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Everybody’s got a jug for the toast.
    Everybody laffed and waved hello. Mitchum brought a portable radio for the countdown. He turned it on. I heard static and “… 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”
    The world went WHOOSH . The ground shook. The sky lit up mauve and pink. We all raised our bottles and applauded. The colors receded into bright white light. I had my arm around Elizabeth Taylor. I looked Ingrid Bergman straight in the eyes.

5
    L.A. ’53 was my ground zero. That A-bomb blast still shoots shock waves through me. My calendar pages are radioactively roasted. You can’t read the dates as they swirl.
    There was smog in the air then. People coughed and gasped citywide. I never noticed it. The bomb-blast colors stayed with me. My L.A. was always mauve and pink.
    I worked LAPD. I walked a downtown footbeat. I rousted Reds during the “Free the Rosenbergs!” fracas. I pinched pervs, purse snatchers, and pickpockets in Pershing Square. My smut-film biz laid in loot. Donkey Don Eversall plied his python all over Hancock Park. Joi was Donkey Don’s dispatcher. She coffee-klatched with horny housewives and set up the dates. Liberace gave me girl-talk gossip. Liz Taylor and Michael Wilding went to Splitsville. I got 10 percent of Liz’s alimony. Joi, Liz, and I threeskied on my Landing Strip. Liz knew a Pan Am stew named Barb Bonvillain. She flew the L.A.–to–Mexico City route and had half of Hollywood hooked on Dilaudid and morphine suppositories. Bad Barb was 6'3", 180, 40-24-36. She scored high in the women’s decathlon, Helsinki ’52. All four of us locked loins. The Landing Strip lurched. We murdered the mattress and banged the box springs down to the floor.
    L.A. ’53— ring-a-ding-ding!
    Joi and I hit the Crescendo and the Largo most nights. Cocktail waitresses fed me slander slurs in exchange for my titanic tips. It was my kid-voyeur days, rabidly redux.
    A fragmenting frustration set in. I had the dirt. It would take an armada of shakedown shills and photo fiends to deploy it. I racked my brain. I knocked my noggin against the bruising brick wall of unknowing. Extortion as existential dilemma. A confounding conundrum worthy of those French philosopher cats.
    My cop life could not compete with the lush life. I was a double agent akin to that Commie cad Alger Hiss. Liz Taylor drove me to Central Station and signed autographs for the blues. I knew that word would leak to Chief William H. Parker. I was full of a finger-stabbing Fuck you.
    Ralph Mitchell Horvath still haunted me. Nightmares nabbed me as I slid into sleep. Joi and Liz nursed me with yellow jackets and booze. My bedtime mantra was He Deserved to Die. It was beastly bullshit. I couldn’t convince myself that what I did was right.
    The Rosenbergs fried at Sing Sing. That was justified. They sold A-bomb secrets to Russia. They got what they paid for.
    I developed my personal credo: “I’ll work for anyone but Communists. I’ll do anything short of murder.”
    Morally sound in L.A., circa ’53. Equally sound in purgatory today.
    I spent nuke-bomb nights at the Hollywood Ranch Market. My office was two-way-mirrored and overlooked the aisles. I scanned for boosters and looked down at legions of the lost.
    Their pathos pounded me. Bit actors buying stale bread and Tokay. Six-foot-two drag queens shopping for extra-long nylons. Cough-syrup hopheads reading labels for the codeine content. Teenage boys sneaking girlie mags to the can to jerk off.
    I watched, I peeped, I lost myself in the losers. A goofy ghost came and went with them.
    He was about 23. He slouched in windbreakers and wore cigarettes as props. He breezed through the aisles at 3 a.m. He always looked ecstatic. He talked to people. He cultivated people. He studied people the way I looked in windows as a kid. I saw him out on the sidewalk once. He played the bongos for a clique of fags and junkies. A girl called him “Jimmy.”
    The fucker appeared intermittent. I made him for an actor