John Belushi Is Dead (5 page)

“Nah, it's cool,” I said. “Lynette's expecting me for dinner.”

“Since when have you cared about that?”

“I don't care. I've just got shit to do.
Comprende
?”

“Whatever. You still up for tomorrow?”

Was he kidding? I had been looking forward to this expedition for ages. “Cielo Drive,” I said.

“Cielo Drive,” he repeated, and the name hung between us like a talisman.

“Benji?”

“Yes, Hilda?”

I looked at my nails, which were chewed and sore. “What do you suppose that guy was so nervous about today?”

“Nervous?”

“You know, the guy in Echo Park. Hank. The way he freaked out when we knocked on the door, it was like he was hiding something.”

Benji didn't look up from the screen. “I dunno. Maybe he's got some unpaid bills. You know they can't turn off your electricity unless they tell you in person. They have to make sure you're not on dialysis or something. An electric company once cut off the supply to this old woman's house in winter, and she froze to death in her chair.”

“No… it was something else. He seemed really scared, like he was expecting someone else.”

“Maybe he's the Unabomber. Or a serial killer. Maybe he had pieces of dead bodies in his fridge. Anyway, what do you care?”

“I just think that maybe we should have stayed a bit longer. He seemed lonely.”

Benji didn't respond. I looked over again at his collection of artifacts. The stones from Sharon Tate's fireplace were in a little Ziplock bag on a shelf by themselves. I stood up and walked over to the cabinet and emptied the stones into my palm.

“I saw an episode of
Ghost Chasers
last week,” I said. “A woman bought a piano that turned out to be haunted. From the moment they had it in the house, all sorts of strange stuff started to happen.
They think the piano belonged to a gangster who used to slam people's fingers in it.”

“So?”

“So maybe having all this stuff in our houses is bad luck.”

“Hey, Hilda,” Benji said, turning back to his computer. “You should see this video. It's a girl getting screwed to death by a horse.”

I am the first to admit that my interests border on the macabre, but Benji's obsessions were without boundaries. I put the stones down and grabbed my bag.

“I'm out of here,” I said, and Benji waved to me halfheartedly. As I walked to the door I heard the sound of a girl moaning in ecstasy; then the moans became groans, and then screams. I closed the bedroom door behind me, and smiled at Mrs. Connor on my way out.

T
HE DAY
B
ENJI AND
I became friends was the day the cat died.

Stanley Dale was the first to notice it. No one saw it happen but we all heard the sound, the sickening squeal of tires as the car slammed on its brakes, then sped off again.

“You guys! You've gotta come and see this!” Stanley yelled, gesturing toward the road. A small crowd gathered around him, screaming and pointing. I was on my way to the library when I heard the shouts. I followed the sounds, convinced Stanley was going to show us a dead bird or rat, or something equally disgusting. What he showed us was much worse.

The cat was still moving, flopping around on the roadside like a fish out of water. I couldn't tell if it was still alive or in the last throes of muscle spasm: its body was literally jumping into the air, and its blood was flying in thin spurts onto the asphalt. I squealed and put my hand to my mouth. Stanley hung over the fence like a monkey, and soon a large group of kids had gathered to see what the fuss was all about.

“Somebody do something!” I heard someone scream.

“What do you want me to do?” another kid yelled. “I'm not going to pick it up!”

There was nothing we could do. The cat was jerking so violently that there was no way anyone could have caught it. All we could do was hang over the side of the fence and stare.

“This is so awesome!” Stanley yelled. Someone punched him on the shoulder.

“Shut up, you retard. It's not funny!”

I looked around. Half the kids were laughing and pointing, the other half gazed on in shock.

“Look at the blood!”

“Is it dead?”

“Holy shit. Its guts are on the road.”

“Should we get a teacher?”

Then I saw Benji. He was standing quietly at the edge of the crowd, his hands on his head, a look of horror on his face. We were in the same classes but had never spoken to each other. Benji was quiet and mopey, and would sit in the back on his own and stare out the window, only speaking when called on. He didn't stand out in his tight jeans and Morrissey T-shirts, but he didn't fit in, either.

I had my own problems. Everyone thought I was strange. I was the tragic girl whose parents had died suddenly, the one everyone whispered about but didn't know how to talk to. I wasn't interested in making friends, and spent my lunchtimes in the library, reading celebrity bios about tragic stars like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe and staying away from groups and conversations, not revealing anything about myself and what had happened to me. So Benji and I had sailed past each other week after week, oblivious to each other's presence, until today.

The cat started to tire, its flops becoming heavier, until finally it lay on its side in the dirt, took a few shallow gasps of air, and died. I looked back at Benji. Two fat teardrops were making their way down his cheeks. Everyone quieted down, and an eerie silence descended on the scene. Suddenly Mr. Barrett appeared, blowing his whistle and trying to disperse the crowd. Mr. Barrett was a gym teacher who always wore short shorts, even in winter, and was known for picking students up by their sideburns.

“What's going on over here?” he bellowed. “Get away from the fence, all of you!”

“There's a dead cat on the road!” someone yelled.

Mr. Barrett made his way to the fence and peered over. Then, without a word, he strode off in the direction of the teachers' lounge, returning minutes later with a black garbage bag.

“Okay, show's over,” he shouted. “All of you get out of here. Now!”

We began to wander off, a few of us lagging behind to take one last look at the carcass on the road. Mr. Barrett picked the cat up with his bare hands and threw it in the garbage bag. Benji didn't move. I heard some of the other kids chatting excitedly as they walked away.

“I've never seen anything dead,” one of them said.

“I saw my grandma.”

“I saw my uncle in a coma.”

“Yeah, but he wasn't dead, was he? Doesn't really count.”

Mr. Barrett swung the bag over his shoulder and strolled off toward the Dumpsters without a glance in our direction. I walked over and stood beside Benji, the tears now streaming silently down his face. I felt bad. Not because he was upset, but because he was doing what I desperately wanted to do. I wanted to curl in a little
ball on the ground and cry for that poor cat, its beautiful tabby fur now hardened with dry blood. But I couldn't bring myself to. I had cried so much over the past few years, I was empty. But Benji cried openly and without fear. He cried as if he were alone.

“Are you okay?” I tentatively asked.

He didn't say anything. He turned to look at me, his eyes glistening. Then he ran off.

Lying in bed that night, all I could think about was the dead cat. I thrashed about in the heat, a tiny fan blowing ineffectually into my face. I thought about the Dumpster, how hot it was in there during summer. One day the other kids had thrown me in, amused by my indifference to their taunts and my refusal to fight back. They had closed the lid and suddenly everything was silent, black, and hot, like the inside of an oven. On an excursion to the Holocaust museum one day, an old lady told us about the furnaces, the places where they burned children alive, and I pictured that rustic green Dumpster at the back of the schoolyard, crouched in the sun, its mouth open.

I imagined that night what would happen when the trash was collected, how the cat's body would be compacted with soda cans and candy-bar wrappers until it was all one compressed block of rubbish. I wondered who its owners were, and whether someone was tapping on the side of a can with a spoon, calling its name. I remembered that Dumpster collection happened only once a week, and that the next collection was days away. I still had time.

The next day, under a blistering hot sun, I related my plan to Benji. We stood in the middle of the playing field watching our classmates play baseball. Mr. Barrett always sent the worst players as far away from the diamond as possible, where there was nothing
to do but run after balls hit so far out that it didn't matter how slowly we threw them back. I was more than happy with this arrangement.

I sat on the grass, patted the ground next to me, and Benji reluctantly moseyed over, squatting beside me among the dandelions. We didn't say anything, just picked at the flowers and watched the players run in circles. Then Benji started to scratch at his face. Under the sun his pale skin was turning lobster red.

Someone hit a ball out of the field and everyone cheered. The boys ran to the fence and started climbing it. Mr. Barrett chased them from behind and yelled at them to get down.

“That was horrible yesterday,” I said to Benji. “You know, what happened to that cat.”

He waited, and for a while I thought he wasn't going to say anything. Then he spoke.

“I have a cat,” he said. “Freddie Prinze.”

“Freddie Prinze? You mean after the actor? The one who killed himself?”

Benji nodded. A loud
chock
sound echoed across the field and another ball sailed over our heads. Neither of us made any attempt to get up. Mr. Barrett yelled in our direction. I gave him a wave, and, defeated, he went to get another ball from his gym bag. Benji laughed. He tore at the dandelions in the ground and crushed them between his fingers.

“I hate Mr. Barrett,” he said, his voice cold. “He deserves a bullet in the head.”

“Teachers like him make you understand why Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did what they did,” I replied, not even thinking before the words tumbled out. “Columbine wasn't a very nice place
to begin with, from what I've heard. I mean, killers aren't made in a vacuum, you know? I'm not saying what they did was right. It wasn't. I just hate how people call them evil and don't think about why they did it.”

I didn't know whether he was going to call me crazy for sympathizing with the Columbine killers.

“Columbine had a history of bullying and repression,” he said, as if reciting from a textbook. “The teachers had established a hierarchy that kept the jocks at the top and everyone else on the bottom. What they did—Dylan and Eric—was a political act, like in the French revolution.”

I was stunned, and kind of relieved. I had never heard anyone say something like that about Columbine. My aunt Lynette always said the world was a better place now that “those sociopathic monsters” had blown their own heads off.

“This place is just as bad,” Benji continued. “Nothing but a bunch of jocks and cheerleaders.”

I thought again of the cat baking in its metal coffin. “Would you be interested in coming on an expedition?” I asked.

Benji looked suspicious. “What kind of expedition?”

“I'm going to help the cat that got hit by the car,” I said. “I'm going to save it.”

“How can you save it? It's dead.”

This was true. Still, I believed that dead things were not beyond dignity. And
I
was still alive and could do something about the way the cat had been literally thrown away. The whole incident had made me feel indescribably dirty, like a rubbernecker at the site of a car crash. I wanted nothing more than to get clean.

“Are you in or are you out?” I asked. Benji looked at his classmates,
all the jocks and princesses and people we would never be like.

“I guess I'll help you,” he muttered, as if he were doing me an enormous favor. “There's nothing on TV tonight anyway.”

Benji met me at the Dumpster after class. We waited until the other students had left and the school was deserted. The Dumpster was hot to touch, but luckily the handles had been shadowed by the towering oaks above it. I took this as a sign that the natural world was pleased with my plan, that it too knew the importance of setting things right.

If Benji was nervous, he didn't show it. As I struggled to lift the side of the lid, he took the other end without being asked, and together we hoisted the Dumpster open and let the top bang noisily against the classroom wall. Immediately we smelled the cat, a cloying, decaying stench that slapped our faces. I covered my mouth with my hand. Benji heaved himself over the side and stuck his head in.

“I can see it,” he yelled. “Its paw's sticking out of the bag. I'm going in.”

He threw his legs over and disappeared into the darkness. I waited in the cool breeze until the garbage bag appeared over the side, wet and torn, fur poking from a hole. I took the bag from Benji and gently laid it on the ground, trying not to look at the contents. Benji vaulted over the side of the Dumpster and landed with a thud in the dirt.

“Careful,” I said as he steadied himself inches from the bag. “You nearly jumped on it.”

“My cousin accidentally jumped on a puppy once. He was on the top of his bunk bed and the puppy was on the floor and he
didn't see it. He landed right on its stomach and its guts came out of its mouth.”

“Benji! That's horrible.”

He frowned. “Well, it happened. Just 'cause you don't wanna hear about bad stuff doesn't mean it doesn't happen.”

This I knew. Another reason I never talked about my parents' accident was to spare myself and everyone around me the gory details. I knelt and opened the bag carefully, sticking my hand inside. The cat's head lolled out, limp and lifeless. I jumped back and shrieked.