Just Bleed: or, Thoughts on the Dead Man in the Rain

You bleed just to know you're alive.
-- The Goo Goo Dolls

The day began they most of 'em do in the rainy season here in Southern California -- slowly, groggily, and with a lot of muttered cursing. The alarm jangled at 5:45 AM, otherwise known as the crack of "why am I alive?" I rolled upright, pushed the cat off my lap, stuck my feet into their recently-purchased CVS carpet slippers. I need these wretched slippers in what passes for winter here, because the studio in which I live has no insulation: winters are freezing cold, summers intolerably hot. At moments like these, it's hard not to think back to a few years ago, when I lived in a luxurious top-floor apartment with parquet floors and a view of the Hollywood sign, but 5:45 in the morning is a poor time to reflect on poor choices and the places they lead you.

So I get up. Switch on the light. Feed the cat. Empty my bladder. Rinse my teeth and then brush them, trying hard not to look in the mirror, because who the fuck wants to see this face before the sun's even up? I know what I'll see. Thinning hair, badly rumpled. Baggy bloodshot eyes. An unshaven mug. Christ, I look like a walking momento mori, a kind of advertisement of the horrors of middle age. Now the inevitable question arises: do I bother with a shower? God knows I need one, but what's the point? The clothes I'm going to wear are filthy, why put a clean body into them? Especially when that clean body will soon be surrounded by clouds of dirt, dust, powder, and fuck knows what? Yet if I don't bathe I'll feel as shitty as my clothing all day. So into the shower I go. The water takes too long to heat up and there are brown recluse spiders lurking in the uppermost corners of the stall. I could vacuum them out again, but we have a sort of peace treaty whereby they do not descend upon me when I'm bathing and I don't smash them into paste. As I wash I debate shaving. I don't have the time, but I will need groceries on the way home from work and the hot blonde cashier at the Handy Mart, though half my age, need not know that I am too old to be leering at her. After all, when I do shave I look about 37 and not 45, which is still too old to be leering at her but, overall, seems less shameful somehow. So I shave. My razor is dull, my mirror dirty, but ah, well, the things we do for unrequited lust.

I step out of the shower and back into my shoes lest my wet feet catch on the invisible yet oh-so-present grains of cat litter that inevitably spill onto my bathroom floor. There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door and with the same instinct that makes little boys peel back their bandages, I risk a glimpse at the reflection. This, then, is Miles Watson, voted "Top TKE" in 1997, graduate of the Maryland State Correctional Training Academy, with honors; holder of two Masters degrees, recipient of the first-ever Endowment Award from Seton Hill University, author of 2016's Book of the Year, Cage Life, black belt, historian, and all-around übermensch. Why do I look like shit? Something isn't adding up. Must remember to pose a few pointed questions to God when I get home, starting with, What did you do with my hair?

I struggle into my foam clothes. "Foam clothes" are make-up effects artist's slang for anything you wear to the shop. Since anything you do wear to work is ruined that same day, those clothes become "foam clothes" and you keep them and wear them to work until they disintegrate, whereupon you find some other clothing you won't miss and put that on instead. My shirt is so stiff with foam latex, plaster of Paris, paste-wax and silcone that it feels like body armor; ditto my pants and jacket. Even my shoes are little more than blocks of vary-colored rubber. I buckle my tool belt in place, strap on my kneepads, tie my Maryland State Flag bandanna around my neck and jam a filthy baseball cap down onto my head. Then I open the door and -- hell, it's raining again. Six o'clock in the fucking morning and it's still pitch dark and raining in the bargain. Each drop contains some irony. In just a few months it will be summer, the temperatures will soar into the 100s, and the idea that moisture or cold temperatures can even exist here become a sort of fantasy. But that's SoCal, my adoptive homeland: happy mediums need not apply.

My cat Spike is not happy about the rain either. He wants to roam and hunt in the yard, to do battle with lizards and birds. Rain means another day trapped inside my house. But I'd happily trade places with him. The cat can go to work and I'll lie in bed watching bootleg DVDs of T.J. Hooker in my pajamas. It's a nice fantasy. It ends when I scoot him back inside, grab my food bag (containing breakfast and lunch) and my laptop, and move quickly to my car.

When I was 23 years old I drove a lemon-yellow Jaguar XJ6 and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 32 I drove a forest-green Ford Explorer and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 40 years old I drove a bottle-green Chrysler LeBaron convertible and had a gorgeous girlfriend. Now I drive an ancient Honda whose every part has been replaced at least once, and I have no girlfriend. Like my present living quarters, like my lack of a girlfriend, the very existence of the car seems to indicate a backsliding, a retrogression, a falling-off. People are supposed to move forward as they go deeper into their lives; they are supposed to progress. As I move toward my car in the rain, I wonder whether I hit my peak some years past and failed to notice it.

Ice, in the San Fernando Valley, is quite rare, but I have to scrape some off my windshield nonetheless. As I do so I get fleeting reminders of my old life back East, in Maryland, where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania, where I lived for many years. Scrapers and de-icers and sacks of sand and salt and chains on tires and long underwear and heavy gloves -- all of that stuff is unnecessary in Los Angeles, but I'm strangely nostalgic for it, as I am for snow, and seasons, and fireflies, and summer thunderstorms. Maybe I've lived here too long; maybe I should go. Whatever it was I was trying to prove by moving here in 2007, I've more than proved it. After all, 99% of those who do get off the bus on Hollywood and Vine slink away two years later, broken in wallet and in spirit, never having come within screaming distance of the business they came here to dominate. Not me. I endured more punishment than Frank Cotton did when he opened the box in Hellraiser, but I broke through nevertheless. In a field where even the qualified fail to qualify, I've made a living: the entertainment industry. TV. Movies. Video games. Writing. I've done it all. Granted, I've done it as a foot soldier, a grunt, a spear-carrier, and a flunky, but I've done it. Isn't that a victory? And even if it isn't, can't I declare victory and go home?

I shoot out onto Hollywood Way, heading for the Five Freeway. Sleazy light from the gas station reflects in the puddles on the street. The radio murmurs bad news. My windshield wipers make too much noise, and I'm tired. I went to bed at 9:30 pm but it didn't matter: I may as well have not slept at all. The weight of the day oppresses me in advance. Ever since I was in junior high school I've been cursed with a terrible form of prescience that allows me to experience everything in my day before it happens -- bathing, commuting, working, coming home. That backwards power afflicts me again now. I may be on the Five, zooming west at eighty miles an hour, but in my mind I'm already in the effects shop, listening to the angle grinders and power saws, the drills and generators and walk-in ovens. Movie magic is messy magic; the air will be full of dust and grit and pulverized rubber. Within half an hour I'll have so much talcum powder on me I'll look as if I'd rolled in flour. Soon gooey blobs of foam latex, not yet gelled, will be caked in my arm hair, on my clothing, in the laces of my boots. Clay will work its way into the creases of my knuckles and into my ears and beneath my fingernails. Not long after that I'll get a fiberglass splinter in the ball of my thumb, or get my finger pinched in a mold, or scrape my ribs against an exposed bolt. At some point I'll drink so much coffee that I actually get tired of going to the bathroom to get rid of it, a condition known to all who work early-morning or late-night shifts as "bladder fatigue." By the end of the day I'll have shivered beneath air conditioners and sweated in the walk-in ovens; I'll stink, I'll be dirty, I'll be exhausted in body and spirit. And then I'll have to drive home and try to find the energy to shop, wash, eat, write, exercise, and cook tomorrow's meals, all before 9:30, which is when I have to be in bed.

And hell, now I've got traffic to deal with. I grip the steering wheel in weary rage, feeling betrayed. Bad traffic's for the afternoon, not the morning, and I detest being late. I was so unpunctual as a kid that, as a young man, I began to develop a kind of allergy to tardiness; the thought of it as a 45 year-old fills me with fury. But the traffic is at a crawl. Even with the margin for error I built in because it is raining -- and Angelinos can't drive in the rain -- I may be late. Soon I begin to see why. The police are out in force. Helicopters buzz and prowl overhead. Two lanes are blocked off, and all the cars are flowing slowly through a three-lane chokepoint. Now I observe the first wreckage: twisted pieces of metal, plastic components, shattered glass. A black sedan with its bumper stove in at the middle. A shattered Harley-Davidson lying on its side like a slaughtered cow. A police cruiser with its flashers spinning a merry red in a gray and dismal landscape. A police officer in a yellow reflective vest, standing in the peculiar attitude of a man who has just performed an unpleasant but important act. And that's when I see the body.

It lies some yards from the wrecked motorcycle and the slewed-over sedan, and from the look of it the sheet which covers it has just been put into place. The contours are heavy and masculine, and two feet clad in heavy motorcycle boots protrude from the white plastic, as do the fingers of a single leather-gloved hand. I cannot see the face, but the body is large and powerful-looking even sheeted, even in death, even lying on the wet pavement in the rain. I realize I missed seeing the officer lay in the cover in place by a matter of seconds; he was in the act of standing up straight afterwards when I came upon the scene.

My car rolls slowly past, and I look at the dead man just yards from my window. It has been a long time since I have seen death. Of course, in effects shops I am surrounded by fake death every day: I've handled gallons of stage blood, dragged mangled, burned, eviscerated, vampire-bitten faux-corpses over shop floors and shooting locations, tossed severed "heads" into the backs of trucks, carried bags and bags of fake intestines, fake severed fingers, fake eyeballs into and from make-up trailers. I've stood by as gorgeous young actresses, practically throbbing with the juices of life, were made up to look dead, and helped effects artists transform fit, handsome stunt men into zombies, ghouls and all manner of supernatural unlife. But when was the last time I saw actual death? I can scarcely remember, which is odd, because death used to be a small part of my business: when I was a pre-sentence investigator for the District Attorney's office back in the early 2000s, I occasionally attended the autopsies of murder victims. And once, an acquaintance of mine, a woman who worked at the CVS across the street from my old apartment, was herself murdered while sitting on her front porch one night. But all of that was long, long ago and my life has largely been freed from the specter of violence or unnatural death (even as intermittent as it was) since I moved West. Or maybe it's simply that I haven't paid any attention. There is something about California that makes the idea of aging and dying seem remote and unfashionable, even silly. This brief rainy season aside, it is hard to contemplate infirmity and decay when bathed in sunlight and surrounded by so many people who make a mockery of entropy. I remember meeting Elizabeth Hurley on the set of the disastrous Wonder Woman pilot some years ago. She was exactly half a century old and heart-stoppingly beautiful; perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body. She could out-dazzle many women half her age, and do so easily. It was heartening to see how thoroughly she had repudiated her age, and in my better moments I knew I could do the same, albeit on a lesser level. I may not be as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful (I may not be anywhere near as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful), but under the right circumstances, i.e. when I don't have to drag-ass out of bed at 5:45 to go to a job which is hardly my passion, I can still pass for five to eight years younger than I am, and while genetics must be credited with some of that, I think part of it may have to do with living in this preservation jar called California, this land of endless summer and semi-eternal youth. Had I remained in the East, where every spring is paid for -- with interest -- by winter, maybe I'd have more mileage on my face, more wear-and-tear on my body. Yet had I remained in the East, where the very rhythm of the seasons is a constant reminder of your own mortality, maybe the sight of that dead motorcyclist would not have shaken me the way it did.

When I rolled into work some time later, at precisely 7:15 AM (about 20 minutes later than usual, but not actually late), I found I could not erase the image of the dead man from my mind. I kept seeing him there, still and silent, with his boots sticking out from beneath the sheet which had become his shroud. I kept remembering the rain striking the asphalt and the twisted pieces of wreckage scattered all around him. I kept thinking of how that man and I had both awakened this morning, yawned, and contemplated the day through our respective windows. Our hearts were beating, our lungs billowing, our beards growing and our minds awakening. We were enormous concentrations of specialized cells capable of reasoning and imagination, contemplative thought and a wide spectrum of emotions both subtle and gross. Our brains were storehouses of memories and information that far exceed even the most sophisticated computers. And both of us were the living extensions of huge chains of ancestors reaching back tens of thousands of years -- and, beyond that, millions and even billions of years, to a some single-celled organism that existed in the earliest pre-history of this planet. We were, in a very real sense, related, as all humans are related, though our relations were probably several thousand times removed. And that morning we had set out on the same rainy freeways -- first the Five, then the One-Eighteen -- to reach our respective destinations. In so many ways we were exactly alike, with the important exception that I was still alive and he was now dead.

When you join up with law enforcement, one question inevitably asked during the hiring process is, "What do you consider to be the hardest aspect of this job?" I was asked this question many times by many different organizations and responded in a variety of ways, and my answers, carefully thought out as they were, were always wrong. Shooting someone is not the hardest aspect of being in law enforcement. Having to inform on a partner who is taking payoffs is not. The pressure, the fear, the hostility, the strain on personal relationships, none of that is the hardest aspect of the job. The very worst thing, I came to understand, is the day you are ordered to inform someone that their loved one is dead.

I never had to do this, but I know people who have -- military men and police officers both -- and I truly believe most of them would rather do anything on earth than knock on someone's door with that news. I strongly suspect that in some cases, men have been suspended, demoted, even fired for refusing this duty, and if so, my sympathies are entirely with them, because I do not think I could do it even if you put a gun to my head. And as I drew my morning coffee from the huge samovar in the shop kitchen, I remembered that by this time, the dead man had certainly been identified by the officers on the scene, which meant that soon some luckless pair of detectives or patrolmen would soon have to deliver someone the very worst news they had ever received in their life. In this case the dead man's bed might still retain traces of his body heat; the breakfast table, crumbs of his last meal. A half-read book, never to be completed, might lay on his nightstand, and a dry-cleaned suit, never to be worn again (except perhaps at his funeral), hanging on a doorknob in his bedroom. Very soon, someone -- some wife, some sister, some mother, someone -- was going to answer that phone or the knock at the door, and their own life would change almost as drastically and certainly as the man's had. They would never forget that moment, or that day, and they would relive a thousand thousand times the decision the dead man had made, that morning, to ride in the rain instead of taking a car or getting a ride or hailing a cab or just staying the fuck home. I remembered once reading a book about Vietnam, in which the author recalled being confronted by a Viet Cong soldier in the jungle. The author was slower to draw his weapon, but managed to kill the enemy anyway. Examining the man's body, he saw the Cong had forgotten to release the safety catch on his rifle before stepping out of cover to shoot. "That small detail," he recalled soberly. "Cost the man his life and saved mine." And in fact life -- and death -- are often like that. Our momentous plans, our grandiose schemes, our grand designs for career, life and love often come to nothing, and our destinies turn instead on the smallest possible details -- small accidents, trivial coincidences, offhand decisions, momentary lapses of memory or concentration.

I remember almost nothing about my workday except a curious feeling that I was observing, through imagination or some kind of psychic means, the progression of the dead man. First they loaded him onto the ambulance or the coroner's meatwagon. Then they transported him to the the morgue, where he was tagged and put into storage pending the autopsy. At some point the pathologist would ply his grisly trade and carefully catalogue the injuries which had deprived the man of the life that had once empowered his body. He would then be sewn back together, wheeled into a stainless-steel locker, and kept on ice until released to the funeral home. And whilst all of this was happening, while his relatives' lives were shattered into a thousand pieces by a string of phone calls and knocks at the door, I was engaged in shooting stuff that looked like pink icing into fiberglass molds so that the extras on The Walking Dead could portray convincing corpses. I do remember that I had trouble concentrating or caring about my job that day. I felt shaken and isolated, almost overcome with a desire to go home, lock the door, put on my pajamas and hide from the world. And in fact when work was finished, when the last of the foam latex had been shot and the various molds wheeled into the oven to bake out for the night, I did just precisely that. But on the way home I drove slower when I passed the scene of the accident. The wrecked vehicles were, of course, gone; so too was most of the debris. Indeed, I saw no evidence the accident had ever occurred. The ultimate tragedy of someone's existence had been swept neatly away, and we who had not died on our morning commute reversed it and went home. Hell, even the rain had stopped. But as I sat on my couch on that Friday evening, eating marijuana mints and drinking whiskey and water and wondering whether I shouldn't get back to work on my latest novel, or just jam a DVD into the player and vegetate for the rest of the evening, I realized something had happened to me that day. I had been reminded, in the starkest possible way, that as dismal as life can seem at quarter 'til six on a rainy workday when one is middle-aged and alone and not yet blessed with being able to do for a living exactly what one really wants, it is still life. Indeed, the very act of self-pity, of existential hand-wringing and despair, is a pleasure denied to the dead. And so I finished my day thinking of the end of the previous year -- another rainy day, as it happened. I had driven out to Wildwood Canyon to hike the mountain on New Year's Eve. Halfway up the hill the drizzle turned into a downpour, but I was damned if I was going to quit, and somehow I managed to reach the summit despite being soaked to the skin, freezing cold and caked in mud. Up there, quite literally in the clouds, unable to see five yards, and in imminent danger of being blown off the cliff by scourging winds, I started laughing. My laughter was half genuine, half bitter; the laughter of someone who is experiencing a perfect metaphor for his own life and is fully conscious of it, yet pleased for the consciousness, the ability to feel anything, even pain. A poem entered my head, written by none other than Clive Barker, and before I made my precipitous flight back down the mountain to my car, I recited it aloud. It was an act of defiance, yes, but also of gratitude:

Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is