John Belushi Is Dead Read Free Page A

was ruined when they introduced the talkies. Apparently his voice was so bad he became the laughingstock of the industry. They tried dubbinganother voice over his, but it didn’t work. He became a junkie and an alcoholic, then killed himself in his apartment.”
    â€œHow?”
    Benji leaned in close. “He stabbed himself.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘stabbed himself’? Like with a knife?”
    Benji shook his head. “Scissors.”
    Scissors. What a way to go. I whistled. “That’s awesome.”
    â€œNot only that, they were small sewing scissors so blunt you could barely cut your toenails with ’em. He just gouged that shit straight into his heart and moved it around till the hole was big enough to kill him.”
    â€œWow. How could I not have heard about this?”
    â€œIt gets worse. His wife was in New York when it happened, and apparently she didn’t give a shit. She didn’t even come back to town for the funeral.”
    â€œDamn.”
    â€œShe didn’t even send flowers. She sent a telegram saying how “regretful” she was that it had happened, or some crap like that. When he stopped being famous, no one gave a shit about him anymore, you know? Everyone forgot about him, even his wife. Suicide was his last stab at being famous.”
    â€œLiterally.”
    Benji held up the napkin he had scribbled on at Barney’s. “I just found out where his apartment was.”
    My eyes lit up. “Where?”
    â€œEcho Park.”
    Echo Park. One of the oldest neighborhoods in LA, home to junkies, freaks, and bohos. Jackson Pollock and Ayn Rand once lived there, as well as Tom Waits and Frank Zappa. Gentrificationhad turned Echo Park into a trendy suburb, but there was still a good amount of squalor in its rambling Spanish homes and overgrown gardens. I took the piece of paper from Benji and held it in my hands.
    â€œI want to get inside,” he said.
    â€œOh yeah?” I laughed. “How are we going to do that? Breaking and entering?”
    He put the car in gear and pulled out from the curb. “Simple,” he said. “We’ll just ask.”
    I looked at Benji, with his military clothes, dark sunglasses, and black army cap. “You think some little old lady is gonna let you into her apartment?”
    â€œHilda, you have seen my methods of persuasion. I can charm myself into anyone’s good graces.”
    We drove down Hollywood Boulevard, past Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and away from the busloads of tourists and faded stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We headed east toward downtown LA, where the road became cracked and pitted with potholes and the most colorful sights were the prostitutes outside the Rite Aid.
    â€œCan’t remember the last time I was this far downtown,” I said.
    â€œDid you know Echo Park was actually the center of the movie business during the silent era?”
    â€œGee, Benji, you’re a wealth of information today,” I said a little sarcastically. Benji loved to show off how much he knew about Hollywood.
    â€œI just read a book about it,” he continued. “All the major studios were in Echo Park before they moved out to the Valley. Mack Sennett’s studio was there. Can you imagine how cool it must havebeen? Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle and all those guys making all those fantastic films, pioneering the medium. It would have been magic. Fatty Arbuckle raped a girl with a Coke bottle, you know.”
    â€œNow, that I
do
know.”
    It was one of the most famous stories from that era: the fat movie star in the bowler hat who allegedly held the studio bit player down on the bed and rammed the bottle inside her, causing massive internal injuries. There were rumors that Fatty wasn’t even in the room at the time, and that the actress was really a prostitute who OD’d during a party in his hotel suite, and somehow Fatty got blamed. The actress