Crazy Bob and the Pervert from Cedar Rapids

By John KayeJanuary 29, 2015

Crazy Bob and the Pervert from Cedar Rapids

ROBERT JOSEPH BANDLER, a 75-year-old white man, was fatally shot by a Los Angeles police officer Sunday, Nov. 17, in the 1200 block of Stone Canyon Road in Bel-Air, according to Los Angeles County coroner’s records.


Bandler allegedly confronted a utility worker checking out the smell of gas coming from the two-story home. The worker reported to police that he had been assaulted and threatened with a handgun, police said.


When officers arrived shortly before 3:30 a.m., Bandler displayed a handgun […] and refused their commands to drop it.


“An officer-involved shooting then occurred,” [LAPD spokesman Richard] French said. “He died of the gunshot wound.” […]


Officers were familiar with Bandler because of the numerous calls to his home for odd behavior. He had a nickname: “Crazy Bob.”


He often wore fatigues and a military hat and once crashed a wedding across from his home. He sometimes ended conversations by saying “over and out” and played historic war speeches late at night, loud enough for neighbors to hear.


Neighbors in the area said that Bandler was not a violent person.


“He always was a strange man; he had things that he did,” said Norma Fink, 88. She added that he wasn’t “anyone that would hurt anybody.”


“I’m really sad about it. We all are,” she said.


Los Angeles Times, Nov. 17, 2013


¤


NORMA FINK and the neighbors were wrong. Well, partly. Yes, Bandler was strange, but to say he was not violent is simply untrue. Of the many incidents I could describe, one stands out. It took place on a summer night in 1958, at a party in the parking lot of Will Rogers State Beach. It was there, in the glare of headlights and with music blasting in the background, that I saw Bob, a coiled spring of inexplicable but spectacular rage, suddenly leap out of a crowd of teenagers with a shattered beer bottle held high above his head like a hatchet; for a breathless moment the world seemed to completely stop, then a great cry cut the air, and a skinny boy I didn’t know was lying on the asphalt with blood everywhere, his face in ruins, split apart, the flesh sliced away from the bone.


Why Bandler decided to attack this boy with such electrifying force was a question that no one could fully answer, but my older brother Mike — he was not at State Beach on that warm and humid night, but he knew Bandler well, and for a brief period of time even considered him a friend — was not surprised by this sudden act of unprovoked brutality.


“Was Bob evil? Who knows? But he was seriously fucked-up,” Mike told me, when I interviewed him for this essay. “He wanted to be a badass like Gleason, but he was a coward. That’s what made him so dangerous.”


“Gleason” was Scott Gleason, the president of the Flywheels, an off-campus car club whose clannish members were a belligerent brotherhood of trouble-hunting greasers and habitual truants. Branded by their classmates as either misfits or losers, they were feral and cunning and dedicated to violence, lashing out at those they envied, nursing grudges and settling scores.


Bandler, unlike the majority of the Flywheels, came from a family that had attained great wealth. He boasted to Mike that his father was part owner of a bank in Beverly Hills, an assertion my brother could never confirm, but whenever he visited him at his palatial home on Stone Canyon Road, the same house where he was later shot to death, his father was always present and friendly in a distant way. A sports fan and high-rolling gambler, he was among the first to acquire season tickets for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1958, the year they migrated west from Brooklyn. He was also a regular at Santa Anita, the mobster-controlled racetrack in Arcadia where he and his wife, a delicate blue-eyed beauty who was once a finalist in the Miss America contest, shared a box with the actors Walter Matthau and Cary Grant.


When I asked Mike if he could remember when he and Bob ended their friendship, he said,


The summer when we came back from Montana. We both had turned 16, and Bob’s dad bought him a car. One night when he came to pick me up, after we pulled away from the house, he told me to open the glove box. Inside was a loaded pistol. Although I kept my cool and didn’t say anything, Bob could sense right away that I was scared, and that was the point. Like I said, he was a coward. In a fair fight, straight up with fists, he knew he’d get his ass kicked, but if the word got out that he was crazy enough to carry a gun, nobody would mess with him. A couple of weeks later, Gleason asked him to join the Flywheels.


¤


Roger Converse Jr., 15, the son of Roger Converse Sr., the president of the Converse Shoe Company, died Monday in an automobile accident on Highway 10 outside of Drummond, Montana. He was on his way to Blue Bay Boys’ Ranch, a summer camp located on Flathead Lake in the northwestern part of the state. Camp Spokesman, Don Havlik, said the accident “was a terrible tragedy. Roger was a wonderful boy and a terrific camper.”


Daily Inter Lake, Kalispell, Montana. July 7, 1954


[In 1957, when he was in the third grade, Michael Reagan, the adopted son of actor and future president, Ronald Reagan, was enrolled in an after-school camp which, as it turns out, was run by a pedophile.]


“Don Havlik was the name,” he said, in an interview. “He died about seven years ago, and he had taken naked photographs of me as an 8-year-old child, and had me in fact develop the photographs when I was almost turning nine. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Wouldn’t your mother like a copy of this?’”


Reagan said his life “absolutely ended” that day.


“I thought I was going to Hell, and I didn’t know if people would see me as gay or heterosexual,” he said. “My dad ran for governor, my dad ran for president, and I knew there were photographs out there.”


Reagan kept his secret for the next 30 years, finally revealing to his father and First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1987 what had happened. Reagan said his father reacted by saying “I’ll go out and kick the guy’s butt,” and Nancy Reagan responded, “Honey, I don’t think he has a butt anymore.”


— The Washington Times, August 9, 2013


[After Havlik’s death,] Don’s family discovered hundreds of nude photos of children in his house. They have since all been destroyed.


— KLTV.com, April 30, 2008


¤


The image I have of Don Havlik, the one that’s the clearest and most lasting, is from when he came to our house in the spring of 1954. Thin and gregarious, with an asymmetric face and a peculiar awkwardness, he brought with him an 8-millimeter projector and a short film that he used as a sales tool to convince our parents to sign us up for what he described, in a tone of childlike excitement, as a “once-in-a-lifetime camping experience in the unspoiled wilds of Montana.” In the film, for which he provided the narration, there was, along with shots of campers participating in such ordinary activities as archery, ping pong, boating, horseback riding, and arts and crafts, an extended scene of a weekend wilderness trip led by the camp’s co-director, Bill Gundel.


“Bill’s a Montana native, an ex-marine and professional fishing guide,” Havlik said, “and every session he and a group of hardy campers hike up to the South Fork of the Salmon River, where they become proficient in their outdoor skills, fly-fishing for steelhead and rainbow trout.”


Here the film showed campers of all ages, some as young as seven, lined up at dusk on the grassy banks of a fast-moving river, casting their lines into the water. Gundel can be seen in the background, a grizzled, unsophisticated-looking man with muscular forearms crouched over a small fire in front of a row of canvas tents, neither smiling nor frowning, but looking oddly self-conscious as he pan-fried a batch of freshly hooked trout. What cannot be seen in the frame are those campers — the non-fisherman — armed with loaded rifles, wandering around the woods unsupervised, taking potshots at birds and squirrels.


In his spiel to our parents, who could not ignore our wordless excitement, Havlik outlined how a day at Blue Bay Boys’ Ranch would unfold for me and my brother if we chose to attend the camp, stressing the safety precautions that were strictly enforced for each activity, and how his counselors were ex-campers whom he’d known for years, each of them hired for their intricate knowledge of and passion for the outdoors. Unfortunately, this carefully chosen crew also contained several young men who lacked the natural good sense that could have prevented the monumental fuck-up that caused the death of Roger Converse. But that sad and avoidable accident was still several months in the future.


Once the movie was over and he was packing up his gear, Havlik warned our parents that the available slots left for the summer were filling up fast. He said that after he left us he was driving up to Mandeville Canyon, where he would be meeting with the actor Robert Mitchum, to finalize the two vacancies he’d set aside for his sons, Jim and Chris.


“I remember being appropriately impressed,” I told Mike.


“And so were mom and dad,” Mike said. “Along with being a pedophile, Havlik was a great bullshitter.”


As far as we knew, none of our friends or schoolmates had signed up for Blue Bay, so it was only when we arrived downtown at Union Station, as we waited in line to board the train, that my brother noticed Bob Bandler partially concealed within the milling crowd of campers and their parents, staring at him with a frenzied focus.


“This was before I knew how crazy he was,” my brother told me. “He was just some kid I’d seen around school, hanging out by himself or eating alone in the cafeteria.”


Bob and Mike ended up sitting together on the train, and it turned out that in recent months they had both become enthusiastic fans of science fiction and the supernatural, especially the gruesome and twisted stories inside the soon-to-be-banned EC Comics Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. But what really cemented their friendship during that long ride north was their mutual and inexhaustible curiosity about the opposite sex. According to Mike, Bob, whose carnal appetites were not under complete control, said that he used to spy on his parents while they were screwing, and when he was finally caught, his father agreed to buy him a whore when he turned 16.


Mike said, “He told me he couldn’t wait, that he planned to get laid before then, hopefully that summer, even if he had to rape someone. I remember laughing when he said that, but I’m not sure if I even knew what the word ‘rape’ actually meant.”


Although I have no memory of Havlik riding with us on that outward journey from Los Angeles to Montana, I remember that he was there when the train finally pulled into Butte during that summer’s first heat wave, his predatory inclinations hidden beneath a furious energy as he quickly took charge, herding everyone into the two yellow school buses that were parked in front of the station. Several counselors who had already been at the camp for over a week, spiffing up the cabins and preparing for our arrival, drove down in two station wagons to greet us on the platform, welcoming us with camp T-shirts and box lunches filled with fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies. And then, for reasons that have never been fully explained, they chose a group of campers to ride back with them.


In 1954, before the interstate highway system had been completed, it took over four hours to drive from Butte to our destination on the shores of Flathead Lake. Sometime during the first hour, just south of Deer Lodge, the radiator exploded on one of the station wagons, and it was decided (with an overabundance of optimism) that instead of having it repaired by a local mechanic, which could take hours and cause everyone to arrive behind schedule, they would buy a chain and tow the crippled vehicle through the steep mountains. Why some campers were then allowed to travel in the towed wagon is another question I can’t answer. Was it a question of space? Perhaps. But it’s more likely, given the probability that they could have all been squeezed onto the waiting buses, that it was a colossal lack of judgment.


According to eyewitnesses and surviving campers, the tow-chain had not been secured properly, causing the station wagon to sometimes drift dangerously close to the tall trees and telephone poles on the road’s edge. Resigned or too terrified to scream, the campers remained silent as the station wagon suddenly broke free on a hairpin turn and crashed through a guardrail, the now sharply formed edge piercing the rear door like the ragged blade of a ceiling fan, slicing Roger Converse’s throat.


A boy in my brother’s cabin who had survived the crash with only minor injuries said that Converse, despite a hastily applied tourniquet by one of the counselors, lost his heartbeat on the ground before the ambulance arrived. The news of his death sent a shockwave south, and by the following day a number of parents, their confidence shaken by an accident that was clearly preventable, had flown up and pulled their kids out of camp. Their fees were refunded, but Havlik, in a flourish of defiance, and despite the possibility of a drawn-out legal wrangle, was determined to keep the camp open, and amazingly, after a series of long-distance phone calls, persuaded the majority of parents to support him.


“Did you want to go home?” I asked my brother.


“No.”


Neither did I.


As anyone who has attended a conventional summer camp knows, there is a formula. Campers are divided by age and placed into cabins with their peers, and each cabin has a counselor whose role is clearly defined. Capable and calm — more than a guardian but not quite a friend — they accompany their campers to all meals and activities, adopting an attitude that is, paradoxically, both eternally adolescent and forgivingly paternal.


At Blue Bay Boys’ Ranch, if you were over 12 or a returning camper, things were handled differently. Except for aggressive rituals like “fight night” (more about this later) or capture the flag, where cabins were pitted against each other, your counselor rarely displayed any proprietary interest in your sphere of action, and for the most part you were a free agent: you woke up and went to sleep when you wanted; you ate when you were hungry; and it was left up to you to devise your own schedule, going to whichever activity you preferred, unsupervised.


For example, if I wanted to spend my entire day alone, fishing on Flathead Lake, that’s what I did. Following a quick breakfast in the dining hall, I would commandeer a canoe and paddle away, into the open water, ignoring the remarkably indifferent lifeguard who watched over the younger swimmers. In minutes I would be invisible to anyone on the shoreline, and if a summer storm suddenly blew in, which periodically happened, darkening the skies and whipping up waves that threatened to overturn my canoe, I was on my own. Was I frightened? Of course I was, but I was also exhilarated.


And I caught a lot of fish.


My brother said that Bandler, as far as he could remember, spent most of his days at camp either taking target practice at the rifle range or trying to flirt with the townie chicks who worked in the kitchen:


I remember our counselor, Neil White, who despised Bandler and saw through his efforts to manipulate and take advantage of the locals, teasing him mercilessly, calling him “Romeo” or “Hollywood Bob.” Bob hated to be mocked or disrespected, and one day he told Neil that he was going to “hurt” him if he didn’t stop messing with him. White, who was a Korean War vet who later played football at San Diego State, laughed off this threat, calling Bandler a “spoiled, skinny, rich-kid punk.”


That night while Neil White was asleep in his bunk, Bob, driven by something that went beyond commonplace anger, stabbed him twice in the chest with his hunting knife. Protected by his sweatshirt and the thickness of his sleeping bag, Neil received only minor lacerations, but he was so freaked out that he demanded that Bandler be expelled from camp and shipped home.


“But that didn’t happen,” Mike said. “Instead, Havlik put Neil in charge of another cabin, and for the rest of camp we no longer had a counselor.”


¤


“Fight night,” which was contrived by Havlik for no other reason than to satisfy his sadistic impulses, took place during our fourth week at camp, enough time for intra-cabin rivalries and animosities to have already been formed and nurtured. Furniture was pushed to the walls, and a regulation boxing ring was erected downstairs in the main lodge. The campers — most volunteered but some were signed up by their counselors or urged on by their friends — were supposed to be evenly matched, and the fights were limited to three rounds of three minutes each with a one-minute break. Of course, not every fight lasted the limit, and it was not unusual for Havlik, who acted as the referee, to stop a bout in mid-round if a boy was bleeding badly or in danger of being seriously injured — unless, of course, that camper had rejected his advances, and then Havlik, acting with a kind of barbaric vindictiveness, would allow the fight to continue, sometimes extending the round until the youngster either quit or was pounded into submission.


My brother, having trained for two years at the Hollywood YMCA, was already a skilled boxer, and he quickly advanced to the finals, where his opponent in the “camp championship” was one of Havlik’s favorites, a kid from Pasadena whose parents were well-known socialites and influential civic leaders.


Mike knocked him out in the first round.


“Don’t mention his name in the piece,” he said.


“Why?”


“Because Havlik might have molested him.”


“I’ll give him a pseudonym.”


“Don’t give him anything,” Mike said, sounding annoyed. “Look, the kid didn’t want to fight in the first place. Havlik pushed him into it. He made it into a Jew versus gentile thing.”


“Really?”


“Havlik was an anti-Semite. I picked it up when he first came over to the house. I remember he made it seem like he was doing us a favor by letting us sign up, like Blue Bay was some exclusive country club. I know dad picked up on it right away.”


“Bandler was a Jew,” I said. “And there were others at Blue Bay, like Phil Ferdeber and Steve Beller.”


“Yeah, but most of the kids came from old money WASP families. Like Converse.”


When Bandler witnessed my brother’s prowess in the ring he seemed genuinely impressed, and if he didn’t exactly follow Mike around, he always made it a point to sit next to him at meals. Even before he stabbed Neil White, Mike knew that Bob’s mask of menace wasn’t a mask, that he really was deeply sinister and half-insane, but he found his preposterous boasts and fabulations so weirdly compelling that he became, for a while, a co-conspirator in his escapades.


Mike said, “One night we stole a camp truck and drove across the lake, where one of the townie girls was supposed to meet Bob at a diner. He said she’d agreed to ‘put-out,’ and that we could both probably fuck her, but when we got there and he called the number she gave him, no one answered.”


At the time, Bandler didn’t seem particularly upset, and he decided instead that they should drive up to Kalispell, where he’d overheard a counselor say there was a whorehouse just off the reservation. But Kalispell was an hour drive, and my brother, worried that someone would notice the truck was missing and become suspicious, told Bandler that he wanted to head back to camp.


“Bob gave me this cold stare,” Mike said. “It was like I’d suddenly violated an understanding that we’d established between us, some unspoken code that we could do whatever the fuck we wanted, and worrying about the consequences was a stupid waste of time.”


The next day my brother saw Bandler standing outside the kitchen holding a rifle. The door was closed, and he was speaking through the screen to the townie girl who had stood him up the night before. You said you’d meet me and you didn’t. That was wrong. You shouldn’t have done that. Those were the words my brother remembered. He also remembered Bandler’s tormented face, inches from the screen, beyond any kind of solace as he listened to the girl apologize. Gee, Bob, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you were serious. But you have to stop bothering me, before you get me in trouble.


Mike said, “For a few seconds I thought he might shoot her. That’s how deranged he looked. After that I started to avoid him. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. He was in his own world.”


“What was he doing?”


“Shooting animals and trying to put the make on the Indian chick who took care of the horses. She was in her twenties, so the math didn’t make any sense, but Bob couldn’t see it. He was obsessed with getting laid before he hit 16.”


Then, early on a Saturday morning, 10 days before the camp session ended, Don Havlik was escorted out of the dining hall by two members of the Montana state police. We were told that he’d been called away due to a family emergency, but the truth quickly leaked out: he’d been arrested and charged with sexually abusing at least five campers, all under the age of 10.


Mike said, “Everyone knew which kids had been molested, because their parents flew up right away.”


“Who took over after Havlik left?”


“No one.”


“Where was Gundel?”


“I don’t remember,” Mike said. “But he wasn’t in charge. No one was. It was like Lord of the Flies.”


“I was oblivious.”


“All you wanted to do was fish.”


That was true. And read The Sporting News, which my mother faithfully sent me every week, so I could track the baseball statistics in which I’d taken an obsessive preoccupation. Whatever “child molestation” was, it held little interest compared to Steve Bilko’s batting average and the home run total for the Los Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League.


¤


In the summer of 1992, for reasons that were never clear to me, my brother, who was wholly unsusceptible to the joys of travel, decided to take his family on a road trip back to Montana. According to his son, Jake, there was no premeditation. “He just woke up one morning and said, ‘We’re going on an adventure,’ and the next thing I know we were driving down to REI. He bought backpacks, camping gear, the whole bit. My mom, my brother, none of us could figure it out.”


It was as if overnight the idea to revisit Blue Bay and that part of our shared past had wandered into Mike’s mind and taken hold. So much of who we are is memory, and that Mike was driven by nostalgia was obvious, but his son thought he was looking for something else.


“Like what,” I asked him.


“Some evidence that what took place back in 1954 had actually happened.”


When they arrived, they found the camp had become part of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The lodge and the cabins were still there, but they had been renovated and were now used as part of a rehab center for recovering alcoholics. The Indians who ran the place were friendly, but Mike felt he was invading their privacy by asking too many questions.


“Did you take any pictures?”


“Just a few.”


“I’d like to see them.”


¤ 


bluebay1


bluebay2


bluebay5


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 ¤ 


Mike said, “While I was there wandering around the woods, a lot of memories came rushing back. I remember we had this kid in our cabin who slept all day, and at night, just before lights-out, he would disappear. No one knew where he went, and no one seemed to care.”


“Maybe he was a vampire.”


Mike laughed. But when he spoke next something had changed in his voice. The tone had become serious. “To have all that freedom was really cool, but I remember toward the end I started to get worried.”


“About what?”


“You.”


This came as a surprise. “Me? Why?”


“You were my younger brother, and I felt responsible,” Mike said. Then he paused, thinking. “I’d never send my kids to a camp like that.”


I told my brother about the Bar 717 Ranch, the coed summer camp in the Trinity Alps that my son, Jesse, attended when he was 10 years old. “For the first week he was homesick, and he called me collect every night, crying, pleading with me to drive up and take him home. I felt awful, but his counselor assured me that he would get over it, and he did. He had a great time. Then I fucked up. Actually, I fucked up twice.”


“How?”


“Halfway through the eight-week session, parents were allowed, though not necessarily encouraged, to drive up and visit their kids. I wasn’t thrilled by this idea, mainly because I was worried that Jesse might become homesick again after I left. But he wanted me to come, so I did. Unfortunately, I brought this girl I was seeing.”


“Did Jesse know her?”


“No.”


“So she was just some random chick.”


Her name was Leslie, and when Jesse saw her he barely gave her a glance before he silently turned away. Right away I knew I’d made a huge mistake. The whole idea was for the two of us to have a father-son bonding experience, not a weekend for me to shack up with some hippie that he didn’t even know. Anyway, we were there for only about ten minutes before I agreed to take Leslie back to the motel where we were staying. We got into this violent argument, and she decided to hitchhike back to Mill Valley. I knew there was no way I could talk her out of it, so I didn’t even try. I gave her some money and the coke I’d brought with us, and that was that.


A week before Jesse’s summer session ended, a postcard arrived in the mail, reminding each parent of the day and time when the campers would be returning to San Francisco. The drop-off point was in front of the War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness, across from City Hall, the same spot where the buses initially picked everyone up.


A side note: I need to emphasize here that I am someone who is compulsively prompt, and if I’m pre-punctual to a fault, I also believe that to make someone wait is an unpardonable affront. I’ve never missed a plane or an important meeting. I’m not bragging, it’s just a fact: when I’m expected to be someplace, the date and time are like nails hammered into my mind. I’m never late.


Except this one time.


When the buses from the Bar 717 Ranch pulled in front of the Opera House at two p.m. on that Saturday afternoon, I was nowhere to be seen among the throng of parents who had gathered by the curb, everyone staring and waiting, their anticipation mounting.


“Why couldn’t you have just been there?”


“I blew it, Jesse. I misread the postcard.”


“You were probably hungover.”


“I wasn’t. I just made a mistake.”


“Nobody else made a mistake.”


“I know.”


“What were you doing?”


“Nothing. Reading. Watching television.”


“I thought something bad happened to you. I thought you were hurt.”


“I’m sorry, Jesse.”


“I was scared.”


“I know. I’m sorry.”


“Why couldn’t you have just been there?”


For weeks afterward, I could see that question — it was more like an accusation — in Jesse’s eyes, radiating outward, and my cycle of contrition continued until one day, thankfully, I finally ran out of shame.


But it’s one of those stories I never lie about. What happened is not open to interpretation. The buses came. The kids ran off and hugged their parents. Their duffels were unloaded and tossed into the open trunks of the station wagons that were double-parked by the curb. And when they pulled away, Jesse stood alone on the sidewalk with a spike in his heart.


¤


A few months ago, I found Don Havlik’s obituary online. It was from a funeral home in Marion, Iowa:


Don was born January 8, 1927, the son of Frank and Marie (Elias) Havlik, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A graduate of Wilson High School in Cedar Rapids, he served in the United States Navy during World War II. Don owned and directed a Blue Bay Boys Ranch on Flat Head Lake, Montana and also managed and directed the Little Outfit Boys Ranch in Patgonia, Arizona. He was a senior staff director of youth activities at the Jane Boyd Community House and a physical education teacher for St. Ludmila’s and St. Pius Schools in Cedar Rapids. Don also worked as a general manager for Pine Inn Restaurant and a day manager of Perkins.


He died on February 8, 2008.


Not long after Mike read the obituary, he phoned me. In the course of our conversation, he wondered out loud if the 8-millimeter film that Havlik had used as a promotional tool still existed, and if it did, how he could find out where it was. In his voice I could feel an obsession beginning to build, a need that would not rest silently. For him, summer camp had become a complicated memory that he repeatedly needed to revive and explore.


“Havlik was always shooting film,” he said. “Once, while I was water-skiing, I remember seeing him on the dock with his camera. I think he shot ‘fight night’ and the awards banquet too. I bet there’s a whole archive of Blue Bay footage out there somewhere.”


I suggested that he try to find Bill Gundel. “He would be the one person who might know something.”


“That’s where I started. But I couldn’t find a thing on the web. Nothing. Anyway, he’s probably dead.”


Mike felt there was a possibility that Havlik might have stashed everything in a storage locker that he subsequently abandoned. But when he tracked down one of Havlik’s relatives, a cousin living in Cedar Rapids, he seemed confused by my brother’s polite inquiries. Films? Of a boys’ camp in Montana?


Mike said:


He seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. He wasn’t rude, but I could tell that he wanted to get off the phone. Talking to a stranger about some pervert in his family was probably the last thing he felt like doing. But he did give me the name of Havlik’s last roommate, this guy named Hank. It took me a few days, but I tracked him down in Arkansas, in this small town where he and Havlik lived before he died. I told Hank about our camp experiences and wondered if Don had saved any mementos from those years. He said there was nothing like that in his belongings when he died. No films, pictures, brochures, anything. Curious to get his response, I told him that Havlik had been arrested for child molestation while we were at camp, and that three years later, when he was 30 years old, he’d molested Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s adopted son, at a day camp in California. Hank told me that people get accused of all sorts of shit that they didn’t do. But if he did do what I said he’d done, then he was a sinner and would burn in hell. He said, “Is that good enough for you?” I told him I was a Jew, and Jews don’t believe in heaven and hell. That’s when he said, “Well, that’s your problem,” and he hung up.


“Do you think Hank was a pedophile,” I asked Mike.


“Who knows? To me he just seemed like this pissed-off old dude.”


“Like Bandler turned out to be,” I said. “I wonder what happened to the rest of those guys.”


“Who do you mean?”


“The hoods he ran with in high school. Like Scott Gleason.”


That’s when Mike told me a bizarre story, one that I’ll preface by repeating what I’ve written in an earlier essay: my brother in high school, though well liked and never a bully, was known as someone who had certain boundaries that could not be encroached upon. Fearless and quick-fisted, his reputation as a street fighter extended well beyond West Los Angeles into El Segundo and Manhattan Beach. Gleason had a similar rep, but what made him really scary and gave him legendary status was the understanding that (unlike my brother) his brutality knew no limit. There was a rumor that once over spring break in Palm Springs he’d beaten a kid so savagely — he carried a short-blade knife but his weapon of choice was usually a tire iron or the steel toe of his engineer’s boots — that he’d damaged his brain and left him paralyzed.


“I always thought one day we would tangle,” Mike told me, “and if anybody was capable of instigating it, it would be Bandler. We didn’t run with the same crowd, but our paths occasionally crossed, and when they did there was a tension that we both could feel. I wasn’t scared of him, but I’ll be honest, he definitely made me nervous.”


“Did you think you could take him?”


“Actually, I wasn’t sure. But there was a part of me that wanted to find out.”


“Did you ever think about starting something.”


“That wasn’t my style,” Mike said. “I didn’t look for fights. If it was going to happen, Gleason would have to provoke it.”


“But he never did.”


There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, before Mike said, “He almost did.”


It happened on a Friday sometime in the late 1960s, at the end of a week when my brother was on vacation from his job as a Los Angeles County probation officer. Urged by the balmy autumn weather, Mike decided to spend the day sunbathing by the ocean, and the deserted beach he chose was a few miles south of Malibu and across from Temescal Canyon in the Pacific Palisades.


“After October it was rare to see more than five or six people on the sand. There was a fireman who was a regular,” Mike said, “and there was an older couple who came every day but never left their car, except to use the bathrooms. We called them the ‘paper people,’ because they used to put newspapers against the windshield to shield out the sun.”


“They would play cards all day. I remember them.”


“Sometimes one of my fraternity brothers from USC would show up. Or Dave Kahn, this guy I knew from work. But I never ran into anyone from high school. Not once.”


Mike was reading the latest issue of Esquire when he noticed a girl set up her backrest and spread her beach towel on the sand next to the vacant lifeguard tower. She had long blond hair and the bikini she was wearing underneath her T-shirt and cut-offs was bright red.


Mike said, “I was too far away to see her face clearly, but her body was distracting enough. Chicks didn’t come down to Temescal to get hit on. Just the opposite. They came not to be bothered, and I always respected that. But I was definitely intrigued.”


“Of course.”


“Anyway, you’ve got the scene. Noon on a Friday in November and not a soul on the beach except for me and this blonde. After a half-hour or so, during which she never once glanced in my direction, my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to get a better look. But I didn’t want to do something obvious and uncool, like ask her for the time or bum a cigarette, so instead I decided to take a quick dip in the ocean and cruise past her on the way back to my towel. That way I could check her out.”


“Was she pretty?”


“She was beautiful.”


And to my brother’s surprise, she initiated the conversation by asking him if the water was as cold as it looked. He said it was, but it was so refreshing that he couldn’t resist. That’s when she said that the ocean — and here she made little waves with her hands — was her favorite part of Los Angeles, and the first place she visited after she moved to Southern California from the Midwest.


“I forget where she was from. I think some place in Minnesota,” Mike said. “In a way she was a cliché. A pretty blonde — somebody’s prom queen in high school — and now a wannabe actress. But she was open and nice, and I sat down and we started to chat. The conversation was easy and comfortable, and I felt there was definitely a connection.”


“What did you talk about?”


“Honestly, I don’t remember. I just remember the vibe. The calmness.”


Then, abruptly, Mike noticed the girl’s attention shift from his face to a point over his right shoulder. “I turned and saw this guy in street clothes walking around a pile of seaweed down by the shoreline. He was dressed all in black: black pants, black shirt, black shoes. I figured he would just continue trudging down the beach, but when he was even with the lifeguard station he turned and angled toward where we were sitting. His face looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him until he was a few yards away. That’s when he said my name. ‘Hey, Mike. Long time.’”


“He recognized you first.”


“Yeah.”


To my brother, running into Scott Gleason on this nearly empty beach was certainly an unexpected event. That it took place while he was moving beyond a flirtation with this beautiful girl — toward what he wasn’t sure — was more than just ill-timed: Gleason’s solitary presence and mysterious purpose charged the atmosphere around them with uncertainty and gave Mike a moment of panic.


“Did he look the same?” I asked.


“More or less. But I’m not sure I would’ve recognized him on the street.”


“Describe him.”


“Fleshy, pasty-faced, and with that same glassy-eyed smile that could mean anything. The chick was spooked, I could see that right away.”


“Did you introduce them?”


My brother laughed. “Are you kidding? That would be like inviting him to sit down.”


The conversation they had lasted no more than 10 minutes. After so many years the details remained hazy, but Mike said that Gleason conveyed an attitude of restrained menace, an anger seething beneath the surface, making even everyday words sound threatening.


“I stood up to talk to him. On my feet I knew he couldn’t intimidate me. What I remember was that he wanted to talk about the car I drove in high school, the red ’57 Chevy. He said he was jealous that I had such a cool car,” Mike said. “I told him that I thought the ’50 Merc he drove was probably just as cool. Then he asked me what I was driving now, and I pointed to the Porsche in the parking lot. I could tell that confused him, and he didn’t say anything for a while, but his eyes kept traveling over to the chick, who was starting to pack up her stuff.”


I said, “You realize this whole scene is surreal.”


“No shit.”


“After what, ten years of not seeing each other, he wants to rap about cars. Did you ask him what he was doing at the beach?”


“No. But I remember he wanted to know what I did for a living. I told him I was a probation officer,” Mike said, “and whatever he thought about that didn’t change his expression. When the girl stood up, getting ready to leave, I told her I would walk her up to the parking lot, but she said that it was okay, that I should finish my conversation. Before she walked off, she said to give her a call, and she handed me a piece of paper with her phone number on it.”


When she left and it was just the two of them, Mike could sense a stillness in the air, a cautious silence that had a movie feel to it. That’s when Gleason brought up Bandler, and how in high school Bob always felt Mike went out of his way to avoid him. Gleason said that Bob was bothered that Mike, once his good friend, now seemed to look down on him.


“What did you say?”


Mike said he didn’t know what to say. Finally, after a long silence that was both awkward and tense, he told Gleason that, nothing against Bandler, but in high school he’d naturally gravitated toward a crowd whose interests were more compatible with his own. He said that if Bob was so offended he should’ve said something and they could’ve straightened things out.


“Then I told him I had to leave,” Mike said. “I made up some limp excuse about an errand I had to run. Right away I saw his stare harden, and I could feel that all sorts of unspoken thoughts were circulating in the air between us. He disliked me, and he knew I disliked him, but he knew also that I wasn’t afraid of him.” As they stood facing each other, Mike vividly remembered feeling the raw force of Gleason’s presence and a mounting sense of unease. He thought, He’s waiting for me to turn around and leave. He’s silently trying to dominate me, to get me to back down. But that’s not going to happen. There was not a soul on the beach, just the two of them, still as statues, bound together in this moment, a moment that was filled with implications that only men can understand. The future was now irrelevant, and whatever was going to happen next felt mapped in advance. Then Gleason did something that was totally unexpected and out of character. “He stuck out his right hand. He wanted to shake hands.”


“Wow! Did you?”


“Yeah.”


“Then what happened?”


“Nothing. That was it. No goodbye. No more conversation. He just walked off, in the same direction that he came.”


My brother said he felt let down, that something fundamental was lacking in the way things ended on that day: an element of tragedy or heroism that he would remember and make part of his life.


I said, “Why do you think Gleason split?”


“I think he sensed something and made a judgment.”


“He sensed that you were ready to fight.”


“I wanted to hurt him,” my brother said in a voice that commanded attention. “And I think he saw that in my face and decided to move on.”


I told my brother that after more than 10 years, to believe that Gleason, like some vague-eyed and bloated revenant, suddenly materialized in front of him on an almost-deserted beach was hard to get my mind around. “People are going to think I made this up.”


“It happened,” Mike said with a sigh. “Look, I’ve gone over it hundreds of times, and I have no fucking idea why he was there. I should have asked him, but I didn’t. I was too shocked, and the chick added another element that confused everything.”


“Did you ever call her?”


“No, I wanted to put the day behind me. In my head, any chance for a romance, of something spontaneous occurring, was now ruined.”


“No regrets?”


“About what?”


“Any of this.”


“Just one,” Mike said. “That I shook that prick’s hand.”


A few months after this conversation, on the Monday before the November midterms, I received another phone call from my brother. He said, “I read an article about Chris Mitchum the other day in the LA Times. He’s running for Congress in Santa Barbara as a Republican. He’ll probably win.”


“He wasn’t much of an actor. Neither was his brother.”


“I remember seeing their dad at Union Station when we came home from camp. He was just standing there puffing on a cigarette, waiting for his kids like a normal dad. Remember him in Night of the Hunter?”


“Scariest movie ever.”


“I saw it with Bandler,” Mike said. “It came out during our first year in high school. The week after that he picked me up with the loaded gun. That was it. I don’t think I ever spoke to him again until a couple of years ago.”


I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “You spoke to Bandler? What do you mean?”


“Yeah, he called me late one night, out of the blue. He was drunk, so it was hard to understand him. He wanted me to come over to his house.”


“Which house?”


“On Stone Canyon. He inherited it when his dad died. He said he was rich. He wanted to get together. He wanted to apologize.”


“For what?”


“Who knows? I could barely understand him,” Mike said. “The whole thing freaked me out, just knowing that he had my number, that he might be crazy enough to show up on my doorstep in Agoura. Finally, I just hung up on him. He called me back a few weeks later, and he left his number on the voicemail. He said we needed to talk, that it was important, but I never called him back.”


¤


(Although the names of a few people in this essay have been changed to protect their privacy, most have remained intact; some conversations have been reconstructed and certain moments condensed.)


¤


John Kaye is a novelist and screenwriter.

LARB Contributor

John Kaye is the author of two novels, Stars Screaming and The Dead Circus. He has also written numerous screenplays, including American Hot Wax, Where the Buffalo Roam, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, and Forever Lulu, which he also directed. He is currently finishing a new novel.

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