’d told McFarland everything, there was no reply, so maybe now the entire hassle would just go away.

     Suddenly, Allison and Damien wanted to get married. No matter that they’d had all this time when he was doing nothing and she could have taken time off from subbing. It just hadn’t occurred to them that that was a good time. NOW was a good time, except they had none.

     They had to do it on a Saturday morning at the Malibu courthouse, where they moved to the front of a long waiting list with but a word to the Court Clerk from Mr. Morrissey’s office. Damien wouldn’t ordinarily want to be bumped ahead of other people, but when he considered that he was jumping line on some of the colony’s finest and flashiest, it just seemed alright. Nick needed him to be available Monday, this had to be done, and that was that.

     So he and Allison were married by a judge. Nick and Jeannie were their witnesses, and took them to Sea Shells on the highway for lunch, after which they drove down to Ensenada in the Corvette for their overnight honeymoon.

     The road between Tijuana and Ensenada is spectacular, like Big Sur without the redwoods, treeless along Mexican desert bluffs over a panorama of the Pacific from cliffs high above the water. North America has its rivieras, Big Sur in Northern California for one, and this road to Ensenada another, but come next hiatus, Damien vowed he would  take Allison to the European ones.

    As they came into Ensenada, the road became a traffic circle, with a kiosk in the center, and the cars spun out as if by centrifugal force onto streets that were like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The kiosk, in the center of the traffic round, was a drive-by information center for tourists, with two uniformed officials, a man and a woman, inside, and a counter outside filled with glossy brochures and stapled stacks of  memeographed  pages.

    Allison said,  “Let’s get a map.”

    Damien stopped at the window, and she grabbed from several of the piles. As he pulled away, she looked through the papers.

    “We have a map, something about insurance, and a bunch of ads.”

    She continued reading while he drove, and then said, “When you have a chance, you need to read this insurance pamphlet. Mexico has Napoleonic Law.”

    “Napoleonic Law? The burden is on the accused to prove he’s innocent.”

     “it says if you have an accident, you’re assumed at fault, and have to pay for any deaths or injuries or property damage until you can prove in court it wasn’t your fault. If you don’t have money, you stay in jail without bail until your trial. Unless you have insurance. They sell it by the day to tourists. Let’s find an insurance office.”

    “Check in first?”

    “Insurance first, Damien. Don’t risk it.”

    So they drove around a little in the downtown streets, and then, in the distance, saw a huge billboard with red letters against a white background, saying in English, AUTO INSURANCE----TOURISTS.

    He drove towards it, but it turned out to be deceptively farther away than it had appeared. The sign was higher than the roofs of all the one and two story buildings, and it also misled them into thinking it was straight ahead. Eventually, Damien realized he would have to turn right, but when they reached its approximate coordinate that way, they had to turn again, in the direction they had initially been going. That street began to curve, however, so they turned left onto a tangent street. They were soon making rights and lefts at every block, trying to get to the sign they were close to but not AT yet

    By the time they found the insurance office, they didn’t know where they were. Their only reference point, the only thing they knew of Ensenada, was the traffic circle and kiosk, which were “back that way”. Maybe.

    They had the map, but no landmark or building noted on it was in sight to serve as a guide. Well, did it matter? Nick had suggested a hotel and they had reservations. It was a four star and prominent on the map, so if they asked, they should find it, but if not, they’d find something. Damien had done a good job of obscuring himself today---black sunglasses, a blue Dodgers cap turned backwards, and a week-old black haired moustache, grown especially for this trip, that was, with his blue eyes covered, making him look just a trace Mejicano. They’d  blend, they could stay anywhere.

    The insurance office was a bungalow, staffed on this late Saturday afternoon by a professional looking and somewhat elegant bilingual woman in a tailored business suit who explained the details of the policy, which sold for five dollars per day.

    They got two days worth of coverage, and asked her where the Sherbourne was. She told them she didn’t speak English well enough to tell them exactly how to get there, but went outside with them, pointed, and said if they went that way, they’d see signs for it. Not find the Sherbourne---see signs. Ask again.

    If there were any signs, they missed them. What they found was a residential area, away from the downtown bars and shops, dusty streets that were at first poor, but soon became more like a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, except there were no gas stations, 7-11s or fast food joints, if anyone who knows Southern California could imagine Van Nuys or North Hollywood like that. They were in a middle class section, definitely, with stucco and wood houses, houses much smaller than in L.A., like downscaled replicas, but HOUSES, with paved driveways and grassy front yards. And there were cars and SUVs and boats on trailers in the driveways.

    The street ended and they had to turn right. They were now parallel to the ocean, one block away from it. Through the spaces between houses, and at intersections, to their left  (which meant they were probably driving north now---unless the coast sloped west, as it does between Santa Monica and Oxnard), they saw the beach, the water blue and lovely, the beige sand laced with pebbles twinkling like flecks of diamond in the sunlight. They got glimpses of bathers and blanket potatoes and surfers, and along the water’s edge saw people riding horses.  But on the horizon, the sky was dark. It looked like Santa Ana effect in L.A., when the cleansing westerly winds from the desert blow the smog out over the ocean, where it hovers, waiting for the ocean breezes to strengthen and bring it back in again. There were some sort of clouds out there, and Ensenada was more humid than he’d expected it to be, but none of that was influencing beach activities on this otherwise beautiful day.

    Suddenly (sudden because it was on the only street they came to now that went toward the ocean, so they hadn’t seen it while approaching) a wide two story building appeared to their left like a mirage. It had a Spanish courtyard that opened facing them, so they could see the interior of it. The walls and ground were paved with tiles of multiple colors, and though the patterns didn’t quite comprise a mural, they outlined Aztec symbols and warriors. The scene was breathtaking.

   Allison was the first to acknowledge that with a simple, ”Wow!”

    It was a motel! Above it was a sign that said MOTEL, and a name, MONTEZUMA’S PLACE, by an owner with a sense of humor and a flair for American English  (unless, as often happened in Korea with attempts at English, it was a mistake by somebody along the way to making a sign, and the intended name had been MONTEZUMA’S PALACE. Just a thought Damien had.)

    Allison said, “Damien, we don’t need the Sherbourne.”

    “No”, he agreed.

    It almost seemed sacrilegious to drive over the tiles, but as like at most motels, you parked vertically in front of and under the rooms. The thing was, there were only two other cars. Hardly anybody was staying here. If they were employees cars (they weren’t bad but they weren’t new), nobody was staying here. Was it that far out of the way?  If so, how could they stay in business?  This was a Saturday afternoon.

    They went into the office, to a young man about twenty, a desk clerk who greeted them in a friendly manner, but seemed shy (afraid they’d talk to him in English?)

    “Are you open?” Damien asked.

    “You want room?”

    “Yes.”

    The clerk extended a registration form and they began to fill it out. The rent here was not so cheap. Not four star, but he couldn’t have afforded it in the old days.

    Allison asked, “Where is everybody?”

    The boy smiled. No comprende.

    Damien said, “You know ‘guest’?”

    “Guest?. Si.”

     He seemed to be acknowledging that they were guests. Well, he understood that.

    “Guests where?”

    “Room 120.”

    “No, no, Why no guests?”

    “No guests?”

    “Yes. Why not?”

    “Ahh…Tropical, Senor.”

     "Que?"

    "Tormenta tropical."

    The young man took the key to 120 and showed them to their room. Tormenta tropical? It was hot and humid today alright, but the tropics were still a thousand miles south. What did he mean? That Ensenada was so unpleasant in July, Californians so tormented by it, they weren’t going down there on weekends now?

    The ground floor room (which he moved the Corvette close to but not in front of, to keep an eye on without making the car a neon sign saying RICH AMERICANO STAYS HERE) was a motel room with a door that opened from a sidewalk around the inside of the courtyard. This wing of the building faced the ocean, and the bathroom was directly behind the room. From the bathroom, there was a back door leading to the beach, and also a window. Both the door and window locked securely, the door with a deadbolt, but Damien didn’t much like that there was entry from the beach, where there was no fence separating the motel from public use areas.

    Allison didn’t seem to share his concerns.. She said, “We’ll be alright. It’s beautiful. Nobody can come in without making a lot of noise. Break a window. Kick a door down. We could run out the front.”

    The bathroom had two doors, the back door and one from the room, which only locked inside the bathroom. They wanted to sleep for a while, so he took one of the two dining chairs in the room away from the small round wooden table, and braced it at an angle under the bathroom doorknob. It held like a New York “police lock.”

    Securely fortressed like that (except that Allison moved the chair to take a shower and didn’t put it back---he did), they lied down and took a nap. Didn’t even have sex. They did a lot of that, and it had been a long afternoon of driving.

    When Damien woke up, the chair was gone again from under the door handle. He might have to forget it is she wasn’t taking it seriously---he was starting to feel like a wimp. Allison was breathing softly, and somehow whistling, though she couldn’t whistle when she was awake. Strands of her black hair were on her face, sticking to her cheeks, which were perspiring a little despite the air conditioner, which was working, but puquito, and not doing anything about the humidity. What had awakened him was a persistent knocking at the back door, the one to the beach. It was not the knock of fingers from a closed hand, but the irregular banging of an ill fitted door against the jamb. And now, beyond the drone of the air conditioner, he heard a pelting rhythmic onslaught like wood chips hitting the wall at the back also, and metallic pinging like hail against the window, though it was much too hot for hail.   

    He got up and went into the bathroom. He separated the green plastic curtains on the window, which was steamed and looked like the windshield of a fast moving car between wipes of the blades in a downpour. He brushed away the moisture and fog with his hand, and outside, through a blur of water, saw huge waves rising along the shore and  rain cascading on the window.

    He said, “Holy shit!”  Tropical, Senor. How dumb could they be? A tropical storm.

They should watch the news once in a while. Couldn’t Nick and Jeannie have warned them? Was Nick supposed to take care of everything for him? The Morrisseys obviously hadn’t known either.  The kid in the motel office must have thought, Stupid gringos, don’t they know enough to hunker down away from the ocean?

    When he went back into the room, Allison was awake---either became aware of his movement, sensed his absence in the bed, or just heard the door banging also.

    “It’s raining?” she asked.

    “A monsoon.”

     Where had it come from so fast? The day had been humid and sunny. Just those smoggy clouds loitering at the horizon.   It wasn’t even dark yet---no, it was dark, it just wasn’t nighttime yet---and they had a car, so they could get away from the beach.    Where had it come from so fast? The day had been humid but sunny. Just those They thought about that, but who wanted to drive in this? The gloomy daylight and the gust driven rain had decreased visibility to about half a block.  They still didn’t know their directions, so they wouldn’t know where they were going, and might not find their way back to Montezuma’s Place if they left.  They had shelter here.  Probably as good as anywhere in a beach town right now.  The ocean wouldn’t reach them unless there was a tidal wave, and he’d never heard of tropical storms causing that.

     They agreed to staying. Allison reassured again. “We’ll be alright.” How did she know? Was she psychic? This was the second time since they checked in that she said that. She’d said, “You’ll get that part. I FEEL it.” And always, when she said those things, he believed her.  What about when the transmissions bore bad tiding? Did she withhold information? Paranoid, Damien.

     They were hungry now and could see that maybe that was going to be a problem. They got dressed and went out front to check on the accommodations, running through the rain to the desk. Here was the situation: The bar was open, would be all evening, the kitchen was closed, but the office had a big commercial refrigerator box stocked with pre-prepared food and a microwave.

     So the office food it would be. There was the stuff you’d expect, even in Mexico---egg sandwiches, ham sandwiches for the touristas (which touristas would those be?) --- and lots of Mexican food. They got two big chicken burritos, had them heated by Luis, the same young clerk whom they had now introduced themselves to, and took the burritos back to the room with a large bottle of Pepsi.

   
     The electricity had not been effected (yet anyway) and they turned the TV on. Yeah, the local stations in Spanish were giving a lot of attention to the “tropical”, though there wasn’t much show yet---just the high surf Damien saw from the back window, and a checkpoint somewhere now back towards the U.S. border where the Mexican police were turning cars around. So did that mean the storm wasn’t buffeting California too? What was happening in Malibu? For a moment, he had an image of their house crushed under a giant boulder, though there was no giant boulder over the house. (There was one north of their house, though, responsible for the vision, right over the highway, and he made a point of rarely driving far enough up the coast to have to go under it.)

    The burritos, under the circumstances, were exquisite, and even Pepsi had a previously unnoticed tangy flavor. They soon got tired of watching on TV what they could see mainly from their window, and most of the channels were covering the event. There was, however, a cable channel showing movies in English with Spanish subtitles, now broadcasting the later version of “Cape Fear” with Robert De Niro, maybe perversely selected by someone to accompany this tempest (and Damien’s phobias), but more likely synchronistically and ironically previously scheduled, because the station was listing movies to come for the entire week.

    Damien and Allison might be getting cozy, but this big blow was intensifying whether they chose to ignore it or not. By the time the psycho was trying to kill an entire family on a boat in a maelstrom, it was beginning to sound in Room 120 like the door to the beach really was going to come in, which would have caused their quarters to become just a bit drafty.

    Allison went into the bathroom with one of the dining chairs, and did what Damien had done earlier against the inner bathroom door. Bracing it against the doorknob

Actually eliminated some of the clattering in the frame. Damien had considered doing that an hour ago, and didn’t because, well, he’d done that twice inside, but he felt redeemed now of her earlier rejection of his effort. Was it rejection if she used the bathroom and forgot to put his security back? Yes! She didn’t take seriously an outside threat from possible intruders, but at least she was using his method against the elements.

    “Cape Fear” was followed by “Sleepless in Seattle”, which they’d both seen, and, as good as it was, they didn’t think of it as much of a “watch again” movie when you knew the story, and it was a little too fantasy sweet for their current predicament.

    The bar was open all evening. The bar was on the street, at the front of the motel, with most of the building behind it toward the sea. The bar was brick enclosed with no windows. The bar had karaoke. The bar had people. The bar sold alcohol. The bar was the place to go, for a variety of reasons.

    Before they left, just in case, feeling vindicated now, Damien also braced the inner bathroom door one more time with the other chair. There. That was done. They had done everything they could. It was all in God’s hands now.

    Damien wasn’t drinking, but Allison ordered “Kahlua and leche”, which she could drink until the half full quart sized carton of milk was gone. The Kahlua bottle was almost full, however, and  Illiana, the middle aged woman tending bar, poured Allison’s drinks generously. The karaoke machine was on loud, but even so, over the music, there was an intermiittent rumble like the sound a subway train makes below the gratings of New York streets as it goes through the tunnel. Between songs, without the

 blare of noise covering it, it sounded more like the echoing roar on the station platform as a subway train rolls in. The heavy varnished front door of the tavern shuddered and creaked at those moments, and outside things banged and rolled and clattered around.

    Besides Damien and Allison, the other people in the bar were the bartender Illiana,

liberal with the drinks tonight, Jose and Maria, another newly married young couple, the desk clerk Luis, who had closed shop and headed for safe ground also, and two other men, Jose Too, a computer programmer about fifty, and Hector, in his thirties, who spoke good English. These people, Hector told them, were regulars, storm or no storm. They lived nearby and this was their only neighborhood bar. Hector didn’t take the tropical seriously. “It’s not a hurricane. It’s a tropical storm. We get them all the time. No sweat. This isn’t Florida.” But after he said that, the train came into the station again, and he glanced nervously toward the door. Damien thought maybe there were tropicals and there were tropicals.

    Illiana had stretched the milk out to give Allison five righteous drinks that were mostly Kahlua, but the carton was empty now. It was 11:45.  Kahlua is not a high proof drink, but it is alcohol, and five good ones are five good ones, so Damien could see she had a buzz.

    Now she ordered a Long Island. Earlier, she had conversed with Illiana, who was drinking screwdrivers, through the bilingual Hector, but now that the bartender was blotto herself, they just talked to each other in their respective languages, didn’t understand a word the other said, but laughed anyway. It was great chemistry Allison and Illiana had. Sister rapport. “People who need people”, as Allison was singing this moment.

    The Long Island. Made with a lot of alcohol. She finished the song, drank a couple of more sips, then asked Damien to have some.

    “I don’t want to drink.”

    “Why not?”

    “I’m driving.” His usual excuse.

    “Very funny. You have to help me.”

    He took a sip through the straw. It tasted so good, set off such an instant craving, he wanted to suck the entire drink into his mouth and swallow it all. He stopped because that was exactly what he would do. And then order another.

    Allison was into the karaoke. She had an angellic voice, as most Koreans do, and by now everyone was encouraging her to sing everything, to be the entertainer of the evening .Earlier, the locals had sung the Spanish songs, but now they wanted songs in English. She sang "Let It Be" and  “Wonderful Tonight”, but also "Living La Vida Loca” and “La Bamba” (she didn’t forget she was in Mexico) and down through the listings to even “Green Fields” and Elvis tunes. She sang on request any song anybody wanted to hear, if the machine was programmed for it. She was oblivious to the elements. They all were, except Damien, because they had drank themselves courageous.   

    Allison kept singing. She mostly ignored the Long Island, but not entirely. From time to time, as the karaoke machine was making another selection, and the engine of the D train was pulling ten subway cars into the station  (nothing  loose left blowing around outside now though), she’d take another little sip. By 2:00, she had finished the Long Island. Not fast drinking, but high octane drinking. Then she ordered a Black Russian, another knock-you-off-your-barstool drink.

    Hector had told them they weren’t stupid  (thank you, Hector), the storm caught everybody by surprise until today. It was supposed to miss Baja. Hector lived in San Diego, but grew up in Ensenada. Though the electricity was working, the phones were down, so he didn’t know what was happening in San Diego. “Montezuma’s”, as Hector put it, was his “folks’ place”. Damien asked about the name. Hector laughed.

    “No, man, it was intended as Montezuma’s Place. Just a little joke.”

   “ Why don’t you have customers? Just the bad weather?”

    “We never get booked full because we’re word-of-mouth. The people who come here like it that way, that it’s secret. That’s our charm, and why we charge a little more. We don’t advertise. Movie stars used to stay here. My grandfather knew Erroll Flynn.”

    When Damien marveled about the tiles, Hector beamed. Damien thought the pride for Montezuma’s Place was also ethnic.

    “Are you Aztec?”

    “A little, but I laid those tiles. Those are my designs.”

    “You’re an artist.”

    “I try.”

    About 4:30, Hector started hinting at closing the bar. It was way after legal closing time, but who’d be checking tonight, and he had let Illiana keep the party going. Even if the police did come, the emergency would be justification. Besides, a little tip to the boys anytime, and they’d be on their way.

    Allison was on her second Black Russian, and had drank a quarter of it,  but now that Hector  announced “Last Call”  California style for the folks from L.A. (except Hector was allowing as much time as needed to finish that last one) she put the glass to her lips and downed half of what was left.

    Hector was staying at the motel himself this morning, and any of the regulars who didn’t care to go into the howling jeopardy had a room for free until things cleared. Regarding the safety of the rooms themselves, he told Damien his philosophy on life, borrowed from Hemingway’s “ The Sun Also Rises”

    “You know it?” he asked.

    Damien nodded.

    “You know the character Jake who had his balls blown off in the war? He has some bad nights, right, and one time he says to himself, ‘The day is the same as the night,' but then he thinks about that and says, 'The hell it is.’

    “Well what I say, live by---I could make this sound like a Mexican saying to give it power, but its not, its mine---I say, ‘When you made it through the night, you’re going to be okay.’  This tropical has been blowing all night. It’s running out of breath now. Gonna give it a rest soon.”

    Then, just to let everybody know he really would be closing sometime before noon today, he turned the karaoke off.

    Damien tried to start sopping Allison up, and as it became apparent they would soon be leaving, Hector came back to their spot at the bar and said to Damien,

    “Good move, the Montezuma. Everybody thought you’d be at the Sherbourne. Damien, my oldest boy loves you. Can I get your autograph for my kids?”

    Now Damien had actually introduced himself as Damien, because he’d had to register using ID, so it wasn’t such a surprise that despite his effort at concealment Hector knew who he was. But, Everybody Thought You'd  Be At The Sherbourne? Whoa! What?

    “What are you talking about?

    “Bro’, with that red Corvette, you can’t disguise yourself looking like a blind baseball player with his head on backwards. My kids think you’re so funny. They’ll’ be thrilled.”

    “I’ll give your kids an autograph, Hector. What do you mean, everybody thought I’d be at the Sherbourne?  What about the red Corvette?  There are lots of red Corvettes.”

    “Not in Ensenada.”

    “So what/”

    “Do you read the National Enquirer?”

    “No.”

    “You should. You and Allison got married in Malibu this afternoon, right?”

    “Yeah!”

    “Congratulations, mi amigo. Senora.”

    Hector raised his glass in toast, and so did Allison. He was as reverent as if he was going to make the Sign of The Cross in front of a church. Damien’s coke glass was only ice, but he raised it to be polite. Hector took a gulp of his drink, and Allison sucked up the remaining Black Russian until she was straw  slurping.

    Hector said, “To a good life”, then continued to Damien, “At the courthouse. And you drove down here in your trademark red Corvette, and were booked for tonight at the Sherbourne.” He sounded like a Latin Perry Mason.

    “That was in the paper?”

    “Earlier this week. You have no secrets anymore, bro’. Don’t worry, I won’t blow your cover while you’re here. I want you to come back. Tell your TV friends. But let’s keep it discreet. For the rich and famous, right, like the old days. My grandfather said W.C. Fields once stayed here too. But you can take the shades and cap off now. These people only speak Spanish, and they don’t get American TV. Cable movies, yes, TV no.”

    “Was Erroll Flynn here the night W.C. Fields stayed?”

    “I dunno.”

    “That would have been a night of drinking to rival tonight.”

    “Yeah…How come you don’t?”

    “I’m crazy.”

    Hector seemed to both accept and comprehend that. Damien thanked Hector on the confidential scoop on his wedding, courtesy of the Enquirer. He was not only in a program that modeled itself on “The Truman Show’, his life was “The Truman Show.” He wrote four autographs, fond wishes personally addressed to each of Hector’s kids, chronologically by age being Guadalupe, Maria, Hector, Jr. (finally got to carry on that Lopez line----he would be the oldest boy, who loved Damien), and Pepe, who was Pedro.

    They all said goodnight, and when Damien got outside, he grabbed Allison  (who was singing “Aye, aye, aye, aye”)  by the arm and ran like hell with her against the wind and rain back to their motel room.

    The back door and window had held. The room was fine. .Dawn  was coming in weak and densely filtered, but there’s no stopping that rotation of the earth. Daylight was almost upon them, but not quite, would maybe be not quite all day, but it was looking as if Hector’s interpretation of Hemingway was right for this morning That faint visibility seemed to calm the ocean. The gusts were still shaking the back door, but had ceased to shout  “I huff and I puff and I’ll blow your house down”, and the rain now only beat against the roof and window and door and did not masquerade as the crest of a wave. The weather was still ferocious, but because they would live, it was atmosphere now, not an imminent threat, and there is nothing like mortality giving you a good stare in the face (and then looking away) to put your priorities in order. For Damien, right now, while it was still dark and stormy enough for “the mood”, but bright enough to see her, it would have been to “consummate”  their honeymoon  (which would only be to do something they did at least five times a week already, but THIS was special)  but that wasn’t going to happen because she was intoxicated now, and later she’d probably be sick.  But she was with him and that WAS the important thing. About that there was no question.

    And what was RIGHT NOW for Allison?

    Well, she was crying.

    Guys, have you ever had a night like that with a woman?

    Ladies, come on….

    Crying!

    She had been having SO much fun. She sang, she laughed, she drank. It was the alcohol, of course. Unpredictable alcohol. Unpredictable women.

    He tried to console her, tried not to be so condescending, even to himself, that he would dare think he was humoring her. Not Allison. Too sensitive, too intelligent, even drunk, for that. But what was wrong?

    He asked again, hands on her shoulders, her bobbing, sobbing head bumping on his chest, moving almost like a junky’s nodding. Her face was contorted, wrenched into a mask of anguish from her struggle to control the tears, and her body trembled convulsively. This was no time for patronizing. Never with her. Maybe never time with anybody. No.

    He asked yet again, “What is it, Allison?”

    “I’m not worthy.”

    “What are you talking about?”

    “I don’t want to live.”

    “Allison!”

    Remember, now, honeymoon. Survived the beast. Night of fearlessness and revelry. This magic moment.

    “We don’t deserve what we have.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “That’s how I feel. I’m riding on your coattails.”

    WE don’t deserve.

    “I’m riding on my own coattails. I thought we understood that. The money is a gift, pure luck.”

    “I never earned anything. Everything was given to me.”

    “That’s not true. You’re a hard worker.  A good  teacher.  A good dancer.”

    “I wasn’t entitled to the education it took to get them. I didn’t suffer like my mother. Children begging on the streets in Cambodia don’t become teachers or dancers or TV stars.”

    Now what was happening was that he had gone from being close to, almost (to be truthful) patronizing a drunk, to hearing a truth spoken that could only be negated by an arsenal of rationalization. The biggest, most tempting, most convenient was Why Shouldn't I Have It?  (followed by the assertive Fuck Them), but Allison had fired a direct buckshot volley of Damien’s motivation for the volunteer work at Annunciation which he’d quit in despair of  human beings, throwing money as he fled at the pastor, who was at least committed and trying.

    But it had been too much hard work. For bums.  Fuck them. Father Morales didn’t scrub the bean pot, Fuck him. But somebody did it. Maybe even Cliff, a Damien-declared, clearly obvious, overt asshole. Cliff couldn’t be where he was today if he hadn’t scrubbed the big pot sometime. When he broke Damien in, he was an older doctor with the callouses of experience observing an intern go through basic training, the Lakers coach not making it easy for a rookie who has to play against the Chicago Bulls.

    On the very first night, Cliff had given Damien two messages: 1) You’re irrelevant,  and  2) I’m going to work your irrelevant ass off without acknowledging your effort (yet). Humility and Service. In dismissing Cliff, could Damien have missed that he might be a master teacher? He’d forgotten Cliff was a volunteer himself.

    Cliff probably saw those impulse do-gooders all the time. Flakes. Mother Teresa for a night. Better to find out right away if they had any steel in them than have them quit just when you came to rely on them.

    Allison was relaxing in his arms, and in response to her comment about the children of Cambodia, he said in a soothing voice, in a tone intended to convey, I’m Not Challenging You, I’m Just Being Reasonable:

    “Half of America could say that, Allison”

    She muttered,  “And maybe should.”

   Napoleonic Law applied to both of them. Guilty until proven innocent. Paul Simon sang,  “I would not be found guilty/ By a jury of my peers.”  Damien and Allison would be convicted by a jury of their peers. No wonder they were together. Their bond, what they had in common, was seeming less and less glamorous.

    Maybe his last few gentle words served as a lullaby, or maybe she just passed out, but she’d fallen asleep. They were sitting on the bed, and he eased her down and got the pillow under her head. Her breathing was deep, and she snored loudly, something she didn’t ordinarily do. He lay down beside her, both of them dressed, put a hand on her shoulder and tried to go to sleep himself. The daylight beyond the window, in the spots where the curtains didn’t quite cover, was the dull steel gray of a moving truck loading ramp.

    She might not even remember her words in the morning, or the scene would be blurred, and she’d be apologetic with hangover remorse. But she’d said what she said, and Damien would remember, remember the virisimilitude of it, but also that she had for the first time since he’d known her expressed doubts about her self value.

    He knew that was a message her mother had imprinted, but had believed also she’d  left it behind. Just shrugged it away and it was gone. Moved three thousand miles to get away, and no more Mom. No more scar tissue from years of scalding ridicule, bullying and beatings.

     That was what he’d liked to believe. He didn’t want her burdened, he wanted her free, and of course she instinctively knew that. No new age chick hang-ups, no angst. He remembered again the words from one of the Elvis songs she sang tonight, smiling at him lovingly all the time: “Any way you want me/ That’s how I will be.”

    They woke up about mid-afternoon, and Sunday was cloudless and beautiful, not a trace of the previous night in the sky, though on the ground there were lots of fallen roof tiles, and the signs that said Montezuma’s Place and Motel had disappeared. Trash of all sorts, from candy wrappers to detergent boxes, plastic soda bottles to condoms, litter that must have travelled hundreds of miles before blowing in off the ocean, finally rested when the wind ceased in the courtyard of the Montezuma.

    Allison was sunny too, no sign of a hangover, but unlike the leftovers at the Montezuma, her debris was buried again

    As with references to her mother always, last night’s tears were only acknowledged with glib humor.

    “So, I was bombed and had a crying jag. Don’t make too much out of it, Damien. ‘Everybody must get stoned’. Sometime..

    “Why?”

    She paused to answer, but never let up her lightheartedness.

    “Because they’re scared of a hurricane. Beause they’re happy and its their wedding night. There are two good reasons. Lighten up, Herr Freud. We have a long day of driving ahead of us again.”

    Well, even Freud couldn’t treat a patient who wouldn’t talk. He did have lots of hours of driving to face, so let the matter go for now. And of course he’d be more comfortable going back to the way things were. Maybe the way she told it was right---just a jag. A variation on Sinatra singing “One More For The Road.” Another drunk, another bar, another sad tale to tell.

    When they got back on Sunday night, the back railing of their deck was broken and dangling like a see-saw toward the sand. Two Foot Wide Beach was now more like eight inches, they had no electricity, and the ocean had flooded the deck, taking a couple of beach chairs for souvenirs, though no water seemed to have entered the house.

     The phone was still working, and Damien called up to Mulholland. Jeannie answered, and when she heard his voice said,

     “Damien! You’re back?”

     “Yeah. Is Nick around?”

     “He’s not here. He had to turn your power off. He was afraid of a fire. You must have got the weather in Baja  too.”

     “A little. Not too bad.”,  he lied

     “Well, it wasn’t too bad here either,” she lied back, “But it doesn’t take much out in Malibu anymore. We have a guest room here you can use.”

     I’m a MOVER, Damien thought. I can turn the electricity back on.

     “Thanks, Jeannie, but I just wanted to see if there were any problems I didn’t know about.”

     “None I’m aware of, but mi casa es su casa. You and Allison come up and stay here”

     He knew she meant well, but it almost sounded like an order. It was the way people of her position were accustomed to telling others what to do.

     “We can manage here if it won’t fall into the ocean.”

     “It might fall into the ocean. You kids are always welcome.”

     “I appreciate that, Jeannie. Tell Nick I called.”

     “Damien?”

     “Yeah/”

     “Nick will have to talk to you. The show is in trouble.  He couldn’t tell you yesterday at lunch. Not on your wedding day. Do you know about it?”

     “I’ve read the rumors in the trades, sure. I didn’t give them much credence.”

     “That free million dollar lottery on CBS is taking our ratings. Hard to compete with that much cold cash, but we have a great show, so we’ll make some adjustment. Do talk to Nick, though.” 

     “Will do, Jeannie.”

     They said goodbye, and Damien set about turning the lights back on and inspecting the house for water damage. None was apparent, though on the other side of the highway, the Department of Transportation had taken about forty 4" by 8" planks, fourteen feet long, and placed them vertically against the hillside, the bottoms of the boards dug deep into the bank of the road. If the hill collapsed and succeeded in flattening the boards, which it looked like it could, it would absolutely crush any vehicle passing underneath, but Damien calculated that it would not land on his house. Some of the scattering debris might smash a few things shatter windows, but he and Allison would not get killed in an avalanche. The other good news was that this storm was atypical, and it really would probably not rain again until November, three months away. The bad news was that it would rain in November.

     So the house was a love nest, it was temporary. That it was doomed gave it a greater charm and vitality, intensified their sensual vibrancy in that live-for-today-because- there- is- no- tomorrow atmosphere in which to party unto death like the haunted revelers from the musical “Cabaret”. Like their weekends in the past on Hollywood Boulevard, this couldn’t last, but nothing could be better while it was happening. Who needs a future when you have a present?

                                                  CHAPTER NINE

     A few weeks after his first visit, Detective McFarland came back to Damien’s dressing room, this time accompanied by Nick, who seemed bewildered and was uncharacteristically subdued. McFarland did the talking.

     “I spoke to your producer, and he can spare you for an hour or two. I need you to come with me.”

     “Where?”

     “McArthur Park. We just pulled a body out of the lake with Harry Hartman’s wallet in a pocket.”

     Damien didn’t even think to object. Calling an attorney didn’t occur to him. He wanted to know where this was going now, and was eager to go with McFarland.

     They rode in McFarland’s car, a Buick Electra about two years old, a blending  middle class/blue collar vehicle, an undercover car if ever there was one, with two guys in civvies riding around inside.

     The car had power, and McFarland used it. Unlike his cool manner, his driving was fast and aggressive, and he maneuvered back and forth between traffic lanes like a quarterback seeing an opening.

     As he drove, he said, “We don’t think the body is Harry Hartman. This was a derelict.”

     “How do you know Harry Hartman wasn’t a derelict?”

     “Not the way his father described him.”

     “What do you want me for?”

     They reached the freeway entrance at Sunset, and McFarland drove into the on-ramp.

     “Just to take a look.”

     “At what?”

     “The lake. The body.”

     “We’ve had this conversation. I don’t know Harry Hartman… Didn’t know. Whichever.”

     McFarland didn’t say any more, and when they got on the freeway he accelerated and was over in the fast lane in seconds, passing on the right if a car ahead wasn’t moving fast enough for him. A cop would have given him a ticket. His driving got a pang of adrenaline flowing through Damien’s stomach, and he looked around hoping he might see a Highway Patrol cruiser. But you know you never can find a cop when you need one. A highway officer probably wouldn’t cite another cop, but it might have slowed McFarland down a little.

     Damien sat captive in the front passenger seat (the d seat). He hadn’t put the seat belt on when they’d started (neither had McFarland, though its use is a California law---but then so is driving below the speed limit and not passing on the right) and now he tried to tug it down and latch it without McFarland knowing because he realy believed the detective’s objective was to scare the shit out of him. He never succeeded in getting it on, and after ten mniutes of terror they got to the Benton Way exit in Silverlake and got off the freeway. There were several more minutes of erratic street driving, and then they were at 6^th and Alvarado, the southwest corner of McArthur Park.

     Jerry, the building manager at the Poinsettia Arms on Hollywood Boulevard, used to live around McArthur Park, and had told Damien a little about the recent history of the area (and in the process about himself).

     Jerry, a true tar baby, had arrived in L.A. one day in June of 1966 after hitchhiking from St. Louis, and “settled” in the McArthur Park section, which is to say he found a job where he worked for three hours every afternoon bussing dishes at a retirement hotel in return for two daily meals and a bed in dormitory style housing, with no dollar salary.

     According to Jerry, the area was already in decline in the sixties, when it was a neighborhood of social security hotels (“Just sign that check over to us, and we’ll leave you enough for cigs and bus fare”) and other cheaper hotels for transients. The streets then were dominated by the hotels, liquor stores, pawnshops and bars, with the down and out huddled in doorways.

     Today, the wine bottle is mostly replaced by the crack pipe, and the tenants in the hotels and dilapidated apartment buildings are dealers, addicts and impoverished Latino families, though some of the old time winos never did find the better part of town.

     McArthur Park is generally known in Hollywood, by users and non-users alike, as a place to score crack or heroin. The body of an alcoholic or addict in the lake, whether by accident, foul play or suicide, unless it was someone like a Kennedy, really couldn’t be a big item to the police or anyone else. Damien was sure DOAs were a regular occurrence. Nevertheless, the police would sill have to set up shop and go through the drill.

     Seeking  a place to park, McFarland drove to the west end of the park, to Lakeview Avenue at 7^th Street, and parked across from  the graffiti scarred old Otis Art Institute building, its hulk abandoned and looking war ravaged.

     Damien and McFarland walked across Wilshire Boulevard, then entered the park and went down a wide, graded concrete walkway with wooden benches between grassy slopes. The lake was ahead of them. In front of it were at least twenty uniformed LAPD officers and a bunch of other guys wearing shirts with the word POLICE on the back. There was yellow crime scene tape around the entire lake, and a white sheet was covering what was obviously a corpse lying on the dirt lake bank, where most of the activity was taking place. They were measuring something, making chalk lines, and searching in the grass and nearby bushes. A dark gray van, with the words Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office printed on the side of the cab door, was  parked on the paved path.

     Damien didn’t have to look at the body. McFarland showed him Polaroids of a skinny man in his thirties or forties with a bloated face circumferenced by a halo of red hair and beard that made his head reminiscent of the planet Mercury His blue eyes, despite their ironically appealing tint, stared like the eyes of a fish, the only other dead eyes Damien had ever seen. They were as shining, blind and colorful as marbles, connected to no thought center, processing nothing.

     Damien felt weak in his stomach and limbs, the way he’d once felt from food poisoning, but without the nausea. He was also beginning to feel abused and violated, unfairly impugned, and said  to McFarland,

     “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?”

     “This is a homicide and you were using the name we found in his wallet.”

     “I’ve explained that…A homicide?”

     “I didn’t show you that picture. There’s a gash on the back of his head. The coroner has to make the determination, but either the blow to the head killed him, or he drowned in the lake after the blow.”

     Like La Brea Woman, Damien thought. He also thought now about a lawyer

     “Am I a suspect?”

     “Not at the moment, but I feel there’s something you’re not disclosing to us.”

     “I told you everything. You guys think nobody is disclosing everything."

     "Nobody is."

      Well, sure, that was true, but it had nothing to do with this.

      "You don’t know the man in the pictures?” McFarland asked.

     “No. Why don’t you get his father for an ID?”

     He’s coming this afternoon. A formality. We know this is not his son.”

     The coroner’s van drove down to the lakeside now. A man and woman got out, raised the body onto a gurney with the assistance of two police officers, then wheeled the gurney to the back of the van and slid the corpse inside.

     “Can I go back to work?” Damien asked.

     “You have nothing else to tell me?”

     “What else could I possibly tell you?”

     McFarland looked at him with a knowing disdain and said, almost begrudgingly,

     “Yeah, you’re free to go.”

     Now Damien would never get into a car again with McFarland at the wheel unless he was in handcuffs, but this was just one more transgression and injustice, a matter of principal.

     “You’re not gonna take me back?”

     “I have work to do, on the taxpayer’s dollar. You can catch a taxi up on 6^th Street.”

     There's not much point in fighting for something you don't really want, so Damien left the park by the entrance at the northwest corner of 6^th and Lakeview. Away from the photographs and the body and the crime scene, he still felt sick, but somehow hungry also, as if refueling his body might restore him.

     Across 6^th Street, in front of the Department of Public Social Services building, the welfare office for McArthur Park, Hollywood, Silverlake, Echo Park---the areas to the west of downtown--- there was a lunch wagon parked. He had missed lunch at the studio, and decided to get a quick snack from the truck before going back to the set.

     He crossed the street to the food van, and got a chicken burrito with, despite the hot day, a cup of coffee. For energy renewal. There was no place to sit except at the bus stop bench, so that’s where he went. He sat leaving a space between himself and the other two occupants of the bench. An obese black woman, whose age he would not be able to guess because of her weight, was talking about a methadone program to a toothless middle aged white guy with a Leon Redbone hat that almost hipped up the rest of his drab Salvation Army street duds.

     She was saying, “Slim, I was as thin as you before methadone.”

     Slim, whether that was his nickname or she’d just dubbed him that, said, “Yeah, and I had all my teeth before I started shooting speed”, and broke into a raucous laugh that she joined with glee at his quick repartee, and the stone cold truth of it all.

     Slim now noticed Damien, took him in for a moment, then said, “Duane. Aint you Duane?”

     Duane was the name of his character in The Family Way This was his first stroll among the common folk since Ensenada, his first encounter again with fame, and his improvisational skill surprised him as he said, with a country drawl, “Nah. I’m startin’ to get that shit all the time now. I’m on GR, man.”

     “You look just like him.”

     The woman started giggling at Slim and said, “What would he be doing here?”

     “Ypu coming from the GR office now?” Slim asked, still suspicious.

     “Going.”

     “This late? You better finish that burrito and get in there. They lock the doors at 2:00”

     “I’ll make it,” Damien said. He consciously kept himself from glancing at the Benrus watch on his wrist, which he had started sliding his shirt sleeve over.

     A bus was coming, and the pair got up.

     “They must give you a good clothing allowance,” Slim said.

     “Better times,” Damien said.

     The bus stopped, the front door opened, and they got on, bidding gregarious farewells to him.

     Damien quickly finished the burrito and coffee, then stood up to look for a taxi. He didn’t see any, but there was yet another bus at the next bus stop east at Alvarado. He was thinking about taking it just to get out of the neighborhood when somebody in the doorway of the GR office shouted, “Hey, Damien Rennard!” Damien was sure it wasn’t an old friend, and to dispel the caller’s delusion that he had seen Duane from The Family Way, he laughed, shook his head, pointed at the bus when it arrived, then boarded it.

     What made him thing the bus was a sanctuary? As soon as he sat, in the only vacant seat, a high school aged Latin kid directly across the aisle said, “Hey, are you Duane?”

     Damien said, full of put-on, “Yeah, I’m Duane. You want my autograph?”

     The kid laughed. “No, you aint Duane. On an MTA bus?”

     “Yeah, I’m Duane.”

     “You sure look like him. Hey, if you’re Duane, what’s your real name?”

     “Damien something.”

     “Yeah, Damien something. Ha-ha-ha. You should be his double. Like Jack Nicholson has this dude who goes to Lakers games and pretends to be him.”

     “But Nicholson goes too sometimes.”

     “Yeah. Got them all confused. Is it Nicholson or his double?”

     “Maybe I’ll look into it.”

     “Yeah. Hey, are you really him?”

     “What would I be doing on a bus?”

     “Maybe your car broke down.”

     “He’d take a taxi,” Damien said, deliberately getting away from referring to himself in the first person.

     “Can’t find one in this neighborhood.”

     “You have a point.”

     “Nah, you’re not him.”

     When Damien went back to the set, the phrase “Nick is in meeting” was being whispered in the corridors, green room and dressing rooms with the gravity and reverence people use to refer to someone who has just lost a family member or has a terminal illness. Damien never had that conversation with Nick Jeannie had suggested because he didn’t think it was his place to initiate it, and Nick hadn’t called him. But everyone knew The Family Way was having serious ratings problems now. Who Nick was in-meeting with were the executives of the network and The Base Camp., who were losing their following in a very popular and funny show to one that was giving away a million dollars every episode.

     John Mann, a colleague and friend of Nick’s, rehearsed the episode in the afternoon, and Nick finally appeared  toward evening. Mann left then, and Nick assembled the cast in the green room, shooing away everybody else---all the grips, techies, make-up people, script folk, even the A.D.---until there was nobody in the room but himself and his actors. Though he looked haggard, Morrissey didn’t have the demeanor of a doctor about to give news of a terminal condition.

      “We’re just going for a time change,” he said. “To get away from that lottery slot.”

      A Time Change of course meant replacing another show, and everybody wanted to know What show?  What day? What time?

     “I don’t know,” Nick told them. “Prime time, of course, but they haven’t decided yet. Let’s tape a great show tonight. We were Number One, and with the right schedule, we will be again. They want to keep us. They know we’ll get the ratings back.”

     Indeed, after the pep talk, the taping of the episode, with Nick taking over but essentially leaving John Mann’s blocking and direction alone, did have the spirit and enthusiasm of a stage opening, things taken for granted and almost lost always cherished more.

     When they finished, Damien was in his dressing room, using cold cream and Kleenex to get the make-up off his face, when the phone rang.

     It was McFarland. He said, “You showed ID from Harry Hartman when you first ran the ad in the Commercial.”

     “No I didn’t.”

     “I talked to the Classified Ads Department, and they said you have to.”

     “That’s not true.”

     “You have to show the PUC registration when you place the ad.”

     “I didn’t show anything. I placed the ad by phone and told them I was Hartman’s employee, paying with a money order. I didn’t want to use my own personal checks. They made me wait a week after they got the money order, then they ran the ad. I paid it like that every time.”

     “Their policy is verification of the mover’s  license.”

    ”Ask them to show that to you then. There isn’t any.  I guess the gal wanted her commission.”

     “Harry Hartman’s father gave a positive ID.”

     “ I DON’T CARE.”

     “You were in Scream Therapy a couple of years ago.”

     “No. I stayed with a friend who was, and I worked for a bunch of them because they had cash businesses. I had no green card, remember? I told you all that.”

     “Something’s fishy.”

     That’s what he said. Something’s Fishy.

     “Well, that body was in the lake a while.”

     He knew instantly that was a dumb thing to say. McFarland responded reflex fast.

     “How do you know that?”

     “Oh, look! You showed me pictures. Go to the Commercial, ask them for the verification they say they have, check the number I gave them against any actual PUC  number, do your job right,  then prosecute me for anything I did and leave me alone with the rest of this.”

     Then he hung up. On a cop. But a cop who WAS fishing, to stay close to his own simile, a detective who just wasn’t doing all his homework.

                                                CHAPTER TEN

     Damien left the studio and drove across Sunset, which, on the west  side, becomes a  hilly and curving tree lined street, almost like a mountain road, but there’s no simple way to get to the Pacific Coast Highway from Hollywood.

     The western end of Sunset goes through the prosperous Pacific Palisades, then winds itself down to level ground at the sea. On the Coast Highway, he turned right to go north along the ocean, but didn’t get far. Halfway between Sunset and Malibu, part of a hillside, soft from the recent squall, had come down on the highway. It hadn’t fallen on anybody or anything just plopped in the middle of the road. A Department of Transportation crew clawed at the mess with earth movers, and one lane of traffic had been cleared, which meant cars going north went through, then cars going south, then the bulldozer squatted for a while in the free lane while everybody waited again.

    Damien had eaten on the set, and he was just going to have to be a little late getting home. He tried to call Allison on the car phone, but the line was busy, which meant the Call Waiting line was busy too. Time to sit and think. He could play a CD or listen to the radio, but didn’t.  Allison’s period was late by over a month. She was still embarrassed about her crying bout in Ensenada, and unwilling to address that she had anything whatsoever to discuss about her mother. When he pressed, she retreated into the Korean Mary Poppins.

     Was she pregnant? Sure, Damien wanted kids sometime, but wouldn’t THAT screw up their blue lagoon. And didn’t people with terrible legacies of their own (like Allison’s mother) keep bringing in more people to visit their torment on? Carriers. The chain of crimes, the Oedipus theme from the Greek tragedies, offspring paying for the “sins” of the parents. Was it not literally true? Look around. You didn’t have to be a dramatist or a psychologist to see it.

          Et vous, Damien? He wanted her to talk (now he did), but he’d never looked at his father’s death. What was there to see? A graphic vision of a man falling to his death. An impact. His death was horrible, but it had nothing to do with the man. That’s what he told himself. It had nothing to do with the relationship, with the son emulating the father. And everything. His father was a thrill seeker, an adventurer who hadn’t let a family stand in his way. He just quartered them in the troop tent, and when it was time to move out, took them along. Until the recent present, hadn’t Damien’s life been a lot like his father’s, at least metaphorically---rootless, precarious and always a moment from being blown off the beam.

     The bulldozer pulled out of the traffic lane, and the flag man was waving the northbound cars through. He almost got there before the guy put his hand up to stop traffic again. Damien was three cars back. He’d make it next time. He called home again, but the line was still busy. Was something wrong with the phone?

    Allison. She was once all he had and all he wanted. She was still all he wanted. If he could have the rest of it and not her, he’d take her and give everything else back.

     Whatever he’d stopped them for, the guy with the orange vest and orange helmit suddenly let the northbound cars through again. In a moment, Damien was between the earth movers and construction workers on the narrow dirt and mud strewn road where the hill had slid, then as quickly past them and out on open highway again.

    The line was stll busy. He drove as fast as traffic permitted, and when he got to the house, there were no lights on. He used the remote to open the garage, and the blue Mustang that he gave her when he bought the Corvette, and she sold the Dodge Dart, was in the car port. The only light on the premises was the bare dim bulb in the garage. It was early for her to be sleeping, but if she was, she’d have left something on. What was wrong with the phone?

    He pulled the Corvette in beside the Mustang. The house felt forlorn and abandoned,

and his heart pounded with the realization that something was not right here. His adrenaline surging, he unlocked the door from the garage to the house, and entered blackness. He felt his way along the entry corridor until he got to the foot of the stairs. The light panel there was marked by a dot shaped glow. He flicked the switch, and the stairs were lit from above.

     “Allison?”

     No answer.

     He went quickly up the stairs to the living room, and turned on a table lamp. The bedroom door was closed, not something usually done when she went to bed. He knocked softly. No reply.

     He opened the door. The room was dark, with vague shadows cast by the little bit of light from the living room. There was no overhead light, only the lamps on the bed tables, too far away to turn on. He saw her shape, head and all under the covers.

     He went in, then sat gently on the bed beside her. He said, “Allison?"

     When she didn’t answer, he put a hand on her shoulder.

     Not her shoulder! Not her! Cloth. A dummy of clothes and blankets. He had a mili-second flash of fear and clarity, and during that blink of a moment, something powerful, a big fist, hit the side of his head from behind. The blow simultaneously stunned him and knocked him off the bed. He somehow got back to his feet, but was looking now at his own pistol, the one he’d bought and kept in one of the bed end tables,  after the phone calls, for defense against something exactly like this. It was in the hand of a large man wearing a ski mask and jogging suit who was between Damien and the bedroom door.

     Damien’s words came from someplace unconnected to his mind, which was unconnected to his body. Everything in the room was out of proportion, and the floor tilted at a forty five degree angle. He was not here and this was not real, but a voice, his voice, said,

     “Who are you?”

     “I’m the Big Bad Wolf.”

     “Where’s my wife?”

     “You mean Goldilocks?”

     “She has…” Shut up!  He’d intended to say “black hair”. Maybe this thing didn’t know.

     “Yes?…Has what?” He laughed. “Porridge?”

     Damien recognized the whang, incongruous to a man this large. It was the voice of the caller that afternoon when they were ready to go down to the beach.

     “Where is she?”

     “Allow me to introduce myself.”  Then, as Damien had known for some time now somebody was going to say sooner or later, it uttered, “I’m Harry Hartman.”

    After allowing that it’s moment, he added, “Nice to meet you, Day-me-in”

      “Don’t call me Damien.”

      “No? How about Harry?”

     “No.”

     “What should I call you?”

      “Nothing. Where’s my wife?”

     “All things in time. So far she hasn’t been hurt. The rest depends on you. Your cooperation.”

     He switched the gun to his right hand, the one he’d punched Damien with. Coming from behind, the blow had been to the right side of Damien’s head, which ached now along the entire area above his right ear. It gestured with the left hand to the only arm chair in the room.

     “Sit down. Right there.”

     If cooperation really was, as it had said, the key to protecting Allison, Damien sat.

    “Turn the lamp on.”

     He did.

     Now Damien could see his captor was about 6’3’’, and looked soft and pudgy under the XXL jogging suit, which was Navy blue. He guessed his weight at over 300 pounds, and his breathing was coming hard through the filter of wool.

     There were a couple of glasses and a bottle of cognac on a dresser,  Damien’s glasses and bottle taken from the dining room highboy. The Mask took the cognac now and poured into both glasses, then came across the room with a drink. When he was close enough that Damien might be able to make a move for the gun, he put the muzzle to Damien’s head as he placed the drink on the night stand. Then he moved away again, out of grabbing-for-the-gun range.

     “I don’t drink,” Damien said.

     “Really? What was it doing in your cabinet?      “It’s for company.”

     “Thank you. But tonight you shall join me.”

     “I’m not in the mood.”

     “I want you to be social. Get to know me.”

     “No.”

     The gun went off, and a bullet whizzed by so close to Damien’s head he felt the breeze. It lodged in the other dresser, the one behind him.    

     The masked man said, “Remember, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. With guns. You will have a drink. Any more tantrums and I’ll shoot you in the leg. I think you’ll find it more congenial to share a bottle of cognac with me, MISTER Rennard, since you don’t want me to call you Damien.”

     Damien took the glass and almost dropped it he was trembling so badly. He had to hold it with both hands, and even then had difficulty keeping it from spilling. The fat thing raised the ski mask to drink, revealing that he was a white man with a jowly jaw and wet pink lips. Damien didn’t see enough of his face to ever identify him, but that shape was familiar. This was a larger version of Alfed Hitchcock’s famous outline, Alfred Hitchcock now as the psycho.

     The warm cognac was indeed a welcome guest on Damien’s tongue and in his throat, and he felt a glow almost instantly. Drinking as seldomly as he did left him without much tolerance.

     The buzz relaxed him enough to ask, a little more calmly,  “What do you want?”

     “You borrowed my identity.”

     “Yes. I didn’t mean to do that. I just made up an alias.”

     “You have no idea the problems you caused me.”

     At least it sounded like he wanted to talk. Talk was good. It was better than shooting, as all the international shuttle statesman like to say.

      “What kind of problems?”

     “I have my own moving company. In Panorama City.”

     Damien’s mind, looking for diversion, recalled a moving job to Panorama City. Out in the Valley. Way out. To the tune of “Kansas City”, as he drove, he sang, “I’m going to Panorama City, Panorama City here I come.” If there was a panorama there, the day he saw the place, it was obscured by smog. That THIS came from Panorama City seemed appropriate.

      Damien needed to get back to the bedroom, to be in the Now.

     Harman continued, “I was hounded by the P.U.C. over your advertising. They didn’t believe I wasn’t operating in Hollywood, just not using my own license number.”

     He was agitating himself, breathing with even more difficulty. Calm him down somehow. With more conversation.

     “You called me here one day.”

     “Yes.”

     “You said then we were using the same P.U.C. license number.”

     “I was messing with your head that day. Purpose of my call, you know.”

     “How did you find me here in Malibu?”

     “You made lots of trips between Hollywood and here. I followed you.”

     “And my phone number? “

     “I have a private investigator. Nothing is really secret. The phone company has to send you bills.”

     “Okay. How did you find me in Hollywood?”

     “I booked a job. Your driver went to an address where the people had already moved. I followed him back to the truck rental place, then to your apartment building. I didn’t know which apartment you were in, but you know, the manager there is the talkative type.”

     “Yes, he is. The P.U.C. could have found me too. They make busts, set up stings like you did.”

     “They didn’t bother because they thought I was doing it. They came after me. I had an IRS audit, and then the state tax board looking at my books.”

     The memory of these transgressions were causing him to hyperventilate. Weren’t they compensatory grievances? Maybe Damien could negotiate somehow, but lawyers should be doing that. What Hartman was doing was felonious, and he couldn’t not know that he was throwing away any redress he might get in a courtroom or from a settlement.

     He was getting crazier, gasping and sighing. Maybe (please) he would pass out.

     “When you found out who I was, why didn’t you notify the P.U.C.?”

     “The damage was done already. And then you did me an enormous favor. You became a TV star. I decided to handle things myself.”

     “Look, I do apologize.”

     “Apology isn’t enough.”

     “Okay. What then?”

    “You took my identity.”

     “Borrowed. And not intentionally. We’ve established that.”

     “Doesn’t matter. I want yours.”

     Damien laughed. To his surprise, he was able to. The cognac. He wanted more.

     “I’m a TV star, as you say. You can’t take my identity.”

     Silly  boy.

     “I was living your life vicariously. Now I really want to live it.”

     “Impossible.”

    “Not impossible. Necessary. I died last week.”

     “So I heard. How did you do that?”

     “I put my wallet in a bum’s pocket and dunked him.”

     “After you bashed his head in?”

      “I did him a favor. Ended his pain.”

     “The ID by your father?”

      “I’m the father, I’m the son. One and the same. Father, Son and…”

      If Damien was a Hindu, he thought he'd find this killer’s reference to himself as Divinity blasphemous. He interrupted Hartman before he could say it.

      “Who is Sarge?

     “Sarge?…Oh, that’s Benny. He’s an SFC now”

     “A what?”

     “Sargeant First Class. He got promoted. For his work with you.”

     “What was that work?  What was he trying to do that night?”

     “Nothing. Get some information. Harass you. He’s the private detective.”

      “Not a military man?”

     “Within my organization there is rank. With me, he’s an SFC.”

     “Oh?  You have an army?”

     “Yes, I do.”

     Hartman’s delusion was the flip side of schizophrenia’s plot phobias. He didn’t have an army after him; the army was his. If he were to actually believe what Hartman was telling him, Damien would be a paranoiac.

     Hoping there could still be some faculty for reason left, he explained patiently,

     “You can’t become me because everybody knows who I am.”

      As he said that, he realized Hartman might be planning to take his identity the way      Hartman said, "I want to live your life like you as much as I can, and what better way than conjugally?"

      "What did you do to her?"

      "She's fine. I wouldn't hurt my wife."

      "You son of a bitch."

       It was probably the cognac, but Damien's anger was once again surpassing his terror. Hartman cocked the gun and pointed it at him again.

     "Let's play a game. Multiple Choice. Choose from the following answers: 1) she's dead; 2) she's sleeping; 3) she's unconscious; 4) she's not here; 5) all of the above; or 6) none of the above.

     There was nothing to say to that, so Damien didn't say anything.

     Hartman continued, "Are there any more possible answers?  I think so. There could be 7),  for instance, she's here and conscious, but terrified. Like you. Can you think of any others?"

     Hartman waited. Damien didn't reply.

     "Pick one."

     He remained defiantly silent.

     "I asked you before which you'd enjoy more, a tumbler of cognac or a bullet in the leg. Similar options now."

     He decided on trying cooperation again  "She's unconscious. If she was asleep somewhere, we'd have woken her up."

      "Don't want to believe she's dead, huh? We are alike. Except I've never been married before. Women don't like me. They want guys like you"

     "What guys like me? "

     "NO. Don't pretend you don't know. Skinny guys like you. Lean, good looking, agile. Women don't go for big tubs like me. Hookers don't even want me. They want the money, of course, but won't let me get on them. They get on me. And I'm afraid of the shower and bathtub. I can hurt myself getting in, so I don't smell too good either."

    Damien had been too terrified to identify another unpleasant quality in the room. Now that it was being addressed, yes, there definitely was an obnoxious odor.

     Hartman went on, "You're answer is Number Three?"

     "I don't remember the numbers."

     "Number Three is 'Unconscious."

     "She's not here."

     "That wasn't a choice. Of course, it's logical. Especially if all you have to go on is hope "

      "It was a choice. It was Number Four."

      "I thought you didn't remember the numbers."

     "I remember that one."

     "No, you're wrong."

      "Not Here' was Number Four."

      "You're in no position to argue, Mr. Rennard"

      "What was four?"

     "I don't remember. Judges, shall we allow  that answer?  Why not?  Okay, 8) she's not here. Number Eight is your answer?"

     "What do I get if I win?"

     " A reprieve from a bullet in the leg."

     "If I lose.?"

     "Disqualification, of course."

     "Meaning what? I can leave?"

     The exposed pink lips under the bottom of the mask twisted into a macabre

parody of a smile. Damien's childhood nemesis, the original model for the asshole theory, was a big bully named Roy Crawford in Toronto. Could this be Roy Crawford? What would he be like today? Would he still be fat and bigger than Damien? Damien hadn't seen Roybo since they were eight and in grammar school, but Hartman was bringing him back, even the envy about Damien's looks.

     "The consequences of disqualification are secret, but you're no fool, Mr. Rennard. Your answer is, Not Here? Number Eight?"

     "Yes."

      "But Not Here was four."

     He began fixing himself another cognac. Damien quickly realized he wasn't  bringing the bottle over to him, nor intending to refresh his  glass.

     Hartman said,  "Okay, I can't be any more certain about the correct answer than you, so I won't disqualify you yet. We've just started having fun. Let's continue."

     "I want a drink."

     "No. I don't like the way it changes your personality."

     He came back close to Damien again, but with only the drink for himself.

     He said, "Choose from the following: 1) I will kill you; 2) I will rape your wife; 3) I will kill you and your wife; 4) I will rape you and your wife. Which, Mr. Rennard?"

     Damien couldn't respond to that and Hartman put the gun to his temple again. Now he was making a mistake though. Two mistakes, actually. Make that three. The first was that he had come too close and, despite pressing the gun to Damien's head,  had the glass in his other hand, and was distracting himself with his dribble. The second was that he had initiated Damien's craving for alcohol and was denying him a drink. The third mistake was that, with the other two, he simultaneously continued his depraved litany of options.

     "5) I will rape and kill you and your wife; 6) I will dismember you and…"

     Damien had very fast hands, and he had a chance, an only chance, he now believed. Seemingly as fast as light, so quickly he didn't see the motion himself, his left hand came up and grabbed Hartman's wrist. He pulled down so the gun moved between them as he got to his feet. It was still clenched in Hartman's big hand. He grabbed Damien in a headlock with the free arm, painfully squeezing his neck, the cognac dousing Damien's hair as the glass fell, but without being able to lock the fingers of both hands together, Hartman couldn't bring Damien down that way.

     Damien had the right hand free too, and got both hands on Hartman's wrist to keep the gun between them, the muzzle tilting in a little bit towards the soft belly. He had no contact with the steel, and Hartman's fingers were still firmly around the trigger. He brought his kneecap up with enough force to envision driving Hartman's testicles into his throat, and indeed on impact he felt the soft ping pong balls rise up into his genital pit, where a vagina would be if he was a woman. Damien thought and hoped he was on his way to becoming one.

      The gun discharged and Hartman screamed. He jerked backwards, the force from the bullet wrenching his wrist and the gun away from Damien as he fell. He went down like a circus elephant sitting, then rolled in an oval of back and ass that resembled the tipping of an egg or the curving motion of a rocking chair.

     When he stopped rolling, he sat up again, looking bewildered and waving the gun  in front of him in a cautious arc, the way an officer does entering an unsecured room.

     He had fallen too far away for Damien to try grabbing for the gun again. Instead, he dove head first across the bed and scrambled off it to the floor on the other side,

where he lay as flat as he could. He had no real cover, but he was out of sight. The bedspread on his side would hide him if Hartman looked under the bed. The last glimpse he'd had of Hartman showed blood from his stomach staining the blue jogging jacket.

    Damien was trapped. The door was on Hartman's side of the bed. There was a window, with a soft landing in the sand below it, but Damien would just be a big cardboard cut out to aim at if he went for that.

     Hartman was making gurgling sounds. Damien thought the bubbling was coming from his mouth, and it was as loud as a brook. He guessed he'd be vomiting blood.

     "You're badly wounded," he said. "Let me help you. If you put the gun down, I will."

     In response, Hartman fired again. Damien flinched, and the bullet hit a stud in the wall above him, then ricocheted around the room with a zinnng.

      Hartman was beginning to sound like a waterfall.

     "You need medical treatment. Throw the gun across the room."

     There was no answer. Damien didn't think Hartman could last much longer, but he might shoot under the bed next time. If he could stall him just a bit longer, maybe he'd succumb.

     He said, "I never meant you any harm. I didn't know you existed."

     That was a bad thing to say to a man who'd lost his identity somehow because  Damien used his name, or because he'd never believed he had an identity. Hartman groaned as if he'd been shot or kneed in the balls again. He emitted a yelp of anguish, and Damien cringed at the sound of the gun going off once more. Then the gargling ceased, and there was an incongruously gentle expulsion of air, like a sigh of contentment, and a creaking that sounded like Hartman rolling onto his back again.

     After that there was only silence.

     Damien waited motionless, without taking a breath. It seemed to be for days, but it was probably about two minutes, as long as he could go without breathing under these circumstances.

     Finally, of necessity, he gasped. Still he waited. It could be a trick. Hartman might be too injured to point or aim the gun for long, and baiting Damien to show himself.

     Damien slowly raised the bedspread on his side, and when it was up about three inches from the floor, glanced under the bed. He saw Hartman's unmoving prone figure with the Humpty Dumpty silhouette. He was profusely bleeding, the gun in his limp hand. The mask was still pulled up above his lips, and blood geysered from his mouth. The mask itself was bloody carnage, and Damien was grateful it covered most of his head, because it seemed that into his head was where Hartman had fired the last bullet.

     The blue jogging jacket was drenched in blood also. Nevertheless, Damien watched for any indication of life for a long time before starting to move. At last, he began creeping slowly, shifting his weight as he wiggled across the room to the door.  When he reached it, he raised a hand to the doorknob. The bedroom locked from the inside with a press lock, and as Damien opened the door, he pushed the lock in. If by any possibility this was pretense, Hartman couldn't open the door without that warning click from the lock.

     Damien took one last glance back. Could that be Roybo? No, only the prototype. He scrambled quickly to his feet and out of the room, slamming the door behind him as he did.

     He turned on every light upstairs. Where was Allison? He went to the phone, off the hook he now so, the reason he'd been getting the busy signal.

     He picked it up and depressed the dial plate. At first he got nothing, but after a few minutes of clicking, the tone buzzed in his ear. He started punching in 9-1-

     The downstairs kitchen door from the deck banged open, clapping against the counter so hard he heard glass breaking---a pane from the door, a drinking glass knocked to the floor, something.

     He heard a stumbling staggering movement, then Allison's voice, hoarse and slurry.

     "Damien?" she inquired.

     "Upstairs."

     He dropped the phone and raced down the stairs. Allison was disheveled and drenched, the back of her T-shirt and jeans caked with wet sand, her long wet hair hanging in a bird's nest of twists and curls and unintended braids. In a stupor, she

lunged  toward him, then stumbled and, reaching out with her hands as he caught her, fell into his arms.

     "What happened to you," he asked.

      "I so stupid."  She seemed to be choking on air.

      "Don't say that. What did he do to you?"

     She looked at him, uncomprehending. "Who?"

     She didn't remember? Did she see him? Was it trauma repression?

     "What's wrong, Allison."

     "Tried to die," she said.

      "What? …How?… Why?"

     "Big questions. Specially that last one. Want to sit." 

     She did by holding on to his shirt, then his pants, as she slid along his body to sit on the floor like a kid at a campfire.

     "Pills," she said. "Want to sleep."

     "No."

     "Sleep."

     She tried to lie down. He wouldn't let her. Sleep forever. He got her to her feet again. Treating it as an overdose, he began walking her.

     "Let me go."

     "I can't let you go. What did you take?"

     "Percoset. I took Percoset."

     A jar of it Percoset had been in their medicine cabinet for a long time, first in Hollywood, now here, since she pulled a ligament dancing about a year ago. She'd never taken them. He'd wondered why she kept them when they moved to Malibu.

      "I was sleeping on my back on the beach. Tide came in and the cold water woke me up." She seemed to find that amusing. " Should have passed out on my stomach."

     "Allison, I want you to tell me all the terrible things that ever happened to you."

     "What for?"

     "Because I love you."

     "Maybe love is a pathological delusion, Damien""

      "You don't mean that."

      "No…I've already told you everything." 

     "Not about how you feel"

     " We don't belong here, I was happy on Hollywood Boulevard."

      "No, that's not it. Talk to me."

      "I am talking to you. That is it."

     "I want to know. You can talk to me. You can get treatment."

     "You sound like that Leutenant McFuckland."

      For some incongruous reason, Damien said, "Detective.", then laughed at his absurd correction. "I don't know what his rank is."

      "Doesn't matter."

      "No."

     "Neither here nor there, as the New Yorkers say. And I got his name right. That's what matters in this town. You can't change the past, Damien. Everything that ever happened happened, as YOU like to say."

     "You can learn from the past."

     "I did learn. I survived."

     "Almost not tonight."

     "Almost not. I survived until our lives changed. You know, your friend saved me. That's what I dreamt."

     "What friend.?"

     "That big guy I met a couple of times who kept calling you 'Frenchy'. What a thing to call someone. I kept waiting for him to call me 'Kim Chi' or 'Gooky'. And he was always drunk."      

     "You dreamt Frank saved you?"

     "I was pulled out to sea in a rowboat by a Black Widow Spider Woman... I wonder who that was…hands tied behind my back. But when I was helpless and out on the surf, your pal---Frank?"

     "Frank Larkin."

      "He pushed the boat toward shore. He was standing, but somehow as we got closer to land, like he had been on a sandbar or something, the water kept getting deeper instead of shallower, until finally his head went under the waves, but he kept pushing until I was safe on the beach. Then I woke up, wet and sandy, lying on my back, but your friend was gone. Drowned, I guess."

     She thought Frank was a drunk. Come to think of it, he probably was shitface the few times she met him. That she maybe didn't like him much was disconcerting. His best friend. He thought they were better attuned to other people than that, but at least Frank had redeemed himself in her dream. Subconsciously, she must have liked him. As far as Frank calling him 'Frenchy', maybe you just had to be from the Bronx to understand that, though Allison was expressing a sentiment he'd heard also from his mother regarding that nickname.

     Allison, unaware still of the guest in their bedroom, smacked the tips of her fingers with her lips, then placed her hand over her vagina.

     "Kiss me here. I want to know I'm alive."

     "Sweetheart."

      "Sex is the life force. See. I want to live."

     "I know. There's something I have to tell you."

     "Later."

     "I can't"

     "Day-Mien!"

     He'd never before said  No to her to any request along those lines, nor she to him.

     "Allison, you don't know what's happened here."

     "I don't care."

     "You would if you knew."

     She giggled. "Then don't tell me. Eat my pussy."

     That was not something she would ordinarily say. She'd ask for it as she had, almost poetically: Kiss me there. Allison was in many ways a straight laced girl Though being of mixed heritage she wasn't  typical, she'd had lots of Korean American friends in high school, and her mother was active in that community. Yet she would only have heard that class of talk at home occasionally, from Mom, as crude humorous nostalgia with her ex-soldier husband to the old days in GI bars. But the educator and political appointee would never have permitted her daughter to use such language.

     Should he do it? There was a body in the bedroom, and the police hadn't been called yet. At least not by Damien. If someone heard the gunshots, the SWAT team might be around the house right now. And they thought the telephone was an interruption. "Come out now with your hands on your head." How about with a head in her hands?

     If nobody had called the police, if the shots hadn't been heard, when Damien did call, he'd have to account for the time between the shooting and the phone call, and his reason for waiting. McFuckland didn't work in Malibu, but he came to mind as one of the cops who'd show up at the house. Call it profiling. Well, my wife attempted suicide and she was horny. You know, it's the life force. I've heard that in the old days, people who were dying of TB had great sexual cravings---so I  (how would you say it for an official report? Not Ate Her Pussy. So I Kissed Her There? I Performed Cunnilingus Upon Her Person, officer, because that asshole in the bedroom was dead anyway, whether I did or not.

     Should he? Allison had all her clothes off already and was pointing it up at him. They could just accurately account for this time, that's all. There's no law (that's enforced) against two consenting adults, especially a husband and wife, doing that in the privacy of their own home, scene of one attempted suicide and one successful suicide or not. The police hadn't put yellow crime scene tape around Allison, saying DO NOT ENTER. (No, he didn't think he'd be able to rise to THAT occasion right now--- punny , huh Damien?)

     The hell with it, he did it. Somehow it didn't seem disrespectful of the dead, probably because he wasn't being selfish, and Allison didn't know what was in the bedroom. But that other act---well, even if he could get started, he didn't think he could keep it up. (He was full of puns tonight, like that Harry Hartman was a grave consideration.)  But doing that other, Fucking, WOULD seem blasphemous because that crazy cadaverous bastard bleeding all over their carpet had after all been a human being. Anyway, officer, I was just too distracted this evening for that other function.

     She came. It was fast because she was relaxed and uninhibited. He thought, as she gasped to orgasm, that he heard a click. From the bedroom door? No. No. No  way. He could see upstairs. Not as far as the bedroom, but nobody was in the hall.

     Allison opened her arms to welcome him on board, but it was time to tell her. Death was abroad. Death was starting to smell in the house. Rigor Mortis would be setting in. The corpse would be releasing the contents of its bladder. The cognac. Damien realized he hadn't wanted a drink since the struggle. The survival instinct had been stronger than the craving. THAT'S why people recovered from alcoholism and addiction. That was the real reason: Survival Instinct. The image of that body spilling out cognac and whatever else was in its stomach was also creating some aversion therapy: Damien thought he might never crave another drink.

     Allison had tried suicide. Seriously, or the Call For Help, he couldn't tell, but an irony enormous in its implications occurred to him: The suicide attempt may have saved her life, because she wasn't in the house when Hartman broke in.

     Allison just wasn't getting why Damien was such a morose fellow tonight. She said plaintively, "Make love to me."

     "We can't. Something happened here."

     If he was going to make them talk instead of sex, she had her own topic.

     "When we lived on Poinsettia, on the Boulevard, I loved our life. It was so simple."

     "We didn't have anything."

     "We had each other."

     "We still do."

     "I'm irrelevant here."

     "Television is irrelevant."

     "Oh, Damien. Shame on you. The money is NOT irrelevant, the fame is not irrelevant, and nobody in the business considers themselves insignificant, no matter what they say about the triviality of it all."

     "Would you want to go back?"

     "Why not? At the Poinsettia Arms, a teacher is a star---especially a young pretty one. A tall, good looking amiable guy who moves furniture is way up there in the ratings too. To Art the Fart and Jerry the Juicer---okay, ex-juicer---Damien and Allison were two splendid people, and really, on any religion's Judgement Day, would Art and Jerry be any more or less than Nick or Jeannie?"

     "No, but we moved on."

     "Yeah, didn't we."

     She was making it that her problems were circumstantial. She really seemed to believe that living in the right place, being with the right person, having the right friends, were the answer. Didn't everybody believe that? Wasn't it true? No matter how many angles Nick Morrissey and Damien's helpers looked at the trailer hitch that day on Mulholland, it wasn't going to clear the driveway. Was it not possible Allison  couldn't clear the driveway?  She knew the relationship with her mother, and no amount of examination was going to change the events of her childhood. Maybe she meant, deep within, what she'd said: I Did Learn. I Survived.

     "I never wanted this either, Allison. It happened to us."

     "Then let's undo it."

     He snapped his fingers. "Like that."

     "If you could, would you?"

     "How?"

     "Never mind, 'How?'. Would you?"

     Her question was hypothetical, but not his answer.

     "I would for you."

     She whimpered.  "Damien."

     The police had to be called. The body would be stiff. The smell of death was stronger. Was it death?  He'd never smelled death before. Was it…? It was Hartman! It was that foul body odor emanating from him while he was still alive.

     At that moment, upstairs, a door slammed. From one side of their kitchen, you could see up the stairs to the bedroom. He left Allison sitting, looking toward the sound, and went to the spot by the window where he'd have a sightline to their room..

     He saw nothing.

     "Allison, just stay here."

     "What?"

     "Trust me. Wait.."

     He moved quietly but quickly up the stairs, stopping at the top to peek around the wall.  No one was in the corridor. He went to the bedroom door. Locked. Did Hartman come out into the hall?  Had he been watching them? If the door clicked open, as Damien thought he might have heard when Allison climaxed, Harry Hartman saw a little T and A, but was too late for the main event.  He must have gone back into the bedroom and slammed the door locked again. But there was no blood anywhere. He would have left puddles of it.

     Allison had only heeded Damien for a moment. She was upstairs now beside him, still undressed. Have to call the police.

     "Allison, there is something I HAVE TO tell you."

     He brought her into the living room, and sat her on the sofa, listening closely for  another 'click'.

     He knelt beside her.

      "What, Damien? Tell me."

      The moment was reminiscent of their marriage proposal, and as difficult as he thought telling her was going to be, he was relieved that she'd at least understand then why he'd rejected her sexually. He didn't think she'd be feeling quite so erotic if she knew all the facts. She wasn't dying of consumption, after all.

     Anxious about whether Hartman was dead or alive in the bedroom, he told her as quickly and matter-or-factly as he could, and she took it much more calmly than he'd expected.

     Then he called the Malibu police.     

                                         CHAPTER ELEVEN

      The police arrived quickly, eight of them in four cars, and they ordered Damien and Allison (who had gotten dressed) out of the house with their hands in the air. Then several went in like commandos, covering each other, while others went down on the beach and aimed rifles at the bedroom window.

     Damien  offered them the key to the bedroom and they took it, but once they were in the house, he heard shouts to Hartman to surrender, then what must have been the bedroom door getting kicked open.

     Within a few minutes, a male and female officer came back out to join the officers watching Damien and Allison. The woman asked, with a smile that was not to be taken for flirtation,

     "Is this some sort of joke, Mr. Rennard?"

     "What do you mean?"

     "Keep your hands up,"  one of the male officers said. Damien had gestured.

     "Clasp your hands behind your neck," the woman said.

     He did, and she quickly frisked him. When she had finished, including a thorough grasp of his genitals, she asked, "Where is the gun?"

     "In the bedroom."

     "Show us. You go in first. Keep your hands where they are."

     With the police behind him, and others behind Allison, they were led back into the house. They took Damien upstairs to the bedroom, where the door was now ajar, without a handle.

      In the bedroom, there was no blood, no gun and no Harry Hartman, but there were bullet holes in the dresser and wall. How did Hartman get out? Damien looked at the window. With his intruder phobia, he always kept it locked with the curtains drawn, and now it was open, gaping at the sky.

       A tall male said, "The gun, Rennard."

      He saw again Hartman as he'd last seen him, the extended limp hand with the gun in it. Wasn't that hand actually…

     "It might be under the bed."   

     The woman said, "Could you turn toward the wall and put your face against it?"

     Though she phrased it as a request, he knew it was an order. Through peripheral vision as he greeted the wall, he saw her bend and look under the bed. Another officer was keeping a bead on him.

     "Yeah, it's here," she said. She didn't pull it out. She shouted, "Evidence bag."

     The tall male said to Damien, "Walk  backwards into the hall with your hands where we can see them."

     Then they brought Damien and Allison downstairs, and, with the fired gun recovered, allowed them to sit at the kitchen table, with their hands up.Two officers stood behind them, both men, one black, one white. The black cop asked Damien if he wanted to call anybody. Damien said Yes, and he let him go to the extension phone on the wall.

      He called Nick Morrissey.

     It was a busy night after that. Nick and Jeannie came with an entertainment lawyer named Rock McGill, wearing a navy blue yachting blazer with a purple silk  ascot, who was to be present during the questioning. A couple of detectives arrived also.  They brought Damien and Allison back to the bedroom, which now was packed with the five civilians, the detectives and lots of uniformed police. The detectives wanted to know: Why was Damien shooting? Who else had been here? Did he REALLY shoot anybody?

     Rock McGill, bleached blonde and pretty as a starlet himself, would never make much of a criminal lawyer, because he advised Damien, "Just tell them the truth."

     So he did. The plainclothesmen (condescendingly it seemed to him) reminded Damien that there was no blood, no body. They told him four rounds had been fired.

Tell me something I don't know, he thought.

     They did. They found two spent bullets, one in the dresser, and one, the ricochet that hit the wall, from under the bed. It had come that close to him. The two remaining rounds in the gun were blanks. And the two fired rounds that were not accounted for? The ones Damien believed, at the time, hit Hartman? They also found two fired blank wads. That would explain it, he thought. The first bullet, fired into the dresser, was real.  The second bullet, the one Damien had been sure went into Hartman's stomach, was a blank. The third bullet, that hit the wall and ricocheted, was real, and the fourth bullet, the one Hartman pretended to kill himself with, was also a blank. That meant Hartman brought his own blanks. The gun was always in the night stand top drawer, loaded with the safety on. How could he know it was a revolver, and the caliber and model number, to bring the right blank ammunition? Had he been in the house before? He could get the information out of gun sales records, through his private detective, from Sarge. As for knowing where Damien kept the gun, that wouldn't take Sherlock Holmes. Where do people leave a gun when they go to sleep? The washing machine might be a great hiding place, but it would be a little far to go if someone came in while you were sleeping.

     Allison knew where the gun was too. Why hadn't she chosen that way? She didn't want to die, he firmly believed. A few Percoset, yeah, but not the whole jar or she would have died. She was Crying Out.

       Hartman escaped by jumping out the window. Even he would have survived the fall to the soft sand, but he'd have left an impression the size of a meteorite. The blood was stage blood. They sold it at theatrical supply houses in Hollywood. What he got on the carpet, he must have cleaned up with solvent and rags he'd brought with him too.  And the gurgling was from a sound effects recording. He'd had a small tape recorder in his pocket with a cassette. This was an actor's town.  There was a little ham in everybody. Hartman brought his own props, did his scene, and left. He planned all of it, except getting his cookies crunched.

      Damien tried explaining these theories, but the police didn't seem even vaguely interested.

      Until he said, "He might have brought his own gun. I keep mine in the night stand."

     "You have another gun?" the same tall cop from earlier asked.

     "I only have one, but I'm not sure that's it."

     The uniforms had the contents of both end tables emptied out on the floor in seconds. There was no other gun, just KY jelly and bras and other assorted embarrassables displayed before this unwelcome assembly.

    "I guess that's my gun you have."

    With her incongruous smile again, the woman asked, " Do you have any other weapons, Mr. Rennard?" 

      "No."

       "None of any kind?"

       "No."

      "What about this pepper spray?" one of the uniforms asked.

     There it was on the floor in front of Allison’s night stand, a steel cylinder enclosed in a leather pouch, between the morning- after pills and the vibrator. He hadn't even thought of it when Hartman was here.

     "I forgot about that."

     "Sure you did.," the female said.

     "I did."

     "I believe you. It's alright. You didn't use it against us, and its legal. No problem."   There was amusement in her smile now. 

      They were planning to book him for discharging a firearm within the municipality without due cause. This being Malibu, and nobody dead or shot as far as they knew  (despite Damien's protests again to the contrary, at which point even Rock McGill became savvy enough to tell him to shut up) it was to all be arranged like a program. Damien would be arrested, Nick could bail him out, but the house was a crime scene and nobody could stay here tonight. Though they didn't credit his preposterous tale, the police didn't discount that he might have been firing at somebody.    

     As they were preparing to lead him out of the house, in handcuffs as a technicality, the female officer was close-by again.  Damien petitioned her to hear his argument.

     "The bedroom window was open," he reminded her.

     "Yes," she said, "And isn't it a lovely summer night at the beach."   

     "We always keep it locked," Allison protested.

     "Powder it for prints," Damien demanded.

     "DNA samples too," McGill said. Yeah, Damien thought, but McGill, his supposed friggin' attorney, was being sarcastic.

     Instead of taking him out through the garage, which was the front entrance, they went out on the deck, then down the stairs to the beach, and through sand that ran alongside the posts of the house. The point where the tide usually stopped coming in was about half the length of the house from the street, and there, where the house met the shore, the path became sand dunes.

     Allison, not in custody, was accompanying him, as was Nick, Jeannie and Rock McGill. The reason the cops were getting sand in their shoes was that there were so many police and civilian cars parked by the garage door it would not have opened, and there was just no place to move all those vehicles to. They could have gone out the front way single file through the narrow people door most of them had entered from, but that would have meant squeezing between and climbing over bumpers and fenders.

     They passed under the bedroom window on the way to the street, to the Coast Highway. They were already past the high tide line, on mounds of dry loose sand.

      There it was. Hartman Crater was shaped like a big valentine, so he had come down on his cushion. He had also left shoe tracks the size of Bigfoot's, going in the direction they were all heading now. Though there were cops on both sides to encourage him to move along, Damien stopped.

     "Don't you see the dent he made, his footprints?"

     "Let's go," the one on his right said.

     Now Damien didn't want to start indulging in plot conspiracy paranoia, but why were the police ignoring obvious evidence?

     Then Rock McGill, his barrister extraordinaire, his beautiful people show biz lawyer, said,  "All I see are patterns from wind erosion."

     The police dragged him along, stumbling and off balance in the sand, with his hands cuffed behind him.

     He was booked. Photographed and fingerprinted at the Malibu station. The police questioned Allison, but her account didn't make her a material witness. She was outside attempting suicide while her husband was shooting up the house. The way the police saw it,  Lifestyles of the…There being no dead body, they didn't have to get into those prickly details about their minor delay before making the phone call.

     Their house off limits, this time they accepted Nick's offer to stay in the Mulholland guest room, though Nick asked him also if he had any more guns. They were ready to leave the police station when, whoever had called him and whyever he'd been called, Ward McFarland appeared. If he knew, could the Enquirer be far behind?

     When he saw Damien, McFarland told him to wait in the lobby while he talked to the Malibu cops. Within a few minutes he returned, looking disgusted, and said,

     "Haven't you caused enough problems?"

     "This is my attorney," Damien said.

      McFarland looked at Rock McGill and laughed in his face. He said to Damien,

     "No one can help you unless you want to help yourself."

     This apparently sincere compassion from a police officer for the mentally ill was leading Damien to another theory, a disconcerting one: The Case of The Schizophrenic Cop. If so, God help us, what might happen if McFarland one day stopped taking his meds? There's a little schizophrenia in every population, as there is homosexuality and Parkinson's and left handedness. There are homosexual cops and left handed cops and cops who will get Parkinson's. There have to be schizo cops too, who'd  remain undetected for a while.

     Nick and Jeannie had come in their MG, a two seater. McGill had a Ferrari, with enough room for three, so Nick told him to take Damien and Allison up to Mulholland. That was no short drive, but the lawyer  'yes sir'-ed it at the police station.

     Once they started up Topanga Canyon, though, out of hearing of the boss, it became apparent Rock McGill had other plans for his evening than this imposition.

     "He feels sorry for you," he said. "You're such a loser."

     "What are you talking about? You were supposed to be representing me back there?"

     "Don't you get enough attention? Is that it?"

     "Hey!"

     "You're pathetic, throwing a tantrum like that."

    "You know what, fucker, you don't drive me and her up this canyon and then think you have a license to become an asshole because we're stuck in the car with you."

     "Get out if you don't like it."

      "Stop right now. Stop the car and YOU get out, because we're not getting stuck here."

     Instead McGill drove faster, the car whipping into the wrong lane in the dark on the constant curves.

     "Slow down."

     "Make me."

     Damien grabbed  the ascot and pulled on it, dragging McGill's head toward the passenger side as he cocked a fist back to slam him. Allison screamed, "Damien!" At least she wanted to live. MCGill's foot came down on the brake pedal, and the car screeched to a halt at the edge of a precipice.

     "Now get out with me and back up your mouth."

     "Oh, stop this macho bullshit, I have to take you up to Mulholland"

     "Then do it at a safe speed with your mouth shut."

      McGill, simultaneously backing down and sulking, whined, "It's not my fault the goddamn show was cancelled."

      Nick hadn't told them? Lied to the cast? Couldn't find the words? Didn't accept it himself? How did McGill know? He was the show's lawyer. He KNEW. Maybe Nick was hanging on to some hope, was in his own denial about it.

     It was a very quiet and gloomy ride the rest of the way up the mountain, and there were no thank-yous or goodbyes when McGill dropped them off. He didn't even go into the house, just drove away without a word. Whether he'd ever tell Nick about the altercation was up to him. Damien wasn't going to bother.

     Once in the house, Damien asked Nick directly about the show.

     Nick acknowledged, "That's what they said at the meeting. I'm trying to get other backers. We might do it, but Damien, when a show loses ratings, it's usually gone. It's the nature of the business. There are too many variables with a time change, too many uncertainties. People think Bad Investment, and they won't do it."

     They could stay with Nick and Jeannie until the police let them back in at Malibu. They could stay at Malibu rent free for as long as they needed to. Now Damien wasn't suddenly impoverished, and he didn't want charity, but he was getting a new take on Nick Morrissey. Nick really had been looking out for them. Nick and Jeannie  were decent folk, who genuinely liked them.

     Damien had to appear at an arraignment the next morning. The Enquirer, the LA Times and the TV stations were there, so maybe the cancellation wasn't news yet.

Nobody among the court, the police, nor the media gave any credence whatsoever to his absurd tale about an intruder (though he was sure The Enquirer would manage to squeeze a headline out of it.) Only Allison believed him. Though they hadn't approached the topic with him, he knew Nick and Jeannie were somewhere in line with McFarland in thinking he needed professional help.

                                          CHAPTER TWELVE

     They went back to Malibu for a while. Freeloading wasn't their style, so they continued paying rent, but that arrangement had been a part of the overall package for the show, and they didn't want to keep using Nick's generosity. They couldn't  stay much longer anyway. In a few months the winter storms would drive them out, and after several weeks, not surprisingly, Allison wanted to go back to the Poinsettia Arms.

     After the information Jerry gave to Hartman, Damien didn't want to talk to him, so Allison called. Jerry told her their old apartment was occupied, but Art had had a stroke, and was going back to New York to live with his son.  Art's apartment would be available, cleaned and ready at the end of the month, about ten days away.

     During the time they were waiting, Damien saw Frank Larkin’s byline again in  Elay Week and tried once to call him at his moving business in Huntington Beach. Frank wasn't there, and after a few days still hadn't returned his call.

     Was Hartman coming back? Damien should file a criminal complaint, but the police were convinced he was delusional and wouldn't take it seriously. The court had been lenient. In return for pleading guilty to a charge reduced to Disorderly Conduct, he got summary probation, with conditions that he see a court appointed psychiatrist and not own a handgun.

     He hired his own private investigator, a retired LAPD detective, but only for a consultation and some minor searching, because what he came up with had no promise. There was no moving company currently owned by Harry Hartman, but he indeed had one until six months ago that went bust. If, as Hartman had alleged, bureaucratic harassment brought him down, here indeed was a man who might feel a justifiable vendetta against Damien. As for fingerprints and DNA from Damien’s house, they'd be fruitless without a match to Hartman. There would be all kinds of those traces from former tenants and housekeepers, painters, carpenters, the owner. The bum from the lake with Hartman’s ID had been given a positive ID by HH Sr., and even if the police, led by McFarland, smelled “something fishy”, there had been no match from police files to the fingerprints of the deceased to dispute the confirmation. HH Sr. had shown sufficient ID.  As Damien knew (though his private detective didn't believe it)  Hartman had simply played his own father. Harry Hartman Jr. was officially dead.

     Early one morning the week they were waiting to move, the surf splashing with a monotony to meld with dreaming slumber, he woke up in their bedroom to see Allison, like an apparition, barely visible by the first trace of dawn light, looking out the window.

     She immediately bolted away, the thick curtains that surrounded her joining to darken the room again, and said, "There's a rowboat coming up on the beach." She was gone from the room before he comprehended.

     He sat up and stumbled into shorts and unlaced sneakers, then went downstairs and out on the deck. There it was, rotted and barnacled, Allison standing over it in a foot of surf, struggling to keep it from going out to sea again.

     Damien had kept most of his former moving equipment--- stuff like dollies, wardrobe boxes, furniture pads and long elastic straps---stored on the deck in a shed  he hadn't even bothered to padlock. The floor of the shed had been flooded during the storm, and the bottoms of the leaning cardboard wardrobe boxes soaked, the boxes unusable, though he never bothered to discard them. The refrigerator dolly and the flat four wheeled dolly survived, and he’d left them out in the sun to dry. The shed door had not been blown out but in, wedged at a forty five degree angle, and had served to protect his equipment from washing into the sea. After he put the dried dollies and boxes and movers' straps back, he had simply taken the door and forced it, warped, back into the frame. The fit was so tight it never banged in the wind, and he had not opened the shed since then.

      Now he kicked it in again. The little room smelled of rotten cardboard, the wardrobe boxes moldy and still soggy. He grabbed a couple of long elastic straps, then ran down the stairs to Allison. The rowboat had an anchor ring in the front, and he tied one strap into that, the other end of it to a post of the house. Allison took the other strap and tied it through one of the seats, securing it to another post.

     She didn't have to say it, but she did: "This is the boat your friend save me in."

     Damien got four more straps, and they tied that boat so securely to the house not even another " tropical" would take it away.

     It was then that he started seriously trying to get in touch with Frank Larkin. Frank, Damien now knew, had a receptionist name Betty, who did dispatch and generally ran the office. The first few times he called, she said Frank wasn't there and Damien left messages. He also tried Elay Week, but they could only connect him to a voice mail number, and he left messages there also.

     Frank never called back, and Damien began to think Betty was acting suspiciously. She'd say one time, He went away for a few days. Next time, she'd say, I don't know where he went. I don't know when he'll be back. Does he get my messages? I can't give out any information.

     Now of course Betty didn't know Damien, so if she was covering for Frank in some way, why would she reveal anything to him?

      But Frank would have called him back. Damien began to believe that, more than a dream, Allison had a psychic vision, and Frank was missing. Maybe missing and dead. In fact, Probably Dead.

     And there was somebody Damien wanted to inform about that.

     On the cusp of leaving fortune and fame (as opposed to expressing gratitude for them) he drove back into Hollywood one weekday afternoon just in time for the feeding at Annunciation.

     It was the cracker he wanted to talk to, and wouldn't you know it, the ne'er-do-well was still getting his vittles at the same place. To Damien's amazement, now that his face had almost healed, he looked even more like Frank. It's affect was to accentuate Damien's grief.

     Cliff was nowhere around right now, and there was only one food server, not the usual three. The server was a young woman, and new. The big guy hadn't reached the food pots yet, but was standing in line with his tray.

     Damien went over and stood beside him.

      He asked, "Do you remember me?"

     The guy looked down, glanced blandly at him, and said, "Nope."

     "I used to work here."

     "So?"

     "I said to you one night you looked like a friend of mine. You said 'Nobody has no friends."

     "True enough, aint it?"

     "You asked if he would die for me."

     "I don't remember you."

     "Well, I remember you. The answer is Yes. He did die for me. For my wife, so it was for me too."

     The big guy muttered, "I don't have to take this shit."

     "Your philosophy stinks, just like you."

     "This is uncalled for." His face was flushed with anger, but some fear of a set up kept him in check, sounding as if he might bring a lawsuit against the church. He was like a 7-11 clerk berated by an unreasonable customer, or an elementary school student unfairly chastised by a teacher. He was twice Damien's size, and even with notches on his belt for Harry Hartman and Rock McGill   (No, McGill DIDN'T count), Damien knew he was being a bit kamakaze. But confronted himself, the guy was almost meek. The  fact that Damien was doing it seemed to make him think there was something to be concerned about.

     Damien said, "You're a bum."

     Only stating the obvious. The guy shrugged , then, not to be distracted from his purpose, scooted away, got his staples, and went into the dining room with enough beans on his plate to explode a hydrogen bomb of flatulence in his britches. Tomorrow he'd be back again for a re-load.

     Damien shouted after him, "Why don't you get a job?" He was instantly embarrassed at the cliched triteness of his remark.

     "Why don't you?" the guy roared back.

     That question apparently did set off something in his dormant psychosis, or was just the last indignity he would tolerate. He was like a hungry bear taunted at his meal. The guy left his food and swaggered his shoulders back into the serving line room, apparently no longer worried about Damien having a gun, a knife or anything else. Rage had conquered caution. Damien thought a good survival strategy right now might be to just turn and run, but his former bravado kept him in place. Maybe he could bluff just a little more, fend him off with words.

     Before he could utter anything, the guy got his hands on him and picked him up into the air. Damien flailed arms and legs to no avail, and the guy prepared to dunk  him head first into the bubbling brown cauldron of bean crud.

     "STOP IT."

     Cliff had materialized from somewhere. Damien saw his face upside down.

     Inside the deranged mind of the derelict a survival chord played. Cliff's arrival seemed to remind him on which side his bread wasn't buttered, and where he got it. Annunciation was his bon vivant, his beloved nightly caf้e..  Damien was placed back on the floor, standing upright again, just a little dizzy.

     Cliff was regarding Damien with astonishment. The big guy hadn't moved. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of instruction.

     "Go in and eat," Cliff said, and the giant shuffled and fumbled and  left.     

    The  "Why don't you get a job?",  "Why don't you?" cadence was catching with these folks, who heard it all the time spare-changing, and they picked it up.

     "Hey, the volunteer's back. Almost got boiled in oil. Volunteer, why don't you get a job?"

     They asked each other, "Why don't you get a job?"

      "Why don't you get a job?"

     They asked Cliff, "Why don't you get a job?"

     Cliff said to Damien, "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

     That started another round:

     "Can I talk to you?"

     "Certainly. Can I talk to you?"

      Damien followed Cliff out to the patio, where the bags and packs had been left. Inside, the parody was continuing.

     "What's going on?" Cliff asked.

     "Just came to pay a visit."

     "I just got off the phone. Two of my helpers aren't showing up tonight. I need your help."

     "With them?"

     "Yes. You just do when you have something to be grateful for?"

     So Cliff knew of Damien's decent from the summits. By now, everybody knew. Damien thought, I never had any reason to do this. But Cliff was asking him. Could he just walk away, leaving him with one helper, and she barely more than a girl? Well, he could. Why not?  He didn't come here to work. But the commotion in the dining room, the satire, was not abating, and it was Damien's doing. Cliff had enough problems to deal with without that. And Cliff had saved his ass.

     He said, "Alright, but only tonight. Find somebody else. This doesn't have to be done at all."

     Cliff did something then that Damien didn't imagine he was capable of. He smiled.

     "Of course it doesn't," he said.

     He had something in common with Nick Morrissey too. It wasn't that he was another of those people who could keep you wondering if he was joking or not---Cliff wasn't a joker---but in a closely related way, Damien didn't know what Cliff's words and smile meant.

      When he went back inside, they weren't ready to give it up just because he got behind the serving counter.

     "Hey, you GOT a job."

     Apparently they did get to see the boob tube somewhere once in a while too, because he also heard,  "This the best you can do, TV Man?"

     "Hey, can I model some of them Base Camp clothes?"

     It was banter, though, not mean, and he realized they were being a little like they'd been in his dream about them and Frank Larkin. They were  crazy alright, but his subconscious had picked up something good natured in their group personality.

     Where was Frank?

                                          CHAPTER THIRTEEN

     Sucker! Cliff had him coming back the next day, and THAT was Moving Day, at least the first day of it, because after he brought a truckload, they'd still be running things into Hollywood in their cars for a while. There was no deadline imposed for getting out of Malibu, and despite Allison's enthusiasm for downward mobility, he needed to get as accustomed to that idea as he'd had to moving out there in the first place.

     There was a last minute switch too. They weren't moving into Art's old apartment after all, but to their own. The new tenants had suddenly left town. Jerry thought they were drug dealers who'd had a tip to vacate L.A., but whatever the reason, they were out, had left hastily without giving enough notice to use up their last month's rent or even get their security deposit back. They were just gone.

     Actually, once they got started, they got most of the stuff in the truck the first trip. All that was left in Malibu were a few miscellaneous items they’d get into a car in one more run. It was Allison who went back there while Damien went to Annunciation. He had arranged to meet her at the apartment at 8:00 to go out for their dinner, for convenience at that hour at ex-Rock and Roll Denny’s.

     She was there when he got home.

     “Did you get it all?”

     “I forgot my toothbrush. Can I use yours?”

     "No, Allison."

     “Your friend called. Frank Larkin."

     “Frank called? When?

     "I don't know. It was the last message left on the answering machine. I saved it for you. He said he'll be in his office tomorrow."

     They went to Denny's and had an unremarkable dinner. No Sarge there this time, though the same loud waitress he'd tipped five dollars to was, just to remind him. Sarge wouldn't be a player anymore. After Hartman's appearance, his cameos would be irrelevant.

       He called Frank the next morning. Betty answered the phone, and asked as usual who he was. When he told her, she said,

      “Hi. Just a minute, Damien.” She’d never been so friendly.

     He got Classic Surfer for two minutes, “Little Old Lady from Pasadena”, then a booming,

      “Frenchy!”

      It sounded like a pet family name to him. To Frank, to people in the Bronx, that was simply who he was.

     “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you”

     “I went to Belize. I intended just for a few nights, but I came down with something. I thought malaria, because I was sick out of my head with a fever for two weeks but the doctor told me later that’s not what I had. Maybe some kind of tropical food poisoning. Betty didn’t have a phone number for me. I was too sick to call here.”

     “Did you have any dreams?”

     “Well, yeah. Delirium.”

     “What did you dream about?”

     “I don’t remember. I had the horrors. Something about Good and Evil. A nice little cloud that was good, and a monstrous dark  cloud that was evil. The little cloud didn’t stand a chance.”

     “Frank, listen...”

     “Well, okay. I thought was”

     “Did you dream you were out on the ocean, pushing a woman tied up in a boat?”

     “Naw, they weren’t those kind of dreams, Frenchy. I was too sick, and I haven’t had them since I was thirteen. You know, once you discover you can do that when you’re awake, you don’t get them anymore.”

     “I’m serious.”

     “Me too. I dreamt triple X rated porno movies for two weeks. I want my disease back.”

     “Come on, Frank”

     “I don’t remember a fuckin’ thing except the terror and those clouds, and that’s vague. You’re a Bronx boy, Frenchy.  California sunshine is getting to you.”

     “I’m a Canadian.”

     “Yeah, that’s what it is. I KNOW you from the Bronx. They can’t take that away from you.”

     So Frank wasn’t going to put it together for him, but he had been delirius around the same time Allison dreamt she was in a rowboat and Hartman invaded the Malibu house. That didn’t put Frank in the ocean pushing a rowboat, and it didn’t put Allison in one, even if one resembling it did wash up on their beach. They had left it there, too, tied to the house supports, creaking and rocking at high tide, and there

it would stay until Nick or a new tenant claimed it or released it back to the sea.

     Frank was alive. Damien had confronted the big bum for nothing. No victory there. He was lucky not to have a face of first degree burns, but it was probably time somebody gave the guy an evaluation for Lifestyle.

     Damien was already having regrets. The guy didn’t show up last night. If he didn’t come back tonight, he would start asking the rest of them of his whereabouts, and keep going back himself to see if he returned. Taking  responsibility for him.

     “Your show got cancelled,” Frank said.

     “Yeah. I want to see you.”

     “Let’s do lunch.”

     “When?”

      “Next time I’m up there or you’re down here.”

     “You’re never coming up here, and I’m never going down there. “

     “Let’s meet in between. How’s your schedule?”

     “I have nothing but time.”

     “I do estimates for long distance jobs in the South Bay sometimes. I have an estimator, but I can’t send him that far, so I go myself. Next time I have one, I’ll call you.”

     “Okay, Frank,” he said, but felt he wouldn’t hear from him. They were too far apart now. “Don’t forget.”

     “Of course not. I’ve never seen a fallen star.”

                                         CHAPTER FOURTEEN

     They were in the Page Museum. Not on the official tour that you bought tickets for. They'd done that, just not recently. They pretty much knew which animals were represented here, and there were plenty of written descriptions inscribed at each  display.

     The biggest reconstructions, of course, were the mammoths, set up in approximately the center of the large hall, and that's where Damien and Allison were.

     Allison was snacking from a bag of chocolate covered peanuts. She'd never eaten chocolate or peanuts, but she had cravings now. From another exhibition close to them, one of the great birds flapped its wings and did a glide around the room, then flew over their heads as it came back and perched on its pedestal. Not bad form for a creature dead tens of thousands of years.  It had a mischievous smirk on its beak that indicated it knew that . Then Allison shrieked with glee, not because of the bird, but because a mammoth reached out its trunk for some Goobers.

     Being so close to so large a moving beast got them retreating, and they were back along the wall at the glass case enclosing La Brea Woman. She looked right at Damien, tossed her braids and winked. She was Allison, of course, but Allison was with him. Unlike living Allison, HER breasts were exposed at the moment, but the same as Allison's at home--- swollen and laden, the pointing nipples shaped like small pine cones. She also had the glow Allison had now, and under her hand woven, prehistoric pleated mini-skirt, the baby belly was visibly inflated. She smiled and said, "I'm the real one."

     In the other dreams, he always knew he was dreaming. This time he only knew when he woke up. Allison, sleeping on her side, sighed when he curled his body against her. She whispered from slumber with a thick tongue, “We have to think about names.” 

     Damien started a real moving company, with a PUC license, and bought two trucks. In L.A., there are a Celebrity Taxi Company, a Celebrity Airport Shuttle Van Service, a Celebrity Photos and a Celebrity Hotel, to name just some. NONE are operated by real celebrities, and few have ever had a real celebrity client, so who would be more entitled than Damien to use the name Celebrity Moving Company? He found a small vacant warehouse with a big back yard over near Normandie Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, and used it for office space, truck parking and storage services.

     His life was still great. He and Allison were in the market now for a two bedroom condo. One bedroom would have a crib. They’d wait until a month before the due date  to find out whether to paint it pink or blue.

      It was at his office that the nuisance calls began again. They were all hang-ups, but he had a new phone, and thought they were probably people calling a previous business number. Until the calls started at the apartment also. Hang-ups around midnight, 4:00 AM, then one morning , by the clock radio glowing red numbers in  the dark room, at exactly 5:02 AM. The ringer was off, and the answering machine got it, but the tape clicking and winding  woke them.

     Ten minutes later they heard the answering machine rewinding to take another message. Damien jumped from bed and grabbed the phone.

     “You fuckin’ asshole!”

     “Frenchy?”

     “Oh, shit. Frank.”

     “I’m calling too early. I’ll call back.”

     “No, no. I’m not mad at you.”

     “It’s five in the morning. I wasn’t thinking.”

     “I’m awake. Somebody else just called.”

     “I couldn’t sleep. I have to talk to you. I didn’t think of the time.”

     “It’s alright. Don’t worry. What’s wrong?”

     “I just started getting some recall from my bout with the fever. Unless you planted the  idea, I do remember a dream where I’m pushing this fuckin’ boat on a lake or water of some kind, with a lady inside, and I have to do it forever because I’m like fuckin’ Sisyphus.”

     “Why do you keep saying ‘fuck’, Frank?”

     “Why the fuck not?”

     “It’s distracting. Digressive.”

     “Fuck you. How the fuck do you know what I’m dreaming in a deranged nightmare in Belize? I died. I’m pushing this boat, and we’re going toward shore, but the water keeps getting deeper. The broad’s just sitting there like Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen, only with her hands tied behind her, but completely confident I’m gonna get her where she’s going. Finally the water is up to my mouth, then my nose, then it’s over my head, glug-glug-glug, but like an obedient slave I keep pushing the boat until I can’t breathe anymore. I drown. And then I wake up, or not really wake up because I’m in this fever twilight, but the reason I’m drowning is that I puked, and crazy sick as I was, I was able to get out of  bed and go into the bathroom to take care of that. So in its way, because it woke me up, the fuckin’ dream kept me from drowning in the vomit. You there, Frenchy?”

      “I’m here.”

      “How did you know that when I didn’t remember it myself?”

     “We need to meet. I have a lot to tell you about.”

     “You not gonna give me this California Psychic Express bullshit. You planted this.”    

     “Frankie, my mother knew when my father died before anybody called her. At three in the afternoon, she was asking why he wasn’t home and why he didn’t call, when he didn’t get home till four and never called from work.”

     “The Lord have mercy.”

     “Thanks, but this doesn’t come from me. That was Allison’s dream. She was the woman in the boat. The boat’s tied under the house in Malibu It washed up on the beach.”

      “Bullshit."

      "Not bullshit, Frank.”

      "I want to see that boat."

     “When?”

     “Today. I have an estimate in Redondo Beach at 1:00. Can we meet at the house in Malibu at 4:00?”

     Damien could take a long lunch. Ken was doing dispatch in the office now. He gave Frank directions and the Malibu address.

      “I’ll see you at 4:00.  In front of the house”

     He hung up. Allison was contentedly asleep again. It being only 5:20 or so, and his clock radio not set to go off until 7:00, he got back in the bed and followed her example.

                                            CHAPTER FIFTEEN

     This time he knew he was dreaming. The young nurse had a pretty face and a fair complexion, like Damien’s. Maybe also like him, she was French and part Welsh, or even English with that last name. She could  be Irish American with an English last name from somewhere back there. Her nameplate said she was Kim Allison. With her dark hair and brown eyes, she could be taken for half Korean. Though they weren’t present at the moment, he knew the regular doctors on this ward. They were McFarland and Morrissey. The Head Nurse was Jeannie Figueroa.The patient in the next bed was Hartman. And the overnight intern had been Rennard.

     Kim Allison said, without any real alarm, “Oh, no, Mr. Larkin, the night nurse forgot to give you your medicine again.”

     He took the Risporal  and Cogentin tablets she left, swallowed them with water, then went back to sleep. It was more peaceful this time.

     Damien gave Allison the Corvette to use today and drove the Mustang, pulling an open trailer eight feet long. Traffic was relatively light coming up on four o'clock, so he miscalculated the driving time to Malibu and arrived ten minutes early. Such promptness suited neither of them. He expected just being on time would mean waiting ten to fifteen minutes for Frank, but there was a red Volvo convertible parked on the sidewalk in front of the house. No Frank around, though. Damien parked his combo behind the Volvo.

     He had called Nick, and no one was living in the house. Nick used it on weekends, and Damien hadn't even seen him yet to turn in the keys. Nick told him he was welcome to use the house if he was meeting someone, and didn't comment on any speculation he might have about such a rendezvous. He did request that Damien dispose of the boat though, and not by pushing it back into the ocean.

     The tide was almost in, so the boat would be rocking in the encroaching waves. He didn't want to stand waiting for Frank, wherever he was, so he unlocked the shoulder high gate to the beach path that ran along the north side of the house  (from where he had been arrested), then walked through the sand. Hartman's ass and foot prints definitely looked like erosion now.

     From behind the house, he imagined the wind singing with its husky surf voice. As he got closer, he realized it was a human voice. There was a rhythm, but he couldn't make out the tune yet.

     When he got to the corner of the building, he could see the posts and the shifting boat. In the boat sat Frank on one of the benches, his back to him, singing in his deep voice. He had either reached the refrain, or was just starting his song over, giving a paraphrased rendition of a country western hit: "Mommas don't let your babies grow up to be mooovers..." Without turning around, he said "How you doing, Frenchy?"

     "How'd you know I was here?"

     "I heard you park, open the gate, and walk through the sand like a walrus. The rest was guess work."

     "How'd you get in, Frank?"

     "Over the gate. Who's that supposed to stop?"

     Who? Would it have stopped Hartman? He got in somehow. He jumped out the window. More limber than he looked. In fact, he'd have to have left over the gate. The thought that he might have come in that way and gone around the back of the house when Allison was unconscious was disturbing. What had he meant by “She’s my wife”?

     Damien took off his shoes, rolled up the legs of his jeans and left the shoes on dry sand.

     He said, “Its supposed to stop trespassers”, then went into the surf. Frank was shoeless too, wearing knee length khaki shorts and a white T-shirt with red letters that read ILLEGITIMUS NON CARBARUNDUM.

     The boat was rocking under a retreating wave that swirled as it was pushed in again by a stronger breaker. The opposing currents almost knocked Damien over. He lunged at the boat, and dragged himself into it. He had just got on the other seat, his back to the ocean facing Frank, ready to shift over to the center, but Frank's hand went out. He didn't need help now, so it must be a handshake. The boat tipped during the awkward grasp, and would have turned over were it not for the restraining ties.

     “We’re off balance, Frenchy. What the hell kind of sailor are you?”

     “You didn’t give me a chance to move over.”

     Frank laughed. He said, “Well do it now. They have any fish and chips around here?”  

     Damien answered as he slid toward the middle. “Sea food places. They sell french fries.”

     “We can do better than that.”

     “The nearest real fish and chips place is in Santa Monica on the pier.”

     “Maybe on the way back.”

     Damien wouldn’t be able to park a car with a trailer anywhere down there, and it was too far to go in Frank’s car and come back.

     “Does this boat bring anything back to you, Frank?”

     “A rowboat’s a rowboat. This piece of shit was in the ocean months, maybe years.”

     “I have to get rid of it today.”    

      They were shouting at each other over the surf.

     “What are you going to do with it?”

     “ Cut it loose. Right now.”

     Damien got back into the water, and started to undo one of the ties. Time and salt water had shrunk the knot, so that was no easy task.

     “You gonna send me into the ocean too?”

     They had to roar now to hear each other.

      “If you don’t get out I am.”

     “Frenchy, I want this boat. I’ll bring a truck up here to get it.”

     “I have a trailer.”

     “With you?”

     “Yeah.”

     “Why didn’t you tell me?”

     “You wouldn’t have helped me move it up to the road.”

     “You don’t know if you don’t ask.”

     “Will you, Frank?”

     “Let me come back and pick it up.”

     “The owner of the house wants it out of here today. I’ll take it to my yard. You  have visiting rights.”

     “Ah, Frenchy, I’ve had trouble with my back from all that lifting I’ve done.”

     “Okay.” The first difficult knot was almost free. He finished it. One down and five to go.

     Two left. Frank was riding in the almost freed boat like he was on the back of a bucking horse and almost went into the surf twice.

     He scrambled out of it.

     “Only because I’m hungry. We’re gonna eat when we get this beast to your trailer.”

     It was a work out, pulling and pushing and grunting, to get it through the sand, but after twenty minutes they had it in the trailer. Then they got in Frank’s Volvo and went to a restaurant on the highway.

     The restaurant had booths with windows looking out on the ocean at streaks in the sky that hinted of a violet and pink sunset in a few hours. There were also three  young women in bikinis on a blanket down on the beach.

     Frank said, “Nice scenery.”

    “Yeah. I’m a married man now."

    “So?  I’m engaged. Take the fantasy home.”     

     “I want what I have.”

      “That MIGHT be a good way to be. I’m not sure. .”

     “Who are you engaged to?”

     “You talked to her. Betty.She’s who I want too, but I haven’t died, Frenchy.

You sound like a nun I had in the 8^th Grade."

     The waitress came and they ordered the Fish ‘n Chips. She recognized Damien, smiled and said, “Sorry about your program.” She didn’t turn groupie, didn’t ask for his autograph.

     When she left, Frank said, “You know how it is in our business. You’re only as good as your last move. Damage furniture, have one of the crew or the customer having a bad day attitude, and you can kiss future jobs and referrals goodbye. If you get paid for the one you’re on. So, you want what you have?  But do you have what you want?”

     “Both.”

     "Well! We all want what we have. Who wants to give up anything? But to have what you want. That’s either the fulfillment of all greed, lust and envy, or some kind of enlightenment. Which, Frenchy?”

     “Fuck you.”

     “That’s more like it. Okay, I told you my delirium in Belize, and there’s nothing else to tell. I want to hear your story. After we eat.”

     “You going to write about it?”

     “Maybe. Elay Week might want it, if it’s interesting enough, and you consent. I don’t betray friends.”

     “Why didn’t you take Betty to Belize?”

     “We weren’t a couple yet. That happened since I came back.”

     When the order arrived, it was California red snapper with generous potions of large cut french fries. There were bottles of vinegar and tarter sauce on the table to conceal the greasy taste of the fried food.

     Frank said, “Frenchy, I think there’s enough cholesterol here to cause a heart attack while we’re eating, but clogged arteries probably won’t catch up with us for a

 few decades yet. Lots of time to repent gastronomically. Eat, Frenchy. What’s wrong?”

     “Can you call me Damien, Frank?”

     “What?”

     There was a full three second pause of shock.

     “Sure, Fre...Yeah, okay. I have to get used to that.  Damien. You never objected before. In fact, you told me that was your name.”

     “It never bothered me until today. You keep saying it.”

     “Okay...Damien...Look, I know, French is a nationality, Damien is a name, but I’m gonna make mistakes."

     “Just try.”     

     “Right. If I forget, remind me. Damien, let’s eat, and then I want to hear it, everything, from the last time I saw you to this very moment.”

     After the waitress took the dishes, they ordered coffee, and Damien talked. He told all of it, the details, the fame, Harry Hartman, the dreams, his paranoia, even the sex, feeling safe because he rarely saw Frank now, but asking him to keep that out of print. It was almost seven o’clock. The sky was spectacularly colorful around the orange ball approaching the horizon. The waitress was scowling and wouldn’t approach to pour any more coffee refills, of which they’d had three (four cups counting the first one). The restaurant wasn’t closing, and there were only a few more customers. She just seemed to feel they’d overstayed their conversation visas.

     Frank said, “Yeah, they'd take an article about this. Do you want me to do it?”

     The Enquirer’s last feature cover about Damien, their farewell boot in the rear,  read, ”Cinderfella Goes Home In A Pumpkin”, and though they didn’t endanger his life by printing his home address, they pictured the Poinsettia Arms on the front page. What would be the harm in somebody telling what really happened?

     “Do you believe me?”

     “I had that dream that more or less synchronized with hers. And that fuckin’ boat washed up. I’ll put that in too.”

     “If you believe me, write it. Nobody else does but Allison. Go ahead.”

                                       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

     What Frank wrote appeared two weeks later in an issue of Elay Week, a periodical of entertainment listings and articles about show biz and local politics.

A result of the publication, one Damien should have anticipated but didn’t until it was distributed, was that the new publicity got him spooked. Hartman’s name was openly mentioned, he was accused by Damien of invading the Malibu house and of murder in Mac Arthur Park, and would he not now re-appear somehow?

     Damien couldn’t legally own a gun, but the court hadn’t thought to place restrictions on other things. He took to carrying a buck knife in one front pocket, a can of pepper spray in the other.

     Other than that, he tried to get his life back into the “usual” track, usual before show biz and Malibu. That meant going to normal places, eating at Cantors and Rock ‘n Roll Denny’s and other coffee shops, going to dance clubs, going to the gym, going to movies. He would not be the only TV personality in Hollywood doing such things.

     It was in that spirit that they went to the Beverly Center shopping mall one Friday afternoon when Allison hadn’t been called to sub, went to see a movie and eat dinner afterwards.

     Allison had a hand phone now. Didn’t everybody but Damien? It rang as they were going up on the escalator between floors, and she answered it.

     “Hello...Who’s this?...I’m in the Beverly Center...You’re in the Beverly Center too?”

     Then she looked up, toward the top floors. Damien looked too. Who was in the Beverly Center? He couldn’t tell for sure where she was looking..

     “Who are you talking to?”

     “Nobody.” She hung up and turned her phone off. “It was a wrong number”

     “Who’s in the Beverly Center?”

     “Nobody."

     They were at level four, and would now have to do some walking to get a lift to six. Where they got off the escalator, there was a restaurant with tables and chairs facing the floors of the open mall below them. Standing in the restaurant doorway was a man about fifty holding a phone.

     Damien immediately approached  him and asked,

     “Did you just call her?”

     “Pardon me?”

     “If I thought you were following me around, I’d take care of it right now.”

     Allison threw her arms around him, their baby bumping against his stomach. She said, “Honey, stop it.”

     The man used that moment to signal for security.

      A male Latin guard  in uniform came over and asked,

     “What’s the problem?”

     “He’s threatening me.”

     Allison, releasing her bear hug on Damien, said,

     “It was just a mistake.”

     The guard asked Damien, “Did you threaten him?”

     “No. I thought he was calling us.”

     “I don’t even know them.”

     “Do you have any ID?”

     “Oh, look...”

     “ID, sir.”

     Damien took out his wallet and showed his driver’s license.

     The guard said, “It IS you. What going on?”

     “Nothing. We’re just going to a movie.”

      “That’s not what he says.”

      “Like she told you, it was just mistaken identity.”

     The guard glanced at the complainant, asking with facial expression how far he wanted to pursue this.  

     The man shrugged and said, “If he’s happy, I’m happy.”

     “Go to the movie,” the guard said. “Don’t bother him or anybody else.”

     “You got it.”

     They went on up to the sixth floor, and after buying movie tickets went to the concession stand. There Damien said,

     “Can you explain that phone conversation to me?”

     “There’s nothing to explain.”

     “But you said to some one, ‘You’re in the Beverly Center too?’”

     “Somebody had a wrong number, Damien.”

     “He was in the Beverly Center?”

     “No! I thought that’s what he said. He was repeating what I said. It’s noisy in here.”

     “Why did you tell him you were in the Beverly Center?”

     “Because he asked me where I was. I didn’t know who was calling and he thought he had somebody else. Can we enjoy this afternoon together? I get so few days off now.”

     “Yeah, okay.”

      But sitting in the theatre, he couldn’t. He couldn’t concentrate on the movie. He kept thinking about the phone call. He played it over and over in his mind, trying to gleam from each take the possible meaning and implications. Finally, he could sit still no longer, told Allison he had to use the restroom, and went back into the mall.

     He went down to the level that was below them when the phone rang, then rode up on the escalator. He made the trip up and down three times.

     He was riding between floors three and four. On four, above him going up, was the restaurant, which had a vantage point to where they’d been standing on the escalator.

     The last trip up, he got off the escalator at four and went back to the restaurant. The man with the phone was long gone. As Damien expected, from the restaurant railing he could see to the floors below, could see the people riding up on the escalators.

     The security guard noticed he was back, and started walking toward him. Damien retreated to the lift to go back up to the movie.

     There had only been a handful of people on this weekday afternoon in the small multi-plex screening room theatre, and Allison was no longer among them. He had been gone twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. He looked around carefully to see if she had moved, but she hadn’t. She was gone.

     He went back into the mall again and found a pay phone, but her mobile was still off. There was no point in calling home. She couldn’t get there yet.

     With nothing else to do but go home and see if she was there when he arrived, he left the mall and went down to parking. Maybe she’d be waiting at the car for him.

     The Corvette was gone. They both had keys to it. Had she left him here?  Had she been kidnapped?

     He went home by taxi, and when he got there, Allison was in the living room watching television. She did not greet him.

     "Hello", he said.

     He got no reply.

     “Why did you ditch me?”

     “I didn’t ditch you. You left me alone. I didn’t know where you went.”

     “Okay, look, you said the caller had a wrong number, but then why did you turn the phone off?”

     “So he wouldn’t call me again, and we were going to a movie.”

     “But when you said  ‘You’re in the Beverly Center too?’, you were looking up like you were trying to see someone.”

     “Damien! Stop it! I wanted to see where we were going. I was looking for the movies.”

     Now he felt a bit ashamed of his suspicions.

      He said, “Okay, that sounds plausible. I just needed you to explain it.”

     Allison began sobbing. She convulsed the way she had in Ensenada the morning after their wedding.

      She whispered to herself, not to him, “We’re going to have a baby. I need you, Damien. Don’t go crazy on me.”

     Damien’s company had become an agent for American Van Lines, but he still rented trucks from Lou at Load ‘n Drive if he had a long distance job going within California or to bordering states. He kept his own trucks in LA for local jobs. Lou cut him a great deal at fifty percent of the listed book price, which made the profit high enough to do those jobs himself.

     He had a house of furniture going to Monterey in central California, and he drove. As he had always done, he’d get his helper for unloading somehow up there. Usually, arriving at normal hours, that was simple. Another moving company had guys who wanted to work, or he’d go to a restaurant or convenience store and ask if they knew anybody who wanted to unload a truck. Often, teenage kids hanging around video games would take the work.

     This job was routine, he arrived in the afternoon, and was able to check the truck in before closing time at the Load 'n Drive office in Monterey. He spent the night at a cheap tourist motel, and flew back to Burbank in the morning.  

     He was still recognizable, so in a toilet stall at the airport, he switched to what Hector had called his blind-baseball- player-with-his-head-on-backwards mask. That was for the MTA bus ride to Lou’s Load ‘n Drive office in Hollywood, and his car.

     Lou was behind the counter taking care of another customer, a middle aged man with some kind of foreign accent. While he was waiting, Damien removed his disguise. Lou finished with the other guy, then started settling accounts with Damien.

      The first customer noticed him without the disguise and said,

     “Weren’t you in Monterey?”

     “What?”

     “You were in Monterey.”

     “How do you know that? I didn’t tell anybody here I was in Monterey. I didn’t say anything about Monterey.”

     “I met you there.”

     “I didn’t meet anybody in Monterey. Where did you think you met me?”

     “At the Load ‘n Drive office. Didn’t you go to Load ‘n Drive in Monterey?”

     “Yes, I did. But I didn’t talk to anyone. That’s really strange that you met somebody who looked like me at  Load 'n Drive in Monterey, and I went there too.”

     “My English. Not 'met'.  Not talk to you. I SAW you in the truck office in Monterey.”

     He tried to remember who the hell was in the rental office up there. There were a few people. This guy was as blending as an undercover cop.

     “So what are you doing here?”

     “I rented a truck to LA.”

     “You rented a truck to LA?  You saw me in the rental office in Monterey, and now you're here too? I have enemies. I have people who would hurt me, and I don’t know who you are."

      “Not follow you. I saw you two times, here and there. I am American citizen. I show you. Look. No problem. I have US passport, I have California Driver’s License.”

     He took out those documents and placed them on the counter for Damien to look at. Damien didn’t want to fall for a trick, get that close to him. His hand was on the knife in his pocket. He had practice taking it out and flipping it open with one hand.

     Lou said, “Damien, the guy just brought a truck in. He came from Monterey.”

     “Not follow. I came here before you.”

     That wouldn’t make any difference if he knew where Damien was going, but it could, might just possibly, be a coincidence. A coincidence somehow brought on, like the phone call at the Beverly Center, by Damien’s own errant driven energy.

     Lou said, “Here’s your deposit, Damien.”

     He had a standing deposit of $150 in cash left with Lou to have a truck or trailer reserved any time he knew in advance he needed one, and Lou was giving it back.

     “Keep it, Lou.”

     “Take your money. You want to rent something, call me. We’ll see.”

     The guy with the accent moved back as Damien approached the counter to pick up the bills. His passport and license were still there for his viewing.

     He said, “I never bother you. Not follow you. Have a good day.”

     Damien didn’t answer him, just gave him his best don’t-you-even-think-about-fucking-with-me look, but resolved as he was leaving that he was going to have to stop doing this. Somehow.

     Damien knew he was acting so peculiiar that people (like his wife) were starting to judge him. And yet, there was that guy sitting on a motorcycle in front of the house. What was he doing? Why would anybody sit on a parked motorcycle in front of an apartment building?  He’d seen him there three times.

     After the third time, he called the police. It was early afternoon. He had left Ken to run the office while he took care of some other business, then went home for a while to work on his books in peace.

     When he told the female officer he thought he was being stalked, she asked if he could see the man on the motorcycle now. He carried the phone to the living room window and looked out.

     “Yes.”

     “What’s he doing?”

     “Nothing. Just sitting there.”

     “How do you know he’s stalking you?”

     “I’ve had a lot of publicity. If he’s not stalking me, maybe he’s casing the building. He’s out there a lot.”

     “What’s he look like?”

     “A young skinny white guy with long brown hair.”

     “What’s he wearing?”

     “A purple sweat shirt and blue jeans. Boots.”

     “We’ll send a car, Mr. Rennard.”

     After hanging up, Damien watched from the window until a black and white LAPD car arrived. The officers parked behind the cycle, then got out and talked to the guy sitting there. They only talked for a few minutes, never asked for ID, then got back into the police car and drove away.

     Damien called again and got another officer, a man.

     He said, “If they left, it’s because he wasn’t doing anything.”

     “He didn’t LOOK like he was doing anything. That’s the problem. He’s always sitting out there doing nothing.”

     “What’s that address?”

     Damien gave it to him.

     “We have a busy department, you know. Hold on. I’ll find out the resolution on the contact.”

     If the police weren't going to do anything, maybe he should. Go out with the knife drawn, and if forced to, stick it in. Two motions, in and up. Cut him open like a fish, from groin to sternum. Teach that two bit Hollywood street mafia not to fuck with a New Yorker. Oh, Damien, where has sanity gone?

     While he was waiting on the phone, he watched from the window. A girl about sixteen, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, came out of the Poinsettia Arms and gave the guy a big hug, then climbed on the back of the bike. He now realized the cyclist was a boy himself, maybe eighteen. With his girlfriend behind him, holding on tightly already with her arms around his waist, her cheek against the back of his neck, he revved it up, then the bike reared and sprung forward, screeching as it sped away from the curb.

     Damien hung up.   

                                       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

     He was trying hard to reassure Allison now that behavior of the type she'd seen in the mall, and his suspicious interrogation of her, were an anomaly. They were a result of the stress he'd felt from the drastic changes in their life styles twice within six months, and the trauma of Hartman breaking into their home. He was doing his best to be sensitive with her.

     She didn't know, of course, about the scene at Load 'n Drive, nor that he'd called the police on a kid waiting for his girlfriend. She seemed to accept, because she wanted to believe it, that his problems were behind him. Her birthday came, and he took her to a restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was an uneventful evening.

     Early one evening, she told him the Mustang was overheating, and asked if he could take it to a garage the next day and let her use the Corvette. Damien needed to get to work in the morning too, though. With Ken in the office, if he took the Mustang somewhere tonight, he could drive her to work in the Corvette, then leave work early and pick her up after her classes.

     It wasn't 6:00 o'clock yet, so he called a repair shop near them where he'd had work done before. They were still open and told him to bring the car down right away and leave it.

     Allison went in to take a shower, and he left with the Mustang keys. The car was parked around the corner on Poinsettia.

      He unlocked it and sat in the at-once familiar and comfortable bucket seat, then put the key into the ignition. He allowed himself to relax for just a moment, in a sudden realization, brought on by this old friend the Mustang. of his happiness still, an awareness of all the joy and gifts in his life. He exhaled a sigh and the street dissolved with his burning tears.

     As he fully sobbed, a voice behind him said,

     "You really hurt me, Mr. Rennard."    

    It almost seemed like Hartman couldn't fuck it up. He tried to deny his existence even as he felt his panting breath on his neck

     That which he'd been afraid of was in the back seat. He had suffered from Hartmanphobia. The wrong number caller in the mall, the Load 'n Drive customer from Monterey, the kid with the motorcycle, some or all or none of them could have been Hartman emmasaries. Multiple Choice, Hartman style: "Which do you pick, Mr. Rennard?"

      " I hurt you?"

      "You did."

      "That's good. They weren't doing you any good anyway."

      As he said that, he recalled his speculation, the day he met Frank at the beach, that Hartman might have climbed over the gate while Allison was unconscious. He hoped they hadn't been doing him any good.

     Maybe not, because Harman moaned like a cow in a field, a creature that always sounded to Damien like its stomach hurt. Or did Damien  just happen by when they needed milking, and they complained to him because he was there?  He didn't know. He wasn't a farm boy. But Hartman went “Mmmmmmmmm”, just like them.

     Enough digression.  Back to the moment. Hartman was in the car, and had regained his composure enough to cock a gun behind Damien's right ear and say, in his windy way,

      "Put both hands on the steering wheel and keep them there. I have my own gun now, Mr. Rennard.  Also a revolver. I liked yours so much I bought one myself."

     "Full of blanks again?" Damien asked, though he put his hands where requested.

      "Not FULL of them."

      "Well, why don't you shove it up your ass then and fire till you blow your brains out."

     It was déjà vu. The gun went off and a bullet scorched the rim of Damien's ear on its way to punching a cylinderic perforation in the windshield.

     That gets adrenaline surging right away, and has a way of dumbing up a smart mouth.

     "Be nice, Mr. Rennard. I have more games for us.  Let's play Russian Roulette this time. I'll hold the gun of course, but you make the selection. Which will it be? Fire first at your head or at my head?"

     Damien held back saying, I Told You Where To Put It. If Hartman was using the same loading pattern as last time, the next round would be a blank. If…

     "Choose or I will," Hartman told him.

     A few more seconds of life were a few more seconds to think, a few more seconds of hope. Hartman knew if the next rounds were blank or real. He wouldn't shoot himself. Or would he?

     "Fire at yourself," Damien said.

     Hartman moved the gun away from Damien, whose hands were welded to the steering wheel. Damien turned his head enough to see him lean way back in the seat beyond grabbing range and place the gun to his temple. Even a blank, at such close range, could kill him.

      He watched the finger pulling the trigger until the gun went " CLICK".

       Not a blank. No round of any kind in that chamber.

     "Again," Damien said. "Fire them all at yourself."

     "That's not how Russian Roulette is played," Hartman explained patiently. "Don't they teach you anything in Catholic school? Turn your head back and look straight ahead."

      Just showing he'd done his research, Damien thought, as he looked out the windshield again. It was already dark. People walked by forty feet away on Hollywood Boulevard, noticing nothing. They might as well be extras on TV. If Hartman knew where Damien lived, what he drove, his phone numbers, maybe where he went to movies and which cities he rented trucks to, why wouldn't he know he'd gone to Catholic school? What He Drove. This was Allison's car. Hartman couldn't have known Damien was taking the Mustang in for work tonight. Was he lying in the back seat waiting for Allison to come back, even if that wasn't until morning? Did he really know who drove a car registered to Damien?  That might be giving him too much credit. It did seem Damien was the one he was after.

     As if hearing Damien's thoughts, Hartman said,

     "My wife is pregnant."

     Was he saying his wife was pregnant because in his deluded mind he believed he was Damien, or was he saying it because…? No, he couldn't even indulge that thought.

     "You're an evil scum bag," he told Hartman. He left out 'sick' because he was in no mode of excusing or forgiving.

     Maybe that was not a thing to say to someone holding you prisoner, but Damien believed Hartman was going to do whatever he'd planned, regardless of anything Damien might think or say.

     Which now was to press the muzzle of the gun to the back of Damien's head. Sitting as he was, immobilized by the luxury of the bucket seat, with his hands forward on the wheel and the gun completely behind his head, there was no opportunity to do what he'd done in Malibu.

     "In case this is it, and the gun goes off now, do you have any last words?"

     "I just said them”

     "Evil Scum Bag'? ' Would you like that quote attributed to you on a tombstone?"

      "I can't stop you, so do whatever you're going to do."

      “On three. One…two…two and a half…two and three…”

      CLICK

      " Oh, my, my, my,” Hartman said. “That was a quarter of a second too soon. I do apologize.”

      Damien had it. It didn't think it mattered whether the next chamber was loaded or empty, but he would let Hartman point the gun at himself first.

     When he thought Hartman had done that, he turned and looked. Hartman leaned way back again and was pointing the gun at his head. Were there any more bullets? Did he know where they were? Was he playing this game for real?  CLICK

      Damien executed his simple plan. He opened the car door, put one foot into the street, and prepared to run. Hartman lunged and grabbed him around the neck in a choke hold. He pulled him back into the car, then lifted and dragged him over the bucket seat. The car door was still open. Damien punched and wrestled and struggled, but it was pointless. Hartman pushed him to the floor on his back and sat on him. He wasn't even trying to restrain Damien's hands. Damien was afraid he'd crush his spleen. Hartman had both his hands free also, so the gun was somewhere in the back, on the floor or the seat. He thrashed his hands around on the floor trying to find it. His arms swept in arcs as far as he could reach. Hadn't anybody seen what was happening in this car? Maybe the police would come.

     Damien started screaming. Why didn’t he think of that before? That should attract some attention. Those people strolling on Hollywood Boulevard really weren't  stand-ins.

     “You fuckin’ zung sleezeball dickhead son of a whore rhinoceros, you’re squashing my internal fuckin’ organs, get off of me.”

     Somebody must have heard that. True to his M.O., Hartman had props again, this time including a clothesline rope and a roll of duct tape. First the duct tape, over what he must have thought of as THAT mouth of Damien’s, unrolled from the back of his head to his mouth, then continuing in a complete circle to his hair in the back , then around one more time, and one more, before Hartman tore the tape. He flipped Damien over face down, sat on him again with one of Damien’s arms under the weight, then grabbed the other hand just as Damien was about to start ripping tape off.

     Now he was ready for the rope. It had a choking loop in one end that he put around the wrist he was holding, then pulled on the rope, tightening the cinch to maximum squeeze. He forced that hand down to the arm he was sitting on, tied both hands together, and wound the rope around the wrists four times.

     Damien turned his head to look up and watched his capture. Hartman had a cutting blade too and sliced the rope. With the long remaining section, he tied Damien’s ankles together, then forced them back jackknifed toward his buttocks.

He cut the rope again, then at the new end made a hangman’s knot and put it around Damien’s neck. His legs and thighs hurt already, but Hartman pulled the secondary segment through the knot until Damien would choke himself if he straightened his legs. Any pull would make the loop tighter.

     Hartman got off him, tilted the front seat forward, and got out of the car.

     Damien knew he got in the front  because the bucket seat creaked in protest, then abruptly slid back screeching on its track as the door closed. Some jagged edge at the bottom of the seat, never anticipated by the designer for a situation like this, pinched his thigh and gouged it. Below the waist he was pinned between the front and rear seats. Because the front passenger seat was still forward, he had a couple of extra inches at the upper body.

     “Evening, Officer,” Damien heard Hartman gasp.

     “Everything alright?” a heavy male voice asked. “I stopped because I saw your door open.”

     “Just had to change a fuse. The bigger I get, the smaller this car is.”

     “Okay. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind showing me your driver’s license.”

     “No problem.”

     There were a few seconds of rustling.

     Ask Him For The Registration. Look In The Back Seat.

     The other voice said, “Is this your car?”

     “No, it’s my lover’s.”

     “I see. Do you have the registration?”

      YEAH!

     “It’s in the glove compartment. Under some tools. Do you want to get it, or shall I?”

     “You get it.”

     “Okay. I have to move a plyers and screwdriver out of the way.”

     “Go ahead.”

     Damien heard the front passenger's seat squeak and the tools clatter. Hartman must have done some snooping before Damien got to the car, because he knew they were there, knew where the registration was.

      Damien thought Hartman was spending too much time rattling the hardware around in the glove box. As his weight shifted back and caused the driver's seat to groan again, he heard him say quickly, with some panic,

     "That's why I TOLD you about the screwdriver and plyers, Officer."

     Damien imagined the policeman had drawn his gun.

      He heard, "Give me the registration."

     There was some more shuffling, and then that new voice, the cop, asked,

     “What name is it registered under?”

     “Damien Rennard.”

     “The TV star?”

     “The same.”

     If the cops read  Elay Week, Damien was saved.

     “What’s the address it’s registered at?”

     “7326 Hollywood Boulevard, Apt. 109. Right around the corner.”

     “Where do you live?”

     “The same address. I haven’t changed it on my license yet.”

     “Is Mr. Rennard home now?”

     “No. He’s working late. I’m going to pick him up.”

     “Okay, Mr. Hartman. I’m going to give you a warning ticket.  Leaving a car door open in a traffic lane on a dark street is a hazard. You don’t have to appear on the ticket, but if an officer stops you again for the same offense, or you’re the cause of an accident that way, there will be a record of a previous warning. You better tell Mr. Rennard to replace that windshield too. What happened there?”

     “Beats me. I think some brats through a stone at it.”

     Damien wanted to thump, but there was no part of his body he could thump without strangling himself. The only noise he could make was through his nose, from which he was getting air. He tried snoring. From where his face was, on the rubber floor mat, he sounded like a pig moving up on a trough full of fodder, but the noise didn’t seem to reach the officer. All Damien heard from him was the scribbling of a pen, then the tearing of paper from a pad.

     Hartman said sweetly, “Thank you for not ticketing me, Officer.”

     “Yeah. Have a good evening, sir.”

     In another few moments, the smooth tuned engine of the police car hummed, then diminished to nothing.

     Hartman chuckled, “How about that, Damien? Was that a con job, or what? You don’t mind if I call you Damien, do you? Considering our relationship?”

     Hartman laughed heartily, and started the Mustang.

     “You and me, we’re going for a little ride.”

     Damien’s thighs were cramping. They hurt as if being pounded by hammers. His tendons were on fire. When the pain seemed unendurable, his feet began negotiating with his throat.

     Can you stand a little tightness if I just straighten my legs a fraction of an inch?

     The throat said, No, because you can’t give back looseness. This is a noose. You take a tenth of an inch, if you can push your ankles back again, it’s too late. Giving back slack won’t loosen a noose. Distance given is distance lost.

     He tried shifting weight, to get help from gravity, leaning his weight as much as possible toward his face, grinding it into the smell of the rotting rubber mat.

     They must have been riding for an hour, but never got on the freeway, because the car stopped and slowed down periodically, and never sped up to highway MPH. Where would they be driving to for so long on the streets?

     There came finally a time when the car stopped, backed up, and the ignition was turned off.

     “Okay, Damien, I got you as close as I could. The car will probably get towed away here in the morning, but ces’t la vie, non?”

     The front seat tipped forward again, and Damien was picked up and taken out of the car. He was held between joined hands, supported against Hartman’s right hip, still facing down. They had only been riding around for ten or fifteen minutes, because they were on 6^th Street just west of Cochran Avenue, near the northeast corner of Hancock Park, site of the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits.

     This was an area inhabited mostly by Orthodox Jews, who lived in small two and three story stucco apartment buildings and private houses, and they had their religious schools and synagogues in the neighborhood. Surely, Damien thought, there would be vigilance here. No sign of it though.

     “You’re going home,” Hartman said. There was a ministering reassurance in his tone.

     Hartman carried Damien, like a long loaf of Italian bread used for those gigantic hero sandwiches, face down and backwards, through the grass and under the trees and across the paved paths of the park until they reached its south border at Wilshire Boulevard, where the biggest pit was.

     Around the pit was a meshed wire fence with forked jagged prongs at the top. A gate in the fence was locked.

     Both Damien and Hartman were startled by a voice under a tree that seemed, in the dark, to be coming from a long exposed root.

     “You guys got an spare change?”

     That was delivered aggressively, with more than implied menace, but then, as if suddenly seeing and comprehending the situation, the tone changed.

     “Ohh! Hey! I didn’t see nuttin’. Want me to leave?”

     He stood up to do so.

     Hartman said, “Get back down.  Don’t you think about going anywhere. Lie down like you were.”

     Lucky bum, Hartman had an immediate commitment. He went back to his previous impression of woodland growth.

     “Okay,” he said, “I’m going back to sleep. No shit. Got a few drops left in this ole jug. I din’t see you. Ever. I mind my own.”

     Hartman had his own entrance to the tar pit prepared, a spot where the fence had been sliced seven feet high. He didn’t even have to bend over, just push the fence aside and walk through with Damien.

     Damien’s legs were completely numb now, as were his buttocks and hips. He was afraid he couldn’t control his legs from straightening out and hanging him, but somehow he willed them to remain bent.

     Still being carried bachwards, Damien saw the bum, once he realized they’d passed through the fence, jump up and run away.

     Hartman heard him. He said, “He won’t tell the police, Damien, but even if he does, and they LISTEN to him, it won’t make any difference now. Somebody in those apartments on 6^th Street, somebody driving by, might have seen us. It’s too late. We’re here.”

     He placed Damien down gently on the dirt bank of the big pit, facing the dark and dense bubbling pond. The coldness coming off it shivered him, but the tar water bubbled as if it were boiling. It seemed to be a cauldron, a vat containing the chill of death with the heat of hell.

     Hartman said, “I’m taking the tape off now, Damien. It no longer matters if you shout.”

     He sounded kind, immensely considerate.

     “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? It was clear in that article. Baptism of Tar. Internment in tar. We’re going in together, you and me. Baptism and Communion and Last Rites all together. Maybe Marriage too. How many sacraments are there? Want to go to Confession? I’m killing myself, and you are me, so I’m killing us.”

     Hartman cut the tape in the back with the razor. If his new execution watch sensitivity was so genuine, why did he then RIP the tape from Damien’s face! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Lord have mercy on my soul, bring comfort to my widow and protect my unborn child, I only THOUGHT my legs had hurt!

     He was free to talk. He could scream, but he knew Hartman was right. Nobody could help him. They were here.

     “Damien,” Hartman asked in his almost convincingly soothing voice, “Do you have anything to say now? This time is real. Anything to ask me?”

    “Why the hell are you doing this?"

     There was a pause before he answered.

     “I read the article in Elay Week twice. Your friend put in all the details, all your ideas. I guess from your point of view, I’m every asshhole you ever met.”

     Somebody finally admitted it. STOP. Sarcastic humor wasn’t getting him out of here. Couldn’t hurt, though. Nothing was. Unless stalling would.

     "And what am I to you?"

     Hartman gave that careful consideration too.

     "You? " he replied, "You're the asshole who always got everything I ever wanted."

     "Explain that."

     "Nice try, Damien, but No. As the telephone operators used to say in the old days, You're time is up, Sir"

     Hartman picked him up again. He saw the ominous, blacker-than-night, primordial quicksand grave seeming to rise as he went toward it. To the touch, it was colder than Arctic ice, it was the devil’s deep freeze torture chamber. It was so cold he did scream. He couldn’t believe what he said, but his mouth had a mind of its own.

     “Wait. Wait a minute. Not yet. It’s too cold. Let me get used to it.”

     Talk to a tree trunk. He was under the surface, and as frigid as it was, he had other considerations now. Hartman didn’t lie. He went in too, on top of Damien, to insure he’d go all the way to the bottom.

     The pit was deep and they sank for what seemed to be a very long time, for minutes, and it continued to get colder. He could see nothing. It was as if he was  blind. He no longer knew how he kept from strangling himself. It no longer seemed to matter.

      The bottom was not a bottom at first, but a mucous and seaweed like substance, less dense than a sponge, which slowed their descent because they became entangled in it. They continued gradually through it for several more seconds, and finally, when they did stop completely, he knew he was in the tar.

     Hartman was still on his back, hands on his neck, using his weight and final strength to push his face further into the mask of pitch. The hands would not stop pushing him down until Hartman lost consciousness. If Damien outlasted him, he would be bound and trapped under a dead pachyderm

     He didn't pray now. He felt he was beyond the aid of prayer. Everything that had been done or not done was not done or done. Whatever they said about repentance, he had no inclination for an Act of Contrition, no time to examine and itemize. It was too late. Somebody else would have to count the tally, if anybody in Heaven or on earth cared to. Allison, the night she tried to die, proposed that love, romantic love, could be a pathological delusion. Couldn't the same be said of the concept of God? Maybe those euphoric revelations he'd had (imagined?) were only symptoms of his madness. But was he mad?  His paranoia had been well based.

     He was suffocating, drowning as Frank had in puke. He saw a light. It wasn’t the light at the end of a tunnel. He was staying in this tunnel. It was a light IN the tunnel, increasingly glowing brighter, beckoning him whence he cared not go.

It was a pre-Death hallucination, brought on by lack of oxygen.

     There were others. He saw that dark evil cloud Frank had mentioned, the one so much more powerful than the small good cloud. The hands that had been on his neck were on his shoulders now. They were gentle. Losing strength? They seemed to be bringing him up, not pushing him down. They were slender and smaller and much more caring. He was dying and denying it, believing there was a reprieve from the terrible thing that was happening to him.

     He heard Nick Morrissey. “Damien, can you swim? I’m making a movie about skin divers. Have you ever done any extra work?” That was followed by buzzing. Was Nick crazy? How could he do extra work? Everybody knew who he was. But what did a short circuited brain care about facts?

     His air was gone. Death was on him. These were final mirages. The hands were pulling him back. The light, now intense, hurt his eyes. It was just the survival mechanism, the wish and love for life.

     He heard Allison. She said,  “Honey, come back.”

     Her hands reached into the death mask and lifted his face from it. He was no longer smothering. He could breathe. It must mean he’d stopped breathing.

     The cruelty of illusion by the human mind! The will to live! The tar mask was a pillow. He was in his bedroom. The light source was the Venetian blinds that had been angled open, letting daylight slide in between the slats. With her back to the window, Allison’s head was encircled by a halo, like the saints in holy pictures. She was welcoming him---where? Somehow he had gone home, as Hartman had promised. Allison was as slim as she’d been before pregnancy. She wasn’t giving birth, he was. He said, “We have to give it a name.”

     She laughed and said, “You nut. When did you get back? Tell me about it. Did you eat Mexican food and go to sleep again? All those jalapenos and refritos raging around in your brain.”

     If this was real, he had so much to tell her about. If it wasn’t real, he had a lot to tell her. The important thing was, she was there. If it was all reality, or a lie, a vision, a delusion, a dream or a hallucination, she was there. She was there and he had what he wanted. This unique relationship, that could not be replicated again in the history of humanity. It was his. They were together. Nobody could take that away from him.  Ever.

     Could they?

     Had they?

.