The swinging sixties, the Sunset Strip a smorgasbord of horny Marines, looking for a little action before heading off to Nam. A queen’s delight, and it’s all too easy for a guy to fall in love with these brave, young warriors. But some of those shipping out won’t be coming home, and not all of the wounded wear uniforms.

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The Swinging Sixties. To some, that conjures up images of The Haight in all its flower power glory, before the lilies festered. To others, it was Greenwich Village and that heady period leading up to the events at Stonewall; or the love-ins in Griffith Park.

For me, it was The Strip. Sunset Boulevard. Not the Norma Desmond Boulevard, of flame red Maseratis and grand hotels and pink mansions with heart-shaped swimming pools, but the hurdy-gurdy strip of once-elegant-now-sleazy clubs, discount record stores and gay bars.

And Marines. Scores of them, hundreds of them, flocking there every weekend from Camp Pendleton down the road, strolling about wide-eyed in twosomes, three-four-and-more-somes. And some of them alone. On the prowl. Happily, because these were the ones a gay man like me looked for.

This was the era of the Vietnam war — or police action, as some put it. The population of the one-time Rancho Santa Margarita between Oceanside and San Clemente had soared from a few hundred Marines who marched there from San Diego in 1942 to somewhere around a hundred thousand, give or take a thou or two at any time. Every one of them young, buff, tough — and best of all, as many of us saw it, terminally horny.

To be sure, Camp Pendleton was not the only military establishment in the Southern California area. There were navel stations in Long Beach and San Diego, and one saw sailors, too, on The Strip, their legs slightly bowed, sweet little buns enclosed in tight white that showed their crotches, too, to best advantage, everything nicely outlined to show you exactly what was on the menu — and what hungry wanderer would turn down a tasty seafood dinner when it was on offer?

But for whatever reason, it was the Marines who claimed that Sunset beachhead for their own, where they came each weekend to establish a foothold, to occupy the terrain, to hunt and shoot, and hoist their flagpoles in victory over the restless natives. Their conquests were many. My heart was among them, and therein lies a tale.

For a young unattached gay man, the tail end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies was a kind of golden era, as close as we ever got to a gay Heaven-on-earth. The whole love-in, hippie-flower-child explosion had made men more aware of their tender side. Men, real macho men, not sissies, wore feathers and bead necklaces and their hair hanging down over their shoulders.

This was the onset of the sexual and social revolution as well. Civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights — the pot never stopped simmering. Porn had gone from underground collector’s items to big budget movie theater smash hits like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, though the days when you could walk into a story and buy one to take home and watch were still in the future.

It was almost a rule of the day, too, especially among the young and the curious, that everyone tried almost everything. Drugs, for sure, but for many, that meant sexual experimentation as well. Mick Jagger dressed in drag on the silver screen, Dr. Hook and The Medicine Show sang about “The Freakers’ Ball” (I’ll kiss yours if you’ll kiss mine) and straight men, if a bit shamefacedly, did kiss one another, in public, no less. To be regarded as square was a fate worse than death. To which end, nearly every guy was willing to swing. If you had any hope of being regarded as cool, you had to try it, at least once. Not a few discovered they liked it enough to try it again. Lucky me.

Of course, service men in general, and Marines in particular, were less caught up in this atmosphere than their civilian counterparts, but they were not altogether immune to it either. They were lonely, too, and more of them than would have admitted it were scared. When you think maybe you are going to die soon, it makes living more important, and nothing says, “I’m alive” better than a rock hard dick, especially one in action. Wars and the threat of one’s demise make men horny. Always have. Insects start doing it too, when they think the end is near, but I don’t do bugs. Ever try to give a bedbug a blow job? Marines are way better.

The result was that it would have been a very poor representative of the gay male community who couldn’t find himself a hunk — or two or three if you were especially hungry — to share his Friday night or Sunday afternoon with.

Oh, you’re wondering about that Saturday night I skipped over? Well, conventional wisdom was, when the guys hit The Strip on Friday evening, they were too horny after a week on the base to concern themselves overmuch with who or how. The main objective was, get that load off, now, however, whatever. Sweat the details later, when your nuts cool down.

By Saturday, however, having most of them gotten themselves well taken care of the night before, they were inclined to be more particular and since in general these guys were essentially straight, Saturday night they went out looking for women — never mind that their chances of finding any on The Strip — which was, after all, a part of West Hollywood, or Boy’s Town, as it was known — were awfully slim.

By Sunday afternoon, however, they had regained their senses — along with their hot nuts. And, return to base was looming, which meant another week of doing without. Quite a few of them decided it was best to get what they could while the getting was still good.

For shoppers like myself, Sunday pickings were not quite as generous as Friday night. To be sure, some of the real prizes were still ensconced in the love nests to which the grander queens had whisked them on Friday night; but most Sunday afternoons the crop was still bountiful.

Sometimes you even nabbed a prize bull, one so nearly straight that he had held out for a woman both Friday and Saturday nights, which meant by now his balls were about to burst and “no” had vanished temporarily but completely from his vocabulary. Once was never enough in these cases. You could count on an afternoon’s feast of several repeat loads from these hearty lads before you got them cooled down enough to catch the bus back to the base. This was an occasional Sunday afternoon bonus in the game, much to be hoped for. Truth to tell, it was what many of us prayed for on Sunday mornings. Hey, you kneel in your pew and I’ll kneel in mine.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I met Doug.

I wasn’t, in fact, cruising, having scored very nicely on both Friday and Saturday nights, thank you — not all of them were looking for women on Saturday. I lived a scant half a block off the strip, a fact which had contributed to my success on more than one occasion. Before they could have second thoughts or get cold feet, or think maybe they’d rather keep looking for that elusive pussy, we were already inside my door with skivvies at half-mast, ready for battle stations. It’s called guerilla action, and I can be fast and stealthy when I need to.

So, on this particular Sunday, I’d simply strolled up to a favorite coffee shop on The Strip for a late breakfast early lunch, and was on my way home, when I passed this young man at a corner. He wasn’t cruising, so far as I could tell. Wasn’t doing much of anything, actually, just standing still, watching the traffic, seemingly absorbed in his thoughts.

I was absorbed in my own thoughts as well. Friends had asked if I wanted to go to a matinee showing of an old Robert Mitchum movie and I was considering the possibility — River of No Return, with both Mitchum and Marilyn, neither of them at their very best, but the chemistry between them was worth watching. They’d become good friends during the making of the movie. Years later, when others would trash her, he would say insistently that she was “a good kid.” I liked him for that.

So I had gone by the young man on the corner before he fully registered on my consciousness — like I said, I’d had a couple of busy nights. My fires were tamped.

They were not out altogether, however. I was still alive, in other words. I paused a few feet past him and glanced back, giving him a quick once over. He was nice — not quite movie star material, which was fine with me. There’s something about a guy too handsome to be true that turns me off. I like the hunk next door type. This one qualified, and then some.

Plus, he had the Marine buzz cut. The Vietnam war wasn’t terribly popular in some circles, and a lot of the servicemen wore cheap wigs when they cruised the strip, in a kind of sad attempt to make themselves look less conspicuous — with, of course, the opposite effect.

So, the buzz cut was almost the first thing I noticed about this guy. I liked it. It kind of said, “Here I am, this is the package, take it or leave it.” Masculine confidence is sexy in my book.

There was a lot more to the package, however, than an undisguised haircut. He was a big guy, six three, maybe six four, and beefy, but in the U.S. Marine Corps T-shirt and the tight, faded Levi’s, it was obvious that the beef was solid. And well packed. Did I mention that the Levi’s were tight?

So, there I was, adding all this up, when he turned his head and looked right at me. Not so much like he was cruising. No coy glances. Not even a smile. Just this frank look. Like he was sizing me up too. Then he nodded ever so slightly, as if he had agreed to something.

I hoped I knew what. Mitchum and Marilyn were suddenly a lot less appealing. I walked back to where he was standing. He continued to watch me, neither smiling nor frowning, his expression neutral.

“Busy?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

I hesitated. Usually by this time I was getting signals, one way or another. Many, probably most, of these guys were available, but not all. A few were even hostile, though why those were on The Strip I never did understand. This guy, though, I couldn’t tell. He looked innocent, only not quite. I had a sense that he was looking for something, that he was interested, but in what I wasn’t quite sure. He had the look about him of one of those bulls I looked upon as a special catch, the ones who were still carrying Friday night’s load around, with Saturday’s added to it for good measure, but something about the way he regarded me reminded me too of a bull sizing up the matador.

“I just live a block away,” I said, grabbing the bull by the horns. “Want to come by?”

“Maybe.” A long pause, and then he asked, “You’re queer, aren’t you?”

“Uh, yes. Gay, actually. We prefer gay.”

He continued to appraise me for a minute longer. Then, he kind of shrugged. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

He fell into step beside me and we walked for a bit, turning down the steep hillside that was Alta Loma Street, where I lived.

“You do this often?” I asked.

“This?”

“Get picked up by gay guys?”

“No. First time.” He glanced sideways at me. “Does that make a difference?”

“Not really,” I lied, and restrained myself from turning cartwheels. Alta Loma was a very steep street; I could end up down on Santa Monica Boulevard.

But, he wasn’t giving me a lot to go on here. Maybe he didn’t really know the score. Maybe he thought I was offering a kind of alternative USO without the starlets. Drinks, a bite to eat, some music to listen to. Maybe he thought I was a starlet. Maybe, I thought, I ought to get things cleared up before we waste a lot of time. There was still time to catch Mitchum and Marilyn — or find myself another Marine, now that my appetite had been aroused.

“I was kind of hoping,” I sort of stammered, though I wasn’t usually tongue-tied, and I don’t know why I suddenly was with him, “that we might, you know, fool around when we got to my place.”

“I understand.”

“If that’s cool,” I persisted. “With you, I mean.”

He looked sideways at me, his expression still neutral. “That’s what I figured you had in mind.”

“Ah.” Well, so now I knew that he was amenable — and, also, that he wasn’t much of a talker. Both of which were fine with me. We walked the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. He didn’t feel threatening, the way some do. You learn to sense that sort of thing with these fellows, or you can get into a lot of trouble. I am happy getting pounded with a big dick. Fists are another matter. Sometimes you had to know when to bail out.

I wasn’t getting any angry or threatening vibes from this guy, though. It was more like, I didn’t have any clue what was going on behind that kind of chiseled façade of his.

Even if we never discussed it, most of the jarheads I picked up sort of knew the drill, pretty much knew what was on the agenda. Some of them, a lot of them, wanted a blow job, short and sweet, here’s your supper and thanks for the memories. Some of them — more than a few, I’m glad to report — liked to have their asses plowed, and if I say so myself, I had the tractor for the job. Some were on their way in fifteen, twenty minutes and a few spent the day or even the night, which generally meant a repeat. If once was good, in my book, twice was even better. Sometimes, I got a three-peat. No sense putting the tractor away till the field’s properly seeded, the way I saw it.

In general, there’s a way they have about them, these weekend warriors, and with practice I had gotten very good at tuning in to it, like dialing up an FM station. It was message they broadcast that said better than words, “I’m horny, I just want to get my nuts off, and you’re the lucky one.”

This gyrene, though, was a total mystery. He just didn’t have that feel about him. Didn’t seemed to be broadcasting any particular message. I kept twiddling the dial, and I couldn’t find a station. I glanced sideways at him a couple of times, but he was looking straight ahead, his face expressionless.

Some thoughts from Victor J. Banis

The recent brouhaha regarding submissions for the Lambda Literary Awards had my computer smoking for a day or so, with posts back and forth, some of them reasoned and some silly, some of them angry and some of them, frankly, downright ugly. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I want to take a further look at the subject and at some of the points that were raised.

First, for those of you who weren’t in on the follies, word got around that the Lambda folks had changed their submission guidelines to exclude submissions from heterosexual authors—a move interpreted by many (I suspect correctly) as an attempt to bar the women writers of today’s M/M fiction. A number of these women announced that henceforth they would not be submitting nor in any other way supporting the foundation.

Fair enough. I certainly wouldn’t expect Laura Baumbach (MLR Press) to continue to support this organization the way she has in the past, which is certainly generously, though I confess to be dismayed to think that she will not be submitting either the I Do anthologies or the soon upcoming The Golden Age of Gay Fiction. In the first case, I think even the Lambda people would have to give it a nod, it’s in such a great cause. In the second instance, that Golden Age doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Chinese kitchen, I just think it should go in on general principles. But, maybe the editors can submit these books? I’ll pay the fees, if you do the paperwork, fellas.

Some of the posts I got were funny, if bitterly so. One individual who described himself as “in gay publishing in NYC” and whose name I won’t divulge, was surprised to realize that there was so much ill-feeling abroad toward the Lammies. Uh huh. Welcome to the real world, Mr. When Did I Fall Asleep and Where Did I Wake Up.

And in his innocence lies a problem that afflicts the world of gay publishing muchly. If the New York publishing world is a small town (and it is, very small), the gay publishing establishment is more like a Native American village. These people haven’t a clue what lies beyond their tent poles.

Yes, dear man, people enter the Lammies in the hope of winning, and because an award can mean increased sales. I doubt that very many enter it thinking good thoughts about the Lambda Foundation. Out here in the hinterlands the Lammies are apt to be greeted with the same kind of scorn you like to heap on those of us you consider as “outlanders.” You know, the ones who aren’t members of your little in-clique.

Not so very long ago a group of lesbian authors and publishers, unhappy with the judging at the Lammies, broke off and formed their own awards group, The Golden Crown Awards, which is doing very well, thank you. Does that sound like everything is rosy in La-La-Land, Sugar?

My mail also included lots of discussion of whether the Lammie rules had in fact changed at all. Several persons, including some members of the Lambda Foundation’s Board, pointed out that the submission guidelines had always been worded this way. I was informed that The Lambda’s are “for glbt writERS not glbt writING.” Never mind, as I pointed out, that this attitude would have barred Annie Proulx from winning for her wonderful Brokeback Mountain (Yes, yes, I know it was only a short story, but the point is valid just the same. Great writing isn’t based on gender.)

“But how,” I asked, “Is the committee supposed to know anyway? With writers like Pat Brown, J. P. Bowie, Josh Lanyon, Jordann Castillo Price, to name a handful, who determines which of these are men and which women, let alone who’s hetero and who’s queer?”

“Why, the writers self identify,” was the answer I got. No bed checks, I was assured, to my great relief. If a writer submits as a queer writer, then the Foundation takes him/her at his word and accepts him as queer.

Hmm. Just like the U.S. Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy. You can be queer and serve in our armed forces so long as you’re willing to pretend to be heterosexual. And, yes, you can be a heterosexual woman and submit to the Lammies, so long as we all understand that you are declaring yourself to be queer. And they wonder why folks don’t hold them in greater respect?

I also got a really vicious letter from a well known gay male writer whose name again I won’t divulge. He said in part:
“…I don’t appreciate a bunch of homophobic straight women who fetishize gay sex for the titillation of other straight women trashing the work of LGBT writers, editors and publishers, or our history. I don’t appreciate those same women pretending that gay fiction did not exist until they started writing it. They have no idea who you are, for example…”

Uh, hello? When Haworth dropped their fiction line and reverted right on my The Man From C.A.M.P., MLR Press grabbed the rights and immediately reissued the book, even though I actually warned Laura that the sales at Haworth had been very slow. MLR has that previously mentioned anthology coming out in October, edited by Wayne Gunn: The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, which celebrates the great tradition of gay fiction from the sixties and seventies, a book that promises to be a major event in the industry.

And as for not knowing who I am (waves to Zam, to Kris, to Wave, to Laura, to all my many friends here) that is a genuine snort. These gals have been interviewing me, reviewing me, chatting about me on their blogs and in Yahoo groups. If there’s anybody left out there in the world of M/M who doesn’t know who Victor J. Banis is, she must have been in a coma for the last several months. It seems to me that, if anyone, it’s the Lambda Foundation who doesn’t know who I am. They have steadfastly refused to acknowledge me in any way over the years (which in my opinion says more about them than it does about me.) I’ve never gotten anything but respect from the M/M writers here and around the internet.

“And I’m sorry,” this writer goes on to say, “I will fight till my dying day to keep homophobes from winning awards from us.”

Oh, Honey, not to be rude, but I’m thinking maybe you need to wake up and smell the dildoes. No doubt you’re reading stuff I haven’t gotten, but I have yet to see anything in the world of M/M that sounded even remotely like homophobia. And believe me, if there’s one thing I know, it’s homophobia. That old devil and I go back a long way together, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.

What’s truly sad, though, is there’s a major downside in this for the entire field of gay oriented fiction (whether you label it gay or M/M or chili con carne) and it goes smack dab back to the gay publishing establishment in NYC (including the Lambda people, who seem to come from the same gene pool), and that individual who was so surprised to realize that not everybody loves them.

I’ve written before on the demise of the gay novel at the hands of today’s gay publishing establishing. Yes, I know, there are many reasons for the decline in readership, but I think a goodly share of the blame rests right smack on their doorsteps. Their world has become so insular, indeed, incestuous, that they have lost all sense of what readers outside of their little set might want to read.

I believe there is still a market for entertaining gay-oriented fiction. People still like to read for pleasure. And the results of those publishers demonstrate the same truth. Books by Maupin and Sedaris – books which people read for sheer enjoyment – sell very well indeed. The books that go nowhere are the ones that no one outside their increasingly shrunken world cares a fig about and which they continue to grind out with mind numbing regularity. The same old queens writing the same old dreck for the same old editors to publish, to be read by the same old queens, who give themselves the same old awards over and over. And periodically they get together over sherry, wring their hands, and wonder why no one buys their books. Must be that there is just no longer an audience for gay fiction, huh? Or, darlings, can anybody say “bo-o-o-ring!”

And the Lambda people, year in and year out, work to validate this miniscule view of the glbt world. Ruth Sims, author of a simply wonderful novel, The Phoenix, commented that she has long noticed an anti-female writer bias with the Lammies, and said wistfully that she knew she’d never get one of their gay fiction awards. I wrote her back that the problem was not her gender, she could put any name on it she liked as a byline, and she still wouldn’t get an award because it is a brilliantly entertaining piece of historical fiction – and the key word there is “entertaining.”

To be sure, the Lammies have their mystery and erotica categories (and Felice Picano’s condescending remarks last spring as he introduced the mystery category said exactly how they regard them) but the major fiction categories are meant to be vedy, vedy serious. They aren’t intended to be enjoyed by the readers. Serious reading isn’t about pleasure, you know (sniff, sniff) it’s meant to be edifying.

And here is the great tragedy. (Be prepared for fainting and smelling salts.) The Lammies and the whole gay publishing industry in NYC, need these M/M writers. Yes, there are some guys writing good books too, damned good books. I tip my hat gladly to Rick and Dorien and William and a whole bunch of others – who also, let it be said, are steadfastly ignored in those rarified circles. I read the reviews, the blogs, the comments from readers. People love Rick Reed’s books. I love Rick Reed’s books. Everybody loves Rick Reed’s books…well, except for the you know what folks. To the best of my knowledge, which may well not be complete, Rick has never even got short-listed for a Lammie. How is this possible? Is everybody else in the world wrong? Or is this another example of how out-of-touch with the real gay world the Lambda Foundation is? You guess.

And by the way, it’s worth mentioning that many, maybe most of those guy writers are being published by women – the same houses advancing the M/M field. If there’s a single publishing house in the field that would turn down a book because it was written by a man, I’ve never heard of them. Would that we could say the same in reverse. So much for homophobia.

But it was the recent advent of the M/M women that made me think there is a glimmer of hope yet for my beloved genre. Maybe Laura’s books and Zam’s and Pat’s aren’t “great literature” – whatever in the hell that is; I don’t know, and I don’t think those precious people do either – but they are many of them damned good reads. Dickens didn’t set out to write great literature, he set out to entertain. Same with the Brontes. Same with Flaubert and Balzac and London and…well, I could continue that list for the rest of the day and the night. The point is, many if not most of the writers whose works we regard today as classics had one thing in mind while they were writing – tell a good story, mesmerize the reader with the magic of your words. Try, do try, luv, not to put them to sleep.

Get your heads out of your mole-holes, guys. All this whining and wailing about the lack of market for gay fiction is crap. Maybe there isn’t the market that there was back in the glorious sixties, but there are still people out there who like to read good stories and quite a few of them like a good story about guys doing the boom-boom, and I for one don’t give a rat’s patootie whether it’s a woman or a man reading my books, the fan mail gives me the same glow regardless. I’d make a guess that 80% of the people who write to tell me how much they’ve enjoyed my Deadly Mysteries are women. Good on you, girls. Fetishize me all you want. I’m yours.

All this huffing and puffing about straight women “invading” our turf is on par with the cow patties we used to pick up in our pasture when I was a lad. We used them for fuel, too, but they still stunk.

The reality is, we are an endangered species, and we’re going to hang together or we’re going to hang separately. Katherine Forrest posted quite recently, in defense of the anti-woman policy, “Our books are taken from the shelves of libraries all over the country and even from the website of Amazon.com this year. It is more difficult to be an LGBT writer now than it has been in many decades, more difficult to make any income from our written words, much less a living. Publishers have closed, stores have closed, the markets seem to be shrinking with each passing day.”
Well, I’ve already addressed that shrinking market business, and as for the other complaints, it seems to me all of that applies just as well, only more so, for the women writing M/M fiction. They have to deal not only with the general prejudice against gay fiction but with the prejudice of the gay community as well.

And, hey, wait a sec there, kiddo. As I recall, in that Amazon debacle, it was the women who raised the hue and cry, who sent up flares and organized petitions. It is my belief that it was the entire community standing up together that made Amazon back down, and not just a letter from the Lambda Foundation, though I have no doubt that helped too—another demonstration of what we can – could – accomplish if we started seeing ourselves as partners rather than “the enemy.” We’re all in the same boat. I think we’d go a lot further if we started rowing rather than throwing one another overboard.

Instead of sniffing and looking down their noses, these folks need to reach out and wholeheartedly embrace what is happening in our neck of the woods – because in large part it’s a helluva lot better than what’s coming down in theirs.
And if that means we don’t qualify for the Lammies, then I’ll go back to what I said earlier about my situation with these people – it says way more about them than it does about us.

Just some thoughts from an old word junkie.

The House of the Dead: a mortuary whose directors are drop dead gorgeous and terminally horny-and one of them up to mischief. Stanley and Tom try to separate the naturally dead from the murdered dead and find themselves awash with coffins-until they come to the one Stanley’s name on it.   Deadly Slumber indeed.

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Chapter ONE

The House of the Dead.

He hadn’t known, when he made the appointment, how appropriate that old sobriquet would be before the day, before the hour, even, was out.

That’s what they had called Bartholomew’s Mortuary when David Solomon was growing up just a few blocks from here—never dreaming that one day he would be standing outside like this, looking up at the pseudo-Italian palazzo, and summoning his courage to go inside for a job interview.

“You’re going to work at the House of the Dead?” his sister Rose had asked, laughing.

“I hope. And live there too, if I get the internship.”

“Won’t you feel, you know, icky? All those dead people?”

“Dead people are just dead, Rosie. You want icky, I’ll take you to a gay dinner party or two. You’ll come to welcome a non-bitchy corpse.”

He’d been so used to seeing the building, though, that as anachronistic as it was here in San Francisco’s near-Mission, midst crumbling mansions and almost mansions, he had long since ceased to take any particular notice of it.

Today, however, perhaps because it had taken on a new significance in his life, or maybe it was only a trick of the early morning sunlight, but when he came around the corner from 17^th Street, he saw it with new eyes, the way you catch sight of a different you in a store window’s glass. Pausing outside to really look at the mortuary’s facade, he could suddenly fully appreciate it for the beautiful monstrosity that it was, in a way he’d never done before.

Built for a gold field millionaire whose fortune had vanished as quickly as it accrued—apparently before he’d spent so much as a single night in his new mansion—the palazzo looked, as wags sometimes put it, “about as Venetian as an amusement park funhouse.” It was generally said, though, with an affectionate scorn. It was bastard architecture, to be sure, but fascinating in its own way.

The millionaire who’d commissioned the building had quickly vanished into obscurity, and the palazzo’s subsequent history had been checkered: an expensive bordello, a brief and unsuccessful stint as a hotel (Victorian era guests apparently shied away from sleeping in a former bordello), a gambling casino, a speakeasy, a bordello again (”A whorehouse,” some insisted this time), and for a year or so a boarding house, after which it had sat empty for ten years or more before Percy Bartholomew Senior, looking about for a place to establish a business, had seen it and said, “There, that will be Bartholomew’s Mortuary.”

The building was enormous, and for years Bartholomew’s had needed only the first floor. The top three floors were used for storage and an apartment in which the thrifty Percy lived when he was not hard at work, which was seldom. It had been then a one-man operation, Percy serving as his own embalmer, funeral director, grief counselor, maintenance man, and accountant.

That remained the case for years, and might have continued for the life of the mortuary, had it not been for one twist of fate: the AIDS epidemic.

“It’s an ill wind,” Percy had been fond of saying, though this wind did not blow until after his demise.

When the AIDS plague first struck, many mortuaries did not want to deal with the bodies of its victims. The families of many of those who died conspired with the funeral homes in ordering hasty cremations, often with no kind of service, often without even posted obituaries. People just disappeared. They were there and then they weren’t.

“No services,” was the order of the day.

Enter Bartholomew’s. Percy Bartholomew Junior, son of the now deceased founder, made a momentous decision, which he trumpeted throughout San Francisco’s gay community: “Bartholomew’s will provide full funerary services for AIDS victims, just as with any other deceased.” An announcement, as it happened, heard round the world.

The ill wind of AIDS had been the making of the mortuary’s fortunes. Additional slumber rooms, in the old fashioned terminology still in use at Bartholomew’s, were opened. A growing list of interns came here to work for little more than slave wages while they finished their schooling, and served their apprenticeships.

Even when an intern did not eventually join the firm, everyone knew that an internship at Bartholomew’s was worth its weight in gold at any mortuary anywhere in the country.

“Be gay,” was a sort of unofficial motto for those applying for internship. It was generally understood, though rarely discussed openly, that being gay was a bonus for an applicant. At the very least, one must be fully comfortable with gay clients. Being especially good looking, and gay oriented, was practically a call to apply.

David Solomon, having completed his first year in mortuary school, and blessed with the sort of good looks that made passersby stop on the street and stare after him, had heard the call.

§ § § § §

The first of the tour busses was just pulling up outside Mission Dolores, down the street. The early morning breeze was strengthening to a wind, tossing David’s dark curls, and making his blazer billow out behind him.

He pushed his way through the wrought iron gate, climbed the wide, shallow steps, and shoved open the elaborately carved front door. The vestibule in which he found himself, and that he had never seen before, was no less fantastic than the building’s exterior. Elaborately inlaid marble covered the floor in an intricate pattern of sand, ocher and umber. In the very middle of the space, an airy staircase of black wrought iron spiraled upward, and when he glanced up he saw, four floors above, a domed ceiling painted in garishly impressive frescoes.

He stood for a long moment, craning his neck to study with a guilty sense of pleasure what surely must have been inspired by the Sistine Chapel, if it had fallen well short of its inspiration. It reminded him of the cheap plastic replicas of Michelangelo’s David that one saw in the tawdrier souvenir shops at Fisherman’s Wharf, but on a much more grandiose scale. Kitschy, but not unlikable. Like the building itself, really.

Someone cleared his throat. David tore his attention from the artwork overhead, and looked to his right. A tall man, whose good looks were just beginning to fade, with pale blond hair so carefully arranged and with so bright a sheen that it might have been made of ceramic, came from behind an ornate teak counter.

“Mister Solomon?” he said.

“Yes.” David came forward, hand outstretched. “I’m David Solomon.”

“Cyril Bartholomew.” Cyril Bartholomew looked him up and down, seeming pleased with what he saw. “Jewish.”

“Yes. Non practicing.” And was immediately embarrassed to have said it. What did that have to do with anything? It was something entirely private, wasn’t it, whether or not he practiced his family’s religion?

“I don’t think we’ve had a Jewish director before. Our directors, of course, are chosen for qualities other than their religious practices. Or non practices, as it may. My Uncle Percy will be interviewing you this morning. He’s the managing director of the firm. Come with me, please.” He turned in the direction of the reception desk and the doors that opened behind and on either side of it, and hesitated.

“Normally,” he said, “we’d take the elevator or the stairs from the business wing. But, this being your first visit, perhaps you’d prefer the scenic route, through the public spaces?”

“I would, actually.”

Cyril nodded, as if in approval, and led the way to the curving stairs.

“What are they?” David asked.

The blond man paused with one foot on the first step. “I beg your pardon?”

“What are the qualities for which your directors are chosen?”

Cyril took a moment to look him over again, slowly, from head to toe, and back. He might have been smiling faintly, but his face was a mask. It was difficult to be sure. Certainly there was a gleam in his eye that came from something more than the gilded chandelier above them.

“You have the look,” he said, and started upward.

David followed, resisting the temptation to take another glimpse at that outrageous ceiling overhead, and kept his eyes instead on Cyril Bartholomew’s ramrod straight back. Cyril was ahead of him up the stairs, though, with the result that his buttocks were practically on a level with David’s eyes. David found himself looking at them, then, rather than Cyril’s back.

Nicely sculpted buttocks they were, too, as David was altogether aware, with lush curves like a ripe peach, a similarity enhanced by the tawny silk of the trousers encasing them. David could not help thinking that, like a peach, they invited one to sink one’s teeth into them. He was mesmerized by the play of muscles as their owner climbed upward, and found himself actually leaning toward them. He caught himself with a start.

What a way that would be to begin his experience at Bartholomew’s, he thought, laughing silently at himself—biting into the butt of one of the directors! He wasn’t altogether sure, though, whether that would be a bad thing for his career, or a good one. The invitation they offered did not seem entirely unintended. It appeared to him Cyril Bartholomew wore nothing between his flesh and the silk of his trousers.

He made a mental note to observe if this state of dress was unique to Cyril alone, or indicated a style suggestion for staff members. After all, he very much wanted to fit in—if he got the job. And, he thought his own buttocks were rather nicely shaped. They’d look just fine, he felt sure, in tightly fitted silk, without the hindrance of underthings. He wished in fact that he’d thought of that beforehand. Everyone in the industry understood looks mattered when it came to Bartholomew’s, and he had a notion that his own butt was one of his best features.

Once, Cyril looked back over his shoulder and smiled, and David had the impression that he was not at all unaware of the sight he was presenting to the young man following him up the stairs.

They reached the second floor. David had a glimpse of a chapel, filled with flowers, the perfume of roses and lilies and chrysanthemums seeming to flow out the open door like a fog of scent.

“Our original slumber rooms are on the ground floor. Of course, everyone wants them. The selection room is there as well, and the embalming room. I’ll skip that for today. The newer parlors are here, on second,” Cyril said, waving a hand at the second floor corridor. “They’re a bit smaller, but also more up to date. Depending upon your interview, we can look at those later. The offices and the staff rooms are on the next level, along with a small kitchenette and cafeteria for our employees, and a quite good coffee shop for our guests.” He started up another flight of stairs. “The top floor, that would be the fourth, is the dormitory for our interns.”

David was suddenly aware of the silence that surrounded them. It seemed total. The thick carpet on the stairs swallowed up their footsteps, and when Cyril spoke, it was in little more than a whisper, though it had the effect almost of a shout. No breeze stirred the thick forest green brocade of the draperies. The air was not just still, it seemed gelid, as if they moved through it only with effort.

His mother would have said his imagination was running away with him. The atmosphere here was supposed to be hushed. Except in ghost stories, the dead weren’t given to clatter.

They reached the third floor and went down a long corridor, past an open door where two or three well-dressed and handsome men were having coffee. They glanced at David with some interest as he went by but no one spoke, and Cyril did not pause for introductions.

He knocked at a tall mahogany door at the corridor’s far end, waited for a respectful moment, then knocked again, a little louder. Finally, he pushed a door open, tentatively.

“Uncle Percy?” he said, stepping into the room, and then, in a sibilant whisper, “Oh, Jesus!”

Crowding in behind him, David first saw the enormous desk centered before the two green draped windows, the morning sunlight streaming in so boldly that for a few seconds he was all but blinded. It was another moment before he followed the direction of Cyril’s wide-eyed gaze, and saw the man stretched out on the roan leather sofa against one wall.

He was dead. Even with only a year of training at the San Francisco Mortuary College, David could tell that at a glance. Eyes were open but unseeing, and a small trail of vomit had trickled from his mouth, staining one cheek. His shoes were on the floor beside the sofa, and near them, a large liquor bottle, on its side; a smaller bottle also, with a prescription label on it, too small to read at this distance, an empty glass and—tellingly—a syringe.

Cyril Bartholomew stepped to the corpse. One hand clutched a sheet of paper. Cyril took it from the lifeless fingers and, unfolding it, glanced at it briefly before folding it again and slipping it into the pocket of his suit jacket.

“Suicide?” David said.

“Obviously,” was the answer. “You’d better go down to the reception desk. Take that elevator there, it’ll be quicker. Matt’s office is just behind reception. Tell him to come here. And stay there yourself, to welcome any guests. Mister and Mrs. Bunderson are due shortly. Escort them into the front parlor, the Rose Room, and make them comfortable. There’s a bell pull there. If you need anything, coffee or whatever, ring for Armando. He’ll take care of it.”

David knew then that he had gotten the job.

A painful past. A mysterious stranger. Footsteps vanishing in the fog. All Stanley wants is just to hear Tom say, “I love you.” All Tom wants is Stanley safe. And the stranger? Ah, there’s the rub–what exactly is it that he wants? Be careful what you wish for, fellows. You may get it. Dreams can be deadly.

****************************

Prologue

“Gone?” Her voice went up on an ascending scale, like an opera diva’s in full song. “What do you mean, gone? They took him?”

He shook his head, trying to get his mind clear. Too much pot, and he was pretty sure the last joint had been laced with something, PCP maybe. His thoughts refused to settle, drifting like the acrid clouds of smoke that swirled in the room’s cold drafts.

“It must have been them. The baby was right there when I went into the john.” He pointed at the crib. You could see, or certainly imagine, the indentation where the baby had been. “And when I came back, they were gone, and the baby too. I ran outside but their taillights were clear down to the crossing, and then they disappeared. Just…” he shrugged, and finished lamely, “gone.”

She stared at the crib, empty now of even the blankets the child had been wrapped in, and lifted a hand to the bottom of her throat, as if choking off the anguish rising up in her. “The woman,” she said. “Delia, her name was. She said what a sweet baby he was.”

§ § § § §

“Such a sweet baby,” Delia said, while they were in the kitchen, getting beers. While the men talked man-business. Drug business.

“Yes. He’s very quiet.” Preoccupied. Wishing she were in the other room, wanting to be sure things were handled rightly. She couldn’t completely trust him, not when he was smoking.

“I lost mine.” Delia said it flatly. “No more than two weeks old.”

“Oh, I’m so very sorry. That must have been horrible.”

“Yes.” Her voice, her look, was vague, distant.

§ § § § §

“Delia, her name was. She just lost a baby. A month ago. She told me that in the kitchen, when we were getting the beers.”

He moved toward the telephone, lifted the receiver from the cradle. She crossed to him in three long strides, snatched the phone from his hand and slammed it back on the base.

“What on earth are you doing?” Her eyes wide.

“Calling the police. We’ve got to…”

“The police? Are you crazy? Do you know how much pot you’ve got there?” She jerked her head in the direction of the black plastic bags sitting on the floor. “You want the police to see that?”

“We’ll… well, we’ll hide it. We’ll put it in the trunk of the car, and…”

“And tell the police what? Tell them we had a trio of Cubans, probably illegals, over for the evening? Big time drug suppliers, from Miami? How do we explain who they were, or what they were, or what they were doing here?”

His face screwed up with the effort of thinking. “We could tell them, we could say, they were friends. Or, like, friends of friends, just passing through. We don’t have to mention drugs.”

“Great. And if the police find them, find them with our baby? What do you suppose was in that car of theirs, that big shiny Caddy they were so proud of? You think they came all this way to deliver dope to you and nobody else. I’m betting the trunk was full of goodies. A lot more than grass, I’d guess. Anyway, what kind of people do you think those men are? Use your head. Those were some bad honchos. You send the police after them, you think they’re not going to come back at us? Them, or their friends?”

He sagged—face, shoulders, everything drooping, like wet laundry. “Don’t you care, they’ve stolen our baby?”

“Care? Don’t talk crazy. Of course I care. I care a lot.” She paused, swallowed hard, looked again at the crib where her baby should have been sleeping, and back at him. “But I care about staying alive, too. And we won’t, if you call the police.” She went to one of the chairs, sank heavily into it, taking tight hold of the arms as if it might try to shake her loose, like a bucking horse, like her thoughts were bucking. “We’ve got to think this out carefully.”

“And, do what? We just let them do it, get away with it? With stealing our baby?”

She thought for a long moment. “Christ. I don’t see what else we can do. Even for the baby.” Thought for a moment more, looked again, hard, at the crib. “Besides, think about it, they took the blankets. They must mean to take care of him, they wouldn’t have taken the blankets if they didn’t. That woman, that Delia, who’s to say she wouldn’t take good care of him? Better than we could, anyway, if we were dead.”

He went and sat on the stool next to the coal stove, fighting back the tears that threatened, and shivered despite his proximity to the heat. The glow from the stove gave his tortured face a hellish look. “People will know. People will ask, where’s the baby?”

“Who? Your mother? She hasn’t set foot in this house since the baby was born. You know how she feels about the drugs. I’m surprised she hasn’t turned us in before now. Probably for the baby’s sake. If she knew he was gone, you can bet she wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.”

“What about, well,… your Mom?”

She gave him a look of withering scorn. Her mother had never been here, inside this house. Only once since her marriage had she been to her mother’s home, and that only to confirm what she already knew in her heart—she was glad to have escaped. It was not just the poverty. Her mother lived no leaner than they did, probably she was better off, if only marginally; the difference was, her mother could never deal with the reality of her life, never would. She was the sort of woman who lived her life through the men in it. Now she was widowed, her beloved son dead in an incomprehensible Mid-East skirmish; what could her daughter be but a disappointment to her?

Which, she was painfully aware, was all she had been, while her mother wrapped herself in homilies, carefully stored up like the jars of green beans in the dusty cellar: “Darkest before the dawn.” “God never goes out but what he comes back in.” “His eye is on the sparrow.”

Drowning in artificial sweetness. It had driven her away. Better present misery than a pretense of happiness. Her mom had been just as happy to see her go away. And stay. She didn’t need a daughter to remind her of the lack of male presence in her life.

§ § § § §

She stood up as abruptly as she had sat down, began to pace the small, smoke filled room, in and out of the pale light from the bare bulb overhead. He watched her face darken, glow, darken. With each pass, she looked at the empty crib. A freight train mourned in the distance, where the tracks cleaved the town, the “haves” on one side, with their grassy lawns and tree lined streets; “have-nots” on the other, with… she looked around the room. With… she glowered at the table, at the boxes shoved against the wall, at the uncovered pine floor… with this.

They were like a cancer, those tracks, they ate at her, weighted her soul, always had. If she didn’t have them to remind her who they were, what they were… life might be something different, then, mightn’t it? If she were only shed of those damned tracks. Of living a life on this side, and not the other.

A chunk of coal popped in the stove, an exclamation mark to her thoughts. Like a snap of fingers, it brought her to a sudden standstill.

“We’ll leave,” she said, decision made in the instant, no doubts or confusion. “We’ll just disappear. Go somewhere. Florida, maybe. Or California, that’s further still. Not one of the big cities, some place smaller. Your mom’ll never find us. She’s not that sharp. And it takes money to look for people, especially if they’re a long ways away, if they don’t want to be found. What’s she going to do, come looking for us? California’s a big state.”

“California?” Something that might have been excitement penetrated the fog in his brain, made the incipient tears in his eyes glitter. “I always wanted to go to California.”

“We’ll leave tonight.” Talking quickly now, determined, everything settled. “Just take what we can carry in the car. Who cares about any of this junk?” A sweep of her hand took in all the shabby drug-man’s furnishings—wooden crates for tables, beat up unmatched chairs, wooden boards on bricks to make a bookcase, bed sheets for curtains. “We’ll write her a note, leave it in her mailbox, say you got a job offer somewhere. Not California, we’ll throw her off. New York City, say, or Detroit. Yes, Detroit, that sounds right. Tell her we’ll be in touch. By the time she gets suspicious, starts wondering, the trail will be stone cold.”

“I guess,” he said, torn. “It’s just… my baby. My son. Don’t you care?” he asked again, his tone plaintive.

“Don’t say that,” she snapped. She came to stand over him. For a moment, he thought she meant to hit him and he shrank away from her. “It pisses me off, when you say it like that. I’m trying to think for both of us, damn it.”

She took a deep breath and turned away, pacing again. “Listen to me. The baby is safe with them. They won’t kill him. They wouldn’t have taken him to kill him. Why would they? It’s the woman. She wanted a replacement for the baby she lost. Probably, he’ll be just fine with her, maybe better than he’d have been with us. They’ve got money, plenty of it. The Caddy, and the clothes they were wearing. And that what’s-his-name, Julio, did you see that ring of his? Biggest diamond I ever saw.” She came back to kneel on the floor in front of him, put her arms around him.

She’d always been the stronger one. He’d always deferred to her. He moved into her embrace, lowered his head to her shoulders. “You’re right, I know it. But, fuck, my son, though.”

“We’ll have others.” She paused, thoughtfully, and added, “Maybe sooner than you think.”

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. He pulled back, looking into her face. “You saying…?”

She gave him a sly smile. “I think so. I’m pretty sure, actually. Which means we have to think about him, too, don’t we? We need to keep him alive. He’s got to come first now. This is best, you’ll see.”

He sighed, managed to give her a watery smile. “You’re right,” he said with more conviction.

“‘Course I am. Come on, let’s get packed up, get out of here, tonight.”

“What about the pot?”

She glowered at the plastic bags. “‘We can’t leave it here. And we can’t take it with us. Too risky. If we got stopped for something… that taillight’s still not working. If they pulled us over, searched the car…”

“We have to dump it?”

She thought about that, shook her head reluctantly. It would have been nice to have it for a nest egg, wherever they were going; but, no, it was just too dangerous. If they were going to do this, they had to disappear, completely. Getting stopped by some fool highway patrolman in Nebraska, or wherever you went through to get to California. And them without the baby. They’d call his mom, most likely. She’d say something about the baby. The fool woman never could keep her mouth shut. Then there’d be an investigation. No, it was too dangerous.

“Yes. We’ll have to dump it. We’ll go along the ridge road on our way out of town, toss it in the gully. There’s lots of dopers out that way. One of them will find it, probably, think he’s died and gone to doper heaven. Come on now, help me get our shit in the car. We’ve got to be out of here by morning.”

He grinned, happy to let her take charge, excited despite himself by the prospect of hitting the road. He loved going, going anywhere, just for the sake of movement. Itchy feet. She’d always said he had itchy feet. And California—he’d dreamed all his life of California.

“And goodbye Iowa,” he said, smiling at her, tears gone, the crib with its silent accusation all but vanished from his mind.

“Forever.” She smiled back at him with a kind of tender scorn. He was such a baby. Men were. Thank God she’d gotten him settled down before he did something really tragic. The police? We’d be dead before Christmas.

Despite everything she’d said, she hadn’t quite forgotten the empty crib herself. She glanced at it past his shoulder. She’d thought, in their brief conversation, that Delia was a little round the bend, but that could have been just the loss of her baby. It occurred to her that Delia had not said how she lost the baby. She frowned, and quickly pushed that thought aside. Women did lose their babies. It didn’t say anything about them. It didn’t mean she couldn’t be a good mother.

Anyway, what could she do about that, about any of it? Nothing was what. She had them to think about now. Them, and the baby they’d have in time. It hadn’t been quite a lie she had told him. Anyways, it was easy enough to make it true. Maybe even by the time they got to California. It would be another boy. To make up for the son he’d lost. In time, he’d forget all about the other one. It would be as if that child had never been, just one of his pot dreams.

She wouldn’t forget, she couldn’t, but she could live with it. Women were stronger that way. You did what you had to do. That’s what life was. Life had to be lived. The only question was how.

Later, there’d be time enough to cry. She could feel the tears inside her, wanting to come out, but she took them in a fierce grip and put them away, for a time when they could be wept in private. It was better that way. Someone had to be strong.

“Come on,” she said, “get those boxes off the back porch, start putting stuff in them.”

§ § § § §

“For Christ’s sake,” Julio said, taking a curve at high speed, the tires squealing. Putting distance behind them as fast as he could. What if that fool came after them, looking for his baby? Julio hadn’t seen a car parked by the house, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one, in back maybe. “Why’d you have to take their…?”

“My baby.” She hugged the little blanket wrapped bundle to her bosom, patting him tenderly. “He’s my baby.”

“He’s not—”

“He’s my son.” She said it ferociously, her eyes flashing dementedly in the silver blue glare of the dashboard lights. “My son.”

He bit back a retort, glanced in the mirror at the still unpenetrated darkness behind them.

He thought, not for the first time, that she was probably crazy.

Women. Christ. And now a baby, to get in the way. To hold him back.

It wasn’t good for a man to be burdened.

Let me count the ways.

There are few sights more awesome than flying into Los Angeles at night. You’re high above a pitch-dark desert and then, it seems to happen all at once, you are sailing over a carpet of sparkling jewels. The plane slows, time stands still, and the glittering lights go on and on, as far as the eye can see. Could anything, you wonder, really be so vast?

Yes, it is. And therein lies a problem when one tries to write about the city, and particularly when one wants to write about the mysteries of the city: which city, exactly? Because there are a myriad of L.A.s, encompassing both time and space, and all of them steeped in mystery, murder, violence.

There’s the split personality L.A. of the thirties and forties, rigidly conservative on the outside, wildly bohemian on the inside (for inside, read: the film set); there’s the noir L.A. of the forties and fifties; the suddenly sophisticated L.A. of the eighties and nineties, the jam packed road rage city of the new century.

Even more dizzying is the geography. When you go from Hollywood, up Laurel Canyon, to the Valley, it is as if you enter another world: “In the summer, the valley would be thick with smog and visibility limited to no more than a few miles, but now, the air washed clean by rain, it spread out before her in all its immensity, seeming to go on and on forever before it collided with the purple gray mountains in the distance. She turned off Mulholland to weave her way down Laurel Canyon…The sidewalks were mostly empty. People didn’t walk much here, though there were groups of children playing, and a mailman plodded wearily along his route, a terrier yapping at him from behind a wire fence.” (The Astral: Till The Day I Die, V.J. Banis; Wildside Press, 2007)

The San Fernando Valley, Chandler’s fictional Idle Valley, once mostly arid wasteland until the water came, and fortunes sprang up like weeds, fertilized by greed, and enriched with blood. See the movie, Chinatown-there’s a mega dose of truth there, a glimpse of the real Los Angeles, the story the Valley Girls don’t tell you.

Downtown L.A., East L.A., Compton, West Hollywood (known to some as Boy’s Town)-superficially, these diverse communities have little in common beyond the freeways that connect them. And what about tawdry-chic Beverly Hills, or old money San Marino and Hancock Park, or Malibu and Thousand Oaks? Or Norma Desmond’s Sunset Boulevard?

* * *

There are elements, though, that all of these cities have in common. Beauty, for instance. L. A. is all about beauty. The beautiful people. The term was invented here, and rightly so. For generations upon generations, the most beautiful women, the handsomest men, flocked to this movie mecca, to try their luck at the film studios. A few of them made it. Some of the others went down in flames, jumping from hillside signs, flinging themselves into the ocean, taking too many pills to ease the pain and the loneliness.

Most of them ended less dramatically. They married, had beautiful children, who became stunning cocktail mixers and handsome waiters and sexy gas pump jockeys. As beautiful as their setting: the Los Angeles of white sand beaches and green clad hills and swaying palm trees.

But the sand covers some gruesome debris; the hills slide down on the highways-and the houses-below. The palm trees are infested with rats. And underneath all that beauty, flows an ugly current: crime. Murder, especially, and you are just as dead when murdered by a hot guy as a plain one, midst the splendor of Bel Air or in Boyle Heights. Murder knows neither jockstrap size nor neighborhood.

Not just real life crime either, though there has never been any shortage of that, and often left unsolved. William Desmond Taylor, a bullet in the back. Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia, her naked body mutilated and tossed into an empty lot. Georgette Bauerdorf, strangled in her bathtub. Thelma Todd: a suicide, the jury said, from car exhaust-but no one ever explained where the blood came from. And beautiful Marilyn, all those troublesome questions never quite resolved. Mysteries that linger, answers never found-or at least, never told. To paraphrase writer Carolyn See, “Los Angeles is where crazy things happen.”

Los Angeles is the capital city of fictional crime, too, and Raymond Chandler is its patron saint: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make you nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.” (Red Wind, short story by Raymond Chandler, 1938 )

Pages, notebooks, probably entire books have been made up of Chandler’s lines. But there are other L. A. writers whose names come to mind instantly: Ross McDonald, James Elroy, Michael Connelly, Joseph Wambaugh, Joseph Hansen and Josh Lanyon – a long list, too long to include them all here. “Poets,” as Edmund Wilson puts it, “of the tabloid murder.”

Noir was invented here, too. In L. A. noir, it’s nearly always night; and not just ordinary night, either. “The streets were dark with something more than night,” as Chandler puts it. And, day or not, it’s raining. The sun seems never to shine:

* * *

And movies, all those delicious, chilling stories unfolding on the movie screens. Incest, murder, and a bloody nose: “Forget it, Jake, it’s only Chinatown.” Double Indemnity (script by Chandler and Wilder, from Cain’s inferior novella): Barbara Stanwyck, descends the stairs wearing an ankle bracelet and never has wickedness been so tempting. Robert Mitchum falls for a beautiful Jane Greer from Out of the Past, and finds himself falling into an abyss of evil. The best of L.A.’s movies, like L.A.’s books, are the bad ones.

Here is what the mystery writers have always known about this, their much adopted city: If it is, as its boosters like to boast, The City of The Angels, they are the dark angels, Lucifer’s minions. If the city has a soul, and they say all cities do, it is surely a damned one.

But where to find it, this demon soul, where to begin the search? At downtown’s Bradbury Building, perhaps. If you’ve seen Double Indemnity, or Blade Runner, you’ll recognize the sight. If you’re a mystery reader, something in you will respond to the open atrium, seemingly soaring free, in fact bound in by twisting walls of wrought iron lace, reaching up, up, imprisoning the light, smothering it in eerie shadows.

You’ve only to step outside and cross the street, and there is the Angel’s Flight of Michael Connelly’s eponymous novel, a cable car that takes you—exactly nowhere. Up the hillside, and back down again, and you’re right back where you started. Connelly’s Harry Bosch often finds himself in the same impasse. The freeways, rivers of cars, seemingly carrying you away; but no one escapes.

Travel out Wilshire Boulevard. Could anything be more ironically symbolic of the city than the ancient La Brea Tar Pits? Lured by its opaline surface, beasts millennia ago came to drink and found themselves trapped in its deadly mire, drowning in its dark beauty. The story remains the same. Only the victims change.

Drive up to Hollywood, and stroll The Boulevard. They’ve been cleaning it up for years, but the odor of the hustle remains. Musso and Frank’s is still there, though, mostly unchanged since the twenties. Have a flawless martini at the splendid old bar and look around you. It’s not hard at all to imagine yourself back in the twenties or the thirties. One of those places where time seems to have stood still.

Take Sunset Boulevard west. The elegant nightclubs and boites of the forties are gone now, but the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi died, remains; and so do the hopefuls, the wannabes, the users and the used, who crowd the coffee shops and the cafes, spill onto the sidewalks, searching the faces of the passing strangers, turning away as the strangers search theirs.

In Santa Monica-Chandler’s Bay City, and as far west as you can go-stroll out onto the pier where Cain’s Mildred Pierce contemplated jumping. Joe Hansen’s merry-go-round is still there, its music still appropriately just a little off key. Los Angeles music. The city is ever a little off key.

And back again to the Valley, still searching for the soul of the city. No one ever seems to find it, though. Maybe it’s in the dream, that elusive soul-this is the city of dreams, after all, they manufacture them here. Or, maybe it blows through the air, like Chandler’s Santa Ana winds. Or is it in the sunshine, brown as it filters through the ever-present smog? Old timers like to talk of a day when there was no smog, but that too is only a dream. The Indians used to call the L.A. Basin “The Valley of the Smokes.”

It was always polluted. The furtive danger that seeps into your lungs and poisons you from within; the gleaming pool of tar-water that entraps and destroys when you come to drink from it-the ugliness was always there, perhaps the one inescapable truth of Los Angeles.

The beauty is only a distraction.