One day, looking for stamps in Shelly’s desk, I came across a scrapbook full of news clippings about the butchers, torturers, cannibals, and vampires he so esteemed. He’d been keeping this book since the 1960s, starting with the Zodiac Killer, who’d never been caught. The bulk of the book was dedicated to local killers, no shortage of those. There were several articles about the Green River Killer, who many thought had migrated from Washington State to operate in the wooded areas of east and north San Diego. Then there was Cleophus Prince, Jr., dubbed the Clairemont Killer, a black mother-haunted chap who stabbed his white female victims with repeated frenzy in their chests. The Marine serial killer Andrew Urdiales had started killing prostitutes in his home state of Illinois before his pathological talents were relocated to Camp Pendleton and consequently the unfortunate prostitutes of San Diego. Ramon Rogers was a TV actor and a heavy metal drummer who managed an apartment building in east San Diego and dismembered his close friends with a jigsaw and bolt cutters. Shelly lived in San Carlos, so he had also enshrined the San Carlos Triumvirate: David Allen Lucas, an awkward bullet-headed kid who had cut the throats of many women and children; sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer, who’d shot students of Grover Cleveland Elementary School (the same school Shelly had attended) across the street from the window of her home because she claimed to not like Mondays, yielding a hit single for the Boomtown Rats called “I Don’t Like Mondays”; and Eagle Scout Daniel Alstadt, who after being prohibited from attending a keg party by his authoritarian father, chopped up his entire family — father, mother, sister, brother, and dog — with a hatchet, started his San Carlos home on fire, and went to the party. Lucas was on death row at San Quentin. Spencer, whose school shooting had kicked off a national trend, continued to be refused parole. Alstadt hanged himself in his cell. All three of these killers had struck within the same decade and the same square mile. Murder was definitely in the air in Shelly’s quaint suburban neighborhood.
In another section of this scrapbook, toward the back, were several backpage briefs about missing Tijuana prostitutes. I wondered why Shelly would clip, much less save them. I could determine no dates, though by the newsprint I could tell they were fairly recent. No bodies had been found, no doubt due to the usual public apathy surrounding ladies of the night, but in one of the longer stories, the only one with a hook, it was mentioned that human bones had been recovered from the great incinerator at La Zona Basura, Tijuana’s largest landfill. And though no forensic connection between the burned bones and the vanished hookers had been made, there was prevailing suspicion in the mind of the Tijuana chief of police that the bones belonged to the missing prostitutes.
I returned the scrapbook to its drawer and began to wonder again about Shelly’s claim of multiple personalities, his fractured but carefully partitioned life, his instability, long suffering estrangement, frustration with women, necrophilic fantasies, his long disappearances, his absence of official identity, his frequent expeditions into Tijuana to “straighten out the mess in his head,” and those scorch marks up the passenger’s side door of all his pickup trucks.
22.Mo Ho
MY GROWING INABILITY TO WATCH TELEVISION FOR FEAR THAT IT was stealing my thoughts, brief periods of amnesia and lost time, that fellow approaching in the black overcoat with impulse camera lenses for eyes, the notion that I might somehow be on the verge of isolating the “spice” of the eighth sense, a daylong Tijuana infatuation with obtaining a nonexistent tequila called Monstruo that possessed occult powers, my coffee crystal revelations that had no bearing on the subjects I was attempting to address, my tendency toward echolalia and word transposition, my active fantasy that I was being interviewed by a late-night talk show host, and my rising rage when I encountered a female stranger, were all warnings I should’ve heeded.
But I told myself that a few bumps and blowouts and stormy days down any highway were to be expected. I surely wasn’t going to call Jangler over a handful of minor episodes. And though every schizophrenic I had ever known had been capable of only destructive plots, my view had been tainted by being housed with chronically criminal psychotics. Many more others like me sat harmlessly in wicker chairs playing bridge in sunny sanitariums. Still others functioned benignly and contributed to society. There were even examples of stark-ravers who flourished despite (or perhaps even because) of their affliction: John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize in economics; the artist Louis Wain and his electric Hindu cats; dozens of musicians, including space-rocker Syd Barrett, a founder of Pink Floyd, and blues great Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac; and myriad other Poes, Goyas, El Grecos, and van Goghs.
Neither did I intend to return to medication. My dyskinesia was down to faint tremors. Any possibility of spontaneous recovery, slim as it was, got slimmer under the influence of neurologically toxic antipsychotics, which I now understood were designed to be addictive and therefore to supply an endless river of revenue into the reservoirs of the pharmaceutical companies. The classic psychiatric description of psychosis is an individual untethered from reality, but it seemed more precise to say that this same individual had gotten untethered somehow from the truth. And the truth was not drugs, so I vowed, as Jangler had advised from the beginning,
