VOICES OF THE DAMNED

I'm a student of human moves.
-- Fast Eddie Felson

We have such sights to show you.
-- The Hell Priest

People have always fascinated me -- who they are, what they are, and why they do the things they do. I suppose any writer worth his salt is similarly fascinated. Writers, after all, traffic in human beings both real and imagined. They are our stock-in-trade. In order for our subjects and characters to rise off the page and take three-dimensional shape in the readers' mind, we must nurse the conceit that we understand human nature to a degree which the ordinary person does not. We must make this conceit part of who we are, and never shy away from it or apologize for it. It takes a certain arrogance to be a surgeon or a fighter pilot, and it takes a not totally dissimilar arrogance to write about our fellow homo sapiens, because before we can begin, before we can set down a single word, we must first understand the motive causes of our characters. Who are these people? What drives them? What to they want? What to they love, what do they hate, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- what do they fear? If you can't answer that, or at least speculate in some detail, you've no business writing about people at all.

Now, it so happens that in my life I've had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary miscellany of human beings, from professional criminals to decorated law enforcement officers, from famous scientists to disgraced politicians, from A-list actors to D-list comedians, and everything in between. My father was the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, and that opened certain doors into the world of politics, intelligence and the military. I chose a career in law enforcement, which opened more doors, into the worlds of criminality, crime-fighting and social work, just to name a few. And later, of course, I became a cog in the Hollywood machine, which brought me (and still brings me) into contact with a staggering variety of characters from every walk of life and every background. Some are friends, some acquaintances, some people I met only once, in the back seats of Ubers or cabs or next to me on park benches or trains. At some point or other, I began to realize that many of these people had left marks on me -- their faces, and especially their voices, began to haunt me, as did the details of their life stories. From time to time I tapped into these recollections when creating fictional characters or situations for my books, but for the most part, I've hoarded them, collected them, kept them to myself. Recently, I got the idea that perhaps I ought to cull some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had into a play or a book. To test the waters, I've begun to write down the words that have been rattling around in my head, in some cases for decades, but to do so in a way that entirely preserved the anonymity of these confessionals. As part of that test, I'm adducing a few of the choicer monologues here, gathered over the last 20-odd years. All of them are real and not works of fiction or imagination, though I am going from memory in these particular examples and not from transcripts or recordings. In some cases, too, they are syntheses of more than one person in the same profession. In any case, they are but a sample of the human menagerie which exists within my head, and much of what they say may offend, shock, or bewilder. But as the saying goes -- people: what can you do?

THE HOOKER: When they busted me it was such a fucking joke. I mean, there I was in this motel, doing it with this guy, and after we finished he left, I had no more appointments, so I cleaned up and packed my things and left. And they arrested me in the parking lot. They didn't hassle my client. He just drove away. But they got me and took me in. I denied everything, but they told me don't waste my time, they had been in the next room listening. I was like, “Did you enjoy yourselves?” I was so angry. I mean, people are out there getting raped and murdered, gangs are selling drugs in schoolyards – I've got two kids, mind you – and like, there's the Mafia and terrorists and everything, and you've got four cops in a hotel room with a spike mike in the wall listening to me fake it. And they acted like they were heroes making the streets safer and I was this disgusting piece of trash who had to be stopped. Come on. What a fucking joke. It's my body, why can't I do what I want with it? Athletes sell their bodies, why can't I? If there weren't a demand for pussy, men wouldn't pay for it. So I had to go to court and plead guilty and it was so humiliating because all that stuff ends up in the papers, but it was bullshit, too, because all the guys are looking me up and down, even the judge, and I know damn well some of them would have been very happy to get me in bed and would have paid to do it, too. Come to think of it, I should have handed out business cards.

THE OLD MAN: I tell you what, this neighborhood has gone straight to hell. I've lived here all my life, which is a long time now, longer than I care to remember, really, and I tell you, this used to be a great place to live. Where that electronics store used to be was a livery stable, and we'd go rent a couple of horses and ride all the way to downtown Los Angeles. We'd tie up the horses outside a bar and have a couple of beers and then ride back up the Cahuenga Pass. And that whole time you wouldn't see more than a few cars. Not like today, when it's just bumper-to-bumper all day every day, even on Sundays. In those days, when I was a kid, I tell you, things were so different. This town was really more like the West. Everything was flat and dusty and hot and spread out. Orange groves here. Lemon groves there. We had a hundred acres out here, grew grapes and some other fruits that certain races of people like to eat. I drove around in my daddy's pickup with a shotgun to make sure nobody trespassed. Used to fire over their heads – once I found people using our barbeque and our picnic tables and I let 'em have it. They ran like the devil. People are shocked when I tell 'em that now. But things were different, people were different. Guns were a part of who we were. My friend Charlie was a cop, and he wouldn't take off his pistol for anything, no way. When he got married he got out of the car in his tux and his service revolver just fell plumb out of his cummerbund and hit the pavement right there in front of everybody. I said, “Charlie, for God's sake, let me have the gun.” And he said no, and we had a big argument right there outside the church, and the upshot of it was I carried his gun during the ceremony but he got it right back afterwards when he was climbing back into the car to take him to his honeymoon. He never did stop carrying that gun, but it didn't do him no damn good because he died of spinal meningitis.

THE CABBIE: You what really gets me? American Jews. I don't understand them. I'm Israeli – you can probably tell from my accent. I understand Israelis because we're all hustlers, you know, animals. We like to party. We're not religious. We just know we're Jews. But these American Jews, I don't get at all. They are all so into being Jewish. It's like a religion to them – not Judaism, being Jewish. Like they feel guilty for not living in Israel so they want to show us how Jewish they are, how they keep kosher, how they go to synagogue, how they raise money for kibbutzim and shit. When I meet one they always tell me how much they support Israel. I say, “If you want to support Israel, move there. We could use your money.” Shit, if every Jew in America moved to Israel the Arabs would never get rid of us. We'd have five million more people and we wouldn't need your “support,” because we'd have your money and your kids for the army. I was in the army and I'm a woman. In Israel, everyone goes into the army except the ultra-Orthodox, and you can have them. Worthless. All they do is procreate and pray. Of course I left Israel years ago. Went to Europe, and now here. I like America. There are so many different kinds of people here. I don't think I'll move back. I'll be an American and a Jew. But I'll never be an American Jew.

THE MARINE: Once, in Iraq, we flew out to where the insurgents had gotten hold of a whole bunch of police officer candidates, you know, the guys we were training to be cops for the new government. The insurgents had taken them out into the desert and tied their wrists together with barbed wire and made them kneel down in the sand and shot them in the back of the head. We found fifty of them like that. Made 'em take off their clothes – except their underwear, the Arabs are weird about nudity – and just killed them. And that was like, a common thing. We were always finding bodies, ten, twenty, thirty bodies. All men. Never any women. Sometimes they'd cut the heads off and sometimes they'd just shoot them. It made you wonder how desperate people must be to want to join the police force or the army, that they'd risk getting their fucking heads cut off. What a fucking country. Being in a place like that makes you pretty hard. Otherwise you'll lose it. Like, I was a sergeant and these new guys – we called them nuggets – they'd arrive at the base, and the first thing I'd do was say, “Nuggets, go clean out the fucking helicopter.” Well, we'd lost a gunner the day before and there was blood and brains everywhere and these poor nuggets are puking while they're scrubbing. We found that funny. We did a lot of sick shit like that. Funny thing, at Christmastime we'd get cases and cases of candy canes from back home, and the fucking hajis hated the sight of those things. They knew that candy canes meant Christmas and Christmas is Christian, and they fucking hate Christians. So we'd fly over their villages and dump candy canes on them – thousands and thousands of candy canes – and they'd run out and shake their fists at us and stomp them. We always got a good laugh out of that.

THE HOOKER: It's so frustrating, the way life works. I spent years building up a clientele. I had two houses. I had $50,000 in the bank. A boyfriend that was very supportive. One of my regulars was a CPA and he handled my books – not for free, but you know, we worked something out. Then I got in my accident. Somebody ran a red light and T-boned my car. My back was all messed up. I was out of commission for months. Then I needed surgery – two surgeries, actually. And my line of work doesn't come with health insurance. Everything was out of pocket. By the time the smoke cleared I was living in an apartment again. Savings gone. I used to see 4 – 5 clients a day. Now I see 4 – 5 clients a week. Okay, I'm not as young as I was, and I can't work out the way I used to because of my back, but I've still got this face and these tits, so what's the big deal? But people just move on. I wasn't answering the phone so they moved on. I e-mailed them and told them I was back in business but nobody came back. Not many, anyway. There's no loyalty. Now I have to get a regular job. I have to start sending out resumes. But what the hell am I supposed to put on them?

THE OLD MAN: Guns aren't the problem. I was handling my dad's guns when I was twelve. His shotgun. But he also bought me a .22 bolt-action. Hell, we needed guns then, growing up in the desert. My older brother heard hell breaking loose in our yard one night, the horses screaming, and he went out with his rifle and saw what he thought was a dog out there. He thought it was our neighbor's dog got loose, maybe, so he didn't fire; but it turned out it was a goddamned mountain lion. Messed one of the horses up pretty good. And there were rattlers, too. You had to shoot 'em if you were on horseback. Everyone had a gun back then, but nobody shot anybody. You hear about this big shooting, that big shooting, and everyone blames the guns. OK, so maybe a man doesn't need an AR-15 or whatever, but why blame the gun when it's a man who pulls the trigger? Problem is nobody's afraid of consequences anymore. You kill 30 people, they send you to jail and the taxpayer gets to foot the bill for your food and clothes and medical care. Why should you be afraid? String 'em up from trees, the way we used to, and you won't have that problem anymore. Hell, I can remember when they broadcast executions on the radio.

THE MARINE: The frustrating thing was the rules, really. We knew who the bad guys were but the rules were so fucking strict, and you had these candy asses calling the shots. It got people killed. One day we saw this pickup cruising along, and we had the grunts stop it, and it was full of hajis, including some wanted guys, but the lieutenant wouldn't pull the trigger. He couldn't get clearance and he ordered us to let them go. Well, they rigged the road with IED's, and the next day they blew the fuck out of one of our patrols. You want to talk bitter. We could have wasted every one of those fuckers. We should have. But that's not always the way it works. But sometimes it does. Can I tell you about the night I killed eight people? I won't. I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't want to be one of those guys that everybody things is lying. Like, my grandfather always used to say that the guys who really saw the shit in WW2 never said a word, but the fakers wouldn't shut up about it. He was right. I was in a bar not long after I got back, and I'm telling my brother-in-law about Iraq, and this dumpy little guy in Coke-bottle glasses comes over and says, real loud, “Oh, you were over there too, huh? I'm with the CIA. I was hunting Bin Laden in Afghanistan.” And I'm like, Sure you were, kitten. It's so fucking sad the way people lie about stuff like that, because it just cheapens it for all of us who really were over there doing the dirty work.

THE COP: I was a week on the job the first time I got shot at. A sniper. We were under a railroad bridge when he opened up on us. People always ask, What did you do? Well, what the fuck do you think I did? I ran. Me and my partner. I guess if it were TV show we'd have shot back, called for backup, the whole nine yards. Life isn't a TV show. We ran. We lived. A week after that, I got called to a housing project because of a stabbing. Black woman was lying there bleeding out from a wound to a leg. Femoral artery, I'm sure. I hauled ass over to her and tried to get a tourniquet around her leg, and you know what happened? All the people above me in the building started throwing shit at me. I don't mean rotten eggs. I mean like potted plants and bricks and shit. There I am, trying to save this woman's life, and they're trying to kill me. It was the damndest thing. They kept driving me off and I kept going back. They didn't do it because I was white. They did it because I was cop. Being white didn't help though. I remember once we were patting down some gangbangers outside the project and this one loudmouth kid, this troublemaker, he came over and started giving us shit. He was already in a cast because some cop had beaten his ass a couple of weeks before, and his family was suing the city. He just walked over and got in our faces. Big mistake. There was a guy I was working with, big guy, he says, “Shut your fucking mouth, nigger,” and blasts the guy right in his mouth. The kid fell off the curb and broke his leg. Broke his leg! He already had a broken arm! I just put my head in my hands. That's another lawsuit and please God I don't get subpoenaed to testify. I don't want to work with people like that. I mean, you can call 'em savages but not niggers. That's wrong.

THE ACTRESS: Sometimes it's the good things that hurt you the worst. The things you wait for. That you hope and pray for. I worked on this one show for Nickelodeon as an extra and I got to know the crew pretty well. I'd laugh and joke around with them, and they got to liking me. I never hassled the cast, of course; you can't talk to them when you're an extra, but the crew was different, we were all in the same boat. I'd stand at Craft Services, eating, and kid around with them. So I always got asked back. But of course nobody comes to Hollywood to be an extra. I wanted to act. And one day I'm at my barista job, slinging java, and I get a call from my agent saying they have a part for me. A recurring character. Still a very small part, but I'd be part of this clique of bitchy high school girls, kind of sidekicks to the queen bee bitch, and I'd get a line or two here or there, and it would pay a thousand dollars for the first episode. Same money for any subsequent appearances, and more if I got lines. I was over the moon. This is how you get in the door. Look at Mercedes McNabb, for God's sake: she had years of work off the same kind of role on Buffy. Or the guys who played the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. They came in as day players and got nine years' work out of it. So I asked my boss for the time off to shoot the episode and he said, “As long as you can find somebody to cover your shift, you can do it, otherwise, no.” And I asked everybody. I mean everybody. And they all said no. Every single fucking one of them. I think it was jealousy. We were all in the trenches together, all “aspiring” to be something, and as long as we were all at the bottom we were all bestest buddies. But now I had a chance to take that first rung on the ladder, and boom, out came the claws. It was horrible. It finally came to the point where I had to decide between taking the part and losing my job. But I couldn't afford to lose my job for a thousand dollar payday with no guarantee of other work. I mean, this is L.A., for crissake; a thousand dollars won't even cover one month's rent. What could I do? I passed on the role, went home, and cried myself to sleep.

THE COP: You've got to be fucking crazy to be a cop and put up with all that shit. And we were. We'd get drunk and play bumper cars. Just smash around the streets, hitting each other, hitting parked cars, late at night. We'd get pulled over and flash our tin and the cops would just let us go. They knew we were just blowing off steam. But I was never a hypocrite about it. Once I came up to this car at a green light, and it wasn't moving. I waited two cycles and then hit my siren and lights. Nothing. I got out and found a black kid at the wheel, passed out cold. Drunk. I woke him up. He was underage and scared shitless. I said, “Kid, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna drive this car home at exactly five miles an hour. I am going to follow you. If you hit anyone, if you hit anything, I'm arresting you for DUI. If you make it home safe, you're off the hook.” That poor kid, I don't think he even touched the pedal on his way home. When he finally parked the car I said, “Give me the keys, then go in and go to sleep. Tomorrow come to the station and ask for me, and you'll get the keys back.” When people ask me why I did that I say, “I've driven drunk a thousand times, how can I lock up someone else for it and look myself in the mirror?”

THE BOXER: People ask me, “Would you let your son become a boxer?” I say, “Would you let yours?” And when they say, “No!” – and they always say, “No!” – I say, “Well, you have your answer.” The truth is, I didn't want to turn pro. My style was perfect for the amateurs, but professional boxing is a totally different sport. Being a great amateur doesn't mean you'll pan out as a pro. There's a lot of Olympic gold medalists who washed out in the pros. Look at Henry Tillman. Look at Andrew Maynard. Look at Herbert Runge, for God's sake. I know the history, man. But my father, he had his heart set on me getting there. He wanted me to be the thing he never was, I guess. But it's a hard, hard life. And it's not natural. God gave us this head to think with, not to use as a motherfucking punching bag. People are always surprised by how easily I get upset watching a boxing match. That's because the the things they want to see are not the things I want to see. I can appreciate the technique, the artistry. I can't appreciate one dude beating on another like a fucking slab of meat. You wouldn't either, if you'd ever been knocked out.

THE OLD MAN: It's not just the things that were different, it's people. People understood what community was. Not like now, when everything's so selfish. That's the right word. Selfish. Nobody cares about anyone else. Hell, I'll tell you a story. Lockheed used to have a plant up the way, made P-38 Lightnings or something during the war. And they had a test field here, where the commercial airport is now. One day, I guess maybe this was in the late 1950s, I saw a plane zooming around overhead, which was nothing new, but this one was at treetop level. Like in Korea, the fliers used to do this thing called a Nape Scrape, where they'd fly so low to avoid ground fire they was practically dragging their bellies on the deck? That's what this fella was doing and I knew something was wrong, because even a test pilot don't do that in a residential neighborhood. Well, he zoomed over the houses and crashed into the gravel pit over there – it used to be over there, but I guess that's where the mall is now. Killed the pilot. Well, they had an investigation and it turned out his engine went bad and he had to make a decision – go toward the field down the way, and maybe live, but risk a whole lotta lives, or crash into the pit right here and die, but save everybody else. He chose to crash. Think about that. If he'd made for the field he might still be alive. But he didn't think he had the right to risk a bunch of folks for the chance of saving his own ass. So he gave up his life just like that, for people he didn't even know. People used to be like that, you know. They understood community. They understood they weren't nothing but leaves on a tree: they'd have their time, and then they'd go, but the tree would always be here. But nobody cares about the tree today. And that, my friend, is why the tree is dying.