(when life goes a little noir on you) Virtual America by Art Busse I was broke, with time on my hands, when I first heard of my cousin’s death. My Aunt had seen it on the evening news in LA and called my mother in Santa Rosa, wondering if the Robert Scoville on the TV newscast could be, God forbid, our little Bob-O. He was. The family had gathered just ten days before in Chicago for my Uncle’s funeral, and now, with our good clothes still at the cleaners, we would be re-assembling in Westlake Village for that of my cousin. It would be different this time. My uncle died by the numbers, nice and neat. He was old, he got sick, he died. But Bob was my age and a forceful guy, who could bench press 250 pounds, when he died under circumstances unusual enough to put him on the evening news and the front sections of newspapers up and down the Southern California coast. They dubbed him ‘The Man of Mystery’, the main mystery being whether he was a local businessman who had pulled the plug on himself for reasons unknown, or an international secret agent who had been taken out of the picture before the picture got a little too clear. If you were detective de Pasquale of the LAPD homicide division, it was simpler - ‘suicide or homicide?’ A question that the County Coroner would have the final say on. The gun shots that killed him had scared a flock of gossip, hearsay, and innuendo into the air in quantities large enough to block out the sun, and as we gathered for the funeral, the question remained unanswered. The buzz around the bar at the Marriot got louder with every new arrival. The relatives were restless and the eulogies and condolences only added to the confusion. Bottom line? When we put cousin Bob in the ground, none of us new who we were burying, nor how he had died. It didn’t help that this was LA, where the virtual ran neck-and-neck with the actual, and a good story trumped the truth every time. Everyone you met was posing in one way or another, waiting to be discovered. Even Bob’s teenage daughters, who should have been desolate, were flush with the thrill of their sudden celebrity and delivered their funeral comments as if in a Hallmark screen test shot on-scene at the Westlake Presbyterian Church. It was the peculiar virtue of this story that every new fact that came to light served to elevate the probability of each of the opposing theories in equal measure. That, in turn, raised the level of excitement and anticipation in the audience, as well as its size. This story had legs, and we all stayed tuned for the latest developments. Along with too much time on my hands, I also had a problem with my upbringing. This was not a good combination. It tended to lead to things, things that had a way of getting out of hand. But there was something bogus about my family that irked me, and it was on full display there in Westlake Village. Appearances ruled. Feelings were kept under wraps. When the wrong things happened, the Men in Black would swoop in and wipe the tapes clean. Nobody seemed equipped to deal with life as it actually was, and the amount of effort expended in the ongoing makeover was staggering. My mother had been good and crazy for five years of electro-shock, pharmaceuticals and institutions, but that wasn’t talked about. Her brother, Bob’s father, had blown his head off one Christmas morning back in the Midwest with the kids in the house. This was forever after referred to as the ‘tragic accident’. The list was endless. I thought I had come to terms with it all long ago, turning my back and going my own way. But having to watch us all fake our way through a funeral blind folded without the benefit of the most essential facts was a little too much for me. I swung into action. Westlake Village is a happy little suburban subdivision carved out of the countryside when there was plenty of room. The roads are wide, the intersections big, and it’s clean and green where it would have been dusty and dry without it. Just north over the hills from West LA, it sits within striking distance of Malibu, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood, but is a different animal entirely from it’s more urban and urbane neighbors. If the San Fernando Valley had pretenses, this is where you’d find them. White people lived here. Pleasant, healthy, attractive white people. The kind that seems to exist free from the taint of ethnic origin as if maybe they had all been mail ordered from the Midwest by the developer. They’re the kind that doesn’t have any serious trouble, and doesn’t appreciate finding out that others do. If they’re not all Republicans, they should be. It’s got the holy trinity of suburban enclaves - retail, commercial, and residential. A typical day in the lives of the middle class residents finds them making the trinity rounds, fit, tan, and comfortably tucked into in their shiny expensive cars; to the coffee shop, the office, the restaurant, the office again, the health club, and home to start again the next day. Like the sod rolled out over the rocky sub-soil, the daily demonstrations of self-confidence, bordering on self-congratulation, were laid on a little too thick over an anxiousness about one’s station in life. If you close your eyes and listen, you can hear it. It’s the mewing of the upwardly mobile, the Song of the Self, sung to the church choir, day in and day out. The uniform attractiveness of the people and place has a way of working against itself here. It leaves you with the nagging feeling that something is missing, that you’re not getting the whole story. It leaves you looking for the odd, the unexpected, even the sinister, and human nature being what it is, you don’t have to look for long. When a stand-up guy like Bob turns up dead in his Beemer with three slugs in his gut, it’s more than a personal tragedy – it’s the kind of story that could blow the lid off a town like this. Lucky for me I didn’t have to come in cold. I had a man on the ground in Westlake. A well-placed man on the ground; Mike Barnett, one of my old Chicago school buddies. We used to call him Bronco Barnett back then. He had been a squeaky voiced kid, who wore big hunting knifes strapped to his skinny thighs, and had somehow convinced his parents to buy him one of the first Ford Broncos to come off the line . He was Maynard G. Krebs meets Crocodile Dundee. The years had been good to Bronco. He was now a smooth operator and a classy looking guy, sporting a trophy wife and his own brokerage firm. He could set you up in a refinanced mortgage, no questions asked and no documents required, without breaking a sweat. We had been re-united recently after a thirty year hiatus, and had been greasing each others wheels ever since. His office looked out across a shared parking lot to that of my cousin Bob’s. They frequented the same restaurants and bars. They worked out at the same gym. As an intelligence asset for this operation, he was golden. The drive down was as unremarkable as the scenery. Interstate 5 doesn’t have much to offer, and even at eighty miles an hour the featureless Central Valley might as well have been standing still. My parents were old, pushing ninety, and had glazed over an hour into the drive. I looked over at my dad. He was wearing his signature expression. The one built into his face from years of feeling the same way, the one that said to anyone interested in looking that he was locked down somewhere between pissed and amused. He would have rather been watching the game, any game. Change didn’t agree with him, especially the kind of change that was waiting for him these days, just around the corner, and the idea of going to a funeral was raising the acid level of his abdominal juices. My mother was a little more alert. Her eyes, focused somewhere beyond the confines of the car, dodged back and forth in fits and starts as if lost in a threatening dream. She was already there at the funeral scanning the faces making up the four generations of her family – counting heads – making sure everyone was present - looking for trouble, so she could head it off. Being the oldest girl in a large family with a needy and insecure mother, it had often fallen on her to care for the others. It was her younger brother we had buried two weeks ago, and her older brother who had killed himself all those years back. Now, it was his youngest son that was laid out stiff in a business suit on a slab in Westlake waiting for us. You could say things weren’t going so well on her watch. I wondered how she was taking it. I shrugged it off and turned my attention back to the road. All that wondering had only bought me a hundred miles. It was going dark as we started the push up the grapevine. This was getting to be a long drive and I was feeling stale and ready to be there. An hour later we were sliding down through the San Fernando Valley like a knife through margarine. 5 became 405 and we peeled off to the west on the Ventura Freeway, otherwise known as 101, or ‘the’ 101, if you were from around here. With the blur of tail lights and turn signals pulsing in my road-weary eyes, it made strange sense that the definite article would have a starring role in such an indefinite place. Sometimes freeways were all you could count on. They were a little like royalty here, and considering how much time everyone spent on them, they deserved a title, even if it was the same title for all of them. In Northern California we still labored under the quaint illusion that roads were just chunks of reinforced concrete for which numbers were sufficient. With the way traffic had been stacking up around the San Francisco Bay lately, I had a feeling we’d be getting over it soon. While the central valley had been devoid of things and all the same, Los Angeles was all the same and full of things. The parts here looked interchangeable, with a limited number of the same franchises vying for real estate on every corner in every part of the city. The arteries pulsed with petrochemical life as rivers of headlights moved in one direction while rivers of taillights moved in the other. Even the bedrock was on the move here, and the geologic fault lines kept uneasy company with facial lines in the Collective Unconscious. Personalities were as unstable as the ground. It was hard to know who you were dealing with from day to day in spite of the fact that the names didn’t change. Everybody was their own favorite project, calling on a kaleidoscopic array of improvement programs to change what looked back at them in the mirror every morning. But just as there was no center to the city, no historic point of origin, and any one part could only be located by its relationship to every other part, so the denizens of LA LA Land seemed to find themselves only in the attention they drew from others. I’d have to find an agent, if I was going to get anywhere in this town.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 15:21:59 +0000
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