Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

Hillovi’s voice had by then degenerated into a painful rasp. “Please,” he said, gesturing toward the glass of water on the bedside table. Skip held the glass to his mouth and placed the straw between his lips. Hillovi took a sip, thanked Skip, then lowered his cheek to the pillow and closed his eyes.

But Pender was by no means through with him. “Excuse me, Doctor, there’s something I don’t understand. When I asked you how you’d guessed that it was Sweet who’d set the explosion, you said something about that being one of your worst fears. But a moment ago you said it never occurred to you that Sweet might be planning to blow up the hospital. So when did you first begin to suspect that-”

“From the moment I saw your badge,” Hillovi interrupted. “It wasn’t a question of suspecting, either. I knew it-I knew it in my bones, to put it unscientifically. That’s why I was so surprised when you told me you wanted to talk about Charles Mesker instead.”

“I still do,” said Pender. “And in case you have any qualms about breaching doctor-patient confidentiality, let me assure you that by almost any reasonable standard of judgment, Charles Mesker represents an immediate and serious threat to public safety.”

“I don’t doubt that for a moment-not if he’s at large and off his meds. What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with the diagnosis,” said Pender, irradiated notebook and pencil stub in hand.

“Substance-induced psychotic disorder.”

Pender jotted that down. “And the substance?”

“The-” The doctor broke into another coughing fit. Skip refilled the glass with ice water from a plastic carafe and gave him another sip. Hillovi nodded his thanks. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

“You were about to tell us the name of the substance that induced Charles Mesker’s psychotic disorder.”

“Yes, yes, of course. The substance was Asmador.”

A dark green 1994 Jeep Cherokee with New Jersey plates pulled into an isolated rest stop off Highway 101 North between Geyserville and Cloverdale around 10:00 P.M. Saturday. Asmador, who’d nodded off in the driver’s seat of the BMW, was awakened by Sammael in time to see two humans climbing wearily out of the Cherokee, groaning and stretching. The male of the couple tweaked his crotch to relieve a wedgie, then they departed, bound for separate restrooms.

“You really think he looks like me?” Asmador said doubtfully.

“Near enough,” replied Sammael. “Nobody examines those driver’s license pictures closely anyway.”

“If you say so.”

“I just did.” Once again, the snarky Poison Angel got in the last word before vanishing.

Asmador climbed out of the BMW carrying the suitcase with the remainder of his cash and weed, leaving the Beemer unlocked behind him in the hope that someone would steal it. The male of the couple returned first and resumed his seat behind the wheel of the Cherokee. Asmador waited for the female to return and climb up into the passenger’s seat, then strode toward her with the suitcase in his left hand. “Excuse me,” he called, in a generic foreign accent. “Could you answer for me a qvestion?”

As he’d hoped, the woman rolled down her window, whereupon he drew his gun from inside his denim jacket and jammed it against the side of her head. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he told her husband. “All I need is a ride.”

Asmador was never sure whether they believed him or not, but in the end it didn’t matter. They followed orders with alacrity and died together, kneeling and holding hands, in a dark redwood grove three hundred yards off the side of Highway 128, somewhere between Boonville and Philo.

“Asmador?” Pender and Epstein exchanged baffled glances.

“Asmador,” said Hillovi.

“But that’s what he calls himself.”

“Yes, that’s his alter ego whenever his delusions get the better of him-which is to say, when he’s not sedated to the point of near-catatonia. Originally, however, Dr. Shiffman’s Asmador was the commercial name for a popular over-the-counter asthma remedy. Its major active ingredient was belladonna. I don’t recall what else was in it, but I remember it came in a powdered form, and was intended to be burned in a smudge fire or smoked in a cigarette to alleviate severe asthma symptoms.

“There was a period of time, however, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when certain poor souls decided it would be a good idea to ingest the stuff. Those that vomited immediately survived with relatively minor damage. Those with stronger stomachs fared less well. They became highly delusional, were unable to differentiate between reality and hallucination, and exhibited behavior patterns that ranged from unusual to downright bizarre.

“Some mistook human beings for objects and vice versa, another saw a solid floor as a piranha-infested lagoon, and still another passed most of his time watching Technicolor movies on his thumbnail. One patient died as a result of banging his head against a wall, trying to turn off a radio only he could hear. Another was run over by an automobile while trying to dig a hole in the middle of a busy street to free the people he believed were trapped beneath the pavement.”

“And how did this stuff affect Mesker?” Pender asked, kneeling next to Skip’s chair so Hillovi, lying on his side, could see him without having to raise his head from the pillow.

Profoundly, was Hillovi’s reply. Charles Mesker, he explained, had been seventeen years old, an insatiable reader possessed of a brilliant mind and an eidetic (more commonly known as a photographic) memory, but long-haired and rebellious, with a disturbingly intense interest in demonology. He was also already an inveterate and indiscriminate drug user by the summer of 1972, when Santa Cruz experienced a temporary drug drought.

No one seemed to have any pot for sale, and what few psychedelics were available were of poor quality, or heavily boosted with methedrine, so Charles and a friend decided to experiment with the friend’s grandmother’s asthma remedy. Someone had told them that eating the stuff, as opposed to smoking it, would result in an intense psychedelic experience, during which they would be able to contact their cosmic archetypes. Neither boy was sure exactly what that meant, but they each managed to choke down several teaspoonfuls of the noxious green powder.

Charles never saw the other boy again-whatever his friend’s archetype was, it was evidently airborne, because a few hours into the trip, the young man did a Linkletter off the roof. In some ways, he might have been the more fortunate of the two.

Charles’s trip, perhaps due to his interest in demonology, took on a dark cast. Leaving his friend’s house, he found himself wandering through a hellish world in which features of the familiar Santa Cruz landscape were conflated with visions of what he would later come to call the Blasted Land.

Gargoyles cavorted on rooftops and swung from the hands of the Santa Cruz town clock. At the Boardwalk, where the shrieking of the damned souls all but deafened him, Charles saw hideous demons cavorting among the crowd. Some masqueraded as vendors, serving up scoops of steaming shit in ice cream cones and severed penises in hot dog buns.

As day gave way to night, the ocean turned into desert dunes and the beach into red-hot coals. Fleeing the Boardwalk, Charles trudged westward along the sand, castellated cliffs towering above him like battlements, blocking out the stars.

The next morning the authorities, alerted by alarmed beach-goers, found Charles dancing and waving atop the rock formation known as Natural Bridges, naked as the day he was born and completely out of touch with reality. Still, he cooperated wholeheartedly with the officers, referring to them as his loyal minions and graciously allowing himself to be led through the knee-high surf to a waiting ambulance.