intensely, almost desperately focused on improving himself, as though he were running out of time to make something stick. He wanted to do something purposeful with his life and find some kind of happiness. He still nursed dreams of getting into the porn business--while in L.A. he bought sex manuals and a set of Japanese chrome handcuffs and even corresponded with a local club for swingers--but that idea had foundered a bit since leaving Puerto Vallarta. Instead, he enrolled in a correspondence locksmithing course offered by a company in New Jersey, for he was seized with the notion of becoming a first-rate thief, a safecracker, a moonlight yegg. He took dance lessons, read self-help books, and even consulted a cosmetic surgeon to see about making a few small repairs. Now he'd 'graduated' from bartending school.
It was, for Eric Galt, a time of branching out, of creative and eclectic if somewhat frantic growth. He was like an empty vessel for all the trends of the zeitgeist. He tried on different lives for himself, fresh looks and new styles. He began to think about moving permanently to a foreign country--New Zealand, perhaps, or someplace in South America or southern Africa. He talked vaguely about starting an orphanage for neglected children--child abuse being his soft spot, the one subject that consistently aroused in him noticeable stirrings of empathy. Other times he dreamed of working in the merchant marine or using his newfound bartending skills to open up a pub in Ireland. Here in the bright forgiving anonymity of L.A., in the early spring of 1968, Eric Galt thought he could do just about anything.
And what a boomtime it was to be in L.A.--this twitchy young metropolis of starlets and jet-setters, webbed with highways, exploding with myriad fads, its multiple skylines sprouting new stalagmites of mirrored glass, its hectic airport presided over by a futuristic tower that looked like a flying saucer on four legs. Lew Alcindor was perfecting his skyhook for UCLA, while Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were riding high with the Lakers. The Doors' third studio album,
ERIC STARVO GALT was forty years old, clean in his appearance, his skin smooth and clear but of an almost fish-belly wanness--whatever tan he had acquired on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta had long since faded. He lived on aspirin, and complained of headaches, insomnia, and nameless concerns. His heart raced, and he felt odd pains in his chest. Though a recent eye test revealed that he had twenty-twenty vision, he sometimes worried that he was going blind. He was constantly adjusting his medications, refining his regimes of self-maintenance. He took One A Day vitamins and various supplements. If he was a bit scrawny, he kept his muscles lean and tough with regular calisthenics and weight lifting--he'd recently bought himself a set of barbells.108
Though Galt dressed cheaply, he dressed with neatness and exactitude. He buffed his fake-alligator loafers to a fine polish. He made sure his tailored suit was crisp and sharp and took his clothes every Saturday afternoon to the Home Service Laundry on Hollywood Boulevard, just down the street from his hotel.
In like fashion, Galt fussed with his grooming and was no stranger to a mirror. He kept his face clean shaven, his nails trim, his charcoal hair combed straight back and oiled with Brylcreem, so that it gave off a petroleum sheen in the light. His tidiness and hygiene were a source of special pride; though he frequented the sorriest flophouses and dives, and felt at home among the most unsavory characters, he took satisfaction in knowing that, in his way, he'd risen above the filth around him.
For all his preening, Galt lacked confidence about his looks; he seemed an oddly skittish man, awkward around people and hard to pin in a conversation. He gave off the appearance of a hustler preoccupied with sub-rosa enterprises he did not wish to divulge. Most people took the cue and left him alone.
Those who did speak with him found him hard to understand, for he blurted out words in unrhythmic spates and monosyllables, mumbling softly, his lips cramped in an uncomfortable-looking construction, as though his mouth were full of sharp rocks. He spoke in a drawl that was hard to place; it was the drawl of rural Illinois, along the Mississippi River valley, where he had grown up during the Depression in a succession of impoverished towns. It was the drawl of St. Louis, the city he and his family had lived in and out of--the city that, in his drifter's way, Galt considered home.
Galt was willing to spend good money on certain prescribed things--like dance lessons and bartending school or his portable Zenith television--but at heart he was a cheapskate. He darned his own clothes, sewed buttons on his fraying shirts, drank horse-piss beer, lived in prideful squalor, rarely tipped in restaurants, and prowled drugstores for bargain-basement sales on toiletry items. If he dined out, he usually ordered greasy hamburgers at drive-ins, but more often he ate in his room, subsisting on crackers, canned food, and powdered soups that he warmed in a mug with an electric immersion heater. 'He was tight as a tick,' said one acquaintance; his expenses amounted to scarcely more than five dollars a day.
Galt was equally stingy with his words and thoughts. His emotional life was a mystery. He rarely gestured and almost never laughed. He liked to leave people guessing and once described his personal motto as 'Never let the left hand know what the right is doing.' He once said, in the manner of a boast, that he had not cried since he was twelve years old.
His sexual relationships were fleeting and superficial. Women, he had said, were to use and forget. He'd never married, and he'd never been in love--indeed, he hated the word 'love.' 'I don't think that a man109 sits around talking about love and so on. It sounds sort of odd to me. Women--they'll break down and cry and all that stuff.' As he had in Puerto Vallarta, Galt frequented hookers, and according to one acquaintance his preferred mode of pleasure was 'to get his knob polished.'110 His life seemed devoid of romance. 'You can't trust anyone too far, especially the women type,' Galt later wrote. 'No woman has ever thought much of me--and anyways, marrying would have interfered with my travels.'
Those who conversed with Galt often came away with the unsettling realization that he had revealed nothing of pinpointable substance--and that he rarely returned a gaze. An introduction to Eric Galt was an unsatisfying affair--his handshake was limp and unresponsive. Blinking rapidly, Galt would turn his head and look downward or sideways, so that even close up it was hard to appraise the man. Like a squid, he seemed to throw up clouds of obscuring ink, hoping to screen himself from scrutiny and keep others guessing who he was and where he stood.
Students at the National Dance Studio, where Galt took rumba and cha-cha lessons for several months, quickly noticed his mysterious reticence. The school, on Pacific Avenue in Long Beach, was a melancholy place where lonely hearts came to meet under the net of easy intimacy that close dancing threw over strangers. Galt, however, would not interact with the other students, and refused to join in the fun. He was grimly determined to learn his moves; he said he might soon relocate to a Hispanic country. 'I find myself attracted111 to the Latins,' he said. 'They're easygoing. They're not too bothered by rules and regulations.' But, he said, 'it helps socially if you know a little something about the Latin dances.' He did in fact memorize the steps, but he was stiff and ungraceful. He got the mechanics of the rumba, but none of its soul.
Galt was especially self-conscious around his female partners and would not allow himself to succumb to their harmless flirtations. He would just shiver bashfully in their arms and look down.
'He was shy,' one instructor said. 'One time I talked with him for an hour and tried to break him down. When the conversation got personal, he became quiet.' Rod Arvidson, the manager of the National Dance Studio, concurred: 'He was the withdrawn type,112 the type that often
Nearly everything about Eric Galt seemed bland and retiring, the details of his appearance falling somewhere in the statistical middle: average height, average weight, average build, average age. The cumulative effect of all these milquetoast qualities made him strangely forgettable.
If one lingered and studied him awhile, though, certain attributes began to reveal themselves, like previously unnoticed images rising in the chemicals of a darkroom sink. There was the crooked grin on his face, which, though subtle, was a nearly permanent feature--a smirk that curled with irony and seemed to suggest he knew something he would never tell. There was the tiny dimple on his chin, the touch of gray in his sideburns, the thick cross- hatching of dark hair on his forearms, and a small scar in the center of his forehead. There was his lumbering, slough-footed gait, the stride of a much older man, punctuated by a faint limp. There, too, were the rabbity little tics: the way he constantly tugged on his left ear, the weak nervous giggle, the compulsive habit he had of shuttling
