John Belushi Is Dead (2 page)

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.

W
E DROVE TO
B
ARNEYS
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:

N
AME
: Hilda Swann

A
GE
: 17

L
IVES
: Encino, CA

M
OOD
: 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.

F
AVORITE MOVIE
:
Harold and Maude

F
AVORITE MUSIC
: Nirvana, the Ramones, the Carpenters

F
AVORITE BOOK
:
Hollywood Babylon
by Kenneth Anger

I
NTERESTS
: Dead celebrities, living in LA, books about serial killers

M
Y
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?”