Naomi Hirahara: Santa Cruz Noir

Pacific Avenue

The acid was just coming on. Bob Innes, the lead singer of Fleece the Rich, took the Catalyst Club stage — and there was his girlfriend, rushing on to join him like panic with faint tracers. She wore this see-through Indian dress with a stuffed pillowcase underneath, like she’s pregnant, right?

And in the middle of the show, when they’re singing, “I awoke in a sweat from the Amerikan dream / Our rage against the war machine,” the girlfriend just started SCREAMING — I mean, bloody-murder-shrieking — and she’s performing a spontaneous miscarriage with all these bloodred fabrics from the pillowcase spilling out.

I think it’s part of the show — hell, it’s the Catalyst on Halloween — but Bob Innes and everyone else just looked like they’re trying to keep going.

“Their trickle-down fuckonomics obscene / Their ‘freedom’ is a pyramid scheme.”

The girlfriend’s still shrieking and then she started pulling handfuls of real blood from herself and what looked like small body parts and I remember thinking: Shit, I wish I had a girl like that .

I didn’t even think of myself as gay or straight back then, but I knew I was attracted to the fucked-up.

The room spun tangerine. Shrieks became hysterical laughter and “Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Guilty” and yes, I wanted a girl like Innes’s girl.

And, you know, sometimes I think I conjure people right up.

Does that sound crazy?

It’s the next day and I’m down at the Clock Tower ’cause Food Not Bombs is serving lunch without a permit and I’m not hungry or anything, but I just dropped another tab and I’m in the mood to start some shit with the police. Before I even get a chance, here comes this skinny girl in a skirt and no fuckin’ shirt on and she’s all limbs and yellow hair and tiny pink tits and she’s hungry — she’s practically starving, right?

So, fuck the police — I’ve got my steel-toed boots on and I’m gonna to get this skinny girl some food so I’m dodging SCPD billy clubs and I’m made of steel and the Food Not Bombs guy with his goatee is serving his grub fast, and it’s all sirens and pigs trying to shut it down, and I get this girl some lentils and I’m kind of sheltering her with my body as she spoons stew into her mouth, and when she’s done, I say, “What’s your name, sweetie?”

And she says, “Jane.”

I mean, who’s named Jane, right? You can’t make this shit up. So I say, “Pleased to meet you, Jane, I’m Apex.” And obviously she’s new in town or I’d know her already and she smiles real sweet like something you could crush and I think, I gotta have this girl .

I say, “I don’t know if you’ve already got a place to stay, Jane, but I’ve got a tent at San Lorenzo Park—” And right then I look up and the Food Not Bombs guy is shaking his head and smirking like that’s the oldest line in the book, like next thing, I’m gonna say, What’s your sign? and start reading to her from Real Astrology.

I wink at the Food Not Bombs guy, but also kind of scowl. I mean, motherfucker can back up off my action. I look back at Jane and she’s got the face of a hummingbird but I play it off like I don’t see that and I take her fluttering hand and that’s the day I moved skinny Jane into my tent and everything smelled damp like sea salt and eucalyptus.

Now, I won’t lie: all the other dropouts and runaways in San Lorenzo Park say my girl Jane was psycho right from the get-go, like they could tell by lookin’ at her skinny, smiling face.

But I said, Don’t judge, man , and Who cares, anyway? I mean, her parents had her locked up at Agnew’s for kissing girls and slitting her own wrists, but you’d probably try and kill yourself too if you were stuck in that god-awful pale-blue suburban tract house with your straight-ass parents for all eternity. Did you know Agnew’s was once called the Great Asylum for the Insane and fell down in the 1906 quake and all the lunatics ran out when the building crumbled? — never got caught.

We were never going to get caught neither. I liked the way Jane needed me to hold her at night, the way she asked me to pin her arms to her sides real gentle-like, but tight.

She had nightmares.

She whispered stories about serial killers to soothe herself back to sleep. She whispered, “You ever hear of the Coed Killer, Apex?”

And truth is, I hadn’t.

I had Jane’s arms pinned to her sides and she’s whispering to me about this 1970s serial killer, and she lets her voice get kind of raspy when she whispers. She says, “He hated his mother, that was the thing, and his mom worked at the university and he had an IQ of, like, 145, and he was a giant too, maybe six foot nine, and heavy. His mother was completely narcissistic and abusive, so this giant grew up to be this homicidal psycho — he killed his grandmother when he was a teenager, and when his grandpa got home, he killed him too, and he served maybe five years in the Atascadero State Hospital, but they released him back to his mom up in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1969.”

I tried holding her just a little bit tighter, but Jane wanted to keep talking.

“He started killing girls he picked up hitchhiking. He buried one girl’s head in his mother’s garden like it was this twisted joke because he said his mom always wanted people to look up to her.” Jane’s breath kind of settled as she talked, like other people’s terror calmed her own.

“He hung out in this cop bar on Ocean Street called The Jury Room and he befriended all the detectives so he could keep a step ahead — and not ONE of them suspected him. They just filled him in on the case, night after night. Finally, he killed his mother and her best friend — maybe her lover — and he ripped out her vocal cords and blasted them in the garbage disposal, and then he felt better! Cops never would’ve caught him, but he was done. Over it. He turned himself in. Confessed to everything.” Jane took a deep breath and sighed in my arms. “Apex?”

“Yes, Jane?”

“You’re gonna think I’m fucked up.”

My heart raced. “No, baby.”

“Sometimes I have this fantasy that I get strangled and somebody severs my head and buries, buries me looking up...”

I held her arms so tight. She finally trailed off and fell asleep.

We lived like that in my old tent in the bushes for almost three weeks. But the rains were coming on, and the cops were getting crazy on everybody, not just us — coming through at sunrise like they owned the place and kicking everybody awake. I’d already sold all the LSD I came to town with, except for my personal stash, and the outlook seemed pretty bleak. So when my girl Jane came running across the grass one morning, skinny limbs flying in every direction, scaring the ducks in the pond and yelling that she got us a room at the St. George Hotel, I wasn’t about to ask her how she pulled that one off.

I mean, for all I knew she had her suburban parents wire her money straight from their Costco lasagna dinner in Cupertino. I just packed up my tent and followed her skinny ass across the river and onto the Pacific Garden Mall.

I’m telling you, the old St. George was the best. Seedy and fancy at the same time, art deco and cracked plaster, creaking floors and red carpet. I was high, I admit it, but I knew that old-fashioned elevator was a portal to another realm the minute I stepped inside of it and pulled the metal grate door closed and the machine heaved us up, just rope and iron.

Jane said right then, “All the if s are gonna become is ,” and I wanted to kiss my girl so hard right then, but I didn’t.