John Belushi Is Dead (15 page)

“Why? The kid doesn't seem too bothered by it. It's not like it's old enough to understand what's going on.”

Hank leaned back on the cushion. “I hate kids,” he grumbled.

“But how great is this?” I said, looking around at the crowds as they settled in. “If any film was made to be watched at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, it's
Sunset Boulevard
. It's like the ultimate Hollywood horror film.”

“Gloria Swanson sure was something in her day,” he said. “Stunning.”

“Were you ever in love, Hank?”

“Yeah. We nearly married, but she couldn't live with my goddamn demons.” He looked at the grass thoughtfully. “Sometimes even I can't.”

“There's still so much I don't know about you,” I said.

“You know enough.”

“I know that I have successfully managed to extract you from your house. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.”

“Don't get too cocky. The only reason I don't leave my place is that there ain't no good reason to.”

“Are you kidding me? Hank, we live in
Los Angeles
. This is the best city in the world. There's always something going on, and it's
like something amazing happened on every single street corner. Everything has a story behind it.”

“I've heard a lot of stories in my time,” Hank said. “And not all good ones.”

“Like what?”

Before he could answer, the projector started and the wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum became a screen. Everyone clapped and cheered and even Hank let out a laugh. “We're ready for our close-up, Mr. DeMille,” someone yelled, and the crowd laughed and clapped again.

“Benji would've loved this,” I said quietly, not sure if I was speaking to Hank or myself. This was exactly the sort of thing Benji and I would've done together. I had to admit that Benji and I were growing apart. Whenever I thought of him, all I could see was Sid the white goldfish swimming listlessly in his bowl, jammed in the back of the closet and waiting for death. I wondered what could possibly come next.

The score burst to life, and the night was filled with the sound of a wailing police siren. I crossed my legs and watched as the images flashed across the wall: a police car speeding down 1940s Sunset Boulevard, a gothic mansion hidden behind enormous gates, a man floating dead in a pool. There was nothing better than the movies.

Sitting in a cemetery in the dark of night should have been scary, but it wasn't. Surrounded by couples and families, bathed in the glow of light from the screen, it was almost comforting. Watching movies in a cemetery is a liberating experience. You almost feel like you are keeping the dead company. I imagined the ghosts of Douglas Fairbanks and Peter Lorre were pleased that we were there.
It seemed a fitting tribute. In a way, all these people sitting on the lawn were just like me. They all found comfort among the dead.

I'd seen the movie a few times already. An aging movie star refuses to believe her time as a famous actress has passed, and asks a struggling screenwriter to write her comeback project, a proposal that ends in betrayal and murder. Her house is a decaying mansion that looks like Dracula's Castle. The movie star herself is as terrifying as her surroundings, old and sinewy like a black widow spider. In the end she loses her mind. Unable to come to terms with her lost career, she descends into madness, becoming convinced that life is actually a movie. The film ends with the actress slinking toward the camera and the audience, beckoning us to join her. “Those wonderful people out there in the dark,” she says. Yes. All us wonderful people in the dark. The film ended, and when the screen shut off, the lawn was plunged into darkness. I looked over at Hank and even in the shadows I could see he was crying.

We took a cab back to Hank's apartment. It was still strange to see him out in the night air, standing in his front yard, the wind gently blowing through his grayish blond hair. It was a beautiful sight. I handed him back his bed pillows.

“You sure you don't want me to help you with those?” I asked.

“I'm fine, I just gotta get in,” he said, racing for the front door of his apartment. I yelled out the window of the cab.

“Hank!”

He turned around. “Yeah, what?”

“How 'bout next time
you
tell
me
where you wanna go?”

“Next time. Yeah, sure,” he yelled back, and before I could say anything else he was flying up the stairs to his apartment as fast as someone his age could.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I found myself standing on Benji's doorstep even though I knew he wasn't home. Benji and his parents were long gone up to Yosemite. Mrs. Connor had given me a spare key years ago, just in case Benji ever forgot his, as if we were glued at the hip. To be fair, that wasn't so far from the truth, but it was the enthusiasm with which she gave it to me that made the whole exchange a little awkward. I felt like she was trying to push us closer together and turn us into a couple and was secretly hoping that we would “play house.” It was all a little creepy.

I took the key from my pocket, opened the door, and went over to the wall to punch in the alarm code. The house was deathly quiet. I crept through the kitchen with its spotless surfaces; a ray of sun broke through the closed blinds, exposing not a single particle of dust. I walked down the hallway, past all the happy portraits of Benji through the years, flanked by his parents. Freddy Prinze snuggled into my legs, happy to have the house all to himself, content with the automatic cat feeder that sat in the corner, exposing a fresh batch of food each day.

I pushed open Benji's door. For some reason I hesitated before stepping forward, as if expecting the room to be booby-trapped, or for bats to fly out as if abandoning a cave for the night sky. Mrs. Connor had made his bed before he left; the sheets were freshly laundered. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The posters on the walls were the kind that you would find in any teenager's bedroom; the collection of objects in the cabinet were, to the unknowing eye, bric-a-brac collected from yard sales. But the reality was something much more disturbing. I opened the cabinet door and touched the piece of floor where RFK had supposedly fallen. I placed my hand flat on the piece and waited for something, anything—perhaps an electrical charge, a bolt of light, a dose of meaning. Nothing came. It was just a piece of floor.

I turned to the closet, the reason I was there. I hoped I wasn't too late. Slowly I opened the door, pushed aside all the perfectly pressed T-shirts on hangers, and felt my way through the darkness of the mess below. Finally I felt it; underneath a carelessly tossed robe was the unmistakable smoothness of glass. I picked up the robe, not wanting to look but knowing I would have to. All of a sudden an image of the cat came back to me: poor little Oscar, thrown in a Dumpster and left to bake in the summer heat.

I held my breath. There in the glass bowl was Benji's goldfish, but he wasn't lying motionless on his side, and he hadn't floated to the top. He was hiding in his little castle, not moving much, but enough to let me know he was alive. I put the robe back over the top and pulled the bowl out carefully. I would have to expose him to the light a little at a time: too much at once might send him into shock.

“Come on, Sid,” I said. “We're running away.”

I closed the closet door, left Benji's room, and set the alarm again before leaving.

T
HAT AFTERNOON WHEN
I arrived at Hank's I was surprised to find the door wide open and the chair in front of the television empty. In the middle of the room stood a guy wearing a baseball cap, as unexpected as a mirage. I froze. On first glance I couldn't help noticing how young, tanned, and bizarrely out of place this guy looked in Hank's apartment. He was wearing a gray track tee with jeans that were fashionably too big for him, exposing the rim of his boxers beneath, and red Converse sneakers so bright they looked like they'd just been taken out of the box. He was gathering empty bottles from around the apartment, and as he bent down to scoop up another Bud Lite from the floor, he finally noticed me standing there. We stared at each other, his hands full of empty beer bottles, the liquid starting to drip down his arms. I cleared my throat.

“Who are you?” I said, trying to sound authoritative.

“Who am I?”

With his thick soft lips, large brown eyes, and rounded face, he reminded me of Jim Morrison. His baseball cap had the name
of a movie studio emblazoned on the front, and a few tufts of long, unruly black curls escaped down the back and around his ears.

“Yeah. Who are you?” I demanded, not letting his good looks distract me. “Where's Hank?”

The guy shrugged. “He's, uh, not here.”

“Hank!” I yelled, racing toward the closed bedroom door and swinging it open. Empty.

“I said he's not here,” the guy repeated, throwing the bottles into a black recycling container I hadn't noticed before. I walked to the bathroom and opened the door. No one. There was water everywhere, as if someone had just stepped out of the shower and not bothered to put down the bath mat. That's when I saw a spot of blood on the edge of the bathtub. I'd seen enough photos of blood to know it was fresh. It hadn't dried yet.

“Where is he?” I demanded, storming back into the living room. “I saw blood in there. Tell me what's going on!”

“Whoa, take it easy,” he said, holding up his hands as if shielding himself from attack. “Hank's in the hospital.”

My lip started to tremble. “What happened?”

“He fell down in the shower. Hit his head. He's out of emergency so it's all cool. I'm just tidying up, then I'm grabbing some things for him.”

“What hospital is he in?”

“Calm down. He's fine.”

“Just tell me where he is!”

He picked up the recycling container and placed it under the kitchen sink. I was surprised at his familiarity with the place. He obviously knew his way around.

“I'm going over there now,” he said, running his hands under
the tap and wiping them dry with a towel. He waited. “Are you coming or not?”

We drove to the hospital in a rusty old convertible with torn leather seats, top down, CD player blasting some crappy dance music. It was midafternoon and the sun was at its hottest, leaving long, glistening waves of heat along the surface of the road, like in a dream.

“I'm Jake,” he yelled over the music. “Jake Gilmore.”

He tapped a cigarette from a packet and put it in his mouth before adding, “I've seen you before at Hank's place.”

“Can you turn the music down, please?” I asked. My mind was racing and the last thing I needed was some inane dance track blaring in my ears.

“Sorry,” he said, and turned the volume down. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it behind his ear. “What's your name?”

“Hilda.”

“Hilda? Like the Saint?”

“I don't know. Is there a Saint Hilda?”

“Sure is. She was meant to be very wise, very knowledgeable.”

“If I'm so knowledgeable, then how come I've never heard of you?”

He flashed me a large grin, and his teeth were the whitest I had ever seen, even whiter than Benji's. “Hank hasn't mentioned me?”

“No. He hasn't.”

After all of Hank's paranoia, it was odd to walk into his apartment and find a complete stranger standing there, especially someone like Jake. He pulled a pair of aviator sunglasses from his pocket and put them on.

“Strange,” he said. “It's interesting he hasn't said anything, I mean, considering the amount of time you spend with him.”

“How would you know that?”

“I'm his neighbor. I live downstairs.”

“You mean in the apartment under his?”

“Yeah, that's right. Man, who did you think I was?”

“I don't know. You could have been, like, a debt collector or something.”

“Or the Feds?” he asked with a grin. “A long lost son, perhaps? Heir to the Anderson fortune?”

“I don't know. It's just strange that he's never mentioned you. I didn't know Hank had any other friends.”

“Well, we aren't exactly
friends
. I just help him out with stuff occasionally, odd jobs and things like that.”

“Why?”

Jake looked over at me. “Why? Because I'm his neighbor. That's what neighbors do.”

“I don't know many guys your age who like hanging around with old guys like Hank.”

“I don't know many teenage girls who do, either. I guess we're both kind of strange, huh?”

We? I hadn't been aware that I was part of a team, a veritable contingent tending to Hank's needs. I thought it was strictly a solo venture. Even Benji had been banished from the operation when three became a crowd.

We pulled up to the hospital and I followed Jake up to the ward where they had Hank under observation. He was in a room at the end of the corridor, sitting up in bed, a bandage around his head.

“Hank!” I said, bursting into the room and making the nurse jump. “What the hell did you do?”

When he saw me, his eyes grew wide. “Hey, Hilda!” he cried, and gave me a big, toothy grin. “How ya doin'?”

“I'm fine. What the hell happened to you?”

“Bernie! He pushed me over in the shower!”

Jake pushed forward. “What is he talking about?”

“No one pushed you, Hank. You probably fell.”

“No, I didn't! Bernie pushed me!”

“Who's Bernie?” Jake asked.

“He's a guy who lived in Hank's apartment,” I explained. “He was an actor.”

“What's this actor got against Hank? Why would he come in and push him over?”

“He wouldn't. He's dead.”

“He died in my bathroom!” Hank yelled as he tried to sit up. The nurse pushed him back down. “He killed himself in my bathroom!”