I was not in a mood for idle conversation. The day had been ugly and my heart was full of hate for everything human. I had spent the morning hours at the Hall of Justice, grappling with lawyers and thugs, and the afternoon was wasted by chasing a humpback whale that had somehow got loose in the Sacramento River, creating what is known in the trade as a “media circus,” which my cruel and ambitious associate, Maria Khan, forced me to join.
In Rio Vista, a small riverside town about an hour’s drive east of San Francisco, I met an elderly Chinese woman who claimed to be the former mistress of Richard Nixon. She lived on a houseboat that was moored in a slough near Antioch, she said, and the ex-president had often visited her there when he came to California.
“Sometimes he came in a helicopter,” she said, “with a bunch of Secret Service agents. They would sit on the dock and drink long-neck Budweisers while we went below decks and played cards. That’s all he wanted to do. People said he drank too much gin, but I never saw him that way. We did it for 13 years and nobody ever found out.”
We were sitting on the balmy deck of a restaurant with a view of the river, where the 40-ton whale was lurking like some kind of a Loch Ness monster.
Nobody knew what it meant, but hundreds of curious whale-watchers had come from as far away as Hollywood and Oregon and Winnemucca to chase the beast in fast cars along the narrow dirt roads on the riverbank. Local fishermen were outraged. The whale was a menace to boating, they said, and besides that it was probably diseased. A marine biologist from Sausalito came up with a theory that the mammal was crazed by a terminal parasite called “Brain Fluke,” which might cause it to wallow hysterically in shallow waters and eventually beach itself in some local farmer’s back yard, where it would die in a horrible frenzy of howling and spouting that would be seen all over the country on network TV. . . . Others feared it would bloat and go belly-up in the channel, blocking the river all winter with a mountain of floating grease.
This has not happened yet, but it probably will in a week or so, according to the marine biology people, and there is nothing anybody can do about it. A tugboat captain from Pittsburg tried to put a harpoon in the animal and drag it backward down the river, but on the night before he was scheduled to do battle with the whale he was arrested for aggravated sodomy in a parking lot behind the Stamm Theatre in Antioch.
In fact the whale was not much to see, anyway—just a log the size of a 727 that surfaced every two or three minutes on some days and rarely or never on others.
I had a bottle of gin that I’d planned to drop off with Nixon’s Chinese woman on my way out of town. The press was still on the whale-watch— but not me; I delivered the gin and fled.
Sometime around midnight I stopped in Novato to pay my respects at a bachelor party for a male stripper who was marrying a lap dancer from the O’Farrell Theatre. Some of the guests were shocked when the bride appeared in a set of 100-year-old cowboy chaps and went wild like a minx in heat, but I had worked long enough in The Business to appreciate the subtlety of it.
It was almost three in the morning by the time I screeched into the parking lot at the hotel. The cavernous hotel lobby was empty except for a group of degenerate-looking yuppies who were waiting for the late-night elevator. There were six or seven of them, all about 30 years old and dressed like they’d come from a disco.
The men wore slick-leather jackets and new white Reeboks that squeaked on the tile floor as they paced around nervously and cursed the hotel for fouling the pattern of the elevators.
“They’re all stalled up there on the 35th floor,” said one. “That’s where they keep the girls. You can’t get there without a special key.”
“Who cares?” said his friend. “We can get anything we want out of this newspaper.” He was thumbing through a tabloid sheet called “Spectator,” which had a dim gray photo of what looked like a naked woman and two dogs on the cover. On the back page was a sepia-tone ad for something called the “Euphoria Unlimited” Escort Service—“Outcall Only, Now Hiring Class Ladies.”
One of the women snickered. She was carrying a handful of 20-dollar bills in one hand and a shopping bag from the Dynasty Massage Parlor in the other. Her companion had a cardboard box full of high-heel spike shoes.
It was clear that these people were swingers of some kind, sodomites up from L.A. for the weekend. There was talk of orgies and flogging, and also of calling the baby sitter and getting back in time for the Rams game. One of the women asked me what I thought about Ed Meese, the new attorney general.
“He’ll get you,” I said. “You’ll all be in jail before long.”
She backed away and stared at me. “What are you?” she muttered, “Some kind of creep?”
“I am the night manager of the O’Farrell Theatre,” I said, “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America. I am the final authority on these things. I know the face of decadence.”
October 21, 1985