John Belushi Is Dead (33 page)

The Manson Family parole hearings continued like some grotesque charade. I heard about it from the customers talking over lattes and from snatches of headlines from the newspapers they left lying around. I wasn't too interested anymore. Everyone knew they would never be let out, hell, I'm sure even they knew. It was just another opportunity to give Charlie and his followers the spotlight, macabre fodder for a slow news day. I thought about the family members who had lost their loved ones and had to listen to this crap every four years. It seemed unfair. I continued making lattes, sprinkling chocolate powder on cappuccinos, as Charlie made his pronouncements about judgement day. To Charlie I was one of the squares who had been blinded by the man. I didn't care. It was nice to be like everyone else for a change.

I didn't tell Jake any of what Hank had confessed to me. In some ways what had happened to Hank was unspeakable. Some days I would play the story over in my head, coming at it from
different angles. Sometimes Hank came out as the tragic victim of circumstance. On other days, when I was feeling dark, he was a murderer. I went around in circles so many times that in the end I had to put it aside and let it be. Sometimes that is all you can do.

One day Jake called and asked if I'd like to go to the mall with him. He had a meeting with a director about his screenplay and wanted to buy a new suit for the occasion.

“We can do that in the morning,” I said. “But then there's somewhere I want to go. I have something I want to show you.”

“Let me guess. We're going to the Hollywood sign to see where that chick jumped off.”

“No, Jake, I've already seen that. That's so old-school.”

“Wait, I know. The restaurant where Robert Blake ate dinner with his wife before shooting her.”

“Before
allegedly
shooting her, and no, that's not it, either.”

“So where are we going?”

“You'll just have to wait and see.”

That afternoon, after buying suits at Macy's, we drove in Jake's convertible to a small cemetery in Topanga Canyon. It was on a clearing beside a thick forest, the grave markings small and discreet, so as to not affect the natural landscape. We pulled up and Jake turned off the engine.

“I knew it,” he said. “More death.”

“This is different.” I closed the car door and wandered up the clearing. I hadn't visited for so long. It was as peaceful and beautiful as I remembered. Tiny yellow flowers had covered most of the ground, some of them creeping over the gravestones, enveloping the gray marble in vibrant color. I knelt on the ground and cleared the overgrowth away from a stone. I felt Jake behind me, a few feet away, unsure of whether to come closer. I turned around.

“Come on. Sit down.”

He sat beside me. “Is this who I think it is?”

I ran my hand along the stone. “Mom and Dad, this is Jake.”

There was no crime scene tape, no tour guide with a megaphone, no high fences keeping out souvenir seekers. There were only stone markers on the ground, each one indistinguishable from the next. I didn't know if my parents could hear me, but it didn't seem to matter. I lay down on the grass with my hand resting on their marker, and Jake lay beside me and held me, and at that moment we were just people who had lost people, who would one day be lost to others. I pulled the pool tile from my pocket and pushed it into the quiet earth, where it could wait for me. Everything seemed okay.

L
OS
A
NGELES IS A
town of mysteries and secrets. It is a place where stories converge and collide, where history is not only constructed but reconstructed on a daily basis. Time and place in the novel have been compressed to paint the fullest picture of Hollywood's veiled history. Every effort has been made to verify the many stories told in
John Belushi Is Dead,
but in the end the absolute truth, as you will have seen in these pages, is more often than not unattainable. Sometimes the ending is just the beginning.