John Belushi Is Dead (6 page)

“Geez, what a girl,” Benji said. “Give it to me.”

He pushed me aside and crouched over the cat, lifting the head gently. Its eyes were closed and it looked peaceful, like it was asleep. I'd had nightmares about its eyes being open and was terrified that if I tore open the bag it would be staring at me. Benji felt around its neck for a collar and discovered a small blue name tag.

“Oscar,” he read. “Twelve Paige Street.”

We spoke little as we walked, the cat in the bag swinging between us. I started to feel a little like someone who worked for the government and was going to tell someone that their son had died at war. We arrived at the address to find a cozy little bungalow with a small front yard and no fence. As we walked up the path to the front door, my heart sank. On the stairs were a plastic water dish and a ceramic food bowl, some tuna still in it. I rang the bell. The door opened and a young woman stood in front of us, a friendly smile on her face.

“Yes?” she said politely. “Can I help you?”

“Do you have a cat named Oscar?” I asked.

“Sure do. Didn't come home last night. Don't tell me he's been pestering you for food. He's such a cheeky boy.”

I handed her the bag. I explained how Oscar had been hit by a car, and told her he had not suffered. It was just like with my parents' accident: it was best to spare the gory details. Gory details never made anything better. The woman cried, but she was brave and tried to hide her tears by smiling through them. She stepped forward and hugged me, then Benji, who cringed at her touch.

“You are both such good kids,” she said. “Good kids. Thank you so much for bringing home my baby.”

She closed the door, and Benji and I started the long walk home. I didn't feel like a good kid. I knew we had done the right thing, but something was niggling inside, a worm burrowing its way through my core. I hated to admit how exciting it had been to stand outside that Dumpster, breathing the fetid stench of the cat's remains. The smell was familiar, comforting. After my parents died, Aunt Lynette had tried to get my life back to normal as quickly as possible, and for a while everything
did
seem normal. I went to school, did my homework, watched TV. But something inside me had changed. In quiet moments I could feel it, a creeping anxiety that would overtake me—the realization that everything was temporary, fleeting, and no one was safe. In the shadow of my parents I had felt protected, but once they were gone I was horribly exposed, and as much as Lynette tried to make me feel safe, she couldn't erase what I knew to be terrifyingly, irrevocably true: that any one of us could be taken at any moment, and I sometimes couldn't help thinking that in escaping the fate of my parents, I had somehow cheated death, and that death would now always be with me.

It could have been my imagination, but I was sure Benji had lingered awhile in the darkness of that Dumpster, taking his time before returning to the fading sunlight of the afternoon. I watched
him as we walked together. He was immersed in thought, staring at his sneakers as they hit the pavement. Like archaeologists excavating a tomb, Benji and I had crossed over an unspoken boundary and emerged forever changed by the experience. He looked at me, eyes ablaze, and somewhere in the distance a dog howled.

“So why did you name your cat Freddie Prinze?” I asked.

Benji shrugged. “Don't know. I'm just really interested in that stuff, I guess. You know, dead movie stars and all that.”

“Me too! I'm reading a book about Marlon Brando right now.”

“Oh man, Marlon Brando had such a shit life.”

“I know. His son shot his daughter's boyfriend, then his daughter committed suicide. It's horrible.”

Benji gave me a wry look. “You ever seen the house where it happened?”

“You mean the house on Mulholland Drive? I think I drove past it once. The numbers are confusing.”

“I know exactly which one it is,” Benji said, sounding excited for the first time since we met. “We should go check it out.”

“Totally,” I said. “That would be so cool.”

We walked along in silence, hands in our pockets, and even though I felt that familiar darkness starting to swirl around me, for once I didn't feel so alone. I knew I had found a kindred spirit.

I
LEFT
B
ENJI TO THE
video of the girl getting screwed by the horse and started to walk the few blocks to my house. The warm air, coupled with the start of summer vacation, had brought people out of their homes. Across the road a couple walked a teacup poodle on a thin leash. A group of kids skateboarded past me, the wheels of their boards making a long, rolling sound like an incoming wave, building to a crescendo and then disappearing as they sped away into the dark.

My mind wandered. I looked into the windows of houses, some in shadow, others illuminated by the light of television sets. I thought about the Manson Family. On nights like this they would go out and do what they called a “creepy crawly.” A group of four or five Family members would target a house entirely at random, break in, and proceed to “creep” around the place. The idea was to move around the house unnoticed, making sure not to wake the occupants. Occasionally they would take something, like cash, if it
was left lying around, or food to feed the Family back at the ranch. But it was more about moving around undetected—the excitement and power that came with infiltrating someone's house as he slept in his bed.

Richard Ramirez—the Night Stalker—was one of Los Angeles' most infamous serial killers, and also favored neighborhoods like this. The neatly trimmed hedges and manicured front lawns were a far cry from the bleakness and despair of downtown LA, where he regularly scored drugs at the bus terminal and slept in whatever car he had stolen at the time. The suburbs made the Night Stalker angry, just like they did the Manson Family. The warm little houses in tidy rows were a reminder of every comfort Ramirez didn't have. The order of suburbia affronted his need for chaos.

Aunt Lynette's house was a spacious beige California bungalow with a large front yard and an old-fashioned porch. The light was on in the living room, and I could just imagine Lynette bent over her books, a glass of red wine in her hand. From a distance she looked just like my mother, with her hair hanging loose and those thick-rimmed glasses. It wasn't until you got closer that her features became her own. Green eyes instead of brown. A mole on her chin where my mother had none. From a distance I could imagine it was my mother, and for a brief moment everything was as it used to be. But the closer I got, the more reality came crashing back.

Aunt Lynette and I were always being mistaken for mother and daughter, something that made us both equally uncomfortable. It was easier not to correct people, as that would involve going into details, something neither of us wanted to do. But there was no denying the family resemblance. The same round face, the same large, Kewpie-doll eyes. I didn't get much from my dad's side of
the family, except a healthy suspicion of authority that my teachers liked to call an “attitude problem.”

Aunt Lynette was an assistant district attorney. She prosecuted people on behalf of the county, regardless of whether or not she thought they were guilty. This didn't seem to bother her. She'd worked hard all her life to make it this far, and whether or not clients were guilty was largely irrelevant to her career. She had prosecuted battered wives and mothers, and sent innocent men to jail. But still she slept well at night. All that seemed to matter to her was that she was doing her job effectively.

Lynette also had the alarming habit of flashing her DA badge. Once when I was nine she took me to Disneyland, and two guys got into an argument in the line at Splash Mountain. She pushed through the crowd, walked straight up to them, flipped open her little leather wallet, and watched the blood drain from their faces. No one even looked closely enough at her badge to see that she was an assistant DA and not actually a cop. The two men held up their hands and stepped back as if she was going to taser them or perhaps cuff them to the fence, where they'd have to listen to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” all day long. I remember being mortified and hiding behind a corn dog stand as everybody stared at her. Lynette wasn't fazed by the attention. She was proud of working for the county.

As I walked in the front door, she looked up from her casebooks. Next to her on the dining table were two plates, one stacked high with some kind of casserole, the other scraped empty.

“I've already eaten,” I said as I kicked off my shoes. Lynette looked at the casserole, brown and congealing on her fine china. I watched her swallow her anger.

“What did you and Benji get up to today?” she asked, choosing to ignore the casserole situation.

“Just stuff.”

“Oh, really?” She put her pen down. “What kind of stuff?”

I opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk. “Went to Universal Studios, took the tram tour. Can I take this?”

She didn't say anything, just nodded, then looked down at her books. “I saw the most horrible thing on
Oprah
today.”

“Hmmm?”

“They had a story about a woman whose car was stolen, and her baby was still in the backseat. She tried to grab the baby, but the car sped off, her child still hanging out, attached to the car seat. She watched her child being dragged along the side of the road.”

“That's a repeat.”

Lynette pursed her lips. “Stories like that make you put your life in perspective,” she continued. “Make you realize how lucky you really are.”

“Just another day for you and me in paradise.”

She examined me through her thick, black-rimmed lenses. “Have you done something to your hair?”

“It's pink.”

“So it is. Do you like it?”

“I just love it.”

“Good. As long as you're happy.”

I leaned over her casebooks. “What are you working on?”

“It's a murder case,” she said as she scribbled something down on her notepad. “It's gang related.”

“Cool. Got any crime-scene photos?”

She put her pen down and adjusted her glasses. “Hilda, I find
your fascination with murder a little disconcerting. This is a very sad and horrific crime.”

“But you said it was gang related.”

“So?”

“So then he probably had it coming.”

She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. “Life isn't as black and white as that, Hilda,” she said, sounding annoyed. “It's not fair for you to judge other people when you have no idea what they've been through, the social and economic circumstances they were born into—”

“All right, you don't have to give me a sermon. I'm not the jury.”

“Thank God for that,” she said, putting her glasses back on and straightening up. “Then the poor boy would have no hope.”

“Anyway, you're the one obsessed with murder, not me. You made a career out of it.”

“I'm not obsessed with murder, Hilda. I'm helping people.”

“Come on, just one look…”

I tried to slide one of the case folders away with my finger, but Lynette snatched it back.

“No, Hilda. Trust me when I say you are better off not seeing this.”

I had never viewed any of Lynette's case files. She kept them under lock and key and never once made the mistake of accidentally leaving one out. She obviously had no idea what I had access to on the Internet.

“You're probably right,” I said, giving up. “Wouldn't want to warp me now, would we?”

I was halfway out of the room when Lynette spoke again. “You
know, we could feed a third-world country with the amount of dinners I've made for you and you've never eaten. It's very wasteful.”

“Sorry.”

“I hope you had a proper meal at the Connors.”

“Sure did,” I lied, my stomach still full of Mrs. Connor's chocolate-chip cookies.

“Well, I hope you're more thankful toward Mrs. Connor than you are to me. I'd be very embarrassed if you weren't.”

I went back over to where Lynette was sitting and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “I said I'm sorry.”

I felt her soften. “Next time call,” she said, still trying to sound mad.

“Okay,” I yelled over my shoulder as I left the room, taking the milk carton with me.

J
OHN
B
ELUSHI ONCE SAID
that happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time. I knew what he meant. He was talking about the uncontrollable urge to fuck it all up, the desire to put a knife in the toaster of existence just to see what would happen. To put a bomb under your blessings and watch them blow sky-high. To swan dive off the precipice and give in to the free fall.

Belushi had it all: money, fame, a wife, a home. But he didn't want to live in the safety of these creature comforts. He wanted to exist on the knife's edge, the sharpest point of the blade, where you could fall either way—the only guarantee being that you will inevitably get cut. He rolled the dice, tossed the coin, shook his tail feather in the face of death until the reaper lost his sense of humor. The punch line was a big fat speedball to the heart, a massive dose of heroin and coke that left him dead in an expensive hotel room in Los Angeles, bloated and bleeding on freshly laundered linen thousands of miles from home.

I sat down at my desk and watched footage on the Internet: the old CBS newsreel—all grainy and washed-out—from the day Belushi died, posted on a fan's website. A swarm of photographers milled outside Belushi's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont; the coroner, grim-faced, wheeled his body out on a gurney. That famous toga was now a death shroud: a thin, white sheet covering his body and pulled up over his head in an attempt to give dignity to the unmistakable girth beneath. For some people this unpleasant image would have been enough, but I wanted more. I wanted to see autopsy photos: the incisions made by the coroner's blade, the thick, careless stitches that left the deceased looking like Frankenstein's monster. But what I wanted to see most was an image from the inner sanctum: the photographs of Belushi lying dead in his hotel bed, his naked body seeping gas and fluid onto the sheets. This was the money shot, the point of impact where life abruptly ended. To see how a celebrity looked at the very moment of passing, that mysterious instant where life just stopped. This was what I lived for.