John Belushi Is Dead Read Free Page B

died, and even though Fatty was acquitted by a jury, his career was ruined by the scandal. Ten years later the studio he had worked for all his life finally took pity on Fatty and cast him in a movie. Fatty proudly proclaimed it was the happiest day of his life. That same night he died of heart failure.
    â€œHang on,” I said. “Didn’t Elliott Smith die in Echo Park, too? In a similar way?” I remembered a newspaper article about the Oscar-nominated folksinger who took his own life under very suspicious circumstances.
    â€œThat’s right!” Benji said, excited. “He had an argument with his girlfriend, and she says she went to take a shower, and after the shower she opened the bathroom door and found him standing in the middle of the kitchen with a knife in his chest.”
    â€œMaybe he was possessed by the ghost of Bernie Bernall?”
    â€œMaybe his girlfriend was lying to the cops and stabbed him herself.”
    â€œWho knows. Have you ever heard his music? He seemed pretty miserable to me.”
    â€œKnife-through-the-heart miserable?”
    â€œMore like emo, self-harming miserable.”
    â€œHuh.”
    â€œSo what’s the game plan today?”
    â€œNo game plan. We’ll just knock on the door, ask if we can go in and take a few photos.”
    â€œWhat if some crackhead opens the door and wigs out on us?”
    Benji gestured to the glove compartment. I opened it and took out a small aerosol can.
    â€œPepper spray?”
    â€œYou can never be too careful, Hilda. This town’s full of psychos.”
    I put the spray back. We’d done some crazy stuff before, but knocking on someone’s door and asking if we could take a look inside was a new one. There was the time we trekked through the Hollywood Hills trying to find the mythical ruins of a movie star’s pool, said to be on vacant land wedged between two properties. What made the pool so special was the mosaic tile work on an adjoining wall that depicted a large spider sitting in a web, a creepy remnant of old-time Hollywood we were desperate to see. We climbed down a cliff face and pushed our way through the undergrowth, but when Benji saw a snake we screamed and ran out of there as fast as we could, our mission thwarted.
    One night we climbed the fence at the Hollywood sign and slept under the stars, the enormous D towering above us, Los Angeles teeming below. We hid under the letter so we wouldn’t be seen, curled into its side with pillows and blankets and talked about all the people who’d OD’d up there and the actress who’d leaped to her death from the H. In the middle of the night I felt a tugging on my sleeping bag and woke to find a coyote tearing at the fabric.I stared into its black eyes for a few seconds before it took off, running silently into the scrub.
    I watched Benji as we drove. He was stealing proud glances at the bricks on the backseat, his precious artifacts to add to his vast collection of strange objects. He liked to think of himself as the Indiana Jones of the macabre.
    â€œStabbing yourself in the heart with scissors,” Benji said with admiration. “Now that takes balls. Did you know Elliott Smith’s girlfriend told the cops she found him with the kitchen knife already in his heart and pulled it out. Her prints were all over it. It’s so messed up. People should know better than to pull out the weapon if someone’s been stabbed. It’s the dumbest thing you can do.”
    â€œI don’t think that’s something they teach you in school, Benji.”
    â€œThey should. It’s useful shit to know.”
    We drove down a dead-end street full of crummy apartment buildings and bungalows with faded pink paint. There weren’t many sprinklers on this side of town, and the lawns were dead and covered in weeds. Benji pulled up in front of a white stucco apartment block, the name DISTANT MEMORIES emblazoned on its side in