John Belushi Is Dead (7 page)

Before my parents died, I never even knew pictures like that existed. It was at their funeral that I heard someone whisper it, a family friend who I barely even knew. He leaned over to the person sitting beside him and said, “Kinda like Jayne Mansfield, huh?” At the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but his words stuck with me. In our first few weeks together, Aunt Lynette took me to the local library to get me some books to keep me occupied, and instead of staying in the children's section, I somehow found my way over to the movie star bios and checked out a book called
Hollywood Babylon,
which told me the whole story about what had happened to Jayne Mansfield. It was then that I realized what the person at my parents' funeral had meant,
but strangely enough, knowing that Jayne Mansfield had been through what my parents had didn't make me feel bad at all. It made me feel strangely comforted. Jayne Mansfield was a
Playboy
Playmate and actress, a cheaper, gaudier version of Marilyn Monroe. She died when the car she was traveling in hit the back of a truck in poor light, allegedly decapitating her and killing the two men beside her while her children sat in the backseat. Now, when I started to feel that familiar anxiety starting to grow, that feeling that death was upon me, lurking, I would look at a picture of Jayne Mansfield in the front of that car, and everything would seem okay. Death didn't just come for me, or my parents, it came for everyone: the rich and famous, the beautiful and privileged. The thought made me relax, and I imagined the relief I felt was similar to the feeling some people got when they cut themselves. I didn't have it in me to be a cutter (too squeamish), so this was my anxiety release. Looking at these pictures kept me sane.

I checked in at the Celebrity Autopsy Room. The website was run by an anonymous webmaster who called himself the Coroner. He had set up a Frequently Asked Questions section to try and impede the flow of disgust leveled his way.
Yes,
he posted,
I can live with myself. No, I don't know what it's like to lose a loved one, but I'm sure it's terrible. No, I am not being disrespectful to the dead, if anything I am preserving their legacy by showing the truth of their final days. No, I will not post a photograph of myself on the website, as it will only assist those of you with vigilante justice in mind to track me down and beat me with a baseball bat, as you have threatened to do so many times before. Yes, if you have any photos of dead celebrities, please send them to me. No fakes, please—after so long in the business, I
can
tell the difference.

I logged on to the chat room and posted a question asking
whether anyone had seen a photograph of John Belushi dead. There were some high-profile celebrities who were fortunate enough never to have photographs of their bloated, distended corpses find their way onto the Internet. Phil Hartman was one, which I attributed to the fact that he was so well liked in the press and no one had the stomach to publish photos of such a likable guy with his head blown off. Another was Kurt Cobain. Sure, there was that famous shot taken through the window of the greenhouse in which Kurt's dead, lifeless leg can clearly be seen, a Converse sneaker on his foot. But actual photographs of his full dead body had never surfaced. I'd read that the impact of the shotgun blast blew half his head off. I guess it would be difficult to prove that the exploded head in a picture was actually Kurt's and not some other poor, unfortunate individual's.

I checked the message board. A couple of people claimed they had seen photographs of Belushi's autopsy on the Internet, but when I clicked the links to take me to the photos, I was redirected to porn sites. Most people pointed me in the direction of photos of Chris Farley's death, which had been readily available on the Internet for years. Chris Farley was a
Saturday Night Live
comedian who wanted to emulate his idol Belushi in any way possible, even if it meant dying like him. Farley died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-three, exactly the same age Belushi was when he took the speedball that ended his life.

The photos of Chris Farley showed him lying on the floor of his Chicago apartment, his face purple and bloated, a large, white bubble coming out of his mouth. The bubble was so solid-looking it resembled a mouth gag, so people often mistook his death for an S and M ritual gone horribly wrong. In reality the white stuff was
his stomach coming out of his mouth, pushed up by the toxicity of the drugs. The photos were good and graphic, but still a distant second to the footage of Belushi's body being wheeled from the Chateau. Belushi was an original that Farley had failed to measure up to, no matter how hard he had tried. Their deaths had both been sad and pointless.

M
Y ROOM DEPRESSED ME
. Lynette wouldn't let me stick posters up because she didn't want the wallpaper ruined. As a compromise she bought me a corkboard, which hung like a lonely blank canvas in the middle of the room. To show I wouldn't be placated, I'd never stuck anything on it. Occasionally I'd find a note from Lynette pinned to it about remembering to do my homework, or wishing me a good day at school, but I always took it down. The only thing she pinned up there that I hadn't thrown away was a recent article about the Manson Family parole hearings that she'd cut from a newspaper. I kept that, another slice of LA's morbid history, in a drawer.

My own little collection of artifacts wasn't as carefully laid out as Benji's, or as well presented, and I didn't have lights or even a cabinet, just a single shelf on my wall that once housed Lynette's case files. I picked up my treasures one by one. A jar of dirt from underneath the Hollywood sign, a T-shirt that a guy at a flea market told me belonged to Karen Carpenter. I carefully handled a single long-stemmed rose that was now all dried and flaky. I'd taken it from Marilyn Monroe's grave. There were hundreds of them there, and it wasn't as if she could enjoy them anyway. I'd grabbed it and run, while the other tourists tutted behind me, and some angry lady told me to stop. But I kept running. It wasn't like they really
cared about Marilyn, not the way I did. I figured Marilyn would understand why I did it, and that was all that mattered to me. Everyone else was just a hypocrite.

I picked up a bracelet of tacky plastic beads, all different colors, and put it on. At one time it had been way too large and would hang off my wrist like a hula hoop, but now it nearly fitted. Mom didn't care that they were cheap and gaudy beads, she just loved the colors: the blues and reds and oranges that danced on her wrist. She didn't care what anyone else thought about her. As long as she was enjoying herself and wasn't hurting anyone, everything was fine. I wanted to be just the same way. I was never going to let anyone tell me how to live, what I could and couldn't do, what was
acceptable
. I took the bracelet off, placed it gently back on the shelf, and went to bed.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
B
ENJI
and I once again made our way toward Hollywood. The heat was stifling, the sun blazing like it was the apocalypse. I wound down the window and breathed in the city air, a familiar mix of smoke and gasoline. Brush fires in the north had left a brown haze across the horizon and smoke drifted dreamily over the surrounding hills. We didn't give it a second's thought. Something was always burning in Los Angeles.

I leafed through Benji's copy of
Hollywood Hell
, the pages yellow and well thumbed. It was a pocketbook guide to LA's seedier tourist attractions, offering tourists an alternative to the corporate, predetermined tourist traps like Disneyland and Universal Studios. Listed in its pages was information on Hollywood's sordid, secret past, with detailed maps to guide the way. There was no listing for Grauman's Chinese Theatre, no directions to Knott's Berry Farm. Instead you could find the location of the Beverly Hills house where Lana Turner's daughter killed her mother's boyfriend, the infamous
standover man Johnny Stompanato. The apartment where the actor from
seaQuest
hanged himself. The street where Robert Blake's wife was shot.

We drove to Leimert Park, where the Black Dahlia's body was found in 1947. The Black Dahlia was a young actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. She was a transient floating from one lonely part of Los Angeles to the next, hanging out with sailors and letting strange men buy her meals. Her naked body was found in a vacant lot close to the side of the road, severed at the waist and drained of blood. Cigarette burns covered her breasts, a piece of flesh was carved from her side, and her mouth had been slashed into the shape of a grin with a sharp object, most likely a straight razor. It was the most horrific crime Los Angeles had ever seen, and it haunts the city to this very day.

Benji and I got out of the car and stood next to the spot where her body had been found. The vacant lot had been replaced by a neat row of family homes; the exact spot where her body was discovered was now a driveway. A kid's bike lay on its side on the front lawn, its back wheel spinning slowly in the air. Benji and I stood side by side, entranced. Benji was infatuated with the Black Dahlia. Many were. She was the epitome of the untouched innocent destroyed by the evils of Hollywood. With her ravishing black hair and full, pouting lips, her mysterious death was an obsession Los Angeles couldn't quite shake off.

Benji stared at the spot where her body had been discarded. An old man walked his dog across the road, watching us with suspicion, and the tiny dog started yapping in our direction. The man was old enough to know what had happened here and why two teenagers dressed in black where standing at the side of the
road, staring at the sidewalk. He could see right through us. The little dog kept yapping and I felt the urge to flee, ashamed that we had roused such awful memories on such a beautiful sunny day. I didn't blame him for being angry. Wherever we went we stirred up memories people had been trying to forget, brought darkness back to what were now nice neighborhoods. Benji pulled out his camera and took a picture of the sidewalk.

“Time to go,” I said. The old man and his dog were still watching us. Benji took one more photo, then reluctantly got back in the car.

“Did you hear about that new book?” Benji asked as we drove away. “Apparently John Huston was involved in the Black Dahlia's murder.”

“John Huston?”

“Yeah.”

“The director of
The Maltese Falcon
?”

“Yeah.”

“Father of Anjelica and the perpetually underrated Danny?”

“What's your point?”

“My point is, every day there is a new book about who killed the Black Dahlia. One day it's an evil abortionist, the next it's some vagrant who later burned to death in a hotel room.”

“But Huston could have done it. You could see it in his eyes. When he was in
Chinatown
he totally freaked me out. That guy is one evil dude.”

“Benji, he was playing a role in a movie! Do you think Anthony Hopkins really bites people's faces off?”

Benji found a spot of dirt on the dashboard and wiped it off with a wetted finger. “All I'm saying is, to play a role like that in
Chinatown
, a guy so evil, and to do it so well, you've gotta have something going on inside. He had it in him. He could have done it.”

“Yeah, and Christopher Reeve was faster than a speeding bullet in that wheelchair.”

Many of the sites listed in the guidebook were now gone or had been altered forever. Hotels were now car parks. Schwab's Pharmacy, where a young composer scribbled “Over the Rainbow” on a napkin while Lana Turner sipped malts in the back booth, was now a strip mall. The last place that James Dean ever lived, a large house in Sherman Oaks, had been renovated until it was unrecognizable.

We stopped at a food stand on Ventura Boulevard and bought French dip sandwiches for lunch. The stand was next to a florist that was used in our favorite TV show,
Six Feet Under
. We sat beneath an umbrella and watched the cars come and go, loading up with bouquets and posies. Benji dripped mustard on his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and swore.

Our next stop was the highlight of the day, the one we had been waiting for. We drove through Laurel Canyon and past the Canyon Country Store, an iconic grocery shop frequented by rock gods like Jim Morrison, who would drink orange juice on the patio before scoring drugs from the neighborhood dealer in the parking lot. We only caught a glimpse of the ruins of Houdini's mansion, set high up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard above the racing traffic, obscured by trees. The staircase that led to the mansion fell haphazardly down the cliff face, the servant quarters the only part of the house still remaining. I had read on the Internet that many believed Houdini still haunted the ruins of his mansion, and that the walls of his Hollywood Hills home would forever be the only ones he would never escape.

To me the Hollywood Hills were beautiful, wild, and deadly. This was where coyotes attacked the pets of movie stars, where George Reeves went upstairs during a party at his house on Benedict Canyon Drive and shot himself. Errol Flynn held orgies at his infamous House of Pleasure, and speeding cars regularly ran off the road along Mulholland Drive, plunging down the cliff face. As we drove up Laurel Canyon, cars hurtled back down the hill at terrifying speeds, and a passing truck nearly took off one of our side mirrors. On the radio Courtney Love sang about flying away to Malibu. There were always songs about our town on the radio. Even with the murders and the rapes and the car jackings and the earthquakes, the radio played songs like “L.A. Woman” and “California Dreaming,” convincing us that this was the only place we would ever want to be.

We drove past quaint chateaux and larger, more extravagant homes. Cielo Drive was easy to find. A brand-new street sign had been erected higher than the others, to discourage theft. Another sign,
NOT A THROUGH STREET
, was erected next to it. The houses were inconspicuous in their plainness; lawns were trimmed and walls whitewashed. Two neighbors stood on the corner, coffees and papers in hand, oblivious to the scrutiny of the world and the prying eyes of curiosity seekers. One of them tipped his cap to the other and set off at a jog, sneakers hitting the pavement. Above them the sky turned gray and threatened rain.