Dead is Better (6 page)

Three local TV news vans arrive, two plain-wrap police cars, then my shit brother Mark’s Ferrari, the Nissan Leaf, and Mark’s wife’s Helen’s white Range Rover—which takes a handicapped space. Mark is in a suit, the one he wore to my funeral.

Helen—so thin the bones in her chest are prominent under her platinum and diamond necklace, wears a tight stretchy black dress, and high black heels with bright red soles. Her white blonde hair stays put, as if permanently blown back from her too-smooth, too sunscreened photo-facialed Botoxed forehead. She applies pale, shiny lipstick as men emerge from the news vans’ sliding doors and uncoil cable, lights and microphones on stands. They’re dressed in shirts and jeans—it must still be hot. I recognize Melanie Vann from Channel 8 and Rob Roberts from Channel 3. Both are much thinner than they looked on television, and orange because of the thick foundation on their faces.

Hairy and Baldy throw open the doors of their car, nod to my shit brother Mark and Helen, then talk for a moment on their cell phones before joining the reporters on the sidewalk and a police officer in uniform who carries some papers. Hairy and Baldy wear graphite gray suits today and their mustaches are neatly trimmed. Alan appears from around the corner—I don’t see his car. He’s wearing a black suit, black tie and wrap-around shades. He looks like a large Jewish crow.

Although the dog and I could mingle with this gathering of souls, we hang back, like shrouds undulating in an underworldly wind. Usually in the world of the living, Rose does her own thing while I do mine, but this time she floats right at my side, looking where I look. It is so strange to see these living people congregated here, where I in life so often felt so empty, so full and so completely alone.

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.“

—Leonardo da Vinci

***

The uniformed officer taps the microphone and blinks in the very white lights. The red lights on the video cameras go on.

“Hello? Can everybody hear me? My name is Officer Harris, Leon Harris, from LAPD Public Relations.”

Rob Roberts, holding a notepad and pen, interrupts and says, “Can you please spell your name?”

“Harris. H-A-R-R-I-S L-E-O-N. We are gathered here today with Los Angeles Police Department Detectives Sullivan and Lee, to make an announcement in connection with the shocking unsolved murder of Mr. Charles Stone, 38, here on Gower Street in Hollywood. The victim’s family along with the AndyCo. and MultiCorp companies have donated a $50,000 reward, which they hope will help LAPD detectives solve this baffling and very tragic case.”

Here? I was killed here? You could knock me down with a feather if there were any of me left to knock.

Perhaps a waffle thief high on crack shot me for my wallet or my doggie bag of a chicken thigh and extra waffle? Did I stupidly resist, clutching the greasy bag to my thick chest as he shot me?

The officer hands Baldy the mic, “On Saturday, September 18th about 8:05 p.m. Mr. Charles Stone was murdered as he left Roscoe’s House of Chicken & Waffles and was proceeding north on foot on Gower Street, we assume toward his residence on north Cahuenga Boulevard. According to a studio security guard walking south on Gower, a large group of bicyclists appeared, riding in the street and on the sidewalks, traveling at high speed in the direction of Mr. Stone. The guard says he heard a man’s voice perhaps, but he’s not sure, saying “Slow down” or something to that effect. Then the guard reports hearing shots, which we believe were the result of one or more suspects shooting the victim at close range.

“At present we believe the suspect or suspects responsible for this homicidal bike rage incident then exited the scene on their bicycles, leaving Mr. Stone fatally struck from gunshot wounds to the neck and chest. Mr. Stone was pronounced dead at Maimonides Medical Center at 9:08 P.M.”

“There is a remedy for everything; it is called death.”

—
Portuguese proverb

***

“Bike rage”? You’re shitting me. Some angry guy or guys on bikes shot me?

Jesus fucking Christ.

I know the “bicyclists” the cop is talking about—though not personally—and “bicyclists” is too polite a word for these riders who commandeer the streets at night—hundreds at a time running red lights, even riding the freeways to protest what they call L.A.’s “car culture.” I’ve seen them on Cahuenga on their way to Griffith Park.

Assholes. They used to congregate at the Pioneer Chicken in Silver Lake—once another favorite chicken place of mine. Now they’re everywhere, especially late on weekend nights. There have been ugly incidents with drivers, brawls and accidents.

I’d sit down on the red bench now if I could. Instead, like a pathetic fallacy, I merely sink—right through the red bench until I am a few inches from the red and white “bricks” painted on the ground. The dog—apparently unsurprised or unmoved at the modus operandi of my demise—smoothly descends beside me.

“This homicide has been particularly troubling for detectives and for Mr. Stone’s family members,” Baldy goes on. “There have been few leads. Mr. Stone had no gang affiliations or criminal history. So far, with the exception of the security guard, no eyewitnesses have come forward, and we have pretty much exhausted our leads.”

The woman from MultiCorp looks terribly sad. My shit brother Mark and his wife assume serious expressions. My lawyer Alan looks at his shoes.

Now it’s Hairy’s turn: “Anyone with information about this incident should contact LAPD Robbery Homicide Division Detectives Sullivan or Lee. Anyone wishing to remain anonymous should call Crime Stoppers at 1-310-555-TIPS. Tipsters may also contact Crime Stoppers by texting. All text messages should begin with the letters LAPDHOM.’”

“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.”

—Marcel Proust

***

Good luck with the tips, Baldy and Hairy and Harris, Leon—fifty Happy Andy grand or not.

I realize now that the meaning I have been searching for—the point of my death—doesn’t exist and never will.

My death was accidental. Haphazard. Impersonal.

It doesn’t matter into which man’s face I shouted—as he tried to run me off the sidewalk with his bicycle, then pulled a gun from—what? His ass? Or as he shot me from his 10-speed?

And you can bet your mustaches I did not yell “slow down.” It wouldn’t have been me without shouting Fuck off, Drop Dead, Asshole, or Blow it Out Your Ass.

The dog and I are back inside this smooth, blurry kingdom of quietness like fetuses adrift in amniotic fluid or crystals inside a geode’s darkness. We both stare straight ahead, the dog lying on her side, her eyes open. I sit in a heap beside her, absentmindedly scratching the fur on her bony forehead.

Having learned the circumstances of my death, I am as disconcerted and chagrined as I was before I discovered the truth.

My death lacks meaning. It required nothing of me.

I realize now that my hopes for my death were grandiose. I really wanted something much more than this. A crime of passion directed at me might have burnished my life with real importance.

Instead my death is the punch line of a not very funny joke.

Why did the fat man cross the road?

I didn’t expect the flamboyant. No way did I expect that I would go out auto-erotically in Thailand, or during an orgy, or would be ritually stabbed, my body posed like a broken doll by a soon-to-be-famous serial killer.

I suppose the violence of my exit bestows upon it a tinge of
noir
—but a murderer who doesn’t even drive a car, and the homey smells of maple syrup and fried chicken in the air, bring it down to the level of
I told you so.

I can hear my shit brother Mark’s voice in my head—I told you, you were fat. I told you to go on a diet. Why don’t you get the fucking Lap Band? Or a gastric bypass? Or get a personal trainer? If you didn’t eat so much, you would have been home—in a house with a wife, not alone in your shithole apartment—or at the gym—instead of walking home from Roscoe’s with a To Go order in your hand—your fat ass and fat mouth in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As usual I got everything wrong. Everything ass-backwards.

And that, boys and girls—as Happy Andy used to say at each show’s end—is howdy-do—and fucking
it
.

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”

—Marcel Proust

***

Even by otherworldly standards, I have lost track, of no—not time—we’re beyond time—but what it feels like is that time has lost track of me.

And Rose.

She rolls over for a tummy rub, then stands and looks straight at me. I’m lying on my back, my hands behind my head, as if I’m watching clouds pass above me in a fall blue sky, except there are no clouds, no sky, no up or down, no nothing except nothing, no change in this our little patch of netherworld.

What? What can she possibly be thinking? We know what happened to me now. Mr. Charles Stone died because he couldn’t for once in his life stop eating, shut the fuck up, or get out of the fucking way.

Rose nudges my left arm with her nose.

I pull my arm from behind my head and sit up. She comes close, bends down, and nudges my wrist.

I pat her head obligingly, and scratch that place behind her ears that she likes scratched.

She sits down on my left, then with her nose pushes the bloodied hospital I.D. bracelet on my wrist.

I look at her expectant, wise eyes.

The bracelet.

I can’t get it off, and without my glasses it’s tough to even read the words printed on the plastic, but if I hold it close to my eyes, I can read a date—my death day—and my name, my date of birth, my address—the Cahuenga apartment—and the name of a doctor I do not know—Dr. E. Miller—followed by an 8-digit number and the words, “Maimonides Medical Center.”

Perhaps Dr. Miller was in the ER and pronounced me dead.

Rose nudges me again with her muzzle, and her usually placid expression is almost impatient.

What can she possibly want? As my mother used to say, when it comes to sex, human anatomy, fetal development, politics and religion, there’s such a thing as too much information. And I agree, especially about my own demise. I know more than enough, thank you.

Bike rage was all I had to hear.

I don’t think I need to know the name of the bicyclist. And even if I did know who he was, there is no way that I, in my current condition, could exact revenge or effect justice. Or that it, from my new point of view, would matter if I did.

Rose looks at me, her expression fixed and serious, her brown pupils darkening with intensity, her mouth slightly open.

What can it be? I move my hand to that place along her back that she can’t reach but often likes me to scratch, but she moves aside.

That’s not what she wants at all.

The hospital.

“Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.”

—George Bernard Shaw

***

Rose floats beside me, her ears cocked, like the RCA dog listening to its master, as if she’s waiting for me to announce something—or even better—to do something wise or significant. The two small, dark dots above her eyes, each with a few delicate long dark hairs springing from their centers, contract in an expectant frown.

I have nothing to say and I have no plan. I feel pretty much the way I always did—like shit—having proven as unequal to death as I was to life. If my heart were anything but a piece of meat, it would be contracting now in spasms of shame and regret.

Perhaps this is why I follow Rose’s lead and return to the place on earth where I exhaled my last, pathetic breath.

For the living it’s a Tuesday evening in the Memorial Medical Center in West Hollywood—a hospital famous for its studio head and celebrity benefactors, and for patients who enjoy four-star meals and in luxurious private suites on its exclusive 8th floor.

My mother died in one of those suites. So did that famous child actor from a heroin overdose, and that 102 year old song and dance girl from the thirties whose last young husband—there were ten—is rumored to have poisoned her tea.

I’m looking for Dr. Miller, the name on my ID bracelet. That’s why we drift—like plumes of smoke from a funeral pyre—across the well-scrubbed floor of what is known as “the ER to the stars.”

The plastic rows of seats in the waiting area are half full. A big black and white clock tells me it’s still early—7 p.m. We see no stars, not even one aging trophy wife or B-list leading man.

There’s a pregnant woman in a bright green sari—I’d guess she’s thirty—gasping every few minutes and gripping the sides of her chair as her labor intensifies. Her husband, wearing shorts and flip-flops, speaks in Hindi? Urdu? into his smart phone, a large overnight bag at his feet, his eyes fixed on the male nurse sitting at a desk behind a closed glass window over which is a large sign that says EMERGENCY.

We see an elderly couple both dressed too warmly for LA in fall in matching wine-colored cardigans. The white-haired woman wears her hair pulled back in a ponytail—the hair so thin that large patches of her pink scalp are exposed. Her glasses magnify her very pale blue, very bloodshot eyes. The man seems frail, confused. The woman holds a bloodstained paper towel to his forehead, and now I see that the thin, discolored skin on his elbow is lacerated too. Next to him is an aluminum walker with bright yellow tennis balls stuck on the front wheels.

My survey includes also a 9 or 10 year-old boy in a white karate uniform, sitting sideways, his left leg resting on his mother’s lap, a baggy of ice resting on his ankle; a girl in flip flops, and wearing a UCLA blue and gold sweatshirt and leggings, her head between her knees and groaning softly; and a well-dressed middle-aged man sitting alone—perhaps waiting for someone inside—or feeling ill in a way his body language won’t reveal.