Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 11
“Hurry up, let’s go,” shouts Leo.“I don’t want to go,” says Dave, still in bed, yawning.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” implores his mother, poking her head into her son’s room.
“Yeah, right,” moans Dave, covering his face with his pillow.
“Let him stay,” says Leo, not too thrilled himself about driving far into the San Fernando Valley on the weekend. He’d much rather be outdoors, under the hot sun, playing tennis. “But concentrate on your homework,” he adds. “And I don’t want you hanging around Stew’s place.”
“Yeah, fine. Whatever you say,” says Dave, intending to head right over to his friend’s apartment as soon as his family drives away.
Leo’s determined to leave early enough to beat the traffic, and Sarah wants to get to the discount store for their annual Melmac sale before they run low on stock.
Melmac: the dishware made from melamine resin—a polymer of melamine (a trimer of cyanamide with a triazine skeleton, combined with formaldehyde). Tasty, yes? And so easy to wash, stack, and store—and to drop without shattering into a thousand life-threatening ceramic shards. You can use Melmac for anything, and Sarah and Leo do, consuming countless cups of watery percolated coffee at every meal, heedless of how the steaming hot liquid interacts with its synthetic vessel. Why bother washing and chipping expensive china when you can use Melmac for your weekly schedule of dry Swiss steak, leathery overcooked liver, juicy double-baked brisket, and Kraft macaroni and cheese? Plus potatoes, boiled or baked—“Dinner isn’t dinner without potatoes,” Leo insists, accustomed still to his mother’s plain cooking.
The San Fernando Valley, where they’re headed early Saturday morning, itself resembles a kind of synthetic Melmac cosmos, the pseudo-urban world of Los Angeles spreading rapidly like an invasive species over the mountains and up and down the coast. Large ranch-style homes with expansive water-hungry fertilizer-consuming lawns and other foreign plants fill this flat, endless, formerly dry chaparral plain, a plastic malignancy grafted onto the amorphous conurbation of Greater, and lesser, LA.
But to get to the Valley you must first cross though the Santa Monica Mountains, and that’s fun. Unlike LA’s boring grid streets, with their endless rows of single-story homes, the canyon passageways twist and turn and rise and fall, following the natural landscape and offering glimpses of woodsy shacks and pricey secluded bohemian-looking estates owned by otherwise unconventional left-leaning celebrities. Packing into Leo’s meticulously washed white Mercury sedan, you head into your choice of Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Benedict Canyon, Beverly Glen, or Sepulveda Pass, each of which winds its way through the mountains.
It’s around one of those bends that Leo abruptly lowers his speed, seeing flashing lights ahead. “Monty, duck down right now,” Sarah cries out. “Cover your eyes. And don’t look out the window.”
A sure signal for Monty to raise his head just enough to see the smoking remains of a crash and the leg of a lady protruding from under the wheel of one of the cars, the rest of her body lying in an expanding pool of blood. It’s not the first crash he’s witnessed, three decades before seatbelts become mandatory in California. But it’s the first time he’s seen an actual dead human being. Maybe the car’s going to explode, he thinks, smelling gasoline fumes and smoldering rubber.
“Is she dead?” he asks, both terrified and aroused.
More thrilling yet than the calamities along the winding passes are the conflagrations that periodically devour the mountainsides themselves. Caused by lightning, faulty power lines, or people accidentally or intentionally setting light to the parched terrain, the fires spread rapidly through the canyons, mutating into monumental infernos. Watching safely from afar, sitting on the lawn of his West LA home, Monty watches in awe when sections of the Santa Monica Mountains perennially go up in flames, consuming the homes of the rich. Of course, wildfires also wreck poor people’s lives. And years later, Monty will feel empathy for all suffering—that of the rich as well—and not just human suffering. Nevertheless, catastrophes of all sorts confirm that, despite Homo sapiens’ conceit we’ve conquered the final zenith of evolution, nature ultimately wins. We all die—especially Monty. He knows he’s doomed, and it terrifies him.
“Let’s go,” says Leo, beckoning his family once again into his pristine Merc, this time to join hundreds of other families driving into the hills to gawk at the sight of mansions burned out during the most recent disaster. Who needs Karl Marx butting in when homemade firestorms level the playing field?
By the time Monty flees LA and its smog and heat to attend a notoriously libertine, though academically prestigious, private college in Portland, where he hopes he’ll get a superior education—and lots of sex—most people will have abandoned driving through the picturesque canyon roads to get to the Valley. They’ll be loading instead onto the new Interstate 405. Slashing its way sensibly and efficiently north through the mountains, the San Diego Freeway, as it’s called, is a breeze—except it isn’t. Within days of opening and forever afterward, the 405 will be packed with more cars and more traffic jams than any other single highway in all of America.
But who cares? Monty lives in a pretend world where everything including nothing is here for the taking. Los Angeles itself is a fake city transformed from a conquistador slave mission into an urban sprawl conjured up by railroad and water barons who exploited the northern half of the state’s resources to irrigate the land and incite waves of property speculation. Freeway construction took off after World War II, ultimately crisscrossing the entire LA basin, allowing you to drive everywhere, and nowhere.
And why not? Gas is practically free. Until it isn’t. Until not only does the price of fuel jump, but Monty and everyone else wakes up five or six decades later to realize, lo and behold, me personally, I’ve poisoned the earth’s atmosphere and melted the polar ice caps.
In the meantime, life is scary enough as it is for this eight-year-old—like walking by himself to elementary school, taking care that he doesn’t get attacked on the way by wild animals when he turns the corner of his own street and descends Preuss Road, the steepest hill in his little world.
From the crest of the hill, he can look east toward central Los Angeles. Here Preuss Road has a few larger homes that seem like mansions to Monty and more American, some displaying the flag every day. Christian, Monty guesses. These houses must be Christian. Christians fly American flags every day. Jews like my family live in Spanish-style houses and only fly the flag on July Fourth, and only so no one will think they’re communists.
The homes on his street are smaller and virtually identical in style. In one of several standard layouts, thousands of pastiche Spanish colonial homes were built in LA in the 1930s and ’40s, mostly to accommodate employees of the burgeoning defense industry. Seventy years later these modest homes will be highly esteemed for their decorative details—genuine terra-cotta roof tiles, cool patios, leaded stained glass windows, and wrought iron gates. Landscaped with native plants, modernized with air-conditioning and faux-marble kitchens, fitted out with solar panels on their flat roofs, they’ll cost a hundred times what Leo and Sarah paid in 1950.
Midway down Preuss Hill, heading toward his school, there’s a mysterious house on a double lot, hidden behind tall, stinky-smelling bushes. An old man lives there and, it’s rumored, keeps animals for the movies—dogs and cats, giant snakes and lizards, monkeys, perhaps tigers and lions too. Monty’s never seen any of these animals, but he walks by carefully to avoid disturbing them. In West Los Angeles, you never know when you’ll come face-to-face with a wild beast. Or Nazis or Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy.
Or a movie star, for practically right next door is Hollywood. Monty understands Hollywood. Hollywood is the girl in his third-grade class selected to be a guest on Art Linkletter’s televised kids’ show. The whole class watches her on a puny TV set mounted on a flimsy metal stand at the front of the room. Later she appears in commercials and has a role in a movie, a Western.
“I want to be an actor,” Monty tells his parents, pleading to be sent to acting school. He yearns to be in the movies, to be famous, worshipped, immortal, with his own everlasting gold star on Hollywood Boulevard.
A few years earlier he began demonstrating his thespian prowess at the meetings his parents hosted of the one organization they still dared to belong to, the Red Scare having frightened them into quitting the rest. Members of this secular Jewish association were uniformly “liberals,” his parents’ code word for left-wing Democrats, socialists, and disenchanted ex-communists. Although Leo and Sarah are devoutly nonreligious and committed to racial, religious, and all sorts of other equality, they associate exclusively with other Jews. Liberal Jews.
But there was no politics in this organization. Families would merely gather for picnics with games and barbecues, all very American. When the club’s executive committee met in Monty’s living room, every few minutes he would parade through the room dressed in a different costume. Astride a broom and wearing a witch’s hat left over from Halloween. Draped in a dusty serape, wearing a Mexican hat and shaking maracas purchased during a cut-rate vacation in Baja California. Or brandishing a toy rubber sword and wrapped in a bedspread as a cape, a precursor to Zorro, the righteous upper-class communist who fights the rich and liberates the poor. More characters would appear until his father led him back to his room and ordered him to stay put. He would sit and mope on the floor, playing with his set of toy plastic American soldiers battling Tinkertoy spools, their center holes armed with pick-up sticks. The soldiers always lost: a virtuous fledgling liberal was Monty.
Over the next three years he glumly plots escaping from his bedroom into stardom, becoming infinitely more famous than his classmate, and meanwhile saving the world from starvation, disease, and Richard Nixon. Nix on Nixon reads the presidential bumper sticker on his parents’ best friend’s car, a rusty Model T Ford—like the American communist, a vanishing relic from a bygone era.
“Okay, okay,” Sarah says, giving in to her son’s daily plea. “You can try out that acting school where your cousin went.”
“Waste of money,” says Leo, frowning.
“Yippee,” cries Monty, jumping up and down.
“But remember,” his mother says, “artists starve.”
“Yeah, you should be a lawyer instead,” says his father. “You can convince us of anything.”
One thing he hasn’t managed to convince his parents to do is to give him a weekly allowance like all his classmates receive. Unless he hoards his milk money, he has no spare change, and for months he’s been jealously eyeing other children who stop after school at a corner store and buy Abba-Zabas, Sugar Babies, Bazooka gum, Oh Henry! bars, and Tootsie Rolls. On his way home one rainy Friday, wearing his yellow raincoat and buckled galoshes, Monty grabs a tiny syrup-filled wax bottle from the store counter and hides it in his pants pocket.
As he’s about to head out the door, the owner, a tall, thin bald man wearing a white apron, steps in front of him, raises a fist above his head, and bellows, “Give me that candy! If I ever catch you stealing again, I’ll kill you.”
Two cents they cost: life is cheap in LA. Terrified, Monty hands over the miniature wax bottle and runs out.
The next morning, anxious the man will kill him on sight, he crawls into his parents’ bed and, whimpering, tells them what happened. When they ask if he’s ever stolen anything else, he tearfully leads them outside to the trash can, where he digs down and pulls out five toy cars he’d carefully hidden in crumpled newspaper. He pilfered the cars from a neighborhood toy-and-photography studio where his parents have taken him and his brother every year for family portraits.
“Why did you do this?” his father asks, for once not angry but sensitive to his son’s crisis.
“Because I want a dog,” Monty answers straightaway.
Has he been longing for a dog? The thought’s crossed his mind for sure, but it’s not something he’s craving. Not like candies or theater school or Cubby the Mouseketeer. A dog is merely the quickest excuse he can think of to account for his life of crime. And come to think of it, having a dog might make life perfect. I could be happy all the time, like Jeff, he thinks, picturing the cute blond owner of the golden collie Lassie in the popular TV series of the same name. Monty even looks like a Jewish version of the towheaded Jeff.
The next weekend his parents take him to the nearest pound, where he immediately selects a skittish black-and-tan mongrel with rancid breath. He names her Josephine, a dog he’ll soon enough ignore, leaving her to his father to care for. Decades later he’ll have nightmares that while his parents are away on vacation, he’s left Josephine outside for days and forgotten to add water to her bowl.
As for the pilfered cars, his parents don’t embarrass Monty by insisting he return them to the toy shop. Instead they’re stored high in a closet and later given away as gifts. A family of Zorros sharing ill-begotten booty.
Besides his life as a serial thief, Monty is also a serial killer. Each spring—a seasonal change only barely detectable in Los Angeles, with a slight uptick in temperature—bright pink buds appear on the begonia plants his mother hangs in pots from the archway over the front patio. Lovingly he pops open all the buds he can reach. They make such a marvelous sound. Pop pop pop. It’s a wonder any survive.
And now that he can reach the lower branches of the jacaranda tree growing in the narrow curbside band of lawn in front of his house, he can strip away its violet-colored blossoms. The flowers come off in one delightfully orgasmic zip as he pulls his thumb and forefinger down each stem. Zip zip zip. The lawn is covered with a sea of slaughtered bright purplish-blue blossoms.
What marvelous power Monty has over nature—forget about those fires. Later in life, a practicing Buddhist, he’ll go out of his way to avoid accidentally bruising a flower or harming the tiniest insect. But today he’s free to exercise his ferociously male killer instinct, doing his part in what turns into humanity’s unwitting mass species extinction.
Ants are a favorite target. On the paved driveway of his home, they’re declared enemy number one. J. Edgar Hoover, at the height of his power as FBI director, fails to dispatch anywhere near as many evildoers. Barely ten years old, Monty inflicts a holocaust on ants, his abiding fear of death never once arousing mercy for other forms of life. Not yet, anyway.
Particularly enticing is attacking the ants when they form a long line to harvest something like a dead caterpillar. Slap slap slap: he dispatches hundreds and thousands of ants with the bottom of his rubber flip-flops. The ones his parents bought for him at the Akron store that recently opened not far from his home, introducing Angelenos to all sorts of cheap, colorful imports from Mexico, Korea, Japan, and other impoverished countries.
In the fifties, a decade after its humiliating defeat, Japan remains vanquished and destitute, unlike America at the height of its power: optimistic, economically burgeoning, blindly ignorant of the outside world. Yet to be significantly challenged by the Soviet Union or communist China, America faces only one grave menace: Tetramorium, better known as pavement ants.
These and other Formicidae threaten the entire Monty household. Sarah is vigilant for the slightest sign of them indoors. Particularly vulnerable is the vented kitchen cabinet where bananas and other ripening fruit are stored. “Leo, get the poison. They’re everywhere,” she cries out in panic after spotting two or three scout ants.
Small bottles of sickly-sweet-smelling goop are opened and set up here and there throughout the kitchen, while Monty handles extermination duties outside. A family of liberals transformed into homicidal maniacs.
After he’s attended the private drama school for two years, Monty’s parents convince him to shift to less costly classes at the local Jewish community center. At first his good looks get him leading roles. One time he plays Judah Maccabee, the hero of the Hanukkah celebration. When it comes time for his character to light the menorah, Monty shouts his lines so melodramatically that the younger children representing the candles all break up in giggles. By the time he’s twelve years old, he admits to himself how grossly he overacts and abandons his hope of stardom. But “acting” continues to hang over him like a brand identity.
“You’re just acting,” says Leo when Monty declares his intention to run away to socialist Sweden. “Stop acting,” his mother exclaims when he says he’ll die if she doesn’t buy him a scooter like other neighborhood boys have. “They’re too dangerous.” And years later, when he returns from his freshman year in college and announces he’s gay, “You’re just acting,” his father will declare.
Monty’s begun thinking the same thing himself, that he’s pretending all the time. That he’s a total fake. Pretending to be interested in girls like the other boys in his grade school constantly proclaim, going along with their vulgar taunts, meanwhile hoping no one notices that he’s furtively eyeing the bulges in other boys’ crotches. Bulges that have grown more prominent and alluring with each advancing grade level, cupped neatly by stiff blue Levi’s jeans, with their rolled-up cuffs.
He realizes he isn’t supposed to be ogling boys’ crotches. That’s what’s called queer or faggot and what you get beat up for, for being a sissy, a target of loathing and ridicule. He should be staring instead at girls’ nascent boobs, titties, bangers, bazookas. That’s what all the boys incessantly talk about, boasting of what they would do to these titties or those titties, inventing stories that they’d made it with so-and-so, that they’d had her, whatever that means.
Monty first catches a glimpse of pubescent breasts, so unlike the sagging wrinkled lumps he’d once inadvertently seen when his grandma was dressing in her mothball-and-rosewater-smelling bedroom and forgot to close the door. He’s standing in the bleachers where his sixth-grade class has assembled for their graduation photo. Among the tallest boys, he’s placed in the middle of the top row. From here he can peer down the blouse of the girl standing below him. Her first-bloom breasts are round and firm. He’s supposed to be titillated by these titties and to long to fondle them … and tell all the other boys about his made-up conquests. But he doesn’t feel the urge at all. He wants the Mouseketeer Cubby and Cubby’s thing, or some other Cubby’s thing. Or Jay, the boy who’d once nuzzled up close to him on the kindergarten steps.
By chance, later that day he’s standing right next to that same Jay. In the years since kindergarten, Monty had often spotted him in the playground—tougher, rakish now for a twelve-year-old—but they’d never become friends. The two have been assigned to load up stacks of newspaper onto a flatbed truck for an end-of-year drive to collect funds for a new piano in the auditorium honoring the school’s retiring principal.
Grasping the scratchy sisal string the bundles are tied with, Monty has a momentary fantasy he’s touching the rough fabric of Jay’s faded blue jeans, along the inside of his thigh. The thought sends a chill through his body, like when his mother used to tickle his feet after cutting his toenails. Taking a sidelong glance at Jay, he’s startled to see a large protrusion in the boy’s crotch. Jay catches him looking and smiles. “Down, boy,” he says, talking to his erect penis as if it were a person and he could coax it to settle back down.
Turning to face Monty, he says, “Wanna touch it?” Still the same Jay.
Monty blushes, shocked by the boy’s brazenness. Yes, I want to, he’d like to answer. I’m dying to touch it.
But he’s too scared to say a word, looking this way and that, checking that no one’s watching them, embarrassed by his own arising erection. What if he’s fooling me and tells everyone I’m a faggot? Why does he even have a hard-on? Monty wonders, not realizing he himself is the attraction, that Jay is as aroused by him as he is by Jay, whose erection at that moment is Monty’s whole universe. And yes, he wants it. Desperately.
“Huh, what do you mean?” Monty manages to squeak out.
“Nothing,” says Jay, sniggering. “Just kidding around.”
Or not.
Later that day, standing in the large, tiled stall in the bathroom next to his bedroom, taking his habitual thirty-five-minute-long shower, hot water running over his face and chest, down his back, along the crack of his ass and through the hairs newly sprouting around his genitals, he’s passionately trying to masturbate, thinking about Jay’s erection while rubbing his own.
This growing passion, this new obsession—something besides fearing death, besides showing off how smart he is or craving to be a movie star—is gradually taking shape in Monty’s consciousness. Shadowy and amorphous at first, rising from the source of his being, as intrinsic as his having grayish-blue eyes and blond hair, it calls to him with an instinct he still has no name for. Within the year he’ll have a name for it and furtively look up the word homosexual in every science and reference book he can get his hands on at his local library branch, careful that no one sees him. Careful that no one will think that, like his deformed Aunt Beatrice, he’s a freak.