Begotten- A triptych of Aunts (Part One)

Auntie Yo Yo:

I had three aunts- the middle one demanded to be called Yolanda; that was her stage name. You might recognize her but won’t admit to it. She was a B-list porn actress in the late seventies/early eighties, playing mothers and teachers and the like; the older woman who comes between her daughter and her boyfriend etc.- that end of the transgression spectrum: older women acting up.

There are about ten scenes you can find across the internet; they are played on a regular basis if the counters are accurate. Like any porn casualty, she has a cult of devotees; and no, I can’t watch any of them. Why I have this spasm of propriety and restraint is a real mystery; such an attribute did not come from her end of the family.
I tried a couple of times, drunk of course- I got past the first ten frames or so (this was grainy color news stock: ektachrome probably. These abominations had been filmed long before the invention of cheap, disposable video). It was titled something like, "Saturday Night Beaver", (zzzz...) and was actually set in a badly lit Victorian interior somewhere amongst the seven hills of Frisco rather than a rat shit motel off highway 10 where most of that old school porn was shot; one of those bunkers tossed in a forgotten weed patch, The Capri Motel or The Drop Inn, a money laundry ditched somewhere between Anaheim and Vegas- the kind of boxed truck stop tramp flop she and her mobbed up boyfriend/manager tried to shoot their way out of in 1992 during a federal coke bust. I have to hand it to the Feebs- they spun Gino Spangiaformatta around like a clipped ten pin in a hail of hot lead and all she got hit with was his Hep C flavored blood. She dropped a dime on his supplier and vanished into the protection program- for all I know she’s a file clerk at the VA, a nun finger fucking the novices or a shoe box of cat litter waiting to be claimed at UCLA med center after the organ harvest.

But there she is on computer screen when ever you want her; ever after slathered with that sick Fellini style circus make up job favored by the hacks that cranked out this tangy filth, their idea of Hollywood glamour; brittle spines of cotton candy hair, raccoon dark eyes and thumb smears of blue eye shadow all in the service of a theory that if Hollywood semiotics could be wrapped around hard core action, if the implied sexual tension of romance in legit movies could be flayed open in explicit close-ups, the public would pay big (And boy did they! The red carpet actresses, mistresses and hustlers of respectable entertainment began to assume the porn star look when in their Sunday best, completely inverting the fashion ascetic- with revenue from porn outstripping legal show biz by a factor of 6 to 1 it was no surprise- money is blood to the Hollywood sharks and they swim right for it).

But I can’t watch her. In those first few frames of the one scene I attempted, she gives that stroke victim half smile she’d use as an index of thought- a list of  ponderables including, but not exceeding: Is he rich? Is he hung? The few family functions I recall her attending featured that shy twitch and long looks at her adolescent nephew- I had no idea, of course, what was behind that sly grimace- a desperate need for intimacy denied by her devout father, his deeply gouged forehead betraying his false serenity and the palpable fear of sublimated lust for his daughters.

She’d have a few and loosen up, her older sister, Alethea, sharing the joke. On screen again, I can’t get past that first close-up. I can’t dig any further into that pathological sand pit. I’d be clawing my way out only to sink further, pulled down by the ankle locked in her sparkle green tipped claws.

Begotten- The Stuntman's Apprentice-

The Stunt Man

Harry Hedgie tutored my old man when he first went north to Hollywood. Pop was tipped off there were plenty of jobs if you weren’t afraid of hard work. Harry was a stuntman and paid for the mortgage on his ranch by driving mothballed sedans off the Santa Monica pier at 80 miles an hour for television shows like “You Asked For It” where the viewing audience would request the network have somebody do something dangerously stupid and survive with a wave and a wisecrack. 

One particular broadcast Pop assisted on would inform a questing public on how stuntmen fight their way out of a car immersed in water and make it to the surface before drowning.

It was a time when such a spectacle inflamed the collective imagination, the last vestiges of ignorant wonder and awe Mother Nature inspired by her disastrously imperfect design that reminded an easily thrilled populace that they were small under the cosmic thumb, that volcanoes and earthquakes might still in fact be the wrath of God made manifest.

Hollywood harbored that gullible aspect of human nature for as long as it could, staging destruction and miraculous survival to a rapidly aging audience of fearful sheep who were spending more time indoors to stave off the implied threat of a savage world that television was supposedly deriving its inspiration from. Tranquility, though, was only a brand new car away- or maybe just a smoke break: Athletes as well doctors agree that mild and refreshing is all you want from today’s Herbert Tareyton cork tips…

Now back to our program:
“Mike, get your ass down to the pier, eight sharp! And you bring as much rope as you can find.”
Harry would give orders, some out of the blue request- he knew he was talking to a Marine who was only happy when told to jump. He was teaching my father how to be resourceful with Los Angeles- how to work the area for tools, parts, whatever was required to fake a gag and get the audience to light up in fear and elation.
Pop would come through, though, like a depression era gangster who swapped stolen cars from one end of the state to the other, knowing he could never go back the way he came. Such low grade larceny was not as rousing as it sounds as that daredevil attitude seeped into his romantic stratagems and guaranteed a trail of abandoned wives with an APB out on his balls.
But Harry knew how to ride herd over willful chaos and would not have an apprentice whom he did not think could keep pace. A whelp of the Ozark romance, Harry was a kid moonshiner who at ten figured enough to solder a hollow pipe upright onto the floor of a five gallon gas can, a pipe that could hold the same volume of Granny Clampett’s skull cracker as found in the big city mason jars of Mena City and parts yonder. Chief Blackout, a toothless Choctaw that cooked the stuff, would carefully pour a liter of the paint thinner just to an unspilled dome at the top of the pipe where Harry would cap it. Then he’d fill the can with an inky stew of oil and mud to cover the pipe. When the feds unscrewed the cap at a roadblock and took a tortured whiff of the black goo, all they assumed was lil’ Harry was hauling pitch to his old man’s cabin to refasten a loose shingle or some such. At two bucks a can- and a twelve and a half percent vig for the runner- Harry was in demand and eating regularly to the point he actually believed he’d live long enough to get laid.
When Pop got to the pier, Harry would narrate as he rigged the bulbous old Buick he was scheduled to drown at noon for bloodthirsty onlookers:
“You tear out the front bench seat- You don’t need all those cushion springs puncturing a lung.” He had Pop noose the pedals with the rope he’d filched. He looped more rope under the back bench, tearing out all the potential obstructions: padding, springs- chopsticks?
“Must be two bucks in change,” Pop said, holding the coins out for Harry.
“Keep it- your fee.” Harry said, lighting a cigar and slipping out of his boots. Pop tore up a portion of the rug and noticed sections of sheet metal had been soldered to the floor boards.
“Leave the rug,” Harry said. Pop shrugged and turned to looping the rope several times in making an ersatz seat belt rigging for waist and shoulders.
“Looks good,” Harry said, handing Pop his cigar and snuggling himself into the web of rope. Curious about the sheet metal, Pop held his tongue- the first thing he had learned in the Corps was not to ask questions- if Harry had an explanation, he’d give it.
Harry rocked himself forward several times, then with a hard shove.
“Good- that Eagle scout jazz has something to it, huh?”
“Corps hazing,” Pop said. “They don’t teach you how to bind victims in the Scouts.” He puffed on Harry’s cigar. Akk-! He spit, Harry missed it, bent half over to test the security of Pop’s knots. Pop lapped his tongue, his eyes wet.
“Let’s go!” Harry waived to the camera crew and gave them a thumbs up. He gestured for his cigar which Pop handed back with an extended pinky of disgust.
Harry then sandwiched himself between two single sized mattresses Pop shouldered inside.
“This keeps your head attached in case the windshield blows back on impact.”
With the pulley system in place, a driver could steer, accelerate or brake if need be while buried under padding safely distant from the metal dashboard.
Harry’s relationship with cars went back to his Circus romance, running off with his moonshine nest egg at fourteen and joining Uncle Stink’s Rodeo Runners as they passed, rather quickly and without a show, through Harry’s home camp, Sugar Ditch. He had apprenticed with the Chief who he’d helped routinely repair his skeletal Model T with any and every possible resource, including one time the bones of some slain tribesmen inserted to keep the chassis from buckling. Harry showed his use immediately to Aunt Stinky by getting the lead jalopy running just as the county home guard was spotted clearing the ridge in pursuit.
“Five minutes, Harry,” said the director. The pier was lined three deep with onlookers. There were two film cameras with the Mickey Mouse ear magazines mounted on scaffolding and two Navy grade undersea cameras with the frog men bobbing in the water about twenty yards beyond the pier’s end. Pop ran calculations for the man hours accruing for this lunacy.
“Thirty five hundred an hour, easy, to get this shot. Incredible.”
He saw Kenny DeLuca, the shop steward from local 33, leaning on the pier railing, enjoying his own cigar and the procession of broads who knew where every Hollywood location shoot was scheduled. Harry was going to get a sit down with him to get Pop in the union.
He’d tell that mob capo anything he wanted to hear to get that union card.  
“Mike, wake up partner and strap me in.” Harry pitched his cigar in the water and nestled in the back seat. “Turn the ignition and give ‘em the high sign.”
The director called action through a red, white and blue megaphone stamped with the ABC network logo. It was just for show, to alert the crowd to tighten up as danger drew near.
“Well,” Pop said years later, “the heap did a beautiful belly flop on the waves and….” He lifted his bony hand, short half a thumb, and held it out, palm down. “The car just sat there, gently rising and falling on the tide.” The crowd was set to cheer, but wasn’t sure when to start. There was no applause sign. The director leaned on his megaphone and crossed his ankles. He looked at his AD who shrugged. The frogmen were rolling and film burned below. The car was perfectly balanced, like a bouquet of gardenias gently laid in a bowl of water.  Pop tried  calculating the odds of a heavy four-door like that splash landing at seventy miles an hour after flying fifty-plus yards in the air and not taking in any water. His meditations were interrupted by the guffaws of the crowd. Harry had climbed out onto the roof, arms akimbo, and scratched his head. He realized the crowd was now in stitches and he started jumping up and down in mock anger, trying to push the car under. Pop stood there, wondering whose fault this was, whether Harry had screwed the pooch.
Harry then got the crowd’s approval, leaping off the back hood, twisting a beautiful half gainer into the water with the grace of an Olympian. He did a lazy backstroke back to the pylons and jimmied his way up to the boards. He took a big bow to riotous applause.
“Cut,” said the director, shaking his head and lighting up a cigarette.
“Mike, go get the Olds, “Harry said, wiping his face with a towel. Harry knew enough to plan for failure as well as success and even though the cars didn’t match, in black and white all cars look pretty much the same under water. While Pop fetched the backup car Harry got on the short wave to alert the fireboat patrolling the area that they would use the boat’s crane to drop the Olds into the water and sink it. The underwater crews would film Harry working his way out of the car and rise to the surface. The editors could make sense of it all back at the studios.  
“Your boy’s a genius,” Kenny said, slapping Mike on the back. Mike wasn’t sure if this was points scored or lost. “No stuntman ever does anything just once. We’re on golden time now.”
“Ahh,” thought Pop, “Force Majure,” Hollywood’s favorite phrase. No one gets docked for acts of God. Harry was going to be paid double for one stunt and the crew got at least four hours of overtime to sit and watch the shore patrol set this up. Then the light bulb went on- blew a fuse and exploded in a white puff of smoke: Pop realized that Harry had soldered sheet metal to the floor boards to keep all water out thus guaranteeing the heap wouldn’t sink. The director may have taken a quick glance at the ride but the rug remained to hide the evidence. Harry wasn’t number one by attrition. And those ferndocks on the boat were likely getting paid less than a third of the film crew to do all the heavy lifting. 

The Battle of Bronson Canyon

Harry’s legend was built on one of Pop’s favorite gags: the head-on collision. It was a modern day joust with other stuntmen and pledges who wanted Harry’s perch atop Hollywood’s stunt world. He’d rig his Ford in similar fashion as the dive cars but used a metal pipe to hold the gas pedal down in an all-in bet to ram his opposite number with a twenty to thirty RPM advantage. At that speed he’d cut through the pretender like a mill saw.
One time in Bronson Canyon, Pop stood as Harry’s second for one of the off the books challenges Harry never side-stepped.
“What’s the line, Mike?”
“Jimmy Breech has his seconds laying at 3 to 2.”
“Good, the suckers won’t blanche at another two hundred. Go tell them we raise-” He pulled a money clip out of his shirt pocket and snapped two fifties flat, handing them over. Pop pulled out his wallet and plucked out his last ten, holding it up at one end, turning it over with a flick as if the other side might have an extra zero printed on it.
“I gotcha covered,” Harry said, waiving away the ten. He fanned five twenties, looking past Pop at the hooting gorillas across the clearing. “This money is too easy, so we spend it fast; bad luck to keep stolen loot around for good purpose. The gods won’t take it and the devil’s interest is steep.” He slapped the pile into Pop’s hand.
Pop jogged over to Breech’s muscled up Olds as his brother Pinky was ceremoniously polishing the headlights. High noon in Bronson Canyon, near ninety and the idle exhaust of the two war cars were puffing out a mix of ethel and drag strip rocket fuel. The clearing smelled like a cattle ranch after lunch but the beer farts of the bettors, a dozen well lubed stuntmen between gigs and wives, popped in time. The laughter of the enhanced stake made Harry smirk as he kneeled, face down under the dash, fastening the gas pedal with the flayed end of a five foot section of lead pipe. The pipe looked like the remains of an exploding cigar but it was Harry’s secret weapon. Behind his mattresses in the back seat, he could push the accelerator right through the floor, beating that goose necked pimple Breech by thirty yards past the estimated impact spot. With a head run like that he’d bevel Breech’s bloated beast and punt the heap into the weeds. Maybe even blow it up. That cocksure kinder wouldn’t be caught dead in a Ford, even one refitted for action. The improprieties of youth kept Harry, Bella and the kids comfortably on the smart side of the Valley.
“They bit,” Pop said hustling back to Harry. The master unfolded himself and stood straight up, his back to his rivals. He stretched with a yawn, his wing span as wide as his mount.
“Yeah, I got that. You holding for everyone?’
“Right here,” Pop said, unrolling the bills. “Six months pay.”
“Nah- That’s a weekend’s terror in Miama or Dallas. Start thinking big, Bubba. Small imaginations don’t get callbacks in this racket.”
“Oh, I could spend this quick. Ever have shore leave in Bangkok?”
Harry looked at Pop drooling at the most money he’d ever handled. He glanced at the missing ear and smirked.
“Yeah, I want to be there when you do. What a movie that will make.” They laughed and Harry looked back at Jimmy and his hooligans, Pinky mocking them both by dry humping the Olds from the rear.
“We shoulda filmed this,” Harry said, relighting the stump of his cigar. “That Okie’s gonna be pickin’ his teeth outta his shit for a week.”
Pop suppressed a laugh. The thought that a well read education, military discipline and youthful exuberance had washed him up on a dusty dry back lot to watch two maniacs kill each other like this was too ridiculous to ponder. He spit out a cheek full of beer, unable to keep his fearful elation in check. Harry looked at Pop, thinking, I’d wager, that this kook he’d taken under his wing was in fact crazy enough to outlive death itself.
Harry succeeded enough to produce issue, hustling his way out of the trash with a string of regional circuses. He increased his value by training as an acrobat. Tied in knots and spun by the ankles, thrown free and sailing over the audience, breaking through several barriers to the crash of symbols for thirty five US$ a week. He would drive in figure 8’s, kicking up dirt and detonate a bomb under the hood, come barreling out of a twist tie of purple smoke, covered in soot, arms aloft in triumph- a victory over what, I cannot fathom, but the applause must have been thunderous as he was hosed down with Co2. This skill pack got him to Hollywood.
“I grabbed every ass I could get my mitts on,” he counseled, as Pop finished off the last of the gin.
Until I heard Pop’s version of the Harry Hedgie legend, all I knew of the guy was from his self-medicated daughter, this Floozy I’d been shacked up with for the last eight months. It explained a lot when I found out she was the offspring of two stunt peoples, Harry and his wife Bella, a wife chosen, according to Harry, because she had the tightest ass of the two women he had short listed from a scoop full of studio secretaries, ingénue call-girls and stand-ins. Bella was Dorothy Lamour’s stunt double, more often than not in a sleeveless sarong, tossed around by the lecherous Hope and inebriated, sadistic Crosby:
Watch them on the set, Bing drinking through his performance, half asleep, beating his family into rehab when he does bother to come home while Mr. Robert relaxes between takes with his IV drip of Gin.

“Dateline Hollywood: The affable Mr. Bob Hope Himself waves to fans as he rides through downtown Port Au Prince. The Famous Funnyman is guests of Poppa Doc Duvalier and his adoring son Jean-Claude. When not being famous, Bob enjoys time off from the busy Paramount lot, molesting dogs, under aged extras from sword and sandal epics, getting buggered by trannys in Nazi spy safe houses. Look at ‘em go!: Bob “Anything for a Laugh” Hope teetering on the edge of the Waldorf Astoria roof, drunk, blind and naked, insisting he can fly, firing a .45 at unimpressed pigeons: “You nuttin’ but flyin’ rats- fuggin’ Jew pigin’s. Unka Adolph gonna rise in three days and frickasee you’all clipped Johnnies!” BAM! BAM! BAM!
“Gawddammit! You Fruit Cake!” sez Bing, “Hear them sirens? They catch you this time they won’t just throw you in the rubber room for a weekend! ”
Crosby belches as he’s knobbed by a room service chippie he’s backed up against the onion dome ventilator, now goading Hope, who’s pissing over the edge at a line of taxis, to go ahead and jump as he chugs from his ever present tankard of Old Charter.
“Put this gawddamed act out of its fuckin’ misery, already!” croons der Bingle. “Chrissakes, I have a gawddamned Oscar and I’m still in this circle jerk with you and that jizz bucket, Lah-Moor! Moor is right- there’s more than a few friggin’ niggers in that Octaroon’s woodpile!”
Yes, it’s non-stop with these laughaholics! There’s no business like Show! as Hope and Crosby hurl the shrieking chippie off the roof, the star struck starlet landing twenty stories below, crushing a cab driver as she flattens the roof of the idling waiting taxi.
“Chiggers! The cops!” The two immortals scream at each other and go hotfooting down the stairs, stumbling to put their clothes back on without spilling the last of the hooch. What a pair!”

In those execrable programmers like On the Road to Hell’s Ninth Circle, Bella would get shrugged off the back of an elephant, drop kicked onto a dog pile of horny Bantu, bounce off the tom-toms, landing headfirst in a pot of boiling oil. You know you can't wear knee or elbow pads wrapped in nothing but a table cloth and Bella got banged up real good, but like Harry, she was of a temperament that required a lot of adrenaline to find purpose in another day’s breath and likewise found bruises evocative. Just ask her daughter- when she comes to…
“Ol’ Harry had his hands full during a wrap party,” Pop recalled, “The left hand in concert with the right.”
Bella had the firmest gluts, I guess- she made good by whelping two loose limbed daughters, one of whom I’m taking to Tijuana for no reason, the other we just left with a full list of waiting clients to entertain at the Palms Motel just past the old ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign at the head of The Strip.
Harry would have been fascinated by the mobile plexi-glass boxed strip club I first saw Floozy ride by in while puking my lunch out on Polk street one night. A 8’x8’ dance floor fastened to the flatbed of a truck, complete with pole his daughter was hanging upside down from while being driven around the city, the truck bannered with the Club logo, calling the degenerate to worship with the beat of party rappers of the oldest of seventies rap schools- Floozy pressing her ass against the glass, her two conferrers writhing and wobbling, staying upright on heels that would snap those wishbone ankles over one pot hole. Around a tight turn down Union street a herd of frat boys hurled beer cans, turning over pin wheels of foam, bouncing off the roof and splattering a row of parked hybrids -
“Heyyy beeatches, find a more respectable way to earn a living-!” Somewhat like that, far from it actually, but the invective was accurate to the frustration of these cheese dicks and the flat horizon of their futures- until their girls, shitfaced as the boys, threw back their own self-medicated rage in defense of their sisters, facing, too, the same somnambulant future, the laughable envy at the pole dancers rolling away, the foggy red eyes of the flatbed evaporating down a steep incline that must have been less than ideal for harvesting tips at the stop light.
“Ha!” Pop laughed, raising his soup spoon. “Yeah, Harry would’ve refitted that box, probably wedge a full service bar in as well. Have the strippers serve drinks like a taco wagon.”
I did a spit-take, coffee shooting up into my nostrils. Flecks dropped into his chowder, though he didn’t notice.
“What?” He looked at me wiping my mouth.

Back in the canyon, Harry puffed on his cigar in the backseat as Mike and one from the enemy camp, Earl Sweeney, pushed the car backwards to the starting line.
“Harry wins these things in his sleep,” Pop said.
“I know,” Earl said. “I make decent bank off him.” Pop thought about it- yeah, he reasoned, Earl was a plant to run up the purse with disinformation: Harry’s sick, Harry’s got a bum knee, Harry’s on prescriptions, Harry’s ready to die before the IRS runs him in… The angles Harry played were way beyond the eager young apprentice’s conception. 
Both Breech boys were in the opposite mount. Pinky wanted whatever his older brother wanted and the two would live or die together. Pinky wanted no part of being Jimmy’s proxy if he got injured. It smacked of being a replacement part, like switching out a fried spark plug. And his cut was bigger if he faced down the reaper shoulder to shoulder. They had seven straight “kills”, Bobby Dynamite Wilson the biggest snuff, still in traction but spitting blood for a rematch, the pot already swelling and it would be six months at best before Bobby could walk.
“Mike, take my light,” Harry said, Pop plucking the cigar from Harry’s teeth, all originals, one more indication of Harry’s super powers. “My strap,” Harry said, thrusting out his chin. The chin strap of his leather football helmet needed tightening. “Much obliged. Relight.” Pop put the cigar back in Harry’s teeth. Fear has no use, he thought, not even to teach.
Earl had the pink baby doll they used as a start flag, rumored to be Jayne Mansfield’s, a legend Harry neither confirmed or denied winning for his bravery on the set of Female Jungle for his irresistible courage, but this talisman acknowledged to the inner circle of jousters an official seal of approval. Breech was relatively new to the game and so the pot was lighter than many, action attracted to some of Harry’s jousts from as far away as Reno.
‘Gentlemen!” Earl hollered. And he whipped the slip around thrice, both engines growling, barking, shouts from the bloodsuckers, a geyser sprouted from an open can of Bud.
“Go!!!”
The flag came down and the two missiles went straight at each other- a dagger point of blue firing from Harry’s exhaust pipe- Pop squatting in the weeds, suddenly aware a hit at the wrong angle could run Jimmy’s remains right over him- leaping, he ran as fast as he could up a rise to a dead oak stump, landing on his ass in the dirt as the cars melted into each other- the explosion had to have been heard downtown, Pop thought, the acoustics in the canyon as fine tuned as the Hollywood Bowl.
Harry’s wreck was a half foot lower to the ground and Pop swears to this day he thought Harry dropped the shocks just before impact to get underneath Jimmy’s grill. Either way, the Breech brothers nose dived, did a full somersault with a slight lean to the right and flew straight over Harry, the Olds bouncing on the back tires, flipping ass over tea kettles, twice, a third time, landing flat on the roof before spinning sideways several revolutions and coming to a stop upright by slapping a tree trunk with the back bumper.
Harry disappeared into a wall of dust and reappeared a moment latter, spun backwards and braking, the wheels screeching a few yards and coming to a clean stop, the roof of the car completely sheared off.
Pop peeked over the stump, gob-smacked at the sight of the decapitated metal corpse. Poor Harry, he thought. Bella with two kids and the insurance company not even returning calls on this suicide.
“Whooo! Damn!” The mattress flew out, Harry’s helmet tossed right behind as the mattress skimmed along the ground.
“Ha!” Pop laughed, seeing his mentor sit upright, his expression Pop could only describe as post-coitial deranged as the master surveyed the coffin remains he was resurrecting from.
“Oh God! Oh God!” Shrieks of horror, Pop turned to see Jimmy’s seconds swarming around the Olds which had caught fire, smoke pouring out from under the hood and filling the windowless cab. Jimmy was yanked out by his ankles- his head was missing!
“Gawk, uhk!” Pinky shoved away the mattress he’d hidden under, staggered out through the back passenger door, holding his throat, gasping- a fizzy pink foam was shooting out, a soda can shot with a BB gun, he ran in a circle, the others trying to surround him, not wanting to pull him down, not knowing what to do, Pinky pirouetting, collapsing in the dirt, his hands falling away and gouts of blood splattering in the dirt, forming little dirt balls, blood and piss mixing with a puddle of oil bleeding out of the Olds.
“Jesus Christ!” Harry ran over- he couldn’t believe it. He looked at the Olds being swallowed by smoke. Both Breech boys were dead- all bets were off.
“Put that fire out!” Harry said. Earl ran back to his truck to get his fire extinguisher. Harry punched the concaved hood of the Olds, holding the lip of his shirt over his mouth. Pop was petrified, remaining on his knees up at the stump. Harry held his breath and shoved the hood up to give Earl a clear shot with the Co2.
As Earl doused the engine, Harry shoved the others out of the way to look at the dead idiots.
“All of you get the fuck outta here! We’ll take care of it!”
“What about-?” One of the older men grabbed the punk who was about to ask about the bets, hauling him off before Harry cut his head off, too.
“Mike!” Harry yelled, not knowing where his pupil had gone. He spotted him up on the rise. “Get your ass down here!”
The black smoke had turned gray and dissipated. Earl dragged Jimmy’s body over to where Pinky lay.
“Find his head!” he shouted at Pop. No one would ever say that to him again.
Pop found the head, still stuffed in its football helmet, right side up in a divot about ten yards from the tree that had stopped the car. The face was puffy, a gourd of raspberry and cinnamon paste, ping pong ball halves with ink spots looking at him in shock.
The helmet started leaking as Pop carefully walked towards the body, his hands cupped and holding Jimmy’s head upside down. Blooded by the Corps, Pop had seen his share- one morning’s worth anyway- of dead men outside Pusan that made this tragic farce a concern for his shoes more than the mulch he was holding out in front of him, the helmet a reliquary for this haggis…
Like many in that man’s army, Pop had secretly shot over the heads of the godless heathens in the one action he saw. Not even a knuckle’s worth of his left ring finger shaved off clean by a bullet spurred his anger. He’d had no god going in and no grief for the commies he held some admiration for, believing them as instructed “did not value life as we do”- To Pop’s hunger for certitude, the Spartan portrait painted of these atheists appealed to him. But he felt nothing then for anger and nothing now for the sheer stupidity of the present scene. In his meditations, he’d revealed to me, without consciously acknowledging it, that he is a moralist, as I understand the term. Outside the reach of objective truth morality can stand on any false logic. So, imagining him mechanically following orders from Harry, lugging the corpses of two fools whose hubris will pay for his union card, does this define morality as just a vicarious absolution? Pop believes he’s humane- he refused to kill a fellow human being when in mortal danger. If I was ever honest about him, I’d say it’s just a rationalization for his appetites. He’s an addict, an enabler, a co-dependent. He certainly doesn’t believe, especially after his experience in Korea, that there is any moral fail-safe to any human endeavor. He is now, at the far end of his run, an atheist- not the pagan he thought; that was just a jab at the church. The sun is on his face, even as someone else’s blood has splattered his shoes, and that might be all that he ever needed of a higher power.

Earl’s truck had sufficient horsepower that the two wrecks could be chained together and dragged out of the canyon. Harry and Pop sat flat assed against the back of Earl’s cab, legs stretched out on the bloodstained mattresses laid out on the flatbed while Earl took a narrow dirt path through the boulders and sage, far off the main road.
“Those imbiciles,” Harry said, holding his extinguished cigar. He looked at Pop who stared at the fishtailing heaps chained to hooks inside the flatbed siding. The Olds still had an occasional puff of smoke emitting from under the crushed hood, chattering over the mangled grill as they went up a steep incline.
“Don’t threaten’ none,” Harry said. “None of them others would ever work again if they said shit.” He asked for the wad of money. Shaken from his trance, Pop shoveled the rolled stack into Harry’s lap. Harry slipped off the rubber bands and made an approximate count.
“Take it,” he said, handing Pop well more than half. “That’s our clean up fee. I’ll take care of Earl.”
At the top of the grade, most of LA County spread out ahead, though much of it was obscured by a bed of gray and burnt orange smog. 
While Harry disengaged the chains with Earl, Pop looked inside the Olds. Jimmy was propped up in a sitting position behind the wheel. His head sat in his lap, the left eye popped and protruding like a bruised grapefruit. Pop had seen bodies as bad before, most notably in the five jeep pile-up in Manila that had cost him his left ear and soldier’s career, though the dead Breech boys looked far better off in a pointless death than the dead gooks he’d come upon on the outskirts of Inchon, naked indigenous who had been ritually butchered, beheaded and castrated by some rival clan that had gotten loose of their Chink advisers.
“Mike, help me with the roof,” Harry said, and they refitted as best they could, the top of the Ford. Pinky sat behind the wheel, his head bent back over the headrest, barely hanging onto the neck by a few strands of muscle, the neck gash having torn further on the bumpy ride to the edge of this bottomless gorge. The plan was to lay out tire tracks that would be read as a head-on collision that spilled over the edge of the cliff should the remains ever be discovered in the unreachable depths below.
“Seems like a neon sign to study what went over the side,” Pop said. Looking over the edge he couldn’t fathom how anyone could find anything down the gullet of this canyon, so over grown with kindling that would one day burn out anyway.
“You’re right, Kid-” Harry said. “We’re over- thinking this.” Everyone liked the odds enough that the tire track decoy was quickly abandoned.
The three then shouldered the heaps, one at a time, over and down into the famished maw of the chasm. They lay down, outstretched, peeking over the fissure and watched the car’s remains pinwheel off ledges, throwing out rock and brush with each touch of the canyon wall, ejecting dust and stones, like a controlled demolition where the dynamite fizzled after ignition; what remained of the machines, now just modern art sculptures, disappeared from sight.
“Ha!” Pop laughed, then started giggling, the nervous pressure hissing out of his mouth as he watched Jimmy’s head, just a clump of dark matter, Frisbee away from the main module and evaporate in the shadows far below.
“Get in the truck,” Harry said. “Earl’ll drive you home- I’ll hike out. Get out of town for a while. Take a vacation- Florida. I’ll pass the word you’ll be back. The union will have your slot, I’ll guarantee it.”
Pop again took his orders without question.  All things considered, he was really making out like the proverbial bandit, aiding and abetting involuntary manslaughter not with-standing. He sat in the cab, fingering his cash.
‘’Ofay peckerwoods like the brothers Breech won’t be missed, especially by the date rape babies they probably would have sired,’’ said Earl.
What time felt like at that point, I can’t say but somewhere in his reveries Pop looked up and saw Harry lighting a cigar. He and Earl had their backs to the truck- what was the wait? Their lips moved in profile, Earl tipping his hand with a sideways glance to make sure Pop was where he was supposed to be. Pop slowly moved his hand to the door, ready to leap; he smirked, knew at that moment he was victim of his environment: he imagined himself in his own movie, assuming a double cross as all hack writers would. A crime committed, he saw himself a crimp in the plan- Earl was Harry’s punk, the inside man. Pop was a redundancy that had to be taken care of…
“Shit, wotta day and wotta way to make rent, huh?” Earl chuckled as he waved to Harry. Pop stared at his mentor who walked off without even a glance. Harry, the old bastard had turned his lips in, squeezing them like a chimp, sputtered and grinned, his mud dark face cracking around his greedy eyes.
“Let’s get outta here,” Earl said, bouncing on the seat. He turned the key and rolled backwards out to a clearing, pulled hard on the gearstick and kicked up some dirt as the truck fishtailed towards the service road.
“Christ!” Earl slammed on the brakes but it was too late- the right front tire skidded into a dirt gutter, beyond which was another deep crack in the canyon.
“Jesus! That was close,” Earl said, looking straight ahead. Pop’s fingernails were dug into the spongy dashboard, ripped and chafed from years of sunburn.
“You gotta get out an’ crowbar the wheel outta that ditch, Bubba.” Earl handed Pop a crowbar from under the seat. Pop took it- at least he had a weapon, and got out of the cab.
“This is really happening!”
He had to have thought that- a double cross after all. He was being set up- why not? Earl and Harry and the rest of this showbiz fringe didn’t just work on, but watched and lived, the same bad films Pop had seen. This was a plan on the fly: Earl was to dispose- or at least abandon- their fall guy out here where there was slim chance of escaping in time. Even now Harry was heading for the nearest pay phone- Mike with the lion’s share of the cash…who knows how this would play out in the cop’s eyes.
Pop shouldered the wheel as he reached under to fit the bar over the axel. He could feel the gears shifting, then the engine rev- he rolled over the grill and under the truck as it leapt forward. The crowbar bent, turning the wheels to the right. Earl tried to break and Pop rolled out from under the truck. Earl was trying to open the door as the truck picked up speed and buck jumped over a rise- Earl’s shirt sleeve was caught on the door handle. He managed to get his boots on the ground but was hanging dead weight from the handle and was pulled over the side as the truck disappeared.
Pop crouched like a wrestler, wrapped in dust, frozen in decision- he let Earl fall. Earl had deliberately tried to run him over the edge. Or did he? Was Earl trying to back out and the gear stuck- Had Pop involuntarily sent Earl home to Hell?
Pop finally found himself looking over the edge as the truck rolled sideways over and over through the dry brush, the clash of metal and snapping wood echoing around the canyon, topped by Earl’s screams- then an explosion! Pop fell backwards onto the ground, popped back up and started running.
By the time he found his way to the highway, drawn by the direction of sirens, the canyon was covered with gray and black smoke- at the back end the clouds were so high and hot they were peaked with snow white wads of cotton.

Back in town, on Santa Monica Boulevard, Pop stuffed enough of the cash for his union buy-in down his sock. He drank the rest as fast as he could- not returning to his flop until he was certain the rumors of Harry being caught in the flames were true and he could start real work, innocent of all suspicions. “Don’t believe a word of it,” Pop said, reaching for a napkin. Most of his chowder had to be squeezed from his beard. “The less you believe my tall tales, the better-”

The Bronson Canyon smoke out of ’58 was the only part of this I could possibly verify. The cause of the fire was assumed to be movie related but no one has found a call sheet to back that up. In the year(s) following his “confession”, Pop was careful to steer conversation away from the legend of Harry Hedgie and his own early days in the biz…