Low Life in the High Desert Read online

  Monday morning dutifully arrived, and I met Lynch in the foyer. Another body had been found, and there was a distinct possibility that something I had written might have been cause for the tragedy. I was flattered at the thought that my analysis might have been studied by a lot of people who do not, as a rule, buy a respectable paper like The Australian. As we rode to the third floor, Lynch told me the cops had turned tail at the very mention of our lawyers — as well they should. We made our way to our desks, and I noticed Les weaving his way past the desks that separated us hacks from our betters.

  ‘David,’ Les said. He took about five seconds to pronounce my name, but there was a kindly touch to his north English drawl, ‘You are supposed to investigate murders, not cause them.’

  Coming from a man who was a stranger to flattery, these words rung rich in my ears, and I beamed as he turned and went his way to attend to the task at hand — bringing out the next day’s newspaper.

  Lynch and I went to the pub, where we remained till darkness fell and we had to retrieve our coats. The iron law of journalism is ‘You are only as good as your last story’, and if that story led to someone being killed, it was a good story. One could live off the story for a few days. Some did for the rest of their careers.

  Then we returned to the office, and I determined that, as I was riding high, I would spring my plan to escape Australia — with the approval and support of my editor-in-chief. After three months apart, I would join my beloved, who had just been commissioned to write a screenplay for Disney in Los Angeles about some uncouth Australians.

  I had accumulated some thirty weeks of holidays, but would request unlimited leave to travel to America to help with the project. Like most journalists, I considered myself essential to the working of the paper. Les, my heroic editor-in-chief, seemed to think otherwise. He immediately granted my request with an enthusiasm I felt could have been more restrained. But the word was out that the crime war was close to being settled, and Les was of the opinion that younger journalists should expose themselves to as much of the world as possible. I expect he doubted I would be gone any longer than the leave that was my due.

  My self-esteem lifted when I visited the pay office and was handed a grand cheque. When I returned to the newsroom, Jenny, Les’s secretary, gave me a letter of introduction from him to the authorities of the New World.

  Although armed with the ringing endorsement of the editor-in-chief of my nation’s most influential newspaper, I made my way through customs with some dread. The dread was a vague one, but dread it was. I had been warned by half of Sydney’s journalists about the dangers of Los Angeles.

  Inevitably, amongst the gifts thrust upon me as I bade goodbye, was a copy of The Loved One. But mostly, I was showered in warnings. LA, all agreed, was rather like Africa when discovered by the White Man. A good life and great wealth could be had, but the price was living with dangerous savages — and that was just the film industry. Stan Deadman, a distinguished sub-editor on the Telegraph, took a grim view of the place. Stan was taking a grim view of life in general at that stage, so I carefully weighed his words.

  Thrown out of his home, he had taken to sleeping on the couches of the Journalists’ Club while he contemplated his next move. While making his way from his happy home to the train station a few weeks before, Stan had noticed the local office for the registration of animals and, though running a little late, found time to register his wife as a dog. For the sum of twenty dollars, Mrs Deadman was duly registered as ‘a short-haired, long-nosed mongrel bitch’. Stan forgot about this lark for a week or so, but the people to whom he had given his twenty dollars did not, and the wheels of the city began turning. Stan’s wife was surprised to receive a certificate of registration in the mail accompanied by a name tag to hang around her neck, and Stan was even more surprised to discover that he was no longer the master of his domain.

  Having experienced the shortcomings of life on the outside, he pleaded with me to reconsider my own folly and abandon my plan to move to LA. People I hardly knew joined him in urging me to reconsider.

  ‘Hirsty,’ Stan said, staring through the film of his eyes, ‘you are mad. Fucking crazy, mate.’ Bernie Leo, chief sub-editor on the Telegraph in those days, a man whose struggle with the demon drink was as ferocious as Stan’s, nodded agreement. Kerry, an old hack, issued an earnest warning.

  ‘Don’t wear jewellery over there, Hirst. They’ll cut off your hand to steal a ring.’

  This seemed odd advice, as I never wore jewellery, and did not even possess a wristwatch.

  ‘They would be cutting off my hand to spite my arm,’ I replied.

  The gift of The Loved One proved a mixed blessing. It was not particularly useful as an introduction to modern LA, but turned out to be a distraction from a nuclear physicist that the fates had implacably placed beside me on the long flight to the New World. I hadn’t read the book in years, and set about the task with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy assigned homework.

  As we soared above the Tasman Sea, and I began my studies, the nuclear physicist introduced himself, and wondered what occupation I enjoyed.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ I replied, instantly regretting it. For not only was the professor at my side a nuclear physicist, but he was of a singular mind, and was devoted to the cause of nuclear energy. The prospect of having a journalist as a companion for the seemingly millions of miles that stretched before us brought a brightness to his eye that journalists learn to be wary of.

  I had studiously avoided the subject of nuclear power (except during a brief stint years before when I was acting foreign editor, and things went horribly wrong in a place called Chernobyl), but my companion had not. Indeed, he was a champion of nuclear energy, and by the time the first drinks arrived I knew that this would be a painful trip. My new acquaintance was acquainted with all that is known about atoms and other things that are too small to be detected by the naked eye. I, on the other hand, had never had the slightest interest in things that cannot be seen, except for viruses, and even then only exotic ones like Ebola and foot-and-mouth.

  The professor spent an hour or so explaining the dangers of fossil fuel, and the joys of fission or fusion, or both. He reached for his briefcase, and in merciful relief I returned to The Loved One, noticing that while we had travelled a distance that an early seafarer might have covered in a full week, I had only reached page five. As the book began on page three, it was not much of a start.

  ‘But if I could just get back to my book,’ I murmured.

  I looked urgently for the drink cart. Some years back, a stewardess on an Air New Zealand flight had confused her medication and become so excitable that she ended up sitting, sans-culottes, on the face of a first-class passenger. This novel gesture of in-flight hospitality led to Air New Zealand henceforth being known as ‘The airline that gives a fuck.’

  Aeroplane service has deteriorated since then, in my opinion, but in those not-so-far-off years, the mere wave of the hand would procure a glass, even a bottle, of something from Hawkes Creek — a decent Chardonnay — or a bold red from the Hunter Valley. Or perhaps one of the fine white wines from the north of Tasmania. The sky was the limit. I managed to obtain a drink, but all the wines of Australia, and all the beer in Mexico, could not have made my companion companionable.

  By the time the video screen indicated we were approaching Fiji, I had promised to dedicate my life to the nuclear cause. An hour later, I would have happily handed my mother over to the Nazis just to shut this man up. Though I stared determinedly at the pages of my book, the professor, powered by some inner reactor, ploughed on. He neither slept nor used the toilet. Like the great physicist he no doubt was, he would not be distracted by human demands.

  Finally, I excused myself, and took The Loved One to the bathroom and read much of the volume. When evidence grew apparent that the plane was waking and that others needed my seat, I returned to my seat. My fr
iend was delighted to see me. He had just located an article that proved that Chernobyl was not the human catastrophe that I knew it to be. But we were about to land at LAX, where my girl awaited me, and nothing could restrain my spirits.

  Nothing but some nasty immigration officers, who took one look at me and decided that I should get what they probably call The Treatment. Free of my physicist friend — he had been caught short and forced to repack his papers — I had breezed past the regular officials, and was about to find Boo on the other side of the line when a man in a uniform suggested I come with him. The man had some friends; they also wore uniforms, and it was soon apparent that I was in the company of an elite drug squad customs force determined to rid LA of the scourge of dope by searching the most private parts of my body. I was already glad I wasn’t wearing jewellery.

  As I was led into the sparse room, where one is dehumanised by strangers who take pleasure in such things, I asked what they thought I might be bringing into LA from Sydney.

  ‘Guns?’ I wondered, out loud. ‘I would hardly be bringing guns into LA,’ I said, with the best I could muster of a sneer. ‘Or drugs? I believe there are plenty to go around already.’

  I was ordered to remove my boots, which I will concede had rather large Cuban heels. As I took them off, I suggested they read my letter of introduction from my editor-in-chief, but Les’s influence clearly stopped at the border. They responded by twisting my boot heels one way and another, and I asked whether Max Smart was still popular on local TV.

  That must have been deemed an insult, because I was thrust against the wall and ordered to stretch my arms as high and wide as possible and my legs as wide and low as I could. I was thoroughly searched. Nothing was found. I asked for my boots back with an air of anger poisoned by a touch of fear. Instead, the bloodhounds decided on an even fuller search — a search that involved cavities. The cavity they seemed most interested in was the one surrounded by my bottom.

  Although I had spent four or five hours in the toilet escaping the nuclear physicist, I had not actually ‘gone’ to the toilet. This extraordinary juxtaposition of internal events had caused me to build up a considerable amount of wind, in and around the posterior. My desire to relieve that wind while in flight had been ‘swallowed’, as Bernie Leo might say, by consideration for my fellow travellers.

  My boots were off, my jeans were removed, and I was straddled against the green paint of their little cell. Two of the officers bent behind me while the others kept watch.

  One began to remove my underpants, an act of folly no man has succeeded in. After hours of tension and restraint, my back passage began to make ominous sounds, and had smoking been permitted we would all have been subject to a flash of blue methane that might have interested the nuclear physicist. But the only flash was of my interrogators as they fled their positions and allowed me to march past all hurdles, into the home of the brave and the land of the free, and the arms of my beloved Boo.

  3

  Venice was having its own dirty little war, and bodies were beginning to pile up at a rate that made Sydney look like a pleasant seaside city with an Opera House and a wondrous bridge. I didn’t have to write about them, and although the black–Latino war was being fought within earshot, it was almost in another world. Our problem next door, on the other hand, wouldn’t go away. The Man with No Brain’s dementia worried the immediate residents far more than gang shootouts in the ’hood, which had nothing to do with them.

  The possibility of Boo being caught in the crossfire was of concern to me, as she had ridden through or past bullets while taking her daily exercise. But she would not be deterred, and the last time a respected member of the public had been shot in nearby Santa Monica, the police reaction was so intense the gangs were apparently taking some care not to kill whites, Asian-Americans, or tourists.

  But the Man with No Brain had no such compunctions, and the terror finally reached the point where even the Venice division of the LAPD was forced to take action. Following my cowardly failure to ‘pop’ him, Brainless, perhaps sensing the broadening of hatred throughout the entire block, decided to intensify and widen his targets.

  We were quite blithe to the incident that was to finally lead us to the lip of the Mojave Desert, until 11.00 one evening, when there was a quiet knock at the back door. I was lighting a joint at the time, and, assuming someone was dropping in on their way home from The Circle Bar, casually opened the door to find the Venice cop, the one who had suggested I take out my neighbour, standing respectfully on the crumbling door step.

  He asked if he might come in, and I asked him to wait. I shut the door, extinguished the joint, and returned to the friendly sergeant and ushered him into the kitchen. He entered, and to my surprise brought a few friends with him. The better part of a SWAT team began to pour into a house not designed to accommodate SWAT teams. All were wearing body armour, and carrying automatic rifles or shotguns or both. Their comrades were being assembled outside. The sergeant explained that The Man with No Brain had finally gone a few feet too far. He had, in fact, deliberately driven down and over a woman who lived in the adjacent alley, breaking at least one of her legs. A female Caucasian, no less.

  I gave them the freedom of the house, and they took up positions in the living room, aiming their weapons out the window, into the darkness, and at The Man with No Brain’s house, which was so close that their rifle tips almost scraped his asbestos sidings. I pointed out that it was blue asbestos, and was more dangerous than the occupant. Two SWAT members took up positions behind the lemon velvet love seat, which I suggested was unlikely to deter gunfire. The sergeant informed me that a machine-gun post had been established on the roof of an apartment building opposite, and it might be best for Boo and me to join the crowd of evacuated neighbours that was gathering in the alley. Leave it to the experts.

  On the scale of overreactions, this was shaping up like another Waco. At this stage, Harry, our black-and-white springer spaniel, awoke, and began snarling and barking at the SWAT members, no doubt confusing them with the detested mailman — due to their uniforms. As the SWAT members cowered before Harry’s wrath, I found his lead, and we exited the house. Out in the alley, a sizeable crowd had gathered. Some were evacuated neighbours; others, folks who had wandered out of The Circle Bar and had stumbled into the action. Marijuana was strong in the air, and lines of cocaine were being chopped out on the trunk of an LAPD black-and-white. Beer arrived, and the stakeout party was soon in full swing. Neighbours started taking bets on whether the cops would shoot Brainless. The air was festive; the mood, Woodstock. The remaining SWAT members started to form a phalanx that would have done justice to the Romans. As they marched past us, Harry escaped the lead and flung himself into their midst, utterly disrupting their formation. I retrieved him, and the small army regained its composure.

  One of the SWAT ringleaders produced a megaphone, and demanded that all occupants of the house come out with their hands up — or words to that effect.

  The crowd was assuming the mentality of a mob of vigilantes, inciting the police to open fire and loudly reminding them that he was a ‘druggie’. The house was in darkness, and I wondered if The Man with No Brain was actually home. It was impossible to tell. He owned so many cars I could not figure if one was missing. Nothing transpired, so a couple of SWAT members aimed their tear-gas launchers towards the house and, after a few more warnings on the bullhorn, started peppering the place with the gas.

  For a moment, silence reigned, but as the first familiar whiffs of tear gas drifted back to our assembly, a young man stumbled out in pyjamas with his hands raised. A cop asked me if he was the target, and I assured him he was not.

  More tear gas.

  Finally, the moment we had all waited for. The Man with No Brain, to the cheers of the now huge crowd, lumbered into the glare of the lights from the circling choppers, dressed in a white bathrobe. It wasn’t white for long. Before he could b
e cuffed, our neighbour lost control of his bowels in a fashion quite different from mine at LAX, and soiled himself severely. The stench, as he was thrown into one of what appeared to be the entire fleet of LAPD police cars, overwhelmed the tear gas, and I felt sorry for the cops who had to accompany him on his ride to the slammer.

  Boo, Harry, and I returned to our home, now thick with tear gas. It was to be days before the smell passed, and Boo wondered whether we really wanted to live in Venice forever. So did I.

  4

  ‘Good afternoon. This is Bill Lavender.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Lavender. I hear you have a house for sale. Boulder House?’

  ‘I might have. That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On who’s asking.’

  I lit a cigarette and lay back on the bed, reflecting that this wasn’t going to be your straightforward house purchase. The voice sounded as aggressive as his words. Bill explained that he was considering selling and moving to another state. California was really starting to piss him off.

  ‘I’m a redneck gun-nut. I haven’t killed anyone in years, but if I want to kill someone that’s my goddamn right, and I don’t give a red rat’s ass what anyone says,’ Bill bellowed. ‘It’s bad as taxes. Goddamn taxes are getting to be higher than a damn cat’s back,’ he added emphatically.

  ‘Er … I believe you breed dogs out there,’ I ventured.

  ‘You goddamn better believe it. I’m a horse’s ass when it comes to dogs.’