BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: I sure do miss Mr. Shaw. All during his trouble, there was one way you could tell who was and who wasn’t a gentleman in this town. A gentleman, when he passed Mr. Shaw on the street, tipped his hat; the bastards looked straight ahead. (Chuckling) Mr. Shaw, he was a card. Every time he come in my bar, he kept me laughing. Ever hear his Jesse James story? Seems one day Jesse James was robbing a train out West. Him and his gang barged into a car with their pistols drawn, and Jesse James shouts: “Hands up! We’re gonna rob all the women and rape all the men.” So this one fellow says: “Haven’t you got that wrong, sir? Don’t you mean you’re gonna rob all the men and rape all the women?” But there was this sweet little fairy on the train, and he pipes up: “Mind your own business! Mr. James knows how to rob a train.”
(Two and three and four: the hour-bells of St. Louis Cathedral toll: … five … six … The toll is grave, like a gilded baritone voice reciting, echoing ancient episodes, a sound that drifts across the park as solemnly as the oncoming dusk: music that mingles with the laughing chatter, the optimistic farewells of the departing, sugar-mouthed, balloon-toting kids, mingles with the solitary grieving howl of a far-off shiphorn, and the jangling springtime bells of the syrup-ice peddler’s cart. Redundantly, Big Junebug Johnson consults her big ugly Rolex wristwatch.)
BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: Lord save us. I ought to be halfway home. Jim has to have his supper on the table seven sharp, and he won’t let anybody fix it for him ’cept me. Don’t ask why. I can’t cook worth an owl’s ass, never could. Only thing I could ever do real good was draw beer. And … Oh hell, that reminds me: I’m on duty at the bar tonight. Usually now I just work days, and Irma’s there the rest of the time. But one of Irma’s little boys took sick, and she wants to be home with him. See, I forgot to tell you, but I got a partner now, a widow gal with a real sense of fun, and hard-working, too. Irma was married to a chicken farmer, and he up and died, leaving her with five little boys, two of them twins, and her not thirty yet. So she was scratching out a living on that farm—raising chickens and wringing their necks and trucking them into the market here. All by herself. And her just a mite of a thing, but with a scrumptious figure, and natural strawberry hair, curly like mine. She could go up to Atlantic City and win a beauty contest if she wasn’t cockeyed: Irma, she’s so cockeyed you can’t tell what she’s looking at or who. She started coming into the bar with some of the other gal truckers. First off I reckoned she was a dyke, same as most of those gal truckers. But I was wrong. She likes men, and they dote on her, cockeyes and all. Truth is, I think my guy’s got a sneaker for her; I tease him about it, and it makes him soooo mad. But if you want to know, I have more than a slight notion that Irma gets a real tingle when Jim’s around. You can tell who she’s looking at then. Well, I won’t live forever, and after I’m gone, if they want to get together, that’s fine by me. I’ll have had my happiness. And I know Irma will take good care of Jim. She’s a wonderful kid. That’s why I talked her into coming into business with me. Say now, it’s great to see you again, Jockey. Stop by later. We’ve got a lot to catch up on. But I’ve got to get my old bones rattling now.
SIX … SIX … SIX …: the voice of the hour-bell tarries in the greening air, shivering as it subsides into the sleep of history.
Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers. To know such cities, to unwrap them, as it were, one has to have been born there. Venice is like that. After October, when Adriatic winds sweep away the last American, even the last German, carry them off and send their luggage flying after them, another Venice develops: a clique of Venetian élégants, fragile dukes sporting embroidered waistcoats, spindly contessas supporting themselves on the arms of pale, elongated nephews; Jamesian creations, D’Annunzio romantics who would never consider emerging from the mauve shadows of their palazzos on a summer’s day when the foreigners are abroad, emerge to feed the pigeons and stroll under the Piazza San Marco’s arcades, sally forth to take tea in the lobby of the Danieli (the Gritti having closed until spring), and most amusing, to swill martinis and chew grilled-cheese sandwiches within the cozy confines of Harry’s American Bar, so lately and exclusively the watering hole of loud-mouthed hordes from across the Alps and the seas.
Fez is another enigmatic city leading a double life, and Boston still another—we all understand that intriguing tribal rites are acted out beyond the groomed exteriors and purple-tinged bow windows of Louisburg Square, but except for what some literary, chosen-few Bostonians have divulged, we don’t know what these coded rituals are, and never will. However, of all secret cities, New Orleans, so it seems to me, is the most secretive, the most unlike, in reality, what an outsider is permitted to observe. The prevalence of steep walls, of obscuring foliage, of tall thick locked iron gates, of shuttered windows, of dark tunnels leading to overgrown gardens where mimosa and camellias contrast colors, and lazing lizards, flicking their forked tongues, race along palm fronds—all this is not accidental décor, but architecture deliberately concocted to camouflage, to mask, as at a Mardi Gras Ball, the lives of those born to live among these protective edifices: two cousins, who between them have a hundred other cousins spread throughout the city’s entangling, intertangling familial relationships, whispering together as they sit under a fig tree beside the softly spilling fountain that cools their hidden garden.
A piano is playing. I can’t decide where it’s coming from: strong fingers playing a striding, riding-it-on-out piano: “I want, I want …” That’s a black man singing; he’s good—“I want, I want a mama, a big fat mama, I want a big fat mama with the meat shakin’ on her, yeah!”
Footfalls. High-heeled feminine footsteps that approach and stop in front of me. It is the thin, almost pretty, high-yeller who earlier in the afternoon I’d overheard having a fuss with her “manager.” She smiles, then winks at me, just one eye, then the other, and her voice is no longer angry. She sounds the way bananas taste.
HER: How you doin’?
TC: Just taking it easy.
HER: How you doin’ for time?
TC: Let’s see. I think it’s six, a little after.
HER (laughs): I mean how you doin’ for time? I got a place just around the corner here.
TC: I don’t think so. Not today.
HER: You’re cute.
TC: Everybody’s entitled to their opinion.
HER: I’m not playing you. I mean it. You’re cute.
TC: Well, thanks.
HER: But you don’t look like you’re having any fun. Come on. I’ll show you a good time. We’ll have fun.
TC: I don’t think so.
HER: What’s the matter? You don’t like me?
TC: No. I like you.
HER: Then what’s wrong? Give me a reason.
TC: There’s a lot of reasons.
HER: Okay. Give me one, just one.
TC: Oh, honey, don’t let me commence.
IV Derring-do
TIME: NOVEMBER, 1970.
Place: Los Angeles International Airport.
I am sitting inside a telephone booth. It is a little after eleven in the morning, and I’ve been sitting here half an hour, pretending to make a call. From the booth I have a good view of Gate 38, from which TWA’s nonstop noon flight to New York is scheduled to depart. I have a seat booked on that flight, a ticket bought under an assumed name, but there is every reason to doubt that I will ever board the plane. For one thing, there are two tall men standing at the gate, tough guys with snap-brim hats, and I know both of them. They’re detectives from the San Diego Sheriff’s Office, and they have a warrant for my arrest. That’s why I’m hiding in the phone booth. The fact is, I’m in a real predicament.
The cause of my predicament had its roots in a series of conversations I’d conducted a year earlier with Robert M., a slender, slight, harmless-looking young man who was then a prisoner on Death Row at San Quentin, where he was awaiting execution, having been convicted of three slayings: his mother, a sister, both of whom he had beaten to death, and a fellow prisoner, a man he had strangled while he was in jail awaiting trial for the two original homicides. Robert M. was an intelligent psychopath; I got to know him fairly well, and he discussed his life and crimes with me freely—with the understanding that I would not write about or repeat anything that he told me. I was doing research on the subject of multiple murderers, and Robert M. became another case history that went into my files. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it.
Then, two months prior to my incarceration in
