Lee Goldberg: The Walk

It wasn’t much of an epitaph.

He rose up slowly, unable to take his eyes off the horrifying sight of the dead man. Somewhere deep inside, the Skipper was still burning, thin wisps of smoke drifting out between his charred, dead lips.

Marty looked around for Gilligan and found him in pieces. The camera assistant had been decapitated by a piece of Rodeo Drive, his headless corpse slumped over the smoldering battery pack.

He looked away, repulsed and terrified. In a war, Marty thought, there must come a time when a person becomes inured to the carnage and violent death, when the experience changes from something unusual and shocking into something commonplace and expected.

That time hadn’t come for him yet. He wished it would hurry up and get here or, if it didn’t, that he could be spared any new variations on the theme. Marty didn’t know how much more he could take.

His sanity felt almost physical, like a joint that had already been flexed too far. He knew it was about to snap, but unlike with a torn ligament or broken bone, he had no idea what consequences to expect if it happened.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Maybe it would be a pleasant numbness, a blissful separation from direct contact with reality.

Or maybe not.

It could mean losing all sense of self, all intelligence. He could end up a mewling idiot, staggering mindlessly through the rubble.

And then he would never get home.

Stop being a pussy. So people are dying horrible, grotesque, and painful deaths right in front of your eyes. Big fucking deal. Be glad it’s not you and move on.

Lately, the voice in his head was sounding more and more like Buck and yet, strangely enough, seemed to be making more and more sense to him.

The way to deal with it, he decided, was to look at death clinically, the way a coroner does. When a coroner looks at a corpse-whether it’s been hit by a train, torn apart by sharks, mutilated with an ax, mangled in a car crash, or left decaying in the sun for a week, infested by maggots-it doesn’t sicken or terrify him. Why? Because it isn’t a human being any more. It’s an object, a by-product, a thing. A fleshy sack of organs and bones that just resembles a living thing.

Marty would just have to get in the right frame of mind.

But it occurred to him that coroners had an advantage he didn’t. They rarely witnessed the killing, the moment when a person stops being a person and becomes a corpse.

Then again, millions of soldiers over tens of thousands of years had come to grips with that moment on the battlefield. And most of them didn’t lose their minds. How hard could it be?

Be a fucking man.

Yes, Marty thought. That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll be a fucking man.

He turned and faced north on what was left of Rodeo Drive. For the first few blocks, houses on both sides of the street were aflame and charred bodies were scattered on the sidewalks.

Be a fucking man.

Marty took one flap of his wet jacket, raised it in front of his face like a cape, and trudged across the blackened grass into the smoke.

2:42 p.m. Wednesday

The statues had pubic hair.

It wasn’t some artist’s chiseled interpretation of pubic hair, but actual hair of some kind glued to the carved crotches of a dozen stone nudes. Beyond that, the row of gaudy statues that lined the top of the wall around the Sunset Boulevard mansion would otherwise have been unremarkable.

When Martin Slack first saw those statues twenty years ago from the front seat of his over-heated Chevette, arriving from Northern California for his freshman year at UCLA, he knew for certain he’d arrived in Los Angeles.

The wall was still there, only now it was riddled with fresh cracks and surrounded an empty lot full of tall, dry weeds. The statues and the mansion were long gone, but they undoubtedly lived on in the photo albums of a thousand tourists.

The homeowners on Sunset wanted their properties photographed, not by Architectural Digest but by busloads of tourists, and would go to extreme, and expensive, lengths to get those snapshots taken.

The fervent competition for tourist eyeballs often made Sunset Boulevard look like a residential version of the Las Vegas Strip, only without the budget buffets.

To become a sidewalk attraction, it wasn’t enough to have lavish architecture and lush landscaping, or to park shiny limousines and Italian sports cars around a sparkling fountain. Extravagance, opulence, and gratuitous displays of wealth were merely starting points.

Some homeowners made their blatant grab for snapshot glory only on the holidays, festooning their lawns and eaves with hundreds of flashing lights, elaborate floral displays, and animatronic dioramas that Walt Disney would have envied.

Others were in it for the long run, striving to become a permanent stop on the Hollywood Star Tour and yet, at the same time, maintaining the charade that they valued their own privacy with small “no trespassing” signs staked in their lawns.

One such homeowner decorated the circular drive in front of the white walls that sealed his property with incredibly life-like bronze statues-albeit clothed and presumably without pubic hair, real or otherwise. He began with only a uniformed security guard at his gate, then quickly expanded his repertory company of statuary to include a gardener, a painter, a jogger, kids at play, and in case anyone missed the subtle intention behind his efforts, a tourist couple taking pictures of it all.

Marty sat in front of this house, resting on the homeowner’s sturdy, wood-carved “private property” sign. He didn’t know or care if the house behind the walls still stood, the tall trees behind the wall hiding it from view. But he was glad the statues had survived because now, in his mind, nothing was more authentically LA than this.

Except, perhaps, for the statues with pubic hair, but sadly they were already lost. He thought somebody should have lobbied to give them protection as a historical landmark. They were significant to him, if no one else, even if he didn’t really miss them until now.

Even though he’d traveled on Sunset countless times over the last twenty years, somehow this time it felt like he was retracing the path he took when he first came here from San Francisco, when he was full of dreams and plans that still hadn’t come true.

His melancholy was compounded by his physical state. He’d never experienced so many different kinds of discomfort at once. His back burned, his cuts stung, his shoulder throbbed, and his skin itched under his charred, damp, dirt-caked clothes. Every muscle in his body was sore, and his feet felt as if they had swelled to twice their normal size. He was hot, thirsty, and sweating all over.

And then there were all those dead faces that wouldn’t stay buried in his mind, flashing in front of his consciousness like commercial breaks.

The memories, the weariness, and the pain became an almost palpable weight, carried all over his body. This must be why so many elderly people stooped, Marty thought. Seventy years of this shit must weight a lot.

So he’d stopped to rest, to clear his head, to marshal his strength for the next leg of his journey over the Sepulveda Pass. He knew the hills were ablaze, even from here he could see the smoke. But he was going to take the Pass anyway, because the alternative, trekking twenty or thirty more miles further west and inching into the valley from the coast, was unthinkable. It would take days in the condition he was in now and there was no telling what hazards he’d face there-mudslides, forest fires, deranged mountain lions, swarms of locusts.

The locusts seemed like a stretch, but then again, Marty never would have imagined running into a tidal wave in the middle of Hollywood, either.