John Belushi Is Dead (21 page)

“You're the one who should be looking like this. I thought you and Lynette were doing yard work today?”

“Oh, we were going to, but a case came up and she had to go,” I said. “So—”

“So who was that guy?”

I played dumb. “What guy?”

Benji shook his head as if clearing away whatever was rattling around inside. “The guy in the fucking convertible.”

“He works with Lynette,” I lied, although I wasn't sure why I didn't just tell him the truth. Like Benji had said, I was allowed to have other friends, wasn't I? “I took her some lunch and he dropped me off at home. Are you spying on me, Benji?”

He stood and walked toward me, and I took a step back. He broke into a broad grin and put his arm around me. “That's what I love about you, Hilda,” he said, rubbing my shoulder. “So feisty. I've never met a chick with so much moxie.”

It was like being in a bear's grip. I squirmed. What was it they said about bears? It was best to play dead and let them roll you around a bit. They'd eventually lose interest.

“That's just because you never meet any chicks,” I said. Benji softened his grip and laughed, and I carefully pulled away like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“That's exactly what I'm talking about,” he said. “Come on. I've got something awesome to show you.”

He dragged me down the street toward his car.

“Benji, I'm really tired. Can't we do this tomorrow?”

“No, Hilda! We cannot do this tomorrow. You're going to love it. I promise you.”

A
MOMENT LATER WE WERE
in Benji's car and speeding downtown into parts of Los Angeles most people refused to go. We drove past the gates of Chinatown, the slums of Koreatown, the junkies of Skid Row. I locked my door.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“This is the best part of the city,” Benji replied. “This is where the real gritty living happens. I love it.”

Benji was right, but there wasn't much to love. Downtown Los Angeles was the nerve center of bureaucracy and civil administration, the engine room for the city. During the day this part of town administered to our waterworks and power stations, processed our criminals, and made our laws. Then at night it became a ghost town, and one by one the homeless people shuffled out of their cardboard boxes like zombies in a Romero film, taking over the streets. I looked at Benji's clothes. His knees had grass stains and his boots were covered in mud, which hardened and dropped to the floor in big clumps. Benji didn't seem to notice.

“Why the hell are you covered in dirt?” I asked.

He looked down at his muddied cargoes. “I've been hanging out with these guys I met in a chat room. Hilda, you've got to meet them. They're just like us, into the same things. This one guy Ted, he's awesome. He's into the sickest shit.”

Coming from Benji that was saying something. I was, however, relieved that Benji had found some other friends. Only a few weeks ago the idea would have filled me with anxiety, but now I was happy there was someone else to share the burden of Benji's neuroses. “You still didn't tell me why you're all dirty,” I said.

“Oh, that. Today we dug up a grave.”

I was sure I hadn't heard that right. “Did you just say what I think you said?”

He gave me a grin that put me on the edge of my seat. “Hilda, it was amazing. It was a fresh one, just filled in this morning, at the far end of the cemetery where no one could see us. We dug it up, had a look inside, then filled it in again. Man, you should have seen this guy. He looked so
fresh
, but he was, like,
so not there anymore
.”

I didn't say anything. Benji was crossing boundaries I had never dreamed of traversing. It was one thing to look at photographs on the Internet, but digging up graves and gawking at dead bodies was quite another.

“You just have to meet these guys, Hilda,” he said with an enthusiasm that bordered on mania. “You'll love them.”

We continued driving downtown, past Boyle Heights, City Hall, the LAC+USC Medical Center. I wondered how Hank was doing.

“Look,” Benji said. “There it is.”

He pointed at a nondescript government building, one story, painted white. “That's the coroner's office,” I said.

“Sure is,” he replied, and before I knew it Benji had cut across traffic and turned into the parking lot.

“You brought me to the coroner's office? Why the hell would I want to come here, Benji? Of all places!”

“Jesus, Hilda. Do you ever stop? Just trust me. You are going to get a kick out of this.”

I followed him into a small reception area that was bare except for a few scattered plastic chairs and a vending machine. The walls were fake oak paneling and the floor hard concrete. A large woman sat in a corner chair, her back to us. Two young girls sat on either side of her, holding her hands. The woman rubbed at her eyes with bunched-up tissues, some of them dropping on her feet and onto the floor. One of the girls looked up, her eyes filled with tears. Benji strolled up to the tiny reception window and smiled at the lady seated behind it.

“Good afternoon, ma'am,” he announced loudly. “We are looking for the gift shop.”

The women sitting in the corner looked up at us, disbelieving.

“No problem,” the receptionist said, much to my surprise. She took two visitor passes from a drawer and slid them beneath the glass.

“Go to the next building,” she instructed. “Knock on the door in reception and they'll let you in. Then take the elevator to the first level. Room two-oh-eight. It's at the end of the corridor.”

“Many thanks.” Benji smiled, as if he had just received directions to the gorilla enclosure at the zoo. I lowered my head as we walked past the woman in the corner with her family, their hands interlocked in quiet solidarity.

“Are you high?” I said as we walked out the door. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Chill out.” He handed me a visitor badge and stuck his own to his jacket. It took him a moment to find a spot that wasn't covered in dirt. “This is all totally legit.”

“Did you see that family, Benji? Do you know why they were there? They were identifying a body! I want to go home.”

He stopped walking. “But don't you want to see the gift shop?”

I paused. I couldn't believe a place like this would have a gift shop, but the receptionist had confirmed its existence. At the very least I was intrigued.

“Okay,” I relented. “But it's the gift shop and nothing else. This isn't a fun park.”

We walked into the next building to find the reception area deserted. Benji knocked on a wood-paneled door and waited. A portly woman wearing glasses and a suit opened the door and eyed our visitor passes.

“Can I help you?” she asked me.

“We're looking for room two-oh-eight,” I said.

“You mean the gift shop?”

“I guess so.”

The woman ushered us into a sparse corridor lined with offices and pointed toward the elevator. “Second floor,” she said. “Turn right.”

“Thank you so much,” Benji said.

“Do you have to be so goddamn happy?” I snapped. “How about a little quiet respect?”

“Quiet respect? Hilda, I'm going shopping!”

Two men wearing stiff white shirts entered the elevator carrying folders and clipboards, barely glancing at us. “There's a twenty-two slug in the hallway,” one of them said. “We have to move him now. It's messy.”

“After I check out this stabbing in three-fourteen,” the other man said, looking down at his papers. I looked at Benji and he winked at me, rubbing his hands in excitement.

At the end of the corridor on the second floor was a converted office with a tiny sign that read
SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET
. We walked in and found a small room decked out in merchandise branded with the LA County Coroner name: baseball caps, T-shirts, bags, even mouse pads decorated with the outline of a dead body and plastic skulls for holding pencils. A pleasant-looking woman with frizzy hair sat behind a desk that doubled as a counter. She smiled at us as we walked in.

“I can't believe this,” I said, picking up a key chain in the shape of a toe tag. “This is by far the strangest thing I have seen in this town, and that's saying something.”

“This shit is cool,” Benji said, putting a cap on his head. “I look like I'm from
CSI
.”

“We used to sell jackets as well,” the woman said to us. “They looked like official jackets, with ‘coroner' written on the back. We had to pull them when people started turning up at crime scenes in them, pretending to work for us.”

“No shit,” Benji said.

“They had no idea what they were doing and usually ended up trampling all over the evidence.”

“Cool.”

Benji bought two baseball caps and a T-shirt. “You want anything?” he asked. There was a time when I would have leaped at the chance to buy this stuff, but today everything seemed wrong. I shook my head.

“It goes to a good cause,” the woman said, sensing my uncertainty. “All the money goes to educating kids about drunk driving.
We bring them in here on tours, make them look at the bodies of crash victims. It's very effective.”

“I'm sure it is,” I said, “but I'm fine. Thank you.”

Benji looked at me, shrugged, and handed over his credit card. As soon as he had paid, I left the room and started to make my way back to the elevator. The building was old and sterile, and I couldn't help thinking of how many dead bodies we were surrounded by, hidden behind locked doors and dumped in passageways. This place was different from the streets and houses we visited, where the famous and infamous had met their demise. There was no mythology here, no feeling that you had stumbled upon a sacred place, imbued with history and story and legend. There was only the smell of formaldehyde and the tedious bureaucracy of the processing and disposal of remains. Here bodies weren't sacred; they were paperwork. I felt Benji's hand around my arm as I walked toward the elevator, pulling me in the opposite direction.

“What is it?” I snapped, eager to leave.

“Not that way,” he said, and motioned to the other end of the corridor. “Let's have a look around.”

“We're going to get into trouble.”

“No we won't. Just act like you're meant to be here. I want to do some exploring.” Then he was off down the corridor, and I had no choice but to reluctantly trail behind, cursing that I had once again allowed myself to be taken in by one of Benji's misguided adventures. He raced toward the end of the hall and rounded a corner. I chased after him, holding my breath, unsure of what we would find.

“Let's go back,” I said, and Benji let out a yell.

“Holy shit!”

At the end of the darkly lit corridor was a gurney. There was no one around, everything was quiet, and it looked like someone
had parked it there momentarily and forgotten about it. I saw the unmistakable form of a body covered by a soiled white sheet, its feet pointed toward us.

“That's it, Benji,” I said, my hands covering my face. “We're going.” But he was already bounding down the corridor toward the gurney, and before I knew it he was right beside the body. Without hesitation he yanked the sheet back. The body of a young man stared at the ceiling with open eyes. He had black wispy hair and looked no older than a teenager. His skin had started to turn blue. Benji pointed to a small clean hole above his heart.

“He was shot,” he said. “See the bullet wound?”

I shrank against the wall.

“What are you doing all the way over there?” he said. “Come on. It's not going to do anything to you. It's a corpse.”

I stayed where I was but slowly craned my neck forward. “This isn't right,” I said, and it came out as a whisper. “We've gone too far.”

“What do you mean? The elevator is just around the corner. We can find our way back.”

I looked at the boy's eyes, open and dry, the reflection of the harsh fluorescents burning his retinas. I half expected them to suddenly move, to look at me and ask what I was doing. I wanted to lean forward and close them, give him peace, but I was scared. We had interfered too much already.

“Put the sheet back, Benji,” I said, but he wasn't listening. He was long gone, enraptured. Voices echoed down a nearby corridor and somewhere a door slammed closed. I grabbed Benji's arm.

“Benji! Put it back!”

He looked at me. “But isn't this what you wanted to see?” he asked, confused. “Isn't this what you've been looking for?”

“Take me home,” I said. “I want to go home.”

“Jesus, calm down, we'll go.”

Benji took the end of the sheet in both hands and drew it slowly over the boy's face, taking his time, watching the fabric settle into the grooves of his features.

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

We found our way back to reception. The woman with glasses smiled and opened the door for us.

“Thanks for all your support,” she said, and raised her coffee mug to us. “Have a good day.”

“Don't mention it,” Benji yelled back as I dragged him outside. We got to the car and Benji wrestled his arm free from my grip.

“What is wrong with you?” he said. “You used to love this shit. All of a sudden you're too good for it! What happened to you this summer to make you so prissy?”

I could barely control my anger. “
Prissy
? Benji, there were people in there who had just been told that their kid was dead! That their husband was dead! That's not some old mansion or apartment, or some hotel room. It's a morgue. Death is happening in there
right now
. Those people were in pain, in horrible pain, and you couldn't care less.”

“Why should I care?” he yelled. “It's just death. Most natural thing in the world, remember?”