My Dark Places

blue robe. I put her in bed with some assembly line studs. I gave the guys pompadours and knife scars. They looked like Steve Cochran in Private Hell 36. I was working for hyperbole. I thought ugly details might resurrect ugly memories. I wanted to chart the redhead’s sex roll from my father to the Swarthy Man. My father was weak. He had a tough guy’s body and a candy-ass soul. My mother kicked him out of her life and went minimalistic. All men were weak and some men were weak and attractive. You could not control their weakness. You could limit your awareness of it and euphemize it past recognition. You could let men into your life in limited dosages. I did not see a male stampede to my mother’s door. I caught her in flagrante twice. My father said she was a whore. I believed him. I sensed her sexual bent. I filtered my awareness through my own lust for her. She lived with my father for 15 years. She succumbed to an image. She wised up. Disillusionment was enlightenment. She went at men from a disillusioned and wholly male perspective. Men were containable. Sex and liquor was the way to contain them. She flushed 15 years down the toilet. She knew she was passively complicit. She despised her own stupidity and weakness. She saw cheap men as her consolation prize. She saw me as her redemption. She sent me to church and made me study. She preached diligence and discipline. She didn’t want me to turn into my father. She didn’t smother me with love and turn me into a ’50s textbook faggot. She lived in two worlds. I marked the dividing line. She thought her dual-world scheme was sustainable. She miscalculated. She didn’t know that suppression never works. She had liquor and men over here. She had her little boy over there. She spread herself thin. She saw her worlds blur together. My father rubbed her honky-tonk world in my face. He out-propagandized her. He taught me to hate her every weekend. She scorned him every weekday. She fed me scorn with less virulence than he fed me hatred. She preached hard work and determination. She was a drunk and a whore and thus a hypocrite. The world she built around me did not exist. I had x-ray-eye access to her hidden world.

I caught her in bed with a man. She pulled a sheet up over her breasts. I caught her in bed with Hank Hart. They were naked. I saw a bottle and an ashtray on the nightstand. She moved us to El Monte. I saw a whore in flight. She might have fled to create a space between her two worlds. She said we were moving for my sake. I wrote it off as a lie. Say I was wrong. Say she ran for both of us. She ran too fast and misread El Monte. She saw it as a buffer zone. It looked like a good place for weekend revelry. It looked like a good place to raise a little boy.

She tried to teach me things. I learned them belatedly. I became more disciplined and meticulous and diligent and determined than she ever could have hoped for. I surpassed all her dreams for my success. I couldn’t buy her a house and a Cadillac and express my gratitude in true nouveau riche fashion.

We time-traveled. We covered our ten years together. We made irregular jumps back and forth. Old memories played out contrapuntally. Every Jean-the-profligate-redhead blip sparked a counterpoint image. There’s Jean drunk. There’s Jean with her ungrateful son. He fell out of a tree. She’s pulling splinters from his arms. She’s swabbing him with witch hazel. She’s holding a pair of tweezers under a magnifying glass.

We time-traveled. I lost track of real time in the dark. That counterweighted balance held. I ran out of memories and opened my eyes.

I saw my wall graph. I felt the sweat on my pillow.

I turned off my time machine. I didn’t want to take her anywhere else. I didn’t want to place her in fictional settings or wrap my revelations up and call them her life summarized. I didn’t want to write her off as complex and ambiguous. I didn’t want to shortchange her.

I was hungry and restless. I wanted to breathe fresh air and look at live people.

I drove to a mall. I walked to a food court and got a sandwich. The place was jammed. I watched people. I watched men and women together. I looked for seductions. Robbie courted Tracy in public. The Swarthy Man took Jean to Stan’s Drive-in. Harvey knocked on Judy’s door and made her feel safe.

I didn’t see anything suspicious.

I quit surveilling. I sat still. People crossed my line of sight. I felt buoyant. I was on some kind of oxygen high.

It hit me softly.

The Swarthy Man was irrelevant. He was dead or he wasn’t. We’d find him or we wouldn’t. We’d never stop looking. He was only a directional sign. He forced me to extend myself and give my mother her full due.

She was no less than my salvation.

27

The jury delivered. Daddy Beckett fell for Tracy Stewart. Bill said he’d get life without. Gloria Stewart confronted him. She pled for her daughter’s body and called Daddy terrible names. I said there was no body and no closure. Daddy got life. Gloria got life with Daddy and Robbie.

Bill threw a backyard party. He called it a pre-Labor Day bash. It was really a goodbye party aimed at Daddy Beckett.

I attended. Dale Davidson and his wife attended. Vivian Davidson was a deputy DA. She knew the Beckett case intimately. Some other DAs came down. Gary White and his girlfriend came down. Bill’s father showed up. Bill’s neighbors walked over. Everybody ate hot dogs and burgers and talked murder. The cops and DAs were relieved that the Beckett mess was over. The non-cops and non-DAs thought that meant closure. I wanted to find the fool who invented closure and shove a big closure plaque up his ass. Everybody talked about OJ. Everybody riffed on the potential verdict and its potential ramifications. I didn’t talk much. I was at my own party with the redhead. She was playful. She was snagging potato chips off my plate. We were sharing our own private jokes.

I watched Bill toss burgers and talk to his friends. I knew he was relieved. I knew his relief dated back to Daddy Beckett’s arrest. He circumvented Daddy’s shot at killing other women. That was a hypothetically sound resolution. The guilty verdict was more ambiguous. Daddy was old and infirm. His rape-and-kill days were gone. Robbie was still in his rape-and-kill and beat-up-women prime. He just turned in a stunning performance. It facilitated justice in the matter of L.A. County vs. Robert Wayne Beckett Sr. It made him friends in law enforcement. He committed patricide in their name. It looked good on his prison record. It might serve to influence a premature parole.

Bill was still on the Drop Zone Expressway. He was serving out his own life sentence. He chose murder. Murder chose me. He came to murder as a moral duty. I came to murder as a voyeur. He became a voyeur. He had to look. He had to know. He succumbed to repeated seductions. My seductions started and stopped with my mother. Bill and I were indictable co-defendants. We were on trial in the Court of Murder Victim Preference. We favored female victims. Why sublimate your lust when you can use it as a tool of perception? Most women were killed for sex. That was our voyeuristic justification. Bill was a professional detective. He knew how to look and sift and stand back from his findings and retain his professional composure. I could eschew those restraints. I did not have to build