John Belushi Is Dead (25 page)

“Are you okay?” Jake asked, the wine in one hand, my dress in the other, eyes averted.

“It's just a scrape. Throw my dress over.”

“I don't know if I want to.” He grinned.

I smiled. “Just throw it over, please.”

“How about I do this.”

There was a gap of about a foot beneath the fence through which Jake passed me both my dress and the wine.

“What's that?” Jake asked, pointing at my side.

“Just a scar.”

Jake made an “ouch” face. “Pretty big scar. Were you a cage fighter?”

I pulled the dress back over my head, relieved the material was concealing my body once more. In my eagerness to be seen as carefree I'd forgotten that my scar would be exposed, the only physical evidence of my parents' death.

“It's, uh, from an accident,” I said, not sure how much I wanted to divulge. Jake didn't press me any further.

“Well, you can barely notice it,” he said, and I laughed, the surprised look on his face betraying what he was saying.

“You really think I could be a cage fighter?” I joked, trying to lighten the situation.

“Oh yeah!” Jake exclaimed, happily taking the bait. “Hell, I'm scared of ya!”

“You are not,” I teased.

“Well, maybe not, but I'm not too sure about this fence,” he said, pacing behind the wire like a wild cat, looking for a way through.

“Come on, Jake,” I yelled. “You wanna explore the jungles of Vietnam, or you want to eat tuna fish sandwiches in the car?”

Jake looked at the ground, took a step back, then leaped at the fence with such ferocity I was worried it was going to fall over. I clapped my hands on my face.

“That's it!” I yelled, impersonating a drill sergeant. “Come on, soldier. How bad do you want it?”

“I want it.” He puffed as he reached the top.

“I can't hear you, soldier.”

“I WANT IT!”

Holding his hands triumphantly in the air, Jake took an almighty leap from the very top of the fence and landed straight on his ass. As I helped him up I noticed he had torn the back of his pants.

“Looks like you've got a casualty there, soldier,” I said, putting my finger in the rip. He jumped back.

“Shit. These are Dolce and Gabbana!”

“Serves you right for wearing designer jeans to a picnic. Soldier, there are no catwalks in the jungles of Vietnam.”

“So we're here. I still don't see what the big deal is.”

“Follow me.”

I took his hand and led him along the dirt path toward the mountains and the thick of the jungle. He kept looking around, as if he thought we were going to be set upon by guards at any moment.

“Are you sure this is safe? There might be security dogs, or worse. I've already ripped my pants; I don't want my ass to get bitten off.”

“It's perfectly fine. There's nothing here to protect, and who would be crazy enough to break into an old bike park?”

“You would.”

We approached the edge of a steep ditch that sloped downward toward a small swamp and more marshland. We were now surrounded by rolling green hills and towering palm trees, totally secluded from the nearby highway. I placed the picnic basket down and opened it. Jake had packed a blanket, and I pulled it out and laid it across the dry earth.

“Perfect position,” I said as I looked out over the expanse of Indian Dunes Park. I sat down and Jake followed, still brushing dirt off his pants and shoes.

“I guess it does look a little like Vietnam,” he said, looking around.

A group of birds flocked overhead and there was no sound but the rustling of the trees and the distant ocean. I screwed the top off the wine and took a mouthful from the bottle. I passed it to Jake and he did the same.

“It's so peaceful out here,” I said. “So isolated. I love it.”

“You come out here often?”

“Just once, with Benji. Did you ever see
Twilight Zone
?”

“The TV show?”

“No, the movie.”

Jake snapped his fingers. “I remember. John Lithgow played a guy who thought there was a gremlin attacking the plane he was on, and no one believed him. And Dan Aykroyd ripped his face off to show he was really a monster.”

“And he says, ‘You wanna see something really scary?'”

“That's right! That film scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.”

“Do you remember the helicopter accident?”

“Vaguely. Didn't someone die while they were filming?”

I looked out across the now dry marshland, the place where it had happened. “They were shooting a helicopter scene at night that was set in the jungle in Vietnam. Vic Morrow, this old actor who thought the film was going to be his big comeback, was carrying two little kids across the river down there when a helicopter crashed right on top of them. Vic and one kid were decapitated.
The other kid was crushed under the helicopter. The director was brought up on manslaughter charges but in the end everybody walked free. And it happened down there.”

“Shit,” Jake said, sounding a little stunned.

“Yeah. The poor special-effects guys were the first to rush into the water to try and help the actors. They found Vic's head and torso floating next to the kids.”

“Wow. That's really messed up.”

“Hey, Vic wanted a comeback. This way, he'll be remembered forever.”

“Great, as the man who was decapitated for starring in a shitty movie.”

“Doesn't matter,” I said. “He'll still be remembered. You think people would have remembered him for being the guy who starred in the
Twilight Zone
movie? Hell no. But the guy who had his head cut off during filming? That's a dude worth remembering.”

“You really think that's preferable?”

“Of course.”

“Sounds pretty warped to me.”

I paused. “You wanna know why I'm so obsessed with dead celebrities?”

“I would love to know,” Jake said, taking a mouthful of red wine. He passed me the bottle and I just held it in my hands. The rich smell of the wine reminded me of Hank.

“It's like, when I think about celebrities who have died, it makes me less scared of death, you know? If amazing people like John Lennon and John Belushi and Sharon Tate have all died, then it can't be that bad right?”

“It's a little early to be thinking of death, isn't it?”

“I don't think so. You can die at any time. Look at what happened to my parents.”

“I'm sorry,” Jake said.

I shrugged. “Don't be sorry. People die all the time.”

“But that doesn't make it any easier on you. It may happen all the time, but when it happens to you, it's not a statistic. It's your life. But your life doesn't have to be all about what happened to your parents. It doesn't all have to be about death.”

I stood and walked toward the edge of the cliff. I looked out over the palm trees, the sand dunes, and the forest. It was strange to think that such a beautiful place had been the site of such calamity, chaos, and pain. I thought of the movie crew dropping their cameras and running for the hills. I thought of the parents of the two little children who were killed. They were probably so excited their kids had a part in a movie.

“I should have died that day, too,” I said.

“What?” Jake said softly.

“The day my parents died. I should have died, too. But I didn't. Now death follows me every day. I feel it in my skin.”

“You were in the car?”

I nodded. “We were driving home from my aunt Lynette's house. Dad had had a few drinks and Mom kept telling him to slow down. In hindsight I think he'd been smoking some of the wacky stuff, too. He said he needed it to deal with my aunt Lynette. He ran into the back of a truck that stopped too suddenly in front of us. The front of our car went straight under the truck, stopping after the front seats. My parents were, well, decapitated is the best way to put it. Just like Vic Morrow. I sat trapped in the backseat, seat belt cutting across my chest,
looking at them for what seemed like an eternity. I couldn't see their faces. All I could see was the backs of their heads, crushed against the seats.”

“They died like Jayne Mansfield,” Jake said.

“Yeah. Just like Jayne Mansfield. So I figure, if Jayne died like that, then it must be okay, right? It's not so bad.”

“Hilda.” Jake had turned pale.

“I'm not telling you this to upset you,” I said, “or to show off or try to shock you. I'm telling you this because I want you to understand who I am.”

“I know who you are,” he said, and slid his hand behind my neck, pulling me closer. I shivered. “You're someone who looked after an old man when no one else gave a shit.”

“I wish that were true,” I said, trying to fight back tears. “But Benji and me, we only went to Hank's house to see where someone had died.”

“But it's more than that now. You know that.”

“No. Hank just wanted to live the rest of his life in peace and I kept poking at him, and made him go out. And he got hurt, and now he's miserable.”

“Hank's always going to be miserable. People find excuses to be victims. If it wasn't the fact that he was in a concentration camp, it would have been something else.”

“That's not fair.”

“Life's not fair, but you have to deal with it. I could've used the fact that my parents were doped-up hippies as an excuse to drop out of everything, but I didn't. That's not me. I want to make my own way in the world. I want the things I own to be mine. I want to write stories that inspire and move people, and make movies
that matter. I want to be part of something. Think about it, Hilda. We can do anything we want. We're alive, aren't we?”

I couldn't disagree with that. We were alive, and we were still here. We had a responsibility to the dead to keep on living, no matter how painful. Jake squeezed my hand.

“I think your parents would be proud of you.”

I looked away, over the horizon and the blue expanse of sky that led to the ocean and beyond. “Some days I wonder if my parents knew it was going to happen.”

“How could they possibly have known that? It was an accident.”

“I know, but you hear stories about how people just get this feeling that it's their time to go. Like there was this guy I read about in the newspaper who was totally healthy, worked out every day, went to his job at the office, then one day people started to notice this change in him. He started calling all the people he'd lost contact with, all his friends and family who hadn't heard from him in ages, just to say hello and that he loved them. He started to smile more. He was nicer to his colleagues. He went out of his way to make people feel good, got them cups of coffee, all this stuff that was totally out of character. Two days later he died of a brain aneurysm.”

“That's easy to explain,” Jake said, putting his hands behind his head. “The dude clocked himself out.”

“No, he didn't. They couldn't find any evidence of suicide.”

“Well, then he probably knew he had the aneurysm all along.”

“But how do you explain the change in his behavior two days before it happened?”

Jake smirked. “Maybe he was getting laid.”

“No. Somehow he knew. I don't know if it was, like, a change in his molecular structure, something on a biological level that made his cells get ready. Maybe it was something spiritual. Maybe the universe gets you ready.”

I chewed at my finger absentmindedly. “Don't chew your nails,” Jake said. “There's plenty of food here, why you gotta be eatin' your hands all the time?”

“Steven Spielberg chews his fingernails,” I said.

“And after you've won your first Oscar I'll be a little more lenient on you. In the meantime those stubby little nubs are just grossin' me out.”

I took my hand out of my mouth, wiped it on my leg, and curled my fingers around Jake's.

“Ewww,” he said, but didn't try to take his hand away. Any thought I had of my parents disappeared as I tightened my grip on Jake. Together we looked at the dunes, the curves in the dirt from its days as a bike park. I tightened my grip on his hand, worried that if I let go he would inexplicably be pulled into the abyss, taken from me, and he seemed to understand because he squeezed my hand back.

“Say, isn't this meant to be a picnic?” I reminded him, breaking the silence.

“Of course,” Jake said, letting me go. He dived into the picnic basket and retrieved two sandwiches.

“Tuna fish or egg salad?” he offered.

“Which are you having?” I asked.

“Tuna fish. Egg gives me gas.”

“Well, that's, uh, good to know.”

We ate our sandwiches, drank the bottle of wine, and brushed
the ants off as they marched up our legs. Jake lay on his back in the dirt and closed his eyes, and I watched his chest slowly moving up and down, his heart beating, life intact. A life connected with mine in a way I never thought possible again. I lay down next to him and buried my face in his black curls, and he held me close.

“This is actually a pretty place,” Jake said. “I could think of worse places to die.”

W
E FINISHED LUNCH AND
drove back to Distant Memories, stopping on the way to pick up groceries for Hank. I started to walk up toward his apartment, but Jake lightly grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

“Hey, come in here for a second,” he said, tugging me toward his front door. “I want to show you something.”

As he took his keys from his pocket, my heart raced. I started to get nervous and couldn't help blabbering on as we stepped inside.

“Did you know there's a city near San Francisco built right on a fault line?” I said. “You're not even allowed to go into the town hall because it's slowly breaking in half.”

“What's that got to do with anything?” he asked, closing the door behind us.