The Random's Had It: a Memoir of Steve Careyby Keith AbbottOne of Steve's most maddening traits was calling up (or writing) to announce he'd been in town but hadn't stopped by. His needs seemed as mysterious as his sources of income. With his veiled references, it was never clear why he had been in San Francisco. Usually he bounced from Los Angeles to New York. His earliest publishing was done with the poets around St. Marks Poetry Project; eventually he came to live there in the late 1980s. After the disintegration of the Haight-Ashbury scene, he sought some poetic community and support for his work, but yet appeared unable to quit the LA scene, which seemed to paralyze his writing.
Steve's relationship with the film industry fueled his more allusive conversations. At some time he labored at a ghostwriting job on some television hack's work. The rewrites consisted of substituting modern slang and sentences in dialogue. He once showed me outtakes from this work, quite hilarious in a ghastly way, as the original was riddled with 1940s slang (Hey sister; hotcha; what's cooking? etc.). If I remember correctly, one script was for the cop drama, Hawaii Five Oh. The screenwriter apparently paid Steve in lump sums of cash, but I doubt it was steady work.
During phone call around autumn of 1977, Steve asked me for a favor. He was coming to San Francisco to collect on a pornographic screenplay that he had written. Alice in Wonderland provided the concept for this production. He asked me if, when he went in and hassled the producers, I would act as a silent muscle and back him up.
I said absolutely not. The people who made porno, I knew, usually had other people behind them, and they were seldom nice.
Steve badgered me and pleaded his case, but gave up when it was clear that I had no interest in doing this. It was one of the only times I ever heard him sound truly desperate. He insisted that he really needed to get the money.
Shortly after that, in mid-October 1977, I got a phone call; Steve was in Berkeley; "You gotta come and rescue me, Abbott."
When I asked him where he was, he didn't know, and then had to shout to someone and get the address.
At the time I was doing tree and landscape work in the Berkeley hills; the street he mentioned was on my regular routes. I agreed to come get him and left in my pickup. The address proved elusive. There seemed to be no hope of finding it. The number of the last residence on a dead end road was higher than the one Steve had given me. No continuation of the street showed up on the map and there was only a ravine where this house should have been.
Back home I called him, and he had to ask people there how to get to the place. Then I consulted the map as he gave me directions. I'd been in the right spot, but the street apparently continued on the other side of the ravine for a half a block, although this didn't show on my map. The new directions seemed plausible, so I returned to the hunt.
The house was reachable only on a narrow gravel road off a main street. (In the 1970s I had worked for a few places like that in the Berkeley hills, which had their own private roads and usually did not show up on maps.) The residence was in a cul de sac, a large Spanish style stucco newly built. In the driveway was a huge Chrysler New Yorker Brougham coupe painted a deep midnight blue. The street was so narrow, I had to park my truck on a slant, the right wheels in a shallow ditch.
The front door was thick, massive, with a small window set behind a black metal grill. When it swung open, an exquisitely beautiful Eurasian woman in a bronze silk dress was smiling at me.
"Keith! You're here!" and she hugged me. Her perfume smelled like orchids and sex. "Oh I'm so glad you found it," she whispered in my ear.
Then, instead of drawing away from me, she moved into me, around me, and all over me. This startled me, and I looked down at her, to check if I had ever met her before, and in the overhead light I saw her bronze silk dress turned into gold shimmers.
One hand stroking my neck, her other hand sliding across my chest, she ushered me into the foyer, and then, in an act that was so casual it stunned me, she shoved herself up on my thigh, riding it. I paused, completely disoriented and aroused by her hands, her perfume, and that slithering cool bronze silk dress.
We lurched down the long foyer as if we were in some three-legged potato sack race together, only my third leg was a crowbar erection sliding around under my pants with each push of her bush against me. Lightheaded with lust, I staggered into an open archway to our right.
Inside was a dark, rounded room with high windows showing the night sky and stars through its glass. On the floor were heaped rugs. Even under the dim starlight it was clear that they were amazingly beautiful Kalim rugs, one overlapping the other as if they were in a showroom and had just been ravished by a horde of buyers. There was a rustling sound, of feathers, and I craned my head sideways to look further into the darkness.
In the dim far corner were birds on dangling perches, all tropical and gorgeous, with brilliant white and red and scarlet and orange and smoldering emerald plumage. They were jockeying for positions, nudging each other one way or the other on their perches. Under the darkness, white streaks and blotches on the rugs came into focus; the only sounds were soft plops of birds shitting.
There was something malevolent and casually nasty about that room with its faint wet sounds, as if a ghost were squatting there in the gloom pulling apart fingers at their joints.
"Steve here?" I asked this woman. "Is Steve Carey here?"
"Yes." She cooed unintelligible little wet things in my ear as she guided me through a left hand turn off the foyer into another long hallway and we paused at another doorway.
Inside a high-ceilinged long large kitchen was a swarthy Indio-Mexican woman before a shiny stainless steel industrial range. All six burners were on: steaming menudo pot sat on two, on others, steam table pans of quesidillas and fajitas warmed; to the side chimichangas bubbled and bobbled in a deep fat boiler. Aluminum trays lined the counters with enchiladas streaked with red and yellow. There was enough food for an army in there.
My left hand was now riding on the base of Selina's spine, even though my palm on the silk seemed no longer merely sexy but sinister, as if this kitchen scene were a frightening annex in some sideways dream, and we were slipping back and forth between menace and ecstasy.
"What's your name?"
"Here," she said.
As we mounted some tiled steps, she steered me through a large arch into an immense front room with white plaster walls. More rugs were piled up in a corner to our right two men were conversing in low tones.
One man was dressed in casual khakis, a cashmere sweater tied around his neck, and on his belt was a beeper. The second man bent his head to one side, listening to Beeper Man murmur numbers. He looked Arabic or Indian, his pants a gray wool, his shirt silk, open, a gold chain around his neck. The two paid no attention to us as they talked in low tones, the Beeper Man bending over to hold up a rug for the other man to finger as we turned to our right.
There Steve was lost in a enormous plush chair in the opposite side of the room, watching a late night I Love Lucy rerun on a gigantic console television. He barely looked up as my succubus and I toppled onto the couch to his left.
"I take it you've met Selina?" Steve asked, not taking his eyes of the screen.
Selina adroitly squirmed off my hip as we floundered around on the sofa, shifting over onto my lap so she straddled my hardon.
"Oh I'm so glad Keith could get here!" So far she seemed to possess only two tones: husky whispers and moans. She twisted put her arms around my neck, hugging my head as she rested her cheek against my ear, lovey-dovey style.
While these sensations were so intense I seemed close to passing out, the house itself was making me dry-mouthed and scared.
"Steve! What's . . .uh . . .what's uh . . .?"
The Beeper Man shifted slightly away from his negotiations and he glanced over at me. His eyes had a dead look as he appraised me, once, and then glanced over at the coffee table.
On the coffee table to one side of the television was a large black onyx tray. On it was a mound of sparkling powder about the size of a small white cat.
The I Love Lucy laugh track exploded with chortles and glee. I looked at Steve very closely, but I was sure he was not stoned or sped. He seemed inert, pinned back in that mammoth chair by something.
The phone rang somewhere else in the house. Selina leapt off my lap and rushed out of the room. Watching her bronze silk dress walk away made me feel like I was losing all the sex I had ever had in my entire life.
After a few tries to clear my throat, I managed, "Steve, talk to me."
Without taking his eyes off Lucy and Ethel, Steve only raised one large white hand up and made a flopping, dismissive, hopeless gesture and then he sighed.
Selina hurried into the room and said something to Beeper Man. The two men left with her, but then she returned in a hurry. She sat on my lap again, briskly adjusting her legs around the lump in my pants, taking my right hand and draping it on her knee. Her skin felt hot under the cool silk.
"Steve, hey! Steve! " I appealed to him over Selina's shoulder. "Where do you need to go?"
Selina's lips found my ear lobe again, then she pulled away, leaving it moist. Her low cut silk dress hung open exposing one of her dark nipples, which was barely brushing the inside of her dress. Her nipple seemed to gleam and the sight of that made me dizzy.
"Go?" she whispered, "You're not going are you?'
Someone called her name elsewhere in the house. Selina hopped off me and disappeared down the hallway.
Steve turned his attention away from the comic mayhem on I Love Lucy and laughed, watching me as I watched Selina walk away. "That's okay, Abbott," Steve reassured me, pointing to his crotch. "I don't have one of those."
This stunned me. In all the years I'd known Steve I had never heard him ever make any kind of crude sexual remark.
"Can we get out of here?" I asked. "Steve, I'm going to leave here without you if you don't tell me what's going on."
Steve roused himself up from the chair for a moment, sitting on the edge. I got up, hoping he was going to leave, but it was all I could do to stand; my erection felt like it were cutting me in half.
The Beeper Man drifted back in a careless glide, but that grace was coupled with instinctive casing of the room, checking where I was and where Steve was. He picked up the rug he'd been discussing earlier and fingered its edges, looking annoyed, as if something the other man had said about this rug was correct, that the rug was flawed or less than perfect.
I hobbled over to the onyx tray and stared down at its mound of glittering powder. On one end of the tray was a slim gold post topped by a thin statuette of a skier gracefully leaning into a turn. At the other end of the tray was a gold razor blade and a gold tube.
I stuck a finger on the mound, lightly, a little smudge on the tip. As I tasted it, the Beeper Man looked up from inspecting his rug. He waited to judge my reaction. The powder was bitter, pure raw metallic methamphetamine. Our eyes met; his held only a kind of indifferent predatory gaze, as he were watching something small, something about to move one way or the other.
I was almost certain that Steve was not wired on meth, but I couldn't be sure until I saw him walk. I broke off eye contact with Beeper Man to look at Steve. Steve only grimly smiled as Ricky and Lucy ran hysterical numbers on each other.
The acrid meth flavor dissolved in my mouth and my forehead was touched by some invisible breeze. The sweat simply evaporated. What have taken? crossed my mind.
The Beeper Man looked amused, as if he knew exactly what had just happened.
I marched over to Steve. "Up and at 'em, cowboy." I took him by the arm and pulled on his dead weight. "Steve!" I yanked again, "Let's go!" He didn't budge.
For a moment it seemed as if he were terminally suicidal, industrially depressed, or comatose on intravenous Valium. Then, as I Love Lucy cut away to some commercials, he leaned forward and stood up reluctantly.
When I escorted Steve through the archway of the room, Selina was back, fastening herself to my hip. "Oh, you don't have to go, do you, Keith?"
"Gotta go, gotta go," I tried to sound as if I meant it. Somewhere toward the back of the house a phone rang and Selina was gone, leaving a hot silky place on my hip.
"What did you tell her about me?" I hissed to Steve.
"Nothing!" Steve protested. Then, with a tardy shrug, "Oh--just that you were a world famous novelist."
As we passed the observatory archway, the tropical birds jockeyed for positions on their perches, spattering the rugs underneath with their runny crap in the darkness.
*
The moment I climbed into my truck, I knew the chassis was tilted wrong. Steve hopped on the running board and perched on the truck bed, waiting for me to pull out of the ditch so he could get in the passenger side. I got out from behind the steering wheel and went around the Chevy and looked. A flat tire. I'd driven over a board and punctured the right front on three nails.
Steve took this opportunity to slide into the cab, over on the passenger side. He looked over at me. "What's wrong?"
"Flat. I don't have my spare. It's down at my house."
"I'm not going back in there," Steve informed me pleasantly.
"The fuck you aren't. I'm not going back in there, either. That house is evil, man, that guy is evil."
"Forget it, Abbott. I'm so glad you got me out of that place."
"You didn't act like it. You want to walk all the way down to my place? Get back in there and call us a tow truck."
Steve looked alarmed. "I'm not moving. Go back and borrow Selina's car, we'll drive down and get your spare. She likes you, Abbott. She thinks you're more famous than Hemingway."
*
Even though it cost me yet another tour of my erogenous zones, that's what I had to do. Selina's midnight blue Chrysler came equipped with all the trimmings, two-toned blue velour upholstery and fake mahogany dashboard, plus this boat was so huge that most drivers probably had to use a current passport to get to the hood ornament.
During the drive Steve remained morose. He only got talkative after we got down to my house and plied him with some excellent tea. Selina's services ran a thousand dollars a night. Five hundred for drop-in service, extra for any exotic routines. Judging from my brief contacts with her, the woman was grossly underpaid.
Steve was staying at her house in Marin. She'd been trying to contact the pornmeisters who owed Steve his script money. Steve didn't say how he'd met her.
"And Mr. Beeper Man?"
He had brought Selina in for party favors, "as an entertainment for his guests."
"What guests? There was no one else there. It's two-thirty in the morning! And Beeper Man, he one of the producers of this porn?"
Steve said nothing.
"You were trying to get money out of that guy?"
When I asked again if Beeper Man was one of the producers who owed him money, he only waved the subject away, as if he didn't want to discuss it.
Back at Mr. Beeper Man's mansion, I changed the tire on my truck and then went up to the door to drop off the keys to the Chrysler. I actually stood back from the door and held them out away from my body.
I needn't have bothered. Selina was upset that our trip took so long because she had to go. I went back to tell Steve that he had to ride with Selina, but he refused to get out of my truck.
"You have no idea how she drives, Abbott."
We tried to follow Selina back to Marin County. By that time it was about four in the morning. The highway was almost empty of traffic. To say Selina drove erratically wasn't even close. Selina alternated her speeds between twenty and seventy mph, in ten, twenty and thirty second bursts, irrespective of surrounding traffic, road conditions, neighborhood or weather. On the foggy Richmond Bridge she lost us, hitting speeds of over 100 mph, My poor 1953 Chevy six-cylinder could not keep up.
"She's gone," I said when her taillights disappeared into the fog. "You'll have to direct me to her house."
Steve cleared his throat. "I don't know where it is."
"You don't know where it is? You've been there, what? Three days and you don't know where it is?"
Turned out that Steve had been ferried to her house by her from the San Francisco airport, in what he called one of the most terrifying drives of his life, and this erased everything but an incoherent gratitude that he was still alive. He never got the address, only the phone number.
"In three days you never walked outside and looked at the street sign or the numbers on the front door?"
"It's on a hill," Steve tried.
"In Mill Valley, that's a big help. It's surrounded by hills." I told him we'd turn around once we got off the bridge and go back to my house.
Fortunately some fit of melancholy, probably caused by our failed romance, must have overtaken Selina because just west of San Quentin prison we came out of the fog and found her Chrysler inexplicably poking along in the right hand lane of the highway. Thinking that she remembered me, I pulled up alongside her and waved, to let her know we were back in synch, but she didn't seem to know who we were.
The ride to her house through Mill Valley was just as loony, but on the city streets, her spurts and slowdowns careened between 20 and 60 mph, so my truck could stay close.
The house turned out to be the top of the highest hill in Mill Valley. Even if Steve claimed that he was numb with terror when he got there, how he could have missed the fact that the front deck had a lovely 180 degree view of the bay and night lights of San Francisco I don't know, but it had slipped his mind. By the time we got in her house, Selina showed absolutely no further interest in either of us.
That tiny smudge of speed was still romping around my circuits. I felt crystal clear and insanely thirsty, so I got a beer out of the fridge for me and a soft drink for Steve while Selina cajoled someone over the phone. We sat out in the front room and talked about writers, Steve's recent New York stay, and watched the fog banks shift around on the bay. When I returned for seconds, Selina was putting the finishing touches on negotiating what sounded like a three-or-four way sex orgy at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco. She left shortly after that. Before I decamped, Steve took me down to her bedroom and showed me her S&M gear under the bed.
Around two months later the Beeper Man and everyone in his house were slaughtered. Someone carved him, his wife and his sister up with knives. Apparently the housekeeper was gone, because no Latina name showed up in the police report, or Selina's name, either. Turned out that Beeper Man was a main importer of LSD for the Western states, apparently brewed up to his specifications in Germany and Scotland, but he smuggled other dope, too. Until they came to the house and found the butchered bodies along with half a million dollars worth of LSD, around fifteen grand in cash, plus a half pound of grass, the police never knew he or his network existed. Informers said Beeper Man routinely kept $150,000 around in cash for buys and had about $1-2 million dollars of ergotamine tartrate--the chemical base for acid--stashed somewhere. He had half interest in a Liberian oil tanker, large real estate holdings in the Bay Area, plus a million bucks in local banks. Both his grandfather and father had been murdered, granddad by the Mafia on the East Coast.
A true entrepreneur, Beeper Man had gone west and graduated with honors from University of California with a Criminology Degree to scope out his opponents' tactics. His covers were two: an owner of a black belt, he specialized in karate and martial arts and sponsored teams, while also working the rug import biz. The police speculated that the karate teams were employed as mules. One of his couriers was arrested for the murders. No motive was ever established. He claimed Beeper Man had assassinated possibly two to four people in Miami. The suspect was described as deranged and incoherent, unable to furnish any details of the murders, and confined to a mental hospital until his trial.