I’d ever seen him. It was obvious he hadn’t slept well in a long time. My footsteps startled him as I entered the room. I also startled four of the maybe forty cats and kittens which inhabited the White house and gave it the distinct aroma of the world’s most lavish kitty litter box. The cats went scrambling for the nearest window or door, Chris jumped up so fast he knocked his chair over and the large grandfather clock, in the empty dining room off the kitchen, toned ten o’clock. It was an eerie moment. I stood there waiting for the intense expression on Chris’ face to soften into hospitality as the gongs from the clock echoed through the house. Suddenly it was quiet, except for the clickity-click sound of tiny claws still scoring the polished hardwood floors in the rooms beyond the kitchen. Chris smiled. His face seemed to creak.
“You’re right on time. Pull up a chair.”
He lifted his chair back up and sat in it. I moved around to the other side of the large table and sat down. His kitchen was as big as an average two-bedroom apartment, complete with a fireplace. When he’d hired Goat and Paps to re-do it, they had spent months taking the cabinets back to the bare wood to give it the look and feel of the old Boone family place in Texas. It had worked. In spite of its overbearing size the room felt warm and cozy. Tonight, however, with the October mists drifting in the open windows, the stale smell of cat piss and the forlorn figure of Chris Boone sitting across from me, the place felt like a favorite aunt dying of cancer. In Texas, Chris Boone had been the kind of man who would stop his car to help a turtle across the street. Now, looking at his worn face, I had to wonder what kind of a man he had become.
“So, how’s the wife and kid?”
“Just fine, they’re in Florida right now. Kathy’s doing some in-depth training out there at a special school. I talked to them just a little bit ago and they sound like they’re doing great.”
There was nervousness in his optimism that told me not to ask any more questions about the family.
“So, what are we doing tonight?”
He smiled a little and lit up a cigarette.
“I’m on this new health program, Kathy’s idea, special diet, special exercises and these special vitamin shots….”
“Vitamin shots?”
“Yeah, I get them from her accountant.”
“Pete? You get these shots from Pete? But he’s not a doctor.”
“Sure he is, I mean, in their church he is.”
“Oh, so were going to Pete’s and he’s gonna’ give you a shot?”
“Yeah.”
“So what do you need me for?”
“Well the shots are pretty strong and sometimes I get a little dizzy so I would just feel safer if you took me there and back.”
“Sure, fine with me. When do you have to be there?”
“Actually we should be leaving right now.”
“Let’s go.”
“I’m gonna’ lock the garden door; we’ll leave by the back.”
Chris went to lock the garden door then led me out the back door, which was behind the kitchen. As we walked out I caught the strong smell of a dead animal.
“Christ! What died?!”
“Oh, a couple of the kittens. Orn was playing with them and he accidentally choked them. He was pretty upset about it. But you know kids, they don’t realize how fragile those little kittens are, they think they’re like stuffed animals.”
It was a quiet drive over to Pete’s and back. Chris had stayed in Pete’s over an hour while I sat in the car. When he came out he was puffy and his skin was bright orange, an effect of the niacin he told me. On the way back to my place I puzzled over two big questions that had come out of the evening drive. One, as far as I knew Pete had no other client, just Kathy—so how come he drives a Rolls Royce and Kathy drives a Honda? Two, how can a pseudo-religion give you a license to practice medicine and purchase the syringes and injectable vitamins necessary for such a venture? The answers were not on the tip of my tongue but perhaps I knew a man on whose tongue-tip the answers stood, just waiting for me to ask the questions. I’d call Mank in the morning but for tonight I’d crawl into bed, pull the covers up over my head and pretend I was safe, that I had found asylum.
CHAPTER FOUR
A GENTILE PROBLEM
“WITCHCRAFT IS BASICALLY A GENTILE PROBLEM; Jews stopped believing in the devil a long time ago. Freud put the nail in the devil’s coffin by saying the devil was just your cock telling you what you wanted to hear. ‘I am the magic wand. I make fantasy into reality. I am the seed of life.’”
I was having coffee with Mank at his house off Beverly Boulevard. Mank was from an old Hollywood family; his people had practically invented movies. Mank, himself, was a gossip columnist for the L.A. Times. He was still in his early twenties and somewhat of a black sheep. It was taken for granted that by the time he was in his early thirties he’d have a nice Jewish wife and a couple of T.V. shows to produce before going on to make a name for himself in the movies like the rest of his family.
His apartment was a study in chaos financed by a grant from his parents to the University of Soft Knocks in an attempt to discover which would run out first, his trust fund or his parents’ patience. Piles of clothes, newspapers, records and bedding were scattered around the apartment with an intentional, almost comic, disregard for order. A lot of small change and even a few low-denomination bills were sprinkled on the floor, adding to that touch of disdain for money only the truly wealthy can afford. Mank was a study in casual. He had the face of a child and the body of a fifty-year-old card shark. He dressed in wrinkled chic, a style he originated by wearing his expensive, unearned clothes un-ironed. However, there was a royalty about him, something in his being, that if he told you he was a Gypsy Prince you’d look at those dark eyes piercing through that shock of black hair hanging in his face and think, Yeah.
“Most witches, historically speaking, started out as Catholics, although in this country, with its great religious freedom, you had Puritan witches, Church of England, Baptists, the whole smear. Like everything else, people get into it for the money. And show business, Gentiles definitely do not understand show business. They have always believed it was the devil’s work. The major Gentile contribution to the field of entertainment is the rodeo. That’s it.”
“Mank, you’re not helping me.”
He smiled then looked down at his coffee cup.
“Sure I am. You have to understand the essence of your problem then you can deal with the particulars.”
“Mank, I do not need a beginner’s course in this, I have been researching the occult for the past five years here. I need definite information about definite covens and the people that belong to them.”
“Okay, I’ll quit doing George Burns. What do you want to know?”
“Is there a coven that specializes in initiating children into the black arts?”
“Well, not exactly. There’s the Molochians, who do things to their own kids, but for them it’s like
