The Glitter Dome
The Glitter Dome
Joseph Wambaugh
Open Road Integrated Media ebook
A perverse thank you to those in The Business, who, during a two-year Passage To Hollywood, imbued the author with sufficient venom to produce this book.
and
A humble thank you to Jay Allen, Harold Becker, Jeanne Bernkopf, Jack Herron, John Sturgeon, who helped the author complete the Passage, relatively intact.
IN HOLLYWOOD!
Where is the place that they all like to go?
It's Hollywood.
Jack 'n' Jill, Bruce and Bill, Farrah and Bo
Go Hollywood.
Down on the boulevard Saturday night,
You've never seen such a colorful sight,
But make sure that you roll up your windows real tight
In Hollywood.
Where are there so many hustling stars?
In Hollywood.
Stuck in the sidewalk or parking your carsâ
That's Hollywood.
Most every moment you'll hear sirens scream;
Follow the cop carsâyou'll soon reach the scene
And you're bound to end up on the big or small screen
In Hollywood.
In the tradition of countless marines
Go Hollywood.
Tuck your equipment in super-tight jeans,
Go Hollywood.
Saunter the boulevard, you're out for hire,
Milk all you can out of old men's desire,
'Cause in just a few years you'll find
you
are the buyerâ
That's Hollywood!
â
SONG BY
I
AN
W
HITCOMB
1
The Glitter Dome
It was six inches long. He stroked it lightly, but he could not conjure an appropriate response: eroticism, revulsion, fascination,
terror
. He had read it described in a hundred melodramatic and pathetic suicide notes. Technology had even infiltrated death messages: So far this year four farewells were transmitted on taped cassettes, the ultimate proof of declining literacy.
It was dark and cool in the tiny kitchen. The formica tabletop was greasy and wet from the spillage of Tullamore Dew. He stroked the thing again. It had hung on his body for too long. More of a cock than the other one. He used it once a month as required by the Los Angeles Police Department. He had
tried
to use the other one this very night. The fifth of Tullamore Dew was nearly empty. He should be anesthetized. He'd nearly died and all he could think of was his cock. But the memory of the misfire
hurt
.
Even the Pacific Ocean had the sweats that night. The offshore breeze was hot and wet. He ought to have turned and left The Glitter Dome the moment he entered. It was just nine o'clock, yet there they were, perched at the long bar like Mother Carey's chickens.
Chinatown gave him a headache, especially on those two nights a month when The Glitter Dome was jammed with chickens, yet that was why he was here. Police payday.
He had retreated utterly to the bosom of the cop “family.” To The Glitter Dome. To kaleidoscopic colors: greens, yellows, reds, all of which he hated. To chaotic winking lights and leering neon messages. To winking groupies (seldom at him) and leering young cops plucking the chickens from their tentative perches at that long, long bar.
The hysteria was palpable. The Glitter Dome was teeming, smoky, loud. A dozen couples bumped and banged together on a parqueted dance floor hardly larger than a king-size bed. And it may as well have been a bed: Three of the groping, licking, grinding pairs of cops and chickens had managed everything but penetration.
He had known he should leave. He thought about leaving. But his legs were hurting from a game of handball at the police academy.
His
stupid idea, to provide some badly needed diversion for his partner, Martin Welborn, who, after his marital separation, had become morose, distant, burned out,
eerie
. They'd been partners for three years and he was suddenly scared for Marty Welborn.
So if it hadn't been for his friendship with Marty Welborn, and the handball, and the sore legs, he would not have almost
died
this night. He was ready to leave when one of the chickens (this one more of a vulture) was plucked from her stool by a cop he knew, a street monster named Buckmore Phipps who patrolled Hollywood Boulevard with the subtlety of a Russian gunship.
“Whaddaya know, whaddaya say?” Buckmore Phipps grinned, baring thirty-two donkey teeth, amazingly still intact, given the way
this
street monster did business on the boulevard. “If it ain't Aloysius Mackey. Welcome to the Bay of Pigs.”
Then Buckmore Phipps was off to the dance floor with his boozy vulture, probably a record clerk. Al Mackey had gotten so he could tell the record clerks from the communications operators even before they opened their mouths. The policewomen were most easily identifiable: They evinced all the cynicism of their male counterparts.
So there was an empty barstool, and his legs hurt, and he had a sudden yen for three fingers of Tullamore Dew. He pointed to the bottle of Irish whiskey and nodded to Wing, the proprietor. With his overlong neck, and hollow eyes, and small head with sparse tufts of slicked-down hair sprung loose on each side like antennae, Wing looked for all the world like a praying mantis hopping around behind the long bar, his bony arms extending from his emerald mandarin jacket. Wing was a third-generation American who affected a Chinese accent and obsequious demeanor for daytime tourists. Nothing was as it seemed in The Glitter Dome.
“Double?” Wing winked, pouring a triple.
Before the night was over he would shortchange the detective to more than make up for it. Nothing was free in The Glitter Dome either. The perfect microcosm for Al Mackey. Thank God Marty Welborn didn't come here. He'd probably go home and swallow his Smith & Wesson. The Glitter Dome was a death wish of a saloon.
Al Mackey tossed it down at once and Wing skipped over with another. Three triples of Tullamore Dew and the warlord of The Glitter Dome could give the uncomplaining detective change for a ten and drop his
twenty
into the mysterious box made of monkeypod which sat beside an abacus to accommodate the “tips” which never passed through the cash register. Wing called the “tips” a tribute to his honored ancestors who, among the huddled masses, came to these golden shores and prospered. There was an American flag on the front and Chinese characters painted on the back of the box. The message on the back, roughly translated, read: “Uncle Sam's taxes suck. It's every Chink for himself.”
Another thing that Al Mackey hated about The Glitter Dome was the cascade of fruity drinks they poured over that bamboo long bar: Scorpions, Zombies, Fog Cutters. They all delivered a throat full of phlegm and a world-class hangover. And they were expensive.
“What division you work?”
She was rather young, something between a chicken and a vulture. But why did they all have phony lacquered nails? The one that Buckmore Phipps had plucked loose from the bamboo had actually left claw marks in the varnished bar top.
“Hollywood Detectives.” He said it to the Tullamore Dew, figuring it would be all over the second one of those virile, healthy young authority symbols from Central Patrol came swashbuckling in, full of juice and energy and hope, with the balance of a City of L.A. paycheck causing the
other
bulge in his jeans. We may not be the best cops in the world, honey, but we're the best paid!
And in they came. Look-alikes. Polyester body shirts, tight pants, hairstyles trimmed just short enough to keep the sergeants happy, the inevitable sideburns and moustaches. Why do all cops love sideburns except Al Mackey and Marty Welborn? God, it was so predictable, but not as predictable as the barroom greeting:
“Roll call!” bellowed one young cop, spotting a clutch of pals and friendly groupies. “Marcus!”
“Here!” a voice shouted from the smoky darkness. The goddamn place was starting to smell like incense. Al Mackey's head throbbed. A perverted Chinese church.
“Cedric!” the young cop bellowed, and a voice answered “Present!”
“Sweet stuff!” the cop yelled, and three chickens from the corner pocket tittered and screamed, “Here! Over
here!
”
The chicken-vulture next to him surprised him by not letting it drop.
“I work communications.”
“I woulda guessed.”
“How?”
“Nice voice,” he said. Big ass, he thought.
“My name's Grace,” she said. “Some a the fellas call me Amazing Grace.”
“Al Mackey,” he said, giving her clammy hand a squeeze. Stress. Tension. So familiar, all of it.
Déjà vu
.
He became even more depressed when the door burst open again. (They
never
entered without a flourish.) Three more twenty-two-year-old father surrogates, fresh from a nightwatch radio car, came swaggering through the plastic-beaded curtains, doing a momentary freeze-frame for the queue of fatherless Glitter Dome chickens.
To Al Mackey they all looked like John Travolta. Good-bye to the operator. Catch your number some other time. Maybe around two
A.M.
when you haven't been nested and you're ready for the middle-aged casualties even more hysterical than you are. The kind you wake up with in a Chinatown motel (the
walls
are yellow, green and red), all sour and boozy in a lumpy bed, having left those desperate claw marks in the ass of a sad, blowsy stranger.
Just then Al Mackey got the passing bittersweet idea of going home and shooting himself. Surprise, Marty! Old Kamikaze Mackey beat you to it.
He knew he was extra loaded tonight. The chicken-vulture had begun to look vulnerable and lovely. He wanted to touch her hand. Then she opened her mouth.
“I reeeeel-ly like mature detectives as opposed to cocky young bluesuits. In fact I despise
them
. My girlfriend says if they couldn't eat poontang there'd be a bounty on them.”
She giggled into her Mai Tai just as he'd talked into his Tullamore Dew. They hadn't yet tried talking to each other. Perhaps they never would. What's the difference? The clanging of glasses sounded like the tolling of bells. A dark omen. He saw that she was at least as drunk as he.
“I despise that cheating Chinaman,” he said to his Irish whiskey. “He's a thief.”
Then Al Mackey signaled to the thief, who hopped down the long bar and warmed Al Mackey's cockles by pouring
four
fingers without shortchanging him yet.
“I'll tell you who I hate worse than any Chinaman,” she said to the Mai Tai. Then she sucked the empty straw loudly enough to drown out the music of Fleetwood Mac any old day.
Al Mackey got the clue and nodded to the ever-watchful Wing, who skipped in with a premixed $3.50 special. This time Wing cadged fifty cents from Al Mackey's change.
Amazing Grace didn't thank Al Mackey. Apparently, the information about whom she hated worse than any Chinaman was worth three and a half scoots. “I hate that big ugly cop you talked to when you came in. You know, whatzisname with the big teeth?”
“Phipps. His name's Buckmore Phipps.”
“Yeah, that piece a cancer. I hate him. Only good thing about him, he's such a lushwell his liver's probably big as his ass. Can't last much longer, way he does it. About a year. Canceled check. End of Watch. Bye bye, Bucko.” Then, for the first time, she stopped talking to the Mai Tai. She turned to Al Mackey: “Do you know he has a drippy faucet?”
“A what?” Al Mackey was trying to concentrate on her dancing eyebrows. Was she a blonde? Was she
gray
? He looked down and saw that her ass was
bigger
than Buckmore Phipps' liver. The fact is, she was somewhat repulsive. He was getting aroused.
“I happen to know that in Hollywood patrol right now the clap's as common as a head cold. Your friend, Buckmore Phipps ⦔
“He's
not
my friend,” Al Mackey protested boozily. “I hate him too.”
Wing, never one to miss a conversation heating up, slid in with another triple of Tullamore Dew, took the correct amount from Al Mackey, and managed to steal a dollar from Amazing Grace's bar cash before drifting away.
“Your friend Buckmore ⦠excuse me.” She hiccupped wetly and wiped her mouth with a damp cocktail napkin, smearing orange lipstick over her chin. “He'd like to jump on my bones like a new trampoline. Tried to penetrate my knickers one night right here in The Glitter Dome! That's the kind a animal he is.”
“I hate him,” Al Mackey said fervently. “I really hate him.”
“And I'll tell you something else.” She leaned closer to say it. “I happen to know he's practically
raising
crabs. A steno works Hollywood nightwatch told me. He has them in his armpits even.”
“A goddamn crab ranch,” Al Mackey said, seeing two Mai Tais in front of the hefty operator when logic told him there was one. Double vision meant it was now or never.