Widespread Panic

Cell 2607

Penance Penitentiary

Reckless-Wrecker-of-Lives Block

Pervert Purgatory

7/16/2020

I’ve spent twenty-eight years in this fucking hellhole. Now, they tell me I can memoir-map my misadventures and write my way out.

All that religious shit I disdained and disobeyed has played out true. There’s Heaven for the good folks, Hell for the beastfully baaaaaad. There’s Purgatory for guys like me — caustic cads that capitalized on a sicko system and caused catastrophe. I’ve sizzled in my sins for two decades plus. I’ve relived my earthly life in dystopian detail. My cunning keepers are currently dangling a deal:

Record your jaundiced journey. Trumpet the truth, triumphant. Hop to Heaven, and hit that high note.

Baby, it’s time to CONFESS.

Purgatory is shitsville. You’re stuck with the body you had on Earth when you died. You eat nothing but coach-class airplane food. There’s no booze, no jazzy intrigue, no wilt-your-will women. Violated victims bop by my cell. They remind me of my many misdeeds and jab me with red-hot pokers. Gay gauchos hurtle down from Heaven and scold me for outing them back in the homo-hate ’50s. It was my job. I entrapped soiled celebrities and putzo politicos, and cornholed them in Confidential. I sold my soul to that maladroit magazine. Now, I’m sordidly SORRY.

So what?

Sorry’s for limp-dick losers. Confession salves the savage self and rips it to righteous redemption. Hear my plaintive plea, O watchful world:

Get me the fuck out of here!!!!!

My keepers have poised me with pen and paper. They’ve compiled a complete run of Confidential. My synapses soar with a million malignant memories. Freddy Otash, 1922–1992. I’m a rogue cop, a private eye, a shifty shakedown artist. I’m the demonic deus ex machina of my tattered time and place. I’m the hellhound who held Hollywood captive. I’m the man with the sex-scorched secrets you irksome earthlings want to hear.

Confidential presaged the infantile Internet. Our gobs of gossip were repugnantly real. Today’s blowhard bloggers and their tattle texts? Pussyfooting punks all. We stung the studios. We popped the pooh-bahs. We hurled the hurt, wholesale. We voyeur-vamped America and got her hooked on the shivering shit. WE CREATED TODAY’S TELL-ALL MEDIA CULTURE. We crazily crafted a lurid language and made it our own.

It’s the lexicon of the lowdown. It’s the dialogue of the dish. It’s the slithering slur and the thrill of the threat. I think and write in algorithmic alliteration. Language must lambaste and lay on the lash. Language liberates as it offends. Confidential taught me that. My confession will make this dizzy dialect divide you in two. There’s Sin and Atonement, fuckers — there’s nothing else.

Purgatory’s a punitive proposition. Montgomery Clift pitchforked me yesterday. Confidential labeled him “the Lavender Lilliputian” and “Princess Tiny Meat.” JFK followed Monty. I dumped the dish on his dope habit and call-girl cavalcade. Marilyn Monroe penance-poked me next. Marilyn was a snout trout. She dispensed head to rogue pharmacists, XXX-exclusive. They dispensed noxious Nembutal back. Maybe I shouldn’t have tattled the tale — but I was within my First Amendment rights!!!!!

I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.

Nate & Al’s Deli

Beverly Hills

8/14/92

I was working Hollywood Vice in ’51. We got word on a fuck pad, operating out of a crib at the Villa Elaine. I hotfooted it over there.”

We’re bopped back in my booth. There’s my audience: four showbiz machers in worse shape than me. Walkers, canes, and oxygen tanks clog the aisles to the kitchen. Fractious Freddy O.’s holding court.

It’s late summer, ’92. I’m seventy and in baaaaad fucking shape. I’ve consumed scads of scotch and sucked three packs a day since I shot out the chute. I’ve got emphysema and a bum pump. I’m aching to make eighty. It’s a lunar-looped long shot.

Sol Sidell said, “Get to it, Freddy. You roll to the pad, and then what?”

Sinful Sol. A jailbaiter from jump. He produced beach-blanket flicks in the sick ’60s. I pulled him out of the shit, circa ’66. He was reefer-ripped and poking two underage twists.

I said, “Okay, I roll to the crib and peep a side window. Shit — there’s Sam Spiegel, the cat that produced Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. He’s muff-diving a three-hundred-pound chick. That was a boss beef, back in ’51. I told Sambo it’s dues time. It’s a morals bust, or a monthly donation to the Fred Otash Retirement Fund.”

My pals yukked. I wrapped into my Reuben sandwich and felt a twisted twinge in my chest. I downed digitalis. I saw Jules Slotnick suck on his oxygen mask and light a Camel Light. Julie produced turgid turkeys about farmworker strife. Call him Mr. Guilt for Gelt. He made all his live-in maids blow him. He held their green cards as a hedge against their refusal to bestow daily head.

Sid Resnick said, “Give us another one, Freddy.”

The Sidster was Mr. Holocaust Heartache. He produced schlockumentaries for Islamic TV. He was the King of the Chubby Chasers. He longed for it laaarrrge.

I cruised my cranium cracks for a story. Two elderly gay cats sashayed by the booth. That fed me my cue.

I pointed to them. “I got tipped to an all-male pajama party, back in ’56. I paid some LAPD hard boys a yard apiece to bust it, and brought my camera along. Those cats were piled up in a five-way with Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, and a dude with giant acne cysts. Confidential wrote it up. Universal paid me ten g’s to keep the Rockster’s name out of the story.”

The booth roared and re-roared. Julie Slotnick gasped for breath. Al Wexler yukked out a bagel chunk. It flew and flopped to the floor.

Alky Al owned six porno bookstores and nine nose-job clinics. He plowed a truck full of migrant Mexicans and left six dead. I got it mashed down to a Mickey Mouse misdemeanor. Al owed me, laaaaarge.

I killed my sandwich. Alky Al blew a faux fanfare. I laid out my lifelong credo: “I’ll do anything short of murder. I’ll work for anyone but the Reds.”

My boys clapped and guffawed. A bad twinge hit my heart. I downed digitalis and deep dips of scotch.

Corned beef and sauerkraut socked my system. I got floaty and deep dyspeptic. I brought up a bread crust. It popped on my plate.

The booth tumbled. My pals vaporized. My vision blurred black. Calendar sheets shot backward. Decades disappeared and devolved. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m just dreaming this shit—

Robbery Division Squadroom

LAPD Detective Bureau

City Hall

2/4/49

There I am. I’m fetching fine in ’49. I’m beefcake, boss, and bangin’ them bonaroo bitches, three at a pop.

I’m handsome and heavy-hung. I’m a lustful Lebanese. Call me a camel cad from the get-go. I’m an ex-Marine. I trained troops at Parris Island and sent them off to Saipan, savvy. I joined the LAPD in late ’45. I went on the grift faaaaaast.

I formed a 459 ring. They worked my downtown foot beat. They popped pawnshops and dumped dope-pushing pharmacies. I fingered the jobs. My gang cadged cash and dope. They were 2:00 a.m. creepers. I was their Rogue Cop Rajah.

I’m corrosively corruptible and tempted by the take. I live for the scurrilous score. It’s my existential fate. I had a squaresville home life in bumfuck Massachusetts. My mom and dad loved me. Nobody butt-fucked me in my bassinet. I live by a cool-cat code. There’s shit I won’t do. My code got catastrophized on 2/4/49.

I hogged a hall mirror. I combed my hair and noosed my necktie. Sy Devore tailored my formfit uniform. The squadroom buzzed baaaad all around me. It’s a Code 3 squawk — shoot-out at 9th and Figueroa.

Two men down. One traffic cop/one heist geek. The cop’s nudging near death. The geek suffered superficial wounds. Both men — ensconced at Georgia Street Receiving, right now.

The squadroom bebop buzzed. The squadroom phones rang incessant. The buzz bombarded me. I heard murderous murmurs laced with a lynch-mob gestalt.

I heard heavy footfalls. Booze breath bristled me.

“If you’re through admiring yourself, I’ve got something.”

I turned around. It’s a Robbery bull named Harry Fremont. Harry has a rancid rep. He stomped two pachucos dead during the zoot suit riots. He pimped transvestite whores out of a he-she bar. He was shit-faced drunk at noon.

“Yeah, Harry?”

Harry said, “Be useful, kid. There’s a cop killer at Georgia Street. Chief Horrall thinks you should take care of it. This is an opportunity you don’t want to pass up.”

I said, “Take care of what? The cop he shot isn’t dead.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He passed me a key fob. He said, “4-A-32. It’s in the watch commander’s space. Look under the backseat.”

I got it. Harry locked on my look. He went Nooowww, he gets it. He winked and waltzed away from me.

I steadied myself and stood still. I loaded up on that lynch-mob gestalt. I lurched through the squadroom and zombie-walked downstairs. I hit the garage.

I found the watch commander’s space. There’s 4-A-32. The key fits the ignition. The garage was dark. Ceiling pipes leaked. Water drops turned wiggy colors and morphed into wild shapes.

I gunned the gas and pulled out onto Spring Street. I drove sloooooow. The heist geek was jacked in the jail ward. It was a lockup-transfer ruse. It was forty-three years ago. It’s still etched in Sin-emascope and surround sound. I can still see the passersby on the street.

There it is. There’s Georgia Street Receiving.

The jail ward sat on the north side. The squarejohn ward sat to the south. A narrow pathway bisected the buildings. It hit me then:

They know you’ll do it. They know you’re that kind of guy.

I reached under the backseat. I pulled out transfer papers for Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I grabbed a .32 snubnose revolver.

I put the gun in my front pocket and grabbed the papers. I slid out of the sled. I popped down the pathway and went through the jail-ward door.

The deskman was PD. He pointed to a punk cuffed to a drainpipe. The punk wore a loafer jacket and slit-bottomed khakis. He sported a left-arm splint. He was acne-addled and chancre-sored. He vibed hophead. He looked smack-back insolent.

The deskman did the knife-across-throat thing. I handed him the papers and uncuffed and recuffed the punk. The deskman said, “Bon voyage, sweetheart.”

I shoved the punk outside and pointed him up the pathway. He walked ahead of me. I couldn’t feel my feet. I couldn’t feel my legs. My heart hammered on overdrive. I lost my limbs somewhere.

There’s no telltale windows. There’s no pedestrians on Georgia Street. There’s no witnesses.

I pulled the gun from my pocket and fired over my own head. The gun kicked and lashed life back in my limbs. My pulse topped 200 rpms.

The punk wheeled around. He moved his lips. A word came out as a squeak. I pulled my service revolver and shot him in the mouth. His teeth exploded. He dropped. I placed the throwdown piece in his right hand.

He tried to say “Please.” This dream’s a routine reenactment. The details veer and vary. The “Please” always sticks. I’m alive. He’s not. That’s the baleful bottom line.

The cop lived. He sustained a through-and-through wound. He was back on duty inside a week.

Vicious vengeance. Wrathfully wrong in retrospect. A crack in the crypt of my soul. Harry Fremont passed the word. Freddy O. is kosher. Chief C. B. Horrall sent me a jug of Old Crow. The grand jury sacked him two months later. He got caught up in a call-girl racket. An interim chief was brought in.

Ralph Mitchell Horvath. 1918–1949. Car thief/stickup man/weenie wagger. Hooked on yellow jackets and muscatel.

Ralphie left a widow and two kids. I got the gust-wind guilts and shot them penance payoffs. Money orders. Once a month. Fake signatures. All anonymous. Dig — Ralphie’s dead, and I’m not.

Memory Lane. I’m fetching fine in ’49. I’m full-fuck filleted in ’92.

I holed up at my pad. I lingered through Labor Day. I looped the lane and took last looks at my loved ones, lewd ones, and lost ones.

I scoured scrapbooks. The old photos got my gears going. I’m there with Frank, Dino, and Sammy. I broke legs for them. They cringe and crawl away. There’s boocoo pix of my bed at my old pad. I called it “the Landing Strip.” I was Mr. Three-Way then. I swung with stewardesses, starlets, and stars. Liz Taylor and I swung with a stew named “Barb” on many groin-grabbing occasions. There’s pix of my lost love, Joi Lansing. There’s pix of my true love, Lois Nettleton. I was young and hung then. Aaaahhhh — sweet motherfucking mystery of life!!!!!

There’s my dictionary and thesaurus. They were teaching tools for the wrathful writers at Confidential. Utilize alliteration and instill intensive slurs. Homosexuals are “licentious lispers.” Lesbians are “beefcake butches.” Drunks are “bibulous bottle hounds” and “dyspeptic dipsos.” Vulgarize and vitalize. Create a craaazy populist parlance. Make it sinfully siiiiiing.

My pals popped over on Labor Day. We built burgers and boozed big. They left at 2:00 a.m. A male nurse corps shagged them and shot them down to their limos. Walkers wobbled, oxygen tanks toppled and rolled. It rubbed me raw, Daddy-O.

I settled in and watched a Dragnet rerun. I bought the juicehead judge in four of Jack Webb’s drunk-driving beefs. I shtupped Jack’s wife, soaring songstress Julie London. She said I was the biggest and the best.

I noshed a dozen Famous Amos cookies. I’d seen the episode before. Sergeant Joe Friday busts some hirsute hippie punks. I missed Jack. We shared some yuks. He kicked off back in—

A hydrogen bomb hit my heart. Mushroom clouds claimed me. Monsters morphed out of them. Johnnie Ray. Monty Clift. Politicians pounded and movie stars mauled. It’s a calamitous kaleidoscope of condemnation.

They jumped me. They went J’accuse, j’accuse, j’accuse!!!!! I gasped. My left arm exploded. I hit the medical-emergency button on my phone.

Then some pixilated pops. They’re the Herald’s horror headlines. Tattle Tyrant, Mr. Fear, Shaman of Shame. Then a crunching crash. My door’s down. There’s a mask on my mouth.

I’m dead. Thence comes Purgatory and this confession.

My Fucked-up Foot Beat

Downtown L.A.

10/4/52

Central Division. The doofus day watch. Freewheeling Freddy’s at loose ends.

I disbanded my 459 gang. My main men got hooked on Big “H.” They were decidedly desperate and snitch-prone. I’d gambled away my gelt. I was living on a schmuck cop’s pay and was suffused with the blues. William H. Parker became Chief in ’50. He instituted righteous reforms and riddled the ranks with a phalanx of finks to sniff out miscreants and misconduct. I drove a Packard pimpmobile. I won it in a darktown dice game. Parker’s punks tattled to the hellhound Jefe. I got called in and grindingly grilled. Parker warned me not to be a Bolshevik. He said, “I’ve got my four eyes on you.”

It rained that day. It was some mad monsoon. Wild winds whipped me along on my foot beat. I stopped at a lockbox phone and called the station. The deskman told me to hotfoot it to 668 South Olive. They were shooting a Racket Squad episode in the lobby. They needed a hard boy to shoo off autograph hounds.

I headed over there. I caught a taut tailwind and slalomed in the slush. It was a medical building. The lobby was all lit up. I caught a frazzled fracas, right off.

Lights, cameras, boom mikes. Here’s the action, straight up.

A jug-eared cat was hassling a boss blonde. He wore pegged chinos and a gone jacket. She was built, va-va-voom.

The cast and crew orbed the scene. Jug Ears grabbed the blonde’s arm and applied abrasions. It gored my gonads and hit my heartstrings. I walked up behind him. He saw my shadow and swift swiveled. I notched his nose with a palm shot. I looped a left to his larynx. I kneed his nuts as he dropped.

The blonde genuflected. I tipped my hat. Jug Ears cradled his busted beak and moaned for his mama. The cast and crew clapped.

The blonde said, “He’s my ex-husband. He stiffed me for three months’ alimony.”

I kicked him in the head and lifted his wallet. Jug Ears mama-moaned anew. The cast and crew whistled and stomped.

The wallet weighed in heavy. I fanned the cash compartment and counted a sea of C-notes. I handed them to the blonde. She dropped them in her purse and dropped a dollar on her ex-hubby. She said, “For old times. He was good in the sack.”

I laffed. I reached in my pocket and handed her a card. Understated class shows. There’s my name, phone number, and “Mr. Nine Inches.”

She dropped the card in with her cash stash. A guy yelled, “You’re up, Joi. Scene 16-B.”

She winked and walked away from me. I cuffed Jug Ears behind his back and pay-phone-called the station. Hollyweird: they filmed the scene with the ex coma-conked and cuffed on the floor.

I walked outside and smoked a cigarette. A black-and-white cruised by and hauled the ex to Georgia Street. I thought of Ralph Mitchell Horvath. A kid returned my calling card. She wrote on the back: “Joi Lansing. 39-25-38. Googie’s, tonight at 8:30.”

I’ve got a boss bachelor pad, straight up from the Strip. It’s jammed with Jap flags and shadow-boxed Lugers. There’s a periscope perched on my porch. I peep neighbor women and gas their gestalts.

I’m a voyeur. It’s vampiric. I study people. I rage to know their secret shit.

My bedroom features a biiiiiiiig walk-in closet. I’ve got sixty Sy Devore suits. My dresser drawers drip with lacy lingerie. My lynxlike lovers leave me mucho mementos.

I’ve got a file on Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I culled it from PDs and penitentiaries statewide. I know all Ralphie’s secrets.

He poked a Mexican sissy in reform school. He fathered two half-wit kids. He pimped his wife to cover his poker debts. He scored prescription goofballs from a Chink pharmacist.

I dug up that dirt. It bought me distance on Ralphie. It held off his hold on me. Know your foe. I’ve known that godless gospel since my crib.

I dressed sharp for Joi Lansing. I wore my crocodile loafers and hid my heater in a shoulder rig. A spritz of Lucky Tiger — and a short stroll to the meet.

Googie’s was a coffee cave on Sunset and Crescent Heights. The space-age aesthetic rubbed me raw. Fluorescent lights/Naugahyde/chrome. A hip hive for showbiz shitheels headed for Hell.

I walked in. Joi Lansing table-hopped. She wore a too-tight gown and a meager mink stole with a pawnshop tag attached. The joint buzzed per a sneak peek in Glendale. A Googie’s regular played a love scene with Bob Mitchum. Bad Boy Bob slipped her tongue. They toked a reefer in the RKO backlot. She blew him in his ’51 Ford.

A hubbub juked the joint. I knew I radiated FUZZ. I crashed into a booth and unbuttoned my jacket. A flit flamed by and ogled my piece. He hopped to a hen party, one booth over. Dig this dirt: the barman at the Cockpit Lounge ran an all-boy slave auction. Adlai Stevenson got embroiled and embarrassed. The hens hooted — ha, ha, ha!!!

Joi sat down. I pointed to the pawnshop tag. She pulled it off and dropped it in the ashtray.

I said, “Thanks for the invitation.”

Joi said, “Thanks for the revenge. That guy fractured my left wrist on Saint Patrick’s Day, ’49.”

“You’re too young to have an ex-husband.”

“Yeah, and I’m estranged from number two. I’d head to Reno for a quickie, but it might not work. We got hitched in T.J., so the paperwork could get dicey.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Well, you’re a policeman.”

I lit a cigarette and held the pack out. Joi shook her head.

“He’s on parole, and he’s a grasshopper. You could call Narco. That might do me some good.”

I shook my head. “Give me his address. I’ll think of something.”

“He’ll be here at nine-thirty. He’s been living at the Y since I kicked him out, and the fry cook here takes his phone calls. He’s a nonunion grip. I stiffed him a fake message after I met you. You’re a producer at Fox, with a job for him. You’re meeting him in the parking lot.”

I laffed. “You just assumed that I’d do it?”

Joi laffed. “Come on, Freddy. That stunt you pulled downtown, and ‘Mr. Nine Inches’? What won’t you do for money or gash?”

A Mex busboy sidled by. I grabbed a belt loop and stopped him. He saw my roscoe and got the shiver-shakes.

I socked him a sawbuck. “Go to the kitchen and get me a bag of weed. You’ll be on the night train to Culiacán if you don’t deliver.”

Manuel went Sí, sí and moved out. Joi laffed and bummed a cigarette. I blew a high smoke ring. She blew a higher one. They hit the ceiling and mushroomed, Hiroshima-esque.

Manuel meandered back with the mota. I told him to scram. The hen party parsed a new nugget. Ava Gardner sacked Sinatra. She’s shacked with a heavy-hung extra at Monogram.

I said, “What’s your real name?”

Joi said, “Joyce Wassmansdorff.”

“Give me the fill-in.”

“I’m from Salt Lake City. I’m twenty-four. I went to the MGM school, and went nowhere.”

“But now you’re up-and-coming?”

Joi stubbed out her cigarette. “I’m uncredited in six pictures, and credited in four. I’ve got Racket Squad, Gangbusters, and a comedy with Jane Russell in the can.”

“Give me some dirt on Russell.”

“What’s to give? She’s a Goody Two-shoes married to that quarterback for the Rams.”

I eyeballed the room. Paranoia pounds me, periodic. The two crew cuts by the take-out stand? They’re Bill Parker’s boys. I’d seen them at Central. They were purse-lipped puritans out to bag bent cops.

Joi said, “You’ll need money to enjoy my company.”

I re-eyeballed the room. I exercised my X-ray vision. A punk I popped for flimflam made me and beat feet.

Joi said, “It’s nine-thirty. Look for a little guy with a big pompadour.”

I bopped back to the parking lot. Pompadour lounged upside a ’51 Merc. I closed in close. He orbed my shoulder rig and went Oh shit. He wore light-colored slacks. Piss coursed and covered his cuffs. I dug in, diplomatic.

“Don’t contest the divorce. I’ll negotiate your alimony payments. Send the check directly to me. I’ll take my cut and deliver the rest to Miss Lansing.”

Pompadour held up his hands. It was Don’t hit me, hoss. I pulled out the bag of weed and caught his left mitt in one motion. I pressed hard and finagled a full fingerprint spread.

A drizzle drifted down. I gestured toward the street. Ex-hubby #2 took off running.

“Hollywood could use a guy like you.”

I turned around. There’s Jolting Joi. She knows from opportunity.

“You mean I could use Hollywood.”

She kissed me. I kissed her back. That’s how it all started.

I know from opportunity. It costs money, honey. I heisted a bookie room two days later.

A Hitler mask hid my face. I entered with an empty grocery sack and exited with four g’s. I blew half the swag on Joi. I bankrolled my biz with the remainder. A Beverly Hills pharmacist fed me piles of pills to push. Harry Fremont sold me eight ice-cold roscoes. Joi scared up a scrape doctor. I told him I’d be out seeking nice-girls-in-a-jam. Guns/dope/a felonious physician. My girlfriend as conduit to a coruscatingly corrupt culture.

Joi hit Hollywood in ’42. She was fourteen. She matriculated at MGM and met Everybody. She was luridly low-rent and confoundingly connected. She knew Everything. She was a one-babe Baedeker. She knew bartenders, bellhops, busboys, call girls, casting directors, and cads. She knew pornographers, pushers, and pimps. She knew troves of tramps in trouble. She was out to crown me King Shakedown. Joi greased Hollyweird with my handouts. Scores of scurrilous scamsters licked up my largesse. We were buying bleak and blowsy blackmail dirt.

I worked LAPD. I scored an off-duty gig. I was now the security boss at the Hollywood Ranch Market. It was licentiously legendary and open-all-nite. I bagged shoplifters and check kiters. I lived within my means and never gave Bill Parker’s goons a hook to entrap me. I took Joi to Ciro’s and the Mocambo. I saw Intelligence Squad cops cataloguing the scene. I braced them as a brother. I ballyhooed my big nights, financed by big days at the track.

I sold guns. I sold pills. I brokered abortions. I hawked a filthy film called Mae West’s Menagerie. Shack jobs were verboten for LAPD men. Joi and I trysted at her mom’s pad in Redondo. She said the word was moving out and metastasizing: Freddy O.’s The Man to See.

Gigs rolled in. I pounded a perv who’d whipped out his whang on Duke Wayne’s wife. Duke paid me five yards and gave me the skinny on Red Hollywood. Dino Martin called me. He knocked up his maid with soon-to-hatch triplets. I bribed a Customs cop and got Dolorous Dolores deported. Dino paid me two g’s and dished the dirt on a stunning string of starlets. They bounced on my bed and dug up dirt on my regular retainer. Want C-notes and riotous ruts in the hay? Call Mr. Nine Inches.

I got Lana Turner a scrape. She banged an alto sax named Art Pepper in a bout of bebop abandon. Putzy Pepper wanted her to keep the kid and threatened exposure. I planted two reefers in his sax case and buzzed the fuzz. He got nine months at Wayside Honor Rancho.

Joi knew a classy clique of Hancock Park housewives. They were unbearably unbodied and entrenched in ennui. They needed furtive fucking. She saw money in it. Put “pimp” on my résumé. I’m on Stud Patrol as of now.

Opportunity is love. That cold concept socked my sick soul.

Joi said Liberace had a job for me. We were in the sack at her mom’s place. Her eyes twinkled and twirled me some all-new way. She drew dollar signs in the air.

The moment vibrates in VistaVision and swervy Swish-O-Scope. A piano noodles a nocturne and pounds a polonaise.

Liberace’s Swank Swish Pad

Coldwater Canyon

4/29/53

A fey factotum met me. The yard was tropically tricked out and football-field size.

Flamingos flitted. Toucans tooled and bit bugs. A path cut through ten-foot-high fronds and floral explosions. Everything was green, purple, and pink.

We hit a clearing. It was paved with stones embossed with musical clefs. The pool was shaped like a piano. Liberace sat in a deck chair. A leopard with a mink collar snoozed at his feet.

The factotum sashayed off. I pulled up a deck chair. The leopard stirred and snarled at me. I scratched his neck and kissed his snout. He went back to sleep.

Liberace said, “You’re fearless. You’re the kind of man I need.”

“I’m here to help you out, sir. Joi said you’ve got a guy bugging you.”

The factotum sashayed back with cocktails. Two highball glasses glowed pink. The guy served us and skedaddled. My drink tasted like radioactive bubble gum.

Liberace said, “Bottoms up.”

I yukked. “A kid’s putting the boots to you, right? Pay up, or he’ll rat you to the Legion of Decency. All those dago mob guys that book your act in Vegas will hightail it. Your TV show will be canceled if word gets out you go Greek.”

Liberace sighed. “Inimitably candid, and so, so true. He’s a dishwasher at Perino’s. What was I thinking?”

I sipped my pink drink. “Pictures?”

“Of course, dear heart. He lured me to a motel with a wall peek.”

A hi-fi speaker sparked and kicked on. Judy Garland belted, “Someday he’ll come along / The man I love.” The leopard lolled and licked his balls. Liberace goo-goo-talked him.

“Five thou, sir. You get the pictures and the negatives, along with my assurance that it won’t happen again.”

Liberace pouted. His chest heaved. Sequins popped off his toga. The leopard loped to the pool and arced his ass over the edge. A giant shit ensued.

The factotum ran up. He wielded a turd-scoop contraption. Liberace reached under his chair and snagged a scrapbook.

“Ex-convicts are a weakness of mine, I’m chagrined to say. I’ve got mug shots of him, and quite a few other rough-trade conquests. It’s my new hobby. I paste pictures, when I’m not wowing my fans or practicing Chopin.”

I grabbed the book and leafed through it. It was the fucking lavender lodestone. I counted twenty-six K-Y cowboys wearing neck boards. Names/dates/penal-code numbers. A smutty smorgasbord of malignant maleness. Parole holds and prosty beefs galore.

Liberace jabbed a pic of one Manolo Sanchez. The guy vibed baleful bantamweight.

“He broke my heart, while his evil lezzie sister took snapshots. Feel free to get tough.”

I nodded and flipped ahead. Three glum glamour boys popped off the page. Ward Wardell, Race Rockwell, Donkey Don Eversall. All booked for possession of pornography.

I pointed to the pics. “Blue-movie actors, right? They peddle it on the side. You see the movies, you get a yen, you make a phone call.”

“That’s correct. I went to a screening at Michael Wilding and Liz Taylor’s house. Michael screened Locker Room Lust and Jailhouse Heat, and supplied the referral.”

“Referral” ripped me. “Could these guys get it up for women?”

Liberace whooped. “Could, can, and do, sweetheart. And Donkey Don is the eighth wonder of the world, if you follow my drift.”

I tingled. I thought Parlay. I saw dollar signs and movie-star movement on my Landing Strip.

“So, Michael Wilding’s a gay caballero?”

“In spades, love. His house is known as the ‘Fruit Stand,’ which perturbs lovely Liz no end.”

I yukked. “And Liz wants a divorce, so she can move on to her next husband and break the all-time world record?”

Liberace slapped his knees. “Yes, and she’s pulling ahead of your girlfriend in that department.”

I cracked my knuckles. Liberace swooned. The cat almost creamed in his jeans.

“Tell Liz to meet me at the Beverly Hills Hotel, tomorrow night. Fill her in on my résumé.”

Liberace re-swooned. The leopard snarled and shooed a toucan up a tree.

Perino’s was high swank and old money. It catered to sterile stiffs and dotty dowagers. I drove over at close-up time and parked by the back kitchen door. It was whipped wide open. Sassy Sanchez was scour-scrubbing pots.

I slid out of my sled and hunkered low on my haunches. I ran reconnaissance. I noted a line of lockers by a walk-in freezer. I had Salacious Sanchez alone.

He mambo-minced to his locker and primped. A mirror magnified his mug and tossed it back at me. I squinted and claimed a close-up. Aaaaaaaah — the top locker shelf. There’s a stack of photo sheaths.

He picked his teeth. He squeezed blackheads. He dewaxed his ears. I walked in and crept up behind him. I pulled my beavertail sap. His neck hairs bristled. He wheeled and pulled a shiv.

Flick — the blade sliced my Sy Devore blazer. He shrieked shit en español. It ran the your-mama gamut.

He pirouetted and parried. We were in knife-fight tight. I risked a ripe stab wound and roundhoused him to the head. My sap socked him, full force.

The seams ripped his face. The business end tore an eyebrow loose and gnashed in his nose. He dropped the knife. I kicked it away. I grabbed his neck and squelched a scream. The deep-fry dipper was four feet away. It was spitting hot grease off spuds lyonnaise.

I dragged him over. I stuck his knife hand in the grease and frog-fried it. He screamed. I held his hand in the grease and burned it to the bone. Spatters spotted up my London Shop shirt.

I dropped his hand. I walked to the locker and grabbed the photo sheaths. I flipped through them.

Ooohhh, Daddy. It’s Liberace Goes Greek — Kodacolor prints and negatives.

Sanchez screamed and careened through the kitchen. He dumped a dish rack and spasm-smacked the walls. His hand was charbroiled and crackle crisp. Flayed flesh flew off.

—

The night was young. I was up five thou and blasphemously blasted on blood and aggression. Revelation ripped me. I knew I could mix my own fruit shakes. I pocketed two Liberace negatives.

I called R&I. They delivered the dish on the smut-film troika. The boys shared a pad in Silver Lake. Plus a bent for the sex-soiled and seditious. Semper fi — they met in the Marine Corps and ran rackets out of a bondage bar down in Dago. They sold forged green cards. They peddled Spanish fly. They led Rotary groups to T.J. for the mule act. They sold dildo dupes of Donkey Don’s sixteen-inch whanger.

They fell in the shit in ’50. They sold Spanish fly to a nervous nympho and pledged a date with Donkey Don. The Donkster reneged. The nympho impaled herself on the gearshift of a ’46 Buick. San Diego PD filed Felonious Assault. The judge tossed the case. Here’s a ripe rumor: he was Race Rockwell’s regular trick.

I popped out to their pad. It was a wizened wood-frame job, buried in bougainvillea. I rang the bell at 11:00 p.m. and got no answer. I picked the door lock and let myself in. I crept flashlight-first and inventoried their shit.

The boys possessed Nazi armbands/Mickey Spillane novels/combat-pinned Marine blues. Plus mucho moviemaking equipment. Plus cheesecake mags going back to ’36. Plus souvenir snapshots from the Klub Satan, Tijuana, New Year’s ’48. El Burro sports spiffy red devil ears.

I walked out to the porch. I chain-smoked and sucked on my flask. I recognized the ribbons on their uniforms. The boys savaged Saipan and stormed Guadalcanal.

I sipped bonded bourbon. I got a light load on. A jalopy jammed up at 1:00 a.m. The boys bounced out and made for the door.

I whipped out my badge and flashlight-lit it. It was deep dark out. I couldn’t catch their capitulation. Call it a cool coup d’état. The dominant dog now rules their pack.

“My name’s Otash. You’re going into business with me.”

Extortionist. Entrepreneur. Enterprising Enforcer. I ran that roundelay as I licked my lips for Liz.

I got half looped with the lads and laid down the law. I’m taking 20 percent of your smut biz. You get police protection. You’re now the naughty nucleus of Freddy O.’s stud farm. Get ready to bring the brisket to some housewives in heat.

Donkey Don laid a ladle of bennies on me. I buzzed through my day-watch duty downtown. I broke up a fistfight at the Jesus Saves Mission. I chased a raft of Red agitators out of Pershing Square. I popped a whipout man at the Mayan Theater. I busted a psycho kid blowtorching two lovebirds in a ’49 Ford.

My tour of duty tapped down. I went by the Criminal Courts Building and read up on divorce law. I reserved a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and scrounged refreshments off local merchants. Lou’s Liquor Locker supplied champagne. Hank’s Hofbrau coughed up cold cuts. Fast delivery was assured.

I swooped by my pad. I traded my cop suit for a choice chalk-stripe ensemble. Oh yeah — it’s your ardent arriviste poised to pounce!!!!

The bungalow was big, boss, flouncy, and flamboyant. The bellman harrumphed at my ham and cheese hors d’oeuvres. He rolled his eyes and split. I paced and smoked myself hoarse. The bell rang at 8:00 p.m. sharp.

There she is — Elizabeth Taylor at twenty-one.

She stood in the doorway. I fumbled for chitchat. She wore a tight white dress. It caressed her curves and clambered up to her cleavage. She said, “If I move too fast, I’ll split a seam. Help me over to that couch.”

I grabbed an elbow and steered her. My hand trembled, my heart trilled. I sat her down and poured two jolts of ’53 domestic. We perched on the couch and offered up toasts.

Liz raised her arm. A dress seam split down to her hemline. She said, “Shit. I didn’t have to wear this. You’re just the bird dog for my divorce.”

I yukked. Liz said, “Don’t marry me, okay? I can’t keep doing this for the rest of my life.”

“Have I got a chance?”

“More than you think. Hotel heirs and queer actors haven’t worked out, so who’s to say a cop wouldn’t?”

I smiled. I sipped champagne. Liz snagged a slice of ham and snarfed it. Her wicked white dress constricted her. She looked plaintive, plain, and pure.

I unzipped the back. I slid in some slack and brought breathing room. Liz sighed — Aaaaah, that’s good.

The shoulder straps slid slack and fell down her arms. Liz deadpanned it. Our knees brushed. Liz retained the contact.

“How do I cut loose of Michael? I can’t cite mental cruelty, because he’s a sweetheart, and I don’t want to hurt him. I know you have to show just cause in order to sue.”

I refilled her glass. “I’ll bug your house. You get Wilding looped and get him to admit he digs boys. I levy the threat in a civilized manner, and he consents to an uncontested divorce.”

Liz beamed. “It’s that easy?”

“We’re all civilized folks. You probably earn more money than him, but he’s older, and has substantial holdings. You broker the property split and the alimony along those lines.”

“And how are you compensated?”

“I get ten percent of your alimony payments, in perpetuity. You keep me in mind and refer me to people who might require my services.”

Liz lounged on the couch cushions. Her dress collapsed past her brassiere. Our eyes found a fit. The rest of the room vaporized.

“And how will I keep you in mind? There’s lots of people vying for my attention.”

“I’ll do my best to make this a memorable evening.”

It started out clumsy and sweet. My punch line cued the first kiss. Liz was victimized and vanquished by too-tight attire. She shrugged her dress off. It wiggled down to her waist.

I carried her into the bedroom. The hoist popped buttons off my shirt. They shot across the room. We laffed. I heard the radio a bungalow over. Rosemary Clooney sang, “Hey, there — you with the stars in your eyes.”

We got naked. We were built boss, stratosphere stacked, and hung home wrecker heavy. We were the boffo best of L.A. ’53.

We made love all night. We drank champagne with Drambuie chasers. We smoked cigarettes and spritzed gossip. We put on robes and climbed to the roof of the bungalow at dawn.

An A-bomb test was scheduled in nowheresville Nevada. The newspapers predicted priceless fireworks. Other bungalow dwellers were up on their roofs. There’s Bob Mitchum and a young quail with the quivers. There’s Marilyn Monroe and Lee Strasberg. There’s Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. Everybody looks fuck-struck and happy. They’ve all got jugs for the toast.

Everybody laffed and waved hello. Mitchum brought a portable radio and tuned in the countdown. I heard static and “...eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”

The world went WHOOSH. The ground shook. The sky lit up mauve and pink. We raised our booze bottles and applauded. The colors bristled into bright white light.

I had my arm around Elizabeth Taylor. I looked Ingrid Bergman straight in the eyes.

L.A. ’53 was my ground zero. That blast still shoots shock waves through me.

There was smog in the air then. People coughed and gasped. I never noticed it. That bomb-blast moment made me. My L.A. was always mauve and pink.

I worked LAPD. I walked a downtown foot beat. I rousted Reds during the “Free the Rosenbergs!” fracas. I pinched pervs, purse snatchers, and pickpockets in Pershing Square. My smut-film biz laid in loot. Donkey Don Eversall plied his python all over Hancock Park. Joi was Donkey Don’s dispatcher. She koffee-klatched with horny housewives and set up the dates. Liberace gave me girl-talk gossip. Liz Taylor and Michael Wilding went to Splitsville. I got 10 percent of Liz’s alimony bite. Joi, Liz, and I threeskied on my Landing Strip. Liz knew a Pan Am stew named Barb Bonvillain. She flew the L.A. — Mexico City route and had half of Hollywood hooked on Dilaudid and morphine suppositories. Bad Barb was six-three, 180, 40-24-36. She scored high in the women’s decathlon, Helsinki ’52. All four of us locked loins. The Landing Strip lurched. We murdered the mattress and banged the box springs down to the floor.

L.A. ’53 — ring-a-ding-ding!!!!

Joi and I crashed the Crescendo and the Largo most nights. Cocktail waitresses fed me slander slurs. I tipped them, titanic. It brought back my kid-voyeur days, rabidly redux.

A fragmenting frustration set in. I had the dirt. It would take an armada of shakedown shills and photo fiends to deploy it. I racked my brain. I knocked my noggin against the bruising brick wall of unknowing. Extortion as existential dilemma. A confounding conundrum worthy of those French philosopher cats.

My cop life could not compete with the lush life. I was a double agent akin to that Commie cad Alger Hiss. Liz Taylor drove me to Central Station and signed autographs for the blues. I knew that word would leak to Chief William H. Parker. I was full of a finger-stabbing FUCK YOU.

Ralph Mitchell Horvath haunted me. Nightmares nabbed me as I slid into sleep. Joi and Liz nursed me with yellow jackets and booze. My bedtime mantra was He Deserved to Die. It was beastly bullshit. I couldn’t convince myself that it was true.

I spent nuke-bomb nights at the Hollywood Ranch Market. My office was two-way-mirrored and overlooked the aisles. I scanned for boosters and looked down at the legions of the lost.

Their pathos pounded me. Bit actors buying stale bread and short dogs of muscatel. Six-foot-two drag queens shopping for extra-long nylons. Cough-syrup hopheads reading labels for the codeine content. Teenage boys sneaking girlie mags to the can to jerk off.

I watched. I peeped. I lost myself in the losers. A goofy ghost came and went with them.

He was about twenty-three. He slouched in windbreakers and wore cigarettes as props. He breezed through the aisles at 3:00 a.m. He always looked ecstatic. He talked to people. He cultivated people. He studied people the way I peeped windows as a kid. I saw him out on the sidewalk once. He played the bongos for a clique of fruit hustlers and junkies. A girl called him “Jimmy.”

The fucker appeared intermittent. I made him for an actor living off chump change and aging queens. I saw him kiss a girl by the bread bin. I saw him kiss a boy in the soup aisle. He moved with a weirdo grace. He wasn’t froufrou or masculine. He was in on some exalted joke.

I saw him boost a carton of Pall Malls. I cornered him, cuffed him, and hauled him upstairs. His name was James Dean. He was from bumfuck Indiana. He was an actor and a bohemian you-name-it. He said that Pall Mall cigarettes were queer code. The In hoc signo vinces on the pack meant “In this sign you shall conquer.” Queens flashed their Pall Malls and ID’d each other. It was all-new shit to me.

I cut Jimmy loose. We started hanging out in the office. We belted booze, looked down on the floor, and gassed on the humanoids. Jimmy habituated the leather bars in East Hollywood. He ratted off pushers and celebrity quiffs and filled a whole side of my dirt bin. I told him about my smut-film and male-prosty gigs. I promised him a date with Donkey Don Eversall in exchange for hot dirt.

We’d hit silent stretches. I’d scan the floor. Jimmy would read scandal rags.

They were just popping up. Peep, Transom, Whisper, Tattle, Lowdown. Titillation texts. Lurid language marred by mitigation. Insipid innuendo that left you craving more.

Politicos got slurred as Red — but never nailed past implication. Jimmy loved the rags but cruelly critiqued them. He said they weren’t sufficiently sordid or precise in their prose. He called them “timid tipster texts.” He said, “You’ve got better skank than this, Freddy. I could give you three issues’ worth from one night at the Cockpit Lounge.”

A bell bonged. It was faint and far off. Memory is revised retrospection. Oh yeah — fate fungooed me that night.

A newsboy pulled a red wagon into the market. It was stacked with magazines. He started filling up racks.

A cover caught my eye. Priapic primary colors and hard-hearted headlines screamed.

You get the picture. The magazine was called Confidential.

The Beverly Hills Hotel

8/14/53

Joi woke me up. I was nudging off a nightmare. It was a dark double dip. Ralph Mitchell Horvath, shot in the mouth/Manolo Sanchez with skeleton claws.

I looked across the bed. Shit — Liz was gone.

Joi read my mind. “She had an early call. She said to remind you that Arthur Crowley wants that phone date.”

I lit a cigarette. I chased bennies with Old Crow. Aaaaaaah, breakfast of champions!!!!

“Remind me again. Who’s Arthur Crowley?”

“He’s that divorce lawyer who needs your help.”

I said, “I’ll call him when I go off-duty.”

Joi stepped into a skirt and pulled her shoes on. She dressed as fast as most men.

“No more girls for a while, okay, Freddy? Liz is great, but Barb is like Helga, She-Wolf of the SS. Really, that stunt with the armband and the garters? That, and she hogs the whole bed.”

I laffed loud and lewd. My wake-up whipped through me. It canceled out all dreary dreams and coarse cobwebs. Late summer in L.A. — ring-a-ding-ding!!!!

Joi kissed me and bopped out of the bungalow. I shit, showered, shaved, and put on my uniform.

The phone rang. I snagged it. A man said, “Mr. Otash, this is Arthur Crowley.”

I buffed my badge with my necktie. A mirror magnetized me. Man-O-Manischewitz, I look good!!!!

“Mr. Crowley, it’s a pleasure.”

Crowley said, “Sir, I’ll be blunt. I’m swamped with pissed-off husbands and wives, looking to take each other to the cleaners. Legal statutes are in flux, and divorce-court judges are demanding greater proof of adultery. Liz Taylor told me you might have some ideas.”

I lit a cigarette. Benzedrine arced through my arteries and piqued my pizzazz.

“I do have ideas. If you have flexible scruples, I think we can do biz.”

Crowley laffed. “I’m listening.”

I said, “I know some Marines stationed down at Camp Pendleton. I was their DI in ’43 and ’44, and now they’re back from Korea and looking for kicks. It’s a parlay. Hot rods, good-looking shills, walkie-talkies, phone drops, and Speed Graphic cameras.”

Crowley hooted. “Semper fi, sir. You’re a white man in my book.”

“Semper fi, boss. We’ll work out the details at your convenience, and I’ll round up my boys.”

“And, in the meantime? Is there anything you need?”

Benzedrine was a groin groper. One thing did come to mind.

“My Landing Strip’s got two empty runways tonight. Liz told me you’re conversant with the concept.”

Voices vibrated outside the bungalow. They were mucho male and brazenly brusque. I heard foot scrapes and coughs.

Crowley said, “Liz explained the concept, so I called you prepared. I’ll send two stenos over.”

“Mr. Crowley, you’re a pisser.”

“It takes one to know one, sir.”

We hung up. The voices vibrated. I caught key-in-lock sounds. I walked into the living room. The door whipped wide.

It’s William H. Parker.

With two plainclothes bulls. Both six-four. They live to hurl hurt. They’re mastiffs on a mission to maul for their master.

“Send not to know for whom the bell tolls—”

I unpinned my badge and tossed it at Parker. It hit his chest and dropped on the floor. The mastiffs moved. Parker went Get back. The mastiffs pawed the carpet and growled loooowwww.

I unhooked my gun belt and dropped it on a chair. I called up some cool. Freon Freddy, the Shaman of Shakedown.

“Hit me, Bill. Shack jobs, living above my means, bending the rules here and there. My head’s on the chopping block, baby. Guillotine me.”

The mastiffs smirked smug. Pious Parker parsed out a grin.

“You are currently engaged in an intimate relationship with a Pan American stewardess named Barbara Jane Bonvillain, now in Federal custody for possession of narcotics procured in Mexico. I must inform you that the outsized Miss Bonvillain is a Communist agent and a personal emissary of Marshal Tito, the Red boss of Yugoslavia. As if that weren’t enough, Miss Bonvillain is really a man. She underwent a sex-change operation in Malmö, Sweden, in late 1951, before her stellar efforts impersonating a woman at the ’52 Olympics. You fucked a man, Freddy. You’re a homo. Get the hell off my police force.”

You’re a homo.”

“You’re a homo.”

“You fucked a man.”

“You fucked a man.”

“You’re a homo, you’re a homo, you’re a homo.”

I drank myself into a stunned stupor. I passed out on the floor. I got intimate with insects inhabiting the rug. They were dung desperadoes. They were my filthy fellow travelers, lower than lice.

“You’re a homo, you’re a homo, you’re a homo.”

I drank, I passed out, I woke up. I went eye-to-eye with a big beetle. We discussed the man-bug metaphysic. It was infused with frissons from that freaky frog Camus.

The beetle said that life was horrifically happenstance and that we were all fucked by fate. Bugs were biologically bid to live off larvae and leaves. Men were massacred by lascivious lust and bumbled into bed with he-shes. You didn’t know that she was a he. Hit your bennie stash and find your way out of this funk.

I obeyed the beetle. The Benzedrine outrevved the booze. I talked shit with the beetle for hours. We went feeler-to-feeler on the floor.

I called Abe Adelman at the State License Bureau. I promised him two g’s for PI’s ducat, quicksville. I bid the beetle adieu and climbed back into my civvies. I drove straight to the Hollywood Ranch Market.

L.A. looked like Pompeii, postearthquake. The summer sun skimmed the sky and scattered death rays. Hes were shes and shes were hes and the most gorgeous girls were gargoyles. I got to the market and ran up to my office. Jimmy was scanning the August Lowdown.

He said, “You’re wigged out, Freddy.”

I said, “I’ve been talking to a bug.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Some shit you wouldn’t believe.”

“I would believe it. It’s the basis of our friendship. We tell each other shit the world wouldn’t believe.”

I smiled. “Tell me something typical. I’ve had a jolt. I need to get my feet back under me.”

Jimmy said, “The barman at the Manhole is pushing horse.”

I said, “I’ll file it away, in case I need him.”

Jimmy said, “I’ve got a picture of Marlon Brando with a dick in his mouth.”

“I’ll give you a C-note.”

Jimmy passed the Old Crow. I took a pull and felt the floor meet my feet.

“How was your date with Donkey Don?”

Jimmy held his hands two feet apart. Jimmy said, “Ouch.”

I roared. We passed and repassed the jug. Jimmy lit a Pall Mall.

“I’m up for a role on GE Theater, but this Paul Newman punk will probably get it.”

“I’ll plant a bag of weed on him, and lay on the fear. You’ll get the gig.”

“Thanks, Freddy.”

I thought about the talking bug. I looked down at the aisles. I felt fate beaming back at me.

“I’ve got all this good dirt and no place to put it. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”

Semper fi.

I assembled my ex-Marine cadre. My porno-prosty boys proceeded priapically apace. My Camp Pendleton pals came up to L.A. and joined Operation Divorce. The two crews crossed over. I had six certified psychos, culled for my command. My Pendleton pit dogs were blood-blitzed from killing Commies in Korea. They were out for chaotic kicks and required tight tugs on their chains. Our marks were adulterous wives and husbands. Donkey Don lured ladies to hot-sheet hotels and instigated insertion. Flashbulbs flared as I kicked in doors, camera cocked. My Pendleton pits were adroit and adept at rolling surveillance. They tailed wayward wives and whorehound hubbies to hotels and walkie-talkied me. Joi was the mouthwatering man bait. She worked off Arthur Crowley’s craaazy crib sheets on the hubbies’ habits. Joi was sinful seductress and cold cocktease. I kicked the doors in just as Joi’s zipper dropped.

Operation Divorce was a Marine Corps maneuver and a mad moneymaker. Operation Otash was the ultimate umbrella command. I had an army of snarky snitches on my payroll. My PI’s license arrived and served to cinch my sinful sanction. I did not much mourn my severed service with the LAPD. I paid vulture Vice cops for tips on quivering queers, jittery junkies, dipsos deep in the DT’s. I built fat files on celebrity secrets and hoarded the horrors hard in my heart. Knowledge is power — the Beverly Hills Hotel bug told me that. The one puzzle piece still missing: how to systematically carve cash from all of it.

Jimmy joined in. I kicked putzy Paul Newman’s ass and held a bag of maryjane primed with his prints. Jimmy got the GE Theater role and groveled with gratitude. I hired him to hump the husband of a divorce-seeking dowager sick of hubby’s hijinks. Jimmy was a swift switcherooer — if it mamboed, he’d move on it. He boffed five babes in one week — topping Donkey Don’s extant record. I camera-caught the wives as Jimmy shot them the schvantz.

L.A. ’53 — radioactive ring-a-ding-ding!!!! That mauve-and-pink sky, ever mine.

Then, at long last — the confounding convergence.

I was on the Landing Strip. I was lolling with Liz and a winsome waitress from Biff’s Charbroil. My mail slot creaked. An envelope hit the floor.

It was a Western Union telegram. I opened it and read:

Ava Gardner’s Dusky Dee-lite.”

“Johnnie Ray’s Men’s Room Misadventure.”

“Bad Boy Bob Mitchum: Back in Reeferland AGAIN?”

Oh yeah — Confidential contaminated. Confidential kicked up chaos. Confidential came to work.

I wired Harrison and confirmed the meet. I booked a boss bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I borrowed textbooks from Arthur Crowley’s library and studied libel, slander, and defamation of character. I learned to think and talk like a language-lucid lawyer.

Jimmy bagged back issues of Peep, Lowdown, Whisper, Tattle, and Confidential itself. I studied linguistic loopholes and cultivated codes of mitigation, equivocation, ambiguity. There’s innuendo, inference, implication. There’s many wicked ways to scandal-skin a cat.

I alter-egoed myself in a week’s time. I discovered sinuendo and scandal language. I moved into the bungalow a day early. That talking bug and I conferenced and concurred:

Confidential was the grooved-out grail of this shook-up generation. Disillusionment is enlightenment. Confidential trafficked truth and harpooned hypocrisy. It was a devoutly decorous document. It was the meshugenah Magna Carta of our hopped-up and fucked-up age.

It’s now 9/21/53. It’s now precisely 10:00 a.m. The doorbell rings.

Caviar, canapés — check. Martinis mixed magnifico — check. My dossier on Bondage Bob — malignantly memorized.

I opened the door. There’s the Sultan of Sinuendo. He’s a nervous nebbish in a dreary drip-dry suit.

He said, “Mr. Otash.”

I said, “Mr. Harrison.”

He walked in and went Oooh-la-la. I poured two mighty martinis and pointed to the couch. We raised our glasses. I said, “To freedom of speech.”

He said, “The First Amendment. What it hath wrought.”

We clicked glasses. He made the you-and-me sign. He said, “Strange bedfellows.”

You’re stranger, dipshit. You wear women’s lingerie and love the lash. You published “Honeys in Heels,” pre-Confidential.

“Get my attention, Mr. Otash. Open strong, baby. I need dirt, and a man to excavate it. Hit me, sweetheart. Show me why the cognoscenti says, ‘Fred Otash is the man to see.’ ”

I flashed my Marlon Brando snapshot. Bondage Bob perused it. He spazzed and spritzed me with a mouthful of martini.

It drip-dried on the sofa and my silk suit coat. Bondage Bob coughed and called up composure. He said, “Holy fucking shit.”

“May I give you a candid assessment of your situation, and explain how I might best serve you?”

“Hit me, doll. I didn’t fly three thousand miles for some namby-pamby chitchat.”

I shot my cuffs and showed off my Rolex. Twenty-four-karat gold/diamonds/rubies. I buzz-bombed Bondage Bob with my bold opening thrust.

“You publish what is rapidly becoming the premier scandal magazine in a very crowded field. You compete with Whisper, Tattle, Peep, On the Q.T., Lowdown, and others. Your competitors rely largely on true-crime exposés, reports of miracle cures for various diseases, and rehashes of your own articles on celebrity misbehavior. The specific strengths of your magazine are its staunch anti-Communist stance and sex. Frankly, I find your articles that play on the greed of your readers are both unbelievable and devoid of the heat that people turn to Confidential for. There are no emerald mines in Colorado, and no Uruguayan herbs that triple the size of the male member in two weeks’ time. You’re lying, sir. You’re hoping that bilking your readers with stories like that will both boost your sales and help defray the costs of the libel suits that are being filed against you with greater and greater frequency in circuit courts all over America. My good friend, the esteemed jurist Arthur Crowley, has informed me that magazines that publish filler pieces chock-full of boldfaced lies create what he calls a ‘gap in credibility and verisimilitude.’ This calls into question the veracity of all the articles published in said magazines over time, leaving said magazines vulnerable to both individual lawsuits and the looming specter of what Mr. Crowley calls the ‘lynch-mob-like and Communistic specter of the emerging class action suit,’ wherein aggrieved parties band together under the aegis of left-wing lawyers in order to posit a common beef and destroy the First Amendment right of free speech that we hold so sacred here in America. The mitigating, equivocating, and temporizing language that runs through your groundbreaking articles on celebrity misconduct will not save you. You may use alleged, purported, and rumored as much as you like, but they will not legally extricate you in the end. My first two salient points are these: you must dramatically boost your sexual content, and everything you publish in Confidential must be entirely true and verifiable.”

Wooooooooo!!!! Bravura breath control and artful articulation!!!! Bondage Bob’s flabbergasted and flushed.

He fidgeted. He licked his lips. He crossed his legs and went submissive sissy. I saw restraint-rope scars on his wrists.

“Nuisance suits are costing us twenty-five thou a month. Those Commie lawyers are coming out of the sewers like rats.”

I socked him my Second Soliloquy:

“Informants must be both credible and coercible, as well as vulnerable to exposure of their own misdeeds. I served as an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for close to a decade. I have access to every crooked cop in this town, and they will rat out any celebrity, socialite, Communist, miscegenist, or alluring lowlife that they know of for a simple retainer. The scum that they rat out will rat out six others to stay out of your magazine, and the mathematical equation that I am positing will extend indefinitely. I can tell that you’re thinking, Informants alone will not suffice, and that assumption is correct. You may know that we are entering a bold new era of electronic surveillance. I propose that we install standing, full-time bugs in every high-class hotel in Los Angeles. I will bribe the managers and desk clerks of said hotels to steer celebrity adulterers and queers to specific rooms, where their sexual activities and conversation will be captured on tape. The best bug man on earth is a hebe named Bernie Spindel. I will meet with him soon. Mr. Spindel would love to enter your employ, and has a gift for you. He bugged a bungalow at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica last week. The manager of the hotel is a masochistic child molester with a quite understandable urge to be punished for his aberrant behavior. I will physically chastise him on a monthly basis, which will deter him from hurting children, as well as keep him under my thumb. He will have strict orders to place all celebs in bungalow number nine. Bernie’s gift is a tape of Senator John F. Kennedy fucking Ingrid Bergman, and detailing his preposterous plans to run for president of the United States to her, while she yawns and prattles on about her kids. Be forewarned: the fucking is short-lived. I’ll be frank: Senator Kennedy is a two-minute man.”

Bondage Bob. He’s gaga, goo-goo-eyed, gone.

“So, we—”

I cut him off. “So, we also bug all the gay bathhouses. So, I have extortion wedges on the informants who supply the dirt for our most explosive pieces. So, I polygraph-test them to assure their veracity. So, I create a climate of fear in Hollywood, which is the most gorgeously perverted and cosmetically moralistic place on God’s green fucking Earth. Because, I have an unerring nose for human weakness and have sensed for some time that we have entered an era where the gilded and famous all secretly harbor a desire to be exposed. Because, I am willing to burglarize any psychiatrist’s office in order to get the dirt on their celebrity patients. Because, I am willing to quash lawsuits through the threat and application of physical force.”

Bondage Bob guuuuuuuulped. “What won’t you do?”

I saw Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I said, “Commit murder or work for the Reds.”

A pin-drop silence sizzled. I let it linger loooooong.

“Would you consent to an audition? To test your inside knowledge?”

I nodded. Harrison hit me. I bopped to his beat, beatific.

“Senator Estes Kefauver?”

“Whorehound. Shacks with Filipina prosties at the downtown Statler.”

“Sinatra. Give me the latest.”

“Caught his new girlfriend muff-diving Lana Turner, went on a six-day bender with Jackie Gleason, and wound up with the DT’s at Queen of Angels.”

“Otto Preminger?”

“Mud shark. Currently enthralled with a sepia seductress named Dorothy Dandridge.”

“Lawrence Tierney?”

“Brawling, psychopathic brother of noted grasshopper Scott Brady. Digs the boys at the Cockpit Lounge, and the occasional girl who looks like a boy.”

“John Wayne?”

“Quasi — drag queen. Fucks women and looks stunning in a size fifty-two-long muumuu.”

“Johnny Weissmuller?”

“King Schlong. Well known to have fathered nine kids out of wedlock, with nine different women. Current holder of the White Man’s World Record.”

“Duke Ellington?”

“Current holder of the Black World Record.”

“Van Johnson?”

“The Semen Demon. Sucks dick at the glory hole at the Wilshire May Company men’s room.”

“Burt Lancaster?”

“Sadist. Has a well-appointed torture den in West Hollywood. Pays call girls top dollar to inflict pain on them.”

“Fritz Lang?”

“Known to film Burt’s torture sessions, and screen them for a select clientele.”

“The Misty June Christy?”

“Nympho size queen. My shakedown bait Donkey Don Eversall gives her the big one on a regular basis. Donkey Don’s got a wall peek at his crib. My pal Jimmy Dean made an avant-garde film of their last assignation. It’s called The Stacked and the Hung. The premiere is Friday night, in my living room. You’re cordially invited.”

“Alfred Hitchcock?”

“Peeper.”

“Natalie Wood?”

“Child actress in transition. Rumored to be ensconced at a dyke slave den near Hollywood High.”

“Alan Ladd?”

“Dramatically underhung snatch hound. A man on the horns of a brutal existential dilemma.”

Bondage Bob. The big magazine mogul. He’s gaga, goo-goo, pulled into putty. He’s martini-mangled and mine.

“Mr. Otash, the job is yours.”

I said, “The bite is fifty grand a year, and expenses. My operating costs will go at least double that.”

Now, he’s green at the gills. Now, he knows there’s No Exit. It’s a fabulous fait accompli.

“Yes, Mr. Otash. We have a deal.”

We shook hands. We jacked gin and vermouth. Bondage Bob said, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s a pal of mine. He’ll love The Stacked and the Hung.”

That talking bug rocked across the rug and waved at me. I swear this is true.

Jimmy timed the fuck. It ran 1:46. Jack Kennedy and Ingrid Bergman banged the beast with two backs.

Pillow patter tapped the tape. Jack said, “Aaaaah, that was good.” Ingrid said, “Vell, for vun of us, perhaps.”

I roared. Jimmy howled. The market was 3:00 a.m. dead. We gargled Old Crow.

Jimmy said, “We wrapped GE Theater. I invited Ronnie Reagan to the premiere.”

I said, “He hates the Reds. I’ll hit him up for some snitch-outs.”

The tape groaned and ground down to squelch. Jimmy turned it off. I looked down at the floor. A dippy denizen bought this month’s Confidential.

Jimmy said, “When I’m famous, keep me out of the magazine.”

I said, “When you’re in it, you’ll know you’ve arrived.”

My first ops check arrived. I retained Bernie “the Bug King” Spindel. We spent a week whipping wires to wainscoting and laying mike mounts into mattresses. I bribed hotel honchos up the yammering ying-yang. We drilled, bored, spackled, threaded, planted, and wired all the high-end hotels. Regular retainers would result in records of sicko celebs sacking up in those rooms. Bondage Bob had bountiful bucks. We wire-whipped full-time listening posts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Hotel Bel-Air, the Beverly Wilshire, the Miramar, the Biltmore, the downtown Statler. A Biltmore bellboy tipped us, right off. Gary Cooper and a jailbait jill jumped into that bugged bedroom. BAM!!! — our system socks in sync. Bedsprings bounce, voices vibrate, mikes pick up tattle text and lay it to the listening post. BAM!!! — my Marine Corps mastiff retrieves the tape. BAM!!! — the babe is sixteen and a Belmont High coed. Coop says, “You’re built, honey. Tell me your name again.” The girl gasps, “I’ve always loved your pictures, Mr. Cooper. And, wow, you’re really big.”

The dirt. The dish. The scandal skank. The lewd libels revealed as real. It all came to me and to Confidential. Freddy O.’s in unstoppable ascent.

Jimmy cut his movie and dubbed in a sizzling sound track. The proud premiere was the L.A. Moment of Fall ’53. I served pizza, booze, and pills from a felonious pharmacy. My pad was packed with movie machers and Marines, stupid starlets, stars, and studs. Dig: Liz, Joi, Ward Wardell, Race Rockwell, Donkey Don Eversall. Ronnie Reagan, Harry Fremont, Arthur Crowley, Bondage Bob, and Jean-Paul Sartre — existentially seeking the scene. A six-foot-six drag queen, Rock Hudson, ex — U.S. Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, nodding on Big “H.”

It’s the egalitarian epicenter of postwar America. It’s a colossal convergence of the gilded and gorgeous, the defiled and demented, the lurid and the low-down. This seedy summit set the tone for the frazzled and fractured frisson that is our nation today.

I dimmed the lights. Race Rockwell ran the projector. The sound track hit: Bartók, Beethoven, bebop by way of Bird. There’s the opening titles: The Stacked and the Hung, starring Donkey Don Eversall and June Christy. Photographed, edited, produced, and directed by James Dean.

The applause ran apoplectic. There’s the first shot. It’s a Hollyweird motel room. It’s a through-a-wall-peek peep at you know what.

June Christy enters the room and drops her purse on the bed. She looks apprehensive. She lights a cigarette, she checks her watch, she taps her toes and paces. It’s soundless cinema. The camera stays static — the lens is lashed to that peek.

June hears something. She smiles, she walks offscreen, she walks back on with Donkey Don. Donkey Don winks at the wall peek. He’s in on it. June sits on the bed. Donkey Don whips it out and wags it. My pad shakes and shimmies. There’s gasps, wolf whistles, shrill shrieks.

I looked around for Jimmy. June devoured Donkey Don, tonsil-deep. Where’s Jimmy? Fuck — he’s jacking off by the pizza buffet!!!

’53 to ’54. My mauve-and-pink skies. Sales-graph lines in escalation. Confidential hits a million a month. Confidential makes two million in rabid record time.

It’s all ME. I’m awash in the sicko secrets I’ve cruelly craved my whole life. I’ve got L.A. hot-wired. My city teems with tattle tipsters on my payroll. Hotel rooms are hot-sheet hives hooked up to my headset. I know everything sinful, sex-soiled, deeply dirty, and religiously wrong. It’s wrong, it’s real, and it’s MINE.

My Marines lived in listening posts. They caught Corrine Calvet cavorting with a car-park cat at the Crescendo. They caught Paul Robeson, ripped to the gills at a Red rally. They caught Jumping Johnnie Ray again. I verified all of it and fed it to Confidential. Gary Cooper and Miss Belmont High? Quashed for ten grand.

’53 to ’54. A-bomb parties on Liz Taylor’s rooftop. Cavalcades of color against the dim dawn. The camaraderie and opportunity. The sense that this march of magnificent moments would never stop.

Sales graphs. Confidential covers. Dipsos, nymphos, junkies, and Commies, exposed. That cover I regret, that ball I dropped, that malignant moment. That page in Purgatory as I pause my pen.

It’s January 16, 1954. I’m at my pad. I’m booking a threeski for the Landing Strip. I quashed a story on Marilyn Monroe’s Mexican marriage. Marilyn grovels, grateful. She knows a sapphic sister with a sometimes yen for men.

The phone rang. I picked up. Arthur Crowley said, “There’s trouble, Freddy.”

I said, “Hit me.”

“I got a tip. Johnnie Ray’s been to a libel lawyer, and he’s suing the magazine. I know that you verified the story, but he’s going forward anyway. I strongly suggest that you nip this in the bud.”

“Men’s Room Mishegas: Jittery Johnnie Strikes Again.” I verified the story. Confidential ran it. This was untold grief.

“My Marines are on maneuvers, Art. There’s no one to handle it.”

“You handle it, Freddy. Take care of it, before that tip gets back to Bob Harrison.”

I hung up. My nerves were nuked. I took three quick pops of Old Crow. Joi was tight with Johnnie. They girl-talked regular. I liked Johnnie. Jimmy screened The Stacked and the Hung for him, personally.

I dropped three yellow jackets and obliterated the day. I woke up at midnight. Johnnie always hit Googie’s after his closing set. He always parked in the same spot.

I walked over. I recall spring heat and a brisk breeze. I lounged on Johnnie’s Packard Caribbean. Johnnie bopped out at 1:15.

He saw me. He got the gestalt. He said, “Hi, Freddy.”

I said, “Don’t make me, kid. I’ll keep you out from now on, but you’ve got to stop it here.”

Johnnie said, “You’re a parasite, Freddy. You feed off the weak. I’m not backing off. I don’t see any of your goons around, so you’ll have to do it yourself.”

I said, “Let it go, Johnnie. You can’t win this one.”

“You’re the weak one, Freddy. Joi told me you cry out for your mother in your sleep.”

I trembled. “One more time, Johnnie. No lawsuit. Do this for me, and the magazine will never come near you again.”

Johnnie spit on my shoes. “You’re a mama’s boy, Freddy. Joi told me you fucked a tranny, which makes you more queer than me.”

I saw red and black-red. I hit him. My signet ring slashed his cheek. He went down on his knees. I picked him up and hurled him against his car. I heard bones crack and teeth shear. The bumper ledge gouged his head. I kicked him and tore a chunk of his scalp free.

He said, “Okay, okay, okay.”

I said, “I’m sorry, kid.”

Johnnie spit blood. Johnnie spit teeth and gum flaps. He shot a big fuck-you finger my way.

The market was 2:00 a.m. deadsville. Jimmy and I quaffed Old Crow. We stood by the mirror and gassed at the ghoul show. I was spritzed with Johnnie Ray’s blood.

Jimmy said, “I’m up for the lead in East of Eden. Elia Kazan’s waffling. It could go either way.”

I said, “I’ll lean on Kazan. He’s susceptible. There’s some pinkos he didn’t rat to HUAC.”

Jimmy gazed down at the aisles. My hands hurt. I cracked my signet ring. My shirt cuffs were soaked red.

The Legions of the Lost. They’re down there. They’re damning me. They’re hexing me to Hell. They’re my comrades in chaos. They’re saying You’re One of Us.

“Jimmy, do you know why you’re a freak?”

“I don’t know, Freddy. Do you know why you are?”

I said, “I don’t know, but sometimes it all gets to me.”