SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #29

SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #29

BATFISH

LOS ANGELES

I paid cash for my ticket and caught the first flight out to San Diego. Shitting nickels and dimes when I got off the plane because I was sure that the cops would be waiting for me at the gate. But not a soul.

Since car rental companies don’t like their autos driven into Mexico, I didn’t tell them that I was headed there. I jumped into my little Toyota and headed for Ensenada, where I would spend the next two weeks just laying low and on the beach. 

Every morning I would go to a restaurant that catered to expatriates and would pore over the west coat newspapers searching for anything out of the ordinary. But there was nothing.

Finally, on the fifteenth day I was there I got the balls up to call Zak. The phone rang a couple of times but it sounded funny and then it made a noise like it was being transferred. Mexican phones are notoriously famous for being fucked up so I didn’t give it a second thought until the phone picked up.

Whoever picked it up didn’t say anything. Then I heard a dog barking. Slamming down the phone I took off for my room, packed my bag, and headed back up the coast to San Diego. How long does it take to trace a phone call? I had no idea.

Stopping in Tijuana I went into a cantina and bought a beer and got a ton of change and went to the back to place another call.

This time to Tom’s little love shack up in the mountains. When Tom answered the phone and heard it was me he started to immediately freak out.

“Zak’s dead, man. They found him hanging naked in his locker. He had speaker wire around his neck. There was a bunch of gay fuck books lying at his feet. They’re saying he was doing some sort of weird sex thing and it went wrong. And they found a whole bunch of drugs in the room. Ounces of heroin and cocaine in both of your lockers. Both the fucking cops and NIS are after you, man. Rose has disappeared and they’re saying that you had something to do with it. Where the fuck are you? What the hell is going on?”

By now Tom was hysterical and was practically screaming. Kill the guy. Hang him up so that it looks like it was sex related. Plant drugs on the scene. All designed to cause embarrassment to the victim’s family so they don’t cause a stink. The mark of the military assassin.

Also way out of Leon's league. He couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel. Someone else was involved in this one. I laid my head against the glass of the phone booth.

“Don’t believe a word they say, Tom. Maybe I’ll see you some day and I’ll be able to tell you the whole story. Take care of that woman of yours. And Tom? Stay away from all of this.”

I laid the receiver down in its cradle gently and walked back to the bar. Ten Carta Blancas later I was ready to move on.

As I walked back to my car I was stopped by a young boy who asked if I wanted my picture taken and super imposed on to a painting of The Last Supper. And for some stupid fucking reason I did. It was really quite a work of art. Maybe I should send it to my relatives for Christmas. I was sitting next to Christ himself, with my arm around him, while I was drinking a can of Budweiser.

While I was waiting on my portrait the kid’s sister kept hitting on me while she supplied me with more cervaze. She was very pretty in the face but enormous in the body. There was a cathouse on the floor above the studio and she was on her break.

Realizing that I was too bombed to attempt the drive to San Diego, I took her up on the offer and spent the night there. Zak had been right. It was just like a warm pile of bread dough.

The next morning I threw my portrait of me and old J. C. in the back seat and headed up the coast.

For close to two years I lived in Los Angeles on the top floor of this old warehouse. Just a mattress on the floor. The guy who I worked for owned it. It sat behind this huge night club called “The Slippery Tit” which he also owned. Gus was the name of my boss and he was quite the entrepreneur. Beside the bar, he ran a pro wrestling and roller derby school, and shot low budget porno movies in the warehouse. He also was a part owner of several porno and peep show shops in the county.

I was a bouncer/bar tender at the bar, assistant wrestling coach (I let guys pick me and body slam me or hit me in the head with a folding chair), and light and camera man for the porno movies.

On occasion, several other bouncers and I earned extra dough by strong arming people who owed Gus money.

The Black Dahlia case seemed to have had a lasting impression on my employer. Do you remember that murder? Way back in the late 40s the cops found this chick cut in half on a vacant lot. No blood or anything. Real fucking creepy. Lots of movies and books were done about it. That shit happens practically on a weekly basis in Los Angeles, so I have no idea why so many people are obsessed over a murder that happened in 1940’s. But that’s L. A.

Anyway, Gus had his office just decorated from floor to ceiling with photos of this broad, bookcases full of books about her, and he even owned a couple of vintage porno movies that she had starred in. Mostly lesbian crap. I guess her plumbing wouldn’t accept the male unit because of some birth defect, according to Gus.

Half of Gus’s films that he made always had an “actress” dressed up just like Elizabeth Short. That was the dead broad’s name. Thing about it is, I have a hunch that Gus was involved in it. When I was in L.A., Gus must have been in his mid 70s, the murder was in the late 40’s. He would have been about the right age. He had a real weird buddy, Wally, that was into this chick, too. Those two were always talking about her and trading shit about the case. Some local news reporter thought that Wally had been the one who did it and Wally loved that. I heard the old loon died in a flophouse fire not too long ago. Drunk and smoking in bed.

I had got the job after a week or so of bumming around L. A.

After I had talked to Tom, I drove to the airport in San Diego and caught a flight there. I looked up Regina, the dental tech whose husband went bugshit and shot up their house. She was in the phone book her that I had something that might be of interest to her. She picked me up at the motel I was staying at in Venice Beach and was shocked to say the least when I gave her the file which more than highlighted her affair with the sleazy commander.

Her father who was an labor attorney, had some rather interesting connections on the east coast, some guys with names like Guido and Sal, and she was planning on forwarding the information to them.

She was making ends meet by working for a dentist during the daymmand exotic dancing at night. She had also given up men and was living with a female biker who looked like Sonny Liston, who made me feel very unwelcome.

Strippers tend to make the sex industry circuit in L. And she turned me on to working with Gus. Said that for being a complete slime ball he wasn’t bad to work for. That was a good enough reference for me.

I bought a book on how to change your identity out of this catalog from this weird company up in Washington State named Loompanics, LTD. It had all sorts of crazy books in it like “How To Make Meth Amphetamine For Fun And Profit” and “How to Kill People and Then Fake Your Own Death.” Sounds goofy but it sure helped out in my situation. I wound up with a California drivers license, birth certificate, Social Security card, and video rental card.

I mailed my real identification to my sister along with the Morrison/Elvis files and film rolls from the Admiral’s house.

Appearance wise, I just shaved my head, got my ear pierced and wore a big hoop ear ring, and grew a goatee. I had access to a gym since I worked and lived in a wrestling school, so I continued to pump iron and do steroids. Within the year I had put on roughly forty pounds of muscle. I didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the scrawny little fucker who had left

Albert Lea, Minnesota to join the Navy so(what seemed like) many years ago.

I still went to a local newsstand every couple of days to buy a Honolulu newspaper to check out if anything had ever been reported but never saw shit. I even bought a couple issues of the Navy propaganda rag Navy Times, but likewise, not a thing.

Gus’s porno business didn’t attract what you would call real quality adult film stars. He dealt mainly with heroin addicts who needed some fix money, Midwestern runaways, a midget husband and wife team, couple of the roller derby clique, and every great once in a while an old burned out formerly famous “star” would stop in to make a quick buck.

That’s where my path would cross with Jon.Jon had once been a hugely successful porn star. He had zero looks, a scrawny drugged out looking frame, and couldn’t act even by adult movies standards. But he had an enormous dick. The guy had made thousands of short adult “loops” and longer films but had pissed it all away on booze and crack cocaine. Rumor had it (Jon liked to keep this one spreading) that a very famous singer and actress had once paid Jon big bucks to snort a line of coke off his giant root. He was no longer welcome on any of the mainstream adult sets due to his erratic behavior, inability to get hard on demand, and known ties to the flourishing crack industry. But on occasion for pin money he would make a gay flick or play the heavy in a hard core S&M movie.

Gus signed him on to mainly make appearances at his club, autograph video boxes at dirty book stores, and attempt to make a movie with him once in a while if he could get it halfway up. I don’t know how many nights we all stood around setting up the lights and cameras while Jon would be laying on a bed on the set with two young ladies straight off the farm in Wisconsin, who would be giving it the old college try and attempt to get Jon’s massive stinger to get up and go. Nine out ten times, Gus would freak out and start ranting and raving about all the money that was being wasted on this quality feature and it inevitably would turn into basically a lesbian shot with Jon just kind of rolling around in the middle and getting in the way.

Once Gus tried to make a porno related Black Dahlia murder film with Jon in the role of the murderer. Jon had been out partying the night before and was horribly hung-over. He couldn’t get it up as usual, but what really pissed Gus off was the grand finale. Since we didn’t have any real bodies to cut up like the real murderer had, we had to settle for a store mannequin. It took every bit of strength that Jon had to saw half way through the plastic and then he ruined the whole shot by barfing all over the dummy.

But people recognized him like he was an academy award winner. He came along with us one night to the fights at the Olympic Auditorium, which is a sleazier joint than some of the places Jon made his films in, and we practically had to fend people off of the guy. Both men and women were all over him. Wanting his autograph and maybe a shot at his massive manhood.

My own sister wasn’t even immune to his legendary status. On one of my rare phone calls to Minnesota I had mentioned Jon. I had to send an autographed photo of the bastard in the mail to her within two days after telling her I knew him.

He wasn’t all bad though. When one of the bouncers got married, Jon managed to recruit some of the old female stars from his heyday to the bachelor party. It was held at an incredibly filthy adult motel on Sunset Strip. Jumping Jesus, what a night! A punch was made in a fifty gallon garbage can (clean) with cold duck champagne, beer, and a hundred hits of quality speed.

The night clerk came down to complain about the noise at four in the morning and wound up screwing the porn star he had once jerked off to as a teenager. It was great fun.

I was working the door one night at the club when Jon came out to catch some fresh air. Gus had booked a private ladies stag party and Jon was the main attraction. He had lost a lot of weight from all the crack and he looked bizarre as well as idiotic up on the stage. Shaking his money maker in this g-string that didn’t come close to covering up his once great python of love.

Gus had been concerned that he wouldn’t show up. Jon had been acting real nervous lately and a week or so ago had shown up with a black eye and a nasty looking gash on his chin.

“Got a proposition for you, my man.” Jon always tried to talk like a high rolling pimp. Kind of hissing out the words.

“And what would that be Jon?”

Looking out of the corner of my eye at the Los Angeles Laker shorts that he was wearing. No shirt or shoes.Just these shorts that must have been two sizes too big for him. He looked like Bill Walton with an eating disorder.

“I got these assholes up in the hills that owe me some serious jack for some rock that I fronted them. Not a thing really. A couple of little dipshits. Shouldn’t be problem for a man of your stature.”

As he grinned at me I cringed. His teeth looked like little baked beans and the breath coming out of his maw wasn’t much better than the sight of those teeth.

“If it’s not a thing why do I need to be there?” Sarcasm all over that one.

He didn’t come close to noticing.

“Pure precautionary measures, bro. Tell you what. I’ll double your fee that Gus gives you.”

I sure wasn’t making anything that night on tips with this private stag going on. How hard could it be roughing up a couple of crack heads?

“Oh what the fuck. When do you want to do it?”

“Tonight. Soon as I get done making these babes cream in their panties.” The dumb shit walked back into the club wiggling his tongue at me like a snake.

It was about enough to make you want to give up sex.