Where Are We Now?

I think somewhere in here I've lost the chronology I started out keeping track of so closely. I probably ought to go back and fix it up so it's clear what I did when, but I don't think I will. It doesn't matter that much. Or, it looked when I started here as if it would matter, and now I at least can see that not even my mother would be curious. Well, she'd be curious, but I don't think she'd really want a full accounting of my time. I can try to make up for this mess now by saying this is my eighth day in Yuba City. I arrived here on Sunday, March 30, 1980, and today is Sunday, April 6, 1980. I've worked pretty steadily all the way through, even if I'm not entirely sure even now what I'm doing here. But I continue to work on whatever it is I've started. I do interviews, I check newspaper stories in the Independent-Herald office or the library, I hang around in restaurants or coffee shops (mostly in Denny's, where the food is as terrible as at every branch of this most mediocre of franchise operations, but where the people never shut up, or at Hal's Grubstake, where the barbecue is as great as it ever was, but where I'm too known to overhear any useful stuff), and I spend a lot of time in this room, #216 at the Imperial 400 on B Street, a motel I am staying at for strictly sentimental reasons I have no intention whatever of divulging, and definitely not to my mother. It feels funny coming up here and staying in this room so much when I ought to be taking advantage of being here, but I know if I don't get as much of this down on paper now as I can, no matter what happens the trip will have been wasted. I can picture myself back in Los Angeles with a pile of cassette tapes and some notes on index cards, trying to figure out what happened when. I'm hoping to make up for being a rather disorganized type by not letting myself get buried in a backlog of untranscribed or untyped material. I'm sure this is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at my life and you'd love lots more of the same, but I hate to disappoint you. I'm only trying for about the nineteenth time to make excuses for my shortcomings by claiming that what's going on here is more important than how neatly I get it all down. I might also mention, and this for the first time, that I am going through this ordeal entirely at my own expense. My invitation here was not accompanied by any promises of financial assistance. Sure, visions of big publishing deals have been dangled in front of me, but I'm a sufficient critic of the quality of my own prose to know there will never be millions, or thousands even, to be made from stuff such as this. My own desires to be honest and direct like I am right now, I fully realize are a big part of what keeps this story from being the taut, suspenseful sort of narrative that maybe could go over big. Oh well, it might be that from what I have learned of just the physical labor of sitting at this typewriter hour after hour, listening over and over, inch by inch, to my little bundle of tapes, maybe out of this I will have built up enough courage that when I've got this whole thing behind me, I'll be able to write a real book. I shouldn't complain, though, I know I will never have a chance like this again, I mean being here and getting to talk to someone as notorious as Michael has become.

It has been so much easier to write about real events, real people, and a real place, and not have to make anything up. That's what really gets me, if you want to know, how most authors are able to sit down and picture in their heads characters who never lived and have them say things they never said, and make it seem to a reader as if they're more real than people you know and talk to. I mean who has a more substantial existence for you, Holden Caulfield or your brother-in-law? See what I mean? So despite my complaining, my work here has really been a cinch. I've been not much more than a walking tape recorder, and then a sitting typewriter. If I do make any money out of this, I have no right to keep it. Don't hold me to that, I'm only speaking figuratively.

It's funny that I'm already talking about this whole thing as if it's finished and neatly tied together and comfortably an episode in my past, when the truth is, I have no idea where this is going and whether it will ever be finished, I mean I know it will be finished or else no one would be reading this now. (I bet you hoped I had already pulled that one for the last time.) What I mean is, here I am on what has turned out to be page xxx, and your guess at the very instant this is being written would be as good as mine, and probably better, as to where we're heading and how it might end. On that score, I have to say I wish I had made these people up, so that I could devise some reasonably satisfying resolution to their circumstances. I wish Michael was in my mind so I could take him out of jail and let him go to Canada and live happily ever after, or as happily ever after as you can in Canada. I wish I could turn the five deaths into some kind of elaborate hoax-kidnapping, and return them all to life. I wish I wasn't wasting space here expressing these hopeless dreams, because Michael is still in jail, and the five bodies are buried in the military cemetery on the edge of Beale Air Force Base, and I have no idea how this will wind up. I'd have been much better off, as far as trying to write this, to have waited for it all to have ended in some way and then gone back and learned what happened. I came into this at a very frustrating point, too in the middle of something that still defies real understanding, either on a physical or a psychological level. I mean I've been kidding myself if I think I've provided any substantive material to figure out either how the murders were committed, or why. I hope later I will be able to discount the comments I'm making now to accumulating fatigue, and not treat what I've done so harshly, but right now I can't see what I've been doing besides adding to the small mountain of information about these crimes which has been growing ever larger since the day they happened. I haven't sorted anything out, and I've been foolish to think I've been supplying information to future researchers who may be able to make better sense of these events than I've been able. Why should they do better? They weren't here. They're not in this crummy motel room getting depressed about how hopeless it is to try to understand what happened here. I better quit thinking like this. Here I've been acting like it's all over, when I still might be somewhere in the middle, or even towards the beginning. Well, I'll tell you, for me it's towards the end. It's not the end yet, and I'll still keep going until I bet to somewhere more solid than where I am now, but if this goes on much longer, it's going to go on without me. I'll continue to be a robot fact-gatherer for awhile longer, and then that will be it.

I don't think the readers of this stuff will get the credit they deserve either. All of my forms of laziness or impenetrability mean that much more necessary effort for all of you out there. I console myself on this point by saying the work of reading this material is a result of the complexity of the situation I am trying to explore and of my own unwillingness to impose a clear-cut point-of-view on events I know can be interpreted in any number of ways. After saying that, I know it's bullshit. I take refuge in reciting facts and transcribing interviews because I can avoid having to commit myself any more strongly. You figure out what all that's happened here means. It's enough I've come back and saved you the trip. If I get a few bucks to cover expenses, I'll call it even. As I said before, don't hold me to that. Any modest money-talking is definitely in the metaphorically-speaking category. When this is really all over, I expect I'll be as ready to talk big bucks as the next guy.

It has already been a few pages since I began this by saying the chronology of events here has gotten somewhat out of hand. Let's return to that point and see if we can get back on track. I promise now to stick to the subject, whatever that may be. I think what I wanted to say when this part began is that my usefulness here may be running out. You might have figured that out some large number of pages ago, but it is only now beginning to dawn on me. The way I can tell is that it's taking me longer and longer to get what turns out to be fewer and fewer pages. More keeps happening that's either happened already or that isn't worth telling about anyway. The first day or two, everybody I talked to had important, reprintable things to say, and every particle of information I unearthed (mainly from old newspaper stories) seemed a fresh revelation. The last couple of days, people keep saying things that I've covered in earlier interviews or else they go on and on about stuff I have no interest in, acting as if sitting there with a tape recorder going meant nothing whatever to them. I have to draw the line somewhere, and those are a couple of places where I definitely do. I could let different people I talk to supply slight variations on insights into Michael, for instance, and thereby impress you by the depth of consistent feeling one finds among his old friends. My view, however, is that once it's said by somebody, it's there to be believed or not. No use running something into the ground by repetition. Also, I think we've covered enough of my old friends, teachers, casual acquaintances - I've spared you quite a number I've talked to and chosen not to include, believe me. The stuff that's here is really the best of what I've come up with, as hard as that might be to accept.

I have gotten to where I do feel like it would be interesting to talk more to Michael. I know some people will see this as the kind of potential commercial concession I had said earlier I would resist, but I've at least managed to talk myself into believing I have to get more out of him than I already have What's missing most, I think, is trying to get to some serious issues about what started his revenge feelings going. That is, I really wish that I'd be able to get him talking in a way that evoked a sense of what it was like back then. I guess that's a lot to expect of him, and it's probably impossible without our getting into a big fight. There may also be the problem of who cares, as I think I brought up earlier somewhere. Well, to satisfy those who do care, I will try to cover some subjects I've so far avoided. I've avoided quite a bit, in fact, as I'm doing right now, so it's time to get back to serious work.