John Belushi Is Dead

1

WE HUNG OVER THE fence at the Ambassador Hotel, watching the demolition. Benji stood beside me taking photos with his digital camera, his mouth open in disbelief. He was determined to document every moment. As the bulldozers tore into the side of the hotel, the sound of crushing mortar made me feel sick. The Ambassador had a long, star-filled history. To us the building was a holy shrine, and watching its destruction was like watching a death.

For the past year we had attended protest marches and signed online petitions. During that time the hotel had been used as a movie set and a cheap location for sci-fi and comic book conventions. But finally the decision had been made. The Ambassador had no future, and the demolition was to go ahead. Los Angeles is a town that exorcises its demons—cursed properties are seized and razed.

Benji and I revelled in the celebrity history of the Ambassador. In the golden days of Hollywood, the Oscars were held there. Marilyn Monroe lounged by the pool. In 1968, the allure of the Ambassador was tarnished forever when Senator Robert F. Kennedy delivered a heartfelt victory speech in the ballroom after winning the California primary, only to be gunned down as he tried to make his exit through the hotel pantry. Some people thought the CIA was in on it, but most believed that RFK was assassinated by a Palestinian immigrant with a beef against the Kennedys, just another run-of-the-mill nut job in a town full of them. I preferred the theory that the Palestinian was just a patsy, that he’d been hypnotized and ordered to kill the senator, like something out of The Manchurian Candidate. Benji said he had a piece of the floor from directly beneath RFK’s head. He bought it off eBay from a seller who claimed to be one of the workers hired to tear the building down. Benji said the dark stain on the corner that looked like barbecue sauce was actually Kennedy’s blood.

Our mission for the day was to remove something from the demolition site, this time with our own two hands. Benji had dressed in combat fatigues, convinced it would help him blend into the scenery. A couple of ex-cops in black T-shirts patrolled the perimeter, German shepherds on short leads trailing beside them. We looked for ways to get through the fence undetected but couldn’t maneuver around the guards. After we’d stood around for an hour, hands in our pockets and staring through the chicken wire, one of the guards came over. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and had a gun in his holster.

Can I help you kids with something? he asked.

Good morning, officer, Benji said politely, pointing at the crumbled ruins of the Ambassador. Any chance we could come in and watch history unfold up close?

The guard shook his head. Private property, he said, tipping his head at a sign that read WARNING—DEATH. Dangerous, too. Why, a piece of rock could come flying off one of those bulldozers and hit you—bam!—square in the eye. He threaded his thumbs through his belt, chewed his gum with the gusto of a cowboy, and stared into the sun like the sheriff of Deadwood. It was then I knew we would get what we needed.

Can I make you a proposition? Benji suggested. He removed a black, studded wallet from his back pocket, snapped it open, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. The wallet rattled on its chain. Benji lived to negotiate.

What do you mean, proposition? the guard asked, adjusting his cap.

Benji handed him the bill: clean, crisp, and freshly minted.

The guard paused for a moment, then took the bill and examined it. He held it to the sun as if the light could confirm it was real. What the hell is this all about? he asked, looking around to make sure no one had seen the exchange.

A crane crashed through the ceiling of the hotel and a dust cloud made its way across the lot, shrouding everyone in dirt. Benji coughed and brushed dirt from his clothes. We want some bricks, he said.

The guard stared at him. Bricks?

Flooring, too, if you can find any. But bricks would be a good start.

The guard gazed out across the site, incredulous. His boss was sitting in the watch house taking a nap, feet hanging out the window.

Make it twenty, he said, turning back and licking his lips.

Benji had been expecting this, too. He took another ten from his wallet and handed it over. He always carried many denominations, always started small. Once people knew what we were after they would jack up the price—capitalism at its finest.

All right, then, the guard said, and grinned. He folded the bills and put them in his top pocket, then set off at a jog across the lot. Benji let out a high-pitched whistle and the guard turned around.

Not that way, Benji yelled over the bulldozers and cranes. That way.

He pointed toward where the ballroom had been, and the guard changed direction. A minute later he was running back, two whole bricks in his hands. He carried them against his chest, puffing and wheezing all the way. He dropped the bricks on the ground and started to cough.

Careful, Benji complained. I paid for those.

Just like you paid for the one off eBay, I thought. Only this time he could authenticate it.

The guard spat on the ground, then composed himself. It had obviously been some time since he’d been chasing criminals around the streets of LA.

What the hell do you kids want those for, anyway? he asked. What’s so special about a couple of bricks?

Benji picked up the bricks and cradled one in each hand. He held the rough, red surface against his face and breathed in, then cast a victorious glance in my direction.

Feel this, he said, handing the brick to the guard, who gave me a quizzical look.

Take it, I said. It won’t bite.

He took the brick, sniffed it, weighed it in his hand, then handed it back to Benji. It’s a brick, he concluded.

Benji shook his head. "It’s not just a brick. This piece of building, this element, is a living, breathing organism. This brick has witnessed some of the most amazing events in American history. It was there when Gone with the Wind received the Oscar for Best Picture. It watched Marilyn Monroe being photographed by the swimming pool. Perhaps it made up part of the room where Jean Harlow stayed, or Howard Hughes, or Nixon. Listen."

He held the brick up to his ear as if it were a shell. The air was suddenly still and the crash of demolition momentarily ceased.

It’s telling us its secrets, Benji said. These pieces of building, they are part of history. They talk to us. They tell us stories. Robert Kennedy might have been our president if he hadn’t died here, on this very site. And what do we do? We tear the place down, as if what happened here doesn’t matter one bit. We just tear it down and forget it was ever there.

There was an explosion and rubble rained down. The guard jumped and spun around as if he’d seen a ghost. Benji took a plastic bag from his pocket. I took some newspaper from my backpack and handed it to him. He wrapped the bricks in the paper, lovingly folded down the edges, and placed them in the bag. The guard scratched his head.

You kids are crazy, he said, and started to walk away.

Benji looked at me and smiled, pleased with himself.

Did you have to freak that guy out? I asked.

Benji laughed.

We walked back to his car. He put the bricks on the backseat.

You wanna put seat belts on them, too? I asked.

2

WE DROVE TO BARNEYS Beanery in West Hollywood, where we sat at Janis Joplin’s booth and ordered poached eggs with hollandaise. The food at the Beanery wasn’t the greatest, but the ambience more than made up for it. In the old days the Beanery was a hangout for Hollywood’s rock elite, like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Now it was full of tourists and frat boys with their girlfriends, playing pool. No one cared about the significance of the place anymore, no one except a few educated tourists and us. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were now members of the Forever 27 Club, along with Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin. It would have sucked to have died at twenty-seven, and it was so damn creepy how many awesome musicians had lost their lives at that exact age, but at least they were in good company.

Benji drank coffee and loaded photos from his camera onto his laptop. I looked at the ceiling, where an old table from the Beanery had been nailed up so that everyone could see it. Someone had scratched their name into the table larger than the others. The lettering was messy and jagged but the name was unmistakeable: Janis. It was rumored she’d had her last screwdriver at the Beanery, one final drink before departing this world in a pool of her own vomit. I imagined her in all her junked-up glory, plying her face with pastrami on rye and hacking at the table with a bread knife. I felt honored to be sitting in her booth.

Although it was only ten in the morning, the frat boys were drinking Coronas and the stereo was cranked to the hilt with an Elvis Presley song. A few tourists wearing Hollywood T-shirts with cameras slung around their necks waddled through the doors.

Oh, Harold, a woman said to her husband as she hooked her arm through his. "They say Jack Nicholson used to drink here with Dennis Hopper when they made Easy Rider."

Her old hippie husband looked around in awe. Far out.

These people should have annoyed us just as much as the frat boys did, but the truth was they were just like us. They were scavengers feeding off others, obsessed with lives that were not their own. They were our people.

Benji pierced his eggs with a fork, looked at me, and took a bite.

You look stupid with that pink hair, he said through a mouthful of food. In a fit of boredom I’d dyed my hair the night before. It seemed like a fun idea at the time, but the pink hadn’t really taken and my head looked like Hello Kitty threw up on it. I tossed my napkin at Benji.

You said you liked it this morning.

I’ve changed my mind. It looks stupid.

Well, you look disgusting. Finish your food before you open your mouth.

He stuck out his tongue, revealing the saliva-coated remnants of his meal. Have some respect at Janis’s table, I said.

Janis wouldn’t care. He snickered, chewing loudly. She would fully appreciate someone enjoying such a hearty, lard-laden meal.

He reached over and grabbed my orange juice.

Your aunt Lynette’s gonna be pissed when she sees your hair, he added, swallowing a mouthful of food and juice.

No, she won’t. She won’t even care.

The waitress refilled our coffees and I ordered another OJ. I looked out the window. There was surprisingly little traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. When the road was clear you could imagine it was the 1960s and the Beanery was filled with beatniks and poets, rather than drunken sorority girls. I finished my juice and watched Benji eyeing the girls at the bar. One of them bent over, exposing pink frilly panties beneath her tight leather skirt.

Do you mind if I check something, seeing as how you’re so distracted? I asked, pointing to his computer.

Benji unplugged his camera and spun the laptop around to face me. Another great thing about Barney’s was that it had free Wi-Fi. I logged on to my favourite website, the Celebrity Autopsy Room, and checked my profile:

NAME: Hilda Swann

AGE: 17

LIVES: Encino, CA

MOOD: Apathetic

I opened my personal preferences and changed my mood to excited. Summer vacation had finally arrived, and Benji and I were going to spend it doing what we loved best.

Summer vacation means different things to different people. To the popular girls at school it meant three months of hanging around the mall, playing beach volleyball in string bikinis, and being screwed by jocks under the boardwalk. To the neglected kids it meant being packed off to summer camp to battle the bugs and basket weaving. For Benji and me it meant days and days of glorious death.

FAVORITE MOVIE: Harold and Maude

FAVORITE MUSIC: Nirvana, the Ramones, the Carpenters

FAVORITE BOOK: Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger

INTERESTS: Dead celebrities, living in LA, books about serial killers

MY Favorite Dead People (in no particular order):

1. Sharon Tate

2. John Belushi

3. Chris Farley

4. James Dean

5. Marilyn Monroe

6. Phil Hartman

7. Kurt Cobain

8. Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia, for those not in the know)

9. Jayne Mansfield

10. My parents

Are you done? Benji took the laptop back. I’m waiting for this dude to contact me.

I called the waitress over. Can we get the check?

There it is, Benji said, smiling. Bingo.

He took a napkin and scribbled on it, then stuffed it in his pocket.

What’s that? I asked.

You’ll see. Come on. Let’s head up the hill.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to walk all the way from the Beanery to Janis’s place. Janis OD’d at the Landmark Hotel on Franklin Avenue—now the Highland Gardens—on heroin that was cut too pure. The batch killed a whole lot of people in LA, but Janis was the only famous one. Benji had stayed in the room once before, but every time I tried to make a reservation it was already booked. Sometimes it was booked solid for weeks in advance. People wanted to be close to Janis. They wanted to sleep in the same bed she’d puked on before dying on the floor. When we got to the hotel we tried to see in through the windows of her ground-floor room, but the curtains were closed. We walked back to the car, disappointed. Benji checked the backseat to make sure his bricks were still there.

What next? I asked.

You up for a little adventure?

Sure, I said. What did you have in mind?

Benji leaned over. You ever heard of Bernie Bernall?

Bernie Bernall? I don’t think so, I said. "Was he in Plan 9 from Outer Space?"

Benji rolled his eyes. God, you’re such a lightweight, Hilda. Bernie Bernall was a silent movie star whose career was ruined when they introduced the talkies. Apparently his voice was so bad he became the laughingstock of the industry. They tried dubbing another voice over his, but it didn’t work. He became a junkie and an alcoholic, then killed himself in his apartment.

How?

Benji leaned in close. He stabbed himself.

What do you mean, ‘stabbed himself’? Like with a knife?

Benji shook his head. Scissors.

Scissors. What a way to go. I whistled. That’s awesome.

Not only that, they were small sewing scissors so blunt you could barely cut your toenails with ’em. He just gouged that shit straight into his heart and moved it around till the hole was big enough to kill him.

Wow. How could I not have heard about this?

It gets worse. His wife was in New York when it happened, and apparently she didn’t give a shit. She didn’t even come back to town for the funeral.

Damn.

She didn’t even send flowers. She sent a telegram saying how regretful she was that it had happened, or some crap like that. When he stopped being famous, no one gave a shit about him anymore, you know? Everyone forgot about him, even his wife. Suicide was his last stab at being famous.

Literally.

Benji held up the napkin he had scribbled on at Barney’s. I just found out where his apartment was.

My eyes lit up. Where?

Echo Park.

Echo Park. One of the oldest neighborhoods in LA, home to junkies, freaks, and bohos. Jackson Pollock and Ayn Rand once lived there, as well as Tom Waits and Frank Zappa. Gentrification had turned Echo Park into a trendy suburb, but there was still a good amount of squalor in its rambling Spanish homes and overgrown gardens. I took the piece of paper from Benji and held it in my hands.

I want to get inside, he said.

Oh yeah? I laughed. How are we going to do that? Breaking and entering?

He put the car in gear and pulled out from the curb. Simple, he said. We’ll just ask.

I looked at Benji, with his military clothes, dark sunglasses, and black army cap. You think some little old lady is gonna let you into her apartment?

Hilda, you have seen my methods of persuasion. I can charm myself into anyone’s good graces.

We drove down Hollywood Boulevard, past Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and away from the busloads of tourists and faded stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We headed east toward downtown LA, where the road became cracked and pitted with potholes and the most colorful sights were the prostitutes outside the Rite Aid.

Can’t remember the last time I was this far downtown, I said.

Did you know Echo Park was actually the center of the movie business during the silent era?

Gee, Benji, you’re a wealth of information today, I said a little sarcastically. Benji loved to show off how much he knew about Hollywood.

I just read a book about it, he continued. All the major studios were in Echo Park before they moved out to the Valley. Mack Sennett’s studio was there. Can you imagine how cool it must have been? Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle and all those guys making all those fantastic films, pioneering the medium. It would have been magic. Fatty Arbuckle raped a girl with a Coke bottle, you know.

"Now, that I do know."

It was one of the most famous stories from that era: the fat movie star in the bowler hat who allegedly held the studio bit player down on the bed and rammed the bottle inside her, causing massive internal injuries. There were rumors that Fatty wasn’t even in the room at the time, and that the actress was really a prostitute who OD’d during a party in his hotel suite, and somehow Fatty got blamed. The actress died, and even though Fatty was acquitted by a jury, his career was ruined by the scandal. Ten years later the studio he had worked for all his life finally took pity on Fatty and cast him in a movie. Fatty proudly proclaimed it was the happiest day of his life. That same night he died of heart failure.

Hang on, I said. Didn’t Elliott Smith die in Echo Park, too? In a similar way? I remembered a newspaper article about the Oscar-nominated folksinger who took his own life under very suspicious circumstances.

That’s right! Benji said, excited. He had an argument with his girlfriend, and she says she went to take a shower, and after the shower she opened the bathroom door and found him standing in the middle of the kitchen with a knife in his chest.

Maybe he was possessed by the ghost of Bernie Bernall?

Maybe his girlfriend was lying to the cops and stabbed him herself.

Who knows. Have you ever heard his music? He seemed pretty miserable to me.

Knife-through-the-heart miserable?

More like emo, self-harming miserable.

Huh.

So what’s the game plan today?

No game plan. We’ll just knock on the door, ask if we can go in and take a few photos.

What if some crackhead opens the door and wigs out on us?

Benji gestured to the glove compartment. I opened it and took out a small aerosol can.

Pepper spray?

You can never be too careful, Hilda. This town’s full of psychos.

I put the spray back. We’d done some crazy stuff before, but knocking on someone’s door and asking if we could take a look inside was a new one. There was the time we trekked through the Hollywood Hills trying to find the mythical ruins of a movie star’s pool, said to be on vacant land wedged between two properties. What made the pool so special was the mosaic tile work on an adjoining wall that depicted a large spider sitting in a web, a creepy remnant of old-time Hollywood we were desperate to see. We climbed down a cliff face and pushed our way through the undergrowth, but when Benji saw a snake we screamed and ran out of there as fast as we could, our mission thwarted.

One night we climbed the fence at the Hollywood sign and slept under the stars, the enormous D towering above us, Los Angeles teeming below. We hid under the letter so we wouldn’t be seen, curled into its side with pillows and blankets and talked about all the people who’d OD’d up there and the actress who’d leaped to her death from the H. In the middle of the night I felt a tugging on my sleeping bag and woke to find a coyote tearing at the fabric. I stared into its black eyes for a few seconds before it took off, running silently into the scrub.

I watched Benji as we drove. He was stealing proud glances at the bricks on the backseat, his precious artifacts to add to his vast collection of strange objects. He liked to think of himself as the Indiana Jones of the macabre.

Stabbing yourself in the heart with scissors, Benji said with admiration. Now that takes balls. Did you know Elliott Smith’s girlfriend told the cops she found him with the kitchen knife already in his heart and pulled it out. Her prints were all over it. It’s so messed up. People should know better than to pull out the weapon if someone’s been stabbed. It’s the dumbest thing you can do.

I don’t think that’s something they teach you in school, Benji.

They should. It’s useful shit to know.

We drove down a dead-end street full of crummy apartment buildings and bungalows with faded pink paint. There weren’t many sprinklers on this side of town, and the lawns were dead and covered in weeds. Benji pulled up in front of a white stucco apartment block, the name DISTANT MEMORIES emblazoned on its side in wrought-iron cursive, the letters chipped and rusted.

Distant Memories? I said. How depressing.

It was hardly a fitting place for a movie star to live, and I figured Bernie Bernall must have been really down on his luck when he moved here. The building was two stories with a flat roof, and a sign advertising vacancies was hammered into the ground outside. Thick bars covered the windows of the lower level, giving the building the look of a prison. Old catalogs that had fallen from mailboxes were scattered across the front lawn, the edges eaten by snails. Benji shut off the engine.

If you were gonna kill yourself, he asked, how would you do it? I’d jump off a building, so I could sail through the air and watch the pavement rushing up toward me.

I thought for a moment. Pills, I said quietly. It would be the most painless way to go.

Bor-ing. He opened the glove compartment and took out the pepper spray. We’ll be needing this.

We walked up the sun-bleached path to the apartment building, Benji up front, the spray concealed in his jacket. He stood in front of the mailbox looking for the right apartment number, and