“I do.”
He seemed upset, as if I’d given the wrong answer. “After all the shit they put you through?”
“Look, man, I’ve seen him.”
“At the laughing academy.”
“Without spirit,” I said, “matter is just a blob.”
“With Steve McQueen.” He cackled for a while, getting teary eyed, then he wiped his eyes with his forearm and said earnestly, “Wish I could believe in God.”
“You know what we forgot to talk about last night?”
He got a gulp from his coffee. “What’s that?”
“Your love life.”
“Love life,” he roared.
“Ever since I’ve known you you’ve had a honey on the line.”
Shelly brightened, finger combed his hair, pleased that I would ask. “Well, I have been seeing this waitress every Tuesday for the last year or so.”
“You’re dating her?”
“Well, I go to the restaurant where she works.”
“You ask her out yet?”
Not having had the benefit of a normal family, and believing there was such a thing, Shelly relied heavily on television for instruction on how everyone else, the “lucky people” in his view, lived. Television also provided the basis for many of his identities. Most of the time he was David Janssen in The Fugitive, a hardcore covert loner misunderstood, estranged by fate from the comforts that most Americans take for granted. But now he was Bud from the family sitcom Father Knows Best, whipping back his hair. He finished the sandwich, balled up the wrapping, set it next to him on the seat. “Not yet.”
The rules were we couldn’t go too deeply into Shelly’s girlfriends, only his intentions with them, which was dating and eventual marriage and Jane Wyman scenes with tinkling martini glasses glittering with the dry vermouth of ideal love. In the few years I’d known him before I’d moved to the Bay Area he had described many of his love interests to me: an unidentified TV news personality, the wife of an unspecified friend, a go-go dancer, a barmaid, a cashier at a grocery store, a neighbor, a girl he met one night walking along Harbor Island. I’d never met or even caught a glimpse of any of these women and he’d never produced a grain of evidence that any had ever existed. Pressing him for specifics would only make him recede, so it was a game we played on the shallowest levels, like third-graders giggling about girls on the playground. Still, it was a long drive and, curious, I continued to probe into his fancy. “She married, your Coco’s girl?”
“How’d you know she worked at Coco’s?”
“You told me.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Okay. I guessed. I know it’s your favorite restaurant.”
“It’s not my favorite restaurant.”
“She married, your Coco Puff?”
“Divorced.”
“Really? Kids?”
“Two boys.”
“Interesting. “How old are they?”
“Not sure. One’s in college.”
“State?”
“Pepperdine.”
Good detail. Maybe the girl was real. “So she must be around forty.”
He bunched his lips, nodded for a while. An Italian sports car, flat black and all fiberglass, blasted past on the left with a zzzshiiiing.
This was hardly fantasy territory. I considered: forty-year-old Coco’s waitress, divorced mother of two. “What’s her name, anyway?”
He scrubbed his eyelid with a pinkie, offered a half smile that might’ve been chagrin but was probably closer to I’ve Got a Secret. We both knew he wasn’t going to tell me. The names and locations of his girlfriends were always concealed.
Shelly was fascinated with the black actress Roxie Roker, who played neighbor Helen Willis on The Jeffersons. Helen Willis’s husband was white, making this the first regular prime-time show to feature an interracial couple. Roxie was also the real-life mother of multiple-Grammy-award-winning musician Lenny Kravitz, whose father was white. Shelly’s whole suburban life had been as white as Pat Boone’s 1957 B-side single “The Wang Dang Taffy-Apple Tango (Mambo Cha Cha Cha),” a song he detested, but black was the very soul of all the music he admired and sought, so it was no surprise when he confessed to me once with a breathily anxious giggle that he’d been in love for many years with Motown diva and frontwoman for the Supremes, Miss Diana Ross.
I decided to loosen him with a little levity. “She’s black, right?”
He let out a squeaky laugh that was almost a cry. His green eyes glittered.
“Hey, maybe we can double date. You bring the black chick, I’ll bring the dead one.”
He jiggled from laughter. He had to crack his window an inch. He seemed to be having trouble getting air. It was all this talk about women and love that made him breathless.
“Babe, babe, babe.” I assumed my psychiatric voice, calm but firm, trying to shake his carousel of imps, poses, and caricatures and get to the bottom of his girlfriend. “How can we have a serious discussion about someone you care about if I don’t even know her name?”
“Deborah,” he blurted, grinning wildly, showing off his wrecked and gapped smile, his eyes swinging side to side.
“Where does she live?”
He wagged his finger at me. I was getting too close.
A CHP unit zipped past us on the left, emergency top lights blazing.
“I need to know what to put on the wedding invitations,” I said.
He barked a laugh, his eyes widened in terror, and he was replaced by a more somber version of himself. Whenever he shifted like this I was reminded of his insistence that he had a multiple personality disorder, that he might be seven or eight, maybe twenty or two hundred distinct personalities, each independent and unaware of its neighbor.
It was difficult to read his thoughts, there were so many curtains and walls and infested vapors I doubted that he knew what the truth about himself was. I had granted him the overworked phenomenon called “compartmentalization,” a theoretical process by which the essential personality is fractured through a series of traumatic events in childhood. This theory is also sometimes applied as an explanation of the operation of habitual, recreational killers. Note also the Russian and American Cold War experiments to create “super agents” by similar processes, especially the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control programs, which may or may not have produced brainwashed patsy assassins such as
